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Sony Music Africa to Offer Record Deals to Afrochella Contest Winners
Unsigned and emerging artists in Africa will soon be able to compete for global distribution deals and record contracts with Sony Music Africa through a new collaboration between the major label and the companies behind the Afrochella Festival in Ghana. Afrochella’s parent company, Culture Management Group, and media streaming service Audiomack, are teaming up with Sony Music Africa to expand the “Rising Star Stage” competition, which previously entitled winners to a chance to perform onstage at the festival. With Sony’s involvement, up to 10 prize winners chosen from a short list of 25 will be signed to distribution deals with Sony Music Africa, which will take their music out to the world, Sony says in a press release. The Grand Prize winner will secure an exclusive recording ...
Judge Says Slacker Must Pay $10M Unpaid Royalties, Despite Warning Of ‘Devastating’ Impact
A federal judge says he won’t undo his ruling that Slacker owes nearly $10 million in unpaid music royalties to SoundExchange, seemingly unmoved by the streamer’s warning that the ruling will have a “devastating” impact on the company’s finances. SoundExchange claims Slacker’s parent LiveOne has failed to pay royalties for years, and last month won a ruling requiring the streamer to hand over $9,765,396. Slacker said last month that the huge judgment could trigger financial ruin for the company – a warning SoundExchange urged the court to disregard. In a decision issued Wednesday, Judge André Birotte Jr. did exactly that. He ruled that the seven-figure judgment was simply the result of an agreement that Slacker itself had signed – and noted that the streamer was not actually legally disput...
Crypto scammers are using black market identities to avoid detection: CertiK
Crypto scammers have been accessing a “cheap and easy” black market of individuals willing to put their name and face on fraudulent projects — all for the low price of $8, blockchain security firm CertiK has uncovered. These individuals, described by CertiK as “Professional KYC actors” would, in some cases, voluntarily become the verified face of a crypto project, gaining trust in the crypto community prior to an “insider hack or exit scam.” Other uses of these KYC actors include using their identities to open up bank or exchange accounts on behalf of the bad actors. According to a Nov. 17 blog post, CertiK analysts were able to find over 20 underground marketplaces hosted on Telegram, Discord, mobile apps, and gig websites to recruit KYC actors for as low as $8 for simple “gigs” lik...
Twitter closes offices, staff resign while users eye decentralized options
Elon Musk has been shaking the Twitter tree since he took over the micro-blogging platform in late October. His latest move has resulted in an exodus of employees and office closures. Earlier this week, Musk issued an emailed ultimatum to Twitter staff saying that they need to commit to “working long hours at high intensity,” or clear their desks by Thursday, Nov. 17. A large number of them have taken the second option which is understood to include three months’ severance pay, resulting in the company temporarily closing its offices as hundreds of employees have walked out, according to reports. Twitter also announced it was temporarily suspending all badge access until Monday, Nov. 21, asking staff to “refrain from discussing confidential company information on social media, with the pre...
Metaverse ‘explosion’ will be driven by B2B, not retail consumers: KPMG partner
The Australian arm of Big Four accounting firm KPMG could soon be holding executive meetings and closing multi-million dollar deals with clients in the Metaverse, with the firm now exploring how the revolutionary technology can transform its business model. In a recent interview, KPMG’s James Mabbott, Partner in Charge at KPMG Futures said the firm sees real potential in the technology creating new and more efficient ways for businesses and consumers to interact with each other: “I think the really interesting applications are going to be in the business to business context […] And I think that I actually think that’s where the money is going to be [even] more so than the consumer driven participation.” Mabbott also stated that virtual interactions on Metaverse platforms could ...
Nifty News: Celebs lose big on BAYC, Meghan and Harry building a metaverse, and more.
Celebrities facing huge losses from BAYC NFTs The hype behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) over the last year resulted in many celebrities investing in the Ethereum-based nonfungible token (NFT) collection with many, such as singer Justin Bieber, paying top dollar. Bieber paid 500 Ether (ETH) for BAYC #3001 on Jan. 29, which at the time was valued at around $1.28 million, while the current top offer on the NFT cracks just over $69,500. According to data from NFT Price Floor, the floor price for the collection has fallen considerably since it peaked at 144.9 ETH on May. 1 this year, which at the time was worth around $396,760, to a current low of 48 ETH, valued at $58,589 at the time of writing. Many other celebs also rode the wave of hype that saw the Yuga Labs made NFTs become a “blue ...
