Riley Green, Megan Moroney, Zach Top and Stephen Wilson Jr. are a few of the artists who have been added to the lineup to help ring in the New Year as part of CBS Presents New Year’s Eve Live: Nashville’s Big Bash. The televised event will air Wednesday, Dec. 31 from 8 p.m.-10 p.m. ET/PT and 10:30 p.m.-1:30 a.m. ET/PT on CBS Television Network and streaming on Paramount+.

The five-hour special will also feature newly-added artists Dierks Bentley, Brooks & Dunn, Rascal Flatts, Marcus King, Zach Top, Keith Urban, Gretchen Wilson and Dwight Yoakam, with guest appearances from Dusty Slay, Entertainment Tonight‘s Cassie DiLaura, SiriusXM host Buzz Brainard and Ultimate Fighting Championship champion Kayla Harrison.

These performers and guests will join previously-announced headliners Jason Aldean, Lainey Wilson and Bailey Zimmerman, who will perform at the Bicentennial Capitol Mall State Park, with special guests CeCe Winans and the Fisk Jubilee Singers.

The New Year’s Eve Live: Nashville’s Big Bash official, in-person watch party will be held at Luke Combs’ Category 10 in Nashville. Yoakam will perform his biggest hits and will be joined by King, with special appearances from Cody Alan and Caylee Hammack. The watch party is free and open to fans 21 and older on a first-come, first-served basis, with doors opening at 6 p.m. Guaranteed entry tickets and VIP upgrade options can be purchased in advance through AXS.

New Year’s Eve Live: Nashville’s Big Bash is executive produced by Robert Deaton and Mary Hilliard Harrington in partnership with Music City Inc., the foundation of the Nashville Convention & Visitors Corp. The special will be directed by Sandra Restrepo.

50 Cent revealed that Diddy’s sons nearly participated in his Sean Combs: The Reckoning docuseries to provide a perspective from their point of view, but none of Combs’ children ended up being interviewed for the Netflix series.

50 graced the latest cover of Us Weekly on Tuesday (Dec. 9), where he touched on an array of topics tied to the Diddy docuseries, including trying to get Combs’ kids to be part of The Reckoning.

“I had communications with his son. There was a point when they were interested in being a part of the doc because they wanted to show their perspective,” he told the publication. “They were concerned about how [things] would be portrayed.”

Despite his rivalry with Diddy, the G-Unit mogul had been in communication as he cast two of Diddy’s sons, Justin and Quincy, in television programs of his in the past.

While Diddy’s family members didn’t appear as interview subjects in the series, the public is still responding. According to Deadline, the explosive The Reckoning docuseries netted 21.8 million views in its opening week on Netflix to kick off December.

Combs’ lawyers issued a cease-and-desist to the streamer over the documentary on Dec. 1, a day before The Reckoning‘s release. In an accompanying statement, the disgraced mogul’s spokesperson slammed the four-part program as a “shameful hit piece” that ripped “private footage out of context.” Netflix denied the accusations in a statement.

Even though he produced the documentary, 50 also said he hasn’t had any communication with the incarcerated musician since his arrest on federal charges in September 2024.

All six of Diddy’s children who were present delivered statements at Combs’ sentencing. The embattled Bad Boy mogul was acquitted of charges for racketeering and sex trafficking, but convicted of violating federal prostitution laws.

“We’re going to love him unconditionally through his struggles. But in front of you and in front of us is a changed man,” Combs’ son, Quincy, told the courtroom. “Our father has learned a major lesson. Week after week, we’ve seen him evolve, something we haven’t seen in 15 years. He’s completely transformed.”

Diddy was sentenced to 50 months in prison with time served in October, and 50 Cent called the split verdict “luck.”

“That was luck,” 50 told Us Weekly. “He beat the case [but people] don’t understand why he was [crying] on a chair, right? His finances are dwindling. [He] should have filed for bankruptcy. [And] he thought he was coming home. His attorneys … convinced him he was going to come home when he went to court — he had already booked public speaking engagements.”

The Department of Justice spent more than a year investigating Tim Leiweke’s involvement in a bid-rigging scheme tied to the construction of a new arena in Austin and was hoping to force Leiweke to testify in the government’s antitrust case, sources tell Billboard. 

