Prodshushy, Fat Papi, Matt Harvey, Jaddan Comerford
UNIFIED
No han vuelto los Alcántara, pero en el fondo todos querríamos conservar en nuestros despachos la estética elegante de una buena serie de época. Zara Home lo pone más fácil.
Mi experiencia por las mañanas ha cambiado desde que tengo la cafetera en casa. Tengo siempre el mejor café esperándome cuando me levanto.
Rodríguez ha reflexionado sobre la soledad, el éxito y las consecuencias de haber vivido durante años bajo una enorme presión. Reconoce que hubo momentos en los que, pese a estar rodeada de miles de admiradores, podía sentirse sola.
Ms. Rachel and Mr. Aron are seeing rainbows in a brand new light these days.
For Rachel and Aron Accurso, the married co-creators behind the global children’s phenomenon Ms. Rachel, the colorful subject of their new single “I Love a Rainbow” became an opportunity to go bigger, musically and visually. The playful bossa nova track is the first preview of their debut album, I’m So Happy, due Sept. 25, and its new music video — premiering exclusively on Billboard — finds the pair surrounded by Colorado mountains, polychromatic scarves, chalk-covered sidewalks and plenty of play.
But let’s not mistake all of that joy for simplicity.
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The music video features an extended version of “I Love a Rainbow,” complete with a new bridge, a sweeping string section and additional live musicians. For the Accursos, expanding a song already familiar to Ms. Rachel families meant finding a way to make its world feel even bigger.
“We wanted to expand it,” Aron tells Billboard. “We wrote a new bridge and we added a big string section and more live musicians, which feels expansive.”
So, too, did filming among the Colorado mountains. But at its heart, Rachel says, the video is about “joy and connection and play.”
That philosophy sculpted the day the pair spent filming with 11 children from Colorado families. The couple took a lovely approach in having the children involved in the creative process. They didn’t direct the kids through predetermined actions, and instead allowed them to feel immersed in the music.
“They knew the song, and [we were] like, ‘What do you imagine? What do you think would be good for this next part?” Rachel says. “Just creating it with the kids and making sure they had a really special day.”
The resulting video captures children dancing with rainbow scarves and helping create a giant chalk rainbow, with those outdoor scenes interwoven with footage of musicians performing the song in New York City. For Rachel, a former music educator, putting the instruments onscreen was part of the point.
“When they hear that riff, if they see Aron’s playing it on piano or they see [someone] playing the percussion, I think it’s cool to think, ‘Maybe I could play that,’” she says. “Maybe they get an interest in guitar from seeing the instruments.”
Aron proudly directed the video himself, continuing the hands-on approach that has defined the couple’s work since the early days of their YouTube channel.
“It goes back to just us, the way we started the channel, and that it was very homegrown and creator-led,” he says.
There may have been another influence in those superb mountain shots too: The couple’s 1-year-old daughter has recently been enjoying “Do-Re-Mi” from The Sound of Music, and Aron admits the classic musical was “definitely” on his mind while the team was developing the video.
“There are little hints of The Sound of Music [in the video]: the mountain vibes, and the singing around,” he says.
The visual ambition of “I Love a Rainbow” mirrors the strategy behind I’m So Happy as a whole. The 23-track collection transforms the songs that were first introduced on Ms. Rachel into more lively studio recordings. The album features original songs and children’s classics, with lush orchestration, new arrangements and contributions from 19 vocalists and 42 instrumentalists.
For Aron, who has a background in musical theater as a composer, conductor and Broadway music director, each song required its own approach.
“It was looking at each song individually and just imagining, ‘What is the most special version of that song?’” he says. “So it was unique to each one.”
Some songs called for restraint. “Walking to the Zoo,” for example, uses a smaller ensemble, while tracks including “Caterpillar” felt capable of supporting a full orchestra.
Meanwhile, “I Love a Rainbow” seemed to call out for strings. “I thought the string section would really add to the experience and the expansiveness of the idea,” Aron says.
Rachel has her own shorthand for her husband’s musical instincts: Aron owns a shirt that reads, “I hear things.”
And, she says, “I feel like he hears things that I don’t.”
That attention to detail is central to how the couple thinks about children’s music. Rachel, who holds a master’s degree in early childhood education and music education, says children shouldn’t be treated as though they need less sophisticated art.
“Children deserve detailed, rich music,” she says. “Not just deserve, but that they do enjoy it.”
That same care extended to I’m So Happy, as the Accursos worked with engineers, live musicians and other Broadway-trained collaborators to expand the songs beyond the versions created for the show, where deadlines often require the couple to move quickly from one episode to the next.
