Warner Music Group (WMG) sent letters to tech companies this week instructing them not to use the label’s music to train artificial intelligence technology without permission. Sony Music sent out similar letters to over 700 companies in May.

“It is imperative that all uses and implementations of machine learning and AI technologies respect the rights of all those involved in the creation, marketing, promotion, and distribution of music,” Warner’s notice reads.

It continues, “all parties must obtain an express license from WMG to use… any creative works owned or controlled by WMG or to link to or ingest such creative works in connection with the creation of datasets, as inputs for any machine learning or AI technologies, or to train or develop any machine learning or AI technologies.” 

The notices from Sony and Warner come in the wake of the AI Act, legislation that was passed in the European Union in May. “Any use of copyright protected content requires the authorization of the rightsholder concerned unless relevant copyright exceptions and limitations apply,” the act notes. “Rightsholders may choose to reserve their rights over their works or other subject matter to prevent text and data mining, unless this is done for the purposes of scientific research.”

If companies take this action, then “providers of general-purpose AI models need to obtain an authorization from rightsholders if they want to carry out text and data mining over such works.”

The Cold War between the music industry and much of the AI world has been heating up in recent months. Labels are adamant that AI companies should license their music if they want to use those massive catalogs of recordings  to develop song generation technology.

Most AI companies, however, aren’t interested in paying. They often argue that their activities fall under “fair use” — the U.S. legal doctrine that allows for the unlicensed use of copyrighted works in certain situations.

In June, the three major labels sued two AI music companies, Suno and Udio, accusing them both of “willful copyright infringement on an almost unimaginable scale.” “These lawsuits are necessary to reinforce the most basic rules of the road for the responsible, ethical, and lawful development of generative AI systems and to bring Suno’s and Udio’s blatant infringement to an end,” RIAA Chief Legal Officer Ken Doroshow said in a statement.

In a response to the suits, Suno CEO Mikey Shulman said his company’s tech is “designed to generate completely new outputs, not to memorize and regurgitate pre-existing content.” Udio said it “stand[s] behind our technology.”

Despite criticizing Joe Biden and possibly sitting out the upcoming presidential election, Cardi B calmed some fans’ worries when it came to where her party allegiance lies in the political realm.

“She may have betrayed our country and turned Republican but at least she found a nice tune,” a member of the Bardi Gang wrote on X earlier this week in response to Cardi teasing a track for her upcoming album.

The Grammy-winning rapper replied early Tuesday (June 2), promising that she’ll never take the red pill and join the Republican party. “I will never turn republican lol,” she assured.

The fan responded back, essentially attempting to guilt trip Cardi. “You might be forced to next year since you’re not voting and discouraging people from voting,” they said.

In her May cover story with Rolling Stone, Cardi B slammed President Biden for the United States’ involvement in the Israel-Hamas war, and also criticized his inaction on the economy.

“I feel like people got betrayed,” she said. “It’s just like, ‘D–n, y’all not caring about nobody.’ Then, it really gets me upset that there is solutions to it. There is a solution. I know there’s a solution because you’re spending billions of dollars on any f–king thing.”

After interviewing and endorsing Biden in the 2020 election, it seems like Cardi may be distancing herself from either candidate in 2024. “I don’t f–k with both of y’all n—-s,” she said of Biden and Trump in her RS interview.

On the music side, Cardi B is still working toward the release of her sophomore album; the long-awaited project remains without a release date. Cardi teased another track possibly on the LP earlier this week, which finds her showing off a softer side while sampling Janet Jackson’s “Funny How Time Flies (When You’re Having Fun).”

“Yall like this vibe for CB2?” Cardi captioned the video, which shows her in a car.

Cardi put out some good energy into the universe on X over the weekend when it comes to her proving her haters wrong once again. “I have everything planned, locked, and ready to go. Every thing I said I would do this year, I’m going to do it. Nothing is going to stop me. I proved myself before and I’m going to do it again… now rest,” she wrote.

The clock is ticking, as Invasion of Privacy celebrated its sixth anniversary in April. Cardi has also teased pivoting to release a Spanish album following her sophomore effort.

See Cardi’s tweet reassuring fans that she won’t be voting red:

Darius Rucker thinks it’s time for fans and critics to forgive Morgan Wallen for his use of a racist slur. In an interview with Rolling Stone, the Hootie and the Blowfish singer and solo star said three years after Wallen was caught in a video repeatedly using the N-word the 31-year-old “Last Night” singer is a different person.

“I think Morgan’s become a better person since that,” Rucker told RS. “I’ve known Morgan a long time. Since all that happened Morgan’s tried to really better himself and become a better person and see the world in a much better, better was.”