Those plans changed last week thanks to a friendly round of golf between President Donald Trump and former Republican Congressman Trey Gowdy, who Leiweke hired to lobby on his behalf in the criminal case. First reported by the Wall Street Journal, the account has been confirmed to Billboard by a source with knowledge of the discussions. Leiweke, formerly the CEO of Oak View Group (OVG), had been treated unfairly by the DOJ, Gowdy argued, and had been singled out by overzealous government lawyers determined to punish him for his success. Gowdy contends that the alleged victim in the case the Texas Board of Regents for the state’s public university system — was happy with the deal it struck with Leiweke and did not feel cheated, even after learning that he had worked out a deal with concessionaire Legends Hospitality to not enter a competing bid for the construction project.

In the weeks that followed, Gowdy continued lobbying Trump, pointing out that other executives at OVG had been granted non-prosecution agreements after admitting that the company collected $20 million in upfront payments and $7 million a year to steer the company’s venue contracts to Ticketmaster. Gowdy’s lobbying paid off: On Wednesday (Dec. 3), Trump announced a full, unconditional pardon for Leiweke, wiping away months of investigative work by DOJ attorneys working under Assistant U.S. Attorney Gail Slater, a Trump appointee approved by the Senate in March. 

The day after the pardon, Leiweke sat for a previously scheduled deposition with the Department of Justice to discuss its separate antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation, according to court records. Leiweke, now a free man thanks to Trump’s executive order, opted not to answer questions from the government during the deposition, asserting his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, sources tell Billboard. Now, government officials are weighing whether to ask a judge to force Leiweke to answer some of its questions, prolonging a legal fight over Leiweke’s participation in the Live Nation antitrust case that’s been ongoing for months. 

Leiweke has long been seen as a key player in the Department of Justice’s antitrust probe into Live Nation, with the former OVG CEO identified by the DOJ as a self-described “pimp” and “hammer” for Live Nation. In a lengthy civil complaint filed in 2024 by the DOJ and 41 state attorneys general, Leiweke is alleged to have protected Live Nation’s dominance in the concert promotion business and steered the buildings OVG manages toward signing exclusive ticketing agreements with Ticketmaster, with OVG collecting millions of dollars in fees in the process. 

In July, nearly a year after the Live Nation civil suit, attorneys with the DOJ’s antitrust criminal division unsealed an indictment against Leiweke for allegedly restraining trade in his effort to win the right to build and manage the Moody Center arena for the University of Texas. Leiweke is alleged to have conspired with the former head of Legends Hospitality to rig the bidding for the project and faced a 10-year prison sentence if convicted of the charges.  

That’s now off the table following Trump’s pardon, which was a surprise since Leiweke was not on the list of 15,000 Americans requesting a pardon from the president. In fact, of the more than 1,600 people pardoned by Trump this year, Leiweke was one of just six who had not been convicted at trial or sentenced to prison. And while OVG regularly spent hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on lobbying, neither Leiweke nor OVG were major donors to Trump or either the Republican or Democratic parties, though OVG did make a $250,000 donation to Trump’s inauguration following the 2024 election.  

DOJ lawyers insist that Leiweke’s criminal case is not related to the Live Nation civil case, but the proximity of the deposition and Leiweke’s pardon provide a glimpse into the DOJ antitrust division’s long-running effort to force the executive to talk about OVG’s relationship with the concert giant. 

“There are a couple of categories of relevant information that Mr. Leiweke has as it relates to agreements between Oak View Group and Live Nation,” DOJ antitrust lawyer Alex Cohen argued in a Denver federal courtroom in July, a week after attorneys from the antitrust department’s criminal division announced an indictment against Leiweke.  

Cohen was in court opposing a motion by Leiweke’s attorney to halt the deposition, arguing that Leiweke held critical information about “venue consulting services, agreements not to consult on concert promotions and venues to Ticketmaster pursuant to a 2022 incentive deal” between Live Nation and OVG.  

Leiweke is “a very important fact witness,” Cohen said during the July 17 hearing in front of judge R. Brook Jackson, noting that none of the questions he had for Leiweke “are relevant for the criminal indictment,” but examined how OVG helps Live Nation “maintain its monopolies in concert promotion.” 

During the July hearing, Jackson asked, “If you take his deposition and he asserts the Fifth [Amendment], then you won’t be getting any information with respect to those questions, right?” Cohen responded, “That is correct. Although as we’ve said, we do not believe that his invocation of the Fifth Amendment to all potential questions would necessarily be appropriate,” noting that his office might “seek relief” from the courts if Leiweke didn’t answer those questions. 

