It’s August in Chicago, which means it’s time for Lollapalooza to take over the city. This year’s festival features stars like Chappell Roan, Megan Thee Stallion, SZA, the Killers, Future x Metro Boomin‘ and more rocking Grant Park. Check out Rolling Stone‘s best photos from onstage, backstage and on the ground, and check back throughout the weekend for more.
The Palomosa festival is already starting to reveal details about its third edition. After taking place in September in 2024 and 2025, the 2026 edition will now be held in mid-May, from May 14 to 16.
As news rarely comes alone, it has also been announced that New York band MGMT will be in the spotlight on May 15. The duo, known for hits such as Kids, Time to Pretend and Electric Feel, will perform in a DJ set format.
Depuis sa première édition en 2024, Palomosa s'est distingué des autres festivals montréalais grâce à sa programmation éclectique et variée, aussi adaptée aux Gen Z chroniquement en ligne qu'aux vieux nostalgiques. Le festival, qui se déroule au parc Jean-Drapeau, a dans le passé accueilli des artistes comme M.I.A, Gesaffelstein, Arca, Yung Lean et Jai Paul.
Since its inaugural edition in 2024, Palomosa has set itself apart from other Montreal festivals thanks to its eclectic and wide-ranging programming, appealing both to chronically online Gen Z audiences and older nostalgics. Held at Parc Jean-Drapeau, the festival has previously welcomed artists including M.I.A., Gesaffelstein, Arca, Yung Lean and Jai Paul.
The full Palomosa 2026 lineup will be announced in February. Tickets go on sale tomorrow at 11 a.m on the festival's website.
Dry Cleaning had big plans for January 2026. The English band spent much of the past two years making their third and best album, Secret Love, which brings their uniquely beguiling mix of post-punk and art-rock styles to a new creative peak. Now, with the album’s release set for early this month on 4AD, they were preparing to launch a 21-date tour of North America, historically a strong market for the band, with a Jan. 23 show in Chicago.
Ticket sales were looking good, and the band was feeling excited. But their U.S. visas hadn’t come through yet, months after they got their applications in. Soon they were facing thousands of dollars in expediting fees, on top of the already high costs of mounting a tour of that size. “I started to look at it and I was like, ‘I’m a little bit worried about cash flow,’” says their manager, Tim Hampson. “There were just too many variables starting to stack in a way that made me feel extremely uncomfortable.”
And so, around the middle of November 2025, Dry Cleaning made the agonizing decision to scratch the tour they’d announced just a month earlier and postpone most of its dates to later in 2026. In the statement they released in early December, they cited “the increasingly hostile economic forces that govern touring in the present day.” It was a remarkably upfront acknowledgment of a growing concern in the music business: According to many, it’s harder than ever for bands to make ends meet by playing live music.
“It’s a very brutal situation,” says Dry Cleaning’s lead vocalist, Florence Shaw. “It was definitely much, much, much more doable just a few years ago. Things have got nasty. It’s not even about making a profit. It’s about actually being able to do it at all.”
“It’s becoming more and more common,” adds their bass player, Lewis Maynard. “You see lots of bands just canceling tours left, right, and center. And tours that are selling well, which is crazy!”
That last point is particularly rankling for bands like Dry Cleaning, who have spent years working hard to develop their sound and build an audience for their unforgettable live shows. “It’s not like there’s no supply and demand,” says their drummer, Nick Buxton. “There is demand and there is supply, and the revenue from doing a big tour is significant. It’s a lot of money. It’s just the flights, the tour buses, the hotels, even the food, are just exploding at the moment and making it unrealistic.”
“Something’s going to change, I hope soon,” Maynard says. “Otherwise a whole huge section of gigging is going to disappear. It’s scary.”
Dry Cleaning had to rethink their plans for touring the U.S. this yearAmy E. Price/Getty ImagesIT’S NEVER BEEN EASY to earn a living playing shows, as anyone who’s spent more than a couple weeks in the music business will tell you. “To make it as an artist out there on the road takes a lot of timing, talent, luck — all those things,” says Karl Morse, a partner agent at ROAM who books tours for popular acts including Goose, Khruangbin, and the Lumineers. But there’s a widespread consensus that it’s gotten much more difficult in recent years, especially for developing and mid-size touring acts.
