The promoter of Rod Wave’s Last Lap tour is suing the R&B singer and rapper for allegedly holding onto $27 million worth of advances despite refusing to finish the 35-date trek.

Rod (Rodarius Marcell Green) faced the claims in a Monday (Sept. 29) federal court lawsuit from Grizzly Touring, a joint live events venture between AG Entertainment, Mammoth Touring and CTS Eventim. Grizzly partnered with Rod last year for a North American arena tour supporting his October 2024 album Last Lap, which debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200.

The Last Lap tour was supposed to include 35 shows, and Grizzly allegedly advanced Rod $57 million to cover expenses like travel, lodging and production costs. But according to the lawsuit, Rod only completed 26 performances that earned $30 million against the guarantee, leaving $27 million in advances that he now won’t repay.

“Artist refuses to pay Grizzly a single penny of the more than $27 million he owes, and was required to pay in the first instance, and has instead chosen to spend his advance on private jets and lavish second homes,” wrote Grizzly’s lawyers from the firm Weil Gotshal & Manges.

Grizzly alleges that many Last Lap shows had to be canceled because Rod upped the scale of his tour production without warning, requiring more time to put up and take down his arena sets and making it impossible to play shows back-to-back as originally scheduled.

But the lawsuit says Rod is now unfairly blaming these canceled dates on Grizzly, citing a September Billboard interview in which the singer said his promoter messed up routing for the tour. Rod also said in the Billboard interview that he plans to launch a new tour through his own company, Mainstay Touring, in late 2025 — a breach of the exclusivity clause in his contract with Grizzly, per the lawsuit.

Grizzly now wants a court order forcing Rod to repay his $27 million advance, plus additional financial damages for breach of contract. The promoter is also asking for an injunction blocking Rod from embarking on a self-promoted tour without Grizzly’s involvement.

“As a result of artist’s actions, Grizzly has suffered and will continue to suffer irreparable harm, including harm to its goodwill and business reputation,” reads the complaint. “Artist’s actions are a clear breach of Grizzly’s exclusive right to promote and market artist’s shows, which are uniquely popular.”

Reps for Rod did not immediately return a request for comment on Wednesday (Oct. 1). But the lawsuit attaches a Sept. 18 letter in which Rod’s attorney, David Rose of Pryor Cashman, denied that the singer breached any agreements with Grizzly.

Rose writes in this letter that the canceled Last Lap shows were “solely attributable” to Grizzly’s own errors, including “onerous and inexplicable routing and booking decisions” and failures to properly ship Rod’s touring equipment.

“As a result of Grizzly’s manifest breaches, the agreement and any exclusivity provisions contained in it are no longer in effect,” wrote Rose.

The long-out-of-print self-titled album from Buckingham Nicks debuts at No. 3 on Top Album Sales with 30,000 copies sold in the United States in the week ending Sept. 25, according to Luminate. The set was originally released in 1973 before Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks joined Fleetwood Mac and is the only album from the pair as a duo.

Buckingham Nicks also arrives on Top Rock Albums, Indie Store Album Sales, Catalog Albums (No. 1 on each); Top Rock & Alternative Albums, Vinyl Albums (No. 2); and the Billboard 200 (No. 11).

Originally issued through Polydor, Buckingham Nicks has been out of circulation (though widely bootlegged) until its official remastered Rhino reissue on Sept. 19. The project also made its official debut on CD, streaming services and as a digital download through Rhino, alongside a number of vinyl variants.

Upon the album’s reissue, Buckingham and Nicks shared on their respective Instagram accounts: “We’re so happy this album is getting a second life. We hope you love it.”

With 30,000 sold, Buckingham Nicks tallies the biggest sales week in over a decade for any album by Buckingham, Nicks or Fleetwood Mac. The last time a set from any of those acts had a larger sales week was on the Top Album Sales chart dated Oct. 25, 2014, when Nicks’ 24 Karat Gold: Songs From the Vault, sold 33,000 copies in its opening week (No. 7).

Further, with 18,000 copies sold on vinyl, the album notches the largest sales week in the format in the modern era (since Luminate began electronically tracking sales in 1991) for any project by Buckingham, Nicks or Fleetwood Mac.

THE BIG STORY: Sean “Diddy” Combs essentially won his criminal case, right? After all, the jury acquitted him on the central racketeering and sex-trafficking charges that could have sent him to prison for life. The feds overreached and the jury slapped them down, the narrative goes — let’s get those White Parties going again.

But the star was convicted, albeit on lesser charges of interstate prostitution. And these weren’t misdemeanors: Prosecutors want at least 11 years in prison, and the probation office says he deserves seven years. Combs’ lawyers, on the other hand, want just 14 months — a sentence that would send him home almost immediately on time served.

When Combs is sentenced by a federal judge on Friday (Oct. 3), how much time will he actually get? Legal experts told me that it will largely depend on one tricky question: How much the judge separates the “acquitted conduct” that was rejected by the jury from the actions on which Combs was actually convicted.

