This year, “Die With a Smile” by Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars spent five weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and won a Grammy for best pop duo/group performance — but apparently, the track almost didn’t see the light of day.

In an interview with Variety published Thursday (Dec. 4), producers James Fauntleroy and Dernst “D’Mile” Emile II revealed that after first writing parts of the song three years ago, the Silk Sonic star scrapped it and forgot about it entirely. That is, until Mars learned that Mother Monster would be starring in Joker: Folie a Deux opposite Joaquin Phoenix, which he thought would be the perfect project for the long-shelved ballad.

“He was such a genius for pulling that out of the back of his subconscious memory because of the timing of that movie, which is also how Lady Gaga came into his mind as a collaborator,” Fauntleroy told the publication.

The team had initially thought “Die With a Smile” could pair well with the film or Gaga’s accompanying concept album, Harlequin, but it ended up as a cut on the singer-actress’ Billboard 200-topping Mayhem album instead. “When we found out that wasn’t gonna be a thing, he had already kind of started the ball rolling, because the power of Bruno compels you,” Fauntleroy continued.

Gaga apparently loved “Die With a Smile” as soon as she heard it. “I knew she could play the piano, but watching her actually sit down like a musician and learn the chords, so much so that she actually asked for a pen and paper and wrote the chords down … This is unheard of,” the hitmaker added to Variety. “She learned the f–king song, dude, right there. And they were performing, singing it together. And that’s when I should have known it was going to be something special.”

In addition to its Hot 100 reign, “Die With a Smile” spent an eye-popping 18 weeks atop the Billboard Global 200. Gaga is now up for a bevy of fresh Grammy awards, including album of the year for Mayhem.

But in a 2024 interview with Billboard, producer Andrew Watt — who also helped out on the song — revealed that commercial and critical accolades were the last things on Gaga and Mars’ minds when they jumped into the studio together. “This was a pure, organic thing that both these artists who respect each other so much wanted to do together,” Watt said at the time. “This was about the love of making great music.”

Of watching the two superstars do a surprise performance of the duet at Mars’ Los Angeles concert that August, Watt added at the time, “It was this wow factor of ‘Holy crap, [they’re] like the Avengers of music.”

When Lizzie Dickson joined YouTube in 2015, the music industry was a very different place. Streaming services were still a nascent (but growing) force, while live performances and tours still had untapped commercial potential for artists. Music videos made up most of an artist’s visual output, a medium that had stayed relatively unchanged since the emergence of the form in the 1980s.

A decade on, Dickson, head of music in the U.K., is enjoying the fast-paced revolution of both the music and tech industries and changing habits of the service’s users. “There’s such a variety of touchpoints that people can engage with and artists can release music by now,” she says from YouTube’s London headquarters. “The size of the global stage has grown which is an amazing opportunity for artists around the world, and the accessibility of global music has exploded in that time.” 

She points to YouTube having established itself as an alternative to traditional terrestrial and cable television services, and the growth of communal watching experiences on the platform as a recent trend. Similarly, YouTube’s recent Global Impact report found that viewers in the U.K. were leading in consuming long-form videos and seeking “more profound and more insightful content.”

It coincides with a banner year for U.K. music. In 2025, a number of artists found their place on the world stage: Olivia Dean, Lola Young, RAYE, Yungblud, and Central Cee have established themselves as essential figuress on the global stage. Tours by Oasis, Dua Lipa and Coldplay have dominated box office numbers and cultural conversations. “The UK has always been a global leader in exporting music and always will be,” Dickson proudly says, “so if the industry keeps on signing brilliant acts we’ll keep supporting them.”

Speaking as YouTube celebrates its 20th anniversary – and the fifth anniversary for its streaming offering YouTube Music – Dickson reflects on Dean’s journey as an artist, the role YouTube can play in championing both long-form and short-form content, and how her London-based team’s energetic spirit continues to spark new ideas and discoveries.

What are the biggest changes you’ve seen over your time at YouTube in the past decade?

Definitely how people are consuming music and the variety of music that’s on offer. There’s also been a proliferation of content, which feels unique to YouTube as well. You’ve got formats like Tiny Desk and Colors sessions which have grown on YouTube and are still going strong. They sit alongside the opportunity to fall into a podcast and go for an in-depth conversation with the artist about how a record or song was made, and then see it live in a performance. That’s our strength: to build a world of multi-format content around an artist.

