Justin Timberlake joined the loud and passionate chorus of musicians and fans paying tribute to R&B icon D’Angelo following the singer’s death on Tuesday (Oct. 14) at age 51 following a long battle with pancreatic cancer.

In a heartfelt Instagram Story post on Tuesday night, Timberlake went deep on how much D’Angelo’s music meant to him and inspired his own music, as well as reminiscing about the first time they met. “I’ll never forget hearing Brown Sugar for the first time. It changed me. You changed me,” JT wrote about D’Angelo’s beloved 1995 debut album, which is considered a stone cold neo soul classic thanks to the silky smooth title track and his indelible, languid cover of Smokey Robinson’s 1979 single “Cruisin’.”

“It was the most pivotal moment in establishing confidence in my own voice,” Memphis native Timberlake continued. “For the first time, I heard a sound that reflected the sounds I grew up with — early R&B, but ‘now’ it was intertwined with a modern edge. The chords and arrangement carried a mixture of church/jazz/funk. The harmonies delicately dancing with one another. It sat in my spirit and always will.”

The “SexyBack” singer also had high praise for D’Angelo’s 2000 sophomore album, Voodoo, which critics and fans agreed was well worth the five-year wait thanks to such soul-stirring, slow-cooking burners as “Devil’s Pie,” “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” and the Method Man/Redman team up “Left and Right.”

“And then???! Voodoo??? Where do I begin with this one???,” Timberlake wrote. “Maybe my favorite mixed album of all time. The rawness, that took time to cultivate and process. Created an absolutely transcendent listening experience. The legendary players and collaborators, the sounds, the way it made colors dance around my head. It grabbed me, it shook me, I was changed once again.”

Timberlake also shared a photo of the first time the two singers met backstage at Radio City Music Hall, where the then-19-year-old boy bander saw D’Angelo on his Voodoo tour. In the snap, D’Angelo has his arm around Timberlake’s shoulder as the two men stare into the camera.

“The Voodoo tour at Radio City was one of the best concert experiences of my life,” Timberlake wrote. “You. Quest. Pino. Poyser. And everyone on that stage had just ripped the faces off that crowd. And then I was lucky enough to grab a sacred moment with you backstage and tell you how in awe of you I was. (The picture before is from that moment…) You were kind, under-spoken. I will never forget that.”

Though D’Angelo only released three studio albums in his lifetime, Timberlake said he was fully there for every note, also lavishing praise on D’s third — and at this point, final — studio album, 2014’s Black Messiah. Saying he could “go on and on” about that LP or his favorite “Lauryn [Hill] collab,” “those beautiful covers captured in live recordings,” Timberlake said one thought summed up his fandom.

“You took R&B and put it in all capitals,” JT said, dubbing himself “one of your biggest” fans. “Meshed it with something else and changed the landscape, made it something more. Your contribution will always be remembered,” he added, dedicating his post to “1 of 1. RIP Trailblazer.”

Timberlake joined a long list of musicians who flooded the zone on Tuesday with high praise and emotional memories of the high priest of neo soul, a roster that included Tyler, the Creator, Doja Cat, DJ Premiere and Beyoncé, who wrote that D “changed and transformed rhythm & blues forever.”

At press time no information about memorial services for D’Angelo had been announced.

It’s hard to believe that it’s been a decade since K-pop boy band SEVENTEEN came together. But on Nov. 7, Carats will have a reason to celebrate the boy band’s aluminium anniversary with a new four-part Disney+ doc series called SEVENTEEN: Our Chapter.

Produced by their label, Pledis Entertainment, the docuseries will track the first 10 years of the group’s journey, featuring interviews, performance videos and behind-the-scenes footage of their training and life on the road. According to a release announcing the project, the series will drop a new episode every Friday, following S.Coups, Jeonghan, Joshua, Jun, Hoshi, Wonwoo, Woozi, The8, Mingyu, DK, Seungkwan, Vernon and Dino from their beginnings to the 2024-2025 [RIGHT HERE] world tour that played to more than one million fans, this year’s SVT 9th fan meeting “SEVENTEEN in CARAT LAND,” and the studio sessions for their their fifth album, May’s HAPPY BURSTDAY.