Even some well-established bands are giving up on touring in the U.S., like Garbage, who blamed “the economics of the music industry” when they billed their most recent headlining tour as their last ever. “We’re not complaining, we’ve had a fucking great run,” singer Shirley Manson told fans at a Sept. 17 stop in Washington, D.C. “My concern is for young musicians who go out there and tour — they’re holding down jobs, they take two weeks off their work and they go around the country. Sometimes they’re sleeping in their van, sometimes they’re staying in really, really dodgy so-called motels, and it’s dangerous and it’s really unacceptable and it really has to stop.”
Many of the industry veterans who spoke for this story trace today’s problems back to the existential challenge of 2020, when Covid shut down live music for months, putting countless crew members out of work and closing numerous venues for good. When mRNA vaccines rolled out and concerts resumed the following year, there was a huge surge in demand at all levels of the market, but it didn’t last. “Everyone was ready to come back out, and when it was safe, we saw a really strong, let’s call it six to 12 months there,” Morse says. “Everything was selling well at a premium. But then afterwards, it kind of leveled out. And it’s gotten tougher.”
The live music business is still dealing with the personnel shortage that resulted from that tumultuous period, which ultimately left fewer experienced crew members, promoters, and agents on hand as many transitioned to other careers. The bigger challenge, though, is rooted in the rapidly escalating affordability crisis that defines so much of life in this country.
“First and foremost, we’ve been dealt a tough hand with inflation and wage stagnation,” Morse says. “The availability of inventory for tour buses, the cost of those tour buses, the fuel for those tour buses, accommodation, taxes, general production expenses — all of that has slimmed the margin. The bottom line is, it’s more expensive to tour.”
“The cost of gas is crazy,” adds Andrew Morgan, an agent at Wasserman who works with MJ Lenderman, Wednesday, and Angel Olsen. “It’s gone down a little bit, but it’s still really high. Inflation is making groceries more expensive, so trying to eat reasonably on the road and not always eat fast food is tough. The cost of everything is going up.”
Shirley Manson of Garbage has spoken out about the economic challenges facing touring actsNaomi Rahim/Getty ImagesThose same economic pressures lead to tough choices for fans who have less cash to spread around on the shows they want to see. “If you’re Taylor Swift, if you’re Beyoncé, your profit margins are going to be all right,” Morse says. “But from a fan perspective, if you’re a family of four going to one of those shows, that’s a massive expenditure that might replace 10 concerts at the theater level throughout the year…. How do you incentivize people to go when their bank account might be struggling right now?”
Morgan makes a similar point about another of last year’s biggest success stories: “The amount of money that it costs to go see Oasis just sucks all this money out of the general showgoing public of any city that that tour hit,” he says, admitting that he himself saw the Gallagher brothers’ enormously lucrative reunion tour twice. “How many shows at a smaller club are they going to have to not go to because they spent that money on Oasis?”
As those examples illustrate, the reality of touring in 2026 includes a stark class divide between the A-list acts playing stadiums and everyone else. “The disparity between artists that do well and artists that do less well is broadening,” Morgan says. “It’s getting bigger.”
Even artists who succeed at climbing the traditional ladder of live music — tiny unofficial venues to small clubs to bigger clubs to theaters and onward — often find they have to navigate new obstacles as their careers grow. In Dry Cleaning’s case, the postponed tour will take them to some of the largest venues they’ve ever headlined, including places that can accommodate more than 1,500 fans in cities like New York; that means higher crew costs for things like stage lighting. “They’re on that cusp of being at the lower end of a bigger room. So the crew we need…. We can’t turn up at Brooklyn Steel without lights,” explains Hampson, their manager.
