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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.”
When NxWorries, the duo of Anderson .Paak and Knxwledge, released their second album on June 7, they made it available on vinyl, CD, and cassette. But fans had to wait a week to stream Why Lawd? The goal was “to recreate the nostalgic feeling of truly appreciating the experience of a physical product that we all grew up with in the pre-streaming era,” says Anna Savage, who manages Paak.
Not only that: “We wanted to do something special for their fans by giving them an opportunity to experience the record a little earlier,” adds Jason McGuire, general manager at Stone’s Throw, the label that supports NxWorries. Combined with a pop-up event in L.A., hopefully “more people [are] talking about the record leading up to the streaming date.”
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Most modern albums are released simultaneously on streaming services and in an array of physical versions — or they hit streamers first and the vinyl edition comes later. But as the streaming model is increasingly under attack from all sides, for undervaluing music and limiting artists’ ability to cultivate relationships with their fans, more acts are experimenting with alternative rollout strategies.
There shouldn’t be “a one-size-fits-all strategy,” says Andrew Jervis, chief curator of Bandcamp. “We’re talking about art here — we’re not talking about widgets.”
The hope is that different approaches can fire up the base and serve to re-engage some listeners at a time when album releases are increasingly rote, with all the magic of a morning commute. “The consumer is not happy with the way that they are consuming music right now,” says Enrique “Mag” Rodriguez, founder of EVEN, a platform that enables artists to sell albums and experiences directly to fans before their releases hit streaming services.
Testing alternate release strategies may also allow musicians to generate more money from their biggest followers. “If you permanently emphasize pointing your fans somewhere where they can simply listen to whatever they want, whenever they want, for this rental fee, it’s kind of hard to convince them to come back and open their wallet,” Jervis notes.
As former Spotify chief economist Will Page wrote recently, “for a streamer to provide a record label the same amount of value from an album as a vinyl buyer, a customer would need to press play over 5,000 times — or stream for almost two weeks straight without sleep,” a virtual impossibility.
“Consumers are paying more for the same with vinyl,” Page continued, “but paying less to access more with streaming.”
Notably, a lot of alternate rollout ideas echo debates from roughly a decade ago, when the music streaming model was starting to take hold. Rodriguez points to Nipsey Hussle, who famously sold 1,000 copies of his 2013 release Crenshaw for $100 a piece while also making the project available for free on various mixtape sites. The rapper said at the time that he was “focused on fully serving the [fans] that have connected already.”
Around the same time, multiple stars like Adele kept albums off the platforms for a time — 25 didn’t make it to Spotify until seven months after release, for example, which helped ensure a massive first week of sales. (Adele said new releases “should be an event” and called the streaming model “a bit disposable.”) Some artists debuted albums exclusively on Apple Music or TIDAL before making them available more widely, or made them available only for premium subscribers.
But these “windowing” strategies went out of fashion in the mainstream music industry. Major labels and prominent indies often want streams and physical sales to hit the same week, so they can maximize the first-week numbers that the industry uses to judge commercial success. More than 600 million people around the world now listen to music on Spotify every month — any artists looking for global scale are unlikely to turn their back on that potential audience. Plus they are wary of offending the streaming services by withholding releases.
Smaller artists and record companies are making different calculations, however. At this level, earning even just a few hundred extra CD or LP sales by temporarily withholding an album from streaming can provide a nice boost.
While Jervis “encourage[s] people to put their music in as many places as possible,” he has seen this boost firsthand. Last year, the duo Knower released Knower Forever exclusively on Bandcamp. “They were pretty forthright about, ‘we need to make some money, here’s where you can come and support us by buying this record,’” Jervis says. And that’s what fans did, purchasing “something like $85,000 worth of vinyl and some similar amount in digital.” The album didn’t appear on Spotify until several months later.
One of the Top 25 labels on Bandcamp is International Anthem, the jazz label co-founded by Scott McNiece; for about six months, the company has been experimenting with putting out physical releases and digital downloads a month before uploading albums to streaming platforms. Like McGuire, McNeice says, “we want to be serving people who care enough about that particular album or artist to directly purchase the music.”
International Anthem hasn’t “received any pushback yet from streaming services as far as other people getting the album before them,” according to McNiece. And as an added bonus, indie record store owners are thrilled with the label’s approach. “Especially with the dwindling media market for music, having people care about your music on the ground level at independent record stores is one of the main ways to get the word out,” McNiece continues. “We’ve gotten an enormous amount of positive feedback” from record store owners who are excited to have an exclusive release to tout to customers.
Both McGuire and McNiece believe that offering physical releases first will not cannibalize the streaming audience. The people who buy the record will probably stream it at some point anyway.
Not only that, “before, when all the different formats were released on the same day, our energy was split with our messaging,” McNiece adds. Stream the album! Buy the vinyl! Under the new regime, though, “we’re able to focus a lot more energy specifically on driving traffic to those streaming platforms” once the albums are uploaded to the various services — a later streaming date provides a second marketing moment.
Rodriguez is also adamant that selling directly to fans before putting albums on streaming services is additive. “As fans purchase, they are more likely to share on social media, boosting artist algorithms,” he says. “This also translates to increased visibility on streaming platforms.”
EVEN, which raised more than $2 million in 2023, has run more than 3,500 campaigns for artists to date. Rodriguez likens his platform to traditional movie theaters and music streaming services to Netflix. “Most campaigns go live on EVEN 14+ days before their wide release,” he says. “The average album sells for $25, and the average single sells for $9. It’s