D4vd has not been on the rosters of Sony Music Publishing or The·Team (formerly Wasserman) for some time, Billboard has learned, following the singer’s arrest on suspicion of murdering Celeste Rivas Hernandez, the teenage girl whose dismembered body was found in his car last fall.

The “Romantic Homicide” singer-songwriter, who was arrested by the Los Angeles Police Department on Thursday (April 16), was previously represented by Sony for publishing and The·Team for touring. It’s not clear when exactly he was dropped from the two rosters. Reps for his labels, Interscope and Darkroom Records, did not immediately return inquiries as to whether D4vd is still signed, though he’s been scrubbed from both companies’ websites.

D4vd’s name has been connected to Rivas since September, when Los Angeles police discovered her partial, decomposed remains in the front trunk of an impounded Tesla registered to the singer. Rivas had gone missing from her home in Lake Elsinore, Calif., at the age of 13 in April 2024. It’s unclear how old she was at the time of her death.

D4vd has not yet been officially charged with any crime. He is currently being held without bail at a Los Angeles jail on suspicion of murder, and police say the case will be presented to the District Attorney’s Office for possible charges on Monday (April 20).

Three attorneys representing D4vd — Blair Berk, Marilyn Bednarski and Regina Peter — said in a statement Thursday: “Let us be clear — the actual evidence in this case will show that David Burke did not murder Celeste Rivas Hernandez and he was not the cause of her death. There has been no indictment returned by any grand jury in this case and no criminal complaint filed. David has only been detained under suspicion. We will vigorously defend David’s innocence.”

D4vd’s career took off in 2022 after his first single, “Romantic Homicide,” went viral on TikTok and eventually hit No. 33 on the Billboard Hot 100. After releasing two EPs and opening for SZA’s blockbuster SOS tour in 2023, D4vd dropped his debut album, Withered, last April. The album debuted at No. 13 on the Billboard 200, and he embarked on a headlining tour in August.

But the tour was cut short, and a deluxe version of Withered shelved, after Rivas’ remains were found in D4vd’s Tesla in September. After police responded to reports of a “foul odor” coming from the car in a Hollywood tow lot, they discovered two black bags containing severed, decomposed body parts that were later identified as Rivas — including a head, torso and limbs.

A grand jury in Los Angeles spent many months reviewing the case. D4vd was confirmed as a suspect in the investigation in February, when the singer’s family members filed public court petitions seeking to avoid testifying before a grand jury.

When Elizabeth Matthews thinks about the most unforgettable concerts of her life, her mind goes back to Ann Arbor, Mich., in February 1983, when her high school basketball coach scored free tickets for the whole team to see Prince on his 1999 tour.

But there was a catch.

“She agreed that we would all be the janitors after the show,” Matthews recalls. “We got to see Prince for free, and then we had to clean up the Crisler [Center] with our brooms.”

Matthews was happy to pitch in — and it proved to be an early sign of the work she’s willing to do behind the scenes for songwriters.

Since 2015, Matthews has led ASCAP, the performing rights organization that licenses, collects fees, tracks and distributes royalties for songs played on the radio or streamed online to its 1.1 million member songwriters, composers and publishers in the United States.

Founded 112 years ago, ASCAP is the only U.S. PRO that still operates on a not-for-profit basis, following BMI’s conversion to a for-profit company in 2023. ASCAP issues collective licenses, which allow businesses to play some 20 million songs written by legendary artists like Beyoncé, Jimi Hendrix, Mariah Carey, Neil Young, Paul McCartney, Philip Glass and Stevie Wonder; newer writers including KPop Demon Hunters’ EJAE, Lola Young, Chappell Roan, Noah Kahan and Amy Allen; and Latin music stars such as Marc Anthony, Daddy Yankee, Feid, Myke Towers, Romeo Santos, Becky G, Sebastián Yatra and Xavi.

“As an artist, songwriter and vocal producer, I really value organizations that support music creation and advocate for our rights,” says EJAE, who joined ­ASCAP in 2025, adding that she especially appreciates the support and resources it provides women and Asian music creators. “Beth and her team have been very supportive of me and the causes I care about. I appreciate their excitement about supporting songwriters of all genres and backgrounds, especially in an industry where Asian representation in songwriting isn’t always prevalent.”

ASCAP has no debt on its balance sheet, and its not-for-profit model translates to a payout ratio of around 90 cents per dollar collected, with the rest going to operating expenses. It is the highest among U.S. PROs, and, as ASCAP chairman/president Paul Williams puts it, makes Matthews “a greater expert on the care and feeding of music creators” than anyone else.