How has YouTube been able to not just adapt to that change, but lead it?

Our mission is to be the best place for every fan and that YouTube where there’s a world to fall into when you discover that artist. There’s been a lot of work on our side to make sure to create magic moments between artists and fans. That includes adding features and places for people to congregate and leave comments, especially when there’s premieres of content of a music video or a live moment that an artist wants to show off. Then also making sure that artists have the opportunity to sell merch or tickets to their shows. We want there to be a two-way conversation between artists and fans, and to make sure YouTube feels like a place where fandom can grow.

The archive of content YouTube hosts is a big part of that right?

For sure. I saw a great example of it today, actually, on a RAYE video. Someone wrote in the comments that they discovered RAYE through a Grammy performance on YouTube, then found a video of her Royal Albert Hall performance which blew their mind, and then bought tickets for their whole family for RAYE’s next tour. That is exactly the journey we want people to be taking.

Do you think that the music industry – and YouTube – has found a balance between prioritizing both long-form and short-form content?

Long-form content and the storytelling that comes with it is something that we’re really focused on. People watching YouTube on their television, for example, is our fastest growing surface, and we’re hearing from our partners and artists that often the TV is the most-watched surface for a live concert or series – that’s incredibly exciting and important for the years ahead. We want to be able to harness that opportunity for people to congregate around the TV as it feels like a big growth area, and such an important way for artists to communicate visually through their art.

We’ve seen that with Olivia Dean, with one of her biggest videos being a performance from the Jazz Cafe in London which is 35 minutes long. There’s that feeling that when people want to discover an artist they want to be able to sit with something long-form to understand the way someone performs or the story behind a record. Short-form is great, but it feels more ephemeral. Artists always want to tell a story, so having the time and space to do something longer creates that deeper fandom and connection.

What’s your overall assessment of the British music scene in 2025? The conversation in 2024 was quite downbeat, but there’s been a massive turnaround.

I think we’re in the most exciting moment for British music for a long time. I’m thrilled to see Olivia [Dean], in particular, explode around the world as she’s such an amazing talent and someone who always had a deep integrity in making sure she tells her story her way and represents herself visually. In addition to her we’ve got RAYE and Sam Fender, who had an excellent record this year, but also the newcomers like Sasha Keable, Sienna Spiro, and Skye Newman who all feel like they could continue this momentum into 2026. 

Lola Young is another artist who has really made the most of that relationship with YouTube… 

Lola is such an amazing visual artist. She made a music video for every song on her record [I’m Only F***ing My Self] and wanted to tell that story, so YouTube worked with her on a fan event at Outernet in London and projected the visuals for every song onto the massive screens they have there. Fans were able to hear that music for the first time alongside these visuals, as well as a long-form conversation with Annie Mac.

It was a special way for fans to understand the whole body of work and to spend time with it, but also understand the visual references. Lola’s visuals are incredibly strong and important to her entire output, and to give that stage for fans to truly immerse themselves in it was really important.

In a recent conversation with Billboard‘s editor-in-chief Hannah Karp, Lyor Cohen said that being a “real artist takes time.” Do you agree with that assessment?

Definitely. A lot of artists like Olivia, for example, we’ve known them for a long time and been to their smallest shows as fans. To be side-by-side on these journeys is a real privilege and its even more exciting when global success follows because its so well-deserved. YouTube is a great place to be building because the content we create truly lives forever and is accessible, and time and time again when the moment comes for these artists, people want to go back to the beginning and watch videos from the early days. That archive is a really important part of where YouTube can sit, because when you’re building up, it’s all for a purpose and meant to be loved forever and not just for a moment.

What impact has your artist development program Foundry had on your way you engage with new music?

It’s our first real interaction with a lot of artists and enables us to be with them from the beginning of their journey. Foundry is a combination of marketing support and grant funding for content, and cohorts have been selected throughout the years including people like Dua Lipa and Dave. In 2025 we worked with Odeal and shot one of his live performances at Village Underground, which just goes to show that when asked, these artists want to be ambitious and film a whole show to help fans who can’t be there experience that moment.

