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Is there another $1 billion in global publishing royalties that rights holders can gain by using better technology? That’s what Kobalt CEO Laurent Hubert says.
When Kobalt was bought by Francisco Partners last September, the disruptive innovator known for its publishing administration clients like Karol G, Phoebe Bridgers and Max Martin said that a primary goal of this next chapter would be growing its little known and even less understood global digital rights collections society for compositions, the American Music Rights Association.
In the months since, Kobalt and its new owners have refined their strategy for scaling this “unpolished gem,” as Francisco Partners and Kobalt board director Matt Spetzler calls AMRA. Their first hurdle? Explaining what exactly the global mechanical and performance rights society focused on collecting digital-specific income can accomplish. “Too few people know what AMRA does,” says Hubert.
In an industry where, according to CISAC’s 2021 annual report, over 36% of global music publishing revenue royalties come from digital sources — a figure AMRA says will grow to 80% within five years — Kobalt believes AMRA can better leverage its technology and its direct agreements with digital service providers to streamline digital royalty collection across 212 countries, cutting out the friction or delays of a traditional performing rights organization (PRO). Their biggest licensees include some of the largest DSPs, like Spotify and Apple Music, but they are also working with promising new brands like China-based TikTok rival Kuaishou and others.
AMRA says it is a one-of-a-kind service, providing clients faster turnarounds for royalty collection (in six to nine months), more precise accounting for digital royalties and audit rights, and greater transparency that its executives say make AMRA clients and the wider industry a lot more money.
How much? AMRA CEO Tomas Ericsson estimates that clients can gain “as much as 30%” more royalties in certain regions. Hubert contends that if his companies can reduce the percentage of money that leaks from the $8 billion to $9 billion of royalties collected by the global music industry on the publishing side, excluding writer’s share — “leakage” that stems from high intermediary costs, poor matching, undercollection and underlicensing — AMRA and other players in the industry could grow the pie by another $1 billion for collection and distribution. AMRA could be a tool to help accomplish that, Hubert says.
Ericsson explains that AMRA can go to streaming services and “offer the entire catalog for Kobalt music publishing and an additional three publishers and an additional 180 writers to these streaming services, and we can give them those rights globally under one license. [The streaming services] report to us directly, and they pay us directly.
“In doing so, we can avoid a lot of noise, high fees, inefficiencies, poor technology and local issues,” Ericsson says.
Since its acquisition by Kobalt in 2015, AMRA has distributed almost $500 million in digital royalties on behalf of songwriters and rights holders. Managed as a separate entity under the Kobalt umbrella, AMRA generated $117.3 million in revenue in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2022, and the company currently expects AMRA will generate $150 million in revenue during this fiscal year. Hubert declines to provide specific financial targets but says he expects double-digit revenue growth this year from AMRA, and that its growth rate will substantially exceed Kobalt’s.
Apart from its DSP licensees, AMRA works with songwriters such as Julia Michaels, Lindsey Buckingham, Sam Hollander and independent publishers like Sundae Music Publishing, Anthem and Spirit. It’s also partnering with functional or mood-music companies, such as Strange Fruits, Vanity Snare Music, Lullify Music and Acrylic Records, whose music is popular on passive-listening playlists. Kobalt remains AMRA’s largest licensee, Ericsson says.
Kobalt, AMRA and its new owners are aligned on their aim to massively scale AMRA. Those owners are Francisco Partners, a California-based private equity firm that favors tech-forward music companies; MUSIC, the firm of music industry veteran and investor Matt Pincus; and Dundee Partners, the quietly influential family office of Stephen and Sam Hendel whose investments range from The Knitting Factory to the Fela! musical to music investing platform JKBX. Kobalt founder and chairman Willard Ahdritz and Hubert also have equity stakes in the company and have signed long-term contracts to remain in their roles.
Through interviews with all those stakeholders, AMRA’s emerging growth strategy has three prongs. The first is to expand its list of publishing clients, looking for small, medium and large indie publishers.
At a faster and larger clip, AMRA also aims to exploit opportunities with other niche music genres in the Latin and African markets in a bid to replicate the success it had partnering with mood-music companies. It also aims to take on more clients on the “long-tail end of the business” — songwriters who may not be published or affiliated but have steady streaming income.
This last prong of the strategy reflects the influence of Francisco Partners. In the past two years or so, the firm has invested $2 billion in six music companies, five of which are geared toward music creators, ranging from audio production and DJ’ing software and hardware to a plugin platform with marketing, distribution and authorization services. Managed under the umbrella of SoundWide, Francisco Partners says these companies have a combined 7 million users.
“We have seen the marketplace has shifted and grown around the creator community,” Hubert says. “We have the capabilities from a scaling and tech stack perspective to go after that market.”
AMRA faces hurdles if it’s to maintain formidable growth. Tracking digital royalties is challenging, given metadata errors and fast-growing use cases. The association is also held back when it comes to nondigital royalties, where existing laws and collection societies prevent it from operating as swiftly or accurately as it can with digital revenue. Songwriters in particular are the most restricted: They can use AMRA to collect their digital performance and mechanical royalties, as well as offline royalties, but the offline royalties still pass through a traditional PRO before reaching AMRA, meaning the writer will be charged two fees: one from the traditional organization, then a “significantly lower” fee from AMRA. Also, although AMRA collects in 212 countries, two of the world’s most royalty-rich nations, China and the United States, are not part of their offering due to local laws.
