business
Former acting comptroller of the currency joins Voyager Digital’s board
Crypto trading platform Voyager Digital announced Bitfury CEO and former Acting Comptroller of the Currency Brian Brooks has joined the firm’s board of directors. In a Monday announcement, Voyager chair Philip Eytan said Brooks had joined the board as an “independent, non-executive director,” citing the former comptroller’s experience at crypto companies and his leadership behind regulatory initiatives in the United States during his time at the OCC. Brooks served as acting Comptroller of the Currency until January, was Coinbase’s chief legal officer from 2018 to 2020 and held the position of CEO at Binance.US for less than four months this year. Welcome Brian Brooks as the newest member of our Board of Directors Brooks, the Former Acting Comptroller of the U.S. Currency, is a globally rec...
Inside Hipgnosis Songs’ Mid-Year Report
Hipgnosis Songs Funds improved its gross revenue for the six months ended Sept. 30 by 35% year-on-year to $85.3 million, primarily due to the revenue from eight catalogs with 1,315 songs acquired in the previous six months, the company announced Thursday (Dec. 16) in its bi-annual report to investors. Net revenue—gross revenue minus royalties paid to songwriters under contract and administered catalogs—grew 31% $74.1 million during the same period. Since its launch in 2017, Hipgnosis has built a catalog of over 65,000 songs with a net asset value of $1.63 billion as of Sept. 30, up from $1.46 billion on March 31. (NAV is the acquisition costs less amortization.) An alternative measure, “operative” NAV, which adds to NAV the increase in the catalog’s fair value...
Festival Where Drakeo the Ruler Was Killed Signed JV With Live Nation This Year
The organizers of a Los Angeles festival that was the scene of a high-profile homicide Saturday night (Dec. 18), when rapper Drakeo the Ruler was fatally stabbed, had recently made a major management change, ending its relationship with the organizers of Coachella in July to ink a new joint venture with global concert promoter Live Nation. Last month, Live Nation came under heavy fire for its alleged role in the deadly Astroworld festival headlined by Travis Scott that killed 10 people and left scores more injured. Authorities say that Drakeo was murdered in a stabbing attack Saturday during the Once Upon a Time in LA festival at Exposition Park and Banc of California Stadium in downtown Los Angeles. Headlined by Snoop Dogg, the festival was a joint venture between Live Nation and veteran ...
How Do You Tell the Story of Live Music? ‘Rock Concert’ Author on Tackling the Superstar Subject
In the live music business, it doesn’t get any bigger than stadium concerts. Thanks to the large seating capacity of most stadiums, artists playing at the top echelon of touring can earn $4 million to $5 million per show — double and triple what they can earn at arenas. Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news But the model for stadium touring business wasn’t drafted by a major concert promotion company or a professional sports executive, but by a 16-year-old girl named Kay Wheeler who found herself swept off her feet by a Mississippi singer named Elvis Presley. According to the new book Rock Concert by Wall Street Journal music and arts contributor Marc Meyers, Wheeler convinced the Cotton Bowl to host a concert headlined by the “B...
What Is Eldridge Industries? A Primer on Sony’s Springsteen Partner
Bruce Springsteen’s blockbuster catalog sale to Sony Music Group this week also established a new player in rights acquisitions. Investment firm Eldridge Industries, which partnered with Sony to finance the purchase of Springsteen’s publishing, now holds a stake one of the industry’s most coveted catalogs — around which it can build an attractive portfolio. Eldridge Industries is a private investment firm with holdings in tech, media, retail, entertainment and other sectors. Co-founded in 2015 by Todd Boehly, a former president at Guggenheim Partners, Eldridge investments include the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team, sports gambling company DraftKings, private jet provider Flexjet and personal finance app Truebill, among others. Eldridge owns a stake in P-MRC, a joint venture of MRC and P...
UnitedMasters Names David Reich President
David Reich has been named president at UnitedMasters, the company announced Friday (Dec. 17). He succeeds Lauren Wirtzer-Seawood, who departed the role in May to join SoundCloud as chief content and marketing officer. Reich arrives at UnitedMasters following five years at Uber, where he led product and growth in 60 countries before founding and leading Uber Transit as general manager and head of product. Prior to that, he was a founder and CEO at Assured Labor, a digital recruitment platform in Latin America. “David has played a key role in building some of the most impactful digital marketplaces in the world,” said UnitedMasters founder and CEO Steve Stoute in a statement. “We are excited that he has joined the UnitedMasters team at such an important inflection point in the music industr...
