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Paris Hilton may sing about seeing “what this love can do” in her Billboard Hot 100 hit “Stars Are Blind,” but she’s living out those words when it comes to her passion for helping animals.

“I am very passionate about giving back and it’s very personal to me,” the singer-entrepreneur — who partnered with Chewy to create her own line of pet food and grooming products “to give my pups the best life possible” — tells Billboard about lending a hand to pets in need this holiday season. “While my impact efforts are dedicated to help broadly with donations and more, I also like to go into shelters myself, and I love on the dogs, cats and more. I’ve even brought home some to foster or to adopt. I’m looking for a way to use my voice to do much more as the needs of shelters and pets continues to grow.”

Though Hilton, who is a well-known animal lover, may have more than adequate means to make monetary donations, she points out that — just as she does herself — volunteering is a wonderful and much-needed way to help. “I believe donating your time is just as valuable. Animals need to be fostered, some just need human touch for a few hours in a shelter,” shares the star, who is currently mom to son Phoenix and daughter London with husband Carter Reum. She also currently has five dogs: Diamond, Baby, Ether, Crypto and Iconic. “That’s the beauty of animals — a few minutes of love is so important to them.”

But there’s more you can do that doesn’t cost a single dollar. “Spreading the word, helping find homes even if you can’t take them in. You have power in just making the right connections with your own circle,” suggests Hilton. “Many shelters accept donations like food, treats, beds, crates, blankets towels and toys. Chewy has a great resource to find a shelter near you.”

The star also points out that some shelters have programs where animal lovers can take a dog out for a day of fun or a sleepover. And this holiday season, Chewy also has the Chewy Claus program, which donates five meals to animals in need for every letter written to Chewy Claus.

As for what her own pooches are asking Santa to put in their stockings? You know they’re going to be fancy! Hilton says Diamond, Baby, Ether, Iconic and Crypto have cute ribbon hair bows, glitter nail caps, a rhinestone placemat, a Chewy Vuiton toy as well as a Barkin bag toy and Lamb Chop pop star dog toy on their wish lists. “They love toys, treats and of course, expanding their red carpet wardrobe,” she shares. “And I love decorating the doggy mansion with anything that sparkles and shines.”

Though she now has two children and five dogs, the star reflects fondly on her two favorites pets of the past. “Tinkerbell and Diamond Baby were my closest friends and true soul mates — I always had them with me,” she tells Billboard. “That closeness before I was married, before I had kids was so unique and special. They knew my every secret and knew what I always needed. For such tiny animals, they had the biggest hearts, like nothing I’ve ever known.”

Now, Hilton is helping Phoenix and London — both 2 — learn about the joys of having animal companions. “They have the same love for pets that I do,” she reveals of her kids. “It’s amazing to see how gentle they are and loving they are with all our pets. They have all grown up together, and I hope the memories we are making now stay with them as a wonderful part of their childhood.”

The DJ also speaks proudly about what her children are learning through their pets. “They have learned how to respect and build trust with animals by seeing how we include them in every part of our lives,” says the star, who shares that the family pets also join them on the Sliving jet to fly to and from meetings. “They also see the care and feeding that goes along with it. It’s a great way to show them that pets need to be cared for — they rely on us.”

Hilton adds that though she may have quite a few animals at home, her husband is OK with it — “or else he’s really good at faking it!” she jokes. “He knew when we met that pets are a huge part of who I am, so from day one, it’s been a package deal. He loves seeing the kids with our dogs and he knows how much they mean to me, so it’s second nature to always plan travel, etc., and he includes the dogs. That means so much to me that he knows me so well.”

This week, Mariah Carey makes unprecedented history on the Billboard charts with a 20th combined week atop the Billboard Hot 100 for her signature seasonal staple “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” The song is now the all-time longest-reigning Hot 100 No. 1 on the chart, a mark that should only increase not just in the coming weeks but in subsequent holiday seasons. However, it’s not the first time Mariah’s held the mark: She first set it with a 1995 single that served as a linchpin for her Daydream era, and the climax of perhaps the greatest pop stardom run of the entire decade.

On this week’s Vintage Pop Stardom episode of the Greatest Pop Stars podcast, host Andrew Unterberger is joined by Chris Hine, writer for the Minnesota Star Tribune and a 30-year member of the Lambily, to talk all about Mariah Carey’s historic 1995. We go over the half-decade-long run of superstardom that led up to Carey’s mid-’90s peak, and how she managed to hit yet another new level of mega-success in ’95, thanks to her most accomplished album to that point and a pair of absolutely gargantuan smash hit singles.

