Billboard gives Teyana Taylor her flowers — literally — in the latest installment of our “Takes Us Out” franchise. Five years after announcing her retirement from music, Taylor returns Aug. 22 with her fourth studio album, Escape Room.

The multi-faceted creative — singer-songwriter, dancer-choregorapher, video director and actress —recently dropped by Casa de Flores in Encino, California, to arrange an assortment of red roses and chat with Billboard’s Gail Mitchell. Asked what prompted the end of her musical retirement during the conversation, Taylor referenced her 2020 Billboard cover story which followed the release of her gold-certified third studio project, The Album.

“When I spoke to you five years ago, it wasn’t on my terms,” she begins. “I’ve returned now in a time when I get to come back on my terms. And that was important for me because … I don’t like to be stuck in a box. I don’t want to be stuck in one room. I’m a Glade plug-in: I’m going to plug in wherever I see a socket, wherever I see an outlet.

“For me,” she continues, “why only make one room smell good when you can make the whole store smell good? What do I look like just being plugged up in a bathroom? I need to be plugged in all over! I must be able to smell the fruits of my labor everywhere I go. Coming back to music and being able to do it on my terms was a big turn-on for me.”

And gauging by the response from her fan base, it’s a turn-on for them too, as Taylor clears the runway for Escape Room’s impending arrival. Revealed this week, the 22 songs comprising her fourth studio album boasts features by Jill Scott, Tyla, Lucky Daye and Kaytranada, plus her daughters Rue Rose and Junie Shumpert. Complementing the songs are monologues by a cast of powerful women’s voices belonging to Taraji P. Henson, Sarah Paulson, Niecy Nash, Issa Rae and Regina King, among others.

Taylor, who recently underwent emergency vocal cord surgery, had earlier trumpeted her return with the release of “Long Time” and “Bed of Roses.” Those accompanying videos, both of which feature her beau, actor Aaron Pierre, count 2.2 million and 1.2 million views, respectively, on YouTube.

Watch “Teyana Taylor Takes Us Out” to learn more about her escape route to well-being as well as additional projects on her horizon.

Lil Yachty manifested his working relationship with Drake.

Yachty and his Concrete Boys collective stopped by PlaqueBoyMax‘s stream recently and was asked by the popular streamer how his and Drake’s working relationship came about.

“I manifested it, bro,” he answered after he included the Toronto rapper on a list of some of the most talented people he’s worked with, alongside Tyler, The Creator and Juice WRLD. “I was doing acid one night and I was like, ‘Man, I would really love to work with Drake. That’s one of my favorite rappers.’ I was just talking to the abyss. I was speaking to, like, a higher power, and I manifested it. I did. This was years ago. This was before we ever did anything.”

He added that they followed each other on social media before becoming close friends and collaborators. “He followed me, we was cool. We was on Finsta together and it was cool. But, like, I wanted to have a relationship,” he admitted. “That’s one of my best friends. Manifestation is real. I manifested getting on, becoming famous, becoming a rapper. All this sh– is manifestation. You gotta speak this sh– into existence. I’ll never forget, I used to be in high school and Tyler and Rocky used to FaceTime me.”

Drake and the Atlanta rapper first linked up in 2020 for the latter’s song “Oprah’s Bank Account,” with Yachty contributing to both Her Loss and For All the Dogs as a featured artist, writer and producer.

You can watch the full stream below.

Part one of Wednesday season two left the show’s morose heroine on a massive cliffhanger — and the new trailer for the season’s second part offers only more questions about what is to come for the Addams daughter.

In a trailer that dropped on Thursday (Aug. 14) for the forthcoming second half of the season, Jenna Ortega’s Wednesday Addams wakes up in a hospital after being attacked by former classmate Tyler Galpin (Hunter Doohan), only to see her former, now-deceased principal Larissa Weems (played by Gwendoline Christie) appearing as her new “spirit guide.”

The remainder of the trailer shows Wednesday moving through Nevermore Academy and the local town of Jericho, hunting down Tyler and attempting to save both her family and friends from impending doom. As the plot thickens and the teenager encounters more and more of her family’s “dark chapter,” she is offered an eerily warning by a familiar-sounding voice: “Beware — there will be a price to pay.”

Fans immediately clocked the eerie voice as none other than Lady Gaga, who was announced as a cast member on season two back in November. Mother Monster memorably announced her arrival into the Wednesday universe at Netflix’s Tudum event in May, where she performed a rousing medley of her tracks “Zombieboy,” “Bloody Mary” and “Abracadabra,” where she was joined onstage by Ortega.

