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LONDON — European independent labels trade body IMPALA is rolling out its carbon footprint calculator project to the U.S. as part of a free one-year pilot to help American music companies measure and reduce their emissions.
IMPALA first launched a carbon calculator in Europe in 2022 in partnership with U.K. sustainability charity Julie’s Bicycle. The resource is designed to help record labels track their environmental impact by measuring energy and water use, staff commuting and business travel, as well as the manufacture and distribution of physical products such as vinyl records or merchandise.
The American Association of Independent Music (A2IM), which represents more than 600 independently owned U.S. labels, is partnering with IMPALA on the pilot. The carbon calculator project is supported by global digital licensing agency Merlin, which has provided funding.
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Indie powerhouse Beggars Group, whose labels include 4AD, Matador, Rough Trade and XL Recordings, and London-headquartered Ninja Tune are among the imprints with U.S. offices taking part in the project. A2IM and IMPALA say they are currently talking to other interested labels to complete the core group with a full list of participants due to be published later this year.
In a joint press release, the two indie trade groups called the launch “the first step towards rolling out the tool in the world’s biggest music market” and its expansion into other non-European countries.
“We are very excited that the U.S. is the first territory in the internationalization of IMPALA’s Carbon Calculator,” said Richard Burgess, A2IM president and CEO, in a statement. “Thanks to Merlin‘s support, our members will be able to shape the tool for the U.S. market and play a key role in the expansion of its use.”
In a statement, Karla Rogozar, IMPALA’s sustainability lead said it was important to give U.S. indie labels access to the carbon calculator “to help standardise the [indie] sector’s approach across regions.”
IMPALA’s carbon calculator is part of the Brussels-based organization’s sustainability program, which aims to halve greenhouse gas emissions before 2030 and achieve net zero emissions before 2050.
Since its launch in April 2022, nearly 150 labels have signed up to the carbon calculator initiative from 24 countries. The first report based upon data they submitted was published by IMPALA last year and found that labels using the tool produce the average equivalent of 3.21 kgCO2e for each physical CD or vinyl record they release (based upon the total carbon emissions produced across a label’s whole business, not per physical release).
The biggest source of carbon emissions for the indie sector is manufacturing, which accounts for 76% of emissions on average. Over three quarters of this figure is attributed to vinyl production, which has a higher manufacturing carbon footprint than CDs.
The second highest source of emissions is the distribution of physical products, accounting for 15% of the carbon footprint for labels on average. That’s followed by day-to-day operations, including procurement, business travel and office energy, water and waste (around 9%).
A second edition of the carbon calculator report will be published later this year, said IMPALA, which represents more than 6,000 independent music companies spread across 31 countries.
The U.S. rollout of IMPALA’s carbon calculator is part of a growing industry-wide push to improve environmental and sustainability practices across the music business.
Last year, Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group joined forces to establish the Music Industry Climate Collective (MICC) – a new alliance to address and lessen the sector’s environmental impact, which is being assisted and advised by A2IM.
In 2021, all three major record companies, plus independent labels BMG, Beggars, Partisan, Warp, Ninja Tune and the Secretly Group, signed up to the Music Climate Pact, a wide-ranging commitment to “decarbonize” the global record business.
“Our path towards a more sustainable future involves all of us working together,” said Jeremy Sirota, Merlin’s CEO, in a statement on Thursday (June 20). He said the roll-out of IMPALA’s carbon calculator in the U.S. would “help more independents build that future together.”
Chiara Badiali, Julie’s Bicycle’s music lead, called the pilot project “an invaluable opportunity” to share understanding between European and U.S. independent music companies. “Because meeting the climate crisis head-on means coming together, learning from and with each other, and taking action collectively,” said Badiali.
SYDNEY, Australia — Jessica Ducrou is exiting as co-CEO of Australia’s Secret Sounds Group, producer of Splendour in the Grass festival and a slew of live music brands.
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As co-founder of Splendour, Australia’s flagship mid-winter camping festival, Ducrou is the nation’s leading female concert and festival promoter.
With co-CEO Paul Piticco, Ducrou built Secret Sounds Group, one of the largest music group in the country, representing Splendour, Harvest Rock, Falls Festival, Secret Sounds Touring, Village Sounds booking agency, Secret Sounds Connect commercial rights and creative agency, North Byron Parklands, The Triffid live music venue in Brisbane and more.
