Badu and Alchemist land the record fifteen years in the making, Dahi shows up with Kendrick and Gambino, and Prince gives up ten songs nobody has heard.

After a release week dominated by other rappers’ names, The Game turns the camera back toward Los Angeles. “The Life” makes hometown identity, not feud speculation, the center of The Documentary 3.

Every major distributor now passes streaming fraud penalties straight through to the artist, and CD Baby says a flag counts whether you meant it or not.

Beyoncé’s 20th-anniversary B’Day edition gathers 27 tracks from an era that was scattered across deluxe discs, regional bonuses and Spanish-language releases. The new configuration is expansive, but it is also selective, revealing how Beyoncé wants the album remembered in 2026.

Three Diamond certifications, and Swae Lee's name is second on every one of them. The "SUITCASE" video, five months into the SAME DIFFERENCE cycle, is him working that problem in public.

Sony says Kroger used its recordings 392 times without paying. The songs in the exhibits are not a random sample, and nobody will say whether the artists see a dime.

Four Black women have won Album of the Year at the Grammys. Two of those records have Dolly Parton's name in the credits. Inside a fifty-year run she rarely narrated.

Dillagence 2 is out, and the biggest surprise is not Lil Wayne. Busta Rhymes has revealed that the J Dilla archive in his possession also held a previously unreleased D’Angelo collaboration, reframing the album as an act of musical stewardship.

Dre and Jimmy Iovine endorsed AI in the studio. DJ Quik called it appropriation. The rule that will actually reach your catalog arrived four days earlier, from Apple.

Ruth B.'s third studio album arrived Friday with no features and no manufactured moment. The stranger story is a catalog that has moved billions of streams while barely registering on the chart the industry still reads.

The front page of New Music Friday was crowded. Underneath it sat a rap record you cannot stream, two projects escaping a paywall, three soul singles on imprints you have to squint to see, and the Roots ending twelve years of silence.

Lil’ Kim will celebrate 30 years of Hard Core with her first orchestral performance at Brooklyn’s Kings Theatre. The bigger story is what the concert says about hip-hop’s move into repertory, preservation and institutional spaces.