Globe-trotting house and techno festival Time Warp made its way back to New York last month for a Nov. 21-22 edition at Brooklyn Storehouse. Among a bill featuring stars like Sven Väth, The Blessed Madonna, Mike Servito, Sara Landry and Nico Moreno was bonafide New York house legend Dennis Ferrer, who, after decades in the scene, made his debut at the festival.

“Finally popped my Time Warp cherry and it was beyond impressive!” Ferrer tells Billboard. “The production, the energy, but most of all, the crowd that was dancing rather than filming. One of the highlights of 2025 for sure!”

Now, Ferrer is sharing his 90-minute Time Warp USA 2025 set exclusively with Billboard. Listening to it, it’s obvious why everyone on the floor kept their phones in pocket. While originally scheduled to play b2b with fellow house hero Kerri Chandler, Ferrer did the show solo after Chandler had to drop out, playing an hour and a half of joyful, scintillating, groovy house music.

Highlights from the set include As I Am’s slinky 2014 Defected Records release “Saving Grace,” Riva Starr’s bumping 2025 single “Unique” and Ian Pooley’s 2002 classic “Fly Shuffle.” Listen to the entire set exclusively below.

“’I’ll never do New York. America is not ready,’” Tekksupport founder Rob Toma recalled Time Warp founder Steffen Charles telling him when Toma first suggested doing an NYC edition. While it took a few years of conversations, Toma finally convinced Charles and his team to launch in the U.S., with Time Warp’s New York debut happening in 2014.

As with every previous edition, Time Warp USA 2025 was produced in partnership with Teksupport. Other editions of Time Warp happen in cities around the world including Miami, Madrid and São Paulo.

Olivia Rodrigo was living that Y/N life when she and Harry Styles hung out together, years after she wrote One Direction fan fiction as a child.

While appearing on a Music Makes Us podcast episode posted Tuesday, the Gen Z pop star revealed that she, like so many other girls in the age of Wattpad, used to pen stories about the former boy band — something that made meeting one of the members extra special after she also became famous. “I used to write One Direction fan fiction when I was in elementary school,” she began.

“Many years later, I hung out with Harry Styles, and we got tea, and we walked around,” Rodrigo continued, laughing. “And I got home, and I was like, ‘What the f—?’ I feel like I, like, wrote that in a fan fiction, and now I’ve lived it. That is so crazy how that can happen in your life.”

Calling the British musician “so sweet,” Rodrigo added, “I remember being like, ‘If I told 10-year-old Olivia, she’d be like, shut the f— up, you’re lying.’”

Styles is just one of many musicians who’ve embraced the California native since she shot to fame in 2021 with breakout hit “Drivers License.” On the podcast, Rodrigo also spoke about getting support from childhood idols Lorde and Jack White — for whom she used to run a White Stripes fan account on Instagram.

It’s been more than two years since Rodrigo last dropped an album, topping the Billboard 200 with Guts in 2023. It’s been even longer since Styles released an LP, with the singer taking a step back from the spotlight these past couple of years after Harry’s House arrived in 2022 and later won album of the year at the Grammys.

Fans have, however, seen Styles pop up in random places at various times in 2025. In addition to running the Tokyo and Berlin marathons this year, Styles recently appeared with friends — including rumored girlfriend Zoë Kravitz — in photos posted Tuesday on Instagram by DJ Ben Klock.

Listen to Rodrigo recap meeting Styles on Music Makes Us below.

Keep your eyes to the sky: George Clinton is planning to land the Parliament-Funkadelic Mothership again in 2026.

With the original stagecraft stage prop residing in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, Clinton and longtime P-Funk collaborator Vivian Chew of New York-based Chew Entertainment tell Billboard “a new and improved version” of the legendary spacecraft stage prop is being constructed at the Rock Lititz production campus in southeastern Pennsylvania. “We know it’s going to be crazy,” Chew says. “It’s something people are going to be in awe of. Dr. Funkenstein will be coming out of the Mothership again in a very new way. George is going to take this thing around the world.”

Tour dates, she adds, will be announced “shortly,” though Chew did predict that “I think your first sighting will be next summer.”

The Mothership was introduced, conceptually, on Parliament’s album Mothership Connection, which was released 50 years ago this month. In the science fiction-themed title track, the group proclaims that, “We have returned to claim the pyramids/Partying on the mothership…Gettin’ down in 3D/Light year groovin’.”