How does the YouTube team share and discover music? How do you encourage that spirit of discovery at your office?

It helps that our team are all passionate music fans, and we have such an exciting array of experts across the genres – we just talk about music all the time. We have a model of supporting artists through from development so we’re always keeping an eye on what’s happening, but we have a really tight communication in our team to make sure we’re all collectively monitoring different scenes and genres. We also go to a lot of shows together and discover artists through our own platforms and partners. It’s about people who live music and know the industry really well.

What are you looking for when you’re considering which artists YouTube should be backing and collaborating with?

Some of the artists we spoke about, they have a real strong identity and that’s what really stands out now. Brilliant songs will always be the most important thing, of course, but in terms of building up a narrative, it’s the artist who have a strong identity that stand out and the test of time. You can often tell that from quite early on, where you can see that talent and really amazing music, but tied in with a vision of who they are and where they want to sit. Authenticity is what cuts through for fans and it’s never been truer now in world of content abundance.

Tom Paul from Capitol Records recently told Billboard U.K. that Olivia was an example of how human artistry stands out in a world “increasingly shaped by AI.” What do you make of that assessment?

There’s a deep humanity to Olivia’s songs, and she’s always had a clear sense of who she is and it shines in everything she does. That’s what people gravitate to, and to be a successful artist it’s important to have that sense of human community that people can be a part of and and there’s a coherence to everything you do and feels recognisable. She’s a shining example of quality, authenticity, talent and hard work.

What’s your message to UK industry heading into 2026?

We want to be the best place for every music fan, and we want to be the place where fans fall in place for the longterm with your artist. So keep thinking about artist storytelling, because that deep long-term connection is so important. We see evidence that when a fan sees a music video they go on to consume more of that artist in the following weeks, so make sure that visual storytelling is the important part of an artist’s strategy.

Stars! They’re just like us… until they reach the kind of breakthrough “Weird Al” Yankovic experienced in 1983.

During his appearance on Thursday night’s episode (Dec. 4) of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Yankovich recalled his earliest experiences in the music industry, and how record labels didn’t know what to do with him in the late ’70s and early ’80s when parody records didn’t seem like the most obvious path to chart success. “Nobody wanted to sign me. They said, ‘Oh, you’re very funny, this is amusing, you’re a genius,’” he said. “It was considered ‘novelty music,’ because anything humorous in rock and roll is considered a novelty, and novelty is sort of the domain of one-hit wonders.”

Eventually, Yankovic got his record deal and started releasing singles off of what would become his debut, self-titled album. But, as the singer revealed, he was still working a 9-to-5 when he saw his first major success happen. “I was still working in a mailroom, literally for like $5 an hour, which I think was minimum wage back then. I picked up the mail from the post office one morning, and sticking out of the sack was the new Billboard magazine,” he said. “And I opened it up to the Hot 100 chart, and I was on the Hot 100 chart. And that was the day I gave notice!”

While Yankovic didn’t make specific mention of the song, he was referring to “Ricky,” his 1983 duet parody of Toni Basil’s “Mickey” with Tress MacNeille. The song saw Yankovich taking the power-pop track and translating it into a sendup of I Love Lucy stars Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz.

Since his big break, Yankovich hasn’t had to subsidize his music career with part-time work — in fact, earlier this year, Yankovich rolled out a whopping 90 new dates for his ongoing Bigger and Weirder tour, which previously led to him selling out Madison Square Garden for the first time, 46 years into his career.

“Even before I played, I walked around the Garden, and there’s posters all over the place of Elton John and Taylor Swift and all of these people — it’s the greatest venue in the world!” he told Colbert. “There’s one from Eddie Vedder saing, ‘You’re nothing until you’ve played Madison Square Garden’ … but now Eddie Vedder thinks I’m something, so I’m very happy about that.”

Yankovic also did Colbert a solid by appearing in a cold open bit, “A Holiday Message From ‘Weird Al’,” in which the perennially positive, joyful singer got his accordion in a twist over people mispronouncing his name. “My last name is pronounced Yankovic, not Yanko-vich!” he raged. “The Yankovics didn’t come to this country with just an accordion on their backs and the wrong words to other people’s songs in their hearts just to have their names mangled and butchered!”

