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It’s week six of Monday Night Football and it’s a doubleheader.

This Monday, Oct. 13, the Buffalo Bills and Atlanta Falcons will go head-to-head, followed by a matchup between the Chicago Bears and Washington Commanders. The Bills are fresh off a loss against the Patriots during week five, their first of the season. Atlanta has not bested the Bills since 2013. The Falcons will host the Bills at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, Ga., airing live on ESPN. That game will begin promptly at 7:15pm.

An hour later at 8:15pm via ABC, the Commanders will be hosting the Bears at Northwest Stadium in Prince George’s County, Md. The Commanders are favored to win with a 14-12-1 record against Chicago at home and a 24-22-1 overall record. As for the 7:15pm Bills vs Falcons game, tickets are more expensive, starting at $181 and up via Ticketmaster and Vividseats.

If you don’t live in the area, or just don’t have enough money to shell out on tickets, we’re showing you how you can stream tonight’s game live and on-demand (with and without cable).

How to Watch Monday Night Football on ABC, ESPN & More

You can stream MNF games on DirecTV, Fubo, Sling TV and Hulu + Live TV. Falcons vs Bills will begin at 7:15pm ET broadcasted live via ESPN, followed by Commanders vs Bears at 8:15pm ET broadcasted via ABC.

DirecTV Stream offers a free trial at sign up and over 90 cable and local channels including ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN Deportes, ABC and ACCN. Plans start at $89.99/month. With a free trial, you can save up to $40 off your first month depending on the plan you choose.

Not interested in DirecTV Stream? For sports fanatics looking for streaming alternatives, Fubo, Sling TV and Hulu + Live TV are some of the streamers that provide instant access to ABC, ESPN and other channels.

Depending on which package you choose, DirecTV’s streaming plans lets you access specialty channels like Big Ten Network, ACC, SEC, MLB Network, CBS Sports Network, Starz, Encore, Max, Ion, NHL Network and more.

There are also several other affordable ways to watch local channels such as ABC, NBC and CBS. For example, you can buy an HDTV antenna like this one on sale at Amazon for $24 (free shipping for Prime members), and of course, football lovers can subscribe to streamers such as FuboTV and Sling TV.

For around $20-$75, you’ll get to stream live TV and on-demand content, including sports channels and DVR storage. And now that the football season has officially arrived, many of your favorite streamers are offering streaming deals for the NFL season and beyond.

For example, you’ll get a free trial with Fubo to watch your favorite football games for free for up to a week and a discount at sign up.

Looking for more streaming deals? Sling TV is half off for your first month. That means you can subscribe and stream all TV shows, movies, football games and other sports content starting as low as $29.99. One of Sling’s best streaming deals is the Orange & Blue package. Right now, you can get a subscription to both Orange & Blue for just $29.99 for your first month.

Looking for another affordable option? Subscribe to Fubo and save $20 off your first month.

Fubo’s streaming plans start at $59.99/month (regularly $79.99) after a week free. Fubo Pro, one of the cheapest among the aforementioned streaming plans, includes 202 channels, 1000 hours of Cloud DVR and streaming on up to 10 screens. For Spanish speakers, Fubo Latino is $19.99/month (regularly $32.99/month) to stream 62 channels.

You can also watch NFL games on YouTube TV and NFL+, the latter starts at $6.99/month for the base subscription and $14.99/month for NLF+ Premium.

With NFL+, football fans can watch or listen to games live and on-demand, plus enjoy recaps and more.

Keep in mind, while there are different ways to watch football games from your TV, phone, laptop or computer, the price will vary depending on the platform. Fortunately, ESPN is available on several streamers including Fubo, Sling and Hulu + Live TV.

Hulu + Live TV gives you access to 90+ channels in edition to ESPN+, Hulu and Disney+, and DVR storage, for $82.99/month after a three-day free trial. Click below join.

Atlantic Music Group executives Zach Friedman, 34, and Tony Talamo, 35, have always been seen as a package deal. Often referred to in tandem as simply “Zach and Tony,” the trusted right-hand men of AMG CEO and longtime colleague Elliot Grainge say their friendship predates their label roles by decades.

“We’ve known each other since birth,” Talamo says. “Same neighborhood, same everything. Growing up, we bonded over movies, music and sports.” Like many entrepreneurs before them, the Voorhees, N.J.-raised duo started a marketing and management company — eventually called Homemade Projects — in 2011 during their first year of college. “It was the moment when music really started to become democratized,” Friedman says. “Justin Bieber used YouTube to build a fan base. We were big fans of Mac Miller, and we saw him succeeding with just his friends and a camera.”

