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Big Sean has signed a new management deal with Brandon Silverstein’s S10 Entertainment, Billboard has learned. The Detroit rapper was previously managed by Roc Nation, with whom he had been for a decade.
“Brandon shares the vision, understands where I’m headed, and I’m incredibly excited to work with him and the S10 team,” Sean said.
The news comes on the heels of another major announcement: the Grammy-nominated artist recently revealed his sixth solo full length will arrive on Aug. 9 and is titled Better Me Than You. The album follows a return to the charts for Sean, who earlier this month hit No. 24 on the Hot 100 thanks to his feature on Eminem’s “Tobey” alongside BabyTron. It became his 55th entry on the chart.
“Big Sean is an incredible talent who, even after topping charts, breaking records, winning awards and headlining across the world, is just getting started,” says Silverstein, S10 founder and CEO. “I can’t wait for fans to hear the new music.”
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As the artist wrote on social media after sharing the album’s release date: “Its Been a journey i cant wait to share with you all.”
Over on the Billboard 200, the rapper has charted seven albums in the top 10. His last three solo albums — 2015’s Dark Sky Paradise, 2017’s I Decided and 2020’s Detroit 2 — all topped the chart.
So far, Big Sean has released the lead single “Yes,” on which he dismisses critics, rapping: “Would rather give y’all my soul, I don’t have to sell it.” He’s keeping busy outside of his own rollout as well, and last week appeared alongside Rick Ross and Lil Wayne on a new DJ Premier track titled “Ya Don’t Stop.”
Silverstein currently manages Myke Towers. His previous management clients include Anitta and Normani. The company’s publishing division, S10 Publishing, boasts chart-topping clients including Jasper Harris (Tate McRae), Harv (Justin Bieber), Kavi (Tommy Richman) and more.
Public relations company Sacks & Co is entering the management space with SacksCo Creative, an agency that will represent creative professionals. Among its first clients are Imogene Strauss, who spearheaded Charli XCX’s instantly iconic Brat album cover, and Molly Hawkins, Harry Styles’ longtime creative director.
Other clients include creative directors Dannah Gottlieb, who works with Sabrina Carpenter, and Payton Newcomer, whose projects have included work with Weyes Blood and Suki Waterhouse.
SacksCo Creative is led by Sacks & Co. founder Carla Sacks and Los Angeles vp Reid Kutrow, who has helmed PR campaigns for Florence + the Machine, The xx and Kamasi Washington, among others. Kutrow will oversee the existing roster and recruit new clients.
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“We are extremely excited to have this opportunity to start this new agency with Imogene, Molly, Dannah and Payton,” said Sacks in a statement. “Their work is gorgeous, brave and transformative on behalf of their clients. It’s our goal to build a very supportive and creative firm, much like we have at Sacks & Co. A thoughtfully curated roster of world class talent with endless possibilities for all.”
Added Kutrow, “Sacksco Creative is intended to complement our longstanding work at Sacks & Co. We are grateful and lucky to be working with these enormously talented creative directors whose work augments each artist’s vision, much as we aim to do in our jobs as publicists.”
In her work with Styles, Hawkins oversaw all creative concepts around his Grammy album of the year winner, 2022’s Harry’s House, as well as conceptualized and directed his Love on Tour outing. She has also worked with The xx, FKA twigs and more.
Strauss, who is currently working on Charli XCX’s tour with Troye Sivan as a show director and designer, has also handled projects for Honey Dijon, Waterhouse and FKA twigs.
Sacks & Co’s PR clients include Chris Stapleton, Luke Combs, Lake Street Drive, HARDY and Joy Oladokun.
Teddy Swims’ “Lose Control” has been inescapable this year: Only two songs, Benson Boone‘s “Beautiful Things” and Zach Bryan‘s “I Remember Everything,” amassed more on-demand audio streams in the first six months of 2024 in the U.S., according to Luminate. Swims’ breakout single has also been embraced by five different radio formats, ranging from pop to Adult R&B to mainstream R&B/hip-hop.
Historically, it’s not unusual for the biggest hits to perform well at multiple radio formats. Before the streaming era, in fact, this was basically a prerequisite to becoming a runaway smash.
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But while songs often used to move gradually from one format to the next, conquering fresh territory on the airwaves over a period of many months, this process can now happen all at once. Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” made history by hitting the top 10 in four formats simultaneously, becoming the first song to reach that mark on Billboard‘s Pop Airplay, Adult Pop Airplay, Rhythmic Airplay and Country Airplay charts. Beyoncé, who helped introduce Shaboozey to a wide audience by featuring him on her Cowboy Carter album, was also top 15 in four formats for a week in April.
