business
The Legal Beat: Kanye’s Lawyers Cut Ties – Plus Slacker, Coachella and More
This is The Legal Beat, a weekly newsletter about music law from Billboard Pro, offering you a one-stop cheat sheet of big new cases, important rulings, and all the fun stuff in between. This week: Major law firms cut ties with Kanye West over his antisemitic comments, Slacker fights with SoundExchange over a huge royalties judgment, Coachella sues a nearby business called “Coachillin,” and much more. THE BIG STORY: Kanye West Is Running Out of Lawyers After a string of antisemitic statements earlier this month, Kanye West has lost nearly every aspect of his once-formidable business empire. His representatives at CAA have dropped him, and his signature fashion partnerships with Adidas, The Gap and Balenciaga have all been terminated. You can now add his lawyers to that list. Cadwalader Wic...
Music Catalogs Are Worth More as Streaming Grows — Here’s Why
The long-term potential of music streaming has had a growing influence on the price investors will pay for an artist or songwriter’s catalog. That’s according to a new paper titled How Streaming Has Impacted the Value of Music by Larry Miller, clinical professor and director of the music business program at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development. Miller, with the help of graduate students Felipe Garrido and Matt Palermo, found that streaming revenues were positively correlated with the multiples paid for music catalogs. Here, the term multiple refers to the acquisition price as a multiple of net publisher share (NPS), a publishing catalog’s annual royalties; or net label share (NLS), a recording catalog’s annual royalties. From 2011 to 202...
Yusuf/Cat Stevens Signs With WME
WME has signed Rock & Roll Hall of Famer Yusuf/Cat Stevens in all areas. Yusuf is embarking on a global tour in 2023 and is working on myriad other creative endeavors, including a new album that will mark his first set of new music since 2017’s Grammy-nominated The Laughing Apple. Over the last few years, Yusuf has focused on revisiting his catalog as projects reach their 50th anniversary. In 2020, he released a re-recorded version of 1970’s Tea for the Tillerman as Tea for The Tillerman 2 and put out a boxset heralding the album, which includes his breakthrough U.S. hit, “Wild World.” Following the release of 50th-anniversary boxsets for Mona Bone Jakon and Teaser and the Firecat, a newly remastered 50th-anniversary edition of his 1972...
Amazon Music Now Offers 100 Million Songs to Prime Members
Amazon Music will expand its ad-free offering for Prime members from 2 million songs to more than 100 million songs, the company announced on Tuesday (November 1). There is one caveat, however: Prime members can only listen on shuffle, unless they upgrade to Amazon Music Unlimited. Along with the increased access to music, Amazon announced that Prime members will also have access to a wide-selection of ad-free podcasts, plus a newly launched Podcast Previews feature that lets listeners easily test snippets of episodes to see if they like them. “When Amazon Music first launched for Prime members, we offered an ad-free catalog of 2 million songs, which was completely unique for music streaming at the time,” Steve Boom, vp of Amazon Music, said in a statement. “We continue… to bring eve...
Ex-WMG Innovation Chief Scott Cohen Named CEO of Music Investing Platform
Former Warner Music Group executive and the Orchard co-founder Scott Cohen said on Tuesday (Nov. 1) he is taking a new job as chief executive officer of a fintech platform aimed at selling fractional shares in song catalogs. Cohen, who stepped down from his role as chief innovation officer at WMG in September, said the aim of the new venture is to “fractionalize ownership of music royalties.” Fractional shares are a familiar concept in finance, and brokerages like Robinhood and Fidelity Investments sell them as a way to buy a slice of a share for less than the price of the whole stock. The market for buying and investing in music publishing rights has traditionally been open to only the world’s largest music companies and, more recently, money managers. Introducing fractional shares could ...
Fortune did not, in fact, favor the brave: Matt Damon’s Crypto.com TV spot turns 1
The crypto industry has had its share of issues with marketing, from projects many authorities labeled scams to high-profile branding with sports franchises, but one ad that has stood out came from crypto exchange Crypto.com featuring Hollywood star Matt Damon. Many have ridiculed the “fortune favors the brave” ad starring Damon since its release in October 2021, using the TV spot as a creative springboard to criticize the crypto space and celebrities supporting it. The creators of South Park aired two episodes and one two-part special poking fun at crypto users and the Crypto.com ad specifically. Late-night TV hosts including Stephen Colbert also targeted the ad spot with parodies and jokes following the market downturn in May. Still shot of Matt Damon in the Crypto.com TV spot, sinc...