In 2016, Live Nation acquired a controlling stake in Secret Sounds Group.
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Ducrou announced her departure on Friday morning, June 21, one month before the 2024 edition of Splendour in the Grass was meant to play out in Byron Bay, with a bill featuring Future, Kylie Minogue, Arcade Fire and many others.
That isn’t happening. Splendour, as previously reported, canceled this year’s event just days after tickets went on sale to the public, becoming the highest-profile casualty of a batch of brands that have decided to pause or close for good.
“So many memorable moments over the last almost decade with Secret Sounds, what a wild ride it’s been,” Ducrou comments in a statement. “I’m well due for an overseas summer holiday so it’s a good time to take a break before I embark on my next chapter.”
Established in 2001 and held each year in Byron Bay, a picturesque beach town on the most easterly tip of Australia, Splendour is a destination event.
The fest would become the hottest ticket in the coldest months.
In recent years, however, the show endured a particularly tough run, first with the pandemic, which saw the fest announced, then shelved several times. Then, in 2022, extreme weather conditions wrecked the first day of Splendour 2022, contributing to softer-than-usual ticket sales for the 2023 edition.
It was Ducrou who faced the media when the heavens opened, and on the occasions when Splendour was pushed back. In 2021, when the health crisis shut down festivals everywhere, Ducrou led a novel project that would turn Splendour into a virtual world, with more than 50 exclusive, in-game performances.
Ducrou will take time out with her children, travel, and, in the interim, will continue in her duties as chair of SoundNSW and deputy chair of the Australian Festivals Association.
“It has been an epic journey that has been truly inspiring, and an opportunity to collaborate with the best in the business,” she continues. “It would not have been as rewarding, possible or enjoyable if it weren’t for the people I have worked alongside of. Paul Piticco has been a great business partner for more than 30 years and we will no doubt continue our friendship well into the future. The Secret Sounds team, notably Elise Huntley and the festivals gang, are the absolute best, I will miss working with the awesome individuals who inspired me every single day. I wish all at Secret Sounds and Live Nation the very best success in their future endeavors.”
Miley Cyrus has signed with CAA, re-joining the agency more than four years after moving to WME, it was announced Thursday (June 20).
The signing comes roughly a year and a half after Cyrus enjoyed her biggest hit to date, “Flowers,” which spent eight weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100. In February, the song also netted Cyrus two Grammys: record of the year and best pop solo performance. Earlier this year, she dueted with Beyoncé on the Cowboy Carter track “II MOST WANTED.”
Cyrus has been a household name for nearly two decades, ever since breaking through as the star of Hannah Montana, the Disney Channel sitcom that skyrocketed her to fame as both an actress and a singer. As Hannah Montana, she racked up 20 Billboard Hot 100 hits, including one top 10 (“He Could Be The One”), and scored three No. 1 albums on the Billboard 200 (Hannah Montana, Hannah Montana 2/Meet Miley Cyrus and Hannah Montana: The Movie).
After Hannah Montana concluded in 2011, Cyrus enjoyed success under her own name, notching 61 entries on the Hot 100, including 13 top 10 hits and two that topped the chart: “Flowers” and 2013’s “Wrecking Ball.” She also scored two more No. 1 albums on the Billboard 200: 2008’s Breakout and 2013’s Bangerz.
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In recent years, Cyrus appeared on a 2019 episode of Netflix’s Black Mirror and brought Miley’s New Year’s Eve Party to NBC in 2022 with executive producer Lorne Michaels, hosting the show alongside her godmother, Dolly Parton.
Cyrus’ philanthropic endeavors include the launch of her Happy Hippie Foundation, which has raised millions to support youth suffering from homelessness, especially those identifying as LGBTQ+. This year, she announced the launch of the Miley Cyrus Foundation, an extension of her philanthropic work that focuses on supporting mothers.
Cyrus continues to be represented by Crush Management and attorney Bill Sobel at Laird and Sobel.
A federal judge says Megan Thee Stallion didn’t copy her chart-topping “Savage” from an earlier song, ruling there’s no evidence the superstar has ever even heard the little-known instrumental track.
In a decision issued Tuesday (June 18), Judge Katherine Polk Failla dismissed a lawsuit filed last year by producer James A. Greene, who claimed that Megan’s mega-hit infringed the copyrights to his own song “It’s About To Be On.”
