Chicago’s ARC Music Festival will expand from three to four days in 2026, the festival announced Tuesday (March 10). The fest is happening Labor Day Weekend, Sept. 4-7, at the city’s Union Park.

“This is something the team has been talking and dreaming about since we expanded from two days to three back in 2022,” ARC partner and lead talent buyer John Curley tells Billboard. “Every year booking the festival, we run into one little problem: we have more incredible artists that we want to book than we have slots on the festival. Expanding to four days allows us to go deeper with our programming.”

As such, in tandem with the expansion news, ARC has also dropped its 2026 lineup, which features a long list of producers, including Sara Landry performing her Eternalism show, Ki/Ki, The Blessed Madonna, Nia Archives, Michael Bibi, Chris Stussy, Anyma, Underworld, Cloonee and Chase & Status.

The event will also include a series of special b2b and b3bs, along with a new stage area dubbed The Midway, which takes its name from Chicago’s historic public park Midway Plaisance and nods to both the city’s Midway International Airport and the architectural legacy of the original Midway Gardens, an indoor/outdoor entertainment complex in the city’s Hyde Park neighborhood.

And as has been ARC’s tradition since the festival launched in 2021, the bill features a list of house music pioneers, with the festival itself intended to celebrate the city’s history as the genre’s birthplace. This year this contingent includes Green Velvet, Honey Dijon and Derrick Carter.

Tickets for ARC Music Festival 2026 go on sale March 13.

“Six years in, and ARC really feels like it’s in its own lane,” says Curley. “There’s a global energy to the weekend, but ARC is still very much a Chicago festival in its DNA. That energy gives ARC a character you don’t really find anywhere else. 

“It feels like a family reunion for the global house and techno community,” he continues. “Artists really lean into that, you can feel them bend their sound toward Chicago, see the emotion in their eyes as the sun sets into the skyline. There’s a feeling of legacy when artists play here that gives every set more weight and more staying power.”

See the lineup below:

Chiefs fans, rejoice! Travis Kelce is returning to the team — and you have Taylor Swift to thank for it.

During a Tuesday (March 10) appearance on the Pat McAfee Show, Kelce confirmed that he will be returning to the NFL for a 14th season with the Kansas City Chiefs.

“Making another run at it, baby, making another run at it,” the three-time Super Bowl champion said to McAfee.

Kelce’s confirmation of his return comes after previous rumors that he would be stepping away from the Chiefs and the league. “You always need to take a step back, breathe, let the emotions of the season settle down, see where the body is,” Kelce explained. He went on to say that he still really just loves the game of football and his best opportunity was reuniting with the Chiefs again.

The duo continue to talk about mysterious comments Kelce has made previously made regarding his return to football on his and brother Jason Kelce’s podcast, New Heights.

“Once I started dating Taylor, I started understanding what ‘Easter eggs’ were,” Kelce said, referring to fiancée Taylor Swift’s penchant for hidden messages in her work and appearances. “And you start, kind of, placing those things all over the planet and everybody starts to catch on.”

McAfee used this moment as a jumping off point to talk about Swift and the duo’s relationship. “Two greats together is good for society,” McAfee said before asking Kelce if watching Swift’s ascent to mega stardom has helped motivate him to return to football in any way.

“Without a doubt,” Kelce responds. “We share the same love for what we do … we’ve had this desire since we were kids in our selective professions.”

Kelce said that it’s amazing to watch the “Opalite” singer continue to find new ways to create music and still have a deep lover for what she does. “Of course that’s motivating,” he said. “Something like that definitely motivates me to say ‘You know what? I’m not done either.’”

Watch Travis’ interview below:

Ella Langley commands the top two spots on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart dated March 14, as “Choosin’ Texas” logs a 15th week at No. 1 and “Be Her” rises to No. 2.

The leader drew 21.9 million official U.S. streams, 44.1 million in radio airplay audience and 6,000 sold in the Feb. 27–March 5 tracking week, according to Luminate. “Be Her” tallied 11.8 million streams, 29.2 million in radio reach and 2,000 sold after debuting three weeks ago at No. 3, marking Langley’s seventh Hot Country Songs top 10 and extending a remarkable run for the Alabama native, whose second LP, Dandelion, which includes both songs, is due April 10.

“Choosin’ Texas” has produced a string of milestones already. In February, it became the first song to simultaneously top Country Airplay, Hot Country Songs and the all-genre Billboard Hot 100. It returned to the Hot 100’s summit as Megan Moroney debuted at No. 1 on Top Country Albums with Cloud 9 (March 7), marking the first time that two women who primarily record country music have led the charts in the same week.

The song has also made history on Country Airplay, returning to No. 1 after a three-week absence — the longest gap before reclaiming the crown since the ranking began in 1990.

With Langley now holding the top two positions on Hot Country Songs, she becomes just the third woman to do so, joining Beyoncé and Taylor Swift. Beyoncé met the mark in April 2024 during the first chart week for her album Cowboy Carter, when “Texas Hold ’Em” led and “II Most Wanted,” with Miley Cyrus, debuted at No. 2. Swift took the top two in October 2012 during the rollout of her album Red, when “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” claimed No. 1 and the title track debuted at No. 2.

