Marketplace StubHub has launched an app on ChatGPT, further developing the discovery experience.

The integration will enable fans to find live events easily by asking ChatGPT to ‘find me a game’ or ‘find me the best view for the game on Saturday’. Instead of a typical web search, ChatGPT will open an interactive StubHub app experience directly in the conversation.

Phish returns to Madison Square Garden December 28 – 31 (New Year’s Eve) to cap 2025 with a four-night New Year’s Run. Livestreams for all four shows are now available for pre-order via LivePhish.com.

The four-night stand will be the band’s 88th – 91st shows at MSG, where they first played on December 30, 1994. Phish celebrated New Year’s Eve at The Garden each year since 2010, save for 2014 in Miami and pandemic years of 2020 and 2021. Guitarist Trey Anastasio, bassist Mike Gordon, keyboardist Page McConnell and drummer Jon Fishman also celebrated New Year’s Eve at MSG in 1995, 1997, 1998 and 2002.

Taylor Swift is ringing in the holiday cheer with a sizable donation of $1 million to Feeding America, a nonprofit network of 200 food banks combating hunger in the United States.

The charity announced the donation on Instagram, thanking the singer for her act of altruism. “We are incredibly grateful for Taylor Swift‘s $1 million gift to Feeding America,” reads the post, authored by Feeding America CEO Claire Babineaux-Fontenot. “This holiday season, her continued support is a powerful reminder of what’s possible when we unite to end hunger. When we join together alongside people facing hunger, we can make sure families have a full table this holiday season and beyond.”

ChatGPT’s integration push has reached the ticketing world, where StubHub’s launched a “discovery experience” affording users access to “live ticket availability and pricing in real time.”
The ticket-resale platform today disclosed its high-profile tie-up with ChatGPT, which is on something of an integration streak at present. Now, joining the likes of Apple Music, Spotify, Booking.com, and Expedia, StubHub is plugging passes directly via the chatbot.

As described by the involved parties – interestingly, StubHub’s release mentions the overarching OpenAI a grand total of once – prospective customers can simply ask ChatGPT to find suitable event passes.

Credit: Raph_PH

Höfner, the 138-year-old company best known for making Paul McCartney’s famed Violin Bass, has “filed for insolvency” and is now seeking “a strong partner to…secure business operations and jobs in the long term.”
Hagenau, Germany-headquartered Höfner announced the news in an Instagram post last week. But the straightforward message only recently started gaining stateside media traction – in part because Paul McCartney himself voiced support for the company.

“It is very sad to see Höfner go out of business,” McCartney wrote on Instagram. “They have been making instruments for over 100 years, and I bought my first Höfner bass in the sixties. I have loved it ever since.

Universal Music Group and Roblox have signed a new strategic agreement that will see the companies collaborating to enhance music and commercial integrations across artist and fan experiences. The deal includes the integration of commercial features that aim to drive increased engagement and revenue for artists and labels, with the ability to leverage Shopify for digital and physical merchandise sales. 

UMG and Roblox will work to streamline artist and label engagement within the platform, including access to new Roblox tools and beta features.

You may not know BubbleUp by name, but you definitely know the company they keep. Their client roster reads like a who’s who of music (and entertainment) royalty — Jimmy Buffett, Toby Keith, Luke Bryan, Kenny Chesney, Cody Johnson, Lainey Wilson, Tom Petty, James Brown, Wanda Sykes, The Black Keys, Kelsea Ballerini, Dierks Bentley, Eagles, The Avett Brothers, Khruangbin, Def Leppard, Aerosmith, and many more.

Universal Music Group and music creation platform Splice have established a partnership to create AI music tools together, the companies announced on Thursday, the latest in a flurry of AI developments to hit the business in the past several months.

The partnership brings together the world’s largest music company and one of the industry’s biggest music software platforms, though UMG and Splice were vague on the sorts of tools they’d actually be creating beyond saying they’d be “advanced commercial AI tools that can deliver high fidelity and precise expression of artistic intent.”

Goose initiated an auction with proceeds benefiting the Brown University Student Emergency Fund in the wake of a shooting at the Providence, Rhode Island Ivy League institution that left two dead. The shooting happened just two miles from where Goose held their Goosemas concerts at Providence’s Amica Mutual Pavilion.

The shooting took place at Brown University on the afternoon of Saturday, December 13, just ahead of Goose’s second of two Goosemas shows. Two students, Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, were killed, and nine other students were injured. The alleged gunman was recently found dead in New Hampshire and is also suspected in the killing of an MIT professor.

On Thursday, the board of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., announced that the historic performing arts venue will be renamed the Trump-Kennedy Center, the White House said.

The vote was announced by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on social media

Passim, the Boston folk club and collective announced the 2025 recipients of its Iguana Music Fund, which provides support for New England-based musicians at critical stages of their careers.

The grants provide up to $40,000 to support activities such as community and career building projects including recording, equipment purchases, and event creation.

Musicians and music industry workers with the Musicians For Palestine campaign have published an open letter to Live Nation this week, calling for the live-entertainment giant to cease its operations in Israel.

