Jelly Roll appears to be having the time of his life on his first-ever tour of Australia. The country superstar who was previously barred from playing international shows due to his felonious past has been tearing it up Down Under, appearing at three stops on the inaugural Strummingbird Festival on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Newcastle and Perth, as well as playing shows in Brisbane, Melbourne and the Harvest Rock festival.

By all accounts it’s been a blast. But this week the “Son of a Sinner” singer said he hit a snag while trying to indulge in some high-end retail therapy. In an Instagram Story posted on Wednesday (Nov. 5), Jelly said he hit a Louis Vuitton store during some down time and claimed the staff treated him like he was a common criminal.

“Hey man, The Louis Vuitton in Sydney, legitimately just treated us like we were finna come in and rob that place,” Jelly said with a smile on his face as he laughed about the incident, with the store’s logo clearly displayed behind him. “I have never been looked at more like a crim… Listen, the last time I was looked at like a criminal this bad.. I was an actual criminal this bad.”

Jelly Roll, 40, announced his first-ever non-U.S. dates in June 2024 with a run of Canadian gigs, just a week after telling Howard Stern that his dozens of bids behind bars on drug charges in his youth — dating back to when he was 14 — had been keeping him from booking shows outside the lower 48.

From the looks of it, though, JR is otherwise having the very best time on his Aussie run, arguing with the locals about the inexplicable difference between Celsius and Fahrenheit, getting the obligatory snap with the Sydney Opera House in the background, falling in love with Australian football and, of course, helping his drummer do a shoey.

Jelly has two more shows left on his outing, including a Thursday (Nov. 6) gig in Townsville at Queensland Country Bank Stadium and Saturday (Nov. 8) at the Outer Fields at Western Springs in Auckland, New Zealand.

Billboard’s Live Music Summit will be held in Los Angeles on Nov. 3. For tickets and more information, click here.

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Actress and producer Dame Helen Mirren has been named the 2026 Cecil B. DeMille Award recipient. The award will be presented on the new annual primetime special Golden Eve, airing Thursday, Jan. 8, at 8 p.m. ET/PT on CBS and streaming on Paramount+.

The special will also honor the recipient of the 2026 Carol Burnett Award, who has yet to be named.

The Golden Eve special will feature curated career retrospectives, never-before-seen footage, and in-depth conversations with the honorees. It will air during what the Golden Globes organization is calling Golden Week, a weeklong experience across Paramount platforms as well as celebratory kick-off events ahead of the 83rd annual Golden Globes. That show, hosted by comedian and actress Nikki Glaser, is set to air live on Sunday, Jan. 11.

“Helen Mirren is a force of nature and her career is nothing short of extraordinary,” Helen Hoehne, president, Golden Globes, said in a statement. “Her transcendent performances and commitment to her craft continue to inspire generations of artists and audiences alike.”

Mirren’s accolades include three Golden Globes, an Academy Award, five Emmy Awards, a Tony Award, a BAFTA Film Award, three BAFTA Television Awards, and a Laurence Olivier Award. She has also received the BAFTA Fellowship, Honorary Golden Bear, and the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award. Mirren was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) by Queen Elizabeth II in 2003.

Mirren will become the first British recipient of the Cecil B. DeMille Award since Anthony Hopkins in 2006. Other recipients who were born in Britain are Alfred Hitchcock (1972), Laurence Olivier (1983), Elizabeth Taylor (1985), Audrey Hepburn (1990) and Sean Connery (1996).

First created in 1952 and honoring the eponymous director, the Cecil B. DeMille Award has been bestowed upon 69 honorees. The Carol Burnett Award, created in 2019 and initially awarded to its namesake, is presented to an honoree who has made outstanding contributions to television on or off screen.

The Golden Globes, which likes to call itself Hollywood’s Party of the Year, is the largest awards show in the world to celebrate the best of film, television and now podcasting. Dick Clark Productions will plan, host and produce the annual Golden Globes.

The Golden Globes are produced by Dick Clark Productions, which is owned by Penske Media Eldridge, a joint venture between Eldridge Industries and Billboard parent company Penske Media.

SYDNEY, Australia — More than three-and-a-half years after the siren sounded, the Australian government is activating local content quotas for popular streaming video on-demand platforms operating on these shores.

Confirmed Tuesday, Nov. 4, the new obligation will require those services with over 1 million domestic subscribers to invest 10% of total program expenditure here, or 7.5% of their total Australian revenue, to supporting local storytelling.

