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The Zombies, the British invasion rock band behind classics like “Time of the Season” and “She’s Not There,” announced this week they’ve obtained their master recordings after decades of outside control.
“It’s another stage of us not worrying about what’s going to happen in the future,” says keyboardist Rod Argent, one of the band’s founders and songwriters. “We’ve got more overseeing of everything that’s going on.”
The baroque pop originators signed with Marquis Enterprises in 1964 when they were still teenagers and almost immediately scored a No. 2 hit on the Hot 100 with their Argent-penned debut single, “She’s Not There,” which Marquis had licensed to Decca. They followed that up with another Argent original, “Tell Her No,” which peaked at No. 6. Their signature and most enduring hit — Argent’s “Time of the Season” — didn’t gain traction until after they’d broken up prior to the 1968 release of their sophomore album Odessey and Oracle on CBS. The era-defining song, with its breathy call-and-response vocals from Colin Blunstone and psychedelic keyboard runs by Argent, eventually reached No. 3 on the Hot 100.
Carole Broughton, a Marquis employee at the time, wound up controlling the band’s masters and publishing over several decades, recently placing synchs including Odessey and Oracle album cut “This Will Be Our Year” in the Schitt’s Creek finale and “She’s Not There” in a Chanel ad campaign starring Keira Knightley.
“I’d always promised [the masters] to them,” says Broughton, owner of Marquis and Bocu Group, a publisher that oversees 700 song copyrights. “We’re all in our 70s now and it just felt right. I certainly didn’t want the masters to go back to anybody else other than The Zombies.”
Rod Argent, Hugh Grundy, Chris White and Colin Blunstone of The Zombies attend An Evening With The Zombies at The GRAMMY Museum on April 27, 2017 in Los Angeles.
Rebecca Sapp/WireImage for The Recording Academy
Deal terms were undisclosed, but discussions were “three years in the making,” according to Chris Tuthill, the band’s co-manager. “My partner Cindy [da Silva] and I have been working long and hard to have it controlled and under one roof,” he says. “Although Marquis always kept a sympathetic and active role in the catalog, they didn’t necessarily do things to actively promote the catalog, particularly on DSPs.” When Marquis placed The Zombies’ “A Rose for Emily” in the hit 2017 podcast S-Town, he adds, “It would have been brilliant, had we known this was coming out, having people pitch this for playlisting and promoting the story of this song.”
Still, Broughton and Marquis were unusually fair to The Zombies during a long period when classic-rock stars lost control of their publishing and master recordings to music executives they considered unscrupulous.
“When it was fairly unfashionable, she did the most wonderful job, because she was so dedicated to us,” Argent recalls. “She continually worked it in the early days. She never let it die. That did us a huge favor.” Tuthill adds: “The guys have told me it was always very straightforward, unlike the highway-robbery stories I’ve heard from people who came up in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. Everything got paid through that was supposed to be paid through.”
After the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, Broughton sold The Zombies’ publishing, which includes tracks by songwriters Argent, Blunstone and Chris White, to Robert Wise‘s Wise Music Group. “I’d known Bobby since I was young — he used to put out our sheet music,” says Broughton, who began her music-business career in 1961, at 14, with U.K. publisher Mills Music. “It made sense at the time. I knew they were going to be very proactive with it.”
The Zombies, who are on tour this fall and recently released a new album, Different Game, are directing their managers to dig through boxes of files and scouring original four-track tapes for potential catalog reissues. “The gem in all of this is The Zombies don’t have to ask anyone for permission to do anything with respect to their masters,” says Monika Tashman, the band’s attorney. “This is about them claiming something that seemed impossible at the early stage of their career.”
