Longtime Warner Music executive Bart Cools has announced that he will leave the label this month after a 13-year tenure.

Hailing from the Netherlands, Cools joined WMG in 2013 as its executive vp of global marketing and A&R for dance music, coming from Parlophone amid WMG’s acquisition of the label from Universal during the latter’s EMI divestment. Amid the many high points of his career — which included working with artists like Daft Punk, Massive Attack, Chemical Brothers and Air during their rises in the ’90s — has been a long working relationship with French titan David Guetta, who came into the Warner family with the Parlophone acquisition.

“Suddenly we also had the No. 1 DJ in the world: David Guetta,” Cools tells Billboard. “My task was to ensure this transition succeeded. In addition to this, my main role was to be the dance music specialist with a remit to develop A&R and marketing capabilities in the main territories. Effectively, this meant setting up a Warner Dance community to make sure Warner’s dance and electronic music offering was more robust, more innovative and more connected than ever.”

During these early days at WMG, Cools’ key signings included Robin Schulz in Germany; Feder and Ofenbach in France; and Clean Bandit, Joel Corry and Icona Pop in the U.K. and U.S. 

Cools also oversaw WMG’s 2017 acquisition of trendsetting Dutch dance label Spinnin’ Records, with Cools working with the Spinnin team to, he says, “safeguard its independence and ‘indie’ ways of working.” In 2021, WMG acquired the Guetta catalog, signing a new deal for future releases with the artist. Two years later, the label also acquired a share in SDM management, which represents artists including Schulz, HUGEL, Marten Lou and more.

“I worked with Bart from his very start at Warner,” SDM owner Stefan Dabruck tells Billboard. “He is amazing to work with and always there when you need him. One of the few guys in the industry I will always look up to.”

Adds Guetta’s longtime manager Jean Charles Carre, “Bart has been part of our team since 2009, through every label transition: Virgin, Parlophone, Warner, he was the one who made sure we never got lost in the shuffle. When we sold our catalogue to Warner Music Group in 2021, he was the driving force on their side of the table. In this business, everyone knows Bart and Bart knows everyone. That’s not something you can fake or manufacture; it’s built over decades of showing up, doing the work and actually caring about the people around you. Sixteen years in, and he’s still one of a kind: someone who can close a major deal on a Monday and be at the club at 6 a.m. on a Saturday, still loving every minute of it. Not many people in this business can say that.”

Cools was included on Billboard‘s March feature on Dance Power Players, in which he highlighted the label’s work with “Spinnin’s CYRIL and Atlantic’s Disco Lines, while elevating icons like Tiësto and David Guetta, who became the first artist with 20 No. 1s on Dance/Mix Show Airplay.”

As far as his next moves go, Cools says he’s “going to enjoy the summer and think about what’s next.  Not hanging up the headphones just yet.” 

A harmless fan interaction turned into a viral meme for Madison Beer, and she opened up about the backlash she received when claiming she was supposed to make an appearance in Ariana Grande’s “Thank U, Next” music video in 2018.

While she’s in the midst of her Locket Tour, the pop star stopped Owen Thiele’s In Your Dreams podcast for the Friday (May 22) episode, during which she recalled being criticized and labeled a liar for simply saying Ariana wanted her to be in the Mean Girls-inspired visual, but she couldn’t make it due to scheduling conflicts.

“It really was that serious. But you have to realize that back then it was not received well,” she explained. “People were hating on me and ripping me apart for it and saying I was the cringiest person alive. Why would I lie about it?”

The 27-year-old continued: “The truth is, I was just overly excited about it. I was surrounded by fans who were being so sweet and supportive. ‘Thank U, Next’ had just come out and I thought I was spilling tea. I like, ‘Guys, I was supposed to be in the video.’ I didn’t know that it was just going to be this pivotal moment in my life that I could never come back from.”

What irritated the singer the most was that Beer continued to be accused of lying, which she couldn’t fathom doing.

“That felt so crazy that people were accusing my character of just making that up,” she added. “Then there was like, I was going to post proof. When I was younger, I was so mad that people thought I was lying.”

Eventually, Beer moved on and didn’t even feel the need to post proof to prove her point about the video cameo for Ari, which ended up being a lesson for her career going forward.

“It was kind of sad,” she admitted. “It was a good learning curve for me though, because I feel like I was able to be like, ‘It doesn’t really matter what people think.’ I never posted proof. I was like, ‘You know what? I’m going to let go.’”