“I was a big fan of Star Trek and all that,” Clinton explained some years ago. “We were all about putting Black people in places nobody ever thought they’d be…like outer space, so that’s what we did.” The Clinton-produced album, which features the hit “Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof Off the Sucker),” reached No. 13 on the Billboard 200 chart and was certified platinum. In 2011 it became part of the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry. Billboard recently named Parliament/Funkadelic one of the 50 best rock bands of all time.

The Mothership gained legendary status in 1976, however, when a physical incarnation, designed by Jules Fisher, became part of the P-Funk Earth Tour stage show. It was lowered from the ceiling at the start of the show, with Clinton emerging from its bowels in his guise as Dr. Funkenstein. “It was spectacular. There was nothing like it at the time,” recalls David Libert, who booked Clinton during the ‘70s after serving as tour manager for Alice Cooper. “The logistics around it were crazy, but any audience that saw it was just blown away.”

The Mothership was sold during the early ‘80s but eventually recovered and refurbished for a 1996 P-Funk All Stars concert in New York’s Central Park. It also appeared at a handful of other dates, including Woodstock ’99, before landing with the Smithsonian. “I’m loving the fact that it’s still that valid of a concept, and I’m still around to actually be part of this next journey,” Clinton says now. “It’s a good thing; the first Mothership is in the Smithsonian, and here we are backing it up with a new version.”

Clinton adds that the Mothership’s reappearance will likely be accompanied by some new music. “I’ve definitely got some fresh funk coming in and out of that, very soon,” he says, “very interesting stuff. I can’t talk about it now. It’s going to be interesting.” Clinton was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in June after receiving a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in January. He’s currently embroiled in a lawsuit against former business associate Armen Boladian and his assorted music companies to regain ownership of his music and copyrights.

Before the new Mothership takes flight, Chew will be presenting “Symphonic PFunk: Celebrating the Music of Parliament Funkadelic” on Jan. 31 at the Detroit Opera House, with arrangements by her husband, Dancing With the Stars music director Ray Chew, who will also conduct the orchestra that night. With guest performers Nona Hendryx, Vernon Reid and Rahsaan Patterson, it’s intended as a tribute, but Clinton says he might “get up there and jam when I feel it.”

“This was always my dream,” Clinton continues, “to carry on to that point of respectability and to always try to prove that we were worthy of that. It is all worthy of that. I go back to Motown itself…. All that music needs to be classical, orchestrated and cataloged, curated for the next 100 years. I think we did our part in creating something that lives up to that. And we kept it going.”

YouTube said in a blog post today (Dec. 17) that it intended to withdraw its streaming data from all of Billboard’s charts, effective Jan. 16 (for the charts dated Jan. 31).

The blog post comes in the wake of Billboard’s announcement yesterday (Dec. 16) of a change to chart methodology that will continue to weigh subscription streams more favorably than ad-supported streams, in a bid to better reflect changing consumer behaviors and the increased revenue derived from streaming in the industry. The change means that paid/subscription streams will be weighted against ad-supported streams at a 1:2.5 ratio, narrowed from the previous 1:3 ratio.

Effective of the Jan. 17-dated charts — reflecting data from Jan. 2 to Jan. 8 — the Billboard 200 and other genre album consumption charts will reflect that an album consumption unit will equal 2,500 ad-supported streams or 1,000 paid/subscription on-demand official audio and video streams from songs on an album. Previously, an album consumption unit had equaled 1,250 paid/subscription on-demand streams or 3,750 ad-supported streams, meaning that it will soon take 20% fewer paid/subscription on-demand streams and 33.3% fewer ad-supported on-demand streams to equal an album equivalent unit. The 1:2.5 ratio will also go into effect for the Billboard Hot 100 and other streaming and song consumption-based charts.

YouTube’s inclusion as part of the Billboard charts dates to 2013, when Billboard’s song charts, including the Hot 100, began incorporating YouTube streaming data — making Billboard the first ranking in the world to do so. Billboard’s album charts, including the Billboard 200, began incorporating YouTube streaming data in 2019, making those also the first prominent album charts in the world to do so. YouTube will now be voluntarily withholding its data for all of Billboard’s U.S. and global charts.