Talamo and Friedman identified a promising young act of their own, a tween rapper named Chris Miles. They DM’d him, offering to help make a music video. It didn’t matter that Talamo and Friedman were only 19 or that they didn’t have any experience making videos. They wanted to help Miles build a fan base online. “We took a bus into the city and started making his videos,” Friedman says. Soon after, they got Miles onto WorldStarHipHop, a popular rap blog at the time, which earned the young artist millions of views a day, Friedman recalls.

Homemade Projects grew into one of the early leading digital marketing companies, contracting for major labels on retainer and blowing up artists on now-defunct social apps like Musical.ly (which eventually merged into TikTok) and Vine.

“Now everyone does this. It feels like every day there’s a new one of these companies,” Friedman says. “But at the time no one really understood what we were doing or the full power of these influencers.”

Along the way, Talamo and Friedman met Grainge, a similarly young entrepreneur who was building his own independent label, 10K Projects. “Elliot really got what we were doing from the beginning,” Talamo says. “We became great friends.” Business followed. The duo started handling digital marketing for 10K, then formed a joint venture with Grainge and eventually became the label’s co-presidents.

When Grainge sold a majority stake in 10K to Warner Music Group and was appointed CEO of AMG a year later in October 2024 — which included oversight of 10K, 300 Entertainment and Elektra — he installed Friedman and Talamo as COO and GM, respectively, and adopted the digital-first strategy that Homemade Projects had pioneered.

“It’s just like when we were 16 in the basement,” Friedman says. “And when it doesn’t feel that way anymore, I’m out.”

Early in your careers, you signed one of your artists to Atlantic Records. What was the label like when you first worked with them?

Zach Friedman: Tony and I were in a meeting. It was supposed to be a planning meeting, and we were like, “We really need to get on Spotify playlists.” I’m not going to name names, but someone at Atlantic said, “Name one rapper that’s broken off Spotify.”

Tony Talamo: We looked at each other, like, “Oh, we’re screwed.” That’s when we realized we were going to have to figure this out on our own. That’s when we stumbled across MagCon [the Meet and Greet Convention where fans mingled with Instagram and Vine stars; it ran from 2013 to 2017].

Friedman: That’s where we really saw the power of influencers. Five thousand people would show up to these shows to meet people. It was just a meet-and-greet — literally nothing else. All these girls would show up, and we would see that when the influencers posted songs, they would rise up the iTunes chart. We made a deck, went to every major label and pitched paying these [young influencers] we knew to create hit songs. We were always hustling, and everyone was like, “We’ll give you $1,000, $1,500.” It would always work.

Digital marketing changes at a high velocity. What is the key to staying on top of it?

Friedman: We’re chronically online. We’re fans first. This was our hobby before it was our job. That’s the competitive advantage. Also, we pioneered the space before anyone else was in it or taking it seriously.

Talamo: To Zach’s point, when you do something for so long and you’re so in it, you can read the tea leaves and you know how to maneuver.

When did you see other people catch on to influencer marketing?

Friedman: There were only a few people doing it when Musical.ly transferred to TikTok and COVID happened. There was no other play because everyone was inside, so that’s when it exploded.

What did you do in your first days at Atlantic Music Group?

Talamo: First was the roster. We had to go through and see what we felt we could immediately sprinkle our magic dust on, so to speak. Second was the team. We met everybody and talked to them at length. Then we had to decide how we wanted to structure everything — from a marketing standpoint, from an A&R standpoint. What resources were in one department that we felt should be in another. Really getting under the hood and seeing how we could make it more efficient and more effective in the current music climate.

Friedman: When we met with the staff, a lot of people felt defeated over the past three years, and we just wanted people to have fun again. People here are excited again, and they’re having a good time. I feel like there’s a lot of negativity in music right now. But the vibe at Atlantic isn’t like that.

Now that the music business has become so democratized, what is the value of a major label?

Friedman: We’ve been on the other side of the table. We have the insight of going to all the labels and hearing all the pitches, and we worked in digital for a bunch of the labels. I think we are the best at the internet and providing strategies to maximize people’s fan bases and communities. It’s really powerful that we run the global campaigns out of our office here.

How much of Atlantic under Elliot Grainge is basically a bigger, revamped version of what he built with 10K?

Friedman: The entrepreneurial spirit and the indie spirit definitely flow through Atlantic now. We don’t say no a lot here. People are given the reins to build things and be their own boss, which is really powerful, especially for young people to learn and succeed.

Major labels are largely undergoing a lot of change, including restructuring, layoffs and new CEOs. Why is this happening all at once?