Green claimed he had “no doubt” that “Savage” infringed his rights, but Judge Failla ruled that the two songs were clearly different.
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“Plaintiff’s work is an instrumental piece, with little variety in sounds and instruments used throughout,” the judge wrote. “By contrast, ‘Savage’ is a pop song, featuring lyrics as well as a more upbeat tempo. Plaintiff’s work is qualitatively different from ‘Savage,’ and any similarities implicate common, non-copyrightable elements of any song.”
The judge also ruled that the case was flawed for a simpler reason: That it was unlikely Megan and her co-writers had “access” to his song to copy it — a key element in any copyright lawsuit. Green had argued that he passed along CDs in the early 2000s to someone who might have later given them to “Savage” producer J. White Did It.
But Judge Failla said that wasn’t enough: “Plaintiff is unable to allege any chain of events that creates anything more than the ‘bare possibility’ that defendants gained access to plaintiff’s work.”
The judge also ruled that Green’s song was not popular enough that Megan might have heard it on her own: “At best, plaintiff alleges that he undertook his own efforts to distribute the work throughout the music industry to A&R’s, management teams, etc.,” Judge Failla wrote. “Yet such efforts alone fall short of widespread distribution.”
Greene sued Megan (Megan Pete), J. White (Anthony White) and Warner Music Group last year, claiming “Savage” had borrowed material from his “It’s About To Be On,” a three-minute instrumental track he says he released in 1999. He claimed that the two songs shared the same drum pattern and piano note pattern as well as similar siren sounds.
But in Thursday’s ruling, Judge Failla said each of those elements was different in Megan’s song, including the siren sounds.
“In [Green’s song], the siren sound is an atonal chord that appears to be created using a synthesizer,” the judge said. “By contrast, in ‘Savage,’ the alleged siren sound is not a siren at all, but rather is a distorted vocal sample. Put simply, no reasonable listener would discern any similarity.”
Neither side immediately returned a request for comment on Thursday (June 20).
Most of the men in Dorothy Carvello‘s new novel The Circle Broken are horrible: Bucky, a Nashville record-label chief who screams in a crowded restaurant that his wife is the “whore of Babylon”; The Colonel, who controls his country-star client and takes 40% of his royalties, leaving the singer with just 10%; and Michael, the tortured young talent who suffers a traumatic brain injury and berates and gaslights his partner.
“All my books that I write — and will be writing — will always have the theme of the corruption of the music business,” says Carvello, whose previous book was 2018’s Anything for a Hit: An A&R Woman’s Story of Surviving the Music Industry, which she followed up with a December 2022 sexual-assault lawsuit against two major labels and three longtime record executives. “And there will always be themes of women as the unsung heroes behind the men in any place in the music business.”
Carvello’s lawsuit repeated many of the allegations from her first book. She accuses the late Atlantic Records co-founder Ahmet Ertegun and former Universal, Sony and Warner chief Doug Morris of “horrifically sexually assaulting” her and claims Atlantic, its parent company Warner Music Group and former Atlantic exec Jason Flom “knowingly enabled … outrageous workplace sexual assault.” Among her claims: Female employees were “routinely exposed to Mr. Ertegun masturbating”; Morris carried a pornographic magazine around the office and placed it on Carvello’s desk when she was Ertegun’s secretary; and Ertegun committed “forceful and nonconsensual attacks” on Carvello at a Skid Row concert and in a corporate helicopter afterward.
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(Flom did not respond to requests for comment. Warner has said in a statement that the labels “take allegations of misconduct very seriously. These allegations date back 35 years, to before WMG was a standalone company. We are speaking with people who were there at the time, taking into consideration that many key individuals are deceased or into their 80s and 90s.” Morris, through his attorney, said Carvello’s allegations are “without legal or factual merit.” And Rick Werder, a former attorney for Ertegun’s widow, Mica, who filed a motion to dismiss Carvello’s lawsuit before her death last December at 97, called Carvello’s claims “utterly meritless.”)
Oral arguments were scheduled to begin in New York Supreme Court in mid-June, but a judge postponed them to September. “My jury will have to have trigger warnings because there’s a lot more that wasn’t in the book,” Carvello says, during a half-hour discussion about her writing career and the lawsuit.
Below is an excerpt of the conversation.