As labels push fewer songs to radio, veteran programmers believe it’s likely that more hit singles will be played heavily by multiple formats simultaneously. This potentially makes individual formats less exclusive, but it also allows radio to flex what remains of its mass-market power in an era dominated by streaming.
“Right now, we’re pretty desperate for hits that everyone agrees on,” says Matt Johnson, program director for WPLW, a top 40 station in Raleigh, North Carolina. “Streaming has changed how people consume music, and they’re not as siloed as they were 10 or 15 years ago. So if it’s a quality record, they tend to have a wider footprint across multiple formats.”
“When a song moves at the speed of TikTok, it’s almost like deliberately choosing to lose momentum by going to one format and then going to another two months later,” adds Sean Ross, author of the weekly Ross on Radio newsletter. Now, “It’s less about songs crossing from one format to another,” and more about songs “crossing from streaming to radio.”
Before the streaming era, some superstars promoted different singles to different formats, wooing Top 40 stations with straight-ahead pop, for example, but courting R&B radio with another sound altogether. It’s long been the case that singles that thrived at multiple formats typically grew at one before spilling over into the next. This sequential system for achieving airplay was partially driven by the way labels promoted tracks. “We were just following the patterns of the record labels,” says Tom Poleman, chief programming officer at iHeartMedia.
Labels often promote rap singles, for example, to mainstream R&B/hip-hop radio first, explains Motti Shulman, who recently left promotion after more than three decades. “We’d impact the record at rhythmic three or four weeks after that, so it already was a little more familiar,” Shulman says. “If it was really big, usually like top 10, then a handful of the more progressive pop stations would jump in. And if it worked there, then it could go all the way.”
In addition, labels and radio used to have to wait for “callout research” — audience surveys that helped them determine if a song was eliciting an enthusiastic response or causing listeners to tune out. That process took weeks, if not months, according to Shulman: “You needed at least 100 to 150 spins on a record during the day” before a track’s merits could be judged accurately. It took time for a song to build enough momentum in one format that another would test it out.
Many radio stations still look at those research reports. But while they’re waiting for them, they now have oodles of information to gauge audience demand — they can check streams and Shazams in their market on a daily basis. “We have more data at our fingertips,” Poleman says. “So if we see something really taking off, we think, why wait?”
There’s another factor driving cross-format pickup: “Labels are serving up fewer songs to us,” says Patti Marshall, managing director of branding and content
for four Hubbard Broadcasting-owned radio stations in Cincinnati. “Multiple formats are out there looking for really good music” — and there aren’t as many tracks for them to choose from. “There are about 55 to 60 songs above 100 spins at most radio formats,” Ross says. “That number used to be closer to 100 songs.”
Labels have pulled back because the benefit of a radio hit is not always clear at a time when streaming drives so much of their revenue. “It was so expensive to work songs — doing promotions and flyaways and paying indies [freelance radio promoters],” Shulman explains. “It didn’t always move the needle on streams. So we were impacting a lot fewer records to radio.”
All these forces have combined to reduce some of programmers’ longstanding reluctance when it comes to sharing songs with other formats. “I’m a little selfish,” jokes Tim Roberts, Audacy’s vp of country. “I would love it if Shaboozey was only on the country format, just like I’d love if Morgan Wallen and ‘Fast Car’ by Luke Combs only lived on the country format.”
Chad Rufer, group director of programming for Bonneville International in Sacramento, Calif., also has “mixed feelings” about sharing big hits. “As a country programmer, you wish that pop stations would just leave it so I’m the only place that you can hear the Post Malone country album on the radio,” he says. “But on the other side of that, when it’s played on multiple formats, the audience’s passion for it just gets bigger.”
“There’s always a chance to become less unique” if stations in four, five, or six formats are all teeing up the same track, says Guy Zapoleon, a veteran radio consultant. Now that “streaming is such a huge force,” though, “and people want to make sure that their format reflects the hits, there’s going to be less thinking like that,” he adds. “I think you will continue to see the bigger hits cross over to multiple formats, and even reach the top 10.”
After Rufer heard Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” earlier this year, he added it to both the adult pop and country stations he oversees. “Whether it’s going into Kenny Chesney on one station or Ed Sheeran on the other, it sounds good,” he says. “It fits.”
Investment giant Apollo Global Management is backing Sony Music Group to the tune of $700 million to help the company fund music acquisitions, it was announced Friday (July 26). The deal could provide the financial assistance needed for Sony’s planned acquisition of Queen‘s recording and music publishing catalogs. Sources have told Billboard the band is […]
Tributes from across the live music industry have been paid to Chris York, one of the United Kingdom’s leading promoters and a director of SJM Concerts, following his death at age 55 following a long illness.
