As YoungBoy Never Broke Again travels the country on his first-ever headlining arena tour, the MASA Tour’s Chicago stop set for Wednesday has been canceled by the United Center.

The venue announced that YB’s Chicago show was canceled on Tuesday (Sept. 23) without much of an explanation.

“The United Center has made the decision to cancel the NBA YoungBoy show scheduled for Wednesday, September 24 in Chicago,” the United Center wrote in a message posted to its website. “If you purchased through Ticketmaster, refunds will be issued automatically. If you purchased from a third-party reseller, please reach out to your point of purchase.”

Ticketmaster added that refunds would be issued to all fans at the point of purchase. “You don’t need to do a thing,” the ticket giant said. “We’ll issue a refund to the original method of payment used at time of purchase, as soon as funds are received from the Event Organizer.”

The cancellation comes on the heels of the United Center implementing a stricter bag policy, which was set to ban fans from bringing bags of any kind to the YoungBoy show.

YoungBoy’s manager, Alex Junnier, called out the United Center for the last-minute cancellation on his IG Story.

“@UnitedCenter bitched out. Shoutout to Joe Myhra @UnitedCenter. He didn’t want us to have fun. scary,” he wrote, attacking Myhra, who appears to be the SVP of operations at the venue. “It’s ok everyone Joe just sits behind a desk and got nervous.”

Footage recently emerged of a fan involved in a physical altercation with an elderly security guard at YoungBoy’s Kansas City show. Per KCTV 5, a 14-year-old was detained for allegedly assaulting the T-Mobile Center employee.

“We are aware of an incident at last night’s NBA YoungBoy concert in which multiple T-Mobile Center team members were assaulted by a fan,” Shani Ross, VP Sales and Marketing for the T-Mobile Center, said in a statement to KCTV 5. “The incident was captured on video and has been provided to local law enforcement. Our immediate concern is the well-being of our staff who sustained serious injuries. After receiving prompt attention from on-site First Aid personnel, they were later treated at a local hospital.”

YoungBoy’s MASA Tour is slated to continue this week with shows in Columbus, Brooklyn and Boston. Billboard has reached out to reps for YoungBoy, Ticketmaster and the United Center for comment.

For five days, singer Piya Malik believed her dance-pop trio Say She She was one of the final bands to perform on Jimmy Kimmel Live! So she was “elated” when Walt Disney-owned ABC, in a reversal Monday (Sept. 22), announced it would restore the long-running show to the air. “It’s a small win that we all needed right now,” says Malik, whose late-night debut was Sept. 10, a week before ABC suspended Kimmel and his show. “When we act together, we can protect free expression and hold these monopolies to account.”

Jimmy Kimmel Live! won’t return to full TV strength tonight: Nexstar, which operates 32 ABC affiliates, and Sinclair, which controls another 38 ABC stations, will broadcast news shows instead. And for artists who rely on late-night shows for promotional power, the whiplash of losing, then regaining, Kimmel speaks to the fragility of the medium. “There are fewer platforms on TV that matter and that can move the needle,” says veteran record exec Steve Greenberg, manager of AJR, a pop trio that performed on Kimmel in July. “The few that exist are really important, and it’d be a shame to lose any.”

The most immediate reason for this fragility is that some late-night stars, namely Kimmel, Stephen Colbert and Seth Myers, are fiercely critical of the Trump Administration — and the president and some U.S. officials have responded by threatening to cancel them from the airwaves. The Kimmel brouhaha began when FCC chairman Brendan Carr criticized the host last week for his remarks about slain right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said. Shortly afterwards, Walt Disney, which owns ABC, pulled Kimmel’s show from production. It was an echo of CBS’s move in July, when it announced The Late Show with Stephen Colbert would be canceled in May 2026, a decision unlikely to be reversed.

But late-night talk shows are in trouble for reasons beyond politics: After CBS’s Colbert announcement, The Wall Street Journal reported the show loses $40 million annually, and TV ad spending for the ABC, CBS and NBC late-night shows declined from $439 million in 2018 to $221 million last year. And while each series has a massive social media following, star-making events like Future Islands performing on a single late-night show, Late Show with David Letterman, in 2014 are rare in today’s TV landscape. Earlier this year, Elton John and Brandi Carlile’s album Who Believes In Angels? debuted at No. 9 on the Billboard 200 only after the duo made the rounds to several morning and late-night shows. “People are not watching television at the rate people are watching YouTube, Instagram and TikTok,” says Adrian L. Miller, an artist manager who is working with singer Charlie Bereal and label Death Row Records. “Discovery starts on your phone now.”

Last year, a Chartmetric analysis of 458 artist appearances on prominent TV shows, from Kimmel and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon to Ellen and Saturday Night Live, showed that featured artists’ monthly Spotify streams increased just 1.78% after their respective performances. A few prominent ones, like Bartees Strange on Kimmel in 2022, prompted greater increases, but 192 artists’ streaming activity actually decreased afterwards.

For Ken Casey — frontman of Dropkick Murphys and an outspoken Trump critic who calls the president “a little crybaby who can’t take some criticism, so he has to get the shows canceled” — the Kimmel issue is about the future of the First Amendment and nothing else. “It’s hard for me to even think about what’s lost for a band’s opportunities to perform — that seems so minuscule compared to the larger issue at hand, which is free speech.” But Casey, whose band appeared on Kimmel in 2004, acknowledges the dwindling talk show platform for musicians. “Yes, those opportunities have become fewer and farther between, even before politics,” he says. “Now they’re even fewer. I feel like music always finds a way. The message always finds a way.”