The only character name that appears in The Circle Broken as well as Anything for a Hit is Joel Katz, the real-life music attorney. In the new book, the fictional Katz gives a speech honoring a Nashville record mogul and says he’s “proof that If you do good enough in this town, you’ll be rewarded in kind. Unless you’re Jewish.” How conscious was your decision to put Katz in both books?
It was a conscious decision, because Joel Katz was the only premiere lawyer involved in so many people’s careers, artists and executives, and pretty much ran the town of Nashville. Also, I wanted to show that if you’re Jewish, Nashville is a town that’s hard. If you’re gay, Jewish, if you’re not white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant, it’s a tough town.
Why in general did you set The Circle Broken in Nashville?
I started to go to Nashville in 1988 and my first experience was at Atlantic Records Nashville. They were trying to sign an artist, and I was sitting there, and the person said to the artist, “Jesus wants us to have your publishing.” I was blown away by that. It always fascinated me, the religious undertones of Nashville. Even when I went down as recently as five years ago, a label head asked me what church I belonged to. I said, “I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of the Catholic church — we have our own bank and we have our own ambassadors.”
Cee Cee, the singer-turned-manager in the book, is the victim of abuse and, despite making a few questionable decisions, she’s full of empathy and has a lot of love to give. How personal was writing that character?
I wanted to show all the characters struggling with religious oppression, in a way. I went to an all-Catholic school, a Catholic college. Religion teaches you to obey. As women, we get it no matter where we turn. And in the music business, there are very few women. We’ve never had a woman even run a major corporation. We still have three white men running the game. When the Warner Music Group just changed CEOs [in September 2022], they had a chance to really do something and they still stuck with a white male [Robert Kyncl]. I wanted to show a woman who breaks free and makes a choice who gets away from that religious stuff and falls in love and goes for it.
Why write Anything for a Hit first, then file the lawsuit afterwards?
The law changed in New York in 2022. [The state passed the Adult Survivors Act in May of that year, eliminating the statute of limitations for sexual-abuse cases for a year — which led to more than 3,000 civil suits through last Thanksgiving, including Carvello’s in December 2022.] I couldn’t sue because I was time-barred. The book was published in 2018, and when I found out the law changed, I interviewed lawyers and decided to sue.
After Anything for a Hit came out, did you hear back from the people you wrote about?
No. I received not one pushback, not one letter, not one lawsuit, nothing. Dead silence.
One of the most disturbing details in Anything for a Hit, amid many descriptions of sexual abuse, is your allegation that Ertegun fractured your arm because he was angry about a subpar Skid Row concert after you’d steered Atlantic into signing the band. How long did it take you to get over that abuse, if at all?
Well, I’m not over it, and I probably never will be. I know what happened to me. I know what that truth is and I’m prepared to air that truth in a court of law, with a jury of my peers, at 60 Centre Street [site of the New York County Courthouse].
After the #MeToo movement led to men in the music business being publicly accused of sexual assault, has anything changed?
We’ve had no #MeToo in the music business. Where is the #MeToo?
Several men have been called out in lawsuits and press reports — most recently Diddy, but also Russell Simmons, L.A. Reid, Charlie Walk.
No. I don’t think anything’s changed. Like I said, we have three white males running the business.
How were you able to make the transition from non-fiction and get a book deal in the fiction world?
I had to get a different agent and sell him on the idea, and that was not easy because the book tells two stories — my critique of the music business overall in Nashville, and the story of a woman, two women actually, struggling to help this one man. I had to learn how to write fiction. It took three years. The next book is almost finished and that’s taken me less than a year.
What can you say about it?
It’s called Frontman, and it’s going to be about a rock star and the six women in his life throughout his career that started in the ’70s in the U.K.
When did you notice that you had what the music business calls “solid gold ears,” and the talent to be a record-label A&R person?
When we were doing it in the ’80s and the ’90s, you had radio, and you could get a feel for what was happening and go out and see somebody play live and see how people reacted to the songs. I never say I have great ears. I want to clear my name. I want to reclaim my position in history as the first woman at Atlantic Records.
Where are you right now?
In New York. Born and raised. You’ll never get me to Nashville.
The three major music companies are weighing a lawsuit against AI startups Suno and Udio for allegedly training on copyrighted sound recordings, according to multiple sources.