The Ledger: Music Subscription Prices Barely Budged for a Decade. That’s Quickly Changing
The Ledger is a weekly newsletter about the economics of the music business sent to Billboard Pro subscribers. An abbreviated version of the newsletter is published online. Apple Music may have opened the floodgates on Monday when it announced that it will raise prices on its Apple Music subscription service, as well as its Apple TV+ streaming video on-demand service and its Apple One bundle of services (which includes Apple Music). Apple wasn’t the first music streaming company to broadly raise prices. Deezer started raising prices in France in January. In May, Amazon hiked prices for Prime members for Amazon Music Unlimited from $7.99 to $8.99 (or $79 to $89 if paid annually) and for the single-device plan (for Amazon’s Echo and Fire TV devices) from $3.99 to $4.99 per month. And ...
THORChain network resumes following 20-hour chain halt
Cross-chain exchange and proof-of-bond network THORChain announced it was once again “fully operational” after an outage of more than 20 hours In an Oct. 28 tweet, the THORChain team said the network was “back online and producing blocks” and had reenabled trading. The network was halted on Oct. 27 after the team said a bug had caused “non-determinism between individual nodes.” “Turns out to be string manipulation: code was pushing a cosmos.Uint (instead of a uint64) into a string, which causes the string to get the point of the big int instead of the actual value, causing the memo string to be different on different nodes,” said the THORChain team following the chain halt. “Didn’t see this in stagenet because the bad memo never gets written to disk/block, because it gets swapped immediate...
Lucian Grainge Says Slowing Ad Market Won’t Shake Universal Music
Universal Music Group on Thursday reported its fifth-straight quarter of revenue gains since its public spinoff from Vivendi last year, increasing revenue 13.3% as its many, varied business divisions helped offset slow-downs in areas sensitive to global economic uncertainty. On a call with analysts, UMG chairman and chief executive Lucian Grainge attributed the company’s strong quarter — coming amid a downturn in the advertising market — to its diversification strategy. Over Grainge’s 17-years at the helm, UMG has built dominant positions in multiple geographic markets and across nearly every major segment in music, making it less susceptible to “the inevitable ebbs and flows in revenue of any particular business,” he said. That helped UMG offset a slowdown in ad-supported streaming revenu...
Executive Turntable: Warner Records Appoints Marketing SVP; iHeartRadio Vet Adds Digital Music to Prez Purview
Shawnae Corbett-Rice was promoted to senior vp of marketing at Warner Records. Based in Los Angeles, she will continue to oversee marketing campaigns focused on artist development. She reports to executive vp of marketing & artist development Dionnee Harper. Jon Zellner was named president of programming operations and digital music for iHeartRadio, effective immediately. Zellner was previously president of programming operations. In the new role, Zellner will manage the programming, content and strategy for iHeartRadio’s digital channels and playlists while continuing to oversee iHeartMedia’s programming operations. In addition to running programming and strategy for the iHeartMedia custom and format center stations, he will continue to lead the company’s commercial production center,...
Visa’s trademark applications suggest more involvement in crypto space
Major credit card company Visa may be planning to explore digital wallet services based on two recent trademark applications. According to records submitted to the United States Patent and Trademark Office on Oct. 22, the Visa International Service Association filed two applications for its character mark to be used in software “to view, access, store, monitor, manage, trade, send, receive, transmit, and exchange” crypto assets and nonfungible tokens, or NFTs. The filings also suggested the credit card company may be exploring a move into the metaverse, with its namesake used in “virtual environments in which users can interact for recreational, leisure or entertainment purposes.” VISA has filed 2 trademark applications claiming plans for: ▶️ Managing Digital, Virtual, ...
LeBron James, Kevin Durant, Devin Booker and More Are Now Part-Owners of Mitchell & Ness
Fanatics has announced an expansion of new owners for its newly acquired Mitchell & Ness brand. Earlier this week, Fanatics owner Michael Rubin announced a list of new and familiar names to join the ownership group for the brand. Amongst those making an investment to Mitchell & Ness are major NBA and NFL players, as well as big names in the entertainment industry. LeBron James, Kevin Durant, Chris Paul, Devin Booker, CJ McCollum, James Harden, Joel Embiid, Odell Beckham Jr., Kevin Hart, Rich Paul, Rich Kleiman, Scooter Braun, Steve Stout, and DeSean Jackson are notable names that have joined the groups ownership expansion. The new group of partners together own 25% of Mitchell & Ness while Fanatics owns the remaining 75%. Fanatics partners with a long list of tastemakers and tr...