Still, AMRA will bring all of its promised efficiencies to the digital side, which is what the company anticipates will far outweigh offline royalties soon. The company believes it to be uniquely positioned to collect those royalties. As it likes to say: “AMRA is a category of one.”
On April 16 at Coachella, finally, after years of postponements, and an hour late that night, Frank Ocean performed his first concert in six years, closing the country’s most-watched music festival with a set that left many fans confused and even disgruntled. Transforming the event’s main stage with a giant screen spanning nearly the full width, Ocean and his band gave the impression they were bringing fans into the recording studio — the kind in which he has presumably been working on his much-anticipated third studio album. Tinkering with remixed versions of his beloved songs, creative camera shots often directed fans’ attention away from the reclusive singer on stage and towards his image on screen.
It was not the kind of fan-friendly hit parade some had surely been hoping for, and after Ocean abruptly ended early (albeit 20 minutes past curfew), the negative reviews started flowing. Days later, he canceled his performance for the festival’s second weekend due to an ankle injury and retreated into the private life he’s built for himself away from the limelight. When he’ll come back — either onstage or with new music — is anyone’s guess.
Since the 2011 release of his debut mixtape, Nostalgia Ultra, Ocean has spent more time out of the industry than in it, releasing only two albums and performing live just 25 to 30 times in the last decade, almost exclusively at festivals. So far, that has worked out pretty well for him, creating pent-up demand that led to his booking atop last month’s Coachella, the world’s largest multi-genre festival. The last time Ocean performed in the United States was in 2017 at the Panorama festival in New York — produced by Goldenvoice, the Los Angeles-based company behind Coachella — about a year after releasing his last album, Blonde. There, Ocean ended on a high note, with New York Times reporter Jon Caramanica calling it a “a grand-scale meditation on feelings and politics” that “proved you can translate intimacy on a giant scale.”
Ahead of Ocean’s Coachella set last month, anticipation was at fever pitch. The singer had originally been booked to headline the 2020 festival before the coronavirus pandemic postponed the event for two years. Then, in 2022, it was announced that Ocean would hold off on his festival performance until 2023. All the while, fans have been waiting for a new album that still has not come, satiated only slightly by occasional features, new songs shared on his Blonded Radio show on Apple Music, miscellaneous creative and fashion projects and appearances at the Met Gala. By withholding from fans in an era where so much revolves around the “attention economy,” Ocean’s passionate fans have only become hungrier for new material from the enigmatic superstar whose long absences are viewed as a product of the singer’s meticulous pursuit of perfection.
“He’d rather do nothing than do something that’s not quite right,” Caramanica wrote in his review of Ocean’s Panorama performance. “And doing nothing has also become, in this era of blithe ubiquity, a daring and quite perversely loud kind of performance.”
If being quiet made Ocean’s stock rise, might his widely panned, self-admittedly “chaotic” comeback performance at Coachella — and his decision to pull out of the second weekend — have pushed his stock back down?
“He flopped,” said one prominent booking agent who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Is that a career-ender — being a fallible, over-confident 35-year-old young man with one public blemish in an otherwise brilliant career? Of course not…. After more than a decade of brilliant songwriting and performance, he is entitled to make a mistake or two.”
Whether Ocean’s Coachella set was bad or misunderstood is a point of debate, but the widely negative reception was seemingly enough to make him back out of the festival’s second weekend. For many acts, a show like this would be a major reputational hit, causing fans to second-guess attending a future festival he’s booked on — or promoters to think twice about booking him at all.
“When he releases [new] music, am I gonna give it a listen? Yes. [But] if he announces a tour date, am I going to be hesitant to go see him? … It’s a risk,” says Adrian Romo, 29, who traveled from Houston to see Ocean perform at Coachella’s second weekend. “Your fans have been waiting for however many years, you have the biggest stage in the world, and then you do that? It’s like, what can I expect from you in the future? It makes you look at it a little bit differently.”
“I’m not excited [about him] anymore. He lost a fan,” adds Romo’s boyfriend, Oren Rosenbaum, 27.
“If I am a promoter, who is considering him or a comparable artist for my festival, I’m probably going to go with the comparable artist because my trust has been shaken,” says booking agent Malachai Johns with the Allive talent agency.
Ocean’s profile has thrived out of the limelight, however, and it’s not a stretch to imagine his Coachella set driving further fan interest in what he does next, or to even witness another performance of this supposedly bad set — which was not livestreamed on the festival’s YouTube feed, as originally planned — for themselves. Streams for the singer’s music increased 94% in the days following the festival, and much to fans’ excitement he teased a brief mention of a “new album” during his performance.
“[Ocean] wasn’t planning to replicate Coachella at other festivals this summer and cash in — he doesn’t have any other concerts on his calendar for the entire year,” says a source close to the artist. As for the $4 million per set Ocean was to receive, much of that money was spent on the production of an elaborate set that was not used due to Ocean’s ankle injury. While Ocean is interested in making money, the source tells Billboard, he is not interested in going on tour and or being a festival headliner right now, noting that the Coachella performance was an effort to fulfill a commitment he made to Goldenvoice president and CEO Paul Tollett in 2020 and was never meant to serve as a launching point for a tour.
In the United States, Ocean exclusively works with Tollett and Goldenvoice for festival bookings — a relationship he’s developed in part through his friendship with rapper Tyler, the Creator. Sources say that even after all the negative attention Ocean’s Coachella set received, and the hassle of reorganizing the second weekend when he pulled out, there’s no bad blood between Ocean, his agent Brent Smith and Tollett, and they’re all open to working together again in the future.
