Does it ever drive you crazy just how fast the night changes? Not too long ago, One Direction was the biggest boy band on the planet — a title that BTS now objectively holds — and in a new interview, Niall Horan shared his thoughts.

The 1D alum opened up to Jake Shane on the Wednesday (June 3) episode of Therapuss about the similarities and differences between his former boy band and the Bangtan Boys. “None of our bit was super choreographed or right or anything like that,” Horan said on the topic of K-pop groups on the podcast. “So they’re very different.”

“Each generation seems like it’s got boy bands, but they’re all kind of different to each other,” he continued. “We didn’t wear all white outfits and do routines and things like, say, *NSYNC or Backstreet [Boys]. We just kind of walked around [on stage]. The K-pop thing is I guess more structured — but they look like athletes.”

The Irish singer-songwriter went on to praise BTS specifically. “When you watch BTS dance, you’re like, ‘OK, honestly, I have no idea how to do anything you’re doing, but it’s kind of crazy what you’re doing it.’ It’s pretty intense, but it’s amazing.”

Also comprised of Harry Styles, Zayn Malik, Louis Tomlinson and the late Liam Payne, One Direction may not have done much dancing, but the group still dominated pop culture for years. The X Factor quintet scored 29 entries and six top 10 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 before BTS picked up the baton, with the K-pop superstars now boasting seven No. 1s to date.

Elsewhere on the pod, Horan gave flowers to another dominant force in music: Taylor Swift. Saying that her 2019 Lover track “Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince” “might be her best” song, the former Voice coach said, “The melody is so good … I love that line, ‘Play stupid games, you win stupid prizes.’”

“And ‘Me!’” Horan added. “‘Me!’ is a good song, too.”

Horan’s new album, Dinner Party, arrives Thursday (June 5). Check out his full interview on Therapuss below.

On Wednesday (June 3), Billboard honored this year’s Country Power Players honorees during a ceremony held at The Eye Rooftop at Category 10 in downtown Nashville, celebrating many of the genre’s top artists and music executives.

Billboard co-chief content officers Leila Cobo and Jason Lipshutz ushered in the evening by recognizing the current and enduring power of country music.

“It is an artform that is constantly expanding … new superstars, new smashes, setting new records, innovating while valuing longstanding traditions,” Lipshutz said. “Billboard‘s charts tell us that country is enormous right now, but everybody on this rooftop knows that country music is, was and always will be timeless.”

Melinda Newman, Billboard’s executive editor of West Coast/country hosted the ceremony, and joined in celebrating the executives highlighted on Billboard‘s Country Power Players list and the artists being honored. She also praised executive and artist honorees for the “unprecedented success that country music is experiencing as it continues to surge both domestically and internationally because of your efforts.” 

Billboard Country Power Players cover artist Green was honored with the Hitmaker award. “His music is pure country,” Clint Black said when presenting Green with the recognition, later adding, “I’m impressed with his songwriting.”

Green, a four-time Country Airplay topper, noted that the honor meant a lot to him as an artist who is the sole writer behind some of his hits, such as “Worst Way” and “Don’t Mind If I Do” — and it was fitting that Black, who is also known for writing the bulk of his own hits, presented the award to Green.

“For me, this kind of recognition is a pat on the back that gives me the confidence to go out and write more songs and play more shows,” Green said, acknowledging many of the members of his team. He also dedicated the award to his late “granddaddy Buford” who “loved country music.” “I had a lot of great role models growing up,” said Green, who recalled his grandmother Lola Jean recently attending one of his sold-out shows in Atlanta. “She said, ‘Man, I just wish Buford could see this.’ It’s moments like this that make me very certain he’s sittin’ in a recliner somewhere watching down on this.”

HARDY presented the Rising Star award to Tucker Wetmore, who has been piling up hits including “Brunette” and “3, 2, 1” and taking his engaging live shows to fans around the world this year.

“One thing I do know about him is he works extremely hard and what comes from hard work is success, and hopefully what comes from success is being recognized for that,” HARDY said. “I know for a fact that this guy has been working his ass off … he’s a really good guy … you’ve taken Nashville by storm.”

Accepting his honor, Wetmore said, “First and foremost, I am nothing without God. He has moved mountains in my life that I never thought would be possible and I just want to thank everybody. I look around this room and there are so many people that have made an impact not just on my life, but on my family’s life and my friends life.” He thanked many of his industry colleagues, including those at MCA, Mercury, WME and OH Creative, before adding, “It’s a crazy life that we are able to live as musicians and as artists, and I’m thankful that I get to wake up and do that thing that God put on my heart every single day.”