The potential lawsuit, which would include Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Music, would target a pair of companies that have quickly become two of the most important players in the emerging field of generative AI music. While many of its competitors focus on generating either music or lyrics or vocals, Suno and Udio both allow users to generate all three in the click of a button. Two sources said the lawsuit could come as soon as next week. Reps for the three majors, as well as Suno and Udio, did not respond to requests for comment.
Music companies, including UMG, have already filed a lawsuit against Anthropic, another major AI firm, over the use of copyrighted materials to train models. But that case dealt only with lyrics, which in many ways are legally similar to written subject matter. The new suit would deal with music and sound itself.
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Just a few months from its launch, Udio has already produced what could be considered an AI-generated hit song with “BBL Drizzy,” a parody track created by comedian King Willonius and popularized via a remix by super producer Metro Boomin. Later, the song reached new heights when it was sampled in Sexyy Red and Drake‘s song “U My Everything,” becoming the first major example of sampling an AI-generated song.
Suno has also achieved early success since its launch in December 2023. In May, the company announced via a blog post that it had raised a total of $125 million in funding from a group of notable investors, including Lightspeed Venture Partners and Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross.
Both companies, however, have drawn criticism from many members of the music business who believe that the models train on vast swathes of copyrighted material, including hit songs, without consent, compensation or credit to rights holders. Representatives for Suno and Udio have previously declined to comment on whether or not they train on protected copyrights, with Udio’s co-founders telling Billboard they simply train on “good music.”
In a recent Rolling Stone story about Suno, investor Antonio Rodriguez admitted that Suno does not have licenses for whatever music it has trained on, but he said that was not a concern to him, adding that this lack of such licenses is “the risk we had to underwrite when we invested in the company, because we’re the fat wallet that will get sued right behind these guys… Honestly, if we had deals with labels when this company got started, I probably wouldn’t have invested in it. I think that they needed to make this product without the constraints.”
In a series of articles for Music Business Worldwide, founder of AI safety non-profit Fairly Trained, Ed Newton-Rex, found that he was able to generate music from Suno and Udio that “bears a striking resemblance to copyrighted music. This is true across melody, chords, style and lyrics,” he wrote. Both companies, however, bar users from prompting the models to copy artists’ styles by typing out sentiments like “a rock song in the style of Radiohead” or from using specific artists’ voices.
The case, if it is filed, would hinge on whether the use of unlicensed materials to train AI models amounts to copyright infringement — something of an existential question for the booming sector, since depriving AI models of new inputs could limit their abilities. Content owners in many sectors, including book authors, comedians and visual artists, have all filed similar lawsuits over training.
Many AI companies argue that such training is protected by copyright’s fair use doctrine — an important rule that allows people to reuse protected works without breaking the law. Though fair use has historically allowed for things like news reporting and parody, AI firms say it applies equally to the “intermediate” use of millions of works to build a machine that spits out entirely new creations. That argument will likely be the central question in any lawsuit over AI training.
Some AI companies have taken what is often called a more “ethical” approach to AI training by working directly with companies and rights holders to license their copyrights or form official partnerships instead.
So far, the majors have embraced partnering with AI companies in this way. Already, UMG and WMG have worked with YouTube for its AI voice experiment DreamTrack; Sony has partnered with Vermillio on a remix project for The Orb and David Gilmour; WMG has worked with Edith Piaf’s estate to recreate her voice using AI for an upcoming biopic; UMG launched an AI music incubator with YouTube Music; and most recently, UMG has teamed up with SoundLabs to let their artists create their own AI voice models for personal use in the studio.
Sony Music Publishing Nashville has inked a go-forward and catalog deal with singer-songwriter Clint Black. The company will administer songs from the bulk of Black’s catalog, including hits such as “A Good Run of Bad Luck,” “Like the Rain” and “Nothin’ But the Taillights.” The deal does not include his first three albums. “Clint Black […]
Scan the ground after any given concert or music festival and one thing you’re almost certain to see is a scattering of empty plastic cups. According to a 2024 report by environmental advocacy agency Upstream, the live-event industry creates over 4 billion single-use cups that end up in landfills every year in North America alone.
It doesn’t have to be this way — and reuse company r.World wants to lead the change. The Minneapolis-based company provides reusable serveware — cups, food containers and more — for mass gatherings, with these products designed to mitigate the persistent single-use plastic waste problem in the live music industry and beyond.