Along the way, we also answer all the most pressing questions about Mimi’s 1995: Was Mariah already the greatest pop star of the 1990s by its midway point — and did she still have a lot left to prove anyway? When did “All I Want for Christmas Is You” go from being considered great for a Christmas song to simply being considered one of the greatest pop songs ever? Is the “Fantasy” remix really better than the original? How did “One Sweet Day” go from being one of the biggest events in pop music history to sometimes being disregarded within her catalog of hits? Are we ever gonna hear Alt-Rock Mariah in full? And perhaps most importantly: Is Daydream-era MC as good as it gets for ’90s pop stardom in general?

Check it out above — along with a YouTube playlist of some of the most important moments from Mariah Carey’s 1995, all of which are discussed in the podcast — and subscribe to both the Greatest Pop Stars podcast on Apple Music or Spotify (or wherever you get your podcasts) for great new episodes every Thursday!

And as we say in every one of these GPS podcast posts — if you have the time and money to spare, please consider donating to any of these causes in the fight for trans rights:

Transgender Law Center

Trans Lifeline

Destination Tomorrow

Gender-Affirming Care Fundraising on GoFundMe

After nearly six years as the CEO of Merlin, the quietly powerful organization that negotiates digital licensing deals on behalf of a network of 30,000 indie labels and distributors, Jeremy Sirota is stepping down. 

His tenure came during some of the most pivotal years of technological change for the music business. Since 2020, he has grown and led Merlin through the rise of TikTok, the fads of crypto and NFTs, and the emergence of generative AI, which he now refers to as an incoming “tsunami” for the music business. “I told our members that we’re going to have to get prepared for some discomfort” as they work to create guardrails around the powerful technology, he says. 

The crown jewel of Sirota’s tenure was the deal he inked with ElevenLabs — perhaps the first AI music license connecting traditional record companies and generative AI. The deal created a framework that other licenses could follow, including the provision that artists can opt in as they wish.

But the Merlin job wasn’t one that Sirota expected to take in the first place. In 2019, he was happily working at Facebook when he got the call to interview for the top Merlin gig, replacing founding CEO Charles Caldas. “When you’re hiring an executive, there’s three types you look at: what you think you want — which is usually more of the same — what you think you need and then a third look, a dark horse candidate that is totally different,” Sirota says. He later found out he was the dark horse, given his background in big tech and the previous decade he spent at Warner Music. 

Looking at independent music licensing from the vantage points of the opponents at the other side of the table, however, made him a strategic pick to grow the indies’ influence — and royalty rates — across various digital platforms. 

But after leading the independent music industry into the age of AI, Sirota says he’s now ready to try something new. “One of the things about me is I like to be challenged continuously, and I was looking ahead, and I was like, ‘Okay, we’ve now built out this next-level of suite of services. We led on AI. We streamlined the operation,’” he says. “The organization is too important for the leader not to wake up excited every day.” 

That next leader will be Charlie Lexton, the British executive who has been with Merlin since its inception and has served as COO since 2020. While Sirota admits that he does know what his next move is, he isn’t ready to share — except to say that he’s “very excited for what’s next, and I’m excited for the future of Merlin.” 

You came from the major label and tech perspective, coming from Warner Music and Facebook. How do you think your perspective impacted your performance in the role?

Dave Hanson, chairperson of Merlin at the time and GM of Epitaph Records, was the head of the recruiting committee, and he was the one who brought me into the process. I knew about Merlin, of course, because I had been doing deals with them with my Facebook hat on. I was only a year and a half into my experience at Facebook when I got the call. What made me stand out was that when I went through the process, I just said exactly what I thought, because I was happy at my job. This interview was a fun thought experiment for me. So I presented my vision, which was, basically, “I don’t understand why Merlin’s not bigger.” 

I told them, “You have this clear vision, mission, support of the membership. Really great culture. Why aren’t you doing more?” I think I kind of flummoxed them a little bit, because there were probably a lot of people who said, “We need to hire someone who truly knows indies and comes from the independent space,” and everything I was presenting through that process was challenging their assumptions about what they thought they needed. I essentially proposed we stretch the dough. 

I think I got hired because they realized, “We already know the inside, but this is someone who’s from the outside — who has negotiated from the majors’ perspective, who did it as a lawyer, who did it from the platform side. We don’t have those experiences in our network.”

You started the job in January 2020. Tell me about navigating that first year as COVID was hitting, and what change you wanted to implement right away.

