2026 is shaping up to be the year of the pop icon. Madonna and Sabrina Carpenter are dropping a song together tomorrow, Ariana Grande has announced her eighth album, Charli XCX is making rock music, and the Beyhive is abuzz with rumours a new Beyoncé record is imminent.

As if that wasn’t enough excitement, the New York Times Magazine has published a list of the 30 greatest living American songwriters – including Lana Del Rey, Taylor Swift, Mariah Carey, Bad Bunny, Kendrick Lamar and many (25) more, whittled down from 700+ nominees submitted by more than 250 music insiders.

In an accompanying video interview, Taylor Swift revealed she wrote the song ‘Love Story’ at age 17 in her room when she was mad at her parents “cuz they wouldn't let me go on a date with a guy who was too old… And this is why you need to discipline your kids because they might write songs that go number one.”

I was an angsty teen who got sent to my room heaps with no hit songs to show for it. Maybe my mum should’ve told me to put down the Twilight books and pick up a guitar or something.

P.S. If you want a crash-course on the 30 greats, the NYTimes shared a cheat-sheet playlist with five essential songs to listen to from each songwriter.

“If somebody brought up astrology, I would be like, ‘oh my god, please shut the f*** up.’ And then I met a Gemini man and I dated his ass and then I believed in astrology... Girl Geminis? Amazing. Life of the party. My favourite people in the world. Male Geminis? Go to hell.”
Billie Eilish, victim-survivor of a relationship with a Gemini, speaking to Elle for an interview as the magazine’s May cover star.

$US20 million
How much the cast of Friends each make in annual residuals, according to Lisa Kudrow (who played Phoebe Buffay on the hit sitcom). Ahead of the 2004 finale, each of the six stars negotiated contracts entitling them to 2% of the show’s ongoing licensing, streaming, and syndication earnings – which total about $1 billion a year. What’s that famous lyric from the Friends theme song? “So no one told you life was gonna be this way, (clap x4) your job from 20+ years ago has secured your financial future for generations to come.”

Cynthia Erivo posed with her medal after completing the London Marathon on Sunday (local time). The Wicked star completed the 42km race in just 3 hours, 21 minutes and 40 seconds. In Wicked run time, that’s a full screening of Part 1, and the opening scene of For Good.

Fashion’s night of nights is just around the corner, with the annual Met Gala taking place in New York on Monday.

The dress code, “Fashion Is Art”, ties into the Met’s new “Costume Art” fashion exhibit, so expect another year of iconic red carpet moments, and another year of the straight men in your life… just not getting it.

New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (‘the Met’) showcases one exhibition from its Costume Institute per year.

Before a new exhibition is launched, it hosts a fundraising benefit – the Met Gala – on the first Monday in May, for around 500 guests (at a cost of roughly $75,000 per head).

The event has a practical purpose: to raise funds for the Costume Institute… but it’s better known around the world as a melting pot where celebrity, high fashion, culture, and art collide.

What happens inside is kept mostly under wraps from us mere mortals, with a no-phone/no social media policy once guests enter the museum.

The invite list is just as mysterious, but red carpet mainstays of previous years include the Kardashians, Sarah Jessica Parker, Rihanna, Gigi Hadid, Blake Lively, and Zendaya.

That being said, there are a few big names we know will be at the 2026 Met Gala.

Like us, Beyoncé has skipped the event for the past decade, but she’s finally coming back after being named as co-chair alongside Nicole Kidman, Venus Williams, and chairwoman/Vogue global content director/international fashion overlord Anna Wintour.

Met Gala co-chairs usually oversee everything from the interior design to what food is on the menu and who gets an invite.

Sabrina Carpenter, Doja Cat, Sam Smith, Zoë Kravitz, and Aussie actor Elizabeth Debicki will be in attendance after they were named as ambassadors of the Met Gala’s host committee.

As lead sponsors of the Met, billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his wife Lauren Sanchez Bezos also have a guaranteed invite.

Their role in the gala has drawn criticism, with activists calling on New Yorkers to boycott this year. Protest posters have been shared widely across the city, including some that say: “The Bezos Met Gala: Brought to you by worker exploitation,” right near the Met museum.

