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SYDNEY, Australia — After posting another year of growth, and record revenue and distributions, APRA AMCOS is doubling-down on its call for a tax-offset to kick-start live music.
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The PRO last month posted “very strong” financials for the full-year 2023, with record gross revenue of A$690.5 million ($453 million), up 12% from the 2022 result, and net distributable revenue paid to songwriter and publisher members, affiliates and rightsholders up 11.4% year-on-year to A$595.2 million ($390 million), also a new benchmark — gains that are “indicative of a post-pandemic recovery.”
Those healthy results came with a gut-punch.
Since the start of the pandemic in March 2020, the organization found that 1,300-plus live music venues and stages across Australia were lost, or roughly one-third fewer licensed premises where artists can perform medium to smaller gigs.
At the presentation of those annual results at the APRA AMCOS HQ in Sydney, the organization’s CEO Dean Ormston urged the federal government to commit to a live music venue tax offset to act “as a catalyst in jump-starting live music nationally.”
This week, Ormston and APRA AMCOS reiterated those calls.
“For the current wave and the next generation of music creators to develop their skills and become export-ready, we need to provide them with the resources at home and build a sustainable live music ecosystem,” says Ormston.
A live music venue tax offset, he continued, would revitalize the country’s network of small live music venues.
Meanwhile, the music rights management body has confirmed the make-up of its board, following held two annual general meetings held Tuesday (No. 21) in Sydney.On the APRA board, writers Mark Callaghan and Jonathan Zwartz and publishers Jaime Gough (Concord Music Publishing ANZ) and Matthew Capper (Warner Chappell Music Australia) retained their positions. Jenny Morris and Damian Trotter (Sony Music Publishing) were named as chair and deputy chair of the APRA board, respectively.On the AMCOS board, directors Trotter and Heath Johns (BMG) retained their positions. Karen Hamilton (120 Publishing) is a new director appointment to the AMCOS board, while Philip Burn, chairman and CEO of Hal Leonard Australia, stepped down following ten years as a director, and was thanked for his service and expertise.
APRA and AMCOS board directors are elected by their respective memberships through a secure ballot. The process and results of the elections are audited and verified by APRA AMCOS’ independent auditors, KPMG.
Those elections were held in light of the society’s “Year In Review,” which reported a “dramatic” 400% year-on-year gain in license fees for concerts and festivals to A$31.9 million ($20.9 million), an all-time high, while international income from affiliate societies spiked 17.7% to A$70 million ($45 million), a new record.
Despite inflation and the rising cost of living, Aussie and Kiwi music fans flocked to shows. Notable tours included internationals Ed Sheeran, Elton John and Harry Styles, notes APRA AMCOS, plus Grammy-winning Sydney-EDM act RÜFÜS DU SOL, Crowded House, award-winning NZ acts L.A.B., SIX60 and more.
APRA AMCOS represents over 119,000 songwriter, composer and music publisher members. Click here for its “Year In Review.”
Next year could be a watershed moment for contemporary R&B at the Grammys, particularly in the General Field. With SZA leading all nominees at the 2024 Grammy Awards with nine nods and Victoria Monét (seven) and Coco Jones (five) right on her heels, a new class of R&B powerhouses is looking to make a major splash on Music’s Biggest Night.
At the top of 2023, Beyoncé became the most-awarded act in Grammy history thanks to her triumph in best dance/electronic album for her seismic Renaissance album. That same record — which won three additional Grammys and spawned a pair of Billboard Hot 100 top 10 hits — reigned victorious at the Soul Train Awards, where it secured the “Cuff It” singer her fourth album of the year win at the ceremony.
The Soul Train Music Awards launched in 1987 with a star-studded ceremony co-hosted by Dionne Warwick and Luther Vandross. Intended to celebrate the best in R&B, soul, rap, jazz, and gospel music, the Soul Train Music Awards predate any Grammy categories honoring rap and R&B albums. The Recording Academy introduced best R&B album (along with such other “genre album” awards as best pop album, best rock album and best country album) in 1995, with best rap album arriving the following year.
So, just how often do the winners of the Soul Train Music Award for album of the year sync up with the Grammy winners for best R&B album, best progressive R&B album and best rap album? While Soul Train cannot always be used as a proper precursor there is certainly considerable overlap between the two shows.
