Cam’ron and Mase are planning on dropping a project together.

The childhood friends have had a tumultuous relationship over the years dating back to the late ’90s, when they had a falling out over an appearance in Cam’s video for his hit single “Horse & Carriage.”

Since the two have reconciled, they got into business together and started their increasingly popular sports talk show It Is What It Is in 2023.

Now, they plan on strengthening their relationship by making music with each other again.

On March 19, Cam posted a clip on Instagram. “Harlem Fact check season. Sorry Murder, I had to give them a small sample. Willie Burgers (The EP) July 4th. I’m from old Harlem. Where the dirty kitchen was open pass 12pm. Maybe I’ll drop the full song on @talkwithflee 2mr morning,” he wrote. “We got so many joints in da stash.”

Produced by ADM Beatz, Cam started the song off by rapping, “Shouts Mason Betha, I’m Cameron Giles/ I’m sorry, Richard Porter, I’m sorry, Kevin Chiles/ I’m sorry, Bumpy Johnson, y’all always gettin’ chedda/ It come to Harlem, baby girl, nobody did it better.”

Cam also posted snippet on Talk With Flee earlier Thursday morning, and he’s calling it “Tupperware Freestyle.”

Last week, Mase announced that he’s planning on releasing his first album since 2004’s Welcome Back, and he wants to drop it on the first day of the Diddy trial, which is Monday, May 5. He also claimed that the project will be a “triple CD” and that Cam helped him pick the songs.

You can watch the freestyle below.

The Billboard Latin Women in Music special is scheduled to return for its third edition on April 24 at 9 p.m. ET via Telemundo, Billboard and Telemundo announced Thursday (March 20).

Hosted by the legendary Mexican singer and songwriter Ana Bárbara, who was among the 2024 honorees, the two-hour event will celebrate the groundbreaking women who are shaping the future of Latin music. The show will also be available to stream live on the Telemundo app and Peacock.

“We are thrilled to partner with Billboard once again to commemorate the incredible achievements of Latin women in music,” Francisco “Cisco” Suarez, Telemundo’s evp, primetime unscripted & specials, said in a press release. “At Telemundo, we are committed to empowering and uplifting voices that inspire and resonate with our audience and look forward to an unforgettable night of celebration filled with captivating performances.”

“Billboard Latin Women in Music is a powerful platform that shines a spotlight on the extraordinary talent, resilience and impact of Latinas in the music industry,” added Leila Cobo, Billboard’s chief content officer for Latin/Español. “We are proud to continue this celebration alongside Telemundo, honoring the women who are breaking barriers, shaping culture and inspiring future generations through their artistry. This year’s show promises unforgettable performances and heartfelt moments that showcase the strength and brilliance of Latin women in music.”

This year’s honorees and performers will be announced at a later date.

Ana Bárbara, a renowned singer, songwriter, producer and actress who received the 2024 Lifetime Achievement honor for her significant contributions to music, returns this year to host the special. Throughout her career, the hitmaker behind anthems such as “Bandido” and “Loca” has been a beacon of empowerment, resilience and advocacy for female representation. She has shattered barriers and paved the way for other women in the industry, becoming an artistic inspiration and a respected figure in the Regional Mexican genre.

On the Billboard charts, she’s had hits including “Me Asusta Pero Me Gusta,” “La Trampa,” “Ya No Te Creo Nada” and “No Lloraré” reaching the top 10 of Hot Latin Songs, while albums such as Ay Amor (1996) and Yo Soy La Mujer (2014) have established her as a mainstay on Regional Mexican Albums.

Besides Ana Bárbara, last year’s honorees included Karol G as Woman of the Year, Gloria Estefan as Legend, La India as Pioneer, Ángela Aguilar with the Musical Dynasty Award, Camila Cabello with the Global Impact award, Kany García as Spirit of Change and Kali Uchis as Rising Star.

Late last summer, the composer and producer Itay Kashti received an email invitation to a songwriting camp that Polydor Records was running in rural Wales. Kashti, a 44-year-old London-based Israeli who mostly produces recordings for singer-songwriters and makes soundtrack music, has participated in a few such events over the years, and this one sounded worthwhile. “I scheduled a call with them,” he remembers, sitting in his basement studio in Kilburn, London, facing a computer screen and a recording console. But what at first seemed like a promising opportunity soon turned almost deadly.

The call Kashti scheduled wasn’t much to remember. The guy on the other end of the phone had a strong British accent, Kashti recalls, and he told him that his music had come to Polydor’s attention when a executive liked one of his tracks in an Amazon Prime movie. He agreed to go to Wales for about a week, starting Aug. 26. On a second call, days later, the same man told him that instruments and studio equipment would be provided, asked him if he had any dietary issues, and set up a car service to take him to a cottage in Carmarthenshire, a rural area of Wales north of Swansea.

