Fans got it bad for Usher, who took the stage for the 2024 Super Bowl Halftime Show presented by Apple Music on Sunday (Feb. 11).

The superstar performed a medley of hits, including “Caught Up,” “Burn,” “U Got It Bad,” “Confessions Part II,” “Love In This Club” and more, all while delivering his characteristically sultry dance moves for the roaring crowd at Las Vegas’ Allegiant Stadium.

Usher also had a few surprises up his sleeves, as he was joined by a few of his celebrity friends on stage, including Alicia Keys for a mashup of “If I Ain’t Got You” and “My Boo,” before H.E.R. delivered a jaw-dropping guitar solo, and Ludacris and Lil Jon teamed up to hype up the crowd with a medley of “Turn Down for What” and “Yeah!”

In his Billboard cover story, Usher said shared that his Las Vegas residencies had helped him prepare for the halftime show, as has studying past Super Bowl acts. “I’ve watched every performer, analyzing how they maximized those 12 minutes,” he shared. “But you know, your moment is your moment. And this is a moment I’ve prepared for during the last 30 years.”

Usher’s fiery halftime show comes just a few months after closing one of the most successful and buzzed-about Las Vegas residencies in history, as his My Way show grossed $95.9 million.

Which moment from Usher’s Super Bowl Halftime Show performance was your favorite? Let us know by voting in our poll below.

Gwen Stefani and Blake Shelton‘s “Purple Irises” tops this week’s new music poll.

Music fans voted in a poll published Friday (Feb. 9) on Billboard, choosing the couple’s duet as their favorite new music release of the past week.

“Purple Irises” brought in more than 64% of the vote, and beat out new music from 2024 Super Bowl halftime show star Usher, Kacey Musgraves and more.

Stefani and Shelton performed the song ahead of the big game on Sunday (Feb. 11) for the Super Bowl TikTok Tailgate. Their latest husband-and-wife duet follows their previous collaborations: 2019’s “Nobody But You,” 2021’s “Happy Anywhere,” 2023’s “Love Is Alive” and more.

“Purple Irises” has them singing about their love.

“But if someone comes along and tries to love you like I love you/ Don’t know what I’d do, don’t wanna lose you/ If someone comes along and tries to take you, tries to make you/ Don’t let ’em change your mind,” they sing.

“I didn’t see any of this coming with Blake. This was just a big old ‘What?’ It was an amazing gift to experience love like that for the first time,” Stefani recalled of falling in love with Shelton, in an interview with People in fall 2023. “He’s changed my life … when I [started dating] Blake, that’s when I felt home, like, ‘Oh, this is where I’m supposed to be, with this guy.’”

Trailing behind “Purple Irises” on this week’s poll is Usher’s album Coming Home, with 17% of the vote, and Musgraves’ self-reflective single “Deeper Well,” with 7% of the vote.

See the final results of the poll below.

Verizon is just like Beyoncé‘s soul: You can’t break it. After days of rumors that the 42-year-old superstar would be leading the company’s Super Bowl 2024 commercial Sunday (Feb. 11), she finally hit TV screens during the game’s third quarter on a mission to disrupt the world’s cell service — and even hinted at new music, which she confirmed quickly after the ad aired.

The minute-long ad finds comedian Tony Hale challenging Bey to do something so big, it “breaks” Verizon’s 5G internet service. To do so, she holds a lemonade stand pop-up for fans, plays the saxophone, introduces her own “Beyonc-AI” technology, parodies Barbie as “Bar-Bey” and even announces her candidacy for “Beyoncé of the United States” — but still, the company’s ability to power customers’ phones can’t be beat.

Beyoncé being Beyoncé, though, she had to see her mission through. At the very end of the commercial, the “Halo” singer teases that her next strategy will be to simply release a new song or album.

“OK, they ready,” she says from a rocket ship in outer space. “Drop the new music.”

Within minutes of the commercial airing, Bey posted a teaser labeled “act ii” on Instagram, adding the project’s release date: March 29.

Fans had already suspected that the 32-time Grammy winner would star in Verizon’s Big Game placement, thanks to a pair of teasers the brand posted in the week leading up to Super Bowl Sunday. In the first sneak peek, Hale had stood at the same lemonade stand used in the full commercial and joked, “She wants me to squeeze all these lemons by myself? This better work.”

Then, Verizon shared a second trailer featuring Bey’s silver Renaissance album cover horse, which fans have dubbed “Reneigh.” “So should we be in a Super Bowl commercial? Yay or nay?” Hale asked a life-size model of the stallion.

Watch Beyoncé’s Super Bowl Verizon commercial below.

Kanye West‘s Vultures 1 uses an unauthorized interpolation of Donna Summer‘s 1977 hit “I Feel Love,” the late Summer’s estate claims.

The alleged copyright infringement is found on the pensive electro-pop track “Good (Don’t Die) on Ye’s new joint album with Ty Dolla $ign, which arrived Saturday morning.

On the Vultures track, the lyric “Oh, I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive” is seemingly set to the melody of Summer’s “I Feel Love.”

“Kanye West… asked permission to use Donna Summer’s song I Feel Love, he was denied… he changed the words, had someone re sing it or used AI but it’s I Feel Love… copyright infringement!!!” said a statement posted in an Instagram Story on the official Donna Summer account Saturday (Feb. 10).

“I Feel Love” peaked at No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1977 and spent 23 weeks total on the chart. The song, which was produced and co-written with Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte for the late Queen of Disco’s fifth studio album, I Remember Yesterday, was one of 14 songs to reach the top 10 on the Hot 100 in Summer’s lifetime.