Netflix, Disney, Amazon and other SVOD services will be compelled to comply by the legislation, which will be introduced to Parliament this week, the ABC reports.

Those quotas must pass that bar set by the Australian Content and Children’s Television Standard (ACCTS), meeting or exceeding the same requirements currently applied to commercial and subscription television services.

“We have Australian content requirements on free-to-air television and pay television, but until now, there has been no guarantee that we could see our own stories on streaming services,” minister for the arts Tony Burke remarked.

“Since their introduction in Australia, streaming services have created some extraordinary shows. This obligation will ensure that those stories — our stories — continue to be made.”

APRA AMCOS celebrated the announcement as an “incredible first step for Australia.” Whether the next step is a long-mooted content quotas for streaming music platforms, time will tell.

The Australian-made regulation, says Dean Ormston, CEO of APRA AMCOS, is a critical mechanism “within a global content market where extraordinary local stories and local music can be drowned out by content from major overseas markets.”

Critically, he adds, “the obligation includes requirements to spend on post-production in Australia, opening the door for Australian screen composers and local music to play a central role in telling our stories. This represents a significant new opportunity for Australia’s music creators.”

The Albanese government’s announcement follows the presentation last week of APRA AMCOS’s 2025 Screen Music Awards, and delivers on Canberra’s commitment in its national cultural policy, the five-year action plan dubbed Revive. With its presentation in January 2023, the federal government mapped out a timeline for legislation that would enforce local content quotas on streaming platforms.

“For video streaming,” federal minister of the arts Tony Burke said at the time, “the timeline is locked in.”

The new rules should’ve been implemented in 2024 but were delayed over concerns on how they create a stumbling block for Australia’s trade agreement with the United States.

The champagne corks aren’t exactly flying, but the Australian creative community has cause to celebrate. The government’s commitment to investing in Australian storytelling comes on the heels of last week’s decision that there would be no exception for big tech in Australia’s copyright regime to allow for text and data mining.

A coalition of top independent labels has joined forces to launch Catalog, a curated music licensing marketplace designed to let artists sync their music and receive real-time compensation.

Beggars Group, Domino, Ninja Tune, Warp, Partisan Records and Erased Tapes are among the early supporters of the platform, which launches Wednesday (Nov. 5) via music supervision company Too Young Ltd. 

Created by Frederic Schindler, AIM’s music supervisor of the Year 2025, the platform will debut with more than 30,000 sync-ready tracks from over 1,800 artists, with the aim of serving as an antidote to the royalty-free stock music economy.

Catalog arrives with the intention of helping to put more money into artists’ pockets. Creatives are able to set sync offers via its Sync Smart Pricing technology, which analyzes data points on an artist and song history to generate market-rate fees. The process thus allows for approvals faster, bypassing the traditional exchange of documents and any subsequent red-lines by auto-generating a final license once the terms have been agreed upon between stakeholders.

While searching for music on Catalog, creatives can use advanced filters such as audio similarity, and audio-to-picture auditioning, as well as being guided by a human-led “editorial search” mode to find relevant tracks. Artists signed up to the platform include Kurt Vile, Yves Tumor, Ela Minus, Marie Davidson and Icelandic multi-instrumentalist Ólafur Arnalds.

By providing this technology, Catalog is seeking to reduce the number of sync exchanges with “ghost artist libraries” – stock music attributed to anonymous musicians, presumably in an effort to reduce sync payouts for advertisements, video content and so forth.

“Catalog is the result of a deep collaboration with the most forward-thinking rights holders in the industry,” Schindler explained to Billboard U.K. “This is what happens when artists, labels, publishers, managers, and supervisors come together to address a problem. We’re not ‘disrupting’ them; we’re building this new era together.”

Ahead of its launch, Catalog music director Thierry Planelle worked with Veronique Nichanian, creative director of Hermès, to replace a key track for the fashion house’s Men’s Ready to Wear 2026 runway prior to the show. The feat prompted an endorsement from Christof Ellinghaus, founder and CEO of revered indie City Slang.

“This placement very quickly demonstrated Catalog’s ease of process and powerful usability,” Ellinghaus said in a press release. “We are excited about the prospects ahead with this great new platform. And trust us, we usually hate platforms!”

Membership applications for Catalog are now open in the U.K., Europe, US, Canada and Mexico. Further access information can be found on its official website.