Business News
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United Talent Agency has appointed Kirk Taboada, an industry veteran in the live Latin music scene, as an agent within its music division. Based in Miami, Taboada’s recruitment is part of UTA’s strategic efforts to solidify the company’s market-leading presence across the global Latin music genre. Taboada began his career in the music industry in 2005 […]
Breaking Benjamin signed with BMG to release new music, their first since 2018. According to a press release, the band has racked up 8.5 billion streams globally.
On the heels of his recent signing with Eminem’s Shady Records, Aftermath Entertainment and Interscope, Filipino rapper Ez Mil signed to Grassroots Music for global management. His representative at the company is Dan Lee.
Universal Music Canada signed Punjabi producer thiarajxtt (a.k.a. Dilmanjot Singh Thiara), who released the EP If the Sun Had a Dark Side on the label on Oct. 18. Last year, thiarajxtt produced most of Diljit Dosanjh’s album Ghost and collaborated with Jassa Dhillon, Shubh, Channi Nattan, Jerry and more.
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The Head and the Heart signed with Verve Forecast and released a new single entitled “Arrow.” A new studio album will be announced in the coming weeks.
The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus (“Face Down,” “Your Guardian Angel”) signed to Better Noise Music, which will release the band’s new album next spring.
Finnish rock band The Rasmus (“In the Shadows”) also signed with Better Noise, which jointly released the group’s new single, “Rest in Pieces,” with Nordic indie label Playground Music on Friday (Oct. 25).
Rap-rock group Hollywood Undead signed with Sumerian Records and released the new single “Hollywood Forever.” According to a press release, the group has more than 3.1 billion career streams across platforms.
Alt-pop trio Coyote Theory (“This Side of Paradise”) signed with Nettwerk Music Group and released the new single “Waiting on the Weather.” The band’s drummer, Jayson Lynn, acts as the group’s manager. A&Rs are Anne Elise Dickinson and Tom Gates.
Austin Williams and Truth or Dare Records partnered with RECORDS Nashville/Columbia Records. Williams, known for songs including “Here We Go Again” and “Wanna Be Saved,” is repped by Loyd Potts and Ken Madson at Ignition Management, with agency representation from CAA. – Jessica Nicholson
Big Machine Records signed singer-songwriter and two-time Grammy nominee Ryan Hurd, who released his latest song, “This Party Sucks,” on Friday (Oct. 25). Hurd is also signed to Big Machine Music for publishing. The Big Machine Records roster additionally includes Tim McGraw, Carly Pearce, Midland, Rascal Flatts and Jackson Dean. – Jessica Nicholson
Mereba signed to Secretly Canadian, which will release her new album, The Breeze Grew a Fire, on Feb. 14. The first single from the LP, “Counterfeit,” dropped on Oct. 22.
Pop-rock duo Sparks (Ron and Russell Mael) signed with Transgressive Records, which will release their as-yet-untitled upcoming studio album — the band’s 28th — next year, with Firebird Label Services serving as distributor.
HEYOON, a Korean-born pop artist based in both L.A. and Korea who was previously part of the international pop group Now United, signed with Universal Music Korea. The label will help develop HEYOON globally.
Sibling duo Ocie and Wes Crowe, known as the country/folk/alternative duo Crowe Boys, signed with UMG Nashville. The duo’s first release for the label is “Let Me Feel Alone,” written solely by Ocie Crowe, out Nov. 8. – Jessica Nicholson
New York-based rapper-producer-trumpeter Pan Amsterdam, previously known as Leron Thomas, signed to Heavenly Records and released the new track “White Ninja.” An album is due next year.
Manchester, U.K.-based experimental punk band Maruja signed with Music For Nations and released a new single, “Break the Tension,” on the label. The group is slated to embark on a North American tour next year.
Barbadian singer/songwriter/producer Ayoni signed with Def Jam Recordings and released the single “San Francisco” ahead of a larger project set to drop next year. Ayoni is featured in the Paramount+ documentary Uncharted.
WME signed singer-songwriter Zach Meadows. The Florida native (and now Nashville resident) is repped by Torrez Music Group’s Alex Torrez and Emily Vincent. He released his debut album, Road to Nowhere, in August and will soon join Braxton Keith on the road throughout November. – Jessica Nicholson
Handcraft Entertainment signed Japanese-British artist, model and influencer Hana Kuro to a global production and management deal, marking the second major signing for the J-pop-focused firm.
