Prince’s death in 2016 set off waves of grief at the passing of a music icon. It also set in motion complex legal battles that took years to resolve and have never fully ended.

The star, who died of a fentanyl overdose ten years ago Tuesday (April 21), was legendary for his attention to detail — in his image, his music and his intellectual property. He spent years battling with Warner Bros. over his record deals, closely policed his copyrights in the early days of YouTube, and later pulled his music from Spotify and other streamers over gripes about fair compensation.

But owing to his sudden passing, that same meticulous artist also died without any sort of will, sparking a seemingly endless legal process to settle his estate. “It[‘s] a real mess that he left behind,” a legal expert told the Associated Press at the time. “I find it so hard to believe. How can there not be a will?”

The stakes were high. When he died, Prince left behind a sprawling set of property, including not just his famous Paisley Park mansion and other physical property, but also a prolific music catalog that had been bolstered in 2014 when Warner Bros. returned his masters for iconic albums like Purple Rain and 1999.

Because Prince had no children or spouse, the first challenge was to decide who would even be his heirs. The court eventually settled on his siblings, including sister Tyka Nelson and five half-siblings: Sharon, Norrine, and John R. Nelson; Omarr Baker; and Alfred Jackson. A bank, Comerica Bank & Trust, was named as a court-appointed administrator, handling the estate’s affairs while the probate case was litigated.

Three of the siblings later sold all or most of their shares to Primary Wave, giving that industry heavyweight control over half of the estate’s fate. The three others allied themselves with longtime Prince advisors L. Londell McMillan and Charles Spicer, who were themselves granted control of an undisclosed stake of the estate.

After years of litigation, the case finally moved toward resolution in January 2022, when the heirs reached a deal with the Internal Revenue Service to set a final tax valuation of $156 million. The court then split the estate evenly in two, with Primary Wave controlling an entity called Prince Oat Holdings LLC and the McMillan-Spicer group controlling another called Prince Legacy LLC. The two groups have since operated under an agreement dictating how they administer his music and other jointly-held assets.

The final discharge of the probate case ended the legal battle over the future of the estate, which the heirs said would allow them to “protect and grow Prince’s incomparable legacy.” But it didn’t end the estate’s legal battles.

In 2024, McMillan and Spicer filed a lawsuit claiming heirs Sharon and Norrine Nelson were trying to force them out and seize control of Prince Legacy, even though they were “simply not capable” of running the estate: “They lack any business and management experience, have no experience in the music and entertainment industries, and have no experience negotiating and managing high-level deals,” McMillan and Spicer wrote at the time.

McMillan and Spicer largely won the dispute a few months later, when a judge ruled that the heirs had vested the two advisors with “broad and exclusive” powers and could not now amend the agreement simply because they “came to regret this decision.” But some elements of the case remain pending and await more litigation in Delaware court.

Later in 2024, Primary Wave and Prince Legacy flexed their legal muscle to get Netflix to cancel a nine-part documentary by filmmaker Ezra Edelman that had been greenlit years earlier, citing “dramatic” inaccuracies and “sensationalized” claims.

Netflix formally pulled the plug in early 2025 and announced an estate-sanctioned replacement documentary, prompting Edelman to blast the move as a “joke.” He said nobody would see his film because he didn’t “feel like getting sued,” but that nothing in it had been inaccurate: “I can’t get past this — the short-sightedness of a group of people whose interest is their own bottom line.”

Then last year, the estate was sued by the singer Apollonia, a Prince protegee who claimed the estate had “embarked on an aggressive campaign” to cancel her trademark registrations to her name. She claimed that after Prince’s death, his estate had been on a mission to “acquire all things related to Prince even though it has no legal right to do so.”

In its own court filings, the estate said it had never asked her to change her name, but that it had rightly tried to revoke trademarks she had obtained during the “chaotic period” after his passing, when certain people secured trademarks that “rightfully belonged to Prince.” The case ended in a confidential settlement last month.

SYDNEY, Australia – Fifteen years after Poof Doof first began spreading joy at parties across Australia, the legendary queer events and nightclub brand is entering the label business.

Poof Doof Records launches proper with its first release, “All I Need,” dropping Thursday (April 23) from resident Poof Doof artist Jimi the Kween, the beloved drag queen and musician.

The label is an extension of the colorful business formed in Melbourne in 2011 by founder and Anthony “Hockers” Hocking. “We built up the community and we’ve seen so many young, queer artists come through the doors and perform and play for our events, that it was kind of like a natural progression to start our label,” Hocking tells Billboard.

Its mission: to continue uplifting, nurturing and providing pathways for queer talent in Australia. And to share their music with the world. The new venture, Hocking continues, “has been on my mind for many years.”

Distribution is handled by AWAL Records, with Poof Doof Records partnering with Positive Feedback and Powerhouse Management, and with John Davis, creative director / festivals co-ordinator, playing a guiding hand.