I started in January 2020, so two months later, I’m entering into what effectively was crisis leadership. It was shutting down the offices. This was one of the worst things that has happened in our lifetime, but from an ability to accelerate change internally, it was incredibly empowering. Instead of being on the road all the time, I could just be deeply focused on the team and building the tools and processes we needed to transform and modernize Merlin. 

One of the things I really wanted to emphasize to the team was the idea of “thoughtful urgency.” That’s the way we needed to be approaching the marketplace. Back then, we were just always on our back heels, always trying to play catch-up. I wanted us to get to a place where we were leading. 

I thought Merlin had such great brand equity, but it was so little known. I came in thinking, how do we build that out bigger? Not so that Merlin can be bigger, but so we can achieve more for the members. It’s a balance: you don’t want to get in front of Secretly or Ninja Tune or their artists — I want the music and artists and members to lead — but at the same time, you can’t do that unless Merlin is perceived a certain way. A lot of year one was about brand building as well. 

Merlin represents 30,000 indie labels and distributors. I imagine a lot of members had differing opinions on what Merlin should do. Among all the issues where your members were divided, what would you say was the most divisive issue of all?

The obvious one is truly the right answer: AI. If we reflect back on the last six years, what have we seen? Blockchain, crypto, NFTs, Metaverse, AR, VR — every one of these trends that was going to revolutionize the music world. I don’t see a lot of those deals still out there, if any, today, but we were very thoughtful about it at the time. We always had the conversation. But when we first started seeing AI come up more and more in conversations, I just knew right then that this was going to be a thing. This was going to be a tsunami. We had to get ready to dance with discomfort. 

You have a few types of people in the independent space. One was like, “What is this?” Another who understood it but didn’t want to accept it. You then also had people who were cautiously optimistic, and finally, the people who were excited. 

Are there really many indie labels who are excited about generative AI?

Shockingly, yes, there are. It’s the ones who accepted that it’s coming, so they were thinking, ‘How do we use this? How do we lean into this? How can we be leaders in this?’ In fact, it was a lot of those members talking to me that encouraged me to lean into it. 

This is not the first time disruption and innovation have come at us, and one of the biggest challenges we had was educating people who had all differing levels of understanding and differing views about AI. 

Merlin and Kobalt struck a landmark deal with ElevenLabs, perhaps the first big AI music licensing deal ever. How did you come into contact with them?

We first started talking to ElevenLabs last year. We did this pilot phase with them at the end of last year, and then we closed our deal in August.

We did that deal so early because, number one, we found the right partner to start with. Number two, we want to be the architects of the future. I’m kind of surprised that the deal wasn’t treated as a bigger deal. My friend said it’s because most people were waiting for the majors to make a deal. If we were Universal, this deal would’ve been splashed on every newspaper in the world, but we didn’t do it for that reason. We cared about being on the right side of history. I can’t predict the future, but what you can do is try to create structures for the future and work with the right people.

One of the biggest events to happen during your tenure was that TikTok “walked away” from licensing talks with Merlin, citing issues with fraud among your membership. Instead, they opted to do individual deals with your members. It’s been over a year now since that happened. In hindsight, what do you think went wrong there? Why did negotiations break down so significantly?

That was definitely one of the low points of my professional career, because integrity means a lot to me. I’ve always valued also being able to solve any riddle — there’s no problem or dispute that I can’t figure out.

People will say things publicly that they want to, but the reality is that I can’t explain why certain platforms value partnership and others don’t, because everything that was being said publicly was not accurate. It was accurate in a sense of being able to twist things around to present a certain way.

The other thing, too, is we negotiate from principles. I’d rather do the right deal, and members say we don’t want to participate in that, than do a deal that has everyone in it but doesn’t live up to the values and principles of who we are and what we believe. We value music and rights, and [TikTok and Merlin] disagreed on the value of music, and I would rather stand on our principles and lose than concede on that. 

Another big conversation in the indie label space right now is that Virgin Music Group is in the process of buying Downtown. It has a lot of people concerned about the state of independent music and consolidation. What do you feel is the state of independent record labels right now?

It’s never been stronger and it’s never been more challenging. Number one, the cost to compete is going up every year. The investment you need to make into platforms, into artists, into your organizations, that’s all going one direction, and in many ways, the costs are outpacing the revenue increases. The second is, it’s more challenging than ever to break, sustain, maintain — whatever you want to call it — no matter what trajectory or phase of their career they’re at, and so much of that is around fragmentation of audiences and listening habits. What you don’t want to then do is put more pressure onto that system.

Who am I to judge those who build a business and then want to sell it? I’m not, but what I can say is that the more you continue to consolidate this industry, the more you commodify it. That’s what strikes me about it.