Overall, Langley becomes the ninth artist to control the chart’s top two positions at once. The list is rounded out by solo men Buck Owens, Willie Nelson, Luke Bryan and Morgan Wallen and duos Florida Georgia Line and Dan + Shay. Across the 64 chart weeks in which an act has held Nos. 1 and 2 simultaneously, Wallen far and away counts the majority with 37. Before 2012, when streaming helped reshape music consumption, the feat happened in only five weeks, thanks to Owens’ pair of hits in 1964 (“Together Again,” “My Heart Skips a Beat”) and Nelson’s early-’80s run (“Always on My Mind,” “Just to Satisfy You” with Waylon Jennings).

In the words of Miley Cyrus, “Happy Hannah-versary!”

On Tuesday (March 10), Disney dropped the first trailer for the upcoming Hannah Montana 20th Anniversary Special. In the teaser, Cyrus dons the famous blonde wig as she walks through a studio lot and onto a re-creation of the Hannah Montana set. Fans of the show will recognize the original house that Miley’s character — Miley Stewart — and her family lived in for the first three seasons of the show.

Alongside Miley, her parents — Tish Cyrus-Purcell and Billy Ray Cyrus — are also featured in the trailer. In one scene, Tish and Miley look through a photo album together in the iconic Hannah Montana closet. In another, Miley and Billy Ray, who also played her father in the show, share a hip bump in the Stewart house living room.

Disney previously announced that the special was filmed in front of a live studio audience and will feature an exclusive interview with Miley Cyrus hosted by Call Her Daddy‘s Alex Cooper. According to the entertainment giant, the conversation will cover the impact the series had on fans, the creation of the Hannah Montana character and a look back at some of the music and iconic moments from the series. Viewers will also get to see previously unseen archival footage from the show.

In the trailer, Cooper says to Cyrus, “This show defined a generation.”

“This anniversary is for them, it’s for us,” Cyrus says to the host.

The Hannah Montana 20th Anniversary Special will air on March 24 — exactly two decades after the show’s premiere — on Disney+.

Watch the teaser below:

Happy Hannah-versary! The Hannah Montana 20th Anniversary special premieres March 24 on Disney+. #HannahMontana20 pic.twitter.com/u0CkpF4bTJ

— Miley Cyrus (@MileyCyrus) March 10, 2026

It had no relationship to the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list, but four country artists benefited from the outsider implication in the album title Wanted! The Outlaws.

Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Jessi Colter and Tompall Glaser rode the Outlaws album to No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Country Albums 50 years ago, on the chart dated Feb. 28, 1976, in one of the genre’s most misunderstood branding efforts. The misinterpretations are part of what made it successful.

The “outlaw” brand — which would also apply to fellow rebels David Allan Coe, Johnny Paycheck, Jerry Jeff Walker and Kris Kristofferson among others in that era — was about breaking rules in the music industry and refusing to bend to convention. Still, the fact that many of its proponents did spend some time in the pokey or get investigated for criminal activities only added to the mystique around them. The outlaw sound was tough, and if those sonics bled over into perceptions of the artists’ personal lives, well… it definitely made them attractive to a certain audience.

“It changed the course of country music,” says Ronnie Dunn, who — at age 22 — was in his formative years as a musician when the Outlaws album arrived. “It was probably the most significant wave in 50 years. From my perspective, it turned everything around.”

Country music in the early- and mid-1970s was heavily dominated by sweetened singles, loaded with string sections that somehow made the adult themes of the day — drinkin’, cheatin’ and heartbreak — a little easier to take alongside the genre’s love songs while listening to the radio on the way to work. But the artists who stood up to the system injected some of the rawness, the energy and the brashness of rock into their brand of country.

“That movement developed an attitude that country had never had before,” notes Brothers Osborne guitarist John Osborne. “It went from being kind of like the wholesome music for Mom and Dad to, you know, the outsiders have a chance to listen to this genre.”

Wanted! The Outlaws spent six weeks at No. 1 on Top Country Albums and became the first country album certified platinum by the Recording Industry of America. And it arguably created a niche for itself that has never been matched. There have certainly been other successful multi-artist compilations that documented a certain sound, including The Anthology of Folk Music, the American Graffiti soundtrack and the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack. But rarely, if ever, has a compilation documented a movement while it was happening, thus raising the profile and understanding of that format.

“Then [the genre] just goes to a whole ‘nother level after it comes out,” says filmmaker Eric Geadelmann, whose documentary They Called Us Outlaws premieres March 15 at the SXSW Film & TV Festival in Austin.

The outlaw subgenre emerged in Texas, a state known for its diverse musical heritage. Rock, country, western swing, folk, R&B and various strands of Mexicali music blended into different sounds that all found an audience in the state’s healthy club scene. Those venues are ideal outlets for raw, hardened music, and they mostly draw under-35 demographics. In those conditions, young Texan adults developed a taste for the fusions they were hearing. Thus, Jennings and Nelson were famously characterized as musicians who brought the hippies, the college students and the ranchers together. They also provided a natural space for people who straddled those lifestyles.

