Alicia Karlin has joined The Circuit Group as global president of live, the company’s CEO Dean Wilson announced Tuesday (Jan. 27). With the move, Karlin also brings her firm ASK Management & Advisory into The Circuit Group ecosystem through a joint venture.

Hard techno star Sara Landry is the first joint-venture signing under this new partnership, with Karlin also bringing management clients Annie Tracy and Brandi Cyrus. Having overseen Keyshia Cole’s 20th anniversary tour of her album The Way It Is, Karlin is continuing her partnership with Cole and her management team through ASK Advisory.

“I’m not only bringing in my management company, but also the consulting side of the business that allows me to work with other managers, promoters, event producers and people who really want to make an impact in the live space and across music and media, to build lasting careers and to build a different kind of team around artists,” Karlin tells Billboard.

Having most recently served as vice president of global touring and talent at AEG Presents, Karlin has long known The Circuit Group co-founders Wilson and Brett Fischer and says that “when I was considering all of the options and making the move, I was really into what they’ve been building. They are not only building a global management infrastructure, but a real future-facing, artist career-driven company and a model that has a lot of different arms to it.”

“Building that infrastructure around careers is something I’m really interested in,” she continues, “because I think the future of management and of artists’ careers is driven by this kind of management hub and having all these pieces at your disposal… For me, touring is not just generating revenue, it’s adding to the building of leverage across the artist’s entire business. That’s something I’m really excited to bring into the team.”

Karlin has more than 20 years experience in artist management and development, global touring strategy and large-scale festival and event production. At AEG Presents, she helped strategize Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet tour, the sixth highest-grossing tour of 2025 with $77.4 million, according to Billboard Boxscore. She also helped grow the touring careers of artists including Raye, Mitski and The Beaches and was a founding member of the producer team behind Michigan’s Electric Forest festival, where she served as the talent buyer from the festival’s beginning in 2011.

Meanwhile, The Circuit Group was launched launched in 2023 by Wilson and his wife/business partner Jessica Wilson along with Fischer, David Gray and Harvey Tadman as a collective of management companies including Seven20 and Ayita. The company is focused on creating opportunities for artists across verticals while also offering traditional management.

In November, The Circuit Group launched Circuit Capital, a platform for acquiring and scaling music assets and cultural IP. Circuit Capital is backed by Create Music Group, which is giving Circuit Capital access to more than $500 million to achieve its goals. Other elements of The Circuit Group include Beat Switch, which provides distribution, label services and support to independent artists and Red Wire Publishing, the company’s music publishing division.

Karlin has known Landry for years and first booked her for Electric Forest 2024, although that set was thwarted a thunderstorm that led to the two women hanging out together backstage, with the relationship eventually evolving into a client/manager relationship.

In terms of working with Landry, “she didn’t need any help getting bigger during,” Karlin says of the Texas-born hard techno artist who’s exploded onto the scene over the last few years, helping to popularize the genre in the U.S. “When Sara was looking for management, she wanted infrastructure, and I know that working with women was really important to her and that she wanted to stay uncompromised and dedicated to her vision while she scaled it. I think us having a personal history and her being super familiar with me and me being familiar with her was just perfect timing, and the stars aligned.”

“Partnering with The Circuit Group and ASK Management lays the groundwork for expanding my vision on a global scale,” Landry adds in a statement. “From day one, Alicia and the broader team saw beyond the music and fully understood the culture, intention and community I’m building. This collaboration marks the beginning of a bold and transformative next chapter.”

Karlin credits legendary industry execs including Michelle Jubelirer, Marlene Tsuchii, Cara Lewis and Debra Rathwell with helping guide and inform her career and inspiring her mission to work with and elevate women in the industry.

“I got to learn under and work with all of these women who were the first females in these spaces and who knocked down doors for us to thrive,” she says. “I think that’s really important, and I want to pass that along, mentor women and work with women teams and artists and open doors for them in the same way.”

Ye (formerly Kanye West) apologized once again this week for his repeated amplifying of hateful antisemitic remarks, this time taking about a full-page ad in Monday’s (Jan. 26) edition of The Wall Street Journal to offer a mea culpa. The paid advertorial was his reported attempt to make amends to the Jewish community for his repeated embrace of Nazi symbolism and deployment of hate speech against Jews.

West explained in the pages of the Murdoch family-owned paper that the well-documented 2002 car crash that became the inspiration for his breakthrough 2004 single “Through the Wire” resulted in brain damage to the right frontal lobe of his brain that led to mental health issues and an eventual diagnosis of bipolar disorder. The once high-flying rapper and producer then claimed that he spiraled into a four-month manic episode in early 2025 that included “psychotic, paranoid and impulsive behavior that destroyed my life.”

Now, in a new email interview with Vanity Fair — in which the magazine said Ye declined to answer specific questions about where his antisemitic rants originated and why he chose to express himself that way, or how he has made amends in his personal life — the rapper addressed whether his renewed mea culpa is tied to a PR push to promote his upcoming Bully album.