Comedian Matt Rife presented group The Red Clay Strays with the Groundbreaker award, and blended humor and heart in his presentation. “It is my honor to present this award today to my very good friends and my favorite band in music today, The Red Clay Strays,” he said, calling the group’s music “a timeless sound that sends us back to music’s golden age.”

“Thank you guys for giving this to us,” frontman Brandon Coleman said when accepting the honor. “We don’t really feel like we’ve broken any ground, we just try to make art that is true to us and is something we’d be happy to leave behind once we’re gone … the fact that we’ve been given an award that is named groundbreaker is pretty awesome cause all we’ve been doing is working and trusting God and just trying to tell the truth. We certainly appreciate you guys.”

Seven-time Country Airplay topper Miranda Lambert was recognized with the Icon award. Songwriter Tom Douglas, co-writer of one of Lambert’s signature hits, “The House That Built Me,” presented the honor, calling Lambert “the kind of tough that teaches” and “rugged enough to weather whatever this town brings, and generous enough to let the young ones stand on her shoulders.”

“I’m so thankful for the opportunity to be in this community,” Lambert said. “I’m trying to lift up the next generation. Country music is my life, it’s what I’ve dedicated my entire adulthood to and I still feel that even though I’ve been doing this for 23 years … thank you for all the support all these years.”

Billboard’s Country Power Players Executive of the Year honor was awarded to The Neal Agency’s Austin Neal, who helps guide the touring careers of artists including Riley Green, Morgan Wallen, Ella Langley, Bailey Zimmerman and Nate Smith. 

Neal’s father, retired WME partner Kevin Neal, presented the honor, saying, “I’m so proud of my son, Austin, for receiving this award … Austin has succeeded beyond belief, and he’s such a good person.” He also noted that although The Neal Agency began as a boutique agency, “it is no longer a boutique agency,” thanks to its powerhouse roster.

Taking the stage, Neal grew emotional when discussing the full-circle moment of his father being the one to present the accolade, and also recalled his own early belief in Green’s music. “There are so many people here who have touched my career and I can’t thank each of you enough,” Neal said.

As CMA Fest week kicks off in Nashville, Billboard will Billboard Country Live, a two-day event headlined by The Red Clay Strays (June 4) and Tucker Wetmore (June 5). Other performers at the event, which begins at 3 p.m. each day, include Carly Pearce, The Band Perry, Chase Rice, Lanie Gardner, Ty Myers, Kaitlin Butts, Stella Lefty, Braxton Keith and Alana Springsteen. 

Universal Music Group (UMG) said on Thursday (June 4) it repurchased 14.1 million of shares of its stock following moves by Bill Ackman‘s Pershing Square to offload the investment firm’s entire 80-million share stake in UMG after the record company’s board rejected Pershing’s offer to take over the company.

UMG acquired the ordinary shares at a price of 17.66 euros ($20.48) per share, according to a release from the company, for a total consideration of 250 million euros ($290.9 million). UMG’s share price was 18.36 euros ($21.32) on Thursday morning New York time, up from an earlier trading-day low of 17.99 euros following yesterday’s news of Pershing’s sell off. UMG’s share price has fallen 6.5% over the past five trading days since its board rejected Ackman’s bid.

The share repurchases put something of a bow on the end of UMG’s five-year relationship with Pershing Square and Ackman, who spent three years on the company’s board and who once described his feelings about the company as “love at first sight.”

UMG has been buying back shares as part of an effort to address its under-performing share price. The board granted permission to buy back up to 1 billion euros, of which UMG had, as of May 29, repurchased €147,128,995. UMG said the 250 million euro share repurchase announced Thursday does not come out of the initial planned 500 million euro buyback program but is pursuant to the additional 500 million euros worth of repurchases that were authorized in May.

Ackman had submitted a non-binding bid to merge UMG with a Pershing vehicle and move its primary stock listing to the U.S. on April 7 in a deal that valued the company at 55.55 billion euros ($64 billion). On May 27, Bolloré Group CEO Cyrille Bolloré urged the company not to accept Ackman’s bid, saying during a meeting of Bolloré’s shareholders that, “We think the price is not there at all.” As of Dec. 31, 2025, Bolloré Group owns 18.4% of UMG shares, representing nearly 40% of shareholder voting rights, and the family overall owns around 28% of UMG stock.