In a statement on Thursday (July 25), SJM Concerts said the company was “deeply saddened” to announce the passing of a man who “helped define the U.K.’s live music scene” over the past three decades.
York’s career in the live music industry began in the late 1980s when he started booking gigs at Warwick University, where he was a student.
After finishing his studies, York worked as a booker at London’s The Venue — putting on early shows by Pulp, Suede and PJ Harvey — before deepening his knowledge of the live business with roles at U.K. live promoters Straight Music and MCP Concerts.
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In 1993, York joined SJM Concerts, where he “formed a solid and unshakeable partnership and friendship” with the company’s founder, Simon Moran, that “would last the rest of his career,” the Manchester-based firm said in a statement.
Artists that York promoted during his three decades at SJM included Oasis, Foo Fighters, Green Day, The Chemical Brothers, Lily Allen, Massive Attack, Smashing Pumpkins, Underworld, Robert Plant, Underworld, Lorde, Morrissey, Lorde, Placebo, Kraftwerk, Swedish House Mafia, Suede and Stereophonics, among many others.
Oasis singer Liam Gallagher, The Doves, The Pogues, Stereophonics and Suede are among the many acts who posted tributes on social media.
“Chris York was a true unsung hero of the music world,” wrote The Charlatans frontman Tim Burgess on X, adding that the British group “are proud” to have called York a friend.
“You might not recognise the name but if you’re a London gig-goer then you’ll have been at one of the thousands of gigs [York] put on through SJM,” stated Suede’s bassist Mat Osman, who called York “a huge friend and supporter” of the group. “He put on Suede shows from the lowliest to the biggest and was a constant presence in our career,” he added.
Posting on X, U.K. indie rock group Shed Seven said it was “heartbroken” to hear of York’s death. The promoter “played a pivotal role in shaping our career from the very beginning, standing by us every step of the way,” said the band, who topped the U.K. albums charts earlier this year. Shed Seven went on to call York “a kind and inspirational man, a true gent, one of the good guys.”
Those sentiments were echoed by U.K. venue operator Academy Music Group, which called York “a force of nature, exceptional promoter, industry pioneer and above all, a genuine music fan and all-round lovely man.”
During his career, York also worked closely with The Who’s Roger Daltrey, live producer Des Murphy and fellow SJM director Rob Ballantine on establishing the annual Teenage Cancer Trust spring concert series at London’s Royal Albert Hall. Since its launch in 2006, the event has raised more than £30 million ($38 million) for charity with everyone from Ed Sheeran to New Order to Paul McCartney taking part.
In 2021, York was awarded the Jo Walker Meador International Award by the Country Music Association for his work on the Country to Country (C2C) Music festival, which SJM launched in 2013 in partnership with AEG Europe. The event has since become Europe’s biggest country music festival, taking place annually at London’s The O2 arena, Glasgow’s OVO Hydro and Belfast’s The SSE Arena.
“When he got involved at the start of C2C Chris really knew f— all about country. But to his credit he knew what he had to do and immersed himself in every aspect of it and soon became a go-to oracle on country, which he always maintained,” Steve Homer, CEO of AEG Presents U.K., tells Billboard. “He has left a big hole in the live music industry and I’m not sure it will ever be filled.”
“Chris was so loved by the business as you can see from the tributes that are flooding in for him from far and wide,” Emma Banks, co-head of global touring at Creative Artists Agency (CAA) and a close friend of York, tells Billboard.
“I am going to miss working with him. I am going to miss his wisdom. I am going to miss chatting with him about pretty much everything and having a laugh with him,” Banks adds. “My thoughts are with Alice, his family, friends and the team at SJM.”
Also paying tribute was Live Nation U.K. and Ireland chairman Denis Desmond, who said York was “a fighter to the end. His legacy will live on.”
By raising prices and cutting costs, Spotify has transformed into the kind of profitable company investors always hoped it could become, and the streamer’s upbeat second-quarter earnings on Tuesday (July 23) led its share price to jump 9.1% to $321.87 this week.
After Spotify announced it grew revenues by 20%, improved its gross margin and beat guidance on new subscriber additions, a slew of analysts raised their price targets, including Goldman Sachs (from $320 to $425), JP Morgan (from $375 to $425), Rosenblatt (from $396 to $399), Pivotal Research (from $400 to $460), Barclays (from $350 to $360), Cowen (from $273 to $356) and B of A Securities (from $380 to $430).