In its early stages, the label will accept submissions. “Over time,” explains Davis, “we intend to evolve toward a more traditional A&R model, proactively identifying and developing emerging queer talent.”

The inspiration behind the first release isn’t hidden from view; it’s right there in the title. “All you really need is the people that love and support you around to lift you up and have a really good time,” Jimi the Kween tells Billboard. “So it’s kind of all centered on being around like-minded humans and celebrating each other, and then you can, you know, live your fantasies and be yourself. So that’s also kind of why it’s the perfect message for the first release on the label, too. The messaging behind it is celebration, and it’s pride, it’s joy.”

Poof Doof’s cheeky name made the leap into Australia’s mainstream many years ago, where the team has hosted major activations, including queer precincts and stage takeovers at such shows as Splendour In The Grass, Beyond The Valley and Pitch Festival. Wherever Aussies want to party.  

Many of the biggest names in dance music have played its stages, including Carl Cox, Faithless, Seth Troxler, Melanie C, the Veronicas and many others.

Each year, the brand is front and center at Sydney Mardi Gras, getting the good times humming with a series of pool, boat and underwear parties, culminating in its iconic Mardi Gras Parade After Party. Its specialized events include Red Rave, Snap Crackle Pop XXL, POOF DOOF Drag Brunch and outdoor micro-festivals including A Gay On The Lawn and Yasss Queens Park.

“The Poof Doof audience at heart, a Poof Doof party, can be absolutely anything,” explains Davis, “but at the core of it, it’s about queer joy. Uplifting the community, good fun. Fun is the name of the game. If we’re not having fun, you’re not having fun. We are always about having a great time, making sure everything is colorful, inclusive.” And yes, “there’s confetti.”

With the launch of Poof Doof Records, out rolls its official website at poofdoofrecords.com. Label submissions can be made at music@poofdoofrecords.com.

Sonically, the label will be a broad palate, welcoming future-forward house and techno tunes, to artist-led pop and other styles. It’s unified not by genre, but by a joyful queer creative perspective, Hocking enthuses.

“If the music’s good, if the songs are good, we’ll put it out,” he says. “We don’t want to overpromise, we don’t want to stretch ourselves. But we’ll see what comes in the door.”

Timing is everything. Poof Doof Records launches ahead of June’s Global Pride Month. WorldPride 2026 will take over Amsterdam from July 25 to Aug. 8, 2026. Poof Doof will be on the ground, representing with its famous parties.

“With what’s going on, the world’s a pretty wild place right now,” notes Hocking. “All I Need” is a “feel good song that really speaks out to communities all over the world. The timing is right.”

Apple CEO Tim Cook is stepping down from the job that he inherited from the late Steve Jobs, ending a nearly 15-year reign that saw the company’s market value soar by more than $3.6 trillion during an iPhone-fueled era of prosperity.

Cook, 65, will turn the CEO duties over to Apple’s head of hardware engineering, John Ternus, on Sept. 1 while remaining involved with the Cupertino, California, company as executive chairman. That’s similar to the transitions made by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Netflix’s Reed Hastings after they ended their highly successful tenures as CEO.

“It has been the greatest privilege of my life to be the CEO of Apple and to have been trusted to lead such an extraordinary company,” Cook said in a statement. “I love Apple with all of my being, and I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to work with a team of such ingenious, innovative, creative, and deeply caring people.”

Ternus, 50, has been with Apple for the past quarter century, including the past five years overseeing the engineering underlying the iPhone, iPad and Mac — a role that made him a prime candidate to succeed Cook.

“I am profoundly grateful for this opportunity to carry Apple’s mission forward,” Ternus said in a statement.

The transition to a new CEO comes at a pivotal time for Apple. Artificial intelligence has unleashed the most upheaval within the industry since Jobs unveiled the first iPhone in 2007. Apple has gotten off to a rough start in AI after stumbling in its efforts to deliver new features built on the technology, as promised nearly two years ago.

Earlier this year, Apple finally turned to Google — an early leader in the AI race — for help making the iPhone’s virtual assistant Siri into a more conversational and versatile helper.

Although he never shook the perception that he lacked Jobs’ vision, Cook leveraged the popularity of the iPhone and other breakthroughs orchestrated by his predecessor to lift Apple to heights that seemed unfathomable when it was on the brink of bankruptcy during the mid-1990s.

This story was originally published by The Associated Press.

Goldenvoice, the promoter of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, is facing more than $40,000 in fines after running over time on weekend two of the desert festival, a representative of the City of Indio has confirmed with Billboard. The festival was charged for going past the 1:00 a.m. curfew set by the city, where the festival has been held since 1999.