Here’s how the CFTC could prevent the next FTX
FTX declared bankruptcy this month with $900 million in assets against $9 billion in liabilities. Its founder and former CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried, is being questioned by police in the Bahamas, and many customers are unable to withdraw their deposits. Its holdings of Serum’s SRM, a token Bankman-Fried developed, dropped from a value of more than $2 billion to less than $100 million. Things got worse over the weekend after FTX was apparently hacked, leading to the loss of an additional several hundred million. Some commentators are already calling it cryptocurrency’s “Lehman moment,” referring to the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers that signaled we were in a financial crisis. In the wake of this epic collapse, Congress should get its head out of the sand and pass the Digital Commodities...
US Sen. Warren and Durbin demand answers from Bankman-Fried and his successor at FTX
United States Senators Elizabeth Warren and Richard Durbin wrote to the former and current CEOs of FTX — Sam Bankman-Fried and John Jay Ray III, respectively — on Nov. 16 to ask for more information on the collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange. They made 13 requests for documents, lists and answers. “The public is owed a complete and transparent accounting of the business practices and financial activities leading up to and following FTX’s collapse,” the lawmakers wrote. They provided a summary of the major press coverage of the unfolding events and reconstructed a timeline from the media sources. Noting “the apparent lack of due diligence by venture capital and other big investment funds eager to get rich off crypto” among the issues they identified, they wrote: “These developments just...
FTX will be the last giant to fall this cycle: Hedge fund co-founder
While the FTX crisis is continuing to unfold, the former head of risk at Credit Suisse believes the exchange’s fall from grace should be the last catastrophic event — at least in this market cycle. CK Zheng, the former head of valuation risk at Credit Suisse and now co-founder of crypto hedge fund ZX Squared Capital said that FTX’s fall was part of a “deleveraging process” that began after the COVID-19 pandemic and further accelerated after the fall of Terra Luna Classic (LUNC), formerly Terra (LUNA). “When LUNA blew up a few months ago, I expected a huge amount of deleveraging process to kick in,” said Zheng, who then speculated that FTX should be last of the “bigger” players to get “cleaned up” during this cycle. Before its collapse, FTX was the third largest crypto exch...
Crypto industry was ‘judge, jury and executioner’ for FTX: Pompliano
Prolific podcaster and cryptocurrency investor Anthony Pompliano has not lost faith in people or the crypto industry despite the disappointing conduct of former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried. Bankman-Fried, once widely regarded as crypto’s “white knight” is now a pariah in the crypto industry due to — by his own admission — the “careless” mishandling of FTX customer funds and his ongoing strange behavior on Twitter. Appearing on Nov. 17 at the Texas Blockchain Summit, Pompliano was asked about how to ensure high-quality representation “in the halls of power,” responding that market forces eliminate bad people as quickly as bad businesses: “It might be a little counterintuitive, but the free market is a hell of a fucking referee. If you watch what just happened, this industry is who held the in...
Sensorium Teams Up With Polygon Studios To Accelerate The Development And Adoption Of Web3 Projects
Zug, Switzerland, 17th November, 2022, Chainwire Sensorium, the company behind the industry-leading Sensorium Galaxy metaverse, is pleased to announce that it is entering into a collaboration agreement with Polygon Studios. As part of this wide-ranging alliance, Polygon’s blockchain infrastructure will be crucial in underpinning and furthering Sensorium’s Web3 developments, supporting token and NFT-related features within the Sensorium Galaxy metaverse, SENSO dApp, and the recently announced UNDER project. The first Sensorium product to rely on Polygon’s infrastructure will be SENSO dApp — a Play-to-Earn tycoon game where players are tasked with scouting NFT artists, organizing metaverse music events and selling tickets in return for SENSO token rewards. “Polygon is a go-to hub for some of...
Heroic Story secures $6 million to build Web3 tabletop RPG world
Web3 gaming protocol Heroic Story raised $6 million in a seed round led by Upfront Ventures with participation from Multicoin Capital and Polygon Technology, the company announced on Nov. 17. The funds will be used to hire talent, market the live beta and develop on-chain technology for a massively multiplayer role-playing game (RPG) world, the company told Cointelegraph. The round brings Heroic Story’s total financing to $7.4 million. Other investors included strategic angels, such as a16z Games Fund One founding investor Jonathan Lai, Team Liquid CEO Steve Arhancet and Quantstamp CEO Richard Ma, alongside Miramax head of film Wolfgang Hammer and screenwriting duo Ryan and Kaz Firpo, who are cousins and co-writers of Marvel’s Eternals. “We fell in love with the vision for Heroic Sto...
