Ooshies, AI Music Bans and a Golf Brand's Worst Week: TWIE 151

Solo week. Alex is off carving up the slopes in New Zealand (allegedly back next week — you said that last week too), which means it's just Mal, a jam-packed lineup, and a moment to mark a brutal 48 hours for pop culture that took Dolly Parton, Tim Curry and Peter Cullen within days of each other.

The story everyone's already talking about: Woolworths' Ooshies giveaway added an estimated 1.5–2 percentage points to their sales growth in the first eight weeks of FY27, and dented Coles hard enough that a month of sales growth visibly slowed — all from a rubber toy clipped onto a $30 spend.

• Australia's music charts body ARIA has banned wholly AI-generated tracks from charts and ARIA Awards from 31 August, forcing a "substantially human-made" test after an AI-assisted Madonna cover cracked the top five.
• A 90-year-old Mitre 10 franchise in Jimboomba, Queensland has won a Federal Court costs order clearing the way to sue Bunnings over a store opening next door.
• Meta has agreed to pay up to $18 billion to settle a teen-safety case with 47 US states, with almost a third of that payment contingent on YouTube and TikTok matching its restrictions.
• Woolworths' Disney Ooshies promotion shifted genuine shopping behaviour — 39% of adults and 64% of parents with kids under 18 changed where they shopped to chase them — while raising real questions about plastic waste dressed up as recycling.
• Golf brand Callaway split from creator group Good Good within a day of a co-branded ad backlash, in what's shaping up as one of the cleanest brand safety case studies of the year.