For all the talk about TikTok and its impact on the music business, much less has been said about YouTube in the last few years. George Karalexis and Donna Budica, the co-founders and CEO and COO, respectively, of YouTube strategy company Ten2 Media, want to change that. “YouTube is so underserviced by the music industry. Traditionally, it’s just been a place to put up your music video,” Karalexis says of the platform where Justin Bieber, Troye Sivan and Maggie Rogers were discovered.
“It has evolved so much now,” Budica adds.
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With the 2021 introduction of Shorts, YouTube’s video equivalent of Instagram Reels and TikTok, the duo saw an opportunity to start a firm that hyperspecialized in YouTube. “YouTube is unlike anything else. It is an ecosystem,” Budica says. “Shorts, livestreams, longer videos, music videos, YouTube Music.”
Unlike the plethora of YouTube distributors and rights management firms that simply collect money from the platform and send artists and labels a check for what they’ve found, Ten2 sees itself as a high-touch service, handling YouTube royalty collection but also helping clients strategize content creation specifically for the platform. Those services include helping artists and labels create lucrative livestream loops of their videos, building out playlists of their songs, capturing publishing dollars from user-generated covers and developing strategies to attract new audiences with their Shorts. While Billboard has reported several stories about rights managers employing fraudulent schemes to siphon royalties from YouTube — often from unsuspecting independent artists who don’t have access to the streaming service’s content management system (CMS) — Ten2 offers clients a “completely transparent” dashboard, Karalexis says, that provides “educational tools, greater understanding about analytics — like what’s working, what’s not working — why and how to expedite growth,” Budica says, finishing his thought.
Karalexis and Budica’s clients include Warner Records, Rhino Records and a number of distributors that wish to remain anonymous, and they say they have had major success with such mainstream clients as Brent Faiyaz, Benson Boone, blink-182’s Travis Barker and NLE Choppa, to name a few, and have helped Christian artists Maverick City Music and Don Moen earn six-figure incomes on YouTube alone through savvy strategizing.
With data analytics firm Kantar reporting that YouTube Music was the “most adopted music streaming service” for the second quarter of 2024, and Luminate’s findings that YouTube Shorts are nearly at parity with TikTok when it comes to U.S. music listeners using the platform — more than 30% — Karalexis and Budica contend YouTube has a strong future. “We saw the writing on the wall,” Karalexis says.
Karalexis says he was given this guitar pick after seeing his first concert, Eric Clapton, in 1992. “That experience changed my life and made me want to pursue music.”
Yasara Gunawardena
Should all artists use a service like Ten2, or are there artists who fare better on YouTube with your guidance?
GEORGE KARALEXIS: If you don’t have a partner that understands YouTube [and has access to its CMS], then you’re blind on the platform. It’s not like Spotify and Apple, which have this very [similar] systematic approach where the song just kind of sits there. YouTube is part social network, part streaming service. So if you’re actively creating content on it, you’ll see a lot of upward growth of your own making. Also, Spotify and Apple don’t share how often listeners skip a song or how long people listen to your songs. If you get a partner with access to YouTube’s CMS, you can really get an understanding of who your audience is and who your potential audience is.
You’ve had success working with Christian artists. What makes this genre distinct from others?
KARALEXIS: We’ve found that Christian is song-based rather than artist-based. House bands at churches play lots of covers of popular Christian songs. Don Moen has written huge songs that get covered over and over, and the covers are even bigger than his original. Through that process, we realized there were a lot of royalties to claim. We also found success using keywords that Christians are searching for, like “Sunday prayer,” “worship,” stuff like that. YouTube is the second-largest search engine for folks behind Google, so these keywords really work to drive traffic. Also, it’s very driven by lyrics and long-form consumption. We’ve started a 24/7 livestream, like the Lofi Girl study beats videos, and it’s been huge. We’ve found that people watch these streams for an average of an hour and 50 minutes. Another example: We work with a few superchurch pastors, too. They have such a hardcore following that tunes in. They might draw 1,000 people in person, but on YouTube they’ll have 15,000 to 20,000.
DONNA BUDICA: But all these approaches are genre-agnostic. It doesn’t matter if it’s hip-hop or Christian or whatever. Everyone can benefit from a livestream or a lyric video or keywords.
What makes Shorts distinct in the short-form video space?