This won’t be the first time Gaga’s name is associated with the hit show. After the runaway success of season one, fans began making social media edits of Ortega’s titular character dancing to a sped-up version of Gaga’s Born This Way B-side “Bloody Mary.” The viral trend gave the song its debut on the Billboard Hot 100, where it spent 18 weeks, peaking at No. 41 in April 2023.

While the show didn’t offer further details regarding Gaga’s enigmatic character on the hit series, Billboard previously learned that the second part of season two will also coincide with a new song coming from Mother Monster. Entitled “Dead Dance,” the track is expected to drop in September alongside the final four episodes of the season.

Wednesday season two part two will arrive Sept. 3 on Netflix. Watch the new trailer below:

For decades, a traditional (and, at times, formulaic) sound defined and powered regional Mexican music, the umbrella term that includes subgenres like banda, norteño and mariachi. But today, música mexicana, as it is also known, is booming (according to Luminate’s midyear music report, it fueled Latin music’s growth in the first six months of the year) in large part thanks to the limitless creative visions of its most prominent producers.

This school of hit-makers — who range widely in both style, from Jersey corridos to synth-powered regional ballads, and age — is crafting bold sounds and genre-spanning hybrids, setting the tone for an ever-evolving genre as it adapts to its new global appeal and reach.

Ernesto “Neto” Fernández

The Texas-born veteran has long defined regional Mexican movements, like the quebradita explosion of the 1990s. But when he tried to be “experimental” in the past, “it wasn’t accepted — our hands were tied,” says Fernández, 51. “Now everyone is open-minded and that helped me branch out.”

Among his biggest recent successes: Peso Pluma, whose swaggering lyrics and high-energy sound helped usher in a new era for regional Mexican music and whose signature style was heavily informed by working with the producer. “Very early on in the process, I start hearing and imagining where instruments will go,” explains Fernández, who incorporated charchetas (alto horns) and trombones into corridos tumbados, a subgenre that started with just guitars. “My part is to make sure that instruments don’t compete but to have them each have their own place. I like to hear things a certain way and how I want it to sound.”

It’s safe to say Fernández — who won producer of the year at the 2024 Billboard Latin Music Awards thanks to tracks he worked on for Peso and Xavi — knows a thing or two about what works and what doesn’t. Today, he’s one of regional Mexican music’s most trusted producers, also working with artists like Tito Double P.

Danny Felix

Felix’s production career got off to an unorthodox start. “I was taking English songs and making them regional,” he says. “[Artificial intelligence] didn’t exist back then, so I remember one day, I found Beyoncé’s vocals on YouTube and followed along with a guitar. I was like, ‘This sounds cool.’ ” It sparked his passion for elevating songs with prickly acoustic guitars and led to him pioneering corridos tumbados and producing the subgenre’s first big star, Natanael Cano.

While guitar-driven subgenres like sierreño already existed, corridos tumbados’ guitars make heads bob like a hip-hop beat — even Bad Bunny couldn’t resist joining Cano on 2019’s Felix-produced “Soy el Diablo – Remix.” “Guitars are my thing,” adds the Arizona native, who’s in his early 30s. “People try to do what I do and I love that, but I have a unique way of hitting the strings that you can tell it’s me right away.”

The sound Felix developed has evolved over the years, with artists like Peso Pluma adding different instruments, and he has also adapted his guitars to singers he is producing for today, like Xavi, who pioneered tumbados románticos. “His range of singing is completely different,” Felix says, “so you have to play [the guitar] a certain way to complement his vocals.”

Armenta

Penning and producing hits for Fuerza Regida like “Harley Quinn” and “Bebe Dame,” Armenta, 24, went from thinking a producer was mainly a beat-maker to understanding that there’s much more to the craft. “As a producer, you give it your soul, your essence, and when that goes hand in hand with songwriting, it becomes magic,” says Armenta, who has deviated from tradition by incorporating electronic music, loops and pads (or synthesizers) into his productions. “Everything used to be very rigid; the beats and rhythms were the same. Now it’s a genre for young people, and we achieved this through influences such as rap, hip-hop and other urban genres where it’s no longer just about making regional music but about making music, period.”

“Harley Quinn,” a 2023 collaboration with dance producer Marshmello, turned heads with its EDM-leaning sound. “We called it ‘Jersey corrido,’ ” Armenta says proudly. “In our search for the perfect harmony between house and EDM, we found this rhythm where we can play it with a tololoche [a Mexican folk instrument that is a variant of the double bass] and finish it off with charchetas. All the folklore that this song carries is very beautiful, and it really opened our eyes to the fact that the sky is the limit.”