“With the album, we were able to do more of the details or go back and do some of the things that maybe I would have liked to have done the first time around,” Aron says. “It was just a desire to dig in more with more detailed arrangements, more professional engineers, live musicians.”
The duo wants listeners to understand that children’s music doesn’t require less craft than music made for any other audience.
“I think maybe the misconception is that it is somehow dumbed down or less effortful,” Rachel says. “Children really deserve that detailed music.”
Aron adds that the pair treated I’m So Happy “with as much care as if it were a Broadway cast album.”
That care — and the emotional weight children can find in music — perhaps comes through most clearly in “Caterpillar,” a song with a personal history for the couple.
Aron wrote the track while putting their now-7-year-old son to bed during a period when he was struggling with a speech delay. Their son didn’t begin speaking until he was 2 years and 9 months old, Rachel recalls, and the family watched as he worked to communicate.
“Aron wrote this beautiful song about a caterpillar that’s struggling but keeps going,” she says.
The song can still provoke an unexpectedly strong reaction from some of its youngest listeners.
“Babies have this phenomenon where they cry at it,” Rachel says, explaining that even children too young to fully understand the lyrics seem to respond to its emotion with a sorrowful pout.
“The kids feel deeply and they respond to music, even if they don’t understand the lyrics necessarily,” she says. “They feel what went into it.”
For Rachel and Aron, that’s fundamentally the point of I’m So Happy: Children are listening more closely — and feeling more deeply — than adults may sometimes realize.
“Kids are smarter and deeper and more amazing than we give them credit for sometimes,” Rachel says.
And with I’m So Happy, Ms. Rachel and Mr. Aron are making sure the music meets them there.
“I Love a Rainbow” is out now, while I’m So Happy arrives Sept. 25 via Magic Star, the children’s and family division of Sony Music Entertainment’s The Orchard.
Posty won’t be delivering for fans in Asia, Australia and New Zealand later this year, as planned.
Post Malone’s Big Ass World Tour was scheduled for its swing through Asia and down under later this year, a run that included shows at Melbourne’s Marvel Stadium (on Oct. 9), Brisbane’s Suncorp Stadium (Oct. 12), Sydney’s ENGIE Stadium (Oct. 15), and Auckland’s Go Media Stadium (Oct. 21).
The “Rockstar” singer was also booked to headline three Strummingbird Festival appearances in the regional Australian towns of Ballarat (Oct. 10), Newcastle (Oct. 17) and Sunshine Coast (Oct. 18).
Those shows are now shelved, and a reason has not been given.
“We’re gutted to let you know that Post Malone will no longer be headlining Strummingbird, due to the recent postponement of his Asia and Australian tours,” reads a statement from the touring festival.
The Australia dates have been scrubbed from the official Ticketmaster page, and the NZ show is listed as “cancelled.”
Live Nation has yet to announce new dates for Malone’s headline tour, the U.S. singer and rapper’s first in these parts since headline Spilt Milk festival, which visited Canberra, Ballarat and Perth in 2023, and opened for Red Hot Chili Peppers’ on the rockers’ six-date Australasian stadium run earlier that year.
On the Spilt Milk run, he made himself at home by performed a “shoey” on stage — an Aussie tradition where the victim drinks beer out of a shoe.
Post Malone makes himself at home on the Australian charts, too. His seven albums have all impacted the ARIA top 10, including No. 1s for Beerbongs & Bentleys in 2018, Hollywood’s Bleeding in 2019. His most recent collection, the 2024 country album from F-1 Trillion, flew to No. 2.
The American star has been busy of late. He recently announced his engagement to Christy Lee, with whom he has been romantically linked since early 2025. He busted out a new song “Chrome Heartbreaker” during the 2026 FIFA World Cup Closing Ceremony, and his August 26th mixtape has been made available for streaming for the very first time.
We will always love Dolly Parton. Harry Styles made certain of that, when he paid tribute to the late country music superstar during the first night of his residency at Madison Square Garden, the start of an unprecedented stretch of 30 consecutive shows at the storied arena.
The British pop artist gave the best possible salute to Dolly by playing her recording of “I Will Always Love You” on the MSG speakers.
The former One Direction star thanked his band and gave a “special thanks to all the musicians who have inspired me over the years.” Of course, Parton was high on that list. “Dolly, thank you so much,” he remarked.
Styles went on to play two verses and choruses of the song, originally released in 1974, and told the crowd to sing along on the first chorus. The audio then faded out, say people who were in the arena, and segued to his solo hit “Sign Of The Times.”
Dolly, perhaps the greatest country music artist of all time, an inductee into the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame and the Country Music Hall of Fame, and the writer of more than 3,000 songs, died Tuesday (Aug. 25) at the age of 80.