KARALEXIS: When someone opens the YouTube app on their phone, their mentality is very different than if they just choose to click on TikTok or Instagram. They are [typically] someone who watches long-form, someone who wants to get frequent updates from a person they subscribe to, whereas TikTok is quick virality-driven. We look at Shorts as a brand-builder — onboarding fans versus driving audio consumption.
“Disraeli Gears by Cream is my earliest memory of music,” Karalexis says. “I remember flipping through my dad’s vinyl collection and always asking for this one to be played.”
Yasara Gunawardena
Recently, a lot of labels have turned away from making high-quality music videos for singles. Why do you think that is?
BUDICA: YouTube is no longer a place where an artist should put out one really expensive music video every era and go away. Consistency is key, and the YouTube algorithm rewards that. If you’re constantly putting out one long-form video [shot on an iPhone] every week or every month, it’s better.
KARALEXIS: Hip-hop got it right first. They would do these lifestyle videos, where it’s them with cars, their friends. They’re showcasing the life that their lyrics are selling.
Warner Music Group CEO Robert Kyncl joined the company from YouTube. Is this leadership one of the reasons WMG hired Ten2?
KARALEXIS: Our relationship actually predated Robert. We started working with Warner in late 2021, early 2022. I think [Warner Records co-chairman/COO] Tom Corson is a really smart guy, and he’s always trying to find a competitive edge and find ways to service artists differently.
Does the restructuring at Atlantic Music Group affect you and your artist clients?
KARALEXIS: No, we mostly work with Warner Records. We also service a number of indie labels and artists that are not public.
YouTube is trying to launch a TV equivalent to rival Netflix and other streaming platforms. How will this affect your artists?
KARALEXIS: We’re seeing huge spikes in TV consumption already. It’s the next frontier. It’s so hard to break an artist on a phone because of the barrage of notifications you’re getting on there. Sometimes I don’t even remember what content I’ve seen because I was so distracted. On TV you’re not [barraged], so it has a lot of potential.
Budica says her diploma reminds her to “maintain a beginner’s mind while continuing to build upon the tools, fundamentals and passion for business that Wharton gave me during my formative years.”
Yasara Gunawardena
Artificial intelligence-generated or -assisted videos are starting to appear on social media. Will the rise of AI content hurt your clients’ chances of breaking through the noise?
BUDICA: Any kind of milestone in technological advancements could be malicious. But the reality is it’s here and it can expedite content creation. That’s how we choose to approach it.
KARALEXIS: Yeah, what can you do? Throw up your hands? Then you’ll get left behind. We have to embrace it. We’ve seen it help with Don Moen’s content creation. AI has helped him tremendously to create quick lyric videos and increase their output. We have a lyric-video generator and it can make, like, 50 versions a day.
Is that the future of shortform video platforms — generating a million versions of the same thing?
BUDICA: I’m going to say a soft no. It’s not about blindly putting out volume. It is good to experiment, but it’s about putting out things that resonate with your audience and using analytics to figure out what’s working.
The last year has had an influx in catalog sales and viral bumps for songs that are decades old. What are the opportunities on YouTube for catalog marketing?
KARALEXIS: Massive. Repurposing is important here. Donna came up with this idea of “surface area.” For someone who is deceased or no longer able to produce new material in a traditional way, the method has always been the same: a remaster, a reissue, but there’s a lot more we can do now. You can reintroduce the artist in a number of ways. For example, with The Beatles on YouTube, you could create a ton of playlists [videos that play in a particular order] that are based on keywords and themes, like “Beatles acoustic songs,” “Beatles love songs.” Sometimes it is as simple as reworking their old videos into 4K and uploading them with higher quality. We are very bullish on catalog and in deep discussions with some estates.
You’ve been working with major labels, including WMG, but do you think there is any danger in the majors ever trying to replicate your process in-house?
KARALEXIS The majors could do it [in-house], but they are downsizing and consolidating. For them to build what we’ve done from scratch in-house would be hard, and surprising.
“Much of the artwork in my office, including this one, was drawn by my dad, who came here on a boat from Italy [and] is an aerospace engineer,” Budica says. “His name is on the moon, but he also designed album cover art in the ’60s.”