Every Soul Train Music Awards ceremony since 1995 — barring 2020 — has found the show’s album of the year winner getting, at the very least, a nod in its respective genre category at the corresponding Grammy ceremony. There have been 15 instances in which the Soul Train album of the year winner won the Grammy for their respective genre category. But there’s a catch.
For the the ceremony’s first nine years (1987-1996), album of the year was split into male, female, and group, with additional categories for rap, jazz and gospel albums. From 1997 to 2003, the awards were consolidated into a single R&B/soul or rap album of the year category. In 2004, Soul Train experimented with dropping genre specifications, presenting an award simply titled “album of the year.” They returned to the male, female, group split from 2005 to 2007, ultimately settling on one album of the year category from 2009 onwards.
Here’s some more Soul Train Music Awards lore: the 2008 ceremony was canceled due to the 2007-08 Writers Guild of America (WGA) strike. Luckily, the 2023 WGA strike ended in time for this year’s Soul Train Music Awards.
This year’s Soul Train album of the year nominees are SZA (SOS), Victoria Monét (Jaguar II), Coco Jones (What I Didn’t Tell You – Deluxe), Babyface (Girls Night Out – Extended), Burna Boy (I Told Them…), Ari Lennox (age/sex/location), Janelle Monáe (The Age of Pleasure) and Summer Walker (Clear 2: Soft Life – EP).
The 2023 Soul Train Music Awards will air on Sunday, Nov. 26, at 8 p.m. ET/PT on BET and BET Her. SZA, Summer Walker and Usher lead all nominees with nine nods each.
Here’s a brief overview of which albums have triumphed at both the Soul Train Music Awards and the Grammys.
1995
Brian Jonestown Massacre has abruptly ended its tour of Australia, following an intra-band fracas that broke out onstage earlier in the week, video for which has gone viral.
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Anton Newcombe’s psychedelic rock outfit has canceled the last leg of its 11-date tour, which was scheduled to wrap-up Friday night (Nov. 24) at University of Wollongong UniBar, in New South Wales, with The Laurels in support.
Eight of those shows were sell-outs, including the scrapped dates Wednesday at Theatre Royal, Castlemaine, and Thursday at Northcote Theatre, Melbourne.
There is no official statement to share at this time, a rep for the tour promoters, Principal Entertainment, tells Billboard. Though it’s easy to draw a conclusion.
During the band’s gig Tuesday (Nov. 21) at The Forum Melbourne, their ninth show on their swing Down Under, Newcombe and his revolving cast of bandmates became unstruck in a bizarre — and very public — display.
In fan-filmed clips doing the rounds of social media, Newcombe is seen rumbling with guitarist Ryan Van Kriedt after telling him to leave the stage.
“Cut off this guy’s mic, put down my guitar, party’s over captain,” Newcombe remarked, adding: “get to f***. we actually don’t need you. Go. Put my guitar down on the stage and think about what’s happening. Unplug.”
Van Kriedt can be heard saying: “You better think about this one, man. Because this is forever,” before putting his guitar down and wandering offstage.
Push then came to shove. Newcombe hit Van Kriedt over the head with a guitar, escalating a scuffle that saw security step in and call off the concert. “Undefeated, god bless this country,” Newcombe told the audience, as the house lights went on, the curtains fell and boos rang out.
As frontman of Brian Jonestown Massacre, Newcombe is 20 studio albums deep into a career, one in which commercial success has been outweighed by his reputation for unpredictable and eccentric behavior.
To most casual fans, Newcombe is best remembered for his colorful, central role in DIG!, the 2004 documentary which follows the love-hate relationship between the frontmen of Brian Jonestown Massacre and the Dandy Warhols, and the bands’ contrasting career trajectories.
Brian Jonestown Massacre is touring in support of 2023’s The Future is Your Past, released locally through A Recordings/MGM Australia.
Jack Harlow has his third No. 1 on Billboard’s Streaming Songs chart thanks to “Lovin on Me,” which debuts atop the ranking dated Nov. 25. In the tracking week of Nov. 10-16, “Lovin on Me” earned 22.2 million official U.S. streams, according to Luminate. That’s in its first week of release, though prior to its […]
Mitski continues to reign over the charts with her track “My Love Mine All Mine,” while Jack Harlow breaks into the chart’s top five with his song “Lovin on Me.” Rania Aniftos:Mitski’s “My Love Mine All Mine” ranks atop the TikTok Billboard Top 50 yet again, while Jack Harlow’s viral hit “Lovin on Me” makes […]
Bad Bunny makes history on the latest Latin Songwriters chart (dated Nov. 25), as he becomes the first person to spend 100 weeks at No. 1.