“Thank U, Next” debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in November 2018. The music video would be released a few weeks later, at the end of the month on Nov. 30, and contained references to classic 2000s teen comedies such as Bring It On, Mean Girls, 13 Going on 30 and Legally Blonde.

Directed by Hannah Lux Davis, the visual saw Hollywood cameos from Jennifer Coolidge, Colleen Ballinger, Jonathan Bennett and even reality television mogul Kris Jenner.

Ari remains one of Madison Beer’s inspirations, and the “Bittersweet” singer had no issue giving the three-time Grammy winner flowers throughout the star’s career. While Beers missed out on the music video cameo, things still turned out all right for her.

She’s currently on the European leg of her Locket Tour, which has shows coming up in Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, London and Manchester. MB is set to then kick off the North American run in Austin on June 8. The trek comes in support of her 2026 Locket album, which was released in January and reached the Billboard 200′s top 10.

Watch the full interview with Madison Beer below. Talk about the “Thank U, Next” video controversy takes place just shy of the 10-minute mark.

Now that Olivia Rodrigo has found “The Cure,” the world can forget its troubles this New Music Friday!

The three-time Grammy winner leads this week’s New Music Friday roundup with “The Cure,” the second single from her forthcoming third studio album, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love. Written alongside longtime collaborator Dan Nigro, the song arrives as both Rodrigo’s “favorite song on the album” and the “thesis statement” for her highly anticipated record, according to the artist herself.

Charli xcx and Lola Young also shared new singles, with the former offering the apocalypse-minded “SS26,” while the latter linked up with James Blake for “From Down Here.” Indie rocker Blondshell shared her raging new “Heart Has to Work So Hard” single, and fast-rising R&B crooner Kwn shared a two-pack of new songs titled “Touch Myself” and “Idea of Love.”

This New Music Friday also features new singles from Niall Horan (“End of an Era”), Hurricane Wisdom and Chance The Rapper (“Barbie Doll”), TA Thomas (“I Found You”), Ariana Grande (“Knew Better Part Two”), Vince Staples (“White Flag”), Blxst (“Just My Type”), Channel Tres (“Pop Pop”), Loe Shimmy (“Body Dangerous”), Bailey Zimmerman (“The Climb”), Majid Jordan (“Cold”), CHIKA (“A Gap in the Clouds”) and Brandi Carlile (“Life On the Run”).

In terms of albums, Jack Antonoff-fronted rock outfit Bleachers leads this week with its new Everyone for Ten Minutes LP, while R&B singer 6LACK shared his new Love Is the New Gangsta album, and U.K. underground rap star Fakemink dropped his Terrified sophomore project.

New full-lengths projects also arrived from Skippa (#Skippaholic), mgk and Wiz Khalifa (Blog Era Boyz), Iwaata (Nothing Try Nothing Done), French Montana and Max B (Wave Gods 2: Cosmos Brothers), REMI (Left on Red), Jpegmafia (Experimental Rap), Veeze (Y’all Won), Lelo (Mastiff: Pink Tiles), Maisie Peters (Florescence), Xavi (Dosis), LE SSERAFIM (‘Pureflow,’ Pt. 1) and Dua Lipa (Live from Mexico).

Which new release this week is your favorite? Vote — or share your own pick — in Billboard‘s New Music Friday poll below:

Live Nation has reached a wrongful death settlement with families of the two women killed by a gunman at the 2023 Beyond Wonderland dance music festival in Washington.   

In a Wednesday (May 20) court filing, lawyers representing the estates of Brandy Escamilla and Josilyn Ruiz told a Seattle judge they’ve “resolved and settled all claims asserted” against Live Nation, which operates the Gorge Amphitheatre and promotes Beyond Wonderland through its partial subsidiary Insomniac Events. Escamilla and Ruiz were fatally shot at the festival in June 2023 by a man named James Kelly, who allegedly opened fire after taking hallucinogenic mushrooms.

Details of the settlement have not been disclosed. Reps for Live Nation and the victims’ estates did not immediately return requests for comment on Friday (May 22).

The families of Escamilla and Ruiz had been scheduled to begin a trial on June 1 in their 2024 lawsuit alleging Live Nation could have prevented the shooting if it had more carefully screened festival attendees for drugs and weapons or ejected Kelly after he began acting suspiciously. Co-plaintiff Lily Luksich, who was Kelly’s girlfriend at the time of the incident and was shot but survived her injuries, has not settled her claims and still plans to go to trial next month.