The deposition wasn’t the DOJ’s first interview with Leiweke, who was interviewed prior to the filing of the DOJ lawsuit against Live Nation in 2024. Cohen said the DOJ has deposed two other OVG executives who both indicated Leiweke had “unique individual knowledge about certain arrangements and conduct” between the two firms. 

Now that Leiweke has pled the Fifth, Cohen will have to ask a judge to force him to testify if the DOJ wants to take a second shot at deposing him and prove to a judge that the answers it seeks won’t incriminate the former OVG CEO. If a DOJ civil attorney can’t compel a judge to make Leiweke testify, it might have to request that the DOJ’s criminal division grant him criminal immunity to force him to talk.

Taylor Swift pushed herself to the limits while executing the Eras Tour, and in a teaser for the fast-approaching Disney+ docuseries on how she pulled it off, the pop superstar acknowledges that doing so was “the biggest challenge” of her career.

Two days ahead of the premiere of her End of an Era project on Disney+, Swift shared an exclusive teaser for the first two episodes with Good Morning America on Wednesday (Dec. 10). The clip shows footage of the singer running intense rehearsals with her backup dancers and practicing surprise guest appearances with the likes of Florence Welch and Ed Sheeran.

“This was the biggest challenge any of us has ever done,” Swift says in a talking head, at one point wiping away a tear during an emotional moment. “Every single night, we’re going to do everything in our power to blow your mind.”

The first two episodes of End of an Era will arrive on Disney+ on Friday (Dec. 12), just one day before Swift’s 36th birthday. They are expected to delve into how the 14-time Grammy winner not only got her three-hour showcase off the ground night after night, but how she changed the setlist entirely partway through her two-year run to incorporate The Tortured Poets Department into the show.

“We had to be all hands on desk to put a new era into the show,” she says in the new teaser.

After the first two episodes of the six-part doc arrive, the next installments will be released on the streaming service on a weekly basis. The first people who got to see the project, though, were Swift’s band, dancers and family, whom she hosted for a private screening in New York City on Tuesday night (Dec. 9).

Watch the new GMA teaser for Taylor Swift’s End of an Era docuseries above.

Warner Records Group has appointed veteran A&R executive Jeff Sosnow as president of Reprise Records, adding to his current role as evp of A&R for Warner Records. Based in Los Angeles, Sosnow will report to WRG co-chairman and CEO Aaron Bay-Schuck. 

In his expanded remit, Sosnow will oversee the next chapter of Reprise — a storied imprint founded by Frank Sinatra in 1960 and originally helmed by industry icon Mo Ostin — while continuing to guide Warner’s A&R strategy.

Sosnow has played a pivotal role in shaping Warner’s roster, which includes Benson Boone, Rufus du Sol, Nessa Barrett, Billy Strings, Brandy Clark and The Neighbourhood. His success in driving hits for Boone, du Sol, and Strings earned him Billboard’s Executive of the Week in early 2024. Since joining Warner Bros. Records in 2012, Sosnow has worked with a wide range of artists, from Deftones and Orville Peck to AJR and Tegan and Sara, and previously helped break acts like TV On The Radio, Major Lazer and The All-American Rejects.

“Reprise stands in a league of its own, with a legacy of groundbreaking artists and timeless records, and Jeff brings the vision, taste, and experience to honor that history while leading it into its next chapter,” said Bay Schuck.

Sosnow added: “From the start of my career, my passion has always been championing artists—helping them turn their stories, struggles, and dreams into music that reaches people everywhere. I’m incredibly honored to do that at Warner Records, and deeply grateful to Aaron and Tom [Corson] for their belief, guidance, and trust. It’s a privilege to now lead Reprise—a label I’ve long admired—and I’m excited to build on its legacy.”

Reprise Records, acquired by Warner Bros. in 1963, has long been recognized as an artist-first label with a legacy of groundbreaking releases from Neil Young, Jimi Hendrix, Joni Mitchell, Wilco and The Kinks, among many others. Today, it operates as a distinct imprint within Warner Records Group.

It’s been a busy 24 hours for Warner Music Group, which named Craig Kallman chief music officer on Tuesday (Dec. 9). Additionally, Warner Music Australasia and Southeast Asia announced key promotions. Alex Young steps up as VP of domestic artists for Australasia, overseeing A&R, creative and marketing, while Dan Ellis becomes vp of international artist strategy for the region, leading efforts to expand WMG’s global offering.