If or when Ocean decides he wants to tour, however, he’ll assume far more liability for his shows. Unlike festivals, where fans are buying tickets to a larger event and scheduling is subject to change, canceling touring concerts usually requires refunding fans unless the show is rescheduled. The cost of trying to reschedule a tour can eat into profits and make the entire effort unsustainable if not carefully managed.
It’s also hard to determine Ocean’s drawing power, since he’s basically only performed at festivals for the last decade. His career skyrocketed soon after the release of Nostalgia Ultra, just as the U.S. festival business was taking off and many artists at the time opted to forgo the traditional touring model for the less risky festival circuit where artists are guaranteed a performance fee no matter how well tickets sold.
The downside is that artists who spent the early part of their careers performing at festivals have a challenging time building a live fan base as headliners later in their career. Ocean would certainly attract ticket buyers for a traditional venue tour, but it’s totally untested whether he could draw the kind of regular audience that would earn him $4 million a night, like his Coachella billing. Whether he wants it at all is a different question altogether.
A representative for Ocean did not respond to request for comment at time of publishing.
Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Richard Blumenthal’s new legislation aims to take on Ticketmaster by clamping down on the use of long-term contracts to lock up the exclusive ticketing rights of U.S. venues and festivals. But it could backfire in a way that would negatively affect venues and fans.
Titled the Unlocking Ticketing Markets Act, the legislation — introduced on the same day as a second bill from Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) that would ban hidden ticket fees — is a clear attempt to break Ticketmaster’s grip on the ticketing industry, although it never actually mentions the Live Nation-owned company by name. (A press release announcing the Unlocking Ticket Markets Act says today’s concert marketplace is dominated “by one company” with a “70-80 percent market share” thanks in part to the long-term contracts its clients sign for its services.) But while Klobuchar and Blumental believe shortening ticketing contracts will promote competition, the proposal doesn’t seem to consider the benefits these contracts offer the venue clients.
Ever since Ticketmaster dethroned Ticketron as the top ticket seller in the 1980s, the company has built its dominance by offering large upfront cash payments in exchange for exclusive deals. This practice has become commonplace from ticketing companies in live entertainment, and venues and sports teams have come to rely on these advances — which can equal hundreds of thousands of dollars for smaller venues and millions of dollars for arenas and stadiums, increasing in value based on the length of the term — that are paid off over the term of the deal through fees added to the face value of each ticket.
This is a bargaining tool the ticketing companies use to acquire more venue customers, but within that, it’s at the venues’ discretion what kind of deal to take, passing the cost of that loan onto their customers as ticketing fees. If venues haven’t repaid the advance at the end of the contract term, they typically have two options: cut a check to the ticketing company to cover the difference or re-up their deal and borrow more money.
Klobuchar and Blumenthal’s bill would essentially shorten the length of the exclusive ticketing contracts by ordering the Federal Trade Commission to “prevent the use of excessively long multi-year exclusive contracts,” according to a press release announcing the proposed legislation. (The text of the Unlocking Ticketing Markets Act is not public, so it’s not clear how “excessively long” is defined, though average ticketing contracts are about five to six years.) If the FTC opted to limit ticketing to half of the average terms, Ticketmaster’s competitors would have twice as many opportunities to bid for those contracts the company holds.
Shorter contracts would either mean less money for venues, or greater risk that they would fail to repay the advances — in which case venues would either need to repay the remaining balance or negotiate that debt into a contract renewal. For example, a temporary four-month downturn in business is going to have a greater impact on a two-year, $2 million loan than it would on a four-year, $4 million loan. To protect themselves, ticketing companies would likely increase the fees added to tickets to recoup faster, thereby reducing the heightened risk of default — likely meaning higher costs to consumers.
A bill focused on contract length also fails to address long-standing complaints that venues often work with Ticketmaster because of a perception that it means parent company Live Nation will bring more events to their building. This sort of business practice is prohibited under the consent decree that has governed Live Nation and Ticketmaster’s operations since merging in 2010, but that hasn’t stopped accusations of anticompetitive behavior. While Live Nation has long denied this charge, during a January Senate Judiciary hearing probing Ticketmaster’s botched sale for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, Sens. Klobuchar and Blumenthal indicated they believed that Ticketmaster’s relationship with Live Nation was the main reason Ticketmaster held a such a large market share of the ticketing business. Term lengths of the company’s contracts, however, were rarely mentioned.
In response to the introduction of the Unlocking Ticketing Markets Act, a Ticketmaster spokesperson told Billboard, “The ticketing industry is more competitive than ever. Ticketmaster wins business because it offers the best product available for venues, and the length of contracts is generally decided by venues and the guaranteed payments they want to help support their expenses. We do not expect any of the proposed changes to have a material impact on our business as we historically add clients in competitive marketplaces.”
Changing the terms of those loans, as Klobuchar and Blumenthal seek to do by limiting exclusive ticketing deals, could either cause venues to earn less money on the ticketing deals or increase the fees they charge consumers to repay those loans — making ticket prices even more expensive in a climate where most Americans already feel they’re paying too much.
The Contenders is a midweek column that looks at artists aiming for the top of the Billboard charts, and the strategies behind their efforts. This week (for the upcoming charts dated May 5), it’s the sales of Agust D’s debut LP vs. the streams for Morgan Wallen’s 36-track juggernaut in a race for the Billboard 200 crown.