Asked what he would say to those who think his newest apology is a way to clear the way for his music and operate in the business without the lingering spectre of antisemitism hanging over him, West leaned into stats. “It’s my understanding that I was in the top 10 most listened-to artists overall in the US on Spotify in 2025, and last week and most days as well,” Ye told VF. “My upcoming album, Bully, is currently one of the most anticipated pre-saves of any album on Spotify too. My 2007 album, Graduation, was also the most listened-to and streamed hip-hop album of 2025. This, for me, as evidenced by the letter, isn’t about reviving my commerciality.”

Instead, Ye claimed that the letter stemmed from “remorseful feelings” that weighed heavily on his heart and spirit, reiterating that he owes a “huge apology” to the Jewish and Black communities for his hurtful speech and actions.

“All of it went too far. I look at wreckage of my episode and realize that this isn’t who I am,” said West, who unleashed shock and disgust several years ago after putting swastikas on his Yeezy merchandise, parading white supremacist-inspired “White Lives Matter” shirts at his 2022 Yeezy Paris Fashion Show and repeatedly proclaiming “I love Nazis” and “I love Hitler” during what he now describes as bipolar episodes.

“As a public figure, so many people follow and listen to my every word. It’s important that they realize and understand what side of history that I want to stand on. And that is one of love and positivity,” Ye told the magazine.

In his WSJ advertorial, West skirted around his use of the reviled swastika on Yeezy merch, saying that he suffered from some “disconnected moments” which led to memory lapses that still linger. “In that fractured state, I gravitated toward the most destructive symbol I could find, the swastika, and even sold T-shirts bearing it,” he wrote, claiming that this time he is “committed to accountability” and that he is “not a Nazi.”

In response to the Journal ad, a spokesperson for the Anti-Defamation League told Billboard that Ye’s apology was “long overdue and doesn’t automatically undo his long history of antisemitism — the antisemitic ‘Heil Hitler’ song he created, the hundreds of tweets, the swastikas and myriad Holocaust references — and all of the feelings of hurt and betrayal it caused/ The truest apology would be for him to not engage in antisemitic behavior in the future. We wish him well on the road to recovery.”

At one point, an anonymous former employee of West’s reportedly told CNN that Ye wanted to name his 2018 studio album Hitler, telling the network, “He would praise Hitler by saying how incredible it was that he was able to accumulate so much power and would talk about all the great things he and the Nazi Party achieved for the German people.”

During his earlier 2022 antisemitic spree, West was dropped by nearly all of his creative and professional collaborators, including Balenciaga, Universal Music Group, Adidas and the Gap, as well as his booking agent and a number of social media platforms.

Then, in March of last year, after claiming he was done with antisemitism following yet another outburst of hate speech, West posted on X that his “next album got that antisemitic sound,” seemingly doubling-back and doubling-down on his brief respite from expressing anti-Jewish sentiment.

Also during last year’s manic episode, West said he didn’t feel sick, but rather that everyone else around him was “deeply overreacting. You feel like you’re seeing the world so much more clearly on things, when in reality you’re losing your grip entirely. That’s what it felt like at that time.” Near the end of the four-month episode, West said he changed his medication, with the antipsychotic drug he was switched to taking him into a “really deep depressive episode.” After his wife recognized the effects, Ye said they sought out what’s been an “effective and stabilizing” treatment regime at a rehab facility in Switzerland.

The magazine also spoke to neuropathologist Bennett Omalu, who, speaking generally about the progression of neurological issues, but not specifically about the details of West’s case, said that a frontal lobe injury of the type the rapper suffered can possibly lead to a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. “TBI [traumatic brain injury] can result in a variety of behavioral, cognitive, and mood disorders,” said Omalu.

However, Dr. Avinoam Patt, director of the Center for the Study of Antisemitism at New York University told VF that it’s important to stress that the “vast majority of people who have mental health issues, or specifically have bipolar disorder, don’t espouse antisemitic or racist ideas. And I’ll just say I’m skeptical because we now have a pattern that goes back years of antisemitic rants that reinforce harmful, dangerous stereotypes about Jews.”

The five nominees for best original music at the 2026 BAFTA Awards, the British equivalent of the Oscars, are an exact replay of the Oscar nominees for best original score:

Nominations for the 2016 BAFTA Awards, officially known as the British Academy Film Awards, were announced on Tuesday (Jan. 27). This year’s Oscar nominations were announced on Jan. 22.

This is the first time in 14 years that the nominees at the two awards shows have lined up exactly. In 2012, the nominees at both shows were:

Danna won the Oscar that year. Newman won at the BAFTAs.

Looking closer at this year’s BAFTA nominees, this is Desplat’s 13th nomination, a total topped only by Star Wars legend John Williams (16). It’s Greenwood’s fourth; the second for Göransson and Fendrix and the first for Richter.

Desplat is a three-time BAFTA winner for The King’s Speech (2010), The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) and The Shape of Water (2017). Only two composers have won more BAFTA Awards in this category – Williams (seven) and spaghetti western master Ennio Morricone (six).