For 2023, Billboard is introducing the R&B/Hip-Hop Power Players’ Choice Award, a peer-voted accolade chosen by Billboard Pro members to honor the executive they believe has made the most impact across the R&B/hip-hop music business over the past year. After three rounds of voting, Billboard Pro members have chosen Pierre “P” Thomas, CEO of Quality Control, to […]
In February, TikTok’s billion-plus users received an unexpected gift for Valentine’s Day: exclusive access to the catalog of one of hip-hop’s most revered labels, Death Row Records. Snoop Dogg had purchased the catalog in 2022 and pulled it from streaming services. So the only place to hear tracks from Snoop’s classic Doggystyle or 2Pac’s 10-times-platinum All […]
HYBE’s growing roster of K-pop groups and a heavy touring schedule helped revenue improve 21.2% to 621 billion won ($472 million) in the second quarter of 2023, the South Korea company announced on Tuesday (Aug. 8). Revenue for the six-month period surpassed 1 trillion won ($760 million) for the first time in the company’s history.
Strong album sales by Seventeen and Tomorrow X Together led HYBE to 22.7 million albums in the first half of 2023 and put the entertainment business on pace to far surpass sales of 22.2 million and 15 million in calendar 2022 and 2021, respectively.
Seventeen’s 10th Mini Album ‘FML’ sold 3.99 million units globally on its first day of release and debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 albums chart dated May 13. Nine years after Seventeen’s debut, the group’s fandom “is growing significantly, which is leading to selling out and reprinting of older albums as the group is attracting much attention,” CEO Ji-won Park said during the earnings call.
Tomorrow X Together sold 3.54 million albums in the quarter. NewJeans accounted for 2.1 million units and nabbed its first No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with the Get Up EP. Le Sserafim sold 1.9 million units and Enhypen moved 1.8 million units. HYBE’s sixth- and seventh-best-selling artists were solo members of BTS: Jimin sold 1.6 million units and Agust D sold 1.3 million units.
A revitalized global concert business and more artists on tour helped HYBE’s concert revenue improve 85.4% to 157.5 billion won ($120 million). Suga attracted 290,000 fans to 28 concerts in 10 cities across South Korea, the United States, Southeast Asia and Japan. HYBE plans to have 111 concerts by seven artists in 2023, almost double the 59 concerts by four artists in 2022.
Merchandise and licensing revenue improved 13.3% to 111.9 billion won ($85 million). Contents revenue dropped 28.1% to 50.8 billion won ($39 million) while fan clubs and other indirect revenue grew 29.4% to 21.8 billion won ($17 million).
Despite the strong demand for its artists’ albums and concerts, HYBE’s operating profit declined 7.9% to 88.3 billion won ($67 million), however, and operating margin as a percent of revenue dropped to 13.1% from 17.2% in the prior-year period. CFO Kyung-Jun Lee attributed the decline to expenses related to BTS’s Festa concert in June to celebrate the group’s tenth anniversary and “substantial investment” in Weverse Con festival, also in June. Adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization declined 1.2% to 106.4 billion won ($81 million).
Weverse, HYBE’s in-house social media platform, finished the second quarter with a record 9.5 million monthly active users, up 200,000 MAUs from 9.3 million in the first quarter and more than 50% greater than the 6 million MAUs in the second quarter of 2022. In the second quarter, Weverse launched a payment method called Jelly; Weverse DM, a subscription-based private chat service that allows fans to exchange messages with artists; and Fan Letter, a feature that allows fans to write and decorate messages to artists.
Shares of HYBE rose as much as 4.6% to 287,000 won ($218.03) on the South Korea Stock Exchange Tuesday morning. As of Monday’s closing price, HYBE’s share price had gained 58.2% year to date.
Elon Musk says his potential in-person fight with Mark Zuckerberg would be streamed on his social media site X, formerly known as Twitter.
The two tech billionaires seemingly agreed to a “cage match” face-off in late June. Zuckerberg is actually trained in mixed martial arts, and the CEO of Facebook’s parent company Meta posted about completing his first jiu jitsu tournament earlier this year.
“Zuck v Musk fight will be live-streamed on X,” Musk wrote in a post Sunday (Aug. 5) on the platform. “All proceeds will go to charity for veterans.”
Musk said earlier Sunday he was training for the fight by lifting weights.
“Don’t have time to work out, so I just bring them to work,” Musk wrote.