Agust D, D Day (Big Hit): Just a few weeks ago, the top debut on the Billboard 200 came from a BTS alum: Jimin, who debuted atop the Billboard Hot 100 with his single “Like Crazy” and came one spot from doing the same on the Billboard 200 with the album FACE. This week, the biggest new release may again come from the K-pop superstars’ ranks, as Suga releases his much-anticipated first LP, D-Day, under his Agust D alias.
The album is expected to sell well – helped by a variety of physical releases, which like FACE, came out the same day as the album’s digital release. (Recent album releases from BTS groupmates RM and J-Hope initially arrived as digital-only.) D-Day is available as multiple different collectible CDs (including exclusive editions for Target, Walmart and the Weverse store) — once again with both standard elements (including a sticker, postcard and poster) and randomized photo cards — plus four digital albums (one standard, plus three alternative cover editions sold in Agust D’s official webstore).
The 10-track album will have to sell very well to compete with the continued streaming dominance of Morgan Wallen’s One Thing at a Time – which posted 166,000 equivalent album units in its seventh week at No. 1, boosted by sales of a new vinyl edition of the 36-track album. But if D-Day can get in range of FACE’s first-week numbers (164,000 units), it could be Wallen’s Time to vacate the top spot.
YoungBoy Never Broke Again, Don’t Try This at Home (Never Broke Again/Motown/UMG): He’s back. Three months after his first album of 2022, January’s I Rest My Case, YoungBoy returns with his second full-length release for Motown, Don’t Try This at Home. There’s no physical release yet for the 33-track set, but the tracklist is his longest yet, and features big-name features from Nicki Minaj, Post Malone, The Kid LAROI and Mariah the Scientist — which may help the new album pass the somewhat underwhelming No. 9 Billboard 200 peak for I Rest My Case earlier this year.
Taylor Swift, Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions (Republic): Taylor Swift already has two albums in the top 10 of the Billboard 200 this week with 2022’s Midnights and 2019’s Lover, and she may add another next week with the Record Store Day-only Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions. The vinyl RSD release of the 17-track set — consisting of acoustic live performances of the tracks from Swift’s Grammy-winning Folklore album, previously featured in Swift’s Disney+ special of the same name and available to purchase digitally as part of the Folklore deluxe edition — is limited to 75,000 copies, but that alone would likely be enough to secure a debut in the top 10 if it to sells out, as anything Swift-related seems to do in 2023. (Other titles by the big-name likes of Pearl Jam, Elton John and The 1975 may also factor on the chart next week.)
In the Mix
Mac DeMarco, One Wayne G (Mac’s Record Label): There aren’t many albums on the Billboard 200 you could fall asleep listening to and still be hearing when you wake up the next morning – but Mac DeMarco’s nine-and-a-half hour (!!) new collection is certainly one. The epic set, mostly consisting of instrumentals and demos, is unsurprisingly unavailable for physical release and is probably unlikely to produce a breakout hit. But with 199 tracks, its streaming numbers should still be enough to make it a factor on the Billboard 200 next week.
Twenty One Pilots, MTV Unplugged (Fueled by Ramen): Alt-pop duo Twenty One Pilots are no stranger to the top of the Billboard 200, which they topped with 2015’s Blurryface and revisiting the top three with follow-ups Trench (2018) and Scaled and Icy (2021). The outfit might not get quite so high with MTV Unplugged, but the duo has maintained a devout fanbase since their mid-’10s breakthrough and may see good sales for the CD and LP-released set.
Everything But the Girl, Fuse (Buzzin’ Fly/Virgin): It’s been nearly a quarter-century since the last album from genre-bending U.K. duo Everything But the Girl, who notched a trio of acclaimed albums in the top half of the Billboard 200 in the ‘90s — most recently 1999’s No. 65-peaking Temperamental. This month’s Fuse looks to make it four in a row, with a variety of vinyl and CD options for purchase, and reviews as strong as the pair received at their commercial peak three decades ago.
Over the weekend, a track called “Heart on My Sleeve,” allegedly created with artificial intelligence to sound like it was by Drake and The Weeknd, became the hottest thing in music. By Monday evening, it was all but gone after most streaming platforms pulled it. But in that short time online, it earned thousands of dollars.
“Fake Drake” has a nice ring to it, but the music industry was less than charmed by the fact that a TikToker with just 131,000 followers (as of Tuesday evening) operating under the name Ghostwriter could rack up millions of streams with such a track in only a few days. Even though the legal issues around these kinds of AI-generated soundalikes are still murky, streaming services quickly pulled the track, largely without explanation. Universal Music Group, which reps both Drake and The Weeknd, issued a statement Monday in response, claiming these kinds of songs violate both copyright law its agreements with the streaming services and “demonstrate why platforms have a fundamental legal and ethical responsibility to prevent the use of their services in ways that harm artists.” While a spokesperson would not say whether the company had sent formal takedown requests over the song, a rep for YouTube said on Tuesday that the platform “removed the video in question after receiving a valid takedown notice,” noting that the track was pulled because it used a copyrighted music sample. As of Wednesday, the song had also been removed from TikTok.
What sets “Heart on My Sleeve” apart from other AI-generated deepfakes — including one that had Drake covering Ice Spice‘s “Munch,” which the rapper himself called “the last straw” on Instagram — is that it was actually uploaded to streaming services, rather than just living on social media like so many others. It also was a hit — or could have been one — as the track drew rave reviews online. Once the song caught fire, daily U.S. streams increased exponentially, from about 2,000 on Friday to 362,000 on Saturday to 407,000 on Sunday and 652,000 on Monday before it was taken down, according to Luminate. Globally, the song started taking off too, racking up 1,140,000 streams worldwide on Monday alone.