If late-night talk shows are heading for extinction — whether for the disturbing reason of presidents pressuring networks to shut off contrary voices, or the more mundane reason of audiences and advertising dollars drifting to streaming and social media — artists will lose more than performances before large TV audiences. Late-night shows have a history of taking chances on new artists, breaking once-unknown bands like Phoenix on Saturday Night Live in 2009 and Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in 2015. Today, artists like AJR use late-night appearances as one segment of a broader marketing campaign, sharing the official clips on social media and cutting them into pieces for TikTok.

“That certainly helped us a lot,” says Greenberg, also founder and CEO of indie label S-Curve. “Fans are pulling the performance and posting their own favorites on social media as well.” 

Major late-night shows also give artists professionally-produced, well-lit, immaculately-recorded clips they frequently can’t achieve elsewhere, including on their own tours. “You can do 250 shows a year and play for 5,000 [fans] a night and grind it out. When you play one of these [late night] shows and reach I-don’t-know-how-many millions of viewers they have, it really hits the marker,” says David Shaw, the Revivalists’ frontman, who performed on Kimmel in 2017 and calls ABC’s initial cancellation “troubling.” “I don’t even think we should be talking about losing these shows. We’ve got to make it not happen. If we even speak it into existence, it adds fuel.”

Just hours ahead of the grand return of Jimmy Kimmel Live! following a politically charged suspension, the guests for the show’s first episode back have been revealed as Sarah McLachlan and Glen Powell.

The singer-songwriter will join Jimmy Kimmel on the late-night couch to promote ABC News’ Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery documentary, which chronicles the touring music festival McLachlan founded in 1997 on behalf of female musicians.

“So happy that Jimmy Kimmel is back on the air and even happier to be performing on @JimmyKimmelLive TONIGHT!” McLachlan wrote on her Instagram.

Her appearance on the episode — which will air at 11:35 p.m. ET Tuesday (Sept. 23) on ABC — is particularly fitting, as McLachlan made headlines over the weekend for refusing to perform at the doc’s premiere in a seeming show of solidarity for the talk-show host.

“I’ve grappled with being here tonight and around what to say about the present situation that we are all faced with,” she said in a statement at the event. “The stark contraction to the many advances we’ve made watching the insidious erosion of women’s rights, of trans and queer rights, the muzzling of free speech.”

Kimmel’s other Tuesday guest, Glen Powell, is promoting his new comedy series Chad Powers, in which he stars alongside Steve Zahn, Toby Huss, Perry Mattfeld and Wynn Everett.

The update comes just one day after ABC announced that it would allow Kimmel to resume production after temporarily suspending the program due to the comedian’s remarks about conservative podcaster Charlie Kirk’s assassination. During his monologue on an episode earlier in September, Kimmel had said, “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”

The comment led ABC affiliates Nexstar and Sinclair to pre-empt Kimmel from airing on the local channels under their jurisdiction — but only after FCC chairman Brendan Carr threatened to revoke the licenses of affiliates who continued to run the program. Shortly afterward, ABC — which is owned by Disney — announced Sept. 15 that it would be suspending production on Kimmel “indefinitely.”

After a week filled with protests from SAG-AFTRA, the ACLU and numerous celebrities, the corporation is singing a different tune. “We made the decision to suspend production on the show to avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country,” the network’s parent company shared in a statement on Monday (Sept. 22). “It is a decision we made because we felt some of the comments were ill-timed and thus insensitive. We have spent the last days having thoughtful conversations with Jimmy, and after those conversations, we reached the decision to return the show on Tuesday.”

September 19 marked one month since the tragic death of Ernesto Barajas, the leader of the regional Mexican group Enigma Norteño, who was killed outside Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico. The musician had been working on a new project with his bandmates, who have decided to release the material as an EP and continue their two-decade-long career.

“We took some time to think and reflect on what happened, and we decided that, despite the irreparable loss of Ernesto, our career will continue,” says Humberto Pérez “Kirri,” bassist and founder of the norteña band, in an exclusive interview with Billboard Español. “It’s something we’re sure he would have wanted.”

“With great pain in our hearts, but full of strength, we will move forward with our musical project that we all worked so hard for,” adds Adán Hernández, bajo quinto player and the group’s backup vocalist.

Titled Las Que Más Nos Gustan and recorded just weeks before Barajas’ passing, the EP — set to be released on November 13 under the Fono label — is a collection of covers of hits by other regional Mexican artists, reimagined in Enigma Norteño’s signature style. The first single, a version of Banda El Recodo’s “La Mejor de Todas,” was released last Tuesday (Sep. 16) as a posthumous tribute to Barajas, who would have turned 39 that day.

The second single, a rendition of Duelo’s “Un Idiota Como Yo,” is set to drop on October 16. Other tracks on the album include “Ya Es Muy Tarde,” originally by La Arrolladora Banda El Limón de René Camacho; “Fantasía,” a classic by Grupo Costumbre; “Voy a Pintar Mi Raya” by Banda Arkángel R-15; and “Derecho de Antigüedad” by La Original Banda El Limón.

As previously reported by Billboard Español, the regional Mexican genre was in mourning following the murder of Barajas on August 19, leaving the future of Enigma Norteño uncertain. However, the group — known for its narcocorridos like “El Flaquito,” “Quemándose un Gallito (El Rambo)” and “El Chicken Little (El 09)” — has confirmed that not only will it move forward with their planned EP, but the members are also preparing for an upcoming tour, which will feature special guests to be announced soon.

“From now on, our mission will be to take the next step, just as Ernesto always wanted: to bring our music to every corner of Mexico, the United States, and wherever possible,” says Conín Camacho, the group’s drummer. “This will be a tribute, carrying his essence in every performance.”