Whether or not Musk and Zuckerberg actually make it to the ring in Las Vegas has yet to be seen — especially as Musk often tweets about action prematurely or without following through. But even if their cage match agreement is all a joke, the banter has gained attention.
It all started when Musk, who owns X, responded to a tweet about Meta preparing to release a new Twitter rival called Threads. He took a dig about the world becoming “exclusively under Zuck’s thumb with no other options” — but then one Twitter user jokingly warned Musk of Zuckerberg’s jiu jitsu training.
“I’m up for a cage match if he is lol,” Musk wrote.
Representatives of X, Meta and Ultimate Fighting Championship, which owns the venue where the fight might take place, didn’t immediately respond to emails seeking comment.
Musk’s push to stream the video live on X comes as he aims to turn the platform into a “digital town square.” However, his much-publicized Twitter Spaces kickoff event in May with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announcing his run for president struggled with technical glitches and a near half-hour delay.
Musk had said the problems were due to “straining” servers because so many people were trying to listen to the audio-only event. But even at their highest, the number of listeners listed topped out at around 420,000, far from the millions of viewers that televised presidential announcements attract.
SM Entertainment’s second quarter earnings, which were announced Wednesday (Aug. 2), helped shares of the K-pop music company, home to such acts as NCT Dream and Red Velvet, gain 7.6% to 137,700 won ($105.59) this week. That made it the top performer of the 21 stocks in the Billboard Global Music Index this week. The […]
Apple says it now has more than 1 billion paid subscribers to its various services, as that line of its business has hit an all-time high.
The company revealed the number in its quarterly earnings report, disclosing total revenue of 81.8 billion, a decline of 1 percent from a year ago. This is the third consecutive quarter to see a decline in revenue from Apple, thanks to slower sales of its hardware devices, like the iPhone and Mac lines. Net income was $19.9 billion.
However, its services business continues to grow at a rapid pace, hitting $21.2 billion in the quarter, up from 19.6 billion last year. Apple services include Apple TV+, Apple Music, Apple Arcade, Apple News, and iCloud+. It also includes subscriptions through apps on the app store. The company did not break out how many subscribers used which service, beyond the topline 1 billion figure.
On the company’s earnings call, however, CEO Tim Cook said that Apple TV+ had hit a revenue record and touted the addition of soccer superstar Lionel Messi to Major League Soccer’s Inter Miami. Apple has the global exclusive rights to MLS.
“We are focused on original content and so we are all about giving great storytellers the venue to tell great stories and hopefully get us all to think a little deeper,” Cook added. “And sport is a part of that because sport is the ultimate original story.”
One thing that did not come on the call was the ongoing WGA and SAG strikes. of course, for Apple, its content business is a tiny piece of the overall pie. Apple’s total profits last quarter were nearly double Warner Bros. Discovery’s total revenue in the quarter, with WBD noting that it is firmly in the content business.
“We are happy to report that we had an all-time revenue record in Services during the June quarter, driven by over 1 billion paid subscriptions, and we saw continued strength in emerging markets thanks to robust sales of iPhone,” said Cook in a statement. “From education to the environment, we are continuing to advance our values, while championing innovation that enriches the lives of our customers and leaves the world better than we found it.”
This article was originally published by The Hollywood Reporter.
Adidas brought in 400 million euros ($437 million) from the first release of Yeezy sneakers left over after breaking ties with Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, as the German sportswear maker tries to offload the unsold shoes and donate part of the proceeds to groups fighting antisemitism and other forms of hate.
The first batch of shoes released in June, which sold out, helped the company reach an operating profit of 176 million euros in the second quarter, better than it originally planned, Adidas said Thursday. A second sale started Wednesday.
After Ye’s antisemitic and other offensive comments led the company to end its partnership with the rapper in October, Adidas said it had sought a way to dispose of 1.2 billion euros worth of the high-end shoes in a responsible way.
“We will continue to carefully sell off more of the existing Yeezy inventory,” said CEO Bjørn Gulden, who took over in January.