“Costume Art” is the theme of this year’s exhibition, and the accompanying gala dress code is “Fashion Is Art”. According to the Costume Institute, the idea is “to embrace the body, not to take it away as a way of elevating fashion to an art form”.

Made up of nearly 400 objects, the exhibition will pair garments from the Costume Institute “with paintings, sculptures, and other works spanning some 5,000 years of art history,” Vogue said.

“In turn, the dress code encourages attendees to consider the many ways that designers use the body as their blank canvas.”

Fashion commentators are predicting sculpted and statuesque silhouettes, ‘naked’ dresses, draping, and a celebration of the human form.

Vogue will livestream the 2026 Met Gala red carpet across its digital platforms on Monday from 6pm local time, which is 8am Tuesday morning AEST.

Reporting by Emma Gillespie.

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She’s baaaaaaacccckkkk! Yes I’m talking about Taylor Swift. 

No, not new music (sorry). This week, the pop megastar has been making headlines over an application to trademark her own voice. 

If successful, Swift’s filing could set a massive legal precedent about what parts of a musician’s image and sound can be co-opted by AI.

Don’t worry, you won’t need a law degree to understand it. You’ve got me!

Let’s get into it.

This week, Swift's company TAS Rights Management filed three individual trademark applications with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office – a federal body responsible for overseeing trademarks.

The first application was for a visual trademark of an iconic photograph you’ve almost definitely encountered before featuring Swift holding a pink guitar on stage at The Eras Tour (see above).

The two others are "sound marks". They cover her voice saying the phrases "Hey, it's Taylor Swift" and "Hey, it's Taylor." 

What is a sound mark, you ask? Well famous examples include Netflix's "tu-dum" intro sound (aka its ‘sonic logo’) and Homer Simpson's "D'oh!". A sound mark is a type of trademark that protects a sound as a brand identifier in the same way a logo trademark protects a visual one.

But attempting to trademark a celebrity's spoken voice? That’s new.

According to intellectual property attorney Josh Gerben, who first spotted the filings, that particular use of trademark law has not been tested in court before.

Traditional copyright laws, which protect artists' works from imitation, fail to guard against AI-generated content. 

Copyright law protects specific recordings. If someone takes one of Swift's songs and reproduces it without permission, that's a copyright violation.

But AI doesn't need to copy an existing recording to imitate a voice. It can generate entirely new content that mimics an artist's voice, creating a regulatory gap that copyright law can't fill.

Trademark law plugs that gap differently. While copyright stops identical uses, trademark stops anything "confusingly similar" to the registered mark, which is a much broader and more powerful standard in an AI world. 

So by registering "Hey, it's Taylor," Swift isn't just protecting those three words. She's potentially creating legal grounds to challenge any AI-generated audio that sounds like her.

Matthew McConaughey has already filed similar trademark applications over his catchphrase “alright alright alright”. 

The actor told the Wall Street Journal he made the filing to “create a clear perimeter around ownership with consent and attribution the norm in an AI world.”

Swift appears to be following the same playbook.

Swift's likeness has been consistently used without her consent across AI content, including by Meta chatbots and in sexually explicit deepfakes circulated online. 

In the lead-up to the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Donald Trump shared AI-generated images falsely suggesting Swift had endorsed him.

Swift posted on Instagram at the time, saying the incident “really conjured up [her] fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation.”

Honestly, nobody knows yet. The "trademark yourself" approach has not been fully tested in court with respect to AI. But the theory has teeth, according to Gerben.

“If a lawsuit were to be filed over an AI using Swift’s voice, she could claim that any use of her voice that sounds like the registered trademark violates her trademark rights,” he said.

The same theory applies for the attempt to trademark the image of Swift in her commonly worn tour jumpsuit.

The bet here is that trademark law, with its "confusingly similar" standard, could give celebrities a faster and broader path to enforcement than waiting for copyright law to catch up with rapidly-advancing AI technology.

Whether it holds up is a question for the courts.

Reporting by Elliot Lawry.