Parton was named Billboard’s Top Country Artist of All Time, having landed 25 No. 1s on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart, the most of any woman, and 49 top 10s on Billboard’s Country Albums chart. An all-rounder with a heart of gold, Dolly will also be remembered for her philanthropy, her acting roles, her business acumen and her support of good causes.
The Tennessee native co-owned Dollywood, a theme park located in her hometown of Pigeon Forge, Tenn., and she operated the Imagination Library — a program that mails free books to children from birth until they first begin school. The late star had also been a co-owner of Sandollar Productions alongside her former manager, Sandy Gallin, which produced Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Father of the Bride and Sabrina, among others.
New York is Styles’ current tour’s first and only stop in the United States, after having previously stopped in Amsterdam, London, São Paulo and Mexico City for a combined 31 dates across July and August.
“How about them Knicks, huh?” a mid-strut Harry Styles asked the packed Madison Square Garden crowd on Wednesday night (Aug. 26), midway through opening song “Dance No More,” to a predictably roaring response. “How about them Knicks, huh?”
Forget about the Knicks. Great championship run and all — first in 53 years, good job by them — but their parade was two months ago at this point, and they ain’t been back to MSG since. For the next two months, the World’s Most Famous Arena is officially Harry’s House.
Styles appeared on stage in midtown Manhattan on Wednesday for the first of his 30 — yes, that’s a 3 and then a 0 — consecutive gigs at MSG, as part of his current Together, Together tour, taking him all the way up through Halloween (and well into the start of next NBA season). And he may have been anxious to be there, as he and his band couldn’t even wait till the end of opener Jamie xx’s DJ set to join them, flowing right from the producer’s set into their own.
Playing in the round — really, in the oval, as the light-up stage Styles and his band performed on was more oblong to match the dimensions of the floor — allowed the pop-rock superstar to really harness the energy of the sold-out, packed-out crowd. And he gave it back to them, with the help of a totally reordered setlist from the 31 dates he’d previously played on Together, Together, including a handful of fan favorites making their first appearance.
A couple of those songs got completely new arrangements, too. Perhaps drawing extra inspiration from being in the city of Studio 54, Styles amped up the disco not just for the songs from his clubbier new album Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally., but also for a couple less-dancefloor-obvious older tracks. (Styles’ 2017 self-titled first album was the biggest beneficiary of the new set ordering — now tied with 2023’s Grammy-winning Harry’s House for the second-most-played album with four tracks — though fans who came to Styles from his first group might have left slightly disappointed by the total lack of One Direction representation.)
Even with an updated sound and wardrobe, Styles is hardly the most natural or obvious of disco dons — he comes to the genre through more left-field NYC dance-rock greats like Talking Heads and LCD Soundsystem, drawing physical inspiration their herky-jerky energy, while largely bypassing the manic anxiety that fuels those bands’ signature jams as much as any four-on-the-flour thumping. He also seems to currently have precious little interest in the decadence that drove the scene in its heyday, with his performance as PG-rated as you might expect from a show where the most common merch item found in the audience was a RESPECT YOUR MOTHER T-shirt.
Nonetheless, Styles does understand dance’s power to galvanize and unify, which was on full display throughout Wednesday’s show. The set’s most cathartic and satisfying moments came Styles at the center of his band mid-full disco freakout, summoning a storm of lightning and glitter and fully zapping their gleefully electrified frontman. Whether the kids in the audience got the cleverly laid nods to indie-dance anthems like “Born Slippy (Nuxx)” or “Daft Punk Is Playing at My House” probably doesn’t matter as much as them potentially feeling the sensation of their entire essence being bass-bombed along with 20,000 of their new closest friends, and leaving the building vibrating on a totally new frequency. For some in the building on Wednesday, it will undoubtedly be the beginning of a lifelong pursuit of discoing as often as possible.
Or at least until the Knicks’ next playoff run. Here were the six best moments from Harry Styles’ first visit to MSG since 2022 — one down, 29 to go. (And yes, they do include a Dolly Parton tribute.)
MELBOURNE, Australia — Breakout Aotearoa New Zealand artist Fat Papi and Perth, Australia producer prodshushy, the team behind the viral hit “Freaked Out,” are now part of the UNIFIED Artist Management roster.
The trans-Tasman pair are the first signings since UNIFIED Artist Management established its New Zealand office, led by senior artist manager Matt Harvey, announced in May.
“Freaked Out” blew up when it was paired with content themed around summer haircuts, giving Fat Papi his first career entry on the Billboard Hot 100 when it debuted at No. 89, lifting to No. 88. The single has reached No. 55 on the Billboard Global 200 and this week No. 2 on YouTube’s US Top Songs on Shorts.