Frank Rio

A fan of the stripped-down melodic approach to regional Mexican music, Rio was eager to experiment with the style, but “I didn’t want to force it on anyone,” he says, having previously worked mainly with non-regional Mexican acts like A.Chal and Jhayco. Then he met Ivan Cornejo and they instantly connected. “We’re emo boys,” Rio says with a laugh. Cornejo’s stirring vocal delivery meshed perfectly with Rio’s equally emotional production style. “When I’m part of a record from start to finish, there’s definitely a lot of emotion,” says Rio, 32. “Whether sad, happy or in between, I always try to make it a journey.”

Cornejo’s brooding regional ballads with an alternative edge — like “La Última Vez,” one of the first songs he and Rio did together — defy música mexicana standards. “I don’t want to say I’m responsible for this new sound because I’m sure it wasn’t the first time someone had added synths to Mexican music, but for me, it was a big eye-opener about what you can do in Mexican music, and now it’s tough to identify what we do just as that,” Rio says. “It has never crossed my mind that I could have a limit, especially with Ivan. Focusing on [creative] freedom means constant experimentation in the studio with him. I’ll do four or five versions of a song, from alternative to sierreño, to find the version that works.”

Moises López

López never imagined getting into producing. But when he joined Fuerza Regida four years ago and got in the studio with the band, he saw producers create a song from start to finish and thought: “I can do that and I want my credit, too.”

While his career as a producer is only just starting — the 22-year-old was initially brought on as the band’s tololoche player and officially became one of its producers two years ago — López is already leaving a mark on regional Mexican thanks to his work on Fuerza Regida’s 2025 album, ­111XPANTIA, which peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard 200, becoming the highest-charting Spanish-language album by a duo or group ever. “Building a song from scratch is like a puzzle,” says López, who gets animated talking about his work in the studio. “The goal for me is always to experiment and find what the next big sound or wave will be but also keeping our corridos roots.”

Fuerza’s producing crew — which also includes frontman Jesús Ortiz Paz — took it a bit further this time around, incorporating synths behind instruments for a punchier sound. It also did something the band had never done before: “We added samples from other genres,” López says. “In ‘Tu Sancho,’ you’ll hear Ellie Goulding’s ‘Don’t Say a Word.’ We realized it was time to add samples to our music, which will mark a major shift in our genre.”

This story appears in the Aug. 16, 2025, issue of Billboard.

Chord Music Partners said on Thursday that global private investment firm Searchlight Capital Partners joined Universal Music Group as a strategic investor in its music rights acquisition and management venture.

Formed in 2021 through an inital partnership with KKR, Chord owns more than 60,000 copyrights, including stakes in the Fleetwood Mac hits “Dreams” and “Landslide,” the catalog of OneRepublic frontman Ryan Tedder, and most recently acquired a 49% stake of Big Loud’s stake in Morgan Wallen‘s early masters. As of 2024, Chord is majority owned by Dundee Partners, the investment office of the Hendel family, and UMG has an equity stake worth more than 26%.

The investment of funds managed by Searchlight, a firm with more than $18 billion in assets under management, will help Chord find and execute on recorded music and publishing rights acquisitions faster to achieve greater scale, according to a statement from the companies.

“Searchlight’s expertise, network and ability to meaningfully contribute toward expanding Chord’s premier [intellectual property] portfolio make Searchlight an ideal strategic partner for our next chapter,” Sam Hendel, Dundee Partners’ managing principal and co-founder of Chord, said in a statement.

Searchlight partner Darren Glatt said they were attracted to Chord’s diversified platform and its portfolio of rights to works by The Weeknd, Lorde and David Guetta, which he said has “evolved Chord into the desired home for the works and legacies of the world’s premier artists.”

The joint investment and catalog management platform model has become a popular way for major music companies to aggressively bid for highly desireable music rights in a way that minimizes their reliance on their own balance sheet. Assets that are bought through Chord, like Big Loud’s share of the masters to Morgan Wallen’s first couple albums, are administered through Universal Music Publishing Group (UMPG) and recorded music through UMG’s Virgin Music Group (VMG).

Warner Music Group revealed a similarly structured joint venture with Bain Capital worth $1.2 billion thi ssummer, of which Warner owns 50% and earns revenue from managing, marketing and administering the assets.

Boyd Muir, chief operating officer at UMG, which recently invested an additional 30 million euros in Chord, said Chord is part of their long-term strategic investment plans.

“The structure is working exactly as we envisioned – enabling us to move quickly to acquire high-quality catalogs, without significant capital allocation over time,” UMG Chief Operating Officer Boyd Muir said on a call last month discussing the company’s quarterly earnings. “Chord is successfully raising capital and building a strong deal pipeline.”

Searchlight was advised on this transaction by Lazard and Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP.