business
Spotify Lays Out Roadmap to Higher Margins: Here’s the Plan
Spotify CEO Daniel Ek and a parade of top executives had a simple message for investors in a live-streamed presentation from New York on Wednesday (June 8): Our margins will be better. Although the company has communicated its long-term vision through quarterly earnings calls, press releases and occasional Wall Street conferences, it hasn’t gathered the investment community for a meaningful conversation since going public in 2018. “I’m not sure that journey’s very well understood,” said Ek. “And, frankly, we probably haven’t done a very good job explaining it.” Despite posting 24% revenue growth in both 2021 and the first quarter of 2022, the company’s share price is down 51.7% in 2022. As CEO, Ek’s job on Wednesday was to captain the nearly four-hour presentation communicating to investor...
The Azoff Company Launches Giant Music Record Label With First Release
Giant Music is officially in business. The label, a venture from Irving Azoff and his son Jeffrey Azoff, has launched in earnest with an announcement Wednesday (June 8) that Atlanta-based trap artist SwaVay has signed to Def Jam Recordings through Giant Music. The first song, “JUGG,” leads the act’s forthcoming project Almetha’s Son with release details to be announced soon. This partnership appears to be a one-off deal with Def Jam, and whether Giant Music will continue a relationship with Def Jam or its parent company Universal Music Group is yet to be seen. [embedded content] Giant Music is being run by Shawn Holiday, the former co-head of Columbia Records’ urban music division who also held a dual role at Sony/ATV Music Publishing, where he worked with Travis Scott and Cardi B, am...
Frank Ursoleo, Longtime BMG Exec & Iconoclassic Records Founder, Dies at 65
Frank Ursoleo, a former sales and marketing executive who held numerous label and distribution positions in the BMG network of companies before becoming the president of his own company Iconoclassic Records, died unexpectedly in his Cape Cod, Mass. home on May 5. He was 65. “Frank’s passion and knowledge, developed through decades of deep listening, found its fullest expression at Iconoclassic Records,” according to a tribute from Iconoclassic Records president Jeremy Holiday, who joined the label in 2021. “Here, he reissued Laura Nyro’s mid and late career work, to bust the myth that she peaked early.” Ursoleo, who graduated from Boston College, began his music industry career working at the Strawberries music chain. According to his LinkedIn profile, Ursoleo went on to be a sales represe...
Microsoft-Made Glass Encoded With Thousands of Songs Headed to Doomsday Vault in Norway
LONDON —A Norwegian company that is planning to create a doomsday vault to preserve the world’s most important music works has partnered with Microsoft on what it calls a “paradigm-breaking” storage solution capable of holding recordings for many thousands of years. Oslo-based Elire Group teamed up with the tech giant to come up with a “proof of concept” silica glass platter that can be used as a medium for storing master-quality digital copies of music recordings, which are burnt into the glass using state-of-the-art laser optics. Elire plans to initially store the glass capsules in a dedicated space inside the Arctic World Archive, an existing underground storage facility located on a remote arctic island midway between Norway and the North Pole. Opened in 2017, the Arctic World Archive ...
Songtradr Acquires AI Metadata & Music Search Company Musicube
B2B music company Songtradr has acquired Musicube, an AI metadata and music search company that helps match music to content and a brand’s target audience. Using neural networks and proprietary AI, Musicube’s software is delivered via web widgets and an API that offers metadata at scale for labels, publishers, music supervisors and more. It also allows customers to search for tracks, playlists and artists based on audiences, moods, genres, vocal features, instruments and tempo. With the acquisition, Songtradr expands its portfolio of tech-enabled music solutions, which also include music technology and data companies Tunefind and Pretzel, both of which the company purchased last year, and Jaxsta, which Songtradr invested in back in 2020. “Musicube has approached audio analysis from an enti...
‘Patriotic’ Russian Musicians Are Cashing In on Putin-Backed Concerts
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has led to deep division among local musicians. While critics of the war have trouble playing shows — or are voluntarily refusing to do so — supporters of the invasion are cashing in by playing government-sponsored “patriotic” concerts. With Europe’s largest conflict since World Word II now passing 100 days, throughout April and May, dozens of concerts have been organized across Russia by local authorities to support the Russian “military operation” in Ukraine. Artists participating in those shows were paid sizable fees by local authorities. The folk rock band Pelageya collected 3 million rubles ($49,000) for participating in a patriotic music festival in Stavropol, South Russia, on May 1, and singer Denis Maidanov was paid 2.5 million rubles ($40,000) for taki...
Elon Musk Says Twitter ‘Actively Resisting’ Terms of Merger Deal, Threatens Termination
In a letter sent to Twitter Monday morning, an attorney for Elon Musk wrote that the company “is actively resisting and thwarting his information rights” in regards to a dispute over spam accounts, and threatened to terminate the deal. The letter, sent by a lawyer for Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meager & Flom, follows a weeks-long back and forth between Musk and the company regarding how many active users of the service are real people, as opposed to bots or spam accounts. Musk, who declined due diligence early in the process, has since requested further data from the company, and also tweeted that the deal was “on hold,” although behind the scenes work appears to have continued since then. The letter says that the company sent over information to...
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...