“There’s this catch-22 where as you start to build momentum, the expectations rise,” says Nik Soelter, who manages the buzzy New York acts Water From Your Eyes and This Is Lorelei. “The cost of the crew goes up so much, and the margins start to get even tighter. Maybe when you were at the DIY level and doing 200-cap rooms, things started to feel pretty good. All of a sudden you’re in 500-cap rooms and you’re like, ‘Oh, my God, we’re making even less money than before.’”
And since very few acts in any genre can count on significant income from streaming, finding a way to turn a profit or at least break even on the road is even more crucial. “It’s one of the last areas we could be potentially making money,” Maynard, Dry Cleaning’s bassist, adds. “So then if you’re losing money all across the board, you’re kind of fucked.”
DRY CLEANING ENDED UP salvaging their 2026 U.S. tour by pushing most of the dates to this spring, cobbling together some new shows to replace the handful they had to cancel, and rerouting their travel around a festival booking at Kilby Block Party in Salt Lake City. As the year began, Hampson was still working on securing a grant in the U.K. to help make up any shortfall in funds.
“If we get that, happy days,” he says. “But it is quite a crazy scenario where you’re relying on funding for a band that’s three critically acclaimed albums in, that have appeared on Jimmy Fallon a couple of times, going ‘How do we make this work?’ A mad place to be.”
Some artists from outside the U.S. have decided the costly, time-consuming visa application process is simply not worth it, and opted not to tour here at all. “I’ve got some international artists who say it’s too damn expensive to apply without knowing if it’s just going to get caught in limbo,” Morse says. “I personally book a lot of foreign artists who are taking a very cautious approach right now.”
Those that do tour here, wherever they’re from, know they can’t take fans for granted. “It’s a really hard ask to get somebody to not only spend money out of their pocket, but spend an evening of their life,” says Josh Stern, an agent at Ground Control Touring who works with acts including post-hardcore band Show Me the Body, independent Brooklyn rapper MIKE, and enigmatic British producer Vegyn. “You have to figure out how to make the shows unmissable.”
Some acts are trying to do that by putting together super-stacked bills combining multiple artists, or by scaling down to smaller rooms for a more intimate experience. Others talk about developing alternate revenue streams, like tour-exclusive merch — though the still-common practice of venues taking a cut of merch sales remains a source of consternation, especially since those same venues are reluctant to share their alcohol sales with the bands who get fans in the doors. “Everybody’s here to see this artist; they’re not here because you’re a bar, they’re here because you’re a venue,” Soelter says. “And I understand that running a venue is also a tight-margins game, and keeping the bar sales helps these venues stay afloat. But I think if you’re going to take a cut of merch sales, then you need to give a cut of bar sales.”
One artist looking for another way forward is Colleen Green. She broke through as an indie fave in the mid-2010s, performing sharp, catchy pop-punk songs backed only by her guitar and a drum machine at long-gone venues like Brooklyn’s Shea Stadium. Over the years, the tours got bigger, but not necessarily more profitable. “I did a Europe tour a couple years ago with a full band for the first time ever and ended up losing $5,000,” she says. (Sadly, that’s not an uncommon tale. “I think breaking even in Europe is the ultimate goal for everybody — just not being in the red on a European tour,” Soelter says.)
Colleen Green at a 2025 show with Rozwell KidGrant Kimura*Last year, Green toured North America with the band Rozwell Kid to mark the 10th anniversary of her cult-classic 2015 album I Want to Grow Up. It was fun to revisit the old songs, but also harder than she expected, as she added up the costs of travel, lodgings, and paying her backing band. “The most stressful part about it was, are we going to make any money?” she says. “And I hate that it comes down to that.”
So this winter, she’s trying something different: a fully DIY solo tour that she booked herself, just like the old days, playing record stores and pizza shops with her friend Cassie Ramone of Vivian Girls. When we spoke, shortly before the tour began on Jan. 20, Green was looking forward to workshopping some new songs in small venues like the ones she came up in.
“Man, maybe it won’t work,” she says. “But hopefully it does.”
Three months after a federal judge dismissed Drake’s defamation lawsuit against Universal Music Group, the superstar rapper and his lawyers filed an opening appellate brief Wednesday that seeks to overturn the ruling and revive his bid for damages over Kendrick Lamar’s Grammy-winning diss track, “Not Like Us.”