Under Matthews, ASCAP’s revenue and the royalties it distributes have risen to all-time highs. For the past 10 years, revenue grew by a compound annual growth rate of 6.7% and distributions rose by 7.3%. In 2025, that translated to $2 billion in revenue and $1.8 billion in royalties to members.

“What we do matters to more than a million people and their lives. If we screw this up, they can’t pay their bills,” Matthews says, speaking on a Friday afternoon in ASCAP’s Midtown Manhattan office. “We take quite seriously our obligation to work as hard as humanly possible to protect their rights, to advocate for them, to push on negotiations and licensing, to collect as fast as possible, to match and process as fast as possible and to get people paid. Because on the ground, it’s about paying the rent and buying food and paying tuition.”

That concern stems, in part, from Matthews’ recognition of the precarious future songwriters face. AI poses a threat to the job security of nearly all composers, lyricists and songwriters. Leading tech executives have called for the wholesale elimination of copyrights, and at least one head of a major music company (Warner Music Group’s Robert Kyncl) recently told investors it is working to find ways to bypass ASCAP and BMI to increase the portion of its digital music publishing rights that it directly licenses.

Amid ongoing uncertainty about the copyrightability of AI music and legal battles between major music companies and the leading AI music platform, Suno, Matthews has emerged as a leading advocate in music seeking to shape federal policy around generative AI.

She is a self-described pessimist, but she’s not a catastrophizer. Matthews acknowledges that it’s a hard time to be a musician — but says it’s always been hard. Her friends and colleagues say she barely sleeps, but not because she’s an insomniac: The tall, athletic, blue-eyed blonde with teenage daughters is a voracious reader. She is up at odd hours because she is reading up on the oil markets — during the week in March when Billboard interviews her — and gaming out risk scenarios to predict and forestall the worst possible outcomes.

“If you have gone through scenario planning, mapping from the worst- to best-case scenarios, you get a sense of control,” Matthews says. “If you’ve already envisioned the entire East Coast grid going down, you’ve already walked through ‘How quickly could we get people paid?’ It gives me a greater sense of calm and control because I’ve already gone through the psychological exercise. I don’t like surprises.”

Matthews’ friend and fellow ASCAP board member Michelle Lewis describes her preparation-oriented mind differently.

“In the zombie apocalypse, hopefully you’re with Beth,” says Lewis, executive director of Songwriters of North America (SONA). “She knows where the exits are, her phone is charged and she has good snacks. She’ll get you out of there alive, and it will be a little cushy, too.”

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Matthews may now stand among the most powerful women in the music industry, but her path to the music world unfolded gradually.

She attended Purdue University in Indiana and later Emory University School of Law in Atlanta. Matthews graduated into the tech revolution of the 1990s, working in the technology business group at the white-shoe firm Milbank Tweed Hadley & McCloy (now Milbank LLP) and later joining the intellectual property and corporate law group at Chadbourne & Parks.

In 1998, she started at MTV Networks, ­eventually rising to the role of executive vp/deputy general counsel at Viacom Media Networks handling business and legal affairs for all commercial deals involving MTV, Comedy Central, VH1, Nickelodeon and other Viacom channels. Working alongside former MTV CEO Judy McGrath and former Viacom president Van Toffler, Matthews says the job was a “master class in … different types of [media] businesses and transactions.”

In 2013, Matthews joined ASCAP as general counsel/executive vp and was quickly named to replace John LoFrumento, who had led the organization for 17 years when he retired at the end of 2014.

She launched a strategic growth plan, a signature of her tenure that has roughly doubled ASCAP’s membership and revenue. She initiated a full-scale cloud migration for ASCAP’s back-end technology eight years ago, a move Matthews says was essential to “navigate the volume of performances that we have to ingest, process, match and pay out.”

“We were going from a couple of hundred million to trillions with a T,” Matthews recalls. “You have to get ahead of that curve, so your systems don’t break.”

Future-proofing ASCAP’s system was at the top of Matthews’ mind in February 2020, when, weeks before many Americans could envision the widespread COVID-19 closures that would become a way of life, ­ASCAP began doing work-from-home drills with its staff.

Matthews and key members across the organization instructed employees to take home laptops and other essential items on two different occasions in the month before March 12, 2020, when New York declared a state of emergency. Staff tell Billboard that preparation was key to ASCAP’s ability to operate without material interruption in the early months of the virus’ spread.