Universal Music Group (UMG), the other music company that released earnings this week, had the opposite reaction from investors when its second-quarter subscription revenue fell far short of analysts’ expectations, leading its share price to drop 24.1% to 21.34 euros ($23.17). But it wasn’t all bad news: Overall revenue at the music giant grew 8.7% to 2.93 billion euros ($3.16 billion) and adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) rose 17.4% to 580 million euros ($624 million).
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But investors focused on UMG’s streaming numbers above all else. The recorded music division’s subscription revenue grew 6.9%, down from 12.5% in the prior-year quarter, while overall streaming revenue grew 4.1% compared to 11% a year earlier. A number of analysts lowered their UMG price targets following Wednesday’s earnings announcement, albeit by smaller margins than the decline in the share price.
UMG went public in Sept. 2021, giving investors an opportunity to capitalize on the largest music company during a time of streaming growth and industry expansion. Even optimistic investors will have to bear through short-term ups and downs, however. “If you think the longer term analysis holds then [UMG’s current price] represents a significant buying opportunity,” J.P. Morgan analyst Daniel Kerven wrote in an email to investors on Friday (July 26). “Ultimately we believe you will still get to the same destination…just the pace of getting there was never likely to be linear, particularly on a quarter by quarter basis.”
The Billboard Global Music Index (BGMI) fell 1.2% to 1,757.70 this week, marking the third consecutive weekly decline. The index has risen 14.6% year to date but fell 3.2% in July and is 4.9% off its all-time high of 1,847.64 set on May 17. Nine of the index’s 20 stocks were winners, 10 lost ground and one was unchanged.
UMG’s earnings appeared to have an impact on similar companies that have yet to release their own. Warner Music Group shares fell 6.6% the day UMG released earnings and ended the week down 6.8% to $29.83. Believe shares dropped 9.1% to 13.76 euros ($14.96). However, because UMG’s publishing business fared well — revenues grew 10.1% to 511 million euros ($550 million) — it’s not a coincidence that shares of Reservoir Media, which gets most of its revenue from music publishing, jumped 11.4% to $8.61.
Many major indexes lost ground this week despite gains on Friday following encouraging U.S. inflation data. In the United States, the Nasdaq composite fell 2.1% to 17,357.88 and the S&P 500 declined 0.8% to 5,459.10. South Korea’s KOSPI composite index dipped 2.3% to 2,731.90. China’s Shanghai Composite Index was down 3.1% to 2,890.90. An outlier was the United Kingdom’s FTSE 100, which gained 1.6% to 8,285.71.
In 2022, Will Page, the former director of economics at Spotify, encouraged a U.K. committee looking into streaming economics to consider how collecting societies have divvied up fixed pots of cash for more than 100 years. A fairer system for paying royalties, he said, might consider how long a person listens.
Page’s suggestion wasn’t a new, radical idea. Other royalty accounting systems already take listening time into account. In the U.K., collection societies such as PRS For Music and PPL apply a “value per second” rule to royalty payouts. So, Page explained, Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which clocks in at 5:55, earns twice the royalty as “You’re My Best Friend,” which runs just 2:52. A similar approach is codified into U.S. copyright law: Songs over five minutes long receive a higher mechanical royalty than shorter songs.
But streaming platforms have long paid royalties using a “pro rata” method that treats every song equally. At Spotify, for example, any two songs by Queen are treated the same. But there has been a movement in recent years to make royalty payments fairer to non-superstar artists. SoundCloud adopted a user-centric approach that pays royalties from each listener rather than pool all listeners’ revenue. Deezer has a “user-centric” approach — adopted by Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Merlin — which rewards professional artists at the expense of “functional” music.
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Two years after testifying to the committee, Page has released a paper, “A Case for Completion,” that outlines how streaming platforms could reward songs that get streamed in their entirety. The idea is simple: For each stream, the streaming service asks whether the song was streamed to completion. If the song was skipped before the listener got to the end, a portion of the royalties are transferred to songs that were streamed to completion.
The financial model looks like this: Labels earn about 50 million pounds ($64 million) for 10 billion streams. Page estimates that 10% of the songs will not be streamed to completion. Of those songs’ 5 million-pound ($6.4 million) royalty pool, 40%, or 1.3 million pounds ($1.7 million), goes to the completed songs’ royalty pool. That in turn increases the completed songs’ pool from 45 million pounds ($58 million) to 46.3 million pounds ($59.6 million). On a per-stream basis, a typical 0.0048-pound ($0.0062) pro-rata royalty becomes either a 0.0035-pound ($0.0045) incomplete royalty or a 0.005-pound ($0.0064) complete royalty.