“We cannot stay silent while Live Nation Israel glorifies the genocidal Israeli military that has killed more than 70,000 Palestinians in Gaza,” states the letter. “We echo long-standing Palestinian calls for accountability over its years of artwashing of Israeli apartheid and now genocide.”

The letter has hundreds of signatures so far, including artists Brian Eno, Massive Attack and Caribou.

Heavy metal fans in South Carolina were disappointed to discover that the Lamb of God concert they expected was actually a performance about the birth of Jesus Christ.

Ticket reseller StubHub apologized on Monday (Dec. 22) after accidentally listing the Virginia-based rock band instead of Christian musician Andrew Peterson’s Behold the Lamb of God, a concert featuring music about the stories of Christ, held at the Spartanburg Memorial Auditorium on Dec. 20.

Howie Klein, a veteran record executive, radio DJ and political activist who was a leader in the famously artist-friendly Warner Music family during its golden era of the 1980s and early ‘90s, died Wednesday after a long battle with pancreatic cancer, according to a social media post from his sister. He was 77.

Forget the vinyl revival. CD players and compact discs are back on Christmas lists this year amid a wave of 90s nostalgia and coveted “deluxe” releases from big acts such as Taylor Swift and Pink Floyd.

Demand for compact discs peaked in the mid-00s and many households ditched their systems and libraries as digital music took off. But the distinctive whirr is returning to bedrooms around the country, with retailers and marketplaces experiencing an uptick in appetite for vintage tech and music to play on it.

John Lewis has upped its range of CD players to meet resurgent demand and says sales are up 74% in the last year. “We’re seeing something of a retro renaissance,” said Heather Andrews, one of its electricals buyers.

In business, the power of individual leaders is an inherently hard thing to measure. It’s subjective, and it fluctuates on any given day, just like the strength of an electrical current goes up and down depending on environmental conditions.
 
To commemorate Variety’s 120th anniversary year, we gave ourselves a tough assignment. We wanted to take a snapshot of leadership and muscle in the entertainment industry at this fraught moment of turmoil and transition for Hollywood.
 
After months of internal debate, months of arguing over draft lists and a last push of double-checking titles and name spellings, here we finally arrive at the end result: The Variety 120 list of the most powerful executives in entertainment.

Whitney Houston, Cher, Paul Simon and Chaka Khan are among the music legends set to receive Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Recording Academy. The Recording Academy — which presents the Grammys — will recognize Cher, Paul, Chaka and Whitney, who died in 2012, during a Special Merit Awards ceremony on Jan. 31. Carlos Santana will also receive a Lifetime Achievement Award, which honors recipients for their "creative contributions of outstanding artistic significance to the field of recording."

At the same ceremony, Elton John's songwriting partner Bernie Taupin will receive the Trustees Award from the Academy. This honor is given to people who "have made significant contributions, other than performance, to the field of recording."

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Facebook is testing a system that charges users for sharing web links, in a move that could prove to be a further blow to news outlets and other publishers.

Meta, the social media platform’s owner, said it is carrying out a “limited test” in which those without a paid Meta Verified subscription, costing at least £9.99 a month, can only post two external links a month.

The test appears to involve a subset of Facebook pages and user profiles on Professional Mode, which includes features used by content creators to monetise their posts.

Warner Music Canada has laid off at least 24 people amid major global restructuring this year, eliminating positions in marketing, A&R, catalog, and more.

As Warner Music Group (WMG) shakes things up in ongoing restructuring efforts, Warner Music Canada has laid off at least 24 people, according to Billboard Canada. Multiple former staffers report that the layoffs came on November 18, the same day that Julia Hummel and Madelaine Napoleone were named as the new Warner Music Canada co-general managers.

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TikTok has signed a deal to sell its US business to three American investors – Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX – ensuring the popular social video platform can continue operating in the United States.

The deal is expected to close on 22 January, according to an internal memo seen by he Associated Press and Reuters. The TikTok chief executive officer, Shou Zi Chew, said in the memo that ByteDance and TikTok have signed binding agreements with the three investors.

The new TikTok US joint venture will be 50% held by a consortium of new investors, including Oracle, Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi-based MGX with 15% each. Another 30.1% will be held by affiliates of existing ByteDance investors and 19.9% will be retained by ByteDance, according to the memo.

Country music star Jelly Roll has been granted a full pardon from Governor Bill Lee in Tennessee for his past crimes.

The singer, whose real name is Jason DeFord, was among 33 people who received pardons from Lee on Thursday, according to the Associated Press. The 41-year-old was convicted of robbery when he was 17 after he stole $350 from people in a home in 2002, which led to his arrest and a sentence of one year in prison plus probation. Later, in 2008, police discovered marijuana and crack cocaine in his car, leading to eight years of court-ordered supervision.

Earlier this month, Sabrina Carpenter and SZA became the latest artists to protest about their music being used in White House social-media posts.

The songs, which both had lyrics or performance context related to handcuffs, were clipped as background to videos of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers handcuffing people on immigration raids.