Göransson won best original music at the BAFTAs two years ago for Oppenheimer. If he wins again this year, he’ll become the first composer to prevail twice inside of three years since Gustavo Santaolalla won for The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) and Babel (2006). Göransson won in the score category at both the Critics Choice Awards and the Golden Globes, making him the apparent front-runner in this category.

Radiohead guitarist Greenwood was previously nominated for There Will Be Blood (2007), Phantom Thread (2017) and The Power of the Dog (2021). Fendrix was previously nominated for Poor Things (2023).

Zach Nahome, the executive producer of Olivia Dean’s The Art of Loving LP, has signed a publishing agreement with Universal Music Publishing Group (UMPG) and NWS Music Group.

The exclusive worldwide music publishing agreement with the songwriter and producer comes following Nahome’s recent appearance at the summit of Billboard’s Hot 100 Producers Chart. 

Nahome produced and performed on the majority of Dean’s breakthrough sophomore album, and has co-writing credits on its hit single “Man Need” (which peaked at No. 4 on the Hot 100 and No. 1 on the U.K. Singles Chart) as well as “A Couple Minutes.” 

On Sunday, Dean will compete in the best new artist field at the 2026 Grammys, and The Art of Loving has been nominated for the album of the year category at the upcoming BRIT Awards.

Nahome’s credits extend to work from PinkPantheress, Loyle Carner, Justin Bieber, Maverick Sabre, Slowthai, Teezo Touchdown, Bakar and Celeste.

Pete Simmons, UMPG’s head of A&R, U.K., said: “Zach is an endangered species. Songwriters with taste and execution at his level don’t come around very often, and getting to know him and his process the past few months has been a joy. It’s a pleasure to be on his team alongside his manager, Laura Singer, and our friends at NWS.”

Ben Bodie, co-founder of London-based indie record label and publisher added, “Nick [Raphael], Christian [Tattersfield], I, and everyone at NWS are delighted to be working with UMPG on the next chapter of Zach’s already illustrious career. Our combined efforts and enthusiasm will no doubt propel Zach even further into the songwriting stratosphere.”

The ‘Krazy Super Concert’ series is expanding overseas with its first stop in the Middle East.

One Pulse Group will stage its first overseas edition of its ‘Krazy Super Concert’ this February in Dubai. Billboard can exclusively reveal the city will host headliner G-Dragon in the K-pop king’s first-ever performance in the region, joined by a lineup of artists representing Korea, China, and the United States featuring Jay Park, Kim Jongkook, Yein, Yerin and special guest KUN at the Dubai Media City Amphitheatre.

G-Dragon’s Dubai debut follows his 2025 Ubermensch World Tour, which visited Asia, Australia, North America, and Europe and ranked among the biggest K-pop tours of last year. The lineup includes Korean-American rapper-singer-mogul Jay Park, Chinese pop star and actor KUN, Korean singer and variety-show star Kim Jongkook, Lovelyz girl group member and solo star Yein, as well as Yerin, famous as a member of GFriend and for her solo work.

The Feb. 17 event marks the ‘Krazy’ series’ first major overseas push.

“Marking One Pulse Group’s expansion into the Middle East with the KRAZY SUPER CONCERT is a defining milestone for us,” Luffy Huang, CEO of One Pulse Group, tells Billboard in an exclusive statement. “G-Dragon is not just a headliner; he is a global cultural phenomenon. His historic debut in the region perfectly aligns with our mission to bridge international markets and deliver unprecedented live entertainment experiences to new audiences.”

The Dubai stop for ‘Krazy Super Concert’ marks a new chapter in the young festival’s global expansion, which began in August 2023 with a fully K-pop lineup of IVE, Kwon Eunbi, AB6IX, CRAVITY, and Monsta X’s Shownu and Hyungwon. The fest hopped to the west coast in September 2024 for a two-day Los Angeles edition featuring a range of Asian and Australian talent across pop, hip-hop, dance and indie music with Kim Jongkook, KATSEYE, Sunmi, CL, Lay Zhang, aespa, BamBam, AKMU, DK, The Kid LAROI, ZEROBASEONE, and Agnez Mo.

‘Krazy Super Concert’ is an original event series from promoter and producer One Pulse Group. The international company’s résumé includes staging the Korean edition of EDC and bringing the “world’s wettest party” to NYC and LA via the S2O USA festival which features Major Lazer, Afrojack, Steve Aoki, and Dillon Francis’ EDM sets equipped with monstrous water features. In a press release, One Pulse Group noted a “67% year-over-year increase in K-pop users” among Dubai audiences as part of their interest in bringing a ‘Krazy’ concert to the United Arab Emirates.

Dubai’s first ‘Krazy Super Concert’ takes place on Tuesday, Feb. 17, 2026. General admission tickets and VIP packages will be available through pre-sale signups starting Wednesday, Jan. 28, at 9AM Dubai time via krazysuperconcert.com. The public on-sale begins Thursday, Jan. 29, at 12PM Dubai time.