Produced by prodshushy, the track has accumulated over 7 billion views across TikTok and 9 billion views on YouTube Shorts, and propelling Fat Papi to nearly 10 million monthly listeners on Spotify.
Fat Papi (real name: Baban Hussain) has been releasing music independently since 2023. The Auckland-based Kurdish rapper, singer and songwriter is behind a distinctive style that blends melodic hip-hop, synth-driven club production, and infectious hooks.
“Joining UNIFIED is an exciting next step for shushy and I. Being able to work with Matt and access the backing of the wider team gives me the right mix of independence and support,” comments Fat Papi. “I’m proud to represent both my Kurdish heritage and New Zealand on the world stage, and we’re just getting started.”
Adds Harvey: “Fat Papi is a generational talent whose music has resonated internationally in a remarkably short space of time. ‘Freaked Out’ proved that world-class music originating from New Zealand can break global boundaries without compromise.
“Bringing him and shushy into the UNIFIED Artist Management family as our first trans-Tasman management signing since joining forces, sets the standard for what we intend to build here: sustainable, long-term global careers for top-tier local talent.”
UNFIED, reads a statement, will provide dedicated global management support for the next phase of their career.
The management agreement is announced just days after Warner Chappell Music struck a worldwide publishing deal with Fat Papi and prodshushy.
It’s been a building he’s made his own since the 2018 North American leg of his first-ever solo tour, but never quite like this before. When Harry Styles took the stage at New York’s iconic Madison Square Garden last night, he did so for what would be the first of an unprecedented 30 consecutive shows at the storied venue, taking him all the way through to Halloween — by which point the defending-champion New York Knicks will have already played three home games as part of the 2026-27 NBA regular season.
But of course, to the MSG crowd last night, Harry Styles was a star more than equal to Jalen Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns, as the One Direction alum and solo superstar brought his best-selling Together, Together tour to New York in support of his dance-flavored February LP, Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally. Support for Styles came in the form of DJ-producer Jamie xx, who set the clubby tone for the evening with a mix of solo hits, productions for other artists and classics from his beloved indie-electronic band The xx. Styles and his band joined even Jamie xx during his final song, and took over things from there.
New York is the tour’s first and only stop in the U.S., after having previously stopped in Amsterdam, London, São Paulo and Mexico City for a combined 31 dates across July and August. (After New York, Styles will visit Melbourne and City before calling it a day on the trek — for the time being, at least.) Perhaps due to the unique nature of his visit — and Styles’ history with the Garden — he greeted fans with a completely new song ordering from the setlist he’s been playing on Together, Together to this point, including a handful of longtime fan favorites he’d yet to revisit on this trek, and a tribute to a fallen musical icon.
Find the complete new set list for the first of Styles’ 30 NYC shows below.
MELBOURNE, Australia — A new artist booking specialist opens for business in the land down under, CORE Talent Agency.
The agency is founded by Jaddan Comerford, CEO of UNIFIED Music Group, and Regan Lethbridge, co-founder of Lemon Tree Music, and emerges from Lonely Lands Agency (LLA), which Tash Sultana established with the pair back in 2019.
CORE operates as part of the broader UNIFIED Music Group ecosystem, and is led by co-general managers, Desiree Venuto and Adam Montgomery and boasts a roster that includes Teen Jesus and the Jean Teasers, The Terrys, Budjerah, Day We Ran, Emma Donovan, South Summit, Slowly Slowly, DEVAURA and others.
It’s mission: to focus on established independent Australian artists, as well as some of Australia and New Zealand’s “most exciting up-and-coming talent,” reads a statement, with its artists enjoying access to UNIFIED’s experience, infrastructure and connections.
Venuto joined LLA in 2019, and has been namechecked in The Music Network’s 30 Under 30 and Pollstar’s Impact International Next Gen Honorees lists, while Montgomery is an experienced professional who led boutique booking agency Four Tone Artists, representing the likes of Bec Sandridge, Didirri and Mia Dyson.
CORE’s dedicated launch team includes LaBelle Jackson, Victoria Kozbanis and Jo Syme.
“We are thrilled to officially unveil CORE. Having been a part of this journey since its inception, it is incredibly rewarding to step into this new role to lead the next iteration of the agency,” comments Venuto. “Artist creativity has always been our foundation, and we are stepping forward with a unified team backed by decades of shared industry expertise.”
Adds Montgomery: “Partnering with Desiree to lead this next chapter is a true career highlight. CORE is built around putting the artist at the heart of every decision, and we’re excited to bring this fresh energy into each conversation. “With the support of Comerford and Lethbridge, he continues, “we’re eager to champion our incredible roster and continue to expand our community.”
Visit cta.live for more.