Without Bolloré’s support, UMG said its board rejected the merger offer on May 29, with a press release saying that Pershing’s offer “fundamentally and materially undervalues UMG and will not deliver superior value creation.”

If accepted, the offer would have moved UMG’s primary stock listing from Euronext Amsterdam to a U.S.-based exchange. Ackman had been pushing for the company to move to the U.S. stock market since 2024.

At one point in Power Ballad, the latest music-focused film from director John Carney, a record executive tells a fading boy band star, played by Nick Jonas, not to worry about plagiarism accusations from a little-known singer, played by Paul Rudd. After all, he says, “Where there’s a hit, there’s a writ.”

While Carney’s movie is aimed at a wide audience, that line is going to resonate with a very specific subset of them: music lawyers. It’s a legendary axiom of the trade going back decades — the idea being that if you get popular enough in the music business, somebody is eventually going to sue you for a cut.

“Anything to get lawyers laughing at the cinema,” Carney jokes while speaking with Billboard about Power Ballad, which hits theaters nationwide this Friday (June 5).

Like all his films, Power Ballad mines human drama from the world of music. The critically-adored Once (2007) showed the power of music to heal and connect people; his Sing Street (2016) used it to anchor a coming-of-age story. This time, Carney’s found his story in a type of conflict that the music industry has come to know all too well in recent years.

Rick Power (Rudd) is a middle-aged wedding singer who sees his heartfelt song stolen by Danny Wilson (Jonas), an ex-boy bander trying to become a solo star. As it climbs the charts, Rick becomes obsessed with proving the track was his original creation, but nobody believes him — not his band, not his lawyers, maybe not even his wife. Danny flatly denies it, and there’s no evidence to prove him wrong.

That’s a story that’s played out many times in the real world, where music stars are regularly hit with copyright lawsuits and legal threats over sound-alike songs. Some are valid, filed by artists who have genuinely had their material copied by a bigger name; many others are not, claiming plagiarism in little more than similar vibes or basic chords.

“I know a lot of musicians and songwriters, and I think every one of them past a certain level success or fortune or fame gets one or two of these claims, so it was in my world for a long time,” Carney says about the inspiration for the plot. “Then it started to show up in the newspapers more and more.”

Back in 2022, Dua Lipa was accused of stealing her mega-hit “Levitating” from a little-known Florida reggae group in a case that was later dropped. Later that year, Ed Sheeran won a high-profile trial over claims that his chart-topping “Shape of You” copied a song called “Oh Why” by a smaller artist named Sami Chokri. Then in 2023, Post Malone settled with a studio musician who claimed he’d helped create the smash “Circles” during an all-night jam session and then been denied credit. There have been countless more examples both before and since.

While Power Ballad features a few lawyers and some spirited threats over the phone, it mostly avoids an outright legal battle — a move Carney tells Billboard made sense for the story he was trying to tell. “We didn’t want to do a courtroom drama,” he says. “That might be very interesting [but] I’m not the guy to direct that. We decided to write a hopefully more kind of a timeless story: how an artist feels when they feel they’ve been ripped off.”

In this case that ripped-off artist is Rudd’s Rick, an American living in Ireland who once had stadium-sized ambitions as a young man but has now settled for playing weddings and living a happy life with his wife and teenage daughter. The alleged thief is Jonas’ Danny, an ex-boy band member who apparently missed his Justin Timberlake or Harry Styles moment and is now at risk of getting dropped by his label if he can’t find a solo hit quick.

After a chance encounter at a wedding, Rick and Danny spend a hazy night together drinking, smoking and jamming on each other’s songs, including Rick’s ballad “How to Write a Song (Without You).” Everyone leaves the night happy — until six months later, when Rick hears the song blaring over loudspeakers at a mall, turned into a pop song that’s revitalized Danny’s career.

As the track tops the charts and Rick fixates on proving he wrote it, his life begins to fall apart. But the singer, who once dreamed of pop stardom for himself, simply cannot bring himself to give up the fight. Those big emotions are what power Carney’s movie, and they, too, are rooted in real-life fights — where accusers often spend years of their lives and rack up huge legal bills on doomed pursuits of recognition.

“Researching the project, it made me realize that you could, and I’m sure plenty of people have, kind of die on the altar of getting remuneration and credit for their thing. But it’s not worth it,” Carney says. “You don’t want to lose too much of your present life on earth fighting for something for too long.”

