At a concert in his hometown of Memphis on Friday night (Jan. 19), Justin Timberlake live-debuted the new song “Selfish” — his first new solo material since his fifth studio album, 2018’s Man of the Woods.

“So if I get jealous, I can’t help it/ I want every bit of you, I guess I’m selfish,” JT sings on the silky-smooth R&B track (listen to a snippet in the TikTok video below). “It’s bad for my mental, but I can’t fight it.”

And that’s not all: Also on Friday night, Timberlake unveiled a trailer for his sixth album along with the project’s official title: Everything I Thought It Was. This comes after the pop star’s Instagram teaser on Wednesday was captioned “EITIW,” leading fans on an Easter egg hunt to decode the acronym.

The album trailer has a sort of Wes Anderson, Asteroid City vibe about it, with a model car driving toward a desert gas station. It also has an A-list narrator in Benicio Del Toro.

“What do we have here?” Del Toro says as the video opens. “Ooh, that’s a nice car! Wait, it’s a model. Did that say JT? OK, that sunset is definitely not real. Oh, there’s Justin! Why won’t he turn around? What the f— is he staring at?”

The trailer — which you can watch below — ends with yellow words against a black screen that read: “Justin Timberlake Presents: Everything I Thought It Was.”

A series of clues had hinted at new Timberlake solo music, starting with the star wiping his Instagram clean in early January. In addition to the mid-week Instagram teaser, Timberlake was also announced as a guest on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on Thursday next week and the musical guest on Saturday Night Live (alongside host Dakota Johnson) on Jan. 27. While we don’t have an official release date for “Selfish” yet, you can pre-save the song on Spotify now.

In September, Timberlake reunited with *NSYNC to release “Better Place” for the Trolls Band Together soundtrack, marking the group’s first musical release since 2002 (when the Neptunes remix of “Girlfriend,” featuring Nelly, arrived). That same month, Timberlake reunited with longtime collaborators Timbaland and Nelly Furtado on the song “Keep Going Up!”

Zayn Malik appeared to have an unfortunate run-in with a car while making his way through a swarming crowd at Paris Fashion Week.

The former One Direction singer — who was attending Kenzo’s Fall/Winter 2024-2025 menswear show, which can be viewed in full here — was filmed and photographed being escorted through a large gathering of people on Friday (Jan. 19). Fans noticed in one clip posted on social media that as Zayn walked alongside bodyguards, it appeared that his foot possibly got caught by a car driving by.

“Whoa, be careful! Be careful!” someone can be heard saying in the clip circulating online. Zayn only momentarily paused, then kept on walking.

During the early hours of Saturday, Zayn checked in with fans and shared a few new photos from Paris on Instagram.

“@kenzo @nigo Thanks for a great show!” he wrote, adding: “My foot is fine !! Thanks to my incredibly well made shoes.”

Zayn ended his comment with a crying-laughing emoji and a thumbs up.

In a three-picture gallery, Zayn offered a side-profile selfie, a snapshot from inside the Kenzo show and a closeup of his right foot, the foot in question.

Zayn’s white Kenzo sneaker wasn’t as pristine as it probably was at the start of the night. The right side of the shoe was covered in dark skid marks. Fortunately, his footwear apparently protected him from injury.

The Kenzo show took place at France’s Bibliothèque Nationale Richelieu Friday night. Zayn was also spotted interacting kindly with fans, posing for several selfies with them.

The solo star recently joined a remake of “Tu Hai Kahan,” the 2023 hit from Pakistani trio AUR. The song was re-released on Friday (Jan. 12) and featured additional Urdu-language vocals from Zayn on the chorus.

The release came from U.S.-based D36 & Sony Music Entertainment, Middle East. It’s Zayn’s first new music since last summer’s “Love Like This.”

See the incident and Zayn’s post from Paris below. The third image shows his slightly damaged shoe.

Julia Michaels is the youngest female songwriter for a Disney film, and to celebrate, the artist sat down with Billboard’s Rania Aniftos to discuss the process of making the film.

“It was such an honor. I grew up watching Disney and listening to Disney,” she said of working on the project, before adding, “The first time I saw Wish as a movie with all the songs in it, I was like, oh my gosh, this is going to live longer than me. This exists now and there’s going to be littles all over the world that are going to feel connected to these songs and they’re going to grow up with these songs like I grew up with my Disney songs. Wrapping my head around that has been so deeply surreal.”

As for what her younger self would think of her accomplishments as a songwriter, artist and beyond, Michaels noted, “Little me wouldn’t even understand that. I come from a very chaotic, broken family. I didn’t come from money. I didn’t come from anything.”

Lastly, the star teased working on music in the upcoming year. “I’ve been writing with a lot of people again, which has been really good for the soul,” she noted.

Watch Billboard’s full interview above.

Trace Adkins appeared on Bill Maher’s Club Random podcast this week for a wide-ranging interview, one in which the four-time Billboard Country Airplay chart-topper offered up his opinions on topics including music, how his voice has improved over the years, his smoking habit, his past struggles with drinking, Elvis Presley’s death and his desire to make an album of classic “crooner” songs made famous by artists such as Frank Sinatra.

Louisiana native Adkins, who has never been shy about offering his views on hot topics and who previously released the 2007 book A Personal Stand: Observations and Opinions from a Freethinking Roughneck, also gave his perspectives on the backlash Morgan Wallen and Jason Aldean both faced in recent years. Maher brought up the controversy that surrounded Aldean’s song “Try That in a Small Town” and its music video, which included scenes filmed at Tennessee’s Maury County Courthouse, where a Black man named Henry Choate was lynched in 1927.

