Instead of the Kennedy Center revealing the names through a press release as usual, Trump announced the honorees himself during a Wednesday press conference at the site, where he was flanked by American flags and photo stands for each of the entertainers that were initially covered by red drapes. Unlike in his first term, when he didn’t even attend the honors ceremony, he announced that he would be hosting it later this year and that he had been deeply involved with the selection process. He also suggested he might choose himself for a future award.

The spectacle marked a new era for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which Trump has taken over by installing himself as chair and replacing the board of trustees with loyalists. He has even hinted he’d like to see the venue renamed the Trump/Kennedy Center.

Trump has made revamping the Kennedy Center — and what he calls its “woke” agenda — the center of an ongoing push to overhaul such cultural institutions as the National Endowment of the Humanities and the Smithsonian museums.

A bipartisan history

The Kennedy Center Honors were established in 1978 and have been given to a broad range of artists. Until Trump’s first term, presidents of both major political parties traditionally attended the annual ceremony, even when they disagreed politically with a given recipient.

Prominent liberals such as Barbra Streisand and Warren Beatty were honored during the administration of Republican George W. Bush, and a leading conservative, Charlton Heston, was feted during the administration of Democrat Bill Clinton.

At least some of this year’s winners have a history of backing Trump. Stallone is a prominent supporter who has called Trump “the second George Washington” and was named by the president, along with Jon Voight and Mel Gibson, as a Hollywood special ambassador. Founding Kiss member Ace Frehley endorsed Trump in 2020, calling him “the strongest leader we’ve got.” Meanwhile, fellow Kiss musician Paul Stanley has often criticized the Republican president, notably his resistance to accepting his election loss to Democrat Joe Biden in 2020.

“After numerous audits, debunked claims of rampant voter tampering, dead people voting & the countless cases thrown out by Trump appointed judges & others… When is not getting the hoped for result accepted?? Biden won,” Stanley tweeted at the time.

All of the nominees have had substantial, even iconic, careers. Stallone’s portrayals of the underdog boxer Rocky Balboa and Vietnam veteran John J. Rambo are fixtures in popular culture. Strait’s dozens of chart-topping hits, including “Check Yes or No” and “I Cross My Heart,” have led to his nickname the King of Country Music. Few bands have sold more records or more famously covered their faces in makeup than Kiss, members of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Crawford is a celebrated stage actor who won a Tony for his starring role in “The Phantom of the Opera,” and Gaynor is a leading star from the 1970s disco era whose “I Will Survive” is a feminist anthem.

Breaking with longtime tradition, none of the honorees was from the fields of dance or classical musical.

This year’s Kennedy Center Honors ceremony will take place on Dec. 7 and will air on CBS and stream on Paramount+.

A personal approach

Historically, a bipartisan advisory committee selects the recipients, who over the years have ranged from George Balanchine and Tom Hanks to Aretha Franklin and Stephen Sondheim. Trump said Wednesday that he was “about 98% involved” in choosing the honorees and conferred with such handpicked Kennedy Center officials as Ric Grenell and Sergio Gor. He said he “turned down plenty” of names, saying those individuals were “too woke” or too liberal. He described the artists he announced on Wednesday as “great people.”

Besides naming himself chairman and remaking the board, Trump has indicated he’d take over decisions regarding programming at the center and vowed to end events featuring performers in drag.

The steps have drawn further criticism from some artists. In March, the producers of “Hamilton” pulled out of staging the Broadway hit musical in 2026, citing Trump’s aggressive takeover of the institution’s leadership.

House Republicans added an amendment to a spending bill Trump signed into law in July to rename the Kennedy Center’s Opera House after first lady Melania Trump, but that venue has yet to be renamed. Maria Shriver, a niece of the late President Kennedy, a Democrat, has criticized as “insane” a separate House proposal to rename the entire center after Trump.

___

Italie reported from New York. Associated Press writer Darlene Superville in Washington contributed to this report.

The sync licensing business has always been fragmented, inefficient, and frustratingly analog in a digital world.

SourceAudio is trying to change all that.

The Los Angeles-based company, which bills itself as “the music industry’s most widely adopted sync platform,” is quietly revolutionizing how music is licensed for commercial use — and the numbers support its bold claims.

In 2024 alone, SourceAudio’s platform powered over 6,000 sync briefs, facilitated 23 million music searches, and processed a staggering 59 million downloads.

It currently connects 34 million hosted songs with over 600,000 professional users, growing by approximately 100,000 songs and 1,000 new users each week.

The firm’s client roster reads like a who’s who of media giants: Netflix, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount, and iHeart are among the 140+ broadcast and streaming networks that rely on SourceAudio’s infrastructure.

Some networks average around 10,000 song searches per week on the platform, says SourceAudio, with deals ranging from individual syncs at around $2,000 each to annual blanket agreements exceeding $1 million.

This scale has translated into serious growth. Just last week, SourceAudio was named to the prestigious Inc. 5000 list, ranking #42 in the Media, Arts & Entertainment category, based on 57% revenue growth from 2021 to 2024.

Impressively, this ranking doesn’t include income from the firm’s newest venture: AI music dataset licensing, which has already generated millions of dollars in new annual recurring revenue since launching in May 2025.

In fact, SourceAudio says that as of July 2025, it’s already surpassed its total 2024 annual revenue, putting it firmly on track for 100%+ YoY growth in 2025.

While the music industry continues to grapple with questions around artificial intelligence and fair compensation, SourceAudio has positioned itself as an ethical bridge between AI companies seeking training data and rightsholders demanding fair payment.

With 14 million tracks now opted into SourceAudio’s AI dataset licensing program, the firm has struck partnerships with companies including ElevenLabs, Musical AI, and Wondera.

Co-founded by Andrew Harding, SourceAudio has grown from a sync platform serving production music libraries to what the company describes as “market-making infrastructure for the music business”.

Tellingly, SourceAudio sees opportunities where others see problems.

While the industry frets about AI replacing human creativity, SourceAudio is building licensing infrastructure for it. While others struggle with sync’s traditional inefficiencies, it’s eliminating intermediaries.

Below, MBW speaks with Harding about building licensing infrastructure at scale, why AI represents expansion rather than threat, and how a platform processing nearly 60 million downloads annually is working to ensure smaller independent artists get a fair share of the pie…

SourceAudio has been described as “the music industry’s most widely adopted sync platform.” Can you quantify that claim for us? How many sync deals do you host a year – and of what value?

SourceAudio has become the undisputed leader in commercial music licensing infrastructure. In 2024, we powered over 6,000 sync briefs, 23 million music searches, 59 million downloads, and 100,000 third-party syncs — more than any other platform globally.

Our network now connects 34 million songs with over 600,000 professional users, growing by ~100,000 songs and 1,000 new users each week.

We’re the platform of choice for over 140 broadcast and streaming networks, including Netflix, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount, iHeart, and many others.

“Our deals vary in scale, from annual blanket agreements exceeding $1M in radio to ad agencies doing an average of 40 individual syncs per month at rates around $2,000 each.”

The majority of these networks average around 10,000 song searches per week on the platform. Our deals vary in scale, from annual blanket agreements exceeding $1 million in radio to ad agencies doing an average of 40 individual syncs per month at rates around $2,000 each.

This scale produces millions in annual recurring licensing revenue and fuels our current growth rate of >100% YoY.

We expect to double platform revenue in 2025 and surpass $100M ARR within 3–5 years as we expand into AI licensing and new digital channels — leveraging the same infrastructure that already dominates sync.

You’ve implemented natural language search and AI-powered metadata generation. Can you walk us through how these tools are changing the way music supervisors and creatives discover and license music? What efficiency gains are you seeing?

Our AI-driven tools empower a wide range of media buyers — from TV networks and streaming platforms to radio stations and global ad agencies — to search music using natural language prompts and audio similarity recognition, significantly enhancing discovery speed and accuracy.

Our users are finding relevant tracks up to 75% faster, streamlining workflows, and increasing deal conversion rates, reinforcing SourceAudio as their first stop for every new music search.

SourceAudio operates as both a white-label B2B platform and connects buyers and sellers in one ecosystem. This network-based approach is described as “revolutionizing the music-for-commercial media supply chain.” Can you explain how this model differs from traditional licensing approaches and what advantages it creates?

The music industry’s discovery, delivery, and rights clearance processes are fragmented, often requiring multiple intermediaries that create inefficiencies and delays.

Our weekly growth of 100,000 new songs and 1,000 new professional users is strong validation that SourceAudio is solving this problem.

As the system of record and source of truth for the vast majority of the 3,000+ [rightsholder] catalogs on our platform, we have full visibility into both sound recording and publishing metadata across all of them.

By connecting rights holders directly with buyers in real-time, we eliminate intermediaries and speed up the process, creating a seamless, transparent, and scalable platform that drives efficiency and accelerates value creation for all parties.

Looking at the wider sync business, what problems do you see and how can SourceAudio turn them into opportunities?