Luksich’s attorney, Tomás Gahan, told Billboard on Friday that the trial structure will be “largely unchanged” despite the Escamilla and Ruiz estates exiting the case.

“The jury will still hear about Live Nation’s decisions to ignore its own policies regarding gun searches and its absolute reliance on a skeleton crew of understaffed, undertrained and inexperienced canine security team as the only layer of security trying to keep thousands of paying festival attendees safe,” said Gahan. “Predictably, they were unable to do so, and a mix of drugs and guns led to horrific outcomes.”

Another victim who was injured in the shooting but lived, Andrew Cuadra, also sued Live Nation separately in 2024. Docket entries show that his case has been at least partially settled, though the specifics were not clear as of press time.

Live Nation has argued that the tragic events at Beyond Wonderland were “heinous, random acts of murder.” The company says it could not have foreseen that Kelly, an upstanding Army service member with no known violent history, would go on an “unprovoked homicidal rampage” during a “bad trip.” It also says its security team’s gun-sniffing dogs did in fact search Kelly’s car when he entered the Gorge campground, but found nothing.

Kelly is being prosecuted on criminal murder charges in military court, since he was serving at a Washington army base at the time of the shooting. He has maintained a plea of not guilty and is scheduled to go to trial at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in 2027.

When Niall Horan was working on songs for his upcoming fourth solo album, Dinner Party (June 5), he said he was “dancing around” the idea of writing a song in honor of his late One Direction bandmate Liam Payne, trying to figure out how to pay tribute to the singer who died in Oct. 2024 at age 31 after a fall from the balcony of a Buenos Aires hotel.

“Me and John [Ryan] had this song called ‘End of an Era’,” he told the And the Writer Is podcast this week about the track he wrote with Ryan and Julian Bunetta at the latter’s studio in Nashville. “I was just singing all these melodies and had this idea for a song that was leaving your past behind, but kind of with nostalgia while being excited for the future and not overthinking either.”

The trio worked on the song, talked about it and, in Horan’s telling, “kept getting it wrong,” until Bunetta finally said, “‘This song is about Liam, we just don’t know it yet.’” So after “dancing around it subconsciously” for a while, they finally agreed that Horan was paying tribute to his mate, at which point he said they finished writing it in five minutes.

In an Instagram post earlier this week, Horan further described the origins of the midtempo tune with lyrics about letting go of things we’re not supposed to. He said he, Bunetta and Ryan started working on the song several years ago and rewrote it four times without ever getting it quite right.

“As we were working on this album, we revisited it,” he wrote. “Some songs take a minute to get to what you’re actually trying to say. This one was one of those. I hope it means as much to you as it does to me.” Horan said he felt the song needed “its own space” to breathe before the album drops.

Over gentle acoustic guitar and keyboards, Horan sings, “We had it, pure magic/ Remembering what it was like/ Time passes so fast that I couldn’t tell you goodbye,” in a whispery voice. The pace picks up for the wistful chorus, “Feels like letting go of/ Things we’re not supposed to/ One breath and it’s over/ The end of an era/ Feels like letting go of/ Someone I want more of/ One breath and it’s over/ The end of an era.”

“It’s a song of loss and fear of loss and the end of an era,” Horan told the podcast, describing the verses as alternating between sad and nostalgic. “And they are two of the feelings that I have when I think of Liam, the sadness that he’s not with us anymore,” he added, describing getting goose bumps as he discussed his friend. “But also looking back at the good times and growing up together and doing all the things we’ve spoke about for the last hour … making records together and growing up together in a mad industry.”

Horan is gearing up to play at the BBC Radio 1 Big Weekend show in Houghton Le Spring, U.K. on Sunday (May 24). He’ll play the Capital’s Summertime Ball in London on June 6 before taking the stage for a pair of stadium shows in Tennessee and Pennsylvania on July 9 and 18, respectively, with his pal Thomas Rhett. His North American tour in support of the album will kick off on March 17, 2027 in St. Paul, Minn.

“End of an Era” is the third single from the upcoming album, following on the heels of the title track and “Little More Time.”

Watch Horan on And the Writer Is and watch the lyric video for “End of an Era” below.