Production company Seaview announced the one-time-only streaming performance of 'Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical' slated for New Year's Day, BBC reports. The musical will feature Wayne Brady as Django, Tituss Burgess as Remy, Adam Lambert as Emile, Kevin Chamberlin as Gusteau, André De Shields as Ego, Andrew Barth Feldman as Linguini, Priscilla Lopez as Mabel, Ashley Park as Colette, Owen Tabaka as Young Ego, and Mary Testa as Skinner. It was collectively created by TikTok members. 'Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical', in support of the Actors Fund, will stream on Jan. 1 (at 4 PM in California, 1 AM Jan. 2 in Paris, and 5 AM in Peking) for 72 hours only.

Armando Manzanero, the acclaimed Mexican songwriter and performer, has died aged 85 from Covid-19, CNN reports. Manzanero’s romantic crooner songs, sometimes translated into English, were performed by artists including Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and Perry Como. He has written more than 400 songs and released more than 30 albums.

Venezuelan conductor and violinist Gustavo Dudamel, 39-year-old music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, has premiered his virtual reality film 'Symphony' in Madrid. It took four years and the efforts of 250 people to produce the innovative project that's essentially happening in two huge white trailers. The film is split into two, 12-minute sections. The first, shown on a giant screen, follows three young musicians in Spain, the US and Colombia as they practise their instruments. For the second, visitors are invited into the other trailer, given a virtual reality headset and headphones and they suddenly become part of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, get trapped inside a violin and then fly through the constituent parts of a trumpet. The project will visit 100 towns and cities across Spain and Portugal on a 10-year tour.

Taylor Swift holds the Billboard 200 chart top spot for a second week with her album 'Evermore', as the set earned 169,000 equivalent album units in the U.S. in the week ending Dec. 24, as Billboard reports. Swift's sales were aided by the arrival of the album on CD on Dec. 18. Paul McCartney’s new 'McCartney III' debuts at No. 2 with 107,000 equivalent album units, with 32,000 copies sold on vinyl, the third-largest sales week for a vinyl album (only Jack White and Pearl Jam had stronger vinyl weeks years ago).

Tony Rice, a "giant of the acoustic guitar", and "the master bluegrass picker", has died at the age of 69 on Christmas morning, NPR reports. Rice, famous for the quick, fluid sounds was "the king of the flatpicked flattop guitar... I don’t know if a person can make anything more beautiful", Jason Isbell writes on his Twitter. Ricky Skaggs, who had performed and recorded with Rice, called him “the single most influential acoustic guitar player in the last 50 years”. Other tributes came from musician Béla Fleck and the comedian and longtime banjo player Steve Martin. Rice released dozens of albums, and he played with everyone from Jerry Garcia to Dolly Parton and received many honours.

Navy Blue released his new song '1491' featuring Yasiin Bey (fka Mos Def); Deftones singer Chino Moreno and Far guitarist Shaun Lopez have resurrected ✞✞✞ (Crosses) with a first new track from the project in six years - an 80s synth-pop cover of Cause & Effect’s 'The Beginning of the End'; Eddie Vedder released an EP which includes an acoustic cover of Bruce Springsteen's 'Future Days'.

BBC aired a lovely Christmas story about northern lights turned into music. The two people behind it are biologist Karin Lehmkuhl Bodony who lives in Alaska, and Alaskan composer Matthew Burtner, who works with natural sounds and scientific environmental data to make a piece of music derived from the sounds of the aurora.

Kanye West released a surprise EP 'Emmanuel' performed by Sunday Service on Christmas Day, Rolling Stone reports. The new project, executive produced and composed by West, arrives as a "celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ". It's five tracks of acapella songs in Latin.

The Neverland ranch of the late Michael Jackson has been sold to billionaire Ron Burkle, a former friend of Jackson, for $22m, a quarter of its initial asking price of $100m. The 2,700-acre (1,100 hectare) compound in Los Olivos, California has been rebranded as Sycamore Valley Ranch and has undergone extensive redevelopment since Jackson's death. The businessman saw the investment as a land banking opportunity, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Husband-and-wife duo LadBaby topped the UK 2020 Official Christmas Number 1 with their latest song 'Don’t Stop Me Eatin’'. The single scored 158,000, the biggest opening week for a single this year. Money raised from the single goes to foodbank charity The Trussell Trust. LadBaby now match a record jointly held by The Beatles and Spice Girls, the only other acts who can lay claim to a trio of consecutive Christmas Number 1s.