Going meta: digital cities, attacks on female creators, and more
Following the announcement that Facebook’s parent company would be rebranding in a shift towards the metaverse, many projects have started similar initiatives entering the virtual space, from buying property to testing the limits of what this universe has to offer. Digital cities: Santa Monica and Seoul The Downtown Santa Monica District west of Los Angeles was one of the first real-world areas to allow users to have access to the metaverse through the FlickPlay app. Branded as a metaverse tool, walking around the district seems to be more of a limited augmented reality experience rather than a virtual one, with people collecting digital tokens in the style of Pokémon GO. In contrast, Seoul’s entry into the metaverse is expected to be a 100% virtual environment once launched in early...
From Vinyl Variants to NFTs, Inside 2021’s Collecting Craze
The spike in vinyl has been at a steady incline for over a decade, with sales growing year over year since the mid-2000s. But, during a pandemic in which concerts were canceled and music fans were kept inside, interest in vinyl exploded, dating back to July 2020 and continued with vinyl unit sales in the United States growing 81% as of October 2021, according to MRC Data (compared with 46.2% by the end of 2020). That growth now suggests an estimated year-end 2021 revenue of $1 billion. Interestingly, around the same time that a time-honored physical format started to soar, so too did the very intangible, very online non-fungible tokens in the music space. (An NFT is a one-of-a-kind digital token that exists on a blockchain, most often Ethereum, which is the second most popular cryptocurren...
Here are Music’s Major NFT Moments This Year
While non-fungible tokens have been around for years, buying and selling these blockchain-powered collectibles was relegated to cryptocurrency circles. But there was a noticeable shift in early 2021, when the market for music-related NFTs skyrocketed from $306,000 in sales during December 2020 to $26,756,243 in March 2021, according to tech newsletter Water & Music. The spike proved that what was once a niche, tech-savvy market became music’s next revolution — or at least a way for artists to make a quick buck as the pandemic stretched on. Illmind Sells Samples and Beats as NFTs Grammy-winning producer Illmind released the first-ever melody/sample loop pack as an NFT, opening a new practical use for the token in the music business. By purchasing this NFT, buyers could use the samples i...
Valkyrie’s latest ETF offering has exposure to Bitcoin
Crypto asset manager Valkyrie has launched an exchange-traded fund with exposure to Bitcoin on the Nasdaq Stock Market. In a Wednesday SEC filing, Valkyrie said its Balance Sheet Opportunities ETF will not invest directly in Bitcoin (BTC) but 80% of its net assets would offer exposure to the crypto asset through securities of U.S. companies with BTC on their balance sheets. These companies may include custodians, crypto exchanges, and traders. The filing specifies that Valkyrie’s ETF may invest up to 10% of its net assets in securities of Bitcoin mining firms, as well as up to 5% in the securities of pooled investment vehicles in the U.S. that hold BTC. At the time of publication, shares of the fund under the ticker VBB are trading for $24.48, having fallen more than 1.5% since launch...
‘Free Larry Hoover’ Producer Randy Phillips Tapped by TEG to Create More Artist-Owned Events
Entertainment veteran Randy Phillips has joined the board of Australian live entertainment company TEG, one week after producing and promoting Ye and Drake‘s sold-out Free Larry Hoover benefit concert at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum on Dec. 9. TEG and majority owner Silver Lake Capital — which also has investments in Oak View Group and Endeavor (which owns WME) — financed the sold-out “Free Larry Hoover” concert, which was organized in just three weeks. Phillips hired the production team for the concert, including Rob Hallett from U.K. outfit Robomagic Live, production manager Bryon “Hot Dog” Tate and Roadwerx’s Steven Dixon. “The four of us became DONDA Touring, supporting Kanye and working directly for him,” Phillips says. “That meant complete transparency in terms of the economics,...
Kazakhstan’s central bank reports results on CBDC pilot project
Kazakhstan, the country behind one of the largest sources of Bitcoin mining hash power, has released the results of a pilot program for its digital tenge. According to a Wednesday report, the National Bank of Kazakhstan, or NBK, said it had confirmed the possibility of implementing a retail central bank digital currency, or CBDC, based on distributed ledger technology. In addition, the central bank tested how Kazakhstan’s citizens might use a digital tenge for offline payments as well as its programmability. In a series of hypothetical scenarios, the central bank tested how a CBDC could be used between second-tier banks and other external participants. The tests also explored how a digital tenge would work for cross-border transactions under Kazakhstan’s regulatory framework. Source:...