“When people practice and train for events, then it’s like muscle memory when they actually have to execute protocols,” Matthews says. “We see this time and time again in various contexts including security.”

ASCAP’s work with several hundred thousand licensees and international partner PROs processing payments, using internal proprietary systems and third-party platforms provided by Oracle, AWS and Salesforce, has forced it to adopt serious ­cybersecurity protocols. Speaking at the Mondo.NYC conference in October 2025, Matthews said ASCAP practices frequent “red team drills” where ex-governmental anti-cyber crime experts run them through hacking and ransomware emergency drills.

Other tech initiatives that Matthews has championed include ASCAP’s collaboration to strengthen Songview, a public online database of performance copyright ownership and administration shares, which ASCAP and BMI launched in 2020. Last September, SESAC and GMR (the invite-only PRO founded by Randy Grimmett and Irving Azoff) began sharing their catalogs and information with Songview to provide access to the ownership and administration data for more than 38 million songs.

One outside event that spurred GMR and SESAC to join Songview was the Notice of Inquiry (NOI) launched by the U.S. Copyright Office in February 2025 after congressional questions about new PROs, which it said lacked “transparency.”

ASCAP mobilized its membership to submit more than 4,600 letters to the Copyright Office in defense of the PRO system. ASCAP’s own letters to the Copyright Office stressed that the PRO market was healthy and competitive, and that a government-run version of Songview was not necessary.

The Copyright Office resolved the NOI around Thanksgiving in a letter in which it recommended no changes for ASCAP or other PROs and cautioned against further regulation, given that GMR and ­SESAC had agreed to join Songview.

Matthews leaned on her early career experience — when law was rapidly adapting to technology — again late last year when ASCAP joined BMI and SOCANin adopting policies to accept the registration of musical compositions that are partially generated with AI tools. In a joint announcement, the three PROs committed to continually reject fully AI-generated works, but said that musical works that fuse elements of AI-generated musical content with elements of human authorship deserve to earn royalties and be included in the repertoires licensed by each of the societies.

“You’re seeing the marketplace sort of crawl to a higher level of comfort with partially created AI works, because when you think about it, AI has been used for a very long time,” Matthews said at the Mondo.NYC conference just days after the policy was announced.

Internally, Matthews says ASCAP is examining how AI can improve its software development work, such as by writing code and eliminating duplicative tasks to free up staff “to work on more complicated endeavors to hit some of the challenges of scale.”

At any given time, ASCAP’s staff of several hundred is working on its “issues of scale,” and colleagues say it’s Matthews’ primary focus for the future.

“I have a theory that at the end of the day when Beth goes home and gets into bed, she glows in the dark for about four hours before her core cools off,” ASCAP’s Williams jokes.

Matthews’ team members says they’re comforted by their belief that the ASCAP CEO can see around corners. SONA’s Lewis, who is also a songwriter, says that style of optimism stemming from preparedness is exactly what the group needs.

“She is always considering all the angles,” Lewis says, noting the 4 a.m. text messages she occasionally receives from Matthews. “We have a leader who has really thought this through and knows that despite all of the obstacles we’re going to come out of this OK.”

This story appears in the April 18, 2026, issue of Billboard.

On the day of his new album’s release, Zayn Malik shared that he was in the hospital and “unexpectedly recovering” after a health scare.

Posting a photo of himself lying back in a hospital gown with monitors and an IV attached to his body, the singer wrote Friday (April 17) on his Instagram Story, “To my fans – Thank you to all of you for your love & support now & always.”

“Been a long week and am still unexpectedly recovering,” he continued. “Heartbroken that I can’t see you all this week, I wouldn’t be in the place I am today without you guys and am so thankful for your understanding. Thank you to all the incredible hospital staff of Drs, nurses, cardiologist, management, admin and everyone who had helped along the way and continue to. You are all legends!”

Billboard has reached out to Malik’s reps for comment.

The news comes on the same day Konnakol — his first full-length since 2024’s Room Under the Stairs — arrived on streaming services. It marks his fifth studio album since parting ways with One Direction in 2015.

“Five solo albums now — I was just buzzing that I got to do the first one after [leaving] the band, [and] people seemed to care,” he said on Call Her Daddy in February. “I’m really proud of the progression and just the development and understanding of myself through my music.”

Malik’s previous four albums all charted on the Billboard 200, with debut Mind of Mine reaching No. 1 on the tally in 2016.