“Other than reducing [carbon emissions from] fan travel, reuse is the number one thing venues can do to reduce environmental impact,” r.World founder Michael Martin says. “And artists and fans are asking for it.”
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Founded in 2017, r.World provides reusable plastic cups and other serveware to more than 200 venues across the U.S., along with festivals like Long Beach’s 20,000 capacity Cali Vibes and San Francisco’s 30,000-capacity Portola. In late May, the company partnered with Los Angeles’ Crypto.com Arena, home of the NBA’s Lakers and Clippers, and Peacock Theater to launch a full-time reusable cup program in each venue.
But the mission extends far beyond concerts and sports, with r.World aiming to build the infrastructure for a national reuse economy that would extend to airlines, consumer packaged goods, restaurants and more, ultimately becoming “a one-stop national solution,” Martin says. “The music industry has essentially launched and is leading the reuse movement in the country, and it’s inspiring universities, corporate campuses, quick-service restaurants and others.”
At the center of this movement is the plastic cup itself. Good for 300 uses, r.Cups are made of thick plastic designed and manufactured to r.World specifications that Martin says “overhauled” the manufacturing process of a standard single use cup. Made in the United States to minimize carbon emissions from shipping, each cup is slapped with the words “please return our cup to an r.cup bin,” and when a cup reaches its maximum number of uses, it’s upcycled into other r.World products.
The sweeping project started 10 years ago, when Martin’s other company, the climate solutions-focused Effects Partners, was hired to analyze operations at Live Nation and create a sustainability strategy. While assembling a five-year plan for the live-events behemoth, Martin realized “the recycling and composting efforts at the venues were never going to work,” given that most everything ultimately just ended up in landfills. The realization made him “depressed for, like, six months,” until he considered the reuse programs he’d seen in European venues — and then developed r.World.
r.World reusable products
Courtesy of r.World
Through connections to U2, Martin suggested the band try reuse on their 2017 tour. It was a success, and r.World was soon working with 13 acts, including the Rolling Stones, Dave Matthews Band, Bon Jovi, Radiohead and Maggie Rogers, all of whom gave Martin permission to go to venues on their behalf and request that the venue try reuse during their show.
The first r.Cup cups were branded with band logos, until the team realized fans were just keeping them as souvenirs. In 2019, the model morphed into “an ugly cup” people were less inclined to take home.
Cups are collected in yellow bins that sit alongside garbage cans and recycling containers at venues, then brought to an r.World-owned wash hub facility. These hubs are built in economically depressed areas of any given city to help spur the economy, and are where cups are washed and inspected, largely staffed by people living in halfway houses or who are getting back on their feet after getting out of prison.
These local facilities are crucial because, as Martin says, “you can’t prioritize the environment if you’re shipping cups great distances across the country” due to the carbon emissions created by such transport. r.World plans to establish wash hubs and reuse solutions in the top 20-30 U.S. markets, having already launched in seven. The company expects to add another one or two cities in the coming months and is in conversation with officials from nearly every city they are targeting. “We know the demand and need is there,” says Martin. While the majority of r.World’s current business is cups, Martin cites “exploding” demand for food containers at venues, festivals, schools and corporate campuses.
r.Cup typically launches in a venue after a facility or concession manager reaches out to ask about reuse. (Martin notes that they have a 99% client retention rate, and the one venue that did let go of the program was having financial issues.) With an operational design developed via focus groups with national concessionaires like Levy Restaurants, Aramark and Sodexo US, r.World provides everything from cups and collection bins to signage, employee training materials and social media content to educate guests, offering “a complete turnkey solution so it’s a no brainer for the operators,” says Martin. Venues are also provided with environmental impact reporting that uses EPA guidelines to consider everything from the sourcing and shipping of cups to the temperature of the water used to clean them. (Martin says the company is “sort of obsessive” about these protocols, which he attributes to “being a numbers geek.)