Those streams are worth real money, too. And since streaming royalties are distributed on a pro-rata basis — meaning an overall revenue pool is divided based on the total popularity of tracks — the royalties earned by “Heart on My Sleeve” is revenue that is then not going to other artists. That’s how streaming works for any song— or sleep sound — but in this case it’s an AI-generated song pulling potential revenue from actual living beings creating music.
Aside from the rights issues at play, that money underlines one of rights holders’ key concerns around AI-generated music: That It threatens to take money away from them. For “Heart on My Sleeve,” the 1,423,000 U.S. streams it received over four days were worth about $7,500, Billboard estimates, while the 2,125,000 total global streams were worth closer to $9,400.
However, streaming royalties are typically paid out on a monthly basis, which allows time for platforms to detect copyright infringement and other attempts to game the system. In a case such as “Heart on My Sleeve,” a source at a streaming company says that might mean Ghostwriter’s royalties will be withheld.
“Heart on My Sleeve” was a wake-up call to the music business and music fans alike, who until now may not have taken the threat, or promise, of AI-generated music seriously. But as this technology becomes increasingly accessible — coupled with the ease of music distribution in the streaming era — concern around the issue is growing quickly. As Ghostwriter — who did not respond to a request for comment — promises on his TiKTok profile, “I’m just getting started.”
A song featuring AI-generated fake vocals from Drake and The Weeknd might be a scary moment for artists and labels whose livelihoods feel threatened, but does it violate the law? It’s a complicated question.
The song “Heart on My Sleeve,” which also featured Metro Boomin’s distinctive producer tag, racked up hundreds of thousands of spins on streaming services before it was pulled down on Monday evening, powered to viral status by uncannily similar vocals over a catchy instrumental track. Millions more have viewed shorter snippets of the song that the anonymous creator posted to TikTok.
It’s unclear whether only the soundalike vocals were created with AI tools – a common trick used for years in internet parody videos and deepfakes – or if the entire song was created solely by a machine based purely on a prompt to create a Drake track, a more novel and potentially disruptive development.
For an industry already on edge about the sudden growth of artificial intelligence, the appearance of a song that convincingly replicated the work product of two of music’s biggest stars and one of its top producers and won over likely millions of listeners has set off serious alarm bells.
“The ability to create a new work this realistic and specific is disconcerting, and could pose a range of threats and challenges to rightsowners, musicians, and the businesses that invest in them,” says Jonathan Faber, the founder of Luminary Group and an attorney who specializes in protecting the likeness rights of famous individuals. “I say that without attempting to get into even thornier problems, which likely also exist as this technology demonstrates what it may be capable of.”
“Heart On My Sleeve” was quickly pulled down, disappearing from most streaming services by Monday evening. Representatives for Drake, The Weeknd and Spotify all declined to comment when asked about the song on Monday. And while the artists’ label, Universal Music Group, issued a strongly worded statement condemning “infringing content created with generative AI,” a spokesperson would not say whether the company had sent formal takedown requests over the song.
A rep for YouTube said on Tuesday that the platform “removed the video in question after receiving a valid takedown notice,” noting that the track was removed because it used a copyrighted music sample.
Highlighted by the debacle is a monumental legal question for the music industry that will likely be at the center of legal battles for years to come: To what extent do AI-generated songs violate the law? Though “Heart on My Sleeve” was removed relatively quickly, it’s a more complicated question than it might seem.
For starters, the song appears to be an original composition that doesn’t directly copy any of Drake or the Weeknd’s songs, meaning that it could be hard to make a claim that it infringes their copyrights, like when an artist uses elements of someone else’s song without permission. While Metro Boomin’s tag may have been illegally sampled, that element likely won’t exist in future fake songs.
By mimicking their voices, however, the track represents a clearer potential violation of Drake and Weeknd’s so-called right of publicity – the legal right to control how your individual identity is commercially exploited by others. Such rights are more typically invoked when someone’s name or visual likeness is stolen, but they can extend to someone’s voice if it’s particularly well-known – think Morgan Freeman or James Earl Jones.
“The right of publicity provides recourse for rights owners who would otherwise be very vulnerable to technology like this,” Faber said. “It fits here because a song is convincingly identifiable as Drake and the Weeknd.”
Whether a right of publicity lawsuit is legally viable against this kind of voice mimicry might be tested in court soon, albeit in a case dealing with decidedly more old school tech.
Back in January, Rick Astley sued Yung Gravy over the rapper’s breakout 2022 hit that heavily borrowed from the singer’s iconic “Never Gonna Give You Up.” While Yung Gravy had licensed the underlying composition, Astley claimed Yung Gravy violated his right of publicity when he hired a singer who mimicked his distinctive voice.
That case has key differences from the situation with “Heart on My Sleeve,” like the allegation that Gravy falsely suggested to his listeners that Astley had actually endorsed his song. In the case of “Heart on My Sleeve,” the anonymous creator Ghostwriter omitted any reference to Drake and The Weeknd on streaming platforms; on TikTok, he directly stated that he, and not the two superstars, had created his song using AI.
But for Richard Busch of the law firm King & Ballow, a veteran music industry litigator who brought the lawsuit on behalf of Astley, the right of publicity and its protections for likeness still provides the most useful tool for artists and labels confronted with such a scenario in the future.
“If you are creating a song that sounds identical to, let’s say, Rihanna, regardless of what you say people are going to believe that it was Rihanna. I think there’s no way to get around that,” Busch said. “The strongest claim here would be the use of likeness.”