While the first weekend of the festival obeyed the curfew, weekend two went over on two days, as first reported by TMZ. On Friday night (April 17), Anyma’s midnight sent went on until 1:09 a.m., which cost the festival $24,000 in fines. And on Saturday (April 18), Justin Bieber’s headlining performance went over by two minutes, costing an additional $20,000.

Coachella has a long-running agreement with Indio city officials that the festival end at 1:00 a.m. each Friday and Saturday night and at 12:00 a.m. on Sundays. According to the agreement, Coachella is fined $20,000 for the first five minutes it exceeds the curfew limit, with additional fines beyond that.

This isn’t the first time Coachella has been hit with curfew fines. Way back in 2009, Goldenvoice paid a $54,000 fine after singer Paul McCartney went a whopping 54 minutes over his allotted time. Last year, the festival was fined $20,000 when Travis Scott went three minutes past curfew on weekend one, while in 2024, a performance by Lana Del Rey cost it $17,000. In 2023, meanwhile, Goldenvoice racked up more than $168,000 in fines after six performers — Bad Bunny, Frank Ocean, The Weeknd, Skrillex, Fred Again and Four Tet — blew past their curfew times.

Yesterday, Coachella closed out two weekends with headlining performances from Sabrina Carpenter, Bieber and Karol G. The polo grounds will transform this week into Goldenvoice’s country music festival Stagecoach, which runs from April 24-26 with headliners Cody Johnson, Lainey Wilson and Post Malone.

Tory Lanez has sued the California prison system, saying he never should have been housed with a fellow inmate who stabbed him 16 times last year.

Lanez, 33, whose legal name is Daystar Peterson, filed the federal lawsuit seeking $100 million in damages on Tuesday (April 14) against the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and the warden and guards at the prison in Tehachapi where he was being held.

The suit says he was stabbed 16 times in the back, torso, head and face in an “unprovoked life-threatening attack” by inmate Santino Casio, who used a homemade “shank.” Lanez had a collapsed lung and had to be airlifted to a hospital, it says.

Lanez is serving a 10-year sentence for shooting Megan Thee Stallion in the feet after a dramatic and high-profile 2022 trial in Los Angeles.

Prison officials say he was attacked May 12, 2025, by Casio, who is serving a life sentence for second-degree murder and first-degree attempted murder. Casio had another 2008 conviction for assault by a prisoner with a deadly weapon and another in 2018 for manufacturing a deadly weapon.

“The choice to house Casio with Peterson was known or should have been a known danger,” the lawsuit says. It alleges that correctional officers’ response was slow, and no special measures like flash grenades or smoke bombs were used to stop Casio. It says the institution housed the men together despite the rapper’s “high-profile celebrity status,” which made him a target.

There is no record of Casio being charged in the assault. An attorney who represented him previously did not respond to messages seeking comment at the time.

Lanez was transferred to another prison, the California Men’s Colony, in San Luis Obispo County.

The lawsuit also says the defendants unlawfully seized his songbooks with unpublished lyrics that are of great future commercial value and refused to return them.

In response to a request for comment, Department of Corrections spokesperson Ike Dodson said the agency does not comment on pending litigation.

The lawsuit was first reported by TMZ.

Lanez was convicted of three felonies in December 2022: assault with a semiautomatic firearm; having a loaded, unregistered firearm in a vehicle; and discharging a firearm with gross negligence.

A California court rejected his appeal in November.

Megan, whose legal name is Megan Pete, testified at trial that in July 2020, after they left a party at Kylie Jenner’s Hollywood Hills home, Lanez fired the gun at the back of her feet and shouted for her to dance as she walked away from an SUV in which they had been riding.

She had bullet fragments surgically removed from both feet. It was not until months after the incident that she publicly identified Lanez as the person who fired the gun.

The 32-year-old Canadian Lanez began releasing mixtapes in 2009 and saw a steady rise in popularity, moving on to major label albums, two of which reached the top 10 on Billboard’s charts.

For as long as It Ends With Us co-stars Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni have been battling in court, Taylor Swift’s name has been linked to the case. Baldoni’s camp said Lively used her close friend Swift as a “dragon” to wrest control of the movie. Lively accused Baldoni of maliciously planting media stories about her relationship with the pop superstar.

The crux of the dispute is Lively’s allegation that Baldoni and his associates orchestrated a PR smear campaign in retaliation for her complaints that Baldoni, both the co-star and director of the August 2024 film, sexually harassed her on set. Baldoni initially countersued Lively for defamation, among other things, but all his claims were dismissed. Now fully in defense mode, Baldoni still maintains that there was zero harassment and that his media strategy was merely a response to Lively’s bad-faith efforts to seize creative control of the film and ruin his reputation.

The lawsuit is finally headed to trial next month for a New York jury to decide which version of events is true. This means that after more than a year of Swift’s name popping up in court filings and getting spun into endless tabloid fodder, we’re finally getting a sense of how big a role the singer will actually play in the trial.

