business
JPMorgan secures DeFi partnership in Singapore as crypto giants leave for Dubai
The Monetary Authority of Singapore is partnering with JPMorgan Chase to lead a pilot program exploring the DeFi niche The move is an initiative to explore the economic potential and value-adding use cases of crypto by the central bank of Singapore The project involves creation of tokenised bonds and deposits in a liquidity pool for DeFi applications The Monetary Authority of Singapore recently announced Project Guardian, a pilot digital asset program to examine the potential of tokenisation of bonds on public blockchains. The project intends to establish a liquidity pool of tokenised bonds and deposits. Involved would be trusted financial players who will serve as trust anchors, including JP Morgan Chase & Co, DBS Bank Ltd, and digital asset venture Marketnode. Project Guardian ...
Kenyan-based energy company offers bitcoin miners reserve geothermal power
The country’s biggest energy producer is luring bitcoin miners as it seeks to be a trailblazer in the continent’s growing crypto space The company also hopes to capture the attention of top mining firms in Europe and America that could tap the massive reserves within the country Crypto mining has come under harsh criticism for the massive electricity used to generate new coins and verify blockchain transactions. The annual energy consumption in the crypto mining industry is estimated to be nearly 119 Terawatt hours. This, if quantified, exceeds the energy consumption of the Netherlands, with only about 30 other countries having a higher consumption, according to data from the Cambridge Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index (CBECI). KenGen, an energy producer in Kenya, has seen an opportun...
The Ledger: Music Companies That Didn’t Go Public Missed a Crucial Window
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. If a music company was thinking about going public last year and didn’t, it may have already missed its opportunity – at least for the foreseeable future. Since Universal Music Group went public on Sept. 21, 2021, the S&P 500 is down 5.9% and the tech-heavy Nasdaq is down 18.5%. From that date to the end of 2021, the markets rose 9.4% and 6.3%, respectively, and it looked like UMG might have left money on the table. But in 2022, stock prices turned south due to a combination of factors – namely rising interest rates and high inflation – and recession fears have multiplied. With the U.S. and other major economies on ...
Mariah Carey Accused of Stealing ‘All I Want for Christmas is You’ in $20M Lawsuit
Mariah Carey is being sued for $20 million by a Mississippi artist who claims the singer stole her perennial holiday blockbuster “All I Want for Christmas is You” from him and denied him his rightful profits from the song. In the complaint, which was filed on Friday (June 3) in Louisiana district court by attorneys Douglas Schmidt and Andrew Abrams, Vince Vance (née Andy Stone) says Carey and her “All I Want” co-writer Walter Afanasieff willfully infringed his copyright of the song and have been unjustly enriching themselves ever since. Afanasieff and Sony Music, which released “All I Want for Christmas is You” on Columbia Records, are named as co-defendants in the suit, along with Sony Corp. of America. Described as a “self-employed artist,” Vance says he co-wrote the song of the same nam...
New York State to Ban Hidden Fees on Concert Tickets
New York legislation requiring ticketing companies to display “all-in” ticket prices now awaits Gov. Kathy Hochul’s signature after passing the state senate on Thursday and the assembly on Friday (June 3). Those and other new rules are meant to bring “honesty” into the ticket market, the bill’s sponsor, James Skoufis (D-Hudson Valley), chair of the Senate Investigations and Government Operations Committee, tells Billboard. Hochul must sign the bill before the existing law expires on July 1. Most notably, the bill requires primary or resale web pages for events in New York to disclose an “all-in” price that includes the ticket price inclusive of all ancillary fees, and show “in a clear and conspicuous manner” the portion of the price that represents a service charge or any other fee. The fi...
The Changing World Of: Record Label Streaming
In 1999, Pavement put out the single “Spit On a Stranger,” pairing it with the B-side track “Harness Your Hopes” as a CD-only release. A decade later, in 2008, the band’s 1997 album Brighten The Corners was released in expanded form to digital retailers like Apple’s iTunes Store, complete with bonus tracks and B-Sides from those sessions, including “Harness Your Hopes,” which appeared digitally for the first time. And that’s where the journey for many of those songs would have ended: as footnotes and rarities for collectors and superfans. But the rise of streaming and social media changed all that. In 2017, for reasons that are still a little mysterious to both the band and its label Matador, “Harness Your Hopes” began to explode on Spotify, leaping into the top spot among Pavement’s most-...
Did Angel Olsen Just Show the Music Industry How to Make Vinyl Green?