But do AI companies themselves break the law when they create programs that can so effectively mimic Drake and The Weeknd’s voices? That would seem to be the far larger looming crisis, and one without the same kind of relatively clear legal answers.
The fight ahead will likely be over how AI platforms are “trained” – the process whereby machines “learn” to spit out new creations by ingesting millions of existing works. From the point of view of many in the music industry, if that process is accomplished by feeding a platform copyrighted songs — in this case, presumably, recordings by Drake and The Weeknd — then those platforms and their owners are infringing copyrights on a mass scale.
In UMG’s statement Monday, the label said clearly that it believes such training to be a “violation of copyright law,” and the company previously warned that it “will not hesitate to take steps to protect our rights and those of our artists.” The RIAA has said the same, blasting AI companies for making “unauthorized copies of our members works” to train their machines.
While the training issue is legally novel and unresolved, it could be answered in court soon. A group of visual artists has filed a class action over the use of their copyrighted images to train AI platforms, and Getty Images has filed a similar case against AI companies that allegedly “scraped” its database for training materials.
And after this week’s incident over “Heart on My Sleeve,” a similar lawsuit against AI platforms filed by artists or music companies gets more likely by the day.
The Contenders is a midweek column that looks at artists aiming for the top of the Billboard charts, and the strategies behind their efforts. This week (for the upcoming charts dated April 22), NF remains the biggest rapper you don’t hear on radio or RapCaviar, while an ‘00s nu-metal band plans a second Meteora strike on the Billboard 200.
NF, Hope (NF Real Music/Caroline): He hasn’t had a major crossover hit since 2017’s smash “Let You Down” peaked at No. 12 on the Billboard Hot 100, but NF remains one of the world’s biggest rappers with a cult following that remains just outside of mainstream view. His last album, 2019’s The Search, snuck past Chance the Rapper’s more hyped The Big Day for the Billboard 200’s top spot (with a six-figure first week), and the title track and advance single from follow-up album Hope debuted at No. 49 on the Hot 100 in March.
Aiding Hope’s hopes to follow its predecessor to No. 1: big sales numbers, boosted by a variety of physical variants. There’s a signed CD in his online store (just $5!), a standard Target-exclusive CD with a poster packaged inside, four deluxe CD/merch box sets (with a T-shirt, hat, long sleeve T or a hoodie and a CD housed in a box, respectively) and both a white vinyl LP and a standard black version. If he cracks six figures again, NF might be in the same ballpark as Morgan Wallen’s declining One Thing at a Time — but the 167,000 units that album moved in its fifth week at No. 1 is still a higher single-week number than any NF album has posted yet.
Linkin Park, Meteora (Warner/Machine Shop): Meteora was one of the biggest albums of 2003, debuting at No. 1 with over 800,000 in first-week sales, spawning massive hit singles like “Numb” and “Faint” and finishing as the No. 6 album of the Year-End Billboard 200. Next week, the album’s 20th anniversary reissue may drive it to its highest position on the chart since its release year.
The set has already garnered considerable attention for the advance release of “Lost,” a bonus track that the group recorded for Meteora with late Linkin Park lead singer Chester Bennington, whose No. 38 debut on the Hot 100 made it the group’s biggest chart hit in a decade. It’s one of several previously unreleased tracks found on the reissue, which is available in a deluxe three-CD edition, a four-LP vinyl box set, or a five-LP / four-CD super deluxe box set, and should help Meteora make a more explosive chart impact than most new albums.
Daniel Caesar, Never Enough (Republic): Acclaimed R&B singer-songwriter Daniel Caesar has yet to hit the Billboard 200’s top 10, but he’s getting closer: No. 25 with 2017 debut Freudian, then No. 17 with 2019’s Case Study 01. This year’s long-anticipated third album Never Enough has a chance to get him in that range, though it’s lacking any chart hits near the level of his breakout late-’10s hits “Get You” or “Best Part,” and certainly none in the same stratosphere as his appearance on Justin Bieber’s 2021 Hot 100-topper “Peaches.” Caesar does have a climbing Adult R&B Airplay hit in “Let Me Go” (No. 20 this week), as well as three different box sets exclusive to his web store, three different-colored vinyl variants and both standard and signed CDs available for purchase.
In the Mix
Ellie Goulding, Higher Than Heaven (Polydor): One of the U.K.’s most reliable hitmakers of the early ‘10s is back, with what she calls, in a very un-2023 way, her “least-personal” to date. “We didn’t want to write serious songs,” Goulding has said, “we wanted to write about silly things and dancing.” The album’s approach has been well-received critically, but has yet to generate the kind hits either side of the Atlantic that she enjoyed a decade ago.
Rae Sremmurd, Sremm 4 Life (Ear Drummer/Interscope): Speaking of Goulding: Her most recent top 40 Hot 100 hit was scored alongside Swae Lee, who was also a chart fixture of the late ‘10s — both solo and with brother Slim Jxmmi, as hip-hop duo Rae Sremmurd. The Brothers Rae have since fallen somewhat out of commercial favor, but they’re hoping a return to their Sremm album series (responsible for three straight top 10 albums on the Billboard 200 from 2015-18) will bring them back to the limelight. They get additional assistance on Sremm 4 from featured stars Future and Young Thug, as well as production from longtime gold-spinner Mike Will Made-It.
The Contenders is a midweek column that looks at artists aiming for the top of the Billboard charts, and the strategies behind their efforts. This week (for the upcoming charts dated April 8), new albums from a wide variety of big names could make for the most debut-crowded top 10 on the Billboard 200 yet in 2023.