The sync business is clearly constrained by inefficiencies at the intersection of music discovery and rights clearance.

SourceAudio addresses these challenges by providing a streamlined licensing pipeline, ensuring rights are pre-cleared and easily accessible — exactly what major licensees increasingly require. Our platform facilitated over 59 million downloads last year for sync, giving us unparalleled insight into search, playlists, downloads, performance, and usage data across the ecosystem.

These analytics, along with our deep understanding of what licensees seek and what is being licensed and performed, empower us to continuously innovate and better support both catalog owners and buyers on the platform. Further, while the sync business has been the historical backbone of SourceAudio, the exponential growth in the number of rightsholders and licensees on our platform continues to create new monetization opportunities for everyone in our ecosystem.

You’re seeing the convergence of traditional sync licensing with new applications like AI training datasets. What other emerging use cases for music licensing are you preparing for, and how is SourceAudio evolving to meet these new demands?

As global ad agencies, radio groups, and TV/media networks require more music faster than ever before, SourceAudio is strategically focused on empowering this shift.

These major licensees are increasingly adopting AI for video and voice, driving an explosion of new commercially-driven content, and pairing music with this surge in content creation is a major growth area for the industry.

“Major licensees are increasingly adopting AI for video and voice, driving an explosion of new commercially-driven content.”

Our platform is evolving to meet the growing demand for rapid music discovery and licensing, positioning us to support these licensees in their expanding needs.

By enhancing our ability to handle dynamic, multi-use licensing across traditional and emerging digital platforms, we ensure catalog owners can monetize their music seamlessly across every new channel.

You recently announced a significant partnership with ElevenLabs as their preferred music licensing partner for AI training. With 14 million songs currently opted into your AI dataset licensing program, what revenue streams is this creating for rightsholders? How does it work?

Through our AI dataset licensing program, rightsholders earn income when their fully-cleared music is used to train models. AI companies building music products need three things: 1) fully-cleared music on both sides, 2) premium quality music with consistent, comprehensive metadata, and 3) massive volume that no individual catalog can fulfill.

“This opens up a significant new and inherently recurring revenue stream for rights holders.”

With 14 million tracks opted into our program, our catalog provides AI companies like ElevenLabs with a comprehensive, rights-cleared dataset, enabling scalable, ethical AI training. This opens up a significant new and inherently recurring revenue stream for rights holders, ensuring they’re fairly compensated for the value their music contributes to AI development.

With the likes of Suno and Udio allegedly training on uncleared music, how do you see AI licensing evolving as a business model? What needs to change?

AI licensing must prioritize transparency, control, and fair compensation for intellectual property.

By creating a viable, market-driven licensing solution that addresses the core needs of AI companies — cleared music, premium quality, and massive volume — early movers who once claimed ‘fair use’ have found their position increasingly untenable.

“early movers [in music AI] who once claimed ‘fair use’ have found their position increasingly untenable.”

SourceAudio sets the standard for ethical AI integration, ensuring proper licensing and compensation for music used in AI training. As AI companies and music rights holders collaborate to establish clear, standardized licensing practices, the business model will continue to evolve, safeguarding creators’ rights while meeting the growing demand for music in AI development.

We’re committed to making a steady flow of these opportunities available to the catalogs on our platform, ensuring they benefit from this new revenue stream.

There’s been considerable debate about AI’s impact on the production music industry specifically. Some fear it could devalue or replace human-created production music. What’s your view & how is SourceAudio positioning itself in this landscape?

We see AI enhancing, not replacing, the production music landscape. These new products and opportunities are shown to us first-hand, and here’s what we see: Not every AI company is building generative music applications in the way most of us react when we hear “AI” and “music” together in the same sentence. Many Platforms and AI companies are empowering music discovery, classification, recommendations, contextual pairing of catalogs to video and images, and offering incredible new music production tools for artists.

“We see AI enhancing, not replacing, the production music landscape.”

These innovations will ultimately enable artists to produce and monetize even more human-generated music, driving new revenue through both historical and emerging channels. SourceAudio views AI as a powerful tool to expand creative possibilities, all while respecting and valuing human-created music, and we’re positioned as a partner to both AI companies and production music creators, ensuring fair compensation for creators while embracing these exciting innovations.

Your platform offers direct DSP distribution alongside sync licensing, essentially competing with some of the services that Downtown/FUGA provides. How do you differentiate SourceAudio’s distribution offering, and do you see Universal‘s potential control of FUGA as a competitive threat or opportunity?