In the new 60-page brief obtained by Rolling Stone, Drake argues that Lamar’s track states, as an “unambiguous matter of fact,” that he is a “certified pedophile.” He also claims Universal Music Group “relentlessly” marketed the song in a way that misled consumers and caused him serious harm. The brief contends that the allegation carries a “precise” and readily understood meaning that is “capable of being proven true or false,” a point the district court previously acknowledged, according to the filing.
Drake also claims that the dismissal of his lawsuit could have far-reaching consequences. By ruling that rap diss tracks are non-actionable opinion, the lower court created a “dangerous categorical rule” that would shield artists and labels from defamation liability regardless of how direct or damaging a statement might be, he argues. “The court effectively created an unprecedented and overbroad categorical rule that statements in rap diss tracks can never constitute statements of fact,” his brief claims.
Drake previously filed his notice of appeal on Nov. 12 in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Manhattan, signaling he would challenge the Oct. 9 decision by U.S. District Court Judge Jeannette A. Vargas. In her ruling, Judge Vargas concluded that Lamar’s lyrics accusing Drake of pedophilia were “nonactionable opinion” rather than statements of fact.
“The issue in this case is whether ‘Not Like Us’ can reasonably be understood to convey as a factual matter that Drake is a pedophile or that he has engaged in sexual relations with minors,” Judge Vargas wrote. “In light of the overall context in which the statements in the recording were made, the court holds that it cannot.”
She said the “broader context” of the song was “a heated rap battle, with incendiary language and offensive accusations hurled by both participants,” adding that it “would not incline the reasonable listener to believe that ‘Not Like Us’ imparts verifiable facts.”
But in his Wednesday filing, Drake says the song’s repeated references to pedophilia, combined with its “ubiquitous cover art,” and subsequently released viral video, plausibly convey a false statement of fact that should be decided by a jury. Drake’s appeal asks the court to send the case back, insisting that his claim he was defamed by “Not Like Us” is a question to be decided at trial, not in a motion to dismiss.
Drake, whose legal name is Aubrey Drake Graham, sued UMG last January, accusing the label of promoting Lamar’s hit song in a way that “intended to convey the specific, unmistakable, and false factual allegation that Drake is a criminal pedophile.” He notably sued only the record label he shares with Lamar, not Lamar himself.
UMG responded with a scathing motion to dismiss that ultimately prevailed. “Plaintiff, one of the most successful recording artists of all time, lost a rap battle that he provoked and in which he willingly participated,” lawyers for UMG wrote. “Instead of accepting the loss like the unbothered rap artist he often claims to be, he has sued his own record label in a misguided attempt to salve his wounds.”
A spokesman for UMG did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Drake’s opening appellate brief. UMG’s response brief is due March 27.
The nine-track rap battle at the center of the legal war started making headlines in April 2024. It exploded when Drake released “Family Matters” on May 3, 2024. The song insinuated that Lamar had cheated on his fiancée and was physically violent with her. Lamar responded with the back-to-back drops of “Meet the Grahams” and “Not Like Us,” with the latter’s hook of “certified lover boy, certified pedophile” becoming an instant and viral sensation.
“Not Like Us” went on to win Grammy Awards for record and song of the year last February. Lamar also performed the song during last year’s Super Bowl halftime show.
Pharrell Williams used Louis Vuitton’s Fall-Winter 2026 Men’s show at Paris Fashion Week as a dual-stage debut, unveiling both a new collection and a slate of unreleased music that underscored his expanding creative reach.
Held Tuesday (Jan. 20) at 2 Rue du Pont Neuf, the show was designed by Williams in his role as Louis Vuitton Men’s Creative Director, who also curated and produced the evening’s soundtrack—comprised entirely of unheard collaborations expected to surface on forthcoming albums, though no release details have been confirmed.
The runway presentation featured appearances from Williams himself and longtime collaborator Pusha T, setting the tone for a night where fashion and music moved in lockstep.