In the real world, of course, many of those accusers are simply wrong. Whether they’ve cynically made their claims to win a payout or genuinely believe their song was copied, the majority of song-theft cases end in defeat. Judges often rule there’s no evidence a pop star ever even heard the allegedly-copied song, as one did in 2024 in a case against Megan Thee Stallion. In other cases, like one against Katy Perry, courts say the songs share only basic “building blocks” like chords that everyone is free to use.

What makes Power Ballad so fun is that the audience knows from the outset that Rick is actually right. Because of how such cases typically play out, the whole world is predisposed to dismiss him — to think he’s just another kook who came out of the woodwork with a wild conspiracy theory about a pop song. But like many of the people who bring those kinds of allegations, Rick is desperate to understand why Danny didn’t give him credit, and to be believed.

For Carney, himself a longtime musician who has been putting songs on screen for decades, that’s an “endlessly interesting” topic that was worth exploring. “I think I’ve been on both sides of the thing,” he says. “I’ve never been in a courtroom, but I’ve been emotionally invested with various people — in who did what and who deserves what.”

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Get ready for a bloody good time. We are just days away from the premiere of Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat, the long-awaited sequel and third season to Interview with the Vampire.

Taken straight from the pages of Anne Rice’s vampire book of the same name, the new season follows the more than 250-year-old vampire Lestat de Lioncourt’s rise to fame as an immortal rock star and the frontman of the band The Vampire Lestat. The new season is set to air on Sunday (June 7) at 9 p.m. ET/PT on AMC. New episodes will air weekly on Sundays.

The show is serious about its music roots, so serious, in fact, that a Spotify page was launched for the fictional character Lestat, as well as five singles, including “Your Biggest Fan,” “All Fall Down” and “Long Face.”

How to Watch The Vampire Lestat Online, at a Glance:

Fans of Rice’s book and the adapted show have been waiting for this new season to be released since season two of Interview with the Vampire wrapped in 2024. With new music, glitzy costumes and fangs galore, The Vampire Lestat is sure to be a hit.

Starting on June 7, you can watch The Vampire Lestat online with Sling TV.

When Does The Vampire Lestat Air?

The season three premiere of The Vampire Lestat will air on Sunday, June 7, at 9 p.m. ET/PT.

Where to Watch The Vampire Lestat Online

You can tune in to the vampire rocker show on AMC. Keep reading for more details on how cord-cutters can watch online with Sling TV.

How to Watch The Vampire Lestat With Sling TV

Sling Blue

A subscription to Sling Blue, which comes with AMC, gets you access to watch The Vampire Lestat online. This plan focuses more on entertainment-based channels. Starting at $45.99 a month, you can watch live TV, local networks such as ABC and Fox (in select markets) and cable networks including Bravo, Cartoon Network, Discovery Channel, E!, Fox Sports, FX, MS NOW, National Geographic, SYFY, TLC, BET, CNN and Vice.

Sling Orange

You can stream the vampire show with Sling Orange, which comes with AMC. This subscription is best for sports and family entertainment. The plan is $45.99 a month. However, Sling Orange offers passes for one, three and seven days starting at $4.99, letting you trial before committing to anything. This comes in handy since Sling does not offer free trials.

Once you’ve paid for your chosen plan, you’ll get access to live TV, cable networks such as ESPN, ESPN2, Freeform, TLC, ID, VICE, Disney Channel, Nick Jr., Lifetime, Food Network, History Channel, IFC, Investigation Discovery, Travel Channel and more.

Sling Orange + Blue

If you can’t decide on which subscription is best for you, Sling also offers an Orange + Blue plan that bundles the best of both services into one. Sling Orange + Blue — which comes with AMC — gets you access to The Vampire Lestat, plus live TV and local and cable channels, starting at $60.99 a month. You can watch many cable networks, including ESPN2, FS1, Lifetime, FX, A&E, Bravo, BET, Cartoon Network, Fuse, CNN, Food Network and MSNBC.

Please note: Pricing and availability depend on your local TV market. You can learn more about Sling TV here.

More on The Vampire Lestat

This new show builds upon happenings from the Interview With the Vampire, with returning characters such as Armand, Daniel Molloy and Louis de Pointe du Lac. Jennifer Ehle, who plays Gabriella de Lioncourt (Lestat’s mother) and Sheila Atim playing Akasha, are new additions to the franchise.

Lestat’s band, The Vampire Lestat, transformed the Beacon Theatre in New York for one night on June 2, 2026. Led by actor Sam Reid, who plays Lestat, the faux band performed all of its new tracks, composed by Daniel Hart. The event served as a kickoff for the new show. Fans in attendance were treated to an early screening of the season three premiere.