In a February 2021 video, Wallen was caught yelling the N-word and other expletives while arriving home with some friends. At the time, Wallen apologized, telling TMZ, “I’m embarrassed and sorry. I used an unacceptable and inappropriate racial slur that I wish I could take back. There are no excuses to use this type of language, ever. I want to sincerely apologize for using the word. I promise to do better.”

Though Wallen’s career eventually continued apace, even picking up steam, the immediate fallout included his music briefly being pulled from streaming and radio, a suspension from his label and getting dropped by his booking agent, as well as the Academy of Country Music deeming him ineligible for the 56th annual awards.

By the end of that year, though, Wallen’s catalog had racked up more than $8 million in revenue as U.S. sales skyrocketed, he broke a series of records on the Billboard charts, hit the road again and watched his radio airplay more than double. His Dangerous album went on to win album of the year at the 2022 ACM Awards and Wallen collected 11 trophies at the 2023 Billboard Music Awards

Despite that bounce back, Rucker told RS that it feels like Wallen is still living under the cloud of his racist incident. “You know, he’s not forgiven. He’s still not out for CMAs and ACMs,” Rucker said. “They can say what they want, but the fact that Morgan Wallen is not up for entertainer of the year and those things is crazy. No one’s selling more tickets than Morgan.”

Despite the cold shoulder Rucker said Wallen is still getting, the singer has continued to crank out hits, including his No. 1 Billboard Hot 100 smash “I Had Some Help” with Post Malone. The singer once again courted controversy recently, though, again apologizing to fans in April after he was arrested for allegedly throwing a chair off the roof of a Nashville bar. Wallen was arrested and briefly jailed on April 8 after police said he tossed a chair from the sixth-floor roof of Eric Church’s then-new bar Chief’s, with the seat reportedly landing just a few feet away from two Metro Nashville police officers. Wallen was arrested and charged with three felony counts of reckless endangerment and one misdemeanor count of disorderly conduct.

He later posted a tweet apologizing for the incident, revealing that he’d reached out to Nashville police, his family and the Chief’s crew to make amends. “I’m not proud of my behavior, and I accept responsibility…. I have the utmost respect for the officers working every day to keep us all safe,” he said at the time.

Years before Myles Smith broke through with his anthemic single “Stargazing,” he followed his mother’s advice by focusing on his education — graduating from the University of Nottingham in 2019, launching his own company at 19 and making it profitable by 23.

“I [was] earning good money, but I [wasn’t] fulfilled within my heart,” Smith explains. “That, for me, was a moment of [realizing] that I can’t dedicate years of my life to doing something that I know I’m truly not completely invested in.” So he quit — and already, just two years later, the returns have trumped any apprehension.

As he speaks with Billboard from his Brighton home in late June, the 26-year-old singer-songwriter’s runaway hit “Stargazing” has reached a No. 41 high on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 7 on the Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart, earning 61.2 million official on-demand U.S. streams through June 27, according to Luminate. He has also been announced as a supporting act for select dates on Imagine Dragons’ upcoming fall tour, and will jet to Australia and New Zealand in November for his own headlining trek, which has sold out shows across Europe and North America.

As a kid born to a Jamaican family in Luton, England, Smith consumed a wide-ranging selection of genres: Reggae was a mainstay, but between his mother’s love for Whitney Houston’s “Million Dollar Bill” and his siblings’ indoctrination of Destiny’s Child, Ne-Yo and Justin Timberlake, he listened to plenty of R&B. His vibrant working-class neighborhood also exposed him to hip-hop and grime, but it was the music of the 2010s that truly honed his songwriting skills. He credits the heartbreaking lyricism of Adele’s 21, Ed Sheeran’s +, Bryson Tiller’s Trapsoul and Mumford & Sons’ Babel as four foundational albums.

While he crafted his sound, he began uploading unfinished song snippets to TikTok, one of which caught the attention of Extended Play Group’s Eric Parker as he was scrolling through his For You page in fall 2022. “It was a very sad song [that] hit me in a place I don’t normally get hit on TikTok,” Parker says. He promptly reached out and started managing Smith that November.

The two worked to build his following by joining his originals with evocative covers of songs that mined Gen Z’s penchant for nostalgia, including The Neighbourhood’s “Sweater Weather.” “Covers [were] an opportunity to find an audience that I thought would match with the music I would eventually create,” he explains.