Importantly, Page believes this completion-based scheme complements the current royalty accounting system, whether it’s pro-rata, user-centric or artist-centric. “If we are going to depart from the pro rata model, which has served us since Rhapsody got its license in December 2001 — which is 23-plus years ago — then we need a baby step that doesn’t mess with royalty accounting,” says Page. Tracking duration would add too much stress to a royalty accounting system that encompasses trillions of streams annually, accounting experts told Page. In contrast, setting a threshold that creates a binary outcome — either a song was completed, or it wasn’t — is more feasible, he argues.
The proposal may run into naysayers who believe skipping is a critical aspect to streaming. On-demand services with hundreds of millions of songs charge for the right to skip through playlists and algorithmically created radio stations. In contrast, free, non-interactive streaming services such as Pandora don’t allow unlimited skipping. What’s more, decidedly unskippable formats such as terrestrial radio are losing listening time to platforms that give the listener greater freedom. Whether TikTok has reduced attention spans or listeners are impatient in a world of unlimited choice, skipping is simply a way of life in 2024.
But skipping, however prized by today’s music listeners, isn’t necessarily rampant. As Page explains in an interview with Billboard, he gained confidence in completion-based royalty accounting after learning that completion rates surpass 90% once a person has been listening longer than three minutes. To Page, this means shorter attention spans select shorter songs and people willing to listen longer will do so. “Sprinters enter sprints; marathon runners enter marathons,” says Page. “For the most part, people who want longer songs go for longer songs and stay the journey. Jazz and classical have got the highest completion rates from all the genres.”
Paying based on completing a song makes sense intuitively, because in streaming the business goal is listener engagement, and one sign a listener is engaged is how much a song gets heard. From that perspective, a stream that ends halfway through a song is less valuable to both the streaming platform and the rights holders than a song that somebody listens to all the way through. So, rewarding completion makes sense from this business point of view.
It does. And I think a key strength of the proposal, and I’ve road tested it with the great and good in music and tech — I’m very open on strengths and weaknesses and anomalies. I’m putting all my cards on the table here for this to be accepted and be a model to give people even more assurances. But the strength is it’s asymmetrical. I am not promoting completion. If Glenn Peoples does nothing with this listening experience, I do nothing with these royalty calculations. I must be absolutely clear here. I am only punishing incompletion. I take action when you show intent. If you do nothing, I do nothing. If you step in there and say, “I’m done with this song, move me on to the next one,” I’m going to do something with the royalty structure. That’s crucial in terms of the argument. It’s got a strong common-sense property, as you alluded to, but it’s asymmetric. And to be absolutely clear, streaming services don’t pay a penny more or a penny less. We simply reallocate away from the incomplete pool to the complete group.
The deterrence against fraud or gaming the system, whatever you want to call it, seems to be a strong argument. If some artists are making music based on this 30-second threshold, I don’t see how that’s good for anybody. The royalty model shouldn’t be influencing how music is created and released.
Drake had an album where there were like eight songs which lasted between 40 and 50 seconds — skits — and they’re going to get paid the same as a seven-minute jazz composition with McCoy Tyner? These are questions of fairness. The current model has unfair properties in it as well. We have to remember [that] nobody thought about jazz and classical when they invented the 30-second rule. [An on-demand stream earns a royalty if it is streamed for 30 seconds or longer.] Nobody argued for duration.
Now let me allow me to play Devil’s Advocate. As a user of a subscription service, I pay for the ability to skip songs. And if I skip a song 45 seconds in, it doesn’t necessarily mean that song is less valuable. It means that I enjoy that ability to skip songs. If I don’t want to skip songs, I’ll listen to SiriusXM. And the ability to skip songs is one of the best things about an on-demand service. So why should skipping be punished if it has so much value to me?
I respect that view. I would say that argument is weak because the majority of people are paying for the concierge service. In the vast majority of instances, the act of skipping is a negative signal by the consumer. And for a lot of people, the engagement they have with their music platform is approximately this: in the pocket it goes and that’s it for the day. I’m not paying so I have to skip songs. I’m not paying so I have to select songs. I’m paying to enjoy the music. If you can serve it up for me, I’ll pay, I’ll stay even longer. So I quote [intellectual property expert] David Safir in a piece where there was a heated debate at the NY:LON conference in London. David calmed the debate down by saying, “Hold on, we haven’t even decided who we’re defining fairness for. Is it the creator, the platform, or the consumer?” As the consumer pays for convenience, the act of skipping, or the act of even leaning in, could be a sign of inconvenience. That is negative for the consumer’s experience in terms of willingness to pay and willingness to stay.