There used to be six majors. There used to be dozens of big labels that were outside of the major record companies. With that, you just got more investment in more types of music. 

Let me be clear: I worked at Warner Music for nine years. Some of the most caring people in music worked with me at Warner and the majors — that’s not what I’m saying. What I am saying is that if you have one bookstore chain in your city or you have a dozen independents, I’d rather live in the latter. That’s a dozen different points of view on which books to stock and promote and sell. 

Why did you decide to step down?

I don’t know if this is actually a quote or not, but what I keep saying is, “When you leave, your true impact is measured by how well things run without you.” This company is going to run incredibly well without me. That was always my goal. 

There’s so much that I feel proud of, that we accomplished as a team, and one of the things about me is I like to be challenged continuously, and I was looking ahead and I was like, “Okay, we’ve now built out this, like, next level of suite of services. We led on AI. We streamlined the operation.”

And when I was at Warner for the last year or so, I didn’t wake up excited. I stayed too long. I was just working, and that’s what I wanted to make sure I didn’t do at Merlin. The organization is too important for the leader not to wake up excited every day. And the other thing is, great leaders are replaceable. The whole point of a great leader is building towards being replaceable. You’ve failed if you haven’t done that, in my view. I’m very excited for what’s next, and I’m excited for the future of Merlin. 

This year, singer-songwriter Karley Scott Collins has checked quite a few personal and professional milestones off her bucket list, not only releasing her full-length debut album Flight Risk, but also, while on tour in Australia, she fulfilled her dream of diving with Great White sharks.

“Growing up, I would watch Shark Week all the time and I’d been wanting to do this forever,” Collins tells Billboard. “We finally got to tour Australia, and that’s the best place to do it. It was a five-hour travel and then six out on the boat ride to the middle of the ocean. It was the coolest thing. It blew my mind.”

That brand of fearlessness seems par for the course for Collins, whose Flight Risk, released earlier this year on Sony Music Nashville, doesn’t play it safe. Instead, Collins infuses her style of country with a heavy dose of rock and heavy metal.

“When I was growing up everyone was listening to Jesse McCartney or pop bands, but I was obsessed with Slash,” Collins says. “I loved Guns N’ Roses, Tom Petty, Alice in Chains. When I was older, my Nana gave me a stack of records when I asked for a record player, and that was Willie Nelson and George Jones [records]. And I discovered Howlin’ Wolf. I just read a biography of his and learned about sticking a real rattlesnake rattle underneath the strings, giving it like percussion while you’re playing it.”

Those rock influences shine throughout Flight Risk, right from the guitar riff that launches the album’s first track, seething breakup track “Denim,” which sounds like it could have bene pulled from a classic rock album.

Collins co-produced Flight Risk with Nathan Chapman (Taylor Swift, Keith Urban) at Nashville’s Blackbird Studios. Collins co-wrote every song, while also playing nearly every instrument on the album. Across the album, Collins plays electric guitar, acoustic guitar, violin, and banjo. She also picked up bass for the song “Girlfriend.”

“I learned how to play bass about an hour before I put that on the final track,” Collins recalls. “I was telling Nathan I wanted to learn how to play bass sometime. He was working on that bass part and was like, I’ll teach you right now and you can play it on the record.’ I thought that was insane and I learned how to play it. I feel like I’ve had my fingerprint on everything. Making the record will always be one of my favorite experiences because I learned so much.”

Elsewhere, she plays into her rock influence with the title to the impactful ballad, “Heavy Metal,” though the song is about a dissolving marriage rather than an ode to rock music. The song was inspired by one of her friends’ experiences.

“That line in the song that she’s ‘Three wine glasses on a Wednesday’ was because she FaceTimed me on a Wednesday afternoon after she had gotten some bottles of wine and was crying about her crappy husband,” Collins says. “Where I come from, basically on the Florida-Georgia line, it’s a pretty religious part of the country, and a lot of people I grew up with were married with kids by 21 and if you get a divorce, everyone’s judging you, so she was in that position where she was unhappy and crying a lot. I’d had the title ‘Heavy Metal’ because I love heavy metal music. It’s funny because I’ll get DMs and people at meet-and-greets, and they’ll say, ‘Karly, your song is the reason I got a divorce,’ and I’m like, ‘Yay! I don’t know if that’s good or not, but cool.’”

Fearlessness seems to be at the core of Collins’ career. At age five, she told her parents she wanted to try acting. Her parents gave it the green light, flying Collins to Los Angeles to take part in pilot season. That decision led Collins to roles in films including Amish Grace, The Hottie & The Nottie, and the television series Family Guy. “They have supported every dream I’ve ever had and I’m so grateful for that,” Collins says.