At 10 a.m. on Aug. 26, Kashti, who has lived in London for almost two decades, walked out of his apartment building and found his car — a white Mercedes driven by a man with short hair and a long beard. “After a couple of miles, he started asking me where I’m from and I was a bit taken aback,” Kashti remembers. They had more than four hours of driving ahead, and Kashti worried that, with antisemitism in the UK flaring during the Israel-Gaza conflict, talking about his heritage could make for an awkward ride. But the driver, who said he was a Muslim, told Kashti that he assumed he was from Israel based on his name and “he reassured me that if it bothered him, he wouldn’t have picked me up,” Kashti remembers. Born in the UK, with roots in Pakistan, the driver was curious about Israel, Kashti says, “and we had a really interesting conversation.”

It took some time to find the right location in Wales, a cottage in a remote field of small houses. Kashti remembers thinking that was odd — wouldn’t the organizers want the creators to stay together? — but he just assumed they would work together in another building. Kashti asked the driver to help him with his luggage, while he made sure they were in the right place. There wasn’t much around. The two of them walked into the cottage — Kashti first, the driver behind him — and “there was an alarming sense that something here is strange.”

Suddenly, three men with masks jumped him and he hit the floor. One punched the driver, who ran out as the men pummeled Kashti. He realized he had walked into a trap. “I saw it in slow-motion and I thought, ‘This is the last scene in the movie,’” he says. “After everything I’ve done — moving to the UK, getting into the music business, getting married — what a sorry ending.”

Kashti tried to run, but the three men threatened to kill him, then handcuffed his wrists together around a radiator pipe and ran out of the cottage themselves. Kashti realized that they hadn’t expected the driver. Then he figured out he could free himself, since the other end of the radiator pipe wasn’t connected to the wall. With his wrists still cuffed together, he grabbed his phone in one hand — the men had left it on a table after emptying his pockets — and the case that held his acoustic guitar in the other.

Wait: The guitar?

‘It’s a Martin!” Kashti says, his voice rising with enthusiasm. “It’s not very common, this model — they only made it from ’97 to ’99!” He opens a closet to show me the case, still smeared with some of his blood. The assault, which turned out to be part of an attempted kidnapping, only became public months later, after a March 14 sentencing hearing, so Kashti has had a few months to recover, reflect and regain at least some of his sense of humor.

At the time, with phone and guitar case in hand, he ran outside and tried to flag down the first car he saw, but “I looked like Sylvester Stallone at the end of Rocky,” he remembers, with one eye swollen shut, the other partly closed, and blood all over his face. The driver didn’t stop. So Kashti ran behind a bush to hide and call his wife, who alerted police. Hers was one of three calls to authorities, including his driver and the driver of the car that didn’t stop.

The police took Kashti to the hospital — he was badly bruised but suffered no broken bones or lasting damage. By nightfall, after a helicopter search, police arrested the three men, who had planned to hold Kashti for ransom: Mohammad Comrie, 23, from Leeds; Faiz Shah, 23, from Bradford; and Elijah Ogunnubi-Sime, 20, from Wallington, London.

Kashti doesn’t know why they targeted him individually, but a police investigation determined that the three men chose him because he was Jewish.

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Under UK law, media coverage of a criminal case can offer the defendants grounds for appeal, so Kashti couldn’t talk about his experience while the investigation in Wales moved forward. “The first month, I was in shock,” he says. He couldn’t talk about his experience much, and no one could really understand what he went through. He worried that the three men might have been working with an accomplice. A trial was set for Feb. 17, with Kashti and his driver scheduled to testify on the second day. But Comrie, Shah and Ogunnubi-Sime pled guilty, and a sentencing hearing took place on March 14.

Over the course of the investigation, police discovered that Comrie, Shah and Ogunnubi-Sime had made an elaborate plan to kidnap Kashti and hold him for ransom. They bought handcuffs, a gag, a blindfold and masks, plus enough food and water to last for days. (They also tried to buy ketamine to use as a sedative, according to the prosecutor, without success.) They made some of these purchases with a stolen credit card, rented the cottage in Wales under a fake name and discussed how to launder the ransom money they hoped to get using cryptocurrency.

After all this effort, the three men failed to plan for the possibility that Kashti would enter the cottage with his driver — or even find a secure way to handcuff him. At the sentencing hearing, which resulted in eight-year terms for the three men — Comrie and Shah will go to prison, while Ogunnubi-Sime was sent to an institution for young offenders — Comrie’s lawyer said the plot had been “highly amateurish in its execution.”

The three men wanted to make money on a ransom. But Kashti had been targeted because of the kidnapers’ “understanding of his wealth and Jewish heritage,” according to Judge Catherine Richards’ statement at the sentencing. They “seemed to justify action against the victim in this case based on his background.” In a message in a group chat they shared, one of the men speculated that Kashti’s “fortune came from West Bank settlements taking Palestinian land.” Ogunnubi-Sime wrote that “all three of us have complete 100 percent faith in Allah, so we can’t fail.”