“This is much better than destroying and writing off the inventory and allows us to make substantial donations to organizations like the Anti-Defamation League, the Philonise & Keeta Floyd Institute for Social Change and Robert Kraft’s Foundation to Combat Antisemitism,” Gulden said.
Adidas has already handed over 10 million euros to the groups and expected to give an additional 100 million euros, with further donations possible depending on how future sales go, Chief Financial Officer Harm Ohlmeyer said.
Several Jewish civic leaders contacted by The Associated Press said they weren’t planning to buy a pair of Yeezys themselves but generally welcomed the plan to support anti-hate organizations, saying the company is trying to make the best of a bad situation.
The Adidas CEO said the Yeezy sales are “of course also helping both our cash flow and general financial strength.”
The first sale unloaded roughly 20% to 25% of the Yeezy sneakers that were left stacked up in warehouses, contributing 150 million euros of Adidas’ 176 million euros in operating earnings in the April-to-June quarter.
Ohlmeyer, however, cautioned that the Yeezy contribution was smaller than the number made it seem because it did not include many of the company’s costs.
Adidas also warned that the first sale included the highest-priced shoes and sold out completely but that it wasn’t clear whether the remaining releases would see similar price levels and demand.
The blow-up of the Ye partnership put Adidas in a precarious position because of the popularity of the Yeezy line, and it faced growing pressure to end ties last year as other companies cut off the rapper.
The torn-up contract was now in arbitration, “a process that is being taken care of by legal people” for both sides and was surrounded “by a lot of uncertainty,” said Gulden, the Adidas CEO.
Asked whether it must pay Ye royalties on the shoes, the company has said only that it will observe all its contractual obligations.
Yeezy revenue from June was “largely in line” with sales seen in the second quarter of last year, Adidas said. The boost has allowed the company to cut its expectations for this year’s operating loss to 450 million euros from 700 million euros predicted previously.
On the amount of money given to anti-hate groups, Adidas said the donations were not a fixed percentage of sales but that it had discussed with the recipients what an appropriate amount would be.
BRISBANE, Australia — Mike Shinoda, co-founder of Linkin Park, the nu metal favorites fresh from reigning over several Billboard charts, is now part of the lineup for Bigsound 2023.
In March of this year, Linkin Park’s “Lost” saw the band return to No. 1 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Airplay chart for the first time in almost nine years, and hit the summit of the Alternative Airplay chart for the first time in nearly a decade.
“Lost” features vocals from Chester Bennington, who died in 2017, and was featured on the 20th anniversary release of Meteora, which led the Billboard 200 for two weeks following its original release, and is one of the group’s six leaders on the all-genres albums chart.
Away from the studio and stage, Shinoda, a music industry innovator in the NFT space, was tapped last year by Warner Recorded Music (WRM) to help shape the major’s “artist-centric approach” to Web3.
Also part of the third-wave of announcements is Christine Anu, who appears in the capacity as an official Bigsound headline speaker. One of the country’s most recognizable voices, Anu’s performance of Neil Murray’s “My Island Home” is a solid-gold classic, earning entry in APRA’s list of Top 30 Australian songs, published 2001, just one year after she performed it during the closing ceremony of the Sydney Olympic Games.
Organized by trade body QMusic, Bigsound will boast more than 100 speakers, from international and national buyers, agents, music supervisors, bookers and “industry decision makers.”
Speakers at this year’s summit include Simon Napier-Bell, the celebrated author, filmmaker and artist manager, who guided the careers of Rock Hall inductee George Michael and Wham, English composer Simon Franglen, Cockenflap Festival promoter Cora Chan, artists Ziggy Ramo, Kate Miller-Heidke, Georgia Maq, and more.
Also, upwards of 140 emerging acts from around the globe will play the showcase program, which adds Zheani, Full Flower Moon Band, Dean Brady, FELIVAND, Loren Ryan and others.
This year’s edition will be held Sept. 5 – 8 in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley.
Earlier in the year, the Palaszczuk state government announced funding for Bigsound to the tune of nearly A$4 million over four years, a boost that comes as the Queensland capital gears-up for the 2032 Olympic Games.