Yasara Gunawardena
Conjunto Michoacan, the veteran Regional Mexican group known for its ranchera and norteño ballads, released “El Corrido de Fernando Valenzuela,” about the late star Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Fernando Valenzuela, in 1981. But the group didn’t do it because everybody was doing it — even though, in the early ’80s, everybody was. “We knew of a few other songs, but were not really inspired by them, because we were focused on what we were doing,” recalls Alejandro Saucedo Garcia, the group’s violinist for 40 years. “He was the king of baseball and everybody in Mexico loved him.”
“El Corrido de Fernando Valenzuela,” the group’s 1981 single, was one of many musical tributes that dominated Mexico and Los Angeles while “El Toro” was racking up hundreds of strikeouts and winning in the World Series. Among the most popular were upbeat salsa-and-disco jam “Go Fernando” by Everardo y Su Flota, a Chicago group whose bandleader died in 2014, and “Cumbia de Fernando Valenzuela,” a more traditional, name-chanting ballad by Los Gatos Negros de Tiberio.
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Conjunto Michoacan, one of the few surviving groups that dipped into Fernandomania at the time, had a songwriter, the late Magdaleno Oliva, who knew Valenzuela well. “They would have conversations about baseball and stuff,” Saucedo Garcia recalls, through a translator, by phone from his home in Taretan, Michoacán, Mexico. “The song was very famous,” he adds. “On the radio all over the place. We toured in Mexico and the U.S. and played the song.”
Valenzuela, who died last week at 63, was born in a small Mexican town, Etchohuaquila, Sonora, before becoming the only baseball pitcher ever to win the Cy Young and Rookie of the Year awards in the same season. He was magnetic and dominant and a sort of folk hero to Latino baseball fans, particularly those with Mexican heritage. Still outraged about Dodger Stadium displacing a heavily Latino Los Angeles community called Chavez Ravine in the ’60s to bring baseball to the city, many local Hispanics plunged into Fernandomania.
“My parents, right away, you know, they started crying. We all cried,” Sergio Juarez, a baseball fan who grew up near Dodger Stadium, recently told NBC Los Angeles. “It was different because Fernando looked like us. Fernando was someone that was humble, and he broke barriers that a lot of people wouldn’t even reach.
“And to see a person that had a Spanish surname, Mexican-American, came from a small town,” he added. “It was very special.”
Corridos represent a 200-year-old tradition of story-songs that frequently deal with David-vs.-Goliath-type battles of lone heroes taking on institutions; they were an adaptable way of saluting Valenzuela in the ’80s. In a Los Angeles Times essay after the Dodgers retired Valenzuela’s No. 34, Michael Jamie-Becerra, a University of California Riverside assistant professor of creative writing, wrote that Conjunto Michoacan’s track “would have you believe that Fernando’s on-field success could be attributed to his having a noble heart, caring for his parents and being an all-around good guy.”
Conjunto Michoacan recorded “El Corrido de Fernando Valenzuela” for Odeon Records, an imprint owned by major label EMI that is now part of the University of California Los Angeles’ Strachwitz Frontera Collection of Mexican and Mexican American Recordings. Although the track has only 1,087 YouTube views and is not available on most streaming services, Conjunto Michoacan has recently played it live throughout the U.S. and Mexico. Its fans include the Guatemalan YouTube commenter who posted that he listened to the group’s music “when I went to herd sheep in the field with my radio with pure rayobac batteries.”
Saucedo Garcia says the group plans to release a new version of “El Corrido de Fernando Valenzuela” with updated lyrics and perform it on upcoming tours. “New things about his achievements and his passing,” he says.
The 65-year-old violinist continues to follow baseball, including the World Series, in which the Dodgers have a 3-0 lead over the New York Yankees. He has a rooting interest: “I would like the winners to be the team of Fernando Valenzuela,” he says.
Dick Clark Productions (DCP) has announced the appointment of Diana Miller as executive vice president of talent, effective Jan. 15, 2025.
In her new role, Miller will lead the talent team and oversee talent booking and management for DCP’s iconic lineup of live events and shows, including the Golden Globes, American Music Awards, Billboard Music Awards, Academy of Country Music Awards, and Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve with Ryan Seacrest. Miller will report directly to DCP CEO Jay Penske and be based in Los Angeles.
“Diana’s exceptional background, deep relationships and passion for entertainment make her an ideal fit for our team,” said Penske. “Her innovative and outside-of-the-box approach will be key as we continue to expand and enhance our programming and global reach.”