At SourceAudio, we offer DSP distribution on a very limited basis, and only for specific programs. Our primary focus is on sync and emerging opportunity licensing, where we differentiate by providing a streamlined, rights-cleared pipeline for catalogs, labels, media, and technology companies.

As for Universal’s potential control of FUGA, we see it as an opportunity to further differentiate our platform, especially by focusing on the unique needs of music licensing beyond the DSPs and creating a seamless, transparent marketplace for both rightsholders and buyers.

As a platform that facilitates so much music ‘buying and selling’ — thus seeing the true value of music in a healthy marketplace — are there any areas of the music business today where you think music isn’t getting fair value?

While many focus on emerging value gaps, we’re addressing a long-standing issue in traditional broadcast: the systemic underpayment of royalties to non-feature music rightsholders on U.S. radio.

After tracking tens of millions of radio performances over the past 5 years, we’ve found that less than 0.1% of non-feature music performances are paid, with detailed data backing this.

Using our technology to monitor music at scale, we’re collaborating with publishers on our platform to close this gap and ensure fair compensation for rightsholders, both in broadcast and emerging digital spaces like AI and streaming.

Looking ahead, where do you see the biggest growth opportunities for SourceAudio? Which markets could you expand in or move into?

We’re seeing firsthand how music licensing and usage are rapidly expanding as content creation grows exponentially. At the same time, the world’s largest licensees require streamlined licensing pipelines and diverse, pre-cleared music mixes that align with the speed and volume they demand.

This presents a unique value proposition for SourceAudio and the catalogs who utilize our platform. Our ability to offer vast volumes of music and cleared rights to meet the varied needs of broadcasters, AI companies, and global creative agencies underscores this opportunity. As our partners often put it, “You’re like Merlin in some ways – creating favorable term licensing deals across many catalogs and labels – but you also serve as our music delivery pipeline and you track and report on its usage.”

We’re building the market-making infrastructure for the music business — connecting supply and demand, facilitating the distribution rails, and aggregating the data layer.

Today, we are a very significant player in sync and radio; tomorrow, we’ll leverage the same infrastructure across new verticals like AI, retail/experiential, gaming, fitness, social platforms, and emerging immersive media, both in the U.S. and internationally.

Our pipeline is designed to activate each new vertical within weeks, with minimal marginal cost, transforming SourceAudio into a high-revenue platform with many recurring revenue streams for rightsholders to tap into. As we continue to execute on this strategy, we are watching ourselves become an even more critical source of revenue for rightsholders and the industry at large.

The last question we regularly ask: If you could change one thing about the music industry right here and now, what would it be and why?

Paying major artists/publishers fairly AND paying smaller independent artists/publishers fairly isn’t mutually exclusive – both can happen at the same time.

We see the undervaluation and underpayment of smaller independent music in real-time through our data, and we’re actively working to address this in multiple ways.

The more music catalogs that tap into our collective licensing opportunities, the harder it becomes to overlook fair compensation for the entire group. We’re positioned to provide exceptional music for both today’s and tomorrow’s emerging markets, demand, and opportunities… and to generate fair compensation and transparency for everyone who joins us.Music Business Worldwide

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Cava has invested $5 million in Hyphen—a foodservice platform that automates culinary operations such as meal production at assembly stations—and committed an additional $5 million, subject to terms. The $25 million funding round was also backed by Chipotle’s Cultivate Next venture fund, which previously invested $15 million in July 2024.

“We believe that technology should enhance the human experience, not replace it, and Hyphen’s equipment does just that,” Cava CFO Tricia Tolivar told me. After months of evaluating Hyphen and similar concepts, the company is confident this partnership is a smart move, she added.

Deloitte’s recent “State of AI in Restaurants” survey—based on interviews with 375 restaurant executives across 11 countries—found that 8 in 10 expect to increase their AI investments in the next fiscal year. Casual dining brands, in particular, prioritize benefits such as optimizing food preparation.

At Cava, Hyphen will be used on what Tolivar calls the “second-make line”—a back-of-house station where staff prepare all bowls and pitas for digital delivery and pickup. The system lets employees assemble a bowl or pita on the top level while automatically producing additional bowls below from the same ingredients, boosting speed, throughput, and digital order accuracy, she said. “Most importantly, it’s really about making our team members’ lives easier,” Tolivar said. Cava is still testing the technology and expects to roll it out in a few months.