When I skip, it’s to sample the big catalog of music. It’s one way to listen to more music — not all of which I’m going to go back and listen to again. But at least I hear it. Again, whether it’s an editorial playlist, or just bouncing around the app, skipping allows me to sample the catalog. And not skipping would really get in the way, I think.
I remember with [Spotify’s] Discover Weekly, we began to wonder whether the reason it was successful is you used to spend a bit of your time searching for music that could involve a lot of skipping, and a bit of your time consuming music. And as time became more precious, you didn’t have any time to search. Nobody went to record shops anymore, and therefore there was even less time to consume. And what Discover Weekly did was internalize the search cost, the experimental costs, the skipping costs, and it gave you exactly what you needed. In terms of what pays everyone’s bills in this business, it might be the skipping — I doubt it. It might be the searching — I doubt it. I think what drives it is I just pull out my phone and it delivers me music and I stay the course. I think it’s that.
The [U.K. Competition and Markets Authority] asked the four streaming platforms in the U.K. to reveal a source of streams and just how much is human editorial: not a lot, 5% back then, probably two and a half percent now. How much is algorithmic? Not a lot. The vast majority of listening is people-owned playlists. That was a bombshell. That shook the industry out of a rut because, wait a second, 85% of listening might not be platform directed.
So, you know, it’s interesting to just think about that context as well. If you’re skipping, and you look at that table, you look at all the evidence, I think that the evidence weighs towards skipping as a negative signal in terms of the attribution, the value, utility that person’s gained from their platform, as opposed to a positive one. People want to stay in the saddle of music. They want to complete.
Reading the paper, I sensed some undercurrents, perhaps, of criticism of how people, especially young people, listen to music these days. You quoted somebody saying that wedding bands only play two minutes of a song because TikTok has ruined its users’ attention spans. Is part of this about trying to get people to listen to an entire song, and get their attention spans back?
I really owe a long-time mentor of mine, Fred Goldring, for that quote. He told the story about a wedding band that played a two-and-a-half-hour medley because people don’t have the attention spans for full songs anymore. I was like, “Oh, my goodness! What has TikTok has done? Is that what the 30-second rule has done to our music? Is that where we’re at?” If I can expand on that, Arctic Monkeys are a very successful band. They played the Emirates Stadium [in London] twice last summer. The first night was predominantly die-hard fans in their 40s and 50s. The second night was teenage girls who had discovered them on TikTok, and they only knew 34 seconds of all its songs. If you stick around after the chorus, we’re going to sing another verse. It’s called a composition, people; we’ve had these things for a long time. Yeah, there is a concern there.
Now, the concern could just be misplaced. I think the concern is actually very real. Songs are getting shorter. Choruses have been moved to the front, and Swedish artists were doing this in 2013. Many artists are doing it now. But in an attention economy, any alteration to pro rata [royalty calculations] that helps music win attention, that creates incentives that compete for attention, has to be good. Because music is in competition with so many other distractions. Now, completion has a different agenda, but it’s going to help this industry think about, how does it compete for attention?
You noted in the paper that complexity could be the opponent of a successful royalty system. I’m wondering to what extent people, and mainly creators, will need to understand how this royalty system would work. You’ll understand it. Attorneys will understand it, as they must. But ostensibly, these new royalty schemes are to create more fairness for creators. Do you think creators would understand this well enough?
Is the consumer aware that under pro rata, that if I’m a light user, and Glenn Peoples is a heavy user, my money is being used to compensate Glenn’s consumption? Probably not. If they were, would they change your habits? Maybe. Maybe that user-centric property is interesting. But I’m not sure how interested the consumer is in the actual royalty model. If you surveyed them and said, “How many people know it takes 30 seconds before you get paid?” Less than 1%.
On the industry side, something as simple as a completion index, a third threshold, I feel fits the curve. Even drummers will understand this. That’s really important. Now, where it could get complex in that proposal is that Glenn’s completion of a two-minute pop song would be worth more than my incompletion after listening to six and a half minutes of a seven-minute song. Curb the concern, though, because I did go on to show that genre is not necessarily a driver of completion; neither is song length. That’s a reassurance.
Convicted pharma executive Martin Shkreli is firing back in a lawsuit over Wu-Tang Clan’s Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, arguing he had a legal right to retain copies of the one-of-a-kind album even after he handed it over to federal prosecutors.
The filing came a month after Shkreli was sued by PleasrDAO — a digital art collective that bought the album in 2021 after Shkreli was forced to forfeit it as part of his criminal case. The company is seeking an injunction barring him from leaking the album and forcing him to turn over any copies.