A one-minute teaser trailer that dropped on Wednesday (Oct. 15) counts up the years from the group’s 2015 formation over a montage of footage from their concerts as the members ask probing questions about the ceiling on their global fame. “How far can we go?,” “for how long can we do this?,” “how honest should we be?” they ask.

The trailer dropped a month after two of the band’s members, Woozi and Hoshi, enlisted in the South Korean army to begin their mandatory military service. As with K-pop superstars BTS, SEVENTEEN have said that its individual members will release solo material throughout the two-year military stints, though four members are exempt, S.COUPS because of a knee injury, The8 and Jun because they are Chinese citizens and Joshua because he’s a U.S. citizen.

“This is something that has been inevitable for us all along,” Hoshi told The Hollywood Reporter in May of enlisting. “We have been prepared. We have a lot of projects that we have discussed with [Hybe] very thoroughly up until now.” 

SEVENTEEN are currently on their NEW_ world tour, with upcoming shows in Los Angeles on Thursday (Oct. 16) and Friday (Oct. 17), followed by gigs in Austin, Texas, Sunrise, Fla. and Washington, D.C. before wrapping up with 10 shows in Japan.

Check out the trailer for SEVENTEEEN: OUR CHAPTER below.

Spotify has announced two new developments in its push into non-music content: a video podcast deal with Netflix and statistics that show subscribers are quickly adopting audiobooks on the platform. 

Starting in the U.S. in early 2026, podcasts from Spotify Studios and The Ringer, a media company founded by sportswriter Bill Simmons that was acquired by Spotify in 2020, will be available on Netflix, the streaming giant announced Tuesday (Oct. 14). Among the shows that will be available at the partnership’s onset are The Bill Simmons Show, the basketball oriented The Zach Lowe Show, true crime titles Conspiracy Theories and Serial Killers, and pop culture podcasts The Rewatchables and The Big Picture. 

For Netflix, video podcasts provide an additional way to reach viewers, explained Lauren Smith, Netflix vp of content licensing and programming strategy. “As video podcasts continue to grow in popularity, our partnership with Spotify allows us to bring full video versions of these top shows to both Netflix and Spotify audiences,” she said in a statement. “From pop culture and lifestyle to true crime and sports, this curated selection of video podcasts adds fresh voices and new perspectives to Netflix, making our entertainment lineup more exciting than ever.” 

Spotify also announced a slew of audiobook statistics that show the company is making progress in its ambition to advance the size of the audiobook market. Of subscribers who are eligible to stream audiobooks on Spotify, more than half have done so, the company revealed Tuesday. Audiobook listeners are up 36% year over year, and listening hours are up 37% year over year.  

Spotify made audiobooks available for streaming in the U.K. and Australia in October 2023, followed by the U.S. a month later. Subscribers to the Premier tier are given 15 hours of listening per month and can purchase additional time. Audiobooks are currently available to Spotify subscribers in 14 countries, including the U.S., U.K., Canada, Germany, France, Australia, the Netherlands and Ireland. Approximately 500,000 titles are available in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, Ireland and New Zealand.  

In the year since audiobooks launched in France and Benelux, French and Dutch listening hours are up 10% month over month, Spotify reported. In the six months since launching in Germany, audiobook listeners are up over 9% month over month.  

Spotify entered the audiobook market with the intention of taking on the entrenched leader in the market, Amazon-owned Audible. The goal, CEO Daniel Ek explained in Feb. 2024, is to “grow the pie for the publishing industry and expand the interest in audiobooks to an entirely new set of listeners.” That required raising prices, however, and Spotify increased its monthly fee in the U.S. to $11.99 for individuals in June 2024. Audiobook-free options are available for existing Spotify subscribers for $10.99 per month.  