Friedman: Restructures are terrible, but sometimes they’re needed to bring fresh life. There’s a new way of doing things, and there were a lot of redundancies in the system. They had to be cleared out to provide to other resources.

Now that AMG has gone through layoffs and restructuring, where do you want to invest those savings?

Friedman: A&R and overall digital audience building.

Talamo: Content, for sure. We’re in a battle for attention. You’re not just competing with the million songs uploaded a day or whatever that stat is — you’re competing with business and news and food and influencers and sports — all these different things. And everyone has an opinion.

Can artists compete without doing the kind of digital marketing you are doing?

Friedman: Yes, 100%. Quality always wins. If the art is that good, people will share it. There are so many artists that come here that are doing millions of streams a week and have spent zero dollars on marketing.

Talamo: It’s not all about money. 

Friedman: The fans are creating trends themselves now. Could they amplify that and put their music in front of a bigger audience? Yes. That’s our job, once they bring us in.

Lastly, any update on when we can expect WMG’s long awaited superfan app?

Friedman: I don’t have an update on that.

A vershion of this story appears in the Oct. 11, 2025, issue of Billboard.

Mae Martin multi-hyphenates bigly. The Canadian comedian, actor, author and singer-songwriter — currently seen in the Netflix psychological thriller, Wayward, which took the No. 1 spot on the streamer’s Top 10 list, will revisit her comedy roots on a 37-city 2026 North American tour of their new show, The Possum.

Announced on Monday (Oct. 13), the tour will begin Feb. 26, 2026 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and conclude May 11 in Nashville. It will be the largest tour to date for Martin, who primarily performed shows in Canada and the United Kingdom. Show and Tell, which has produced tours for Please Don’t Destroy, Atsuko Okatsuka and Ramy Youssef and Martin, is the promoter. 

Tickets will be available via Martin’s website on Tuesday (Oct. 14) at 10 a.m. local time with the pre-sale code MAELIVE. Fans can also buy VIP tickets that will entitle them to meet-and-greet opportunities, exclusive tour merchandise and front-row seats.  

In addition to starring in Wayward as a small-town cop suspicious of a local academy for troubled teens, Martin wrote for and executive produced the limited series. They currently co-host the comedy podcast Handsome with fellow comedians Tig Notaro and Fortune Feimster.

Martin’s first comedy special, 2017’s Dope, was nominated for best comedy show at the Edinburgh Comedy Awards and became a stand-up special for Netflix. Their follow-up, Mae Martin SAP, debuted on Netflix in 2023 and was shortlisted for a comedy album of the year Juno Award in Canada.

Martin is well-known for their 2020-2021 semi-autobiographical comedy-drama series Feel Good, which they co-wrote, starred in, and executive produced. (The show also ran on Netflix.) They appeared on the second season of the HBO comedy-drama series The Flight Attendant starring Kaley Cuoco.  

If that isn’t enough, in 2019, Martin published the autobiographical handbook, Can Everyone Please Calm Down?: A Guide to 21st Century Sexuality, and this past February released their debut music album, the indie-rock flavored I’m A TV.

 

It’s astounding, time is fleeting: 50 years ago, The Rocky Horror Picture Show — a sci-fi/horror/musical-comedy adapted from a stage play by Richard O’Brien that opened on London’s West End in 1973 — premiered on U.S. movie screens. At first, its box-office gross was flatter than Brad and Janet’s tire on that stormy night. But all flops should bounce back like this one: The Jim Sharman-directed film is still playing in limited theatrical showings around the United States, making it the longest big-screen run for a film in history. To toast a half-century of Horror, Billboard is doing the time warp, again. It’s just a jump to the left…

‘Show’ and Hell

Thanks to an investment from Ode Records president (and Carole King producer) Lou Adler, the Rocky Horror Show stage production jumped to the left coast to open at Adler’s Roxy in Los Angeles. The April 13, 1974, Billboard hailed its “outrageously decadent humor” and recognized Tim Curry as “a major talent discovery” for his campy portrayal of the gender-bending mad scientist: “How many male performers could go through an entire play costumed in a Marlene Dietrich chorus girl outfit and still come across with Mick Jagger macho?”

‘Rocky’ Start

The following year, The Rocky Horror Picture Show — starring Curry and Susan Sarandon — made its big-screen bow, then fizzled, but beamed into the underground movie circuit. The June 3, 1978, Billboard predicted that the soundtrack, which had just made its Billboard 200 debut that April, “may well become the sleeper soundtrack of the year.” “It’s not a mass item,” one label executive told Billboard, “but it is a mass cult item.”