That early acting ambition served as a doorway to her musical gifts. While auditioning for a film role, Collins was required to learn guitar, and in the process, she uncovered her natural talent on the instrument. “I had never played guitar. We rented a little Martin from Guitar Center and I took guitar lessons in a hippie commune in the top of Topanga Canyon,” Collins says. “I learned a Queens of the Stone Age song, and it was shortly after that I realized I wanted to do music. I think learning how to tap into emotion at a young age was helpful for music, too.”

The Triple 8-managed Collins says Flight Risk marks the culmination of a five-year journey. Her professional association with Chapman dates back to one of Collins’ first writing sessions in Nashville in 2020, when the pair co-wrote the song “Quit You,” which appears on the new album. The album follows her 2023 EP Hands on the Wheel and her 2024 EP Write One (which featured collaborations with Keith Urban and Lady A’s Charles Kelley).

“I’m really grateful for the time that passed between the beginning and when I put out the record, because there was so much growing that I needed to do,” Collins says. “It does take so much time, even as a human being, let alone an artist, to figure out who you really are.”

Collins, Billboard’s December Country Rookie of the Month, spoke about making Flight Risk, her songwriting talents, and discussed the lessons she learned opening on Urban’s High and Alive 25 Tour.

One of the standouts on the album, “Cowboy Sh!t,” was not supposed to part of the album initially. How did you decide to add it to the project?

It very much almost didn’t make the album, because I wrote that song as a joke. Sam Backoff, KK Johnson and I had already written a song that day and then I was supposed to go ride horses. I was like, “You guys, I’m on some cowboy s–t right now,” and they were like, “We have to write that.”

We wrote it and I didn’t send it to my team, because I had an inkling that it was really catchy. So I tucked it away in a box. My manager found it over a year later through other publishers and was like, “You have to record this.” They asked me to just go in and record it and see how it feels. Then Nathan and I had so much fun recording it, so we released it. I’m glad I did, because it’s my favorite song to play live and the crowd loves it.”

“Only Child,” which looks at what it is like to be an only child caring for aging parents, feels really personal. What inspired that?

I don’t listen to that song because it makes me sad. When I wrote that song, my mother had just been diagnosed with cancer. My friend Alex Kline, who I wrote the song with, was going through the same thing at the same time with her mom. She’s also an only child and we were talking about how scary it is. You watch your parents getting older and you’re like, “I’m the only one that’s going to be left at some point.”

It’s interesting because I loved being an only child as a kid; like I say in the song, “I had all their time, all their attention.” As you get older, you’re like, “I wish there was someone else to call to say, ‘Hey, this is happening with Mom. I’m scared, are you scared?’” It’s just you. And so that was a feeling we were both going through.

Outside of your own music, you wrote Alexandra Kay’s song “Straight for the Heart.” How does that feel, to have a song you wrote resonate so much with another artist?

I just met her for the first time at the CMA [Awards], and she’s great. The song had already been recorded and she was so kind to me. I wrote that song for my record, but it didn’t end up fitting the style of the record, so I gave [my publishers] the okay to pitch it. When they said she wanted to cut it, I was so happy — because when I came to town, of course the goal was to be an artist, but when I think about my artistry and the pieces of it that I like the most, writing is probably my favorite part of the whole process. That was my first big cut, and then having it go to radio is incredible.

You opened for Keith Urban this year on his High and Alive 25 Tour. What did you learn musically and professionally from being on the road with him?

He’s been great about giving us all advice and he’s been very supportive of young artists. I learned so much just from watching him perform. He’s one of the artists that, as an entertainer, there’s an entire level that he’s on with very few people. And we were taking notes every night for sure.

What was the first concert you ever attended?

Well, my second concert was Guns N’ Roses on their reunion tour.

Would you ever act again?

If it was something like, I don’t know, anything Taylor Sheridan’s ever done, or they can call me if there’s a Stevie Nicks biopic, that kind of thing. But I would not just do acting to act — [only] if it was something I was really excited about.

What is one artist fans may not know you are into?

Probably the crazier heavy metal stuff. I love Pantera, it’s one of my favorite bands of all time.

Since it is the holiday season, what is your favorite Christmas movie?

Probably The Nightmare Before Christmas. I like the little spooky stuff. I’m always wearing skull jewelry, and I love Halloween, so that one’s a good mix for me.

What’s your favorite Christmas song?

Willie Nelson, “Pretty Paper.” I learned that one from my Nana.