Watch Weird Al’s full interview with Stephen Colbert below:

Miley Cyrus had a lot to talk about with Jimmy Kimmel on Thursday (Dec. 4), from her recent engagement to her new song “Dream as One” for Avatar: Fire and Ash. But one shocking revelation at the very beginning of her interview with the late-night host derailed their conversation for several minutes.

The revelation? Cyrus has a major phobia of one of the most common items in life: paper. “Christmas I’m known as a little bit of a grinch … I hate paper,” she said while catching up with Kimmel. “[Glancing at notes on Kimmel’s desk] Looking at that makes me want to vomit. The real problem for me with paper is when people have dry hands and they touch paper and it’s Christmas and it’s dry and they’re all touching paper.”

The comedian was so shocked that he spent the next six minutes or so questioning Cyrus about her fear, which Cleveland Clinic calls “papyrophobia.” According to the Grammy winner, she refuses to open letters, can’t read books or newspapers – and don’t even get her started on cardboard. (The one notable exception is for marijuana rolling papers.)

“That’s really why I got engaged, because I just make my fiancé open packages outside,” she said of her partner of four years, Maxx Morando.

The paper aversion has become such a problem for her, Cyrus — who repeatedly gagged while discussing the topic — revealed that she’s looking into treatment for the issue. “I can’t even talk about it,” she said. “It’s a phobia, and I need help… It is affecting my everyday life.”

The sit-down with Kimmel comes just a few days after news of the Hannah Montana alum’s engagement came out, with the star modeling her gold ring at the premiere of the Avatar sequel earlier this week. In an interview with Billboard, Cyrus confirmed the news, revealing that she’s in no rush to walk down the aisle as she wants to “enjoy every moment” of being a fiancée.

But wait a minute. Won’t Cyrus — who was previously wed to actor Liam Hemsworth before separating after one year in 2018 — have to sign a paper marriage certificate somewhat soon? “From the last marriage, I think I remember that the paper is wax,” Cyrus quipped when Kimmel asked that same question.

Watch Cyrus talk about her paper phobia above.

Young country artist Maddox Batson is running away and joining the circus. Or at least his music is.

Starting Jan. 2, a special video mix of the 15-year old’s music will soundtrack a Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey gravity-defying unicycle act. It marks the first time in the circus’ 150-year history that it has integrated a music artist into a segment with a custom remix, song debut and video.

“Because music powers every moment, we set out to find an artist who truly connects with Gen Alpha and brings a fresh energy to the experience. That led us to Maddox,” Juliette Feld Grossman, CEO of Feld Entertainment and circus producer, tells Billboard. “Maddox was the perfect fit for this collaboration because his music reflects the experiences of today’s young fans and feels instantly relatable. His playful, high-energy personality aligns with the spirit of the modern Ringling, and his catchy, sing-along tracks bring a fresh new element to The Greatest Show on Earth. Integrating his sound into the show allows us to connect with a new generation in a way that feels authentic, fun, and uniquely Ringling.”

The segment features exclusive video footage of the Warner Records artist performing new single “If I See Her Again,” in a medley that features high-energy remixes of his songs “Girl in Green” and “No More.” It’s part of a reimagined Ringling experience that includes beat drops, live drumming, live DJs, dance battles and popular hits. Maddox was the youngest male artist on Billboard‘s “21 Under 21” list this year.

“I grew up going to the circus, so this collab with Ringling is like a dream coming full-circle,” Batson said in a statement. “Seeing my music become part of The Greatest Show on Earth is just awesome. Getting to go behind the scenes, bounce on the trampoline, climb on the rocket that shoots a performer 110 feet in the air, and even try the unicycle — it was one of the coolest days of my life. Now I get why they call it The Greatest Show on Earth!”

Circusgoers can go behind the scenes and watch footage of Batson and his time with Ringling during a pre-show celebration that starts one hour before showtime. The collaboration also includes a line of Ringling and Batson merchandise and digital content across Ringling’s social media platforms.

For the duration of the 16-month circus tour, which will travel to more than 60 cities, Batson fans can get $10 off each ticket by using the code Maddox at Ringling.com/Maddox.  Batson will also hit the road next year with North American and European dates.