He continues his record-setting run thanks to 14 writing credits on the latest Hot Latin Songs chart, including “Monaco,” which tallies a fifth week at No. 1.
Here’s a look at all of Bad Bunny’s songwriting credits on the latest Nov. 25-dated Hot Latin Songs chart.
Rank, Artist Billing, Title:No. 1, Bad Bunny, “Monaco”No. 5, Bad Bunny & Feid, “Perro Negro”No. 11, Bad Bunny, “Un Preview”No. 12, Bad Bunny & Young Miko, “Fina”No. 16, Bad Bunny, “Where She Goes”No. 22, Drake ft. Bad Bunny, “Gently”No. 28, Bad Bunny, “Baby Nueva”No. 29, Bad Bunny, “Mr. October”No. 30, Bad Bunny & Mora, “Hibiki”No. 33, Bad Bunny, “Cybertruck”No. 38, Bad Bunny & Bryant Myers, “Seda”No. 40, Bad Bunny & Luar La L, “Telefono Nuevo”No. 43, Bad Bunny & YONVNGCHIMI, “Mercedes Carota”No. 47, Bad Bunny, “No Me Quiero Casar”
“Monaco” is Bad Bunny’s 14th career No. 1 on Hot Latin Songs (the fourth-most of all time), and his eighth to spend five-or-more weeks on top.
Across Billboard’s 13 weekly songwriter charts, Bad Bunny is just the second artist to spend 100 or more weeks at No. 1. Kirk Franklin, who has led Gospel Songwriters for 121 weeks, tallied his 100th week at No. 1 in March. “To have my music resonate with so many for 100 weeks is truly a humbling experience,” he told Billboard at the time. “I am grateful beyond words to those that love my music for their support and to everyone who has played a part in bringing my music to life.”
Reaching 100 weeks atop any of Billboard’s 13 producer charts is just as rare. Only two producers have achieved the feat: Joey Moi, with 122 weeks atop Country Producers, and Tainy, with 119 frames at No. 1 on Latin Producers.
Billboard launched the Hot 100 Songwriters and Hot 100 Producers charts, as well as genre-specific rankings for country, rock & alternative, R&B/hip-hop, R&B, rap, Latin, Christian, gospel and dance/electronic, in June 2019, while alternative and hard rock joined in 2020, along with seasonal holiday rankings in 2022. The charts are based on total points accrued by a songwriter and producer, respectively, for each attributed song that appears on the Billboard Hot 100. The genre-based songwriter and producer charts follow the same methodology based on corresponding “Hot”-named genre charts. As with Billboard’s yearly recaps, multiple writers or producers split points for each song equally (and the dividing of points will lead to occasional ties on rankings).
Meet Boys Are Rolling. The producing trio of Miles Sugarman, Crosby Spagnoli and Arno Sugarman are making a name for themselves by working with artists such as Joey Bada$$, Gunna, JID and Smino. The trio opens about how they came together, the projects they are working on, how they find artists to work with, the future of the group and more!Crosby Spagnoli:I definitely saw some people at the beginning were like, “Whoa, you guys made this.”
Miles Sugarman:It’s always, “You guys made this?” that’s always … Arno Sugarman:They always thought that we would pull up like somebody else’s beats or something.
Miles Sugarman:I’d say the simplest way to put it is Arno will start something, kind of get a great base idea down, we’ll then give it to Crosby. Crosby will polish it up, make it ready to then give to an artist, have it, like, song ready, and then I’ll get it to the artist. I’d say that’s the simplest way to put it.
Boys Are Rolling:Yeah.
Miles Sugarman:Me and Arno are brothers, so I guess we’ve known each other for quite a long time now and Crosby went to our high school. He and I did a music theory class together, and at the time, Arno was making beats on his computer, which wasn’t that popular, at least in my personal opinion. It didn’t seem that popular. And Crosby one day was like, “Oh, yo, like I make beats too, like, check this out.” I thought he was hilarious. I thought his music was really interesting, and because they were the only two that I personally knew that did that kind of, I guess, producing, I was like, “You guys need to meet.”
