The first two weeks of Billboard’s Songs of the Summer chart this year have brought two No. 1s.

Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas” rises a spot to No. 1 on Songs of the Summer (dated June 13), after Drake’s “Janice STFU,” now at No. 2, led upon the chart’s annual return a week earlier.

It’s the first time since 2020 that a title hasn’t ruled Songs of the Summer from start to finish. That year, Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande’s “Rain on Me” topped the season’s first chart and Megan Thee Stallion’s “Savage,” featuring Beyoncé, was No. 1 in week two, before DaBaby’s “Rockstar,” featuring Roddy Ricch, led the rest of the way.

Since then, each Songs of the Summer winner by September was the only song to lead each season: BTS’ “Butter” in 2021; Harry Styles’ “As It Was” in 2022; Morgan Wallen’s “Last Night” in 2023; Post Malone’s “I Had Some Help,” featuring Wallen, in 2024; and Alex Warren’s “Ordinary” last year.

The 20-position Songs of the Summer running tally tracks the most popular hits based on cumulative performance on the weekly streaming-, airplay- and sales-based Billboard Hot 100 chart from Memorial Day through Labor Day (this year encompassing charts dated June 6 through Sept. 12, 2026). At the end of the season, the top song of the summer will be revealed.

Also notably, “Choosin’ Texas” is No. 1 on Songs of the Summer even though it hasn’t topped the Hot 100 in each of the summer survey’s first two weeks. Still, its No. 2 rank the past two weeks on the Hot 100 — after it dominated for 10 weeks starting in February — give it the edge over “Janice STFU,” at No. 3 on the Hot 100 a week after it added its second week at No. 1.

Meanwhile, Grande’s new Hot 100 leader, “Hate That I Made You Love Me,” enters Songs of the Summer at No. 10. (All the songs above it benefit from two weeks of chart activity.)

Check out the top 10 summer songs every year throughout the Hot 100’s history (from the chart’s start in 1958); the top 500 Greatest of All Time Songs of the Summer; and the latest Songs of the Summer chart in its entirety.

Copyright termination, a crucial legal provision that allows songwriters and artists to take back their music decades after they sold it away, was meant to be inalienable. You cannot waive it, you cannot sell it: The whole point was for it to be available years later, when an artist would get a “second bite at the apple” after it was clear how much their music was really worth.

But termination is not automatic, as many artists have learned the hard way. You can’t take your music back if a judge says you recorded it as a work for hire (and the labels say almost every album was). You can’t get it back if you used a loan-out company, a common tax structure for musicians. You also can’t get them back if you gave them away in a divorce settlement.

Now we can add bankruptcy to the list. In a first-of-its-kind decision last week, a federal appeals court overturned a victory for legendary hip-hop group 2 Live Crew and ruled that it could not invoke termination to win back five of its albums because one of its members had filed for bankruptcy years earlier. Why did that matter? Go read the full story to find out.

You’re reading The Legal Beat, a weekly newsletter about music law from Billboard Pro, offering you a one-stop cheat sheet of big new cases, important rulings and all the fun stuff in between. To get the newsletter in your inbox every Tuesday, subscribe here.

Other top stories this week…

-The American Federation of Musicians filed a lawsuit against Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group over their settlements with AI music companies Suno and Udio, claiming its members have not gotten paid or given enough information about the deals.

-Director John Carney sat down with Billboard to talk about Power Ballad, his latest music-driven comedy about a fading boy band star, played by Nick Jonas, who steals a song from a little-known singer, played by Paul Rudd. That’s a story music lawyers know all too well.

-Prosecutors added a racketeering charge to Lil Durk’s murder-for-hire case, claiming his Only the Family (OTF) label is also a violent gang — and buying themselves a potentially easier path to secure a conviction at trial if they can’t prove the case’s core counts.

-Spotify was hit with a lawsuit claiming the streaming giant’s 1,000-play royalty threshold and “opaque” stream-filtering policies have led to a “systemic suppression” of pay for indie artists.

-Jermaine Jackson finally responded to a years-old lawsuit claiming he raped a session musician coordinator in 1988 — and he wants to axe a $6.5 million judgment the judge issued by default in his absence.

–Cardi B demanded that gossip blogger Tasha K refund more than $100,000 in legal fees as a punishment for violating a settlement by talking about her estranged husband Offset and NFL player Stefon Diggs, the father of her youngest child.

-A singer who accused Travis Scott, SZA and Future of stealing their 2023 hit “Telekinesis” from an unreleased demo track she created with Ye (the artist formerly known as Kanye West) dropped her lawsuit — telling Billboard that she had “decided to forgive” Scott and move on.