This week, Edgehill’s single “Doubletake” hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Alternative Airplay chart, marking the band’s first charting single. The milestone is significant for both the band and its label, Severance Records, which launched in 2023 as a joint venture with Big Loud. In addition to Edgehill’s success, Severance’s inaugural signing, Dexter and The Moonrocks, hit a new peak on the Billboard Hot 100 this week, rising to No. 51 with its single “Freakin’ Out.”

And these twin successes land Severance Records president Steve “Stevo” Robertson the title of Billboard’s Executive of the Week.

Here, Robertson — who previously worked for 25 years at Atlantic Records, where he signed and helped launch the careers of Paramore, Shinedown, A Day To Remember and Rainbow Kitten Surprise — discusses how the label achieved the dual chart feats, and what makes its partnership with Big Loud Rock a success.

This week, Edgehill landed its first-ever No. 1 on a Billboard chart, as its single “Doubletake” reaches No. 1 on Alternative Airplay. What key decision(s) did you make to help make that happen? 

I approach these decisions from an A&R perspective, so when this very new, unknown band that we had just signed started talking about releasing a project, I stated the obvious: “Well, start turning in truly great songs, and we’ll talk about it.”  They got to work and started writing really compelling music, but I’m listening for the big ones. After a while came “Doubletake,” and it just sounded like an awesome single and definitely a hit. So many things have changed in our business, but a hit still sounds like a hit. We put it out, it reacted, and we decided to send it to our friends like [Jeff] Regan at Alt Nation, and it was embraced by all of Alternative radio soon after.

The band just wrapped up an expansive club tour. How has their touring strategy helped them in other areas, including this airplay success after more than half a year on the chart?

Edgehill has a great manager (Chris Georggin) and agent (Ron Opaleski) who understood the value of booking intimate house shows early on with a young indie rock band like this, right around the time the All-American Rejects started going viral and breathed new life into the house show concept. I think the buzz and the content coming from those early Edgehill house shows went a long way.

What was your physical and merch strategy with the album’s release, especially as it’s the band’s debut? 

As more songs were being written for whatever this project was going to be, they mentioned in one of our music meetings that they had this new song called “Ode To The Greyhouse,” and somebody in the room immediately said, “That sounds like a project.” We all just rallied around that concept of this house, where the music was born, and all of the analog, physical things you could do with that. So, we thought, “What if the grey house has a landline with an answering machine where fans can leave messages?”  That became one of many tangible activations we built on with the whole grey house world-building. The album cover is an original painting of the actual grey house where the band wrote the album. Even the sound of the album is very analog and not polished, which was the band’s vision from the beginning.

You launched Severance Records in 2023, and your inaugural signing, Dexter and The Moonrocks, just cracked the Hot 100 for the first time, with “Freakin’ Out” reaching No. 51 this week. How have you helped the band grow over that time?

I have always believed Dexter could be the biggest band in the world, and I would tell that to anyone who would listen. I became a fan when I was still A&R at Atlantic Records, and when I left there, I chose the absolute greatest partners possible in Big Loud Rock. Seth England and Joey Moi have such passion for rock music and artist development. All of the biggest artists in our collective careers didn’t have a lot going on when we signed them. We just lock arms and believe. The biggest thing we’ve done to help Dexter grow is listen to them and lean in when asked, and get outta the way when they need to do it their way. James Tuffs is one of the greatest singers in rock music right now, and the band absolutely rips live. And we have to mention an absolute weapon in the band, Fox: along with being an awesome drummer, he understands internet culture better than anyone, as evidenced by the worldwide explosion of “Freakin’ Out”.

What specific decisions has the team made to support these songs in these moments?

I’ve got to give absolute props to Joey Moi, who made the courageous decision to completely reinvent Big Loud Rock into what a modern record label needs to be successful, and that you must behave like a digital agency with a dedicated strategy to monitor and react on the heels of engagement. No other label has a marketing machine like Big Loud Rock. 

What’s next for these bands, and for the future of the label? 

We’ve talked about Dexter and The Moonrocks and Edgehill, but we must talk about Dogpark! In my world of scouting and A&R, people ask what I’m looking and listening for, and the answer is always the same: vocals. Great bands need truly great, signature singers, and Dogpark has one in Eamon Mo. This NYC band hit me hard and fit my vision for Severance Records perfectly. The new songs they are writing are next level! You will hear incredible new Dogpark songs this year. Also, hot tip from Severance: Look out for Hendrix Frankenreiter.