In YouTube’s blog post, global head of music Lyor Cohen wrote that the weighting formula “doesn’t reflect how fans engage with music today and ignores the massive engagement from fans who don’t have a subscription.” Cohen continued that YouTube’s stance is that both paid/subscription and ad-supported streams be counted equally.

“There are so many ways a fan can support an artist they love, and each has a specific place in the music ecosystem,” a spokesperson for Billboard said. “Billboard strives to measure that activity appropriately; balanced by various factors including consumer access, revenue analysis, data validation and industry guidance. It is our hope that YouTube reconsiders and joins Billboard in recognizing the reach and popularity of artists on all music platforms and in celebrating their achievements though the power of fans and how they interact with the music that they love.”

Billboard first began weighting paid/subscription streams higher than ad-supported streams in 2018; international organizations such as IFPI also incorporate weighting systems into their own charts. “It is Billboard’s belief that assigning values to the levels of consumer engagement and access — along with the compensation derived from those options — better reflects the varied user activity occurring on these services,” Billboard wrote at the time the weighting decision was made.

YouTube maintains both a massive global ad-supported streaming service and a paid subscription service. Cohen announced at Billboard’s Latin Music Week in October that YouTube had paid out $8 billion to the music business over the past 12 months, though the service has also come under fire from some in the industry — most notably Irving Azoff — over allegations of low artist royalties, with Azoff calling the service “by far the worst offender.” In a guest column for Billboard, Azoff noted that YouTube’s $8 billion payout figure was about 13% of its $60 billion in revenue, and that over that same period, Spotify generated around $18 billion in revenue and paid out $12 billion to music rights holders, or 67% of revenues.

Welcome to Billboard Pro’s Trending Up newsletter, where we take a closer look at the songs, artists, curiosities and trends that have caught the music industry’s attention. Some have come out of nowhere, others have taken months to catch on, and all of them could become ubiquitous in the blink of a TikTok clip. 
 
This week: Heated Rivalry officially becomes the biggest new show in the world of synchs, Jon Hamm unwittingly turns a 15-year-old Danish EDM single into a streaming smash, Tyla has a burgeoning hit for 2026 and more.

‘Heated Rivalry’ Synchs Keep Rising, Led By t.A.T.u.’s ‘All the Things She Said’ 

Heated Rivalry has captured the hearts and screens of America in just over a month, and the steamy queer Canadian hockey drama’s impact can be felt across the streaming landscape. 

Last week, Billboard reported that the first three episodes of the Crave-produced show, which airs Fridays on HBO Max in the States, sparked an increase in official on-demand streams from synched tracks by Feist, Wet Leg and Wolf Parade. With episode four now available to stream, three new songs have earned Heated Rivalry-assisted bumps — and the numbers are just getting bigger and bigger. 

Feist, whose “Sealion” played in episode one, returns with “My Moon My Man,” which opens episode four (Dec. 12). During the four-day period of Dec. 5-8, “My Moon” earned over 28,000 official on-demand U.S. streams, according to Luminate. By the next comparable four-day period (Dec. 12-15), that figure jumped 734% to over 240,000 official streams. While “My Moon” certainly tugged on viewers’ heartstrings, one massive needle drop anchored by two versions of t.A.T.u’s classic “All the Things She Said” proved the episode’s most-talked-about moment. 

During an extended, anxiety-inducing club scene that transitions into two markedly cold sex scenes, t.A.T.u.’s original morphs into Harrison’s dance cover, making for an equally cathartic and chaotic moment. During the period of Dec. 5-8, the original “All the Things” earned just under 640,000 official streams. By the time viewers got time to sit with the new episode (Dec. 12-15), that figure leapt 103% to 1.3 million official streams. Harrison’s version, which arrived in 2022, earned under 1,000 streams during the period of Dec. 5-8. After episode four (Dec. 12-15), his cover ballooned an astounding 114,173% to over 685,000 official streams. Notably, Harrison’s “All the Things” sold 1,255 digital downloads during Dec. 12-15, up from a negligible the week prior. 