Swift is not a witness, and she was never deposed (despite the Baldoni team’s efforts). Her name is, however, included on a long list of individuals who might come up during the testimony, along with dozens of others, including Lively’s husband Ryan Reynolds, It Ends With Us supporting actress Jenny Slate and music mogul Scooter Braun, who has close ties to Baldoni’s lead publicist, Melissa Nathan.

The most concrete way Swift could be part of the evidence is via her text messages with Lively, which Baldoni’s team obtained from Lively after initially trying to subpoena the singer herself. Lively’s lawyers have indicated that they plan to object to this evidence as irrelevant, but the Baldoni camp will likely argue that the messages show that Lively tried to leverage her friendship with Swift against him.

These communications, included in the Baldoni exhibit list and posted to the court docket earlier this year, include Swift agreeing to talk up Lively’s version of a script rewrite to Baldoni (“I’ll do anything for you !!”) and celebrating the use of her hit Folklore track “My Tears Ricochet” in the movie’s trailer.

“If Justin was strategic he would be like no Taylor Swift in the trailer because that gives you more power over the film, that’s your ally not his,” Swift wrote to Lively in April 2024. Lively responded, “Get yourself a best friend who thinks like the actual Roman Empire.” Swift replied, “His misogyny runs so deep he thinks women are incapable of winning chess matches or making long game power plays.”

Other messages show Swift supporting Lively’s legal action against Baldoni. Before the case was filed, she wrote, “I think this b—- knows something is coming because he’s gotten out his tiny violin,” and, “He needs to be beaten by his OWN words…it’s the only way to beat liars and hypocrites.”

Lively’s camp has consistently maintained that Swift had no meaningful involvement in It Ends With Us and is only now being invoked by Baldoni for clout. Swift’s reps said the same when she was subpoenaed last year, writing in a statement that the maneuver was “designed to use Taylor Swift’s name to draw public interest by creating tabloid clickbait instead of focusing on the facts of the case.”

Lawyers for Lively say this is not a new strategy for Baldoni’s team. A key piece of evidence for them is a summer 2024 strategy document authored by Baldoni’s publicists, which recommends “planting stories about the weaponization of feminism and how people in BL’s circle, like Taylor Swift, have been accused of utilizing these tactics to ‘bully’ into getting what they want.”

Along these lines, Lively’s lawyers plan to bring up Swift’s name at trial in order to show that Baldoni’s team was really the one to leverage the singer’s superstardom for its own ends. In addition to the scenario planning document, their exhibit list includes a 2024 story in the Daily Mail titled, “How Blake Lively COPIED best friend Taylor Swift to promote It Ends With Us before turning to singer to help crisis manage backlash and Justin Baldoni drama,” as well as documents that trace the origin of this article.

According to Lively’s team, Baldoni’s publicists urged a Daily Mail reporter to run this story instead of a different article about human resources complaints during the filming of It Ends With Us. In one piece of evidence, the reporter was encouraged to write about how Lively was “emulating her best friend Taylor with the charm bracelets and s—.”

Finally, Swift and her music might come up in the trial as it pertains to the process of incorporating the “My Tears Ricochet” synch for the trailer of It Ends With Us. The messages on Baldoni’s witness list reference this; when discussing the synch with Lively in 2024, Swift wrote, “I fire off those texts to Austin” — presumably a reference to her brother, Austin Swift, who manages the singer’s licensing operations.

If Baldoni’s team argues in court that the “My Tears Ricochet” synch was part of Blake’s plot to weaponize her friendship with Swift, Lively’s lawyers might respond with evidence showing that the idea to use the song came from the movie’s producers and studio, not her. Lively has also obtained evidence showing that the trailer was viewed as a major success by everyone, drawing record viewership and raising the film’s profile.

Tennessee’s House Finance, Ways and Means committee has blocked legislation designed to provide funding to independent music venues across the state. The committee defeated the act with an 11-15 vote on Thursday (April 16).

The bipartisan bill, titled the TN Live Music Support Act, previously passed the state’s Senate Commerce and Labor Committee with an 8-1 vote. It would have supported a proposed $2 million pilot program within the Live Music Fund, overseen by the TN Entertainment Commission, to help independent venues make capital improvement upgrades to remain competitive in a rapidly consolidating live entertainment marketplace.

“It’s incredibly disappointing that members of the Tennessee General Assembly chose to vote down this important legislation this week,” said Chris Cobb, executive director of the Music Venue Alliance Nashville, in a press release. “Independent venues will continue to struggle this year while out-of-state secondary ticketing companies continue to extract value from our music community at the expense of Tennessee music fans. This bill represented a practical solution supported by venues, artists and industry leaders across the state.”