“I wouldn’t get my ass kicked as much, standing in cow pastures with guys that used to kick my ass, [because we were] watching the same bands,” remembers Steve Earle, who launches a new tour, “Steve Earle: Fifty One Years of Songs and Stories,” Feb. 27 at New York City’s Gramercy Theatre. “I was always a guy with long hair and cowboy boots, and that was sometimes an issue.”

Jennings, signed at the time to RCA, famously battled the label over its recording policies. The company demanded that its artists record in its facilities, RCA Studio A and Studio B, using tried-and-true studio musicians who routinely knocked out an efficient three or four songs per three-hour session. Jennings wanted to record elsewhere, away from the watchful eyes of the RCA brass, and he wanted to pick his own material, using the musicians who would be charged with playing the songs in concert.

“All he wanted to do was to include his road musicians in his music and the sound that he had imprinted,” Colter says.

She had been married to rock guitarist Duane Eddy prior to Jennings and had taken for granted that every artist had the kind of freedom that Eddy enjoyed in making his albums.

“He could decide who he wanted to produce, who he wanted to [play] on it, and I couldn’t figure out what they were doing here,” she says. “It was just strange. Waylon… was just hoping to make a change.”

Jennings said as much — “We need a change” — in the lyrics of “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way,” a No. 1 single in November 1975. That was a big year for their brand of music. Colter’s “I’m Not Lisa” occupied the summit six months prior, on May 24; and Nelson captivated listeners with the austere production of his concept album Red Headed Stranger, which yielded his breakthrough “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.”

RCA had previously recorded music in the vault from each of those acts, and division chief Jerry Bradley was convinced that if they could position the music as a movement, it would raise Jennings’ sales. Hazel Smith, who ran Glaser’s office, had coined the phrase “outlaws,” and Bradley decided to use it as a positioning statement in the album title. He invited Guy Clark and Bill Joe Shaver to participate; Clark declined, and Shaver’s wife, Brenda, told Jennings she wasn’t allowing her husband to be on it.

“Brenda was in the other room, overheard it, came running in and ran Waylon out,” Geadelmann says. “[She] said, ‘No, he ain’t gonna be on any outlaw thing’ because he’d been in jail and had all kinds of issues going on, and she was trying to straighten his ass out.”

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Since Wanted! The Outlaws was a marketing construct, rather than a package created by a single artist chasing the muse, it didn’t entirely mirror the creative intent that Jennings and his compadres fought to achieve. But it did capture the sonic spirit, and it became a significant introduction to this edgy version of country for consumers who hadn’t put it all together yet.

“I got a hold of a very early copy of it and proceeded to wear it out,” says Earle, who was signed to a Nashville publishing company at the time.

He connected with it in spite of its corporate-driven foundation.

“I knew it was a compilation, and I knew what the motives were for the people that put it together,” he says. “I don’t think we, who were there in [the business in] that moment, saw it the same way everybody else did, but then it becomes a big hit, and we understood why.”

It surpassed RCA’s wildest dreams behind the Jennings & Nelson single “Good Hearted Woman,” fully organizing the raw side of country as its own separate subgenre.

“I was just as surprised as anybody else,” Bradley said during an interview for They Called Us Outlaws. “But I guaran-damn-tee you, the more you heard it on the radio, the more you liked it.”

Earle, with his gruff “Guitar Town,” revived the outlaw vibe in the next generation of country acts, but he was hardly alone at carrying the flame forward. Jamey Johnson, Jason Aldean and Eric Church all emerged in the 21st century’s first decade as self-styled artists making music that cut against the grain.

Other modern-day outlaws include Luke Combs, Zach Bryan, Corey Kent, Red Clay Strays, Stephen Wilson Jr. and Miranda Lambert, not to mention most of the Texas red-dirt artists and the country-centric acts that are classified as Americana.

To be certain, not everyone fully understands the artistic point of the “outlaw” brand. It’s easy to adhere to the surface connotations, rather than the creative motivations it represents, as Earle is frequently reminded in his role as the host of Hard Core Troubadour on SiriusXM’s Outlaw Channel.

“There’s times when I get a little irritated with people that I run into, you know, artists that we play that their interpretation of outlaw country is drugs and alcohol,” he says.

Then again, other creatives — such as songwriter Laura Veltz (“The Bones,” “Speechless”) — are completely on board with its tenets.

“I consider outlaws to be people who take risks and they’re unbothered when someone is bothered by them,” she says. “That’s an outlaw. I’m that through and through. I don’t know if that’s what I write, but it’s certainly who I am.”

And Geadelmann’s teen-aged daughter understood the brand so well that she announced that if They Called Us Outlaws didn’t feature current acts Tyler Childers and Parker McCollum, she would not be watching it. Or telling her friends about it. Both artists are indeed in the film, carrying on the vision of the original outlaws, who didn’t necessarily have a name for what they were doing until Wanted! The Outlaws came along. “At the end of the day, it’s what it’s all about,” Geadelmann says. “It’s not a fuck-you to the industry. It’s an exploration of what it means to be an artist and follow what’s inside yourself.”