ALPHA DRIVE ONE and inza were both built by fans, backed by one of Korea’s strongest cultural conglomerates and now two of K-pop’s most-watched acts have a major U.S. partner.

Billboard can exclusively report that South Korean label WAKEONE has entered a strategic partnership with REPUBLIC Collective, the Universal Music Group division that has led three of Billboard‘s year-end label charts for the past five years: Top Labels, Billboard 200 Labels and Hot 100 Labels. Officially announced Tuesday (June 9), the deal will see REPUBLIC support WAKEONE’s girl group izna and the recently debuted boy band ALPHA DRIVE ONE for the acts’ global expansion including album promotion and distribution.

Both izna and ALPHA DRIVE ONE were assembled in real-time by international K-pop fan voters: izna through the 2024 survival singing competition show I-Land 2 — where fans across a reported 217 countries and regions voted for the final girl group lineup — and ALPHA DRIVE ONE (also known as ALD1) on Boys II Planet, which reportedly drew more than 26 million votes across 223 countries and regions to decide the eight-member lineup last fall.

The partnership brings the buzzy K-pop acts to a heavyweight Western distributor with a direct line to several of the scene’s most recent crossover moments with nearly a dozen No. 1 albums on the Billboard 200 (including chart-toppers from TWICE, Tomorrow X Together, and eight from Stray Kids) and acting as a label home for the KPop Demon Hunters soundtrack, the juggernaut LP whose single “Golden” topped the Billboard Hot 100 and won both a Grammy and an Academy Award this year.

The Demon Hunter magic could continue with izna, whose music is produced by Teddy — the longtime hitmaker who has worked with BLACKPINK and PSY — who snagged a Grammy and an Oscar for his work on “Golden.” Teddy and his go-to creative collaborators like IDO and Kush — the same names behind several KPop Demon Hunters tracks — work across izna’s music, including their EP Set the Tempo and new single “METRONOME” (below) released Monday (June 8) as the first release under the REPUBLIC/WAKONE alliance.

Debuting just days into 2026, ALPHA DRIVE ONE saw their debut album, EUPHORIA, move a reported 1.1 million physical copies globally on its Jan. 12 release day. The ALD1 boys followed up with new single “OMG!” released at the end of last month, and its video has already earned more than 61 million views on YouTube in less than two weeks.

Both groups are represented by WAKEONE, a label under CJ ENM — the entertainment and media arm of conglomerate CJ Group behind the massive K-pop festival KCON, the highly watched MAMA Awards, and popular Korean cable channel Mnet, which produced both groups’ respective competition series. While CJ and WAKEONE have been comparatively slow to formalize a larger Western label partnership, their boy band ZEROBASEONE — created on the original season of Boys Planet in 2023 — eventually secured distribution through Virgin Music Group and has since notched two Top 30 entries on the Billboard 200 to date with a new EP, Ascend-, set for a physical release in the U.S. on June 26.

Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas” spends a 28th week at No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart (dated June 13), adding another record to its run. The song passes Gabby Barrett’s 2020-21 hit “I Hope” as the longest-leading hit by a woman with no other credited recording artists since the survey became the genre’s main songs chart in 1958.

(Charlie Puth joined for a pop remix of “I Hope,” but wasn’t listed on Hot Country Songs.)

“Choosin’ Texas” totaled 27 million official U.S. streams, 48.9 million radio audience impressions and 8,000 sales May 22-28, according to Luminate.

Only three songs have logged more weeks at No. 1 on Hot Country Songs than “Choosin’ Texas”: Bebe Rexha and Florida Georgia Line’s “Meant to Be,” which ruled for 50 weeks in 2017-18; Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)”(45 weeks, 2024-25); and Sam Hunt’s “Body Like a Back Road” (34 weeks, 2017).

“Choosin’ Texas” debuted at No. 7 on Hot Country Songs in November and has reigned each week since early December. It has also dominated the all-genre Billboard Hot 100 for 10 weeks since February.

Plus, Langley has claimed the top three on Hot Country Songs for five weeks running, with “Choosin’ Texas” followed by “Be Her” at No. 2 and “I Can’t Love You Anymore,” with Morgan Wallen, at No. 3. No other woman has notched such a triple for multiple weeks.

Langey cowrote “Choosin’ Texas” with Luke Dick, Miranda Lambert and Joybeth Taylor and coproduced it with Lambert and Ben West.

“It was such a crazy moment,” the Alabama native previously told Billboard about finding out that “Choosin’ Texas” had first topped the Hot 100. “My label called, with my team on speaker, and it was just surreal. We loved the song when we wrote it, but none of us thought that it would be the song to do everything it’s doing. It keeps giving us a reason to celebrate new milestones.”