But in an opposition filing on Wednesday (July 24), Shkreli’s attorneys argued that he had been well within his rights when he made copies of the album before the forfeiture — and that he had not been required to turn those copies over to prosecutors.
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“Defendant continues to have the right to use them to this day,” Shkreli’s attorneys write.
PleasrDAO has argued a leak of the famously secret album would “irreparably harm” its value. But Shkreli’s attorneys say the feds made no promises to Pleasr that they were buying the only copy in existence.
“Plaintiff was well aware that its purchase of assets from did not include any promise or expectation of ‘exclusivity’ or ‘uniqueness,’” Shkreli’s lawyers write. “It bought a copy of a musical work that it knew was not unique, and cannot now claim to be irreparably harmed by the existence of its non-uniqueness.”
PleasrDAO sued Shkreli last month over the potential leak of the album, accusing him of violating both their purchase agreement and the federal forfeiture order. They also accused him of violating federal trade secrets law, which protects valuable proprietary information from misappropriation.
Wu-Tang’s legendary album was recorded in secret and published just once, on a CD secured in an engraved nickel and silver box. Though the group intended the bizarre trappings as a protest against the commodification of music, Shaolin later became the ultimate commodity. In 2015, Shkreli — soon to become infamous as the man who intentionally spiked the price of crucial AIDS medications — bought it at auction for $2 million.
When it was initially sold, Shaolin came with much-discussed stipulations — namely, that the one-of-a-kind album could not be released to the general public until 2103. But Shkreli’s lawyers say the deal granted him the right to “duplicate or replicate the work for private use.”
After Shkreli was convicted of securities fraud in 2017, he forfeited the album to federal prosecutors to help pay his multi-million dollar restitution sentence. Pleasr then bought the album from the government in 2021 for $4 million, and in 2024 acquired the copyrights and other rights to the album for another $750,000.
In Wednesday’s filing, Shkreli’s lawyers argued that when the government sold the album, it expressly told Pleasr that it would not “assume” any of the promises or guarantees that had been made in Shkreli’s original deal with Wu-Tang — including the claims about the album’s one-of-a-kind status.
“It would be fundamentally unfair for this court to restrict Shkreli from his permitted use of the work after the [government] explicitly disclaimed any warranties, described the assets as being sold “As-Is, Where-Is,” and listed only physical objects to be delivered on the sale of the assets,” his lawyers write.
A hearing on the potential injunction is set for next month. A rep for PleasrDAO’s attorneys did not immediately return a request for comment.
It’s been 25 years since Eminem announced himself on the international stage with his iconic, revered 1999 album The Slim Shady LP. The album — technically his second, but his first on major label Interscope — included huge singles like “Guilty Conscience,” “Role Model” and, most significantly, “My Name Is,” which introduced his alter-ego character Slim Shady to the world. His even bigger followup album, 2000’s The Marshall Mathers LP, doubled down with “The Real Slim Shady,” which hit No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 and spawned one of the most iconic awards show performances of all time, with the bleach-blonde-haired hip-hop superstar lording over his legion of lookalikes.
But it’s been a quarter century since then, and Slim Shady is dead, locked in Eminem’s basement. The final nail came with his latest album, The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grace), which this week became Em’s 11th album to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, racking up 281,000 equivalent album units and landing the biggest week for a hip-hop album this year so far. In addition to the star power that Eminem brings with any new release, the album’s big first week was also the result of a meticulous, months-long marketing rollout involving Fortnite activations, a mock true crime video, print newspaper obituaries and big-time singles like “Houdini,” which landed at No. 2 on the Hot 100 upon its release. And it helps earn Interscope Geffen A&M senior vp of marketing Jason Sangerman the title of Billboard’s Executive of the Week.
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Here, Sangerman — who has worked on 11 Eminem albums himself over the course of his career — talks about that extended marketing plan, the collaborations with Eminem and his longtime manager and Shady Records CEO Paul Rosenberg to set the record up, and what comes next. “The great thing about an artist like Eminem is he keeps everyone guessing, and that includes us, so it keeps you operating at the highest level,” he says.
This week, Eminem’s latest album, The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grace), debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with the biggest first week for a hip-hop album this year. What key decision did you make to help make that happen?
Everything we do when we begin to engage in discussions around the marketing strategy is led by Eminem and his partner and manager Paul Rosenberg. Once we have our initial plan, the Shady Records team and the larger Interscope team begin building it out. There’s a ton of brainstorming and we all work well bouncing ideas off one another — but when it comes to the execution, precision is non-negotiable.