The Tennessee Live Music Fund was created with unanimous legislative support in 2024 as a tool to strengthen the state’s music ecosystem. The TN Live Music Support Act represented the next step in implementing that vision by establishing a sustainable funding mechanism for the program. The act would have established a 5% fee on the sales price of all tickets sold at retail through the secondary ticketing market for any live music and performance event occurring within the state.

“Tennessee has long been recognized as a national leader in smart, forward-thinking music policy. So, it is deeply disappointing to see legislation with strong bipartisan support blocked after pressure from secondary ticket resellers like StubHub,” said National Independent Venue Association (NIVA) executive director Stephen Parker.

Parker continued: “By siding with companies whose business models extract revenue from local music economies without reinvesting in them, these legislators have risked the closure of small businesses in their districts and the loss of jobs. Independent venues are essential cultural infrastructure, and we urge lawmakers to stand with Tennessee communities instead of out-of-state corporate interests.”

Following the vote, advocates, venues and music industry partners across Tennessee have stated their intention to continue working to find solutions to fund the proposed $2 million pilot program.

A genuine Canadian music business legend has died.

Montreal concert promoter, record producer and label head Donald K. Tarlton, more commonly known as Donald K. Donald, has passed at the age of 82.

The news was confirmed yesterday (April 13) by CTV News and other sources.

Over six decades, Tarlton had a huge impact on the live music scene in Montreal and beyond. He was a major inspiration to many of Canada’s biggest promoters, worked with legends like The Rolling Stones and Janis Joplin, and helped launch many influential record labels including Aquarius Records, Tacca Music and Last Gang.

The Montreal-born Tarlton attended Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University) and an interest in entertainment promotion began in his youth. In 1966, Tarlton founded Donald K. Donald Productions, a concert promotion and booking company that had a huge impact on the live music scene in Montreal and beyond.

A major career boost for Tarlton came along in the form of Janis Joplin in 1968. A 2011 feature in The Montreal Gazette recalled “an accident backstage at the old Montreal Forum one night in 1968 when rock legend Janis Joplin puked all over the shoes of Tarlton’s mentor, renowned local promoter Sam Gesser.

“It was the beginning of the rock’n’roll era and Sam had a hard time relating with the culture,” Tarlton told a Gazette journalist many years later. “He hired me as the stage manager. Janis was drunk and threw up all over his shoes. Sam was horrified, looked at me and said, ‘Donald, you can take over all the rock stuff.’ And that was it. I became the rock promoter of Montreal.”

With the Montreal Forum his key venue, Tarlton promoted thousands of concerts there and in other area venues in the following decades.

In 1969, Tarlton ventured into the record business as co-founder of independent label Aquarius Records, alongside Terry Flood, Bob Lemm, Dan Lazare and Jack Lazare. Flood served as label president of the label from its beginning in 1969 until 1990 and he and Tarlton would grow Aquarius into one of Canada’s most important independent record labels. It found major commercial success with such artists as April Wine (managed by Flood), Corey Hart and Sass Jordan and, later, Sum 41.

Canadian Encyclopedia notes that “Under Flood’s direction as president, Aquarius had issued more than 55 albums by 1990, most the work of Quebec-based anglophone rock artists. April Wine has been its most productive act, issuing some 19 albums 1971-89, while Corey Hart’s The Boy in the Box (1985) has been its most successful release, selling more than one million copies in Canada. The Aquarius roster also has included Roger Doucet, Freedom North, Lewis Furey, Myles Goodwyn, the Guess Who, Sass Jordan, Mindstorm, Moonquake, Morse Code, Peter Pringle, Walter Rossi, Sword, Tchukon and Teaze. Distribution of Aquarius recordings was handled by London Records until 1978.”

In 1990, Keith Brown took over from Flood as president. Contacted by Billboard Canada, he offered this tribute to Tarlton: “Working for Donald between 1969 and 2010 I think I can speak for hundreds of co-workers I encountered. Donald was the head of a family. For me, his departure was like losing an immediate family member and I believe countless others feel the same way. We were so lucky have encountered Donald Tarlton.”

Also working closely with Aquarius and Tarlton was Toronto music publicist (Bentertainment) and label executive Nanci Malek. She tells Billboard Canada that “Donald was a titan of the industry. Working with him for years taught me so much and I was very lucky to have such a mentor. I think back on that smile that was always present. He believed in his staff and in his artists and supported us through all the adventures.

“He made me his VP of English Canada and he trusted me to launch Francophone artists into English markets, as well as artists such as Sass and the boys of Sum 41, amongst many others. The career that Donald had cannot be matched and his legacy will be remembered forever.”

In 1991, Tarlton and Nick Carbone co-founded another independent label, Tacca Music. It won multiple Felix Awards for record producer and publisher of the year, alongside multiple nominations in the label of the year and album of the year categories. Artists on the Tacca roster included Kevin Parent, France of Love, Annie Brocoli, Jorane, Lennie Gallant, Harmonium, Andre Gagnon and Dumas.