Maher said Aldean likely did not know the history of the music video location when filming the video there.

“He had no idea,” Adkins agreed, later adding, “The grievance junkies turn on somebody and they try to cancel them, and all it’s going to do, he’s going to sell more records than he ever has and it’s going to make him bigger than he’s ever been. … He had no idea, man. Do you know how many music videos I’ve done that I’ve called up the director and went, ‘Hey, man, now what about this location where we’re shooting this thing?’ And if I did do that, it’s only because I didn’t know where I was going. He [Aldean] had no idea. That director picked that location because it had the look they wanted. It was just a small-town courthouse, that’s all it was. And it happened to be close.”

Maher also brought up Wallen, who garnered backlash after he was filmed using a racial slur outside his Nashville home in 2021. Though Wallen was dropped by his booking agency at the time and briefly suspended from his label and had his music pulled from radio and streaming platforms, he has since seen his music dominate music charts and his tours swell from arenas to stadium dates.

“He sold out two nights in a row, 55,000-plus tickets each night,” Adkins said. “God…cancel me,” he added with a laugh. When Maher stated that he didn’t feel that either Wallen nor Aldean was racist, Adkins answered, “I’ve been around both of those guys. They’re good guys. There’s no… they’re not racist.”

Earlier in the conversation, Adkins also recalled that his mother beat COVID “three times, and she’s 81. … The first time she got it was pretty rough, but then the next two times it wasn’t very bad. She had built up a natural immunity, I suppose.”

Adkins noted that he got COVID-19 twice, but added that he did receive the COVID-19 vaccine.

“So you didn’t think the vaccine had a chip in it to track you?” Maher asked, addressing a conspiracy theory, with Adkins replying, “You know what? I just, I don’t buy all of that crap, you know? I’m like, give me a vaccine for everything that you’ve got one for. I’ll take them. I’m not scared of that. … I don’t think they’re trying to put something in the vaccines to control us.”

Adkins also noted his love of comedy and his respect for comedians, given that that each night, a comedian’s success or failure onstage relies solely on themselves.

“I’ve got such respect for what you guys do, because you’re working without a net. I’ve got those five or six guys standing up there onstage with me. I got my gang, I got my muscle. You don’t like what I’m doing? You’re gonna have to deal with these guys. But you’re up there by yourself. I’ve got just crazy respect for what you guys do.”

Watch the full podcast interview below:

Universal Music Group (UMG) shares almost hit an all-time high on Friday, reaching 27.47 euros ($29.98) before closing at 27.22 euros ($29.21), a 1% increase for the week. That was close to the peak of 27.96 euros ($30.52) reached on Nov. 12, 2021, less than two months after the company was spun off from Vivendi, and marked a new 52-week high. The 1% gain followed a 6.9% improvement last week as investors reacted to news that the company expects to lay off staff in the first quarter. 

If French music company Believe is taken private, as has been reported, shareholders would expect a premium over the recent share price. That would explain why the company’s share price rose 13.5% to 10.18 euros ($11.11) this week — more than offsetting the 10.5% decline Believe shares experienced last week after news broke of the potential takeover. According to a Reuters report, Believe co-founder/CEO Denis Ladegaillerie and U.S. investment firm TCV have floated the idea to private equity firms. 

The S&P 500 rose 1.2% to close at a record high of 4,839.81 on Friday, surpassing the previous peak set two years ago. The Nasdaq didn’t set a record but fared even better, climbing 2.3% to 15,310.97. Stocks in other countries didn’t match the gains in U.S. markets. In the United Kingdom, the FTSE 100 dropped 2.1% to 7,461.93. South Korea’s KOSPI composite index fell 2.1% to 2,472.74. China’s Shanghai Stock Exchange Composite Index sank 1.7% to 2,832.28.

Music stocks were slightly off last week’s record high despite Believe’s double-digit gain and the majority of music stocks finishing the week in positive territory. The 20-company Billboard Global Music Index fell 0.4% to 1,559.48 this week, down slightly from last week’s all-time high of 1,566.45. Twelve of the 20 stocks had gains this week. Other than Believe’s takeover-related jump, the best-performing music stocks had only low, single-digit gains. MSG Entertainment rose 4.1% to 33.48 and SiriusXM improved 4% to $5.42. 

The index’s most valuable companies improved slightly: In addition to UMG’s 1% gain, Spotify improved 0.8% to $204.71 and Live Nation climbed 0.6% to $91.18. Those gains were overshadowed by losses by radio giant iHeartMedia, which fell 1.7% to $2.25, and three Asian companies: HYBE, SM Entertainment and Tencent Music Entertainment.

The index’s biggest losers were K-pop companies HYBE and SM Entertainment, which fell 10.9% and 10.3%, respectively. HYBE has been on a roller coaster in January, jumping 9.6% from Dec. 28 to Jan. 11 before falling 14.1% over the next six trading days. SM Entertainment jumped 20.5% from the end of December to Jan. 11 but has only dropped 3.4% from its high point. Another big mover this week was Chinese music streamer Tencent Music Entertainment, which dropped 9.5% to $8.51. 

There was good news for all companies on Friday when the closely watched University of Michigan’s Index of Consumer Sentiment jumped 13% in January, its highest level since July 2021. Over the last two months, consumer sentiment has risen 29% and Americans’ expectations for future inflation dropped to 2.9%. Consumer sentiment is now 60% above the all-time low from June 2022 but remains 7% below the historical average. 

Music companies will soon announce earnings results for the quarter ended Dec. 31. The first companies out of the gate are SiriusXM on Feb. 1 and Spotify on Feb. 6.