The first track premiered was “Pray For Ya,” a sleek, gospel-tinged groove with John Legend that blurred sacred and secular themes. “All this money, you can’t help yourself,” Legend drawls on the hook, nodding to Barack Obama before closing the free-spirited anthem with an invitation for listeners to let loose.
Next came “Sex God,” a glossy pop offering from Jackson Wang that marked his first collaboration with Williams. The electro-leaning track was punctuated by a guest verse from Pusha T, who channeled a classic Notorious B.I.G. cadence over Pharrell’s jittery, minimalist production.
Additional unreleased cuts included “Disturbing The P,” a celebratory pairing with A$AP Rocky, and the Quavo-led closer “Hit-A-Lik,” continuing the duo’s growing list of joint efforts.
Williams also shared the stage with Voices of Fire and L’Orchestre du Pont Neuf, led by Thomas Roussel, for a performance of their anticipated single “The One,” which was officially released in conjunction with the show.
The moment capped a landmark year for both Williams and Pusha T. Clipse’s fourth studio album, Let God Sort Em Out, reunited Pusha T and Malice with Williams as sole producer and earned widespread acclaim.
The duo is also up for multiple Grammy Awards, including Best Rap Album, alongside nominations for Clipse’s “The Birds Don’t Sing” for Best Rap Song and “Chains & Whips” for Best Rap Performance.
This story originally published on Vibe.
Taylor Swift will be inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame this summer, making the 36-year-old one of the youngest people ever to be welcomed into the prestigious organization.
Swift will be honored alongside her fellow class of 2026 inductees Alanis Morissette, Kenny Loggins, Christopher “Tricky” Stewart, Kiss’ Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons, Terry Britten & Graham Lyle, and Walter Afanasieff.
It’s one of the latest record-breaking accomplishments that Swift can cross off her bucket list, joining the ranks of legendary musicians who became part of the Songwriters Hall of Fame at a young age. Stevie Wonder currently holds the title of the youngest ever inductee, inducted at 33 in 1983.
A writer with a “notable catalog of songs” becomes eligible for the honor after their first commercially released song turns 20 years old. In June 2006, a 15-year-old Swift released her debut country single, “Tim McGraw.” The milestone anniversary made her eligible for induction for the first time this year.
“Taylor qualified from when she was 15 years old,” President and CEO of the Songwriters Hall of Fame Linda Moran told USA Today in November when Swift was nominated. “That’s shortly after she signed her publishing deal and had her first commercial release. So age-wise, she’s the youngest, and I don’t know when we’re going to see someone that young again.”
The organization recognized Swift’s songs “All Too Well (10 Minute Version) (Taylor’s Version),” “Blank Space,” “Anti-Hero,” and “Love Story” as notable songs in her catalog.
Also to be recognized at the ceremony, slated for June 11 at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York City, will be Morissette, honored for her songs “You Oughta Know” and “ Ironic,” and the “King of the Movie Soundtrack,” Loggins, who was behind hits “Footloose” and “Danger Zone.”
R&B and pop hitmaker Christopher “Tricky” Stewart, who helped pen Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It),” Mariah Carey’s “Touch My Body,” Rihanna’s “Umbrella,” will be among those inducted; as well as Walter Afanasieff, a frequent collaborator of Mariah Carey’s who helped write her hits “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” “My All,” and “Hero.”
Additionally, British songwriting duo Terry Britten and Graham Lyle will be inducted, known for “What’s Love Got To Do With It” and “Devil Woman,” and KISS members Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons, behind anthems “Rock and Roll All Nite” and “I Love It Loud.”
Nile Rodgers, the organization’s chairman, said in a statement, “The music industry is built upon the incredible talent of songwriters who create unforgettable songs. Without their artistry, there would be no recorded music, concert experiences, or engaged fans. Everything originates from the song and its creator. We take great pride in our ongoing commitment to recognizing some of the most culturally significant composers in history. This year’s lineup not only showcases iconic songs but also celebrates unity across various genres. These songwriters have profoundly impacted the lives of billions of listeners worldwide, and it is our privilege to honor their contributions.”
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