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Gamers rejoice! After almost two years since its debut, Halo Season 2 premiered on Paramount+ on Thursday (Feb. 8).

The series, based on the iconic Xbox franchise, takes place in the same fictional universe that debuted in the very first Halo video game. The series chronicles a 26th-century conflict between humanity and an alien threat known as the Covenant.

In the second season, Master Chief John-117 (Pablo Schreiber) “leads his team of elite Spartans against the alien threat known as the Covenant,” according to Paramount.

The series stars Pablo Schreiber, Natascha McElhone, Jen Taylor, Bokeem Woodbine, Shabana Azmi, Natasha Culzac, Olive Gray, Yerin Ha, Bentley Kalu, Kate Kennedy, Charlie Murphy and Danny Sapani.

Halo is one of the most successful gaming franchises in history with over $6 billion in revenue and more than 82 million copies sold worldwide. The TV series, produced by Showtime in association with 343 Industries and Amblin Television.

Steven Kane and Steven Spielberg are executive producers on the series alongside Darryl Frank and Justin Falvey for Amblin Television in partnership with 343 Industries. Kiki Wolfkill serves as executive producer for 343 Industries, with Otto Bathurst and Toby Leslie of One Big Picture.

Keep reading to find out all the ways to stream the show for free.

How to Watch Halo Season 2 Online

The Halo series is streaming exclusively on Paramount+ at no additional charge to subscribers. The first two episodes from Season 2 dropped on Thursday.

Sign up for Paramount+ and receive a free 7-day trial to watch Halo and other programming in the streaming library. Want a longer free trial? Use the code “JUNE” to receive a 30-day free trial.

Plans start at $5.99 a month for the Essential plan which lets you stream thousands of TV episodes and tons of movies with commercials. For commercial-free streaming, choose Paramount+ with Showtime for $11.99 a month. You also get access to your local CBS station to watch the 2024 Super Bowl and other sporting events.

Want to save on your monthly bill? The annual plan save your around 16% off the monthly price. Paramount+ offers student discounts as well.

Amazon Prime members can add Paramount+ to Prime Video and stream the Halo series and more from one platform.

Want more ways to stream? Paramount+ with Showtime is also available on DirecTV, Sling TV and Fubo TV (use ExpressVPN to stream internationally).

From movies and acclaimed originals to live sports, Paramount+ features a mountain of entertainment. Paramount+ members get access to exclusive shows and must-watch movies such as Special Ops: Lioness, 1883, Frasier, The Good Fight, Mayor of Kingstown, Star Trek: Picard, RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars, Why Women Kill, Good Burger 2, Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning, Dungeons & Dragons and Transformers Rise of the Beast.

Watch the trailer for Halo Season 2 below.

Kaskade will replace Tiësto as the Super Bowl’s first ever in-game DJ, with the latter producer dropping out of the gig earlier Thursday (Feb. 8), citing a “personal family emergency.”

Hours after Tiësto dropped out, Kaskade — real name: Ryan Raddon — announced that he’d be subbing in, writing on X that “As a kid who grew up in Chicago watching the NFL Super Bowl every year with my family, this chance to actually be part of it is absolutely mind blowing.

“Las Vegas has been my second home for the past decade, as an architect of creating a landscape that includes house and dance music residencies as part of its destination,” he continues. “To be able to be the first electronic musician to be part of the full game experience of the Super Bowl held in Las Vegas seems like coming home, and I’m beyond excited to represent my community.”

Kaskade will spin during Super Bowl 2024 game breaks, with portions of his performance to be featured during the Super Bowl LVIII broadcast on CBS this Sunday.

Upon announcing that he will no longer be playing the gig, Tiësto wrote that “Me and my team have been preparing something truly special for months, but a personal family emergency is forcing me to return home Sunday morning. It was a tough decision to miss the game, but family always comes first. Thank you to the NFL for the collaboration and looking forward to working with them to deliver something incredible together in the future!”