There’s a Light

By 1980, ticket buyers were doing the time warp, again, at call-and-response screenings. An Aug. 2 piece about how rock music could boost a movie’s endurance reported that “the frenzied Rock ‘n’ Roll High School [and the] laughably ghoulish Rocky Horror Picture Show” could still “pack in audiences with the best of them.” Slowly and steadily, it paid off. The film “quietly marked its 10th anniversary last month by topping $60 million,” according to the Nov. 9, 1985, Billboard. “But beyond the numbers, the most important cultural contribution made by Rocky Horror may have been establishing the phenomenon of midnight weekend screenings of cult films.”

Rent-a, Rent-a, Rent Me

“E.T., Rocky Horror Picture Show Top Some Lists,” according to a headline in the Aug. 22, 1987, issue, which described the video titles stores wanted most. Looking at “feedback on catalog releases from special request sheets in each store,” video merchants were eager to taste Curry’s Dr. Frank-N-Furter. By 1990, their desires were fulfilled. “The Rocky Horror Picture Show, one of the most eagerly awaited titles in industry history, will make its belated debut on video Nov. 8 at $89.98,” reported the Sept. 22 issue. By then, the film had grossed “$150 million at the domestic box office.” At the time, “it still plays midnight shows in at least 200 theaters.” It’s still showing.

This story appears in the Oct. 11, 2025, issue of Billboard.

The Taylor Swift blitz will continue into the holiday season. After making the rounds over the past two weeks to promote her just-released, record-smashing 12 studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, the singer has a few more surprises up her sleeve for Swifties to round out 2025. Swift announced on Good Morning America on Monday morning (Oct. 13) that she will be back on our screens in December via a pair of Disney+ Eras Tour specials.

Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour | The End of an Era is described as a six-episode behind-the-scenes docuseries chronicling the “development, impact, and inner-workings” behind the record-breaking career retrospective world tour. In addition, Swift will also drop Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour | The Final Show, a full concert film featuring the Eras Tour debut of the Tortured Poets Department. Both specials will begin streaming on Disney+ only on Dec. 12.

“People like to talk about phenomenons,” Swift says in a promo video for the movies posted on Instagram on Monday morning in which she is seen getting ready to take the stage in one of her many Eras outfits, as well as rehearsing and sharing a sweet moment with her mom backstage. “Almost as if it were pieces falling into place. As if it just happened. The Eras Tour wasn’t when all the pieces fell into place. This tour was just when every single one of us who had done so much work, pushing inch-by-inch, to where we all clicked together,” she continues in what appears to be a back-stage pump-up message for her team.

In between, we see glimpses of the tour stage being built and fiancé Travis Kelce rehearsing his cameo at a London show at Wembley Stadium during which he carried the singer on stage during the “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” transition. “The only thing left,” Swift says, “is to close the book.”

The Instagram post also featured an additional message from Swift about the Eras projects. “It was the End of an Era and we knew it,” she wrote. “We wanted to remember every moment leading up to the culmination of the most important and intense chapter of our lives, so we allowed filmmakers to capture this tour and all the stories woven throughout it as it wound down. And to film the final show in its entirety.”

The End of an Era docuseries promises an intimate look at Swift’s life as the tour made headlines and became a global cultural phenomenon from March 2023 through Dec. 2024, playing 149 gigs to more than 10 million fans and grossing over $2 billion. The series will feature a number of her friends and opening acts from the tour, including Gracie Abrams, Sabrina Carpenter, Ed Sheeran and Florence Welch, as well as never-before-seen insight into the creation of the tour. Two episodes of the series will debut each week beginning on Dec. 12.

In a sneak peek aired on GMA, Swift is seen attempting to relax after a show, filling up a giant marble bathtub while still wearing one of her glittery stage outfits. “I’ll not be able to get to sleep, cuz I can’t, like, come down until I’ve watched tons of TV, I get room service in bed, I sign a box of 2,000 CDs and then I’m tired… and then I do the whole thing again,” she says casually as she removes her false eyelashes and makeup.

Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour | The Final Show was filmed at the final stop in Vancouver, B.C. and will also debut on Dec. 12 on Disney+. The full concert film features the entire Tortured Poets Department set, which was added to the tour following that album’s release in April 2024. 

Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour | The End of an Era was directed by Don Argott, co-directed by Sheena M. Joyce and produced by Object & Animal. Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour | The Final Show was directed by Glenn Weiss and produced by Taylor Swift Productions in association with Silent House Productions.  

Check out the promo video for the films below.

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