Miller, a six-time Emmy Award-winning producer and two-time Billboard Women in Music Award honoree, brings over 20 years of experience in booking celebrity interviews and musical performances, with a career spanning major networks like CBS, NBC, Apple TV, and TBS.
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“I’m thrilled to join DCP, a company I’ve long admired for its rich history and slate of incredible shows”, said Miller. “I’m also excited to be part of DCP’s bright future and vision with Jay at the helm and look forward to shaping compelling, unique and memorable opportunities for talent for years to come.”
She has worked with high-profile figures, including Michelle Obama, Paul McCartney, Ariana Grande and Jay-Z, establishing a reputation for strong industry relationships and creative talent engagement.
Miller’s background includes eight years as supervising producer of The Late Late Show with James Corden, where she played a key role in launching Carpool Karaoke, as well as seven years as producer for Carpool Karaoke: The Series on Apple TV. She also spent seven years as senior talent executive on Last Call with Carson Daly and NBC’s New Year’s Eve special and is currently the senior supervising producer for The Talk.
Duetti, a fintech platform that lends money to independent artists in exchange for stakes in their back catalogs, said Tuesday it secured $114 million from investors led by Create Music Group-backer Flexpoint Ford.
Co-founded by former Tidal COO Lior Tibon and former Apple Music business development executive Christopher Nolte in 2023, Duetti is the latest company in the indie music sector to capitalize on the flood of financing and interest coming from institutional investors and private equity firms.
Duetti said it raised $34 million in an equity financing from Flexpoint Ford, Nyca Partners and Viola Ventures. Chicago-based Flexpoint Ford invested $165 million in Create Music Group earlier this year. Duetti also secured $80 million through a privately rated asset-backed security, structured and placed by Barclays.
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This is Duetti’s second publicly-disclosed fundraise — last year it raised $32 million from investors including Roc Nation, Viola Ventures and Presight Capital — and its first ABS. Duetti chief executive Tibon described the combination of equity investments and ABS financing as more efficient, and said in a statement that it will help them to “accelerate [the company’s] acquisition of music catalogs and expand its proprietary forecasting, pricing, sourcing, and marketing technology.”
“We believe we are leading the way in educating the capital markets on the significant long-term value of the independent music sector,” said Tibon. “The number of independent artists is growing at an unprecedented rate, and Duetti is here to ensure they have access to differentiated financing solutions.”
Duetti says it works with 500-plus artists, including MC Delux, SadBoyProlific and Savannah Dexter, purchasing their tracks or entire master catalogs, in exchange for funds that typically range from $10,000 to $3 million. Through digital marketing campaigns like playlists and channels on Spotify and YouTube, along with traditional sync placements and better distribution, Duetti says it helps artists grow their audience, thereby generating more streaming revenue and a profit for their investors.
Flexpoint Ford managing director Mike Morris called Duetti one of the fastest growing rights music rights companies in recent years.
“We see tremendous potential in their ability to provide scalable, data-backed solutions that address the evolving needs of musicians today,” Morris said in a statement.
ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming tops the list of China’s richest people, according to the Hurun Research Institute, although many of them have seen their net worth plunge over the past year.
The institute, which publishes the annual Hurun China Rich List, found that the total wealth of entrepreneurs on the list this year was $3 trillion, down 10% from the previous year.
The number of billionaires based on their net worth in U.S. dollars was also down 142, to 753. Hurun tallied 1,185 billionaires since 2021.
“The Hurun China Rich List has shrunk for an unprecedented third year running, as China’s economy and stock markets had a difficult year,” said Rupert Hoogewerf, chairman and chief researcher of the Hurun report.
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ByteDance’s Zhang came in No. 1 for the first time this year, with a net worth of $49.3 billion, according to Hurun. ByteDance, which is the parent company of popular short-video platforms Douyin and TikTok, saw its revenue grow to $110 billion last year.
He is also the first individual born in the 1980s to top the Hurun list.
Bottled water magnate Zhong Shanshan fell to second place in 2024 with $47.9 billion, after his brand Nongfu Spring faced backlash in February when consumers accused it of disloyalty to China due to designs of its bottles.
The backlash wiped out billions in market value for Nongfu Spring.
Coming in third is Tencent founder Pony Ma with a net worth of $44.4 billion, as the gaming firm saw its revenues rise.