Lana Del Rey, Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd (Polydor/Interscope): Last year’s Blue Bannisters was Lana Del Rey’s first major label album to miss the Billboard 200 top five, but she seems set to return there with the new Ocean Blvd. The album has received some of the strongest reviews of Del Rey’s career, while seven-minute advance single “A&W” is her first song to reach the Hot Rock & Alternative Songs top 10 since her Weeknd-featuring “Lust for Life” in 2017.
Also helping Ocean Blvd’s numbers: well over a dozen physical variants, including five different-colored options on both vinyl and cassette, and four CD deluxe box sets exclusive to her webstore. (Plus, a special shoutout on the year’s hottest pop tour never hurts.) All of that could create a tunnel from Ocean Blvd to the top of the charts, but it will have to contend with Morgan Wallen’s One Thing at a Time in its fourth week; that album has still been earning over 200,000 equivalent album units a week, and Del Rey has yet to post a single-week number higher than 182,000 (for Ultraviolence in 2014).
Jimin, Face (BigHit/Geffen): Another major contender this week, and the latest BTS alum poised for a major Billboard 200 impact — following J-Hope’s No. 17-debuting Jack in the Box last July and RM’s No. 3-peaking Indigo in December — is Jimin, who should be set for a big debut for his debut album Face. The set has already generated one Hot 100 hit in this week’s No. 30-debuting “Set Me Free Pt. 2,” and could score an even bigger one next week with the entrance of the best-selling “Like Crazy.” Though its six-track length may hurt its streaming totals, Face has the advantage of a simultaneous digital and physical release — where Jack in the Box and Indigo both debuted as digital-only releases — with five different collectible CD variants available (each containing a standard set of items plus randomized photo cards and postcards).
Luke Combs, Gettin’ Old (Columbia/River House): Coming just nine months after last year’s No. 2-peaking Growin’ Up, sibling set Gettin’ Old may return country superstar Luke Combs to the Billboard 200’s top five. Lead single “Love You Anyway” debuted in the Hot 100’s top 15 in February — with advance cuts “Growin’ Up and Gettin’ Old” and “Joe” also reaching the chart — and its studio version of Combs’ live-staple cover of Tracy Chapman’s late ‘80s alt-folk classic “Fast Car” should follow them onto the chart next week. The set is available in CD, cassette and record, with colored-vinyl exclusives for Amazon and Walmart.
In the Mix
Depeche Mode, Memento Mori (Columbia/Mute): Rock and Roll Hall of Famers Depeche Mode look to extend their streak of eight consecutive top 10 studio albums on the Billboard 200 with this month’s Memento Mori, their first album since the May death of founding member Andy Fletcher. The album, supported by the group’s first world tour in a half decade, was met with critical acclaim, and spawned their first top 15 hit on the Alternative Airplay chart since 2009 with lead single “Ghosts Again.”
Fall Out Boy, So Much for Stardust (Fueled by Ramen/DCD2): Fall Out Boy’s first album since 2018’s Billboard 200-topping Mania features more of a return to the emo heroes’ guitar-driven sound, albeit with more of a disco influence in tracks like third single “Hold Me Like a Grudge.” Lead cut “Love From the Other Side” became the group’s first-ever top five hit on the Rock & Alternative Airplay chart when it reached No. 2 earlier this month.
Pink Floyd, The Dark Side of the Moon (Harvest/Capitol): One of the biggest albums in rock history, Pink Floyd’s 1973 prog rock opus Dark Side of the Moon spends its 976th week on the Billboard 200 this week, ranking at No. 172. It should rank a lot higher next week following its 50th anniversary reissue, with a CD and vinyl box set that includes a newly remastered version of the classic album, a 76-page music book, surround sound and Dolby Atmos mixes, and a standalone LP of the group’s 1974 performance of the album at Wembley Arena.
It’s an uneasy time in the music industry. During a Jan. 31 call with analysts, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek emphasized the positive side of the streaming revolution — “there [are] a lot more artists that are mattering now than ever before” — while still acknowledging the anxiety that’s percolating through the business. “The big counter to that would be: Does it mean that you can sustain yourself, or does it mean we have more one-hit wonders?” Ek asked. “You’re seeing a little bit of both happening in the music industry at the present moment.”
Especially in an era when TikTok appears to run the music industry — trends on the app can send songs bounding up the charts, impacting signing decisions and marketing campaigns — it’s common to hear executives fretting about one-hit wonder overload and the lack of “artist development.” On any given day, a handful of songs flare on the app, soundtracking heaps of videos and leading to jumps in streaming. As a result, “more people are investing in songs that might not have the artist proposition attached to them,” one manager recently lamented to Billboard. “By default, if more of the people responsible for breaking acts are focused on songs, that’s how you have a landscape where there are a trillion one-hit wonders.”
Spotify returned to this theme during its recent Stream On event. Gustav Soderstrom, the platform’s co-president, took the stage to tout the power of features like Release Radar for driving streams and long-term engagement. “That’s why discoveries on Spotify, unlike many other platforms, give creators so much more than just a fleeting moment of viral fame,” he said. He didn’t name TikTok, but it was pretty clear who he was aiming at.