On Wednesday around midnight, a new song showed up on RapCaviar, Spotify’s premier hip-hop playlist: “All Falls Down,” Kanye West’s second hit single ever, which came out almost 20 years ago. While RapCaviar is mostly focused on new releases, it does occasionally feature throwbacks. Still, the addition felt notable, because a new release from West and Ty Dolla $ign is expected to arrive at midnight tonight and executives around the music industry are curious how streaming service gatekeepers will respond. 

Will they support the renowned artist who now goes by Ye, despite the fact that his past string of antisemitic comments caused most of his prominent business partners to sever ties since 2022? Or will they just ignore the new album all together?

“It’s going to be complicated,” says one former Spotify employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “There’s going to be a difference of opinion within those places on how to handle it. Some people in leadership positions will want to be harsh on Kanye for the nasty antisemitic things he has said. There will also be another side, the hip-hop teams, who will say, ‘No, it’s Kanye, people say crazy shit all the time, plus he apologized. We don’t care. We’re playlisting because it’s Kanye.’”

A digital marketer who helps artists with streaming strategy was more skeptical. “Streaming services didn’t support ‘Vultures’ [Ye’s previous song], so I would be very shocked” if they support the rest of the album, he says. “Even though Ye did his apology, it felt like that came and went so fast.”

Reps for Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube Music did not respond to a request for comment. 

Streaming services mostly avoid trying to wade into moral debates about artists’ character. One exception came when Spotify announced a new policy in 2018, writing on its blog that “in some circumstances, when an artist or creator does something that is especially harmful or hateful (for example, violence against children and sexual violence), it may affect the ways we work with or support that artist or creator.” 

The backlash against this announcement was swift. Anthony “Top Dawg” Tiffith, CEO of Top Dawg Entertainment, told Billboard, “I don’t think it’s right for artists to be censored.” Others felt similarly, and a few weeks later, Spotify said “we are moving away from implementing a policy around artist conduct.”

That said, two former employees say Spotify flexed its muscles around playlisting on at least one occasion. When Megan Thee Stallion was shot by Tory Lanez in 2020, “his songs weren’t getting in any playlists after that,” according to a former employee. (Lanez was found guilty in court in December 2022.) 

But Ye is not on trial, and he also has more than 140 Hot 100 hits to date. Many of these are still in regular rotation: His catalog has earned more than 480 million on-demand streams already this year in the U.S., according to Luminate.

Even so, his newest song sank like a stone. When Ye and Ty Dolla $ign released “Vultures” in November, it failed to crack the Hot 100, and it has amassed only around 33 million Spotify streams, a flop by Ye’s high-flying standards. (He released a video for the track “Talking/Once Again” with Ty earlier this week, but it is not yet available on streaming services.)

Two sources familiar with Ye’s search for a distribution deal say several streaming services signaled to them that they were unlikely to support new music from the star due to widespread outrage over his antisemitic comments. “For an artist as big as Kanye to release a new track and receive no major editorial placements is quite an outlier,” notes Nicki Camberg, a data journalist at the company Chartmetric, which tracks data on playlisting, social media, and streaming for artists. (“Vultures” was released through Label Engine, a distribution company owned by Create Music Group, according to identification information in YouTube’s Content Management System.)

“Vultures” has fared slightly better on the airwaves than it has on streaming services. The song has received airplay from around 30 stations, according to Mediabase. Two stations in Ye’s hometown of Chicago played the song the day it came out, and they’ve played it far more than anyone else: 199 spins so far in 2024 from WGCI and 181 from WPWX. The station that played “Vultures” third most this year, KVEG in Las Vegas, has played it 50 times. 

Aside from the iHeart-owned WGCI, it’s noticeable that the stations playing “Vultures” are mostly owned by smaller radio companies, not the behemoths like iHeart, Audacy and Sirius. The track has received 2,144 spins overall, with 6.187 million audience impressions. 