With a growing online fan base by 2023, Smith was independently releasing his own singles through Ditto Music, including early tracks like the thumping “My Home” and the witty wordplay fest “Solo” (his first U.K. chart hit). Once he surpassed four million monthly listeners on Spotify, Smith and Parker agreed it was time to look for a label deal. After meeting with scores of potential partners, Smith signed with RCA U.K. last January, in partnership with the U.S. label.

“[My] incredible A&R Jaryn [Valdry] made me cry my eyes out in a meeting because she saw me for who I was,” Smith says. “[RCA’s] whole philosophy being growth over a long period rather than a flash in the pan really aligned with me.”

Two months later, Smith dropped his debut EP, You Promised a Lifetime. “Stargazing” — written in Malibu, Calif. shortly after signing his deal — wouldn’t arrive until May. Fueled by Fireball shots, nachos and tacos, he and co-writers Peter Fenn and Jesse Fink were “eight or nine songs in,” before Smith came up with a chorus melody so arresting that it sparked an immediate search for complementary chords. Most of the song was written in 15 minutes, with verse details finalized in the following weeks. And when the rest of his team heard it, they solidified his confidence in the looming hit.

“I get back to West Hollywood at two or three in the morning, and I play the day-of demo on the speakers in the [ceiling],” he recalls. “I remember my manager waking up on the sofa like, ‘What is this?’ Everyone in the house is running and jumping around. For my team — my harshest critics, after my mum — to give me that genuine reaction, I knew I was on to something.”

They soon launched a month-long rollout for the song, culminating in its release on May 10 to coincide with the start of his next touring leg. The first snippet he posted to TikTok on April 8 doubled down on the intimacy of his guitar-backed singer-songwriter style, and each subsequent teaser featured more members of his team lip-syncing and dancing along to the track.

“Being able to draw people into the context of the song really works,” Smith says. “I’m Myles Smith, but I’ve got a team, and they’re my best friends. There’s a strange culture of everything revolving around the artist. You think I could do this without everyone around me? No way.”

The song’s radio campaign began across the pond, but Parker mentions that RCA wanted to make a stateside push immediately. “They were very proactive, [which] was a good sign that they believed in the song as much as we did.” Their hunch was right: “Stargazing” continues to build at radio, debuting on the Adult Alternative Airplay chart dated July 6 and reaching new peaks at Alternative Airplay and Rock & Alternative Airplay.

Amid his breakthrough, Smith sees himself as someone known for his full bodies of work. “I want to be an album artist,” he stresses. “There’s only so much you can say in an EP or single.” But even more importantly, he’s focused on setting an example for how the music industry intersects with the world’s larger systems of oppression.

“I don’t want to be used as a means of saying, ‘We’ve done enough,’” he says of his success in the singer-songwriter space as a Black man. “If anything, I want to be used as a question for why aren’t there more Myleses breaking through.”

A version of this story will appear in the July 20, 2024, issue of Billboard.

Miranda Lambert had to take a break during a show at Momentum Bank Ballpark in Midland, TX over the weekend when two female fans started scrapping during a performance of her ballad “Tin Man.” In a TikTok of the incident, Lambert is performing the song solo acoustic when she stops to ask if everyone is okay, fearing a fan had passed out in the crowd.

“Are you good? Are y’all fightin’?,” she asked the women. “During this song? Because I will come down there and you don’t want that today. We’re not doin’ that today.” The wrangle took place during a performance of the touching song from Lambert’s 2016 album The Weight of These Wings, in which Lambert tells the Wizard of Oz‘s heart-deficient Tin Man that he’s lucky he can’t ever fall in love and have his ticker blasted to a million little pieces.

In an Instagram post on Tuesday (July 2), Lambert clarified that she has no problem with her fans getting into it during her concert, but if they don’t mind, she would prefer they just pick some different songs to scrap to. “If you want to fight at my shows, I’m all about it. Give ’em hell,” Lambert said in the clip. “I’ve got five songs for you.”

The singer then suggested a handful of other songs from her catalog that might be better options for a hoe down throw down. Among the tracks she offered up: “Fastest Girl in Town,” “Kerosene,” “Gunpowder and Lead,” “Little Red Wagon” and her recent single, “Wrangle.”

She also explained her rationale, adding, “Don’t do it during ‘Tin Man.’ That’s not the time,” she said in the video in which she rocked a white cowboy hat, western shirt and a jewelry box-full of turquoise rings and bracelets. “I know you can hear the s–t talking because it’s a ballad. But that’s not the time. So pick your times. You’ve got five songs. Look at the set list and choose wisely.”

Fans had some ideas as well in the comments, with recommendations including: “Mama’s Broken Heart,” “If I Was a Cowboy,” “Tequila Does” and “The House That Built Me.”

Watch Lambert’s video below.