As Heated Rivalry hurtles towards its season one finale on Dec. 26, expect the series to remain at the center of pop culture well into the new year. — KYLE DENIS 

Blissed-Out Jon Hamm Makes Streaming Smash Out of Danish EDM-Era Jam

The 2010 EDM single “Turn Off the Lights” is credited to Danish house producer Kato, with a featured appearance from “Jon.” That credit originally refers to the Danish singer on the track (full name: Jon Gade Nørgaard), but now there’s a second Jon playing an integral part in the song’s recent crossover success: actor Jon Hamm, whose eyes-closed visage is now inextricable with the ecstatic dance jam. 

“Turn Off the Lights” began going viral a few weeks ago thanks to its use alongside a scene in the Apple TV series Your Friends & Neighbors, which starts with an up-close shot of Hamm in the middle of a club dancefloor, seemingly intently feeling the music being played. In the original scene, the dance song playing is Joseph William Morgan’s much harder-hitting “Sentient System” — but on TikTok, users have substituted the sweeter, more sentimental “Lights” for the scene’s soundtrack, cutting to it to express their own blissed-out and/or nostalgic feelings about a particular situation. 

As a result, “Lights” has absolutely blown up on streaming. The song — which was a top 10 hit in Denmark and various other European territories in the early 2010s, but had little commercial profile stateside — has grown in the past four weeks from around 37,000 weekly official on-demand U.S. streams to nearly 2.5 million (for the week ending Dec. 11), a gain of 6,516%, according to Luminate. It’s been similarly explosive on iTunes, with the song ballooning from a negligible number of weekly sales to over 5,000 over the same time period. 

“Turn the Lights Off” debuts at No. 19 on this week’s Bubbling Under Hot 100 chart — and with the numbers still going up during this tracking period, it seems like the Jons just might help boost this song onto the Billboard Hot 100 before the holiday season. — ANDREW UNTERBERGER

Wake Up, U2: New ‘Knives Out’ Boosts Streams for Titular Song, Tom Waits Track

Each new installment in Knives Out, director Rian Johnson’s mystery-movie franchise starring Daniel Craig as detective Benoit Blanc, yields a streaming uptick for the rock song that inspires its title. Three years after Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery led music listeners to the Beatles’ “Glass Onion,” Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery — the third installment in the franchise, which was released in select theaters last November before hitting Netflix last Friday (Dec. 12) — has produced a spike for “Wake Up Dead Man,” the closing track on U2’s divisive 1997 album Pop.

From Dec. 12-15, “Wake Up Dead Man” earned over 2,000 official on-demand U.S. streams, and posted an 82% increase from the same four-day period during the previous week, according to Luminate. However, the real music-legend winner from Wake Up Dead Man is Tom Waits, whose Mule Variations track “Come On Up to the House” soundtracks a key sequence near the end of the film. “Come On Up to the House” earned 44,000 streams in the first four days after Wake Up Dead Man hit Netflix, a whopping 309% jump from the 10,000 streams the song earned from Dec. 5-8. — JASON LIPSHUTZ

Tyla Fashions a Rising Hit Out of ‘Chanel’ 

Tyla hasn’t seen the top half of the Hot 100 since she exploded onto the scene with 2023’s “Water,” but “Chanel” could be her ticket back to that bracket. 

Over the past four weeks, streaming activity for Tyla’s latest single has risen by 172%, boosted by a mega-viral TikTok dance challenge and buzzy clips from her recently wrapped Asia tour. After first teasing the song in July, Tyla finally dropped “Chanel” on Oct. 24 after previewing the track and its music video at Global Citizen Festival a month prior (Sept. 27). 

Well before the song hit streaming platforms, TikTok user @kipittok shared a dance challenge set to a snippet of the “Chanel” chorus on Oct. 5. That initial clip has since garnered over 256,000 views, setting into motion a dance trend that’s helped the clip’s accompanying TikTok sound soar past 3.6 million posts. The official “Chanel” TikTok sound boasts an additional 2.3 million posts, while a more recent “Last Christmas” mashup plays in 2,275 other clips. On Nov. 11, Tyla herself hopped on the challenge, earning 55.5 million views and 2.9 million likes. 

During the first full week following Tyla’s post (Nov. 14-20), “Chanel” cleared 2.7 million official U.S. on-demand streams, up 63% from the week prior. The song has increased in streams every week since, according to Luminate, blowing past the 4.6 million threshold during Dec. 5-11.  

Already a chart-topper on U.S. Afrobeats Songs and the Bubbling Under Hot 100, the chart domination of “Chanel” is clearly just beginning. — KD