On Friday, former Black Sabbath frontman Ozzy Osbourne also called out Kanye West on social media, saying that Ye had asked to sample a song but was “refused permission because he is an antisemite.” Osbourne said he used the sample anyway at a Vultures 1 listening event at Chicago’s United Center this week. “I want no association with this man!” the rocker wrote. Although Osbourne said online that West asked to sample “War Pigs,” the song he seems to have used at the event is “Iron Man.”

“We get so many requests for these songs,” Sharon Osbourne told Billboard on Friday, “and when we saw that request, we just said no way.” She added, “We’ve been in touch with his team … And it’s also an issue of having respect for another artist.”

On Saturday, she tweeted: “The Osbourne family have never wanted any association with Kanye West. He is an anti-Semitic fool who spews his rhetoric out into the world, Kanye you f—ed with the wrong dude this time. Sincerely, Sharon Osbourne.”

Vultures 1 marks the Ye’s first album since the release of his 2021 album, Donda, and his first project to be released since his string of hate speech and antisemitic remarks, which resulted in companies such as Adidas and Def Jam distancing themselves from the 46-year-old rapper.

Peter Frampton was taking a bathroom break during a recording session at home in Nashville when his managers called to tell him he was included on the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame ballot — for the first time ever.

“I screamed — not like a girl, but I did scream. I said, ‘You’re kidding me!’” Frampton tells Billboard via Zoom, with a laugh. “My band leader Rob [Arthur] was in my music room at the time, ’cause we were doing a video… He came running, ‘What the hell’s going on!’ He thought something was wrong. “So, anyway, it was a very good day.”

Frampton’s long-awaited appearance on the ballot — he’s been eligible since the early ’90s based on his first recordings — is good news for a legion of fans that have long been lobbying for him and protesting his exclusion from even the Rock Hall ballot. In fact, Frampton notes, “A lot of those fans feel more outraged about it taking so long for me than I am. So they can all rest easy now; at least my name’s in the hat.”

“I never expect anything,” adds Frampton, who for several years has been battling degenerative Inclusion Body Myositis (IBM). “I’m a realist. I understand there have been criticisms of the past Rock Hall administration for bizarre choices, which I agree there were. And, yes, my career is what it is, and whatever anybody thinks about it I do feel I deserve [to be inducted].” However, he cautions, “This isn’t it, you know? I’ve still got to get the votes.”

Frampton credits his nomination in part to 2023 Rock Hall inductee Sheryl Crow. She included him in last year’s ceremony in her performance with Stevie Nicks, which Frampton says “stirred the pot big-time and made people aware — including some of the board members, I think. They thought I was already in.”

Frampton’s Rock Hall credentials are unquestioned, certainly. A younger classmate of David Bowie‘s at Bromley Technical School in England, where Frampton’s father was a teacher, he began playing from the time he was an adolescent and began touring in 1964 with his band The Preachers, whose recordings were produced by the Rolling Stones‘ Bill Wyman. As a member of The Herd, Frampton was named “The Face of 1968” by the British teen magazine Rave, and a year later he was part of the original Humble Pie, in which he spent three years before going solo.

Along the way Frampton also played on George Harrison‘s All Things Must Pass, and he did sessions for The Who‘s John Entwistle, Harry Nilsson and Jerry Lee Lewis. Frampton’s first solo album, Winds of
Change, came out in 1972, and it was of course the iconic Frampton Comes Alive! album in 1976 that made him a global star, with estimated sales of more than 20 million copies worldwide and an induction into the Grammy Hall of Fame. Frampton lost his rock credibility after that, however, with his I’m in You album and an ill-advised starring role in the 1978 film adaptation of The Beatles‘ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

“I was trounced on, rightly so, for being the pop star. I became this teenybopper thing,” Frampton acknowledges. But Frampton continued to record and got a boost from Bowie, who featured Frampton on his 1987 album Never Let Me Down and in the band for the subsequent Glass Spider Tour, which reminded the world he was first and foremost a guitar player. Back in rock ‘n’ roll favor, he also won his first Grammy Award in 2007 for the previous year’s instrumental album, Fingertips.

“I have had so many wonderful helping hands along the way,” Frampton says. “Yes, my career has been my own, but I really have had some helping hands, wonderful helping hands, along the way that went to bat for me.”

Frampton adds that the Rock Hall nomination is so fresh that “I haven’t quite realized what I feel it means yet. I’m still in the troughs of ‘Really?!’” But as “a super, super fan of other great talent,” he says the nomination, and the potential of an induction, mean a great deal to him.

“It’s a heady kind of thought, really,” Frampton explains. “If I do make it, to be on the same level these artists that are the be-all and end-all, as far as I’m concerned, is pretty incredible.” Among those as well is fellow first-time nominee Foreigner, whose founder Mick Jones played on “All I Wanna Be (Is By Your Side)” on Wind of Change. “I’m so thrilled to hear that Foreigner got on [the ballot] ’cause Mick and I have been friends for a lifetime.”

Frampton says he’ll do some modest campaigning — mostly reminding fans to participate in the Rock Hall’s public vote — when he sets out on his Never EVER Say Never Tour on March 3 in Greensboro, N.C. He’s been busy of late as well: he and his son Julian, who’s also a musician, recently appeared on the Fox TV reality show We Are Family , and Frampton is among the 60 musicians playing on Mark Knopfler‘s new version of his 1983 instrumental “Going Home: Theme of the Local Hero,” a fundraiser for the U.K.’s Teenage Cancer Trust that comes out Feb. 19.

During the summer, meanwhile, Frampton says he’ll continue work on both a new album of original songs — his first since Hummingbird in a Box in 2014 — and a documentary that’s been in process for several years.

Rock Hall inductees are expected to be announced during early May, with the ceremony taking place this fall in Cleveland, on a date to be determined. Disney+ will again telecast the event.