This year’s China Rich List had just 54 new names added to the list, the lowest figure in two decades. New additions include Charlwin Mao and Miranda Qu Fang, the founders of Xiaohongshu, a social media and lifestyle platform popular with young users.
China’s economy has lagged in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic as the country grapples with a real estate crisis and a volatile stock market. Policymakers are expected to unveil major stimulus measures to encourage consumption and spending, which have declined in recent months.
In 2010, Damien Shields, then 22, was reloading the official Michael Jackson website repeatedly from his home in Australia, anxiously awaiting the arrival of the heavily hyped unreleased track “Breaking News.” When it arrived, he was disappointed — then angry. He believed that the King of Pop, who died June 25, 2009, wasn’t singing on the song. It was an imposter. “I was outraged, the same as thousands of other fans,” Shields says. “But unlike those other fans, I wanted to do something about it.”
That moment led to a 14-year, DIY investigative journalism project, involving expensive trips to interview Jackson’s nephew Taryll Jackson in Los Angeles and scour the archives of the U.S. Copyright Office in Washington, D.C. Originally intended to be a book, Shields’ new, 12-part podcast, Faking Michael, which is available on major podcast platforms, is the “untold story of the biggest fraud in music,” he says.
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The “true-crime podcast,” as Shields calls it, was inspired by NPR’s Serial and makes a methodical case that two producers and Jackson friends, Eddie Cascio and James Porte, faked the vocals on “Breaking News,” “Monster” and “Keep Your Head Up” and hoodwinked Jackson’s estate and longtime label Sony Music. In 2010, the estate made a deal potentially worth $250 million with Sony for 10 albums, including deluxe reissues of previous Jackson albums and new and unreleased material. Shields argues, however, that the estate was under pressure to provide new tracks and made a deal with Cascio and Porte, whom Shields accuses of employing an imposter singer named Jason Malachi.
According to Faking Michael, when superproducer Teddy Riley and Taryll began postproduction on the tracks in August 2010, Taryll concluded his late uncle’s vocals weren’t on the songs and complained on social media. The podcast also reports that the estate asked producers for their expert opinions but ignored their feedback and released the tracks anyway in December 2010.
Damien Shields
Calika
After fans filed a class-action suit against the estate and Sony, the parties settled in an undisclosed agreement in 2022. Earlier, the label had pulled the three disputed tracks from the 2010 album Michael. A Sony representative declined to comment, and a rep for Jackson’s estate did not respond to requests for comment; an attorney who represented Cascio and Porte in the suit did not respond to requests for comment. But Shields, now 36, discussed Faking Michael by Zoom from Australia.
What should listeners take away from your podcast?
This is art forgery.
How did you fund all this research?
It’s self-funded. When I started taking this seriously and traveling overseas, it was very difficult. I was working a minimum wage-type job at a marketing firm and didn’t have any money. I would save up, then go on a trip, do my research and come back totally broke, then save up and do it all again. In 2017, I left my job to work on this full time. To fund that, I started driving ride-share. One of the interviews I did was with Teddy Riley’s manager, Lawanda [Lane]. [According to the podcast, Riley, who had worked with Jackson, received $50,000 per track for Michael, including the Cascio-Porte material.] I’d been trying to get Lawanda for 11 years. She texted me at two in the morning Australian time: “Hey, Damien, I’m ready to talk.” I said, “Now?” She said, “I can be ready in 10 minutes.” So I switched off my ride-share app, drove home and interviewed her for four-and-a-half hours. That’s one of the cornerstone interviews.
The podcast suggests Sony and the estate made the deal with Cascio and Porte because they were desperate to release unheard Jackson music immediately after his death. How did they fall for this?
There were stipulations in the deal that you will release X amount of songs on Y amount of projects over Z amount of years. When the estate was coming into the problem with the vocals and people were telling them, “Well, this is not Michael,” they had to weigh that with “What implication would there be of releasing it anyway?” compared to the implication of breaking the contract.
Why do you think the estate was so desperate for unreleased Jackson material during this period?
The material Michael worked on in the final years of his life — he didn’t really do anything [with it]. He worked with [singer] Akon for two or three years, and he did a verse and some ad-libs on a duet. He worked with [producer] RedOne for two years. RedOne thinks he had one song that could possibly be released, but it would have to be “We Are the World” style, with multiple artists, because he didn’t have enough with Michael. [The estate] wanted final-year songs [from 2009]. They couldn’t do it, because there weren’t final-year songs. And the Cascio tracks were [allegedly] final-year songs.