In a statement to Billboard, Ole Obermann, TikTok’s global head of music, hit back against the idea that the popular app prioritizes brief eruptions over long and healthy careers. “In the few years that our music teams at TikTok have been working closely with the musical creator and label community, our commitment to backing artists across the board has helped propel emerging talent and legacy acts to new points of success,” Obermann said. “Artists who broke out from TikTok such as Ice Spice, Lil Nas X, and Coi Leray have sustained multiple Billboard hits. We also see artists such as Tai Verdes, jxdn and Sara Kays who have grown substantial fan bases on TikTok and are building their music careers broadly rather than based on an individual hit song.”
Many in the music industry believe one-hit wonders are newly abundant. But do they show up on the Billboard charts?
Defining a one-hit wonder as an artist that cracks the top 40 on the Billboard Hot 100 and never makes it back to that position, the annual percentage of acts fitting this criterion remained relatively constant from 2002 to 2019, according to Billboard‘s analysis. On average, 54% of the acts who made it into the top 40 during this period failed to return with at least a second entry. Though the fraction got as high as 61% and sank as low as 39% during this time period, there was no pronounced increasing trend visible over time.
In 2020 — the most recent full year it seems fair to judge — the portion of artists who made it into the top 40 but didn’t land a second entry was higher: 70%. Of course, this number may fall in the coming years, because these artists haven’t had much time to score a second hit. Changing the definition of a one-hit wonder to match the available data for 2020 — redefining it as an artist that cracks the top 40 and doesn’t make it back in the next two years — causes the portion of one-hit wonders to jump by more than 7% each year, on average. This means it’s likely that 2020’s one-hit wonder count will end up more in line with previous years.
The opposite of a one-hit wonder is an act who enjoys a steady stream of popular singles. Say a “career artist” appears at least 10 times in the top 40 as a lead or featured collaborator: Around 10% of all acts who reached the top 40 once between 2002 and 2020 went on to achieve this goal. The frequency of career artists hasn’t changed much over the years either — roughly the same number emerged from the first half of the time period examined as from the second half.
There is one other noticeable trend in top 40 data: The number of new artists appearing on the upper reaches of the chart is gently declining over time. The fall is gradual, approximately one less new artist every two years. This mirrors a decline in new artists getting top 10 hits, but the trend is less pronounced in the top 40. That’s presumably because it’s easier to reach the top 40 than the top 10, and because there are fewer top 10s annually.
Taken together, this indicates that it is somewhat harder to get a top 40 hit than it was two decades ago, but once artists get that breakout hit, they have roughly the same odds of eventually building a catalog of big tracks. The first development is cause for concern. But the second should be reassuring — the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Welcome to The Contenders, a midweek column that looks at artists aiming for the top of the Billboard charts, and the strategies behind their efforts. This week (for the upcoming charts dated April 1), Morgan Wallen’s One Thing at a Time juggernaut faces competition from a new U2 album of old U2 songs, as well as a rising star from the Latin world and a pop icon coming to a stadium near you.
U2, Songs of Surrender (Island/Interscope). The members of U2 are no strangers to the top of the Billboard 200, having reached No. 1 eight times in their 43-year recording history, most recently in 2017 with the debut of Songs of Experience. Many of the songs from those albums can be found on Songs of Surrender — a collection of reinvented re-recordings spanning the band’s entire career.
Released on St. Patrick’s Day (March. 17), the collection is also available in 16-track standard, 20-track deluxe and 40-track super deluxe editions (with the later divided into four 10-track discs each named after a band member). Sales will also be helped by a dozen vinyl variants of the album, including exclusives for Target, Amazon and independent retailers — and even a Boston Celtics Limited Edition vinyl, with team-inspired packaging containing an exclusive poster.
Eladio Carrión, 3men2 Kbrn (Rimas). An international swimmer turned social media influencer turned Latin trap hitmaker, Eladio Carrión has become one of this decade’s breakout stars from Rimas Entertainment, home to global superstar Bad Bunny. If his name isn’t yet familiar to you, some of the A-list features on his latest album 3men2 Kbrn will be – they include 50 Cent, Future, Lil Wayne, and of course El Conejo Malo himself, who appears on the set’s lead single “Coco Chanel.”
Taylor Swift, Lover (Republic). As you may have heard, Taylor Swift recently launched her first U.S. tour in six years – and It’s not just the more than 100,000 fans in attendance at the first two dates in Glendale, Ariz. over the weekend who are psyched to see her, Swift’s sales and streams have spiked across her catalog, but the album poised to benefit most on the Billboard 200 is her 2019 set Lover. It’s appropriate, given how it’s the Swift album fans have waited the longest to see on tour, as she was forced to cancel immediate support plans during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.
IN THE MIX
EST Gee, Mad (CMG/Interscope). Louisville rapper EST Gee has long seemed to be on the verge of a mainstream breakthrough, in the wake of high-profile early-decade guest appearances on Billboard Hot 100 hits like Lil Baby’s “Real as It Gets” and Jack Harlow’s “Backstage Passes.” He’s reached the Billboard 200’s top 10 three times already, most recently with official debut LP I Never Felt Nun in Sept. 2022, and looks to go for four with last Friday’s Mad mixtape – though outside of southern rap stalwart Boosie Badazz, the set is light on big-name guests.
100 Gecs, 10,000 Gecs (Dog Show/Atlantic): The hyperpop paragons lean more into thick guitar riffs while maintaining their absurdist sense of humor on second album 10,000 Gecs, their first since making the jump to Atlantic. The critically acclaimed set — supported by their first Alternative Airplay-charting hit single, “Hollywood Baby” — is likely to give the duo its highest-charting entry yet on the Billboard 200, following the No. 92 peak of its debut album, appropriately titled 1,000 Gecs.