That might seem like common sense, but it’s actually a controversial issue and the key dispute between Combs and prosecutors ahead of sentencing. Experts say it’s also a serious challenge for a federal judge: “It will be hard for the judge to unhear everything he has already heard about Combs,” one former longtime Manhattan federal prosecutor told me.

For more, go read my full story here. And stay tuned at Billboard — we’ll keep you updated when the sentence is issued.

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Other top stories this week…

NO NEW TRIAL – Separately in the Diddy case, Judge Arun Subramanian denied a motion seeking to overturn his prostitution convictions, clearing the way for both sentencing and appeals. The ruling rejected Combs’ various arguments, including his eyebrow-raising claim that the “freak-off” sex parties at the heart of the case were just porn movie shoots protected by the First Amendment. “Illegal activity can’t be laundered into constitutionally protected activity just by the desire to watch it,” the judge wrote.

GET A GOOD LAWYER – A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit claiming Taylor Swift stole lyrics for 15 of her songs from a self-published Florida poet, ruling that accuser Kimberly Marasco was trying to claim ownership over “common words” and basic ideas: “Plaintiff’s poems amount at most to ideas, metaphors, contexts, and themes — none of which is a proper subject of copyright protection,” the judge wrote.

PROTECT YA SECRETS – A federal judge said that Martin Shkreli must face a lawsuit over Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, a one-of-a-kind Wu-Tang Clan album that he once owned. The judge refused to dismiss the case because she said the ultra-rare album might be considered a “trade secret” — and that Shkreli potentially broke the law by retaining copies after he forfeited it to prosecutors. But she acknowledged that such a ruling was “uncharted territory” for trade secrets law.

NIRVANA COVER CASE – The iconic grunge band won a court ruling dismissing a long-running lawsuit filed by Spencer Elden, the man who appeared as a nude baby on the iconic cover of Nirvana’s 1991 album Nevermind. Elden claimed the image amounted to child pornography, but the judge ruled it was not the kind of sexualized photo that would break the law: “This image … is most analogous to a family photo of a nude child bathing.”

KIM K SUES RAY J – Kim Kardashian and Kris Jenner filed a defamation lawsuit against Ray J over allegations that he falsely claimed during a podcast that federal authorities are investigating the mother and daughter pair for criminal racketeering. The case, filed by lawyer Alex Spiro, said the singer had waged a “malicious campaign of harassment” against the Kardashians because he was intent on “reviving his own fading notoriety.” Ouch.

METRO BOOMIN VERDICT – The superstar producer won a jury verdict clearing him of wrongdoing in a civil lawsuit filed by Vanessa LeMaistre, who claimed that he sexually assaulted and impregnated her in 2016. It took only a short deliberation for the jury to reject those accusations, which Metro’s lawyers repeatedly told them had been conjured up while LeMaistre was high on the psychoactive drug ayahuasca during a trip to Peru.

“COMPLETE BOONDOGGLE” – Thomas St. John, a former longtime business manager to Calvin Harris, fired back against the DJ’s recent allegations of fraud, calling the accusations “categorically false.” In a response statement, St. John said he did not steal money from anybody and that Harris had willingly agreed to invest in the Los Angeles real estate plan at the center of the dispute — a project Harris says was a “complete boondoggle.”

MJ ABUSE CASES – Michael Jackson’s estate revealed in court filings that Wade Robson and James Safechuck — two men who have long accused the late pop star of sexually assaulting them as children — are seeking a whopping $400 million in their court cases. The revelation came amid an intra-estate dispute with Jackson’s daughter, Paris Jackson, who claims the estate executors have paid too much in legal bills to certain law firms.

NOT AGAIN – Tekashi 6ix9ine pled guilty yet again to breaching the plea deal he secured by testifying against his former Brooklyn gangmates, marking his third violation of supervised release in less than a year. At a court hearing, Tekashi admitted that he attacked a man in a Florida mall last month after the man taunted him for flipping on his crew.

RAP ON TRIAL – A New York appeals court ruled that Brooklyn prosecutors shouldn’t have used a rap song as evidence in a murder trial, saying the lyrics had “inherent ambiguity” and that the defendant was “deprived of a fair trial.” The decision, which centered on a prosecution expert witness who merely “guessed” when explaining what the lyrics meant to jurors, came amid a nationwide debate about rap in criminal cases.

GRACELAND SCAMMER – Lisa Jeanine Findley, the woman who tried to sell off Elvis Presley’s Graceland mansion for millions of dollars in a bizarre scheme, was sentenced last week to more than four years in prison. Last year, Findley used a fake company and forged documents to try to conduct a foreclosure sale of the legendary Memphis home – an outlandish scam that befuddled media outlets and officials alike.

CLUB CLASH – A trio of Miami club operators who run the city’s famed Club Space venue fired back at a lawsuit brought by dance music giant Insomniac Events by filing a countersuit accusing Insomniac and its CEO Pasquale Rotella of “predatory tactics and greed.”