In 1998, Tarlton founded the music industry promotion company Le Groupe DKD (The Donald K. Donald Entertainment Group), and it launched other record labels, including DKD Disques. Now operating as DEJA Musique, that imprint put out albums by such artists as La Chicane, Dany Bedar, Jonas and Eric Maheu.

Yet another independent record label co-founded by Tarlton was Last Gang Records, launched in Toronto by Tarlton and top Canadian music industry lawyer Chris Taylor in the fall of 2003. A decade later, it was acquired by Entertainment One in March 2016, with Taylor being appointed the new president of eOne Music, now MNRK Music Group. An influential indie label, Last Gang worked with artists like Metric, Crystal Castles, Death From Above 1979 and more.

As a concert promoter, Tarlton worked extensively with the Rolling Stones in the Montreal market. In 1972, the Stones gave him the Above and Beyond the Call of Duty Award after Tarlton and his team managed to secure new equipment for the band at the very last minute, after the Teamsters allegedly dynamited a couple trucks containing the Rolling Stones’ tour equipment at the band’s Montreal stop.

Tarlton’s tour production company DKD!Spectacle enjoyed its greatest success as the global producer and touring representative for Celine Dion throughout the 1990s.

Recently reunited Canadian rock legends Rush posted a tribute to Tarlton alongside a concert poster from a show in Fredericton, New Brunswick.

“Very sad to hear of the passing of Donald K. Donald,” they wrote on Instagram. “He was the consummate and classic old school promoter. Always telling stories, working the room but with a broad smile and ready for a laugh…and he knew his business. We loved working with Donald in Quebec and beyond, and we have a boatload of great memories of Rush and him together. He was unique and will be sorely missed. RIP Donald and thank you”

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Tarlton was also an occasional theatre promoter in the United States, including the Tony Award-winning Black and Blue and Tango Argentino.

In 2000, Tarlton’s contributions to the Canadian music industry were recognized by his induction as a Member of the Order of Canada. The official Order biography states that “From his modest beginnings, hiring teenage bands for school dances, he has emerged as one of the country’s top concert producers. Through his vision, he has transformed several sports arenas, such as the old Montréal Forum and Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens, into huge concert venues.

“A devoted volunteer, he has helped his community by raising funds for the Missing Children’s Network and the Muscular Dystrophy Association of Canada. He also produced a concert that benefited flood victims in the Saguenay region.”

Other honours for Tarlton included earning the Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal in 2002 (upgraded to the Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2012) and, at the Juno Awards in 2007, the Walt Grealis Special Achievement Award, one of the most prestigious industry honours. Reporting on that latter award, The Globe and Mail termed Tarlton “a rock impresario who was a central figure in the small network that built Canada’s nascent recording industry from the 1960s.”

In 2012, Tarlton and Terry Flood jointly received the 2012 MMF (Music Managers Forum) Pioneer Award in Toronto during Canadian Music Week.

In 2015, Tarlton was presented with the SOCAN Special Achievement Award, “saluting the prodigious amount of work he has accomplished since the 1960s.” The citation referenced the fact that Tarlton was also “the cofounder of the Tacca Musique imprint, an influential record label that launched the careers of several major artists in Québec.”

Tarlton also won the Builder Award at the 2017 CIMA Awards, and was presented the award by Derrick Ross, president of Slaight Music.

Billboard Canada will be collecting more tributes to and anecdotes about Donald K. Tarlton for a feature to follow.

This story was originally published by Billboard Canada.

From the tape-trading trees of the 1980s to 21st century torrenting and file-sharing, Deadheads have spent decades tracking down live recordings from the Grateful Dead‘s 30-year career. In the early ’90s, the Dead themselves began officially releasing archival live recordings — and that operation has steadily grown into a commercial juggernaut, helping the band to set chart records 30 years after frontman Jerry Garcia‘s death and 60 years after its formation.

Now, Deadheads have another way to enjoy the band’s extensive live catalog. On Thursday (April 16), the live-music streaming platform nugs — home to archival recordings by artists including Bruce Springsteen, Phish and Pearl Jam — launches Play Dead, a new app dedicated to the high-resolution presentation of the Grateful Dead’s sprawling vault.

Authorized by Grateful Dead Productions and developed in conjunction with Rhino Entertainment, which has exclusively licensed the Dead’s intellectual property since 2006, Play Dead will offer high-resolution streaming of all previous archival Grateful Dead releases. This includes roughly 300 concerts, including many previously available only as physical-only releases, like the 58-volume quarterly Dave’s Picks series, launched in 2012.

Play Dead subscriptions will cost $9.99/month or $99.99/year, with other pricing options available for existing nugs subscribers and new customers interested in bundling Play Dead and nugs.