‘Whitespace opportunity’

For its fiscal second quarter ended July 13, Cava reported on Tuesday revenue of $278.2 million, up 20.3% year over year. About 37% of sales were digital. Same-restaurant sales rose 2.1%, below analyst estimates, but the company outperformed the broader industry trend of same-store declines. Cava lowered its same-store sales forecast to 4%–6%, down from 6%–8%, while maintaining expectations for restaurant-level profit margins of 24.8%–25.2% and adjusted EBITDA of $152 million–$159 million.

The company added 16 net new restaurants in the quarter, bringing its total to 398—a 16.7% increase from last year. Cava raised its 2025 net new openings forecast to 68–70, up from 64–68, and continues to target 1,000 locations by 2032.

Alex Fascino, an equity analyst at CFRA Research, commented on Cava’s expansion plans in a Tuesday research note. “In our view, this strategic pivot toward prioritizing expansion over same-store sales growth validates the substantial whitespace opportunity and unit growth potential in the current market backdrop,” he wrote.

Cava’s 2025 new-restaurant class is on track to deliver average unit volumes (AUVs) above $3 million, ahead of expectations. Overall AUV for Q2 2025 was $2.9 million, up from $2.7 million a year earlier. 

The AUV or average sales for each location is increasing across the country, Tolivar said. “Not only are you seeing it in Detroit, Indianapolis, and Chicago, but in smaller cities like Lafayette, Louisiana or Burlington, North Carolina.”  

Tolivar also revealed a new flavor of the Cava’s popular pita chips—cinnamon sugar served with a side of honey. 

“One of the best parts about being in the office is spending time with our chefs in the kitchen,” she said. “I’ve been part of this journey and the evolution, and I think they’ve nailed it.”

Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com

Leaderboard

Fortune 500 Power Moves

Aunoy Banerjee was appointed EVP and CFO of Citizens Financial Group, Inc. (No. 341), effective Oct. 24. As previously announced, current CFO John Woods will depart the bank on Aug. 15. Chris Emerson, EVP and head of corporate planning and enterprise finance, will serve as CFO during the interim period.  Banerjee joins Citizens from Barclays, where he currently serves as CFO of Barclays Bank PLC, leading a multifunctional team.  Before Barclays, Banerjee served in finance and transformation roles at State Street over eight years, most recently as head of investments and third-party management and chair of State Street India. He also served as chief transformation officer.  Banerjee previously spent 11 years at Citi in several roles, including business unit CFO for Capital Markets and Securities Services.

Every Friday morning, the weekly Fortune 500 Power Moves column tracks Fortune 500 company C-suite shifts—see the most recent edition.

More notable moves

 Aric McKinnis was promoted to SVP and CFO of FormFactor, Inc. (Nasdaq: FORM). McKinnis succeeds Shai Shahar, who resigned from these positions effective Aug. 8. Shahar will serve as an executive advisor through Dec. 31. McKinnis, who joined FormFactor in August 2019, serves as its VP and corporate controller and was previously corporate controller at MKS Instruments. Earlier, he served in various external audit roles at Deloitte, including audit manager

David Hedley was appointed CFO of Bramshill Investments, an alternative asset management firm. Hedley has been working as the firm’s chief strategy officer since 2021. He replaces the firm’s former CFO, Gina Cifello, who retired earlier this year. Hedley has over 34 years of experience. Before joining Bramshill, he was a principal and senior managing director at Ernst & Young Capital Advisors, where he led the Technology Investment Banking Group. Prior to EY, he was a senior investment banker at Canaccord Genuity, UBS Investment Bank, Thomas Weisel Partners and Merrill Lynch. 

Big Deal

According to July inflation data, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose 0.2% month over month, and 2.7% year over year—matching June’s annual pace. Core inflation, which excludes food and energy, edged higher to 3.1% annually, remaining well above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target. Flat headline inflation and declining energy prices fueled expectations for a potential rate cut in September. However, analysts cautioned that persistent service-sector costs and possible future tariff impacts could limit further easing in 2025. While markets rallied on the data, Fed officials indicated they remain focused on upcoming jobs reports before making decisions on additional cuts, Fortune reported. 

Going deeper

“Businesses of all sizes should invest in ‘double literacy’ for their employees, and themselves,” Walther writes. “Beyond AI literacy, this is the time to develop a solid understanding of our human skillset, and how it is impacted by the growing artificial treasure chest.”

Overheard

“I disdain corporate speak and owe more than the standard ‘I want to spend more time with my family and Lauren is a great visionary product-centric strategic operator.'”

—Life360 co-founder Chris Hulls wrote in a sign-off blog post. Hulls ignored legal advice and the boilerplate, “I want to spend more time with my family,” in an announcement about why he’s leaving the CEO role, Fortune reported.