Audiobooks can also help Spotify’s bottom line. Ek said in 2023 that offering the long-form audio content “will increase engagement on Spotify, which will then…reduce churn,” or the percentage of subscribers who lapse in a month. Churn results in additional costs to re-acquire the lapsed subscribers and customer acquisition costs to recruit new subscribers. As Billboard reported in 2021, Citi analyst Jason Bazinet estimated that Spotify’s churn rate fell from 7.7% in 2015 to 4% in 2020, due primarily to family plans that kept people subscribing longer and raised customers’ lifetime value. 

Cardi B doesn’t play when it comes to her kids.

The Grammy-winning rapper is on the cover of the latest issue of PAPER on Tuesday (Oct. 14), and she explained in her cover story why she has a zero-tolerance policy for any sort of negativity surrounding her three (soon-to-be four) children.

“This week I showed the world that I will get the most nasty about mine. I never had to get that nasty for my kids. But I did, and I really feel like a lioness,” she said. “This has been one of the moments I got tested the most about being a parent. But it just goes to show me how strong I am, and it just goes to show me like, Damn, I will really take it to hell for mines: mentally, physically, anything. And I wouldn’t care.”

The Bronx native appears to be referencing her vicious feud with Nicki Minaj, which became a nasty back-and-forth on social media earlier this month that ended up seeing both artists insulting each other’s children.

Separately, Cardi also dissed BIA on her Am I the Drama? album cut “Pretty & Petty.” “Name five BIA songs, gun pointin’ to your head/ Baow, I’m dead,” she raps before referring to her as “diarrhea BIA” later in the song.

Cardi explained on The Breakfast Club that she felt compelled to respond to BIA after the “Whole Lotta Money” rapper name-dropped Cardi’s kids on her “SUE MEEE?” diss track last year.

“You mentioned my kids tryna be cute,” Cardi said. “She did her little diss and it was trash… I could’ve [left] it at that, but everything on social media is gonna be seen. When my kids grow up one day and they see that you mentioned them, they’re gonna ask me, ‘So what you said? What you did [in response]?’ I’m not gonna tell my kids, ‘I felt like she took the high road cause she lost, cause people wasn’t on her side.’ Naw, I’m not sayin’ that to my kids. I’m [gonna be] like, ‘You see how I violated?”

BIA has let the feud simmer down and didn’t directly respond with a bristling diss track of her own taking aim at Cardi on her BIANCA debut album.

As for Cardi, Am I the Drama? topped the Billboard 200 in September and she’s currently pregnant, but will be hitting the road for the Little Miss Drama Tour in February after giving birth.

With hit releases on imprints including Dim Mak, Experts Only, Diynamic, Black Book Records and Insomniac Records, producer and DJ Max Styler is now going solo with the launch of his own label, Nu Moda. 

The California-born artist has been producing for over a decade, topping the Beatport charts multiple times with his largely tech house productions. But, according to Styler’s team, the new label is about more than just music production — it’s a “creative platform designed to challenge convention and open new intersections between sound, style and identity.”

In practice, this means cultivating a strong signature aesthetic inspired by underground subcultures, with original handcrafted artwork incorporating typography, layered iconography and symbolic imagery. 

“Nu Moda is for me, my friends and the artists who inspire me,” Styler says. “It’s a place to push boundaries, whether that’s in production, style, or self-expression.”

The label’s debut release will be Styler’s own “You & Me,” out Friday (Oct. 17). The artist says the track “fuses a lot of the sonic elements I’ve become known for as a producer while touching on some new textures, which is something I try to do with every new track.”

Nu Moda is celebrating its start with a Dec. 3 launch party at Floyd in Miami during Art Basel and will also host an event during Miami Music Week 2026. These events will offer “a first look into the experiential side of the label…[bringing] together music, fashion and art under one roof,” says the Nu Moda team.

Beyond the debut release, No Moda will welcome a roster of like-minded collaborators and new talent in 2026. In the meantime, Styler is on a tear of a tour with headlining club shows across the U.S. and Canada and upcoming festival sets at EDC Orlando 2025, Groove Cruise 2026 and Coachella 2026.

“For as long as I can remember, starting my own label has been one of my biggest goals,” adds Styler. “This is something that I’ve been working toward for many years, and now that the moment has arrived, I couldn’t be more excited.”