Rhino’s robust physical release schedule for Dead recordings will continue apace, with all new releases also appearing on Play Dead, but the service will also offer two new vault releases every week in perpetuity — amounting to an exponential increase in the volume of new archival releases available to Deadheads. Twenty of these previously unreleased vault recordings have gone live on Play Dead to accompany its launch.

“This is my life’s work,” says nugs founder/CEO Brad Serling, a Deadhead who launched the platform in the late ’90s. “I was born to do this. So here we are — it’s finally happening.”

It’s been a long time coming for Serling, who the Dead hired in 2000 to do a version of this. That initiative, dubbed Project Bandwagon, would have created an online distribution channel for the music of a handful of acts — including, possibly, the Dead, Dave Matthews Band, Phish and Pearl Jam — along with tie-ins for merch and ticketing. Without subscription apps, iPhones and social media, the band considered selling hard drives pre-loaded with Dead concerts, Serling says, calling the ill-fated project “a very pie-in-the-sky, very 2000, dotcom-era idea.”

But the seed was planted, and for the next two decades, as the Dead’s business operation evolved, Serling would find himself discussing the prospect of digitizing the Dead’s vault with two key players in its releases: Rhino Entertainment president Mark Pinkus and the band’s legacy manager and audio archivist David Lemieux. In January 2020, at Dead & Company’s Mexican destination festival Playing In The Sand, Serling and Pinkus began to outline what creating such a platform would look like in practice.

So, a Deadhead might ask, what’s taken so long? “What we’re embarking on now is the largest tape transfer project in the history of rock and roll, as far as I know, at least for any single band,” Serling says. The Dead’s vault contains a vast assortment of tapes — multitracks, reel-to-reels, DATs, anywhere from two to a dozen for a given show — that all require careful digitization. A decade ago, nugs partnered with a third-party company, Sonicraft, to help operationalize Springsteen’s archives for the platform; the Dead project is substantially more time-intensive.

“We thought we were going to be ready to launch it prior to the 60th [anniversary] shows,” says Pinkus, referring to Dead & Company’s August 2025 concerts in Golden Gate Park celebrating 60 years of Grateful Dead music. “As with most things in life, it takes a while to do them right.”

Doing it right has been critical for the Play Dead team. Bootlegs for many of the 2,300-plus concerts the Grateful Dead performed exist, of course, and resourceful Deadheads know where to find them. But Play Dead continues the philosophy of the band’s archival releases up to this point: deploy savvy mastering techniques to ensure official releases significantly outstrip the audio quality of the unauthorized versions floating around the internet or living on old cassettes. “This is not, ‘Let’s do quick transfers and spit them out,’” says Lemieux, adding that the fidelity is “really unlike anything you’ve heard.”

In fact, Play Dead will even surpass the audio quality the Dead’s archival customers are familiar with; the service has a minimum 24-bit, 48kHZ audio quality threshold, which exceeds the quality that can be committed to a CD. Beyond mastering unreleased recordings for future Play Dead vault releases, the Dead’s audio team, led by mastering pro David Glasser, has gone back through previous archival releases, optimizing them for the fidelity enabled by streaming. Even for listeners who have worn out their copies of the CD-only Dave’s Picks, those recordings should sound better on Play Dead.

“The music’s all over the place on the internet, but it’s not in good enough quality, and it’s not presented in a thoughtful way,” Pinkus says. “Play Dead is going to give it to you in high-res, sounding better than you’ll find it anywhere on the internet, and it’s going to be in a logical, thoughtful, fun way to listen to and interact with.”

High-resolution audio isn’t all Play Dead has to offer. The platform will support the creation and sharing of playlists, along with curated selections by Lemieux and other venerable Deadheads. Lemieux raves about the app’s interface, which helps to make a daunting amount of data navigable. Play Dead will also allow offline listening and seamlessly transition between bit rates and sample rates based on available bandwidth.

“This app is going to create a completely different experience than the joy that one gets from these physical releases,” Pinkus says.

Meanwhile, Deadheads accustomed to the band’s predictable schedule of physical releases and (still impressive) array of live recordings available on major streaming platforms like Apple Music and Spotify can carry on. “Play Dead will be additive,” Pinkus says, assuring that the band’s physical releases will continue as normal, and that its music won’t leave other streamers. “Play Dead will just be more music for more Deadheads.” But, he adds, those sources won’t approach the audio fidelity now offered by Play Dead.

“This is the closest you are getting to the piece of media that was in the room with the band, other than the band members on stage and whoever might still be alive from who was in the room,” Serling says. “This is the last living relic of what was in the room with the band on any given night, and we are making a high-res digital capture of that relic. To me, it’s very much like that scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark when they lift the lid off the Ark and everybody’s faces melt. We want to melt your faces.

“You can listen to it on archive.org [the site where many Dead bootlegs circulate], but that’s a copy of a copy of a clone,” he continues. “Some of them sound pretty good, but they’re not mastered by Dave Glasser — and, I think it’s important to say, they’re not hand-picked by David Lemieux. He’s choosing these [shows] for a reason.”