I find mostly bubbling artists, mainly through Spotify. I’ll check out artists that I really like, see who they’ve worked with or check their Instagram to see who likes them, and you’ll stumble upon something fantastic. Luckily, we now have, I feel like, enough credibility where I can DM someone who’s not, you know, completely blown up and usually we have a good success rate of who will hit us back. That’s my favorite part of this. It’s been like this is great. We want to work with them and actually have the ability to work with them.Watch the full video above!
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Spotify’s new royalties model will be a subject of discussion when IMPALA’s board meets later this month.
In a brief statement, the Brussels-based independent music companies association announced it was canvassing its member views on the proposed changes, detailed for the first time in a blog post published on Tuesday (Nov. 21).
“Our focus is and will remain ensuring a fair, diverse and sustainable music ecosystem for all,” reads the trade body’s message, “as set out in our 10-point plan to make the most of streaming, which was released two years and a half ago and was updated earlier this year.”
The board of IMPALA is scheduled to meet next Thursday, Nov. 30.
With its post, Spotify confirmed the broader music industry’s worst-kept secret by sharing details of a three-pronged royalties model, which would funnel more money to popular artists, labels and distributors, lift the streaming threshold, while putting the clamps on streaming fraud.
Among the changes touted by Spotify: tracks must have reached at least 1,000 streams in the previous 12 months in order to generate recorded royalties; labels and distributors will fined per track when “flagrant artificial streaming is detected” on their content; and functional content — think rain noises, whale sounds, recordings of wind rustling the leaves— will be significantly devalued, and its minimum track length increased to two minute into order to be eligible to generate royalties.
By tackling these issues that account for just a “small percentage of total streams,” Spotify reckons, its new policing of content “now means that we can drive approximately an additional $1 billion in revenue toward emerging and professional artists over the next five years.”
IMPALA’s voice has been front and center in the debate for a “fairer, more dynamic” streaming market.
In April, IMPALA published an updated version of its 10-step plan to “make the most of streaming,” which proposed various changes to how digital royalties are allocated, including attaching a premium value to tracks that the listener has sought out, a so-called “Fan Participation Model” whereby artists and rights holders could generate incremental revenue within digital services through offering special features and extra tracks, higher share for master rights and more.
Later, in September, IMPALA raised concerns over the new “artist-centric” streaming model being rolled out by Deezer and Universal Music Group (UMG), warning of a potential “two-tier” music market that unfairly disadvantages indie artists and labels.
The European trade body represents nearly 6,000 independent companies, labels and national associations, including Beggars Group, Cooking Vinyl, Epitaph and PIAS Music Group.
The Voice has reached the Playoffs phase and Huntley is, well, very much in the hunt.
The Fredericksburg, Virginia-native impressed when he stepped onto The Voice last month for the Blind Auditions, showcasing a voice with depth and character, a rare blend that could power its way through country, blues, rock and grunge.
From the opening notes of that audition, when he sang “She Talks To Angels,” Huntley caught a four-chair turn. Niall Horan went on to secure his services.
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Heading into Tuesday night’s episode, Huntley had a lot to live up to. Pressure, no pressure.
Huntley put on his game voice, and hit a full-throated rendition of David Kushner’s “Daylight”.
The coaches loved it. “I just can’t believe how amazing you are, every single time,” was Gwen Stefani’s immediate response. “Your actual vocal ability, especially in the lane of music that you do, your style of singing, it is masterful.” If she had a label, she’d sign him up. “You’re so amazing.”
John Legend was also blown away. “What you’re giving us on stage is well beyond a competition,” he enthuses. “You’re already a star. You carry yourself that way with confidence, with that distinctive voice.” The execution, flawless. Huntley could go on to be a Grammy winner someday, he reckons.
The performance was “just insane,” Horan remarks. The rocker’s coach challenged him with the song, something he felt Huntley wouldn’t pick, and the result was “the best you’ve ever sung here.”
“You’re one of the people that’s got something to say to the world, and you’ve got a voice like that, it’ll be one hell of and album, and I’d buy it.” So would Reba McEntire. So would many others.
The Irishman had the challenge of cutting three of his six artists. Ultimately, he selected Huntley, Nini Iris and Mara Justine to progress in the competition.
The Voice airs Mondays and Tuesdays on NBC and streaming next day on Peacock.
Watch Huntley’s performance below.
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