Bigsound 2023 is presented by Brick Lane Brewing and independent ticketer Oztix, and supported by national youth broadcaster triple j.
Visit bigsound.org.au for more.
Continued growth in music subscriptions and new Copyright Royalty Board mechanical royalty rates helped Reservoir Media improve revenue 31% to $31.8 million in the fiscal first quarter ended June 30, the company announced Wednesday. About two-thirds of the improvement came from organic revenue growth while the remainder stemmed from the acquisitions of music catalogs of The Spinners and Greg Kihn, among others.
Digital revenue improved 34% to $17.5 million due to “increasing demand trends for streaming music globally, something we saw evidence of in Spotify’s higher-than-expected subscriber numbers reported last week,” said CEO Golnar Khosrowshahi during the earnings call. Spotify’s premium subscribers rose 17% to 220 million in the second quarter, beating company expectations of 217 million subscribers. Monthly active users, which includes subscribers and listeners to the ad-supported service, climbed 27% to 551 million, easily topping the company’s 530-million target.
Those gains helped Reservoir’s adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization to climb 36% to $10.1 million and outpaced the 20% increase in administration costs in the quarter. CFO Jim Heindlmeyer expects operating leverage — the ability to increase earnings by increasing revenue — to improve in the coming quarters. “Looking ahead, we expect revenue to outpace operating costs as this has generally been the case during our time as a public traded company,” he said.
Reservoir sounded upbeat about Spotify’s decision last week to raise the monthly price of its individual plan in the U.S. and other markets. Spotify’s increase, like the similar increases by Apple Music in 2022 and Amazon Music earlier this year, “will impact our revenues on a pretty linear basis,” said Heindlmeyer. “In other words, a 10% price increase at a streaming service will flow through to us at around a 10% increase to our pool of money.”
Last quarter’s music publishing revenue of $20.8 million was up 26% from the prior-year period and accounted for 65% of total revenue, down from 67% in the prior-year period. New mechanical royalty rates from streaming services established by the CRB for 2023 to 2027 represented “a meaningful increase” and allowed Reservoir “to recognize higher revenue associated with mechanical royalties from digital sources,” said Khosrowshahi. Publishing’s digital revenue grew 41% to $11.9 million and performance revenue improved 28% to $4.5 million. Synch revenue declined 8%, from $3.3 million to $3 million.
Recorded music revenue grew 37% to $10.4 million and accounted for 33% of total revenue, up from 31% in the prior-year period. The segment’s physical revenue grew 176% to $3.6 million. Digital and neighboring rights revenues, which combined to account for about 12% of recorded music revenues, improved 23% and 25%, respectively.
The decline in synchronization revenues — down 8% in publishing and down 68% in recorded music from the prior-year period — were the results of a timing issue, not the strike by actor’s and writer’s unions that has stopped productions of many television shows and motion pictures. Khosrowshahi said the advertising placement and movie trailer businesses are both “strong” but could have varied impacts based on when the strike ends.
Reservoir maintained its earlier fiscal 2024 guidance for both revenue ($127 million to $132 million) and adjusted EBITDA ($49 million to $52 million). “We remain confident about the growth trajectory of the global music industry and how Reservoir is positioned to capitalize on it,” said Khosrowshahi.
Earnings highlights:
Total revenue increased 31% to $31.8 million. Adjusted EBITDA rose 36% to $10.1 million.
Publishing revenue increased 26% to $20.8 million. Publishing’s digital revenue rose 41% to $11.9 million. Performance revenue jumped 28% to $4.5 million.
Recorded music revenue grew 23% to $5.6 million. Physical revenue jumped 176% to $3.6 million. Digital revenue improved 23% to $5.6 million.
Guidance for fiscal 2024 (the year ending March 31, 2024) remained at $127 million to $132 million, representing 6% growth at the midpoint. Adjusted EBITDA guidance remained at $49 million to $52 million, representing 9% growth at the midpoint.