AI BATTLE IN GERMANY – One of the first major AI music cases in the European Union went before a Munich court this week. The case — pitting German music royalties group GEMA against OpenAI — raises the same question at play in the billion-dollar U.S. lawsuits: Do AI companies need to pay for the vast numbers of copyrighted works they use to train their machines? Billboard’s Rob Levine has a breakdown of the case and its implications.

ROYALTY ROW – T.I. was hit with a new lawsuit from veteran hip hop producer Sir Jinx over accusations that the rapper has failed to pay proper royalties for his 2016 Dr. Dre collaboration “Dope.” Jinx — Dre’s cousin who rose to fame with Ice Cube in the 1980s — has become a prolific litigant in recent years, filing lawsuits seeking more compensation for his work with Cube, Yo-Yo and others.

BAND BREAKUP BATTLE – The metalcore band Hatebreed and its frontman Jamey Jasta fired back at a lawsuit filed by bassist Chris Beattie over his ouster — calling it a “garden variety band break-up case” filed by a “disgruntled” former member who is improperly claiming a legal right “to remain a permanent member” of the band.

Billie Eilish, Gracie Abrams and hundreds of other artists are taking a united stand against threats to free speech.

As announced Wednesday (Oct. 1), Jane Fonda is relaunching the Committee for the First Amendment — an entity that was first founded at the beginning of the Cold War by the actress’ father, Henry Fonda — with the help of 600-plus creators. In addition to the aforementioned pop stars, John Legend, Barbra Streisand, Janelle Monae, Bonnie Raitt, Finneas, Maggie Rogers and Patti LuPone have also joined the cause, which aims to call out and stand against infringements on free speech.

“Today, we relaunch the Committee for the First Amendment,” reads a statement signed by all of the new committee members. “This Committee was initially created during the McCarthy Era, a dark time when the federal government repressed and persecuted American citizens for their political beliefs. They targeted elected officials, government employees, academics, and artists. They were blacklisted, harassed, silenced, and even imprisoned.”

“The federal government is once again engaged in a coordinated campaign to silence critics in the government, the media, the judiciary, academia, and the entertainment industry,” it continued. “We refuse to stand by and let that happen.”

Emphasizing that the committee’s mission is “not a partisan issue,” the statement ended with a poignant message. “To those who profit from our work while threatening the livelihoods of everyday working people, bowing to government censorship and cowering to brute intimidation: We see you, and history will not forget,” it concludes. “This will not be the last you hear from us.”

A full list of signatories backing the cause is available to view on the organization’s website, as is more information on the original Committee for the First Amendment. Banding with fellow Hollywood stars such as Lauren Bacall, Lucille Ball, Judy Garland, Humphrey Bogart, Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra, Henry Fonda originally founded the committee to hit back at the Red Scare, which saw its leader Sen. Joe McCarthy interrogating suspected communist sympathizers in the entertainment industry, the federal government and in society at large.

The relaunch comes as many in the entertainment business have been voicing concerns over perceived threats to free speech, most notably the suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live! in September. ABC temporarily paused production on the program after affiliates — under the veiled threat of the FCC revoking their licenses — stopped airing the show due to comments Kimmel had made about the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

Following protests from SAG-AFTRA, the ACLU and countless entertainers, ABC reinstated the show after five days.

Actor Jharrel Jerome is officially picking up the microphone. In an exclusive premiere with Billboard, The When They See Us star drops off a fiery new single called “Chu Know,” the first preview off his upcoming mixtape More Than a Bronx Tale.

While Jerome has dabbled in rap over the years, things got serious this past year when he partnered with Feeture to make his hip-hop dreams come true. His debut tape, which drops Oct. 9, explores Jerome’s New York upbringing through raw penmanship and plenty of bars. Aided by beats from 6ix and Rob Knox, Jerome is also partnering with Feeture to help carve out his own lane in the rap game before the year is out.

“I’ve had a ton of moments, too many to count, where it is actually harder to find the right collaborator than making the music itself,” Jerome says in a statement to Billboard. “Especially collaborators who don’t believe jumping in with me is a risk. I know some other artists who are always jumping in with other people because they have a community, I’ve always wanted to plant myself in that community but it’s tricky. But then I put my pen to paper or I explain the stories I’m trying to tell and that when I get the collaborator on board.

“But that’s also tricky as well,” he continues. “I love when I can find a collaborator who off rip is just like, ‘Listen man, I don’t care about the music. I don’t care about the TV. I care about you, I care about your story. What is your story?’ Because that’s what feeds the artist in me. That’s what made me want to become a Feeture Artist Partner so I can identify collaborators who are as hungry as I am and are looking to change the game.”

Feeture CEO Jareiq JQ Kabara adds: “Jharrel is an extraordinary artist whose vision continues to shape the pulse of culture. He embodies the true power of collaboration, and we couldn’t be more excited to stand alongside him as he evolves.”

Jharrel Jerome · Chu Know