Cost of implementation is based on the number of single use items required by a venue and varies by how much of their service is packaged drinks versus draft or fountain drinks. Martin says the biggest arenas that serve draft and fountain beverages go through 1.5 million-2.5 million single use cups per year. While upfront costs of r.World products are higher than single use, the cost over time is generally less given that venues must keep buying the reusable plastic cups that get thrown away after each event.
r.World reusable products
Jesse Roberson
Some venues embed this added expense into the drink price, while others allow guests to opt out and get a single use cup for a slightly lower cost. (Over r.World’s millions of transactions, Martin has heard about “two or three” people opting out.) Drink servers are also into r.Cup, he says, “because they felt bad giving out all that single use waste, and cups are a conversation starter with guests.” Beyond the price differentials, Martin says the biggest hesitation venues and events have about adopting reusable cups is an “imagination gap,” along with other factors like existing vendor contracts, venue infrastructure and apathy and misinformation, such as thinking single-use aluminum or compostable cups are good for the environment.
To wit, reusable cups are alternatives to frequently-used compostable cups, which have a dicey record of being composted and behave as a regular single use plastic cup if they end up in a landfill. Aluminum cups and bottles also often end up in landfills given that recycling sorting at events can be spotty. A 2023 Upstream report states that “single-use aluminum cups are the worst option for the climate by far,” as they use 47% more energy over their life cycle and create 86% more carbon dioxide than other single-use plastic options.
r.World reusable products
Courtesy of r.World
As sustainability initiatives become more common and more in-demand across the industry and culture at large, more than 150 national reuse companies have launched since the pandemic. In 2022, Live Nation invested in Turn Systems, a program that provides reusable cups, collection bins and mobile washing systems at venues and festivals. As such, r.World is partnered with Live Nation competitors including AEG, ASM and NIVA, and provides product washing for other reuse companies.
Beyond venues and events, r.World clients include the Coca-Cola Company, which is widely cited as one of the world’s leading single-use plastic waste producers. Coca-Cola has made a commitment to incorporating 25% reusable products by 2030 and is working with r.World to provide reuse services for Coca-Cola clients like music venues, movie theaters, the Olympics, the World Cup and wherever else Coca-Cola wants to implement reuse. r.World has also been selected by the EPA and the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality to help raise national awareness of reuse.
Martin says that while an industry has developed to help solve the single use plastic problem, many waste management and consumer packaged goods companies would rather not see a large-scale shift to reuse happen. And despite the explosive growth in the sector, Martin says r.World’s biggest competitors are still single-use cups and serveware, whether plastic, compostable or aluminum.
This is where artists and fans can flex their power by requesting reuse programs in their riders and spending money at venues with reuse programs given, Martin says, that “businesses will give back what consumers are asking for.”
Two Madonna fans have now dropped their lawsuit complaining about delayed starts to her concerts, but the star’s lawyers are emphatic that the move was “not the result of any settlement” and are warning they might even seek penalties over the “frivolous” case.
In a motion filed in federal court Wednesday (June 19), lawyers for the aggrieved fans said they would permanently drop the case, in which they accused Madonna and Live Nation of breaking laws by making fans wait for hours at December concerts in Brooklyn on her Celebration Tour.
But later that same day, Madonna and Live Nation’s lawyers fired off a letter to the judge advising him that the move to drop the case had been made “unilaterally” by the other side — and that they had not reached any kind of agreement to end a case they say should never have been filed.
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“Defendants believe that this action was a frivolous strike suit designed to force them to incur legal expenses,” the star’s lawyers write. “Plaintiffs have now abandoned this lawsuit when it became clear that this approach would not result in a settlement payment and that they would need to oppose defendants’ motion.”
The motion to drop the case said that each side would “bear its own fees and costs,” but Madonna’s lawyers said in their letter that they had never agreed to that — and that they might still demand that the plaintiffs repay the money they were forced to spend litigating the short-lived lawsuit.
“Given the legal expenses that defendants were forced to incur to defend this action … defendants reserve the right to move for sanctions, attorneys’ fees, and costs,” lawyers for Madonna and Live Nation write.
An attorney for the plaintiffs, Michael Fellows and Jason Alvarez, did not immediately return a request for comment on Thursday (June 20).
Madonna and Live Nation were first sued in January over the Brooklyn shows — a case that made headlines because it claimed the fans “had to get up early to go to work” the next day. She was later hit with a similar case in Washington, D.C., that claimed fans had waited in an “uncomfortably hot” arena and that she had lip-synched portions of the show. A third case, filed last month, echoed those claims but also alleged that Madonna’s show in Los Angeles had been unexpectedly “pornographic.”
All three cases have been filed as class actions, seeking to represent potentially thousands of other fans who also endured the alleged delays. By starting the concerts later than expected, the cases claim Madonna and Live Nation breached their contracts with fans and violated state consumer protection laws.