The key to this rollout was thinking and working comprehensively. It always starts with the music. Marshall delivered yet another amazing album; this time it also came with a high-concept narrative woven throughout. We put a plan together with Paul that gave us plenty of runway to activate all the essential components — social platforms, press, radio, DSPs, D2C, gaming, our Complex relationship, IRL pop-ups, etc. The plan not only enabled us to engage his global fanbase, but we created new entry points for prospective fans, which was key to a successful launch.
The concept of this album — killing off the iconic alter ego of one of the most successful rappers of all time — must have both been a marketer’s dream and nearly overwhelming to contemplate. How did you approach setting it up?
The character of Slim Shady and the world built around him is all Marshall’s creation. It’s always a privilege to help provide a tangible experience for the fans based off his ideas, and so a lot of the marketing plan starts directly from Marshall and Paul. The larger Interscope team then creates a space to augment and build upon those innovative ideas. It’s always critical, but especially so given the nature of this particular album, to get the chronology right for each moment. We couldn’t make a move that would potentially give away something planned for a future payoff.
In what ways were you able to call back to the original Slim Shady character from 25 years ago?
It’s so wild to hear “25 years ago,” because Eminem was the first concert I saw when I was growing up. It was the Slim Shady Tour at the House of Blues on Sunset. I still have the original T-shirt. That colorful crayon style Slim Shady logo was one of the pieces that was brought back into the mix for this album. Once “Houdini” was released, there were elements of nostalgia in everything we did, and they became Easter eggs for the album marketing — the “Rap Boy” costume, the blonde hair, a flash mob of “real” Slim Shadys popping up in Washington Square Park in New York, etc.
The Complex “Face Off” piece is of course an integral part of the campaign, and a key element in explaining the concept around the album. It goes without saying that Marshall has earned the right to be very judicious about the way he puts himself out there to the world. Complex came to us with a really creative idea that builds off the album’s narrative and brings it to life in a way that makes sense for him and his fans.
Another important element to all of this is that many of us at Interscope have been working with Eminem and Paul for years. Some of us, like [vice chairman] Steve Berman, since the very first record. So, there’s an institutional knowledge built in among the team that we bring to each Eminem release, and we definitely tapped into that for this campaign.
How were you able to use the singles and music videos to help promote the album and its themes?
The great thing about an artist like Eminem is he keeps everyone guessing, and that includes us, so it keeps you operating at the highest level. Of course, he’s dropped albums recently with little to no warning as surprise releases, but in this case, we were having conversations with Paul and Marshall in Detroit about the best way to roll out this project last year. Given the album’s theme, they wanted there to be true singles along with videos to set the project up. Paul and the team at Shady led those conversations. They’ve always had an extraordinary vision.
Obviously, Eminem’s songwriting is unparalleled, but he’s also a super visual artist. So the video for “Houdini” was crucial to launching this campaign. It has a similar energy to first singles from earlier albums — so right there you have another benefit of the team’s long-term continuity. We had the ability to tap into a collective knowledge base from past releases. The “Houdini” video allowed fans who have always loved Slim to reconnect while introducing the character to a new generation of fans.
“Houdini” was the spark that activated everything we had been planning for so long. Every single person on the team did their part to help mobilize and expand fandom around the track. We always try to build an entire world around a release, and the immediate global reaction to “Houdini” allowed us to pour gasoline on the fire.
How was the rollout for this project different from any other in Eminem’s career — and in your career as well?
This plan started well before the album was announced. If you look back at the Eminem and Fortnite activation from the end of last year, you’ll see that some of the aspects in that collaboration included throwback Slim Shady themes — the popcorn trail started all the way back then. There was a long roadmap leading up to the album release that had storytelling components every week, using every medium that made sense. We used advanced AI technology in some of our visuals, but we also ran a fake “true crime” show commercial on TV to announce the album, and then we took out the Slim Shady obituaries as print-only media in physical newspapers. Some of the music critics at those papers didn’t even see them until they got traction from other outlets. Regarding my career, this is the 11th Eminem project I’ve worked — I’m just lucky to be anywhere around something like this.
Slim Shady is dead. Where does Eminem go from here?
Eminem always likes the element of surprise, and since I don’t need him making an album called “The Death of Jason Sangerman,” I’ll leave that up to him to answer.
Fabled Mexican music singer and producer Pepe Aguilar has signed a worldwide deal with SESAC Latina, Billboard has learned. Previously with BMI, he now joins his children, Ángela and Leonardo Aguilar, who are also part of the SESAC Latina roster. “We are pleased to announce that superstar Pepe Aguilar has affiliated with SESAC Latina,” Celeste Zendejas, SVP, […]