You air snippets of recorded music, including songs that appeared on Michael and unreleased studio recordings. Did you have to clear them with the estate and Sony?
A lot of the material Cascio and Porte turned over to Sony leaked online in the spring of 2015. [It’s unclear who was responsible for the leak.] The source materials were out there on the internet. You’ve got to let listeners hear it, but you’ve got to respect fair-use copyright guidelines. [The recordings are] only used when I’m talking about something to prove my case. Ethics are at the top of my list.
And you don’t want Jackson estate co-executor John Branca coming after you.
I hope that John Branca will appreciate this. As much as it makes the estate look foolish, it does demonstrate that they were the victim of fraud. The estate should be listening to this and going, “We have to contact the authorities.”
Have you heard from Cascio or Porte or anyone from the estate or Sony?
No. We haven’t had any blowback or pushback from people who are depicted in it. Even though we are talking about something that I consider to be the greatest fraud in music history, I made a very conscious effort to not attack anyone’s character. The actions speak for themselves.
What’s next?
I want to get a good night’s sleep!
DistroKid, the world’s largest independent distributor, has placed 37 union employees on “administrative leave” just an hour before the union was set to meet with company’s lawyers for new contract negotiations, according to an Instagram post by the DistroKid Union on Saturday (Oct. 26). The information provided in this Instagram post was verified by two employees at DistroKid.
The union says that these employees are set to be “replace[d]…with overseas labor” and that this move has impacted about a “fourth” of the company’s staff. Another source close to the situation believes the total is closer to 15% of staff affected. According to an employee at DistroKid, those impacted were part of the company’s Quality Control and Artist Relations (customer service) teams. Another employee claims there were also Quality Assurance Engineers impacted as well. The union adds in the post that DistroKid told them that the reason they want to eliminate these positions is to instead “to spend their salaries on marketing.”
In response to Billboard’s request for comment, a DistroKid spokesperson said: “DistroKid is committed to continuously enhancing support for independent artists around the world by expanding to 24/7 customer service with faster response times. To achieve this, we have identified solutions that allow us to deliver more scalable and exceptional service, ensuring that artists around the globe receive the high-quality support they deserve. This includes considering difficult decisions that may affect valued team members as we continue our focus on providing the best artist experience possible.”
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For the last year or so, DistroKid has contracted a third party customer service team, based in the Phillippines, to help with artists’ needs. This move to place 37 works on administrative leave seeks to eliminate its in-house, U.S.-based Artist Relations team and replace it with more third party and international workers. The company believes this will help them with the influx of international DistroKid users who need round-the-clock services in multiple languages.
The DistroKid Union was formed in February as part of the National Association of Broadcast Engineers and Technicians, a union within the Communication Workers of America (NABET-CWA). According to an announcement from NABET-CWA about the formation of DistroKid’s union, “workers at the company were subjected to a ferocious anti-union campaign that included multiple, one-on-one anti-union meetings and near-constant anti-union propaganda. The company president also sent several anti-union letters to workers.”
“Despite attempts to dissuade workers, they returned a vote 45-28 in favor of joining NABET-CWA. This effort succeeded due to the unified efforts of the organizing committee, which kept the entire campaign hidden from management until it went public, a rare early coup for the team,” the announcement continued. The DistroKid workers all work remotely, but their union joined the NABET-CWA local 51016, based in New York City.
This news comes after a few years of rapid expansion for DistroKid, which now distributes 30-40% of the world’s new music. Two years ago, it introduced DistroVid, which enables artists to upload an unlimited number of music videos to leading digital service providers for a flat fee. Then, last year, the company launched an iPhone app that featured an AI-powered mastering tool, called Mixea, to help artist prep their songs and announced that it had acquired music web platform Bandzoogle, an e-commerce business that helps artists create websites and sell their music and merchandise.
Update: This article was updated at 1:55 PM e.t. to include the claim that there were also Quality Assurance Engineers, a different role from the Quality Control team, that were placed on administrative leave.
SESAC Music Group has acquired media software and services company HAAWK, which specializes in copyright management and the monetization of indie music, film, television and video catalogs. HAAWK (Helping All Assets With Knowledge) offers full-service admin of YouTube’s Content ID system and Facebook’s Rights manager platforms, including Instagram. HAAWK will also operate alongside Audio Salad […]