Any attempted kidnapping would be frightening, but it’s alarming to think that a Jewish person was targeted for this crime in the UK in 2025. Some of the messages shared by Comrie, Shah and Ogunnubi-Sime show a chilling disdain for Jews, and it’s scary, and a bit absurd, how wrong their stereotypes were. As a working producer, Kashti says he makes a middle-class living in the music business, but if he’s wealthy, he hides it well. “I had to sell the Bentley to afford this amazing look,” he jokes, glancing down at a black shirt, gray trousers and Nikes. His recent involvement in Israeli advocacy amounts to playing guitar at a memorial vigil for the victims of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, and he grew up in a suburb of Tel Aviv and never spent much time in the West Bank.

—

Kashti’s harrowing experience is an especially extreme example of how vulnerable working creators and musicians can be. Almost all of them work for themselves, and collaborating often involves traveling to an unfamiliar place to work with people one doesn’t know — sometimes for days on end. Only the most successful have a management staff or assistant to screen opportunities and potential collaborators. They are on their own.

Before this happened to Kashti, of course, it was hard to imagine that anyone would set up a fake songwriting camp solely to lure someone to a remote location — let alone target someone based on his ethnicity. “This didn’t spark any suspicions,” Kashti says. Why would it? These days invitations come from consultants as well as companies, and phone calls like the ones Kashti was on are often made by external organizers or assistants.

The truth is, Kashti was lucky. “One of the most chilling things is, my life was saved by such random things,” Kashti says. Most important was the intervention of his driver, who helped with his bags, walked into the cottage with them and happened to be fairly big and pretty quick. But that wasn’t just luck, and Kashti takes another lesson from his ordeal. If he hadn’t talked to his driver, he might not have asked him for help with his bags, and the driver might not have agreed. “As far as I’m concerned, that’s the most positive part of the story,” he says. “I connected with him on a human basis and that is what saved me.”

Musicians have often expressed a desire to make a difference in the world, through both their art and their actions. Now, the world’s biggest music company has assembled a powerful squad of corporate ninjas to help its artists get the job done.

In June 2024, Universal Music Group chairman/CEO Lucian Grainge announced the creation of the UMG Global Impact Team to “enact and amplify the company’s vision for positive change through community engagement, environmental sustainability, events and special projects,” the company stated.

Music industry veteran Susan Mazo — who has been with UMG since 2014, is chief impact officer/executive vp and serves as the founding chair of UMG’s All Together Now Foundation and is a co-creator of the Amplifier Award, which recognizes artists committed to positive change — assembled the new team of specialized change agents.

The members of the Global Impact Team, who happen to be all women, include Mazo; UMG senior vp/head of sustainability Dylan Siegler; Kristin Jones and Arielle Vavasseur, co-founders of Inside Projects, a strategy and marketing agency that specializes in social impact; UMG senior vp/executive director of the Task Force for Meaningful Change Menna Demessie; UMG vp of global impact Markie Ruzzo; and UMG senior director of global impact and communications Sharlotte Ritchie.

“The strategy came from the highest levels of the company,” Mazo says, “working closely with Lucian Grainge and Will Tanous,” UMG’s executive vp/chief administrative officer and a member of the company’s executive management board. Mazo says they sought to form a team who “could help create change and awareness through the power of their networks.”

That team’s work led to the announcement last September of UMG’s 2024 Use Your Voice campaign, which built upon a similar initiative four years earlier and sought to increase voter awareness and participation in the November general election. UMG partnered with leading voter resource organizations including HeadCount, the NAACP, the National Council of Negro Women, When We All Vote and the Voto Latino Foundation.

Mazo notes that HeadCount has reported that Sabrina Carpenter got more voters engaged in last year’s election than any other artist the organization works with. HeadCount says Carpenter inspired 35,814 voter registrations and got another 263,087 voters to take other actions outside of registration, such as checking their polling location. The team also launched UMG sound practices for events, a guide for integrating sustainability into UMG initiatives.

In January, as wildfires devastated Los Angeles, the Global Impact Team supported UMG’s overall response. UMG partnered with groups and organizations including Support + Feed, Dodgers Foundation, World Central Kitchen and Bruce’s Catering to serve first responders and families in need. UMG merchandising company Bravado donated clothing to affected UMG employees and the fire departments in Pasadena and Santa Monica. The company canceled all of its Grammy weekend activities, donating and repurposing all resources including hotel rooms, catering, trucking and vendor resources to relief efforts. In addition, UMG’s All Together Now U.S. employee matching program had record donations following the announcement of a 150% super match for fire relief organizations. UMG’s efforts regarding wildfire relief are ongoing.

Most recently, the Global Impact Team helped UMG expand its four-year partnership with the nonprofit Music Health Alliance to launch the Music Industry Mental Health Fund. The initiative, announced in February, will provide comprehensive, high-quality outpatient mental health resources for qualified members and workers of the music industry. Mazo calls the expanded partnership “the most natural way to ensure continuous and effective mental health support for anyone working in our industry.”

Are the issues that the Global Impact Team addresses “of particular concern to the current generation of UMG artists? Absolutely,” Mazo says. “And we’re really taking the lead from what our artists are interested in and what our artists are talking to us about.”

This story appears in the March 22, 2025, issue of Billboard.