It’s a role Lemieux has cherished since he began steering the Dead’s archival releases in 1999. He’s a voracious listener of all the band’s distinct eras, and says “we’re really going for a full variety” with Play Dead’s vault releases, promising music from each decade the Dead was active. Plus, where recent archival Dead releases have generally held firm to a “complete shows” criteria, Play Dead will allow flexibility for posting partial shows in the Dead’s vault that may be victims of deteriorated physical media or a distracted audio engineer.

“We’re definitely going to be putting things up that we don’t have complete,” Lemieux says. “It’s either, let it sit on the vault shelves forever and nobody hears it, or get up the 30, 60, 80% of the show that we have, so at least people can hear what is in the vault on the shelves.”

In conversation, Pinkus, Serling and Lemieux — all dyed-in-the-wool Deadheads who first saw the band in the ’80s — repeatedly emphasize that they approach their work with the Dead’s legacy as fans. And to them, Play Dead realizes a long-held dream of many Deadheads. “This is really the opening of the vault,” Lemieux says. “Ultimately, we don’t really have an interest in stuff sitting on shelves. We want to get it into people’s ears.”

A jury in New York has found that Live Nation runs an unlawful monopoly that touches multiple corners of the concert industry. But it will take some time before we find out the consequences.

The blockbuster verdict, which came down on Wednesday (April 15) after a monthlong trial and four days of jury deliberations, is limited to findings of liability. That means jurors were asked only to decide whether Live Nation monopolized the market for primary concert ticketing and unlawfully required artists to use its promotion services in order to play its amphitheaters — and they answered a resounding “yes” on all counts.

Live Nation will now ask U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian to overrule that verdict and enter judgment in its favor. If he declines to do so, it’s this judge who will then be tasked with deciding what the ruling practically means for Live Nation’s future by way of a “remedy” — that is, an order for the company to pay financial damages and/or change the way it does business.

Critics of Live Nation, including the state attorneys general that litigated the trial, say the remedy should be the forced divestiture of Ticketmaster. The states’ antitrust case rested on the theory that controlling both ticketing and artist promotion gives Live Nation an anticompetitive edge — specifically, because it threatens to withhold concerts from venues that don’t use Ticketmaster as their primary ticketer. The jury’s verdict could be interpreted as endorsing this argument.

Judge Subramanian could alternatively allow Live Nation to keep Ticketmaster but require the company to sell off other assets, such as certain amphitheaters it owns. Lauren Spahn, an entertainment partner at the law firm Buchalter, says this could be a strategic way for the judge to “weaken [Live Nation and Ticketmaster] without completely killing the combined companies.”

While judges do have the power to split up companies, dating back to the breakup of Standard Oil in 1911, such orders have become rare in the modern court system. In 2024, for example, Google was found liable at trial for monopolizing the online search market. But when it came time for remedies, a federal judge declined to order the forced divestiture of Google’s Chrome browser or its Android operating system.

In the Google search case, the judge instead required the tech giant to change its contracting practices and make certain data available to rivals. It’s possible this case will have a similar outcome, with Judge Subramanian deciding to order damages and putting operating guardrails in place for Live Nation in lieu of a forced divestiture.

Such guardrails could include limiting Live Nation’s use of exclusive ticketing contracts, capping fees or requiring the company to open up its amphitheaters to rival promoters. Live Nation already agreed to make many such changes to its business practices — and create a $280 million payment fund — as part of a proposed settlement with the Department of Justice (DOJ) struck a few days into the antitrust trial. The company said in a statement on Wednesday, “We remain confident that the ultimate outcome of the states’ case will not be materially different than what is envisioned by the DOJ settlement.”

This could get complicated, though. The settlement still needs Judge Subramanian’s approval, and numerous state attorneys general who initially sued Live Nation alongside the DOJ criticized that deal as too lenient before forging ahead with the trial on their own. This now puts Judge Subramanian in the awkward position of simultaneously being asked, by two sets of government agencies that were once litigation partners, to both approve a settlement and order a more stringent structural remedy on the same set of facts. Kenneth Dintzer, an antitrust partner at Crowell & Moring who spent 33 years at the DOJ, says the situation is “unprecedented.”

“Nobody’s ever seen something quite like this,” Dintzer tells Billboard. “So exactly how these cards are going to be shuffled is anybody’s guess.”

The process won’t be quick, either. It could take months, or even up to a year, for Judge Subramanian to gather all the arguments and evidence he needs to come up with detailed decisions on both the settlement and a proposed remedy. Then there’s the appeal. Live Nation has said it “can and will appeal any unfavorable rulings,” and this could drag the proceedings out for at least another year.

In other words, says Spahn: “It’s going to take a while before anything trickles down to the consumer level.”