Could there be a simpler way for the music industry to go green? While acts like Coldplay and Justin Bieber have been focused on bicycle-powered stadium shows and kinetic dancefloors, for her new album Big Time (out Friday on Jagjaguwar) Angel Olsen took a more straightforward approach that’s replicable for artists of all sizes. Each vinyl or CD copy of the album purchased from her label’s website has carbon offsets built into the pricing, meaning the environmental impact that went into producing — and will go into consuming — the vinyl album (for $1 each) or CD (50 cents each) is effectively neutralized. All the proceeds from these surcharges go to Native, a public benefit corporation specializing in carbon offsets, which will use the money to purchase carbon offsets supporting the Medfor...
Just A Gent Signs Global Administration Deal With Angry Mob
Australian electronic artist and producer Just A Gent is the latest addition to the Angry Mob Music Group roster, Billboard can exclusively reveal. Hailing from Newcastle, New South Wales, the electro music-maker (real name Jacob Grant) has been releasing music as Just A Gent since 2013, and has amassed more than 300 million streams with such cuts as “Limelight (NGHTMRE Remix),” “Rolling Dice,” “The Change (featuring DMA’S) [Remix],” “Iris in the Dark,” and others. His 2016 cover of Kid Cudi’s “Day N Nite” for triple j’s Like A Version series has garnered almost 3 million plays. [embedded content] Over the years, he’s had nods from some of the top guns in electronic music, from Skrillex to Diplo, Dillon Francis, What So Not, and others, and dropped his debut full-length album project Plane...
Event & Arena Marketing Conference Returns to Honor SoFi Stadium’s Vanessa Kromer
The Event & Arena Marketing Conference is returning after a two-year pandemic pause. This year, EAMC will honor Vanessa Kromer from SoFi Stadium with its top honor — the 2022 Gigi Award of Excellence — named after the late Gigi Pilhofer, one of the conference’s founders. Kromer is the former EAMC president and a Hall of Famer currently serving as senior director of publicity at SoFi Stadium, YouTube Theater and Hollywood Park in Inglewood, Calif., and has actively contributed to the conference for more than 20 years. Kromer previously worked at Nederlander Concerts in Los Angeles. During her tenure at EAMC, she has hosted conferences in Anaheim (1999) and Los Angeles (2015), served as the president and v.p. of agenda, served as a board member, and created the EAMC Awards. Kosha Irby fr...
Sevenn Files Copyright Claims Against Alok in Brazilian Court
Dance music producers Sean and Kevin Brauer are formally pursuing copyright claims for 19 songs they say they worked on for the Brazilian DJ Alok over five years, for which they say they were denied proper credit. In a filing in a São Paulo civil court last month, the Brauer brothers, who have performed as the dance duo Sevenn, say they want the court to initiate a technical review of the authorship of the releases, which include some of Alok’s better-known songs, including “Favela” featuring Ina Wroldson, Alok and his brother Bhaskar’s “Fuego,” and a remix of Mick Jagger’s “Gotta Get A Grip.” The songs were produced while the Brauers — who are Brazilian-American dual nationals — were living mostly in Brazil, but their Rio de Janeiro-based attorney Eduardo Senna says that the brothers coul...
Facebook’s Longtime COO Sheryl Sandberg Steps Down
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Sheryl Sandberg, the No. 2 executive at Facebook owner Meta, is stepping down. Sandberg has served as chief operating officer at the social media giant for 14 years. She joined from Google in 2008, four years before Facebook went public. “When I took this job in 2008, I hoped I would be in this role for five years. Fourteen years later, it is time for me to write the next chapter of my life,” Sandberg wrote on her Facebook page Wednesday. Sandberg has led Facebook — now Meta’s — advertising business and was responsible for nurturing it from its infancy into an over $100 billion-a-year powerhouse. She’s leaving Meta in the fall and will continue to serve on the company’s board. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in his own Facebook post that Javier Olivan will serve as Meta’...
MoneyGram partners with Stellar to build a stablecoin-fiat transfer platform
The US-based financial service company is intent on capitalising on emerging market’s potential as most remittance recipients are out of the country The growth in demand for stablecoins matched with the increase in supply over the past year could be a likelihood of success The cross-border payments and money transfer giant MoneyGram has revealed its ambition to bridge the gap existing between traditional finance and crypto by providing money transfer services. The firm announced on Sunday a strategic partnership with the Stellar blockchain to build a platform that will allow users of the Stellar wallet to send the USD Coin to other users who can then cash out in fiat. This stablecoin-based platform provides users an avenue to convert stablecoins to fiat currencies. In an interview with Blo...