In the mid-2010s, radio was eclipsed by streaming services as the most important driver of listening behavior. Now a similar thing has happened to streaming services: Young fans are increasingly likely to discover music on short-form video platforms like TikTok. (Though they can’t find Universal Music Group songs there at the moment.) That tendency, combined with streaming services’ emphasis on personalization, led executives to tell Billboard in 2022 that “Spotify and Apple editorial playlists don’t have as much punch” as they used to.  

On an earnings call on Thursday (Feb. 8), Warner Music Group CEO Robert Kyncl noted that “the data discovery and consumption trends” in music “are driven by the algorithms of the larger platforms and users sharing playlists with each other” — not playlists controlled by the various platforms. “The guys who do playlists had a lot of power four or five years ago,” says one longtime A&R. “Now their power is dwindling, because it doesn’t matter what they say. The kids choose at the end of the day.”

This could work to Ye’s advantage. If he’s able to luck into viral moment, it won’t matter much whether he’s put on editorial playlists initially. Listeners will find the music and play it, and the audience response will impact streaming services.

So far, “Vultures” hasn’t generated this kind of enthusiasm. “From a fan perspective, if it was going crazy and everyone was talking about it, that would push it,” the digital marketer says. “But I haven’t seen that anywhere.”

Mojo Nixon, the unpredictable rock and roller behind the 1987 MTV-favorite novelty song “Elvis Is Everywhere,” died Wednesday (Feb. 7) at age 66.

According to a statement on his Facebook page, Nixon (real name: Neill Kirby McMillan Jr.) died after suffering a “cardiac event” during an Outlaw Country Cruise on which he was a performer.

“How you live is how you should die,” the Facebook post reads. “Mojo Nixon was full-tilt, wide-open rock hard, root hog, corner on two wheels + on fire… Passing after a blazing show, a raging night, closing the bar, taking no prisoners + a good breakfast with bandmates and friends. A cardiac event on the Outlaw Country Cruise is about right… & that’s just how he did it. Mojo has left the building. Since Elvis is everywhere, we know he was waiting for him in the alley out back. Heaven help us all.”

Nixon had left on the Outlaw Country Cruise with his band The Toadliquors out of Miami on Sunday (Feb. 4). Other performers on the cruise include Steve Earle and Lucinda Williams. In addition to performing, Nixon also recorded a SiriusXM Session at Sea with the band 49 Winchester, in his other role as a SiriusXM host on the show Loon in the Afternoon on Steven Van Zandt’s Outlaw Country channel.

Born in North Carolina in 1957, Nixon made his way to California in the early ’80s and teamed up with musician Skid Roper, with whom he released six albums between 1985 and 1990. Roper played washboard while Nixon played guitar and sang his own lyrics. Their 1987 project Bo-Day-Shus!!!, which included “Elvis Is Everywhere,” peaked at No. 187 on the Billboard 200 albums chart.

Nixon also hit the Billboard charts with “Don Henley Must Die” — a savage song that takes aim at the Eagles frontman from his 1990 solo album Otis — which was a No. 20 hit on Alternative Airplay.

In an interview with the Austin Chronicle, Nixon recalled the night when Henley himself showed up at his gig at Austin, Texas’ Hole in the Wall venue in 1992 and asked to join him onstage. “He was sh-t-faced and he goes, ‘I want to sing that song, especially the part about not getting together with Glenn Frey!’” Nixon said. “He was beltin’ that sh– out, screaming like he was Johnny f—in’ Rotten.”

In addition to his music career, Nixon also worked as an actor, appearing in the 1989 Jerry Lee Lewis biopic Great Balls of Fire! and starring as Toad in the 1993 Super Mario Bros. movie.

A documentary about Nixon, The Mojo Manifesto: The Life and Times of Mojo Nixon, debuted at the 2022 South by Southwest film festival and was released digitally in March of last year.