One of my biggest passions outside of my job at Jaybird Communications has always been interviewing celebrities. It began years ago with me chatting up the opening acts at tours I was attending, and more recently has expanded into the television and film world. I’ve gotten to talk to some amazing talent like the cast of Amy Sherman Palladino’s Étoile (cancelled way too soon), the stars of Zombies 4 for Disney Channel, Joy Sunday from the Netflix smash hit series Wednesday, and the iconic Michael Cyril Creighton from Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building. In order to land these opportunities, I use a variety of strategies that are direct lessons from the PR best practices we use at Jaybird. So I thought it would be cool to take a closer look at how those overlap.

– Ashley Friedman

The Federal Trade Commission and a Maryland-based ticket selling firm are locked in a legal fight that could reshape the ticket resale industry — and determine how far the government can go in policing alleged “bot” activity in the live events market. At the heart of the dispute is a disagreement of what constitutes the use of bots.

– Dave Brooks, Billboard

Some of the world’s biggest technology companies, including Google, Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI and X, scraped copyright-protected music from millions of songwriters, composers and artists to train generative artificial intelligence systems, says international music publishing trade association ICMP. The organization is sharing extensive evidence it has compiled over the past two years exclusively with Billboard, showing that songs by the Beatles, Mariah Carey, The Weeknd, Beyoncé, Ed Sheeran and Bob Dylan are among the artists whose work was used for training purposes.

– Richard Smirke, Billboard

According to court filings, the new deal will see rates paid by radio stations jump from 1.78 percent of revenue under the old agreement to 2.14 percent, then slowly increase to 2.20 percent by the end of the term. The deal is retroactive to January 2022 and will run until January 2029.

– Mandy Dalugdug, Music Business Worldwide

From culture-shifting labels to marquee talent to the artists of tomorrow, Billboard chronicles the musicians and executives who are defining R&B and hip-hop today — and pushing the genres into the future

– Billboard