Madonna’s attorneys have strongly rejected those accusations. In a request to dismiss the New York case earlier this year, her lawyers argued that simply needing to wake up early was not the kind of “cognizable injury” that can form the basis for a lawsuit. And they say that anyone buying a concert ticket is well aware that a show likely won’t start at the exact time printed on the ticket.
“No reasonable concertgoer — and certainly no Madonna fan — would expect the headline act at a major arena concert to take the stage at the ticketed event time,” her legal team wrote in April.
While Wednesday’s dismissal means that the New York case is now closed, the D.C. and Los Angeles lawsuits remain pending.
Futureverse, an AI music company co-founded by music technology veteran Shara Senderoff, has announced the alpha launch of Jen, its text-to-music AI model. Available for anyone to use on its website, Jen-1 is an AI model that can be safely used by creators, given it was trained on 40 different fully-licensed catalogs, containing about 150 million works in total.
The company’s co-founders, Senderoff and Aaron McDonald, first teased Jen’s launch by releasing a research paper and conducting an interview with Billboard in August 2023. In the interview, Senderoff explained that “Jen is spelled J-E-N because she’s designed to be your friend who goes into the studio with you. She’s a tool.”
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Some of Jen’s capabilities, available at its alpha launch, include the ability to generate 10-45 second song snippets using text prompts. To lengthen the song to a full 3:30-long duration, one can use its “continuation” feature to re-prompt and add on additional segments to the song. With a focus on “its commitment to transparency, compensation and copyright identification,” as its press release states, Jen has made much of its inner workings available to the public via its research papers, including that the model uses “latent diffusion,” the same process used by Stable Diffusion, DALL-E 2, and Imagen to create high quality images. (It is unclear which music AI models use “latent diffusion” as well, given many do not share this information publicly).
Additionally, when works are created with Jen, users receive a JENUINE indicator, verifying that the song was made with Jen at a specific timestamp. To be more specific, this indicator is a cryptographic hash that is then recorded on The Root Network blockchain.
In an effort to work more closely with the music business, Futureverse brought on APG founder/CEO Mike Caren as a founding partner in fall 2023. While its mid-2024 release date makes it a late entrant in the music AI space, the company attributes this delay to making sure its 40 licenses were secured.
For now, Futureverse has declined to comment on which songs are included in their overall training catalog for Jen, but a representative for the company says that among these 40 catalogs includes a number of production libraries. Futureverse says it is also in talks with all major music companies and will have more licenses secured soon for Jen’s beta launch, expected for September 2024. Some licensing partners could be announced as soon as 4-6 weeks from the alpha launch.
In September, Futureverse has more capabilities planned, including longer initial song results, inpainting (the process of filling in missing sections or gaps in a musical piece) and a capability the company calls its “StyleFilter,” allowing users to upload an audio snippet of an instrument or track and then change the genre or timbre of it at the click of a button.
Also in September, Futureverse plans to launch a beat marketplace called R3CORD to go along with JEN. This will let JEN users upload whatever they produce with JEN to the marketplace and sell the works to others.
So far, the U.S. Copyright Office has advised that fully AI generated creations are not protected copyrights. Instead, they are considered “public domain” works and are not eligible to earn royalties like copyrights do, but any human additions made to an AI-assisted work are able to be copyright protected. (Already, this guidance has been applied in the music business in the case of Drake and Sexyy Red’s “U My Everything” which sampled the fully-AI generated sound recording “BBL Drizzy).”
“We have reached a defining moment for the future of the music industry. To ensure artistry maintains the value it deserves, we must commit to honor the creativity and copyrights of the past, while embracing the tools that will shape the next generation of music creation,” says Senderoff. “Jen empowers creators with tools that enhance their creative process. Jen is a collaborator; a friend in the studio that works with you to ideate and iterate. As we bring Jen to market, we are partnering with music rights holders and aligning with the industry at large to deliver what we believe is the most ethical approach to generative AI.”
“We’re incredibly proud of the work that’s gone into building Jen, from our research and technology to a strategy that we continue to develop with artists’ rights top of mind,” says Caren. “We welcome an open dialogue for those who’ve yet to meet Jen. There’s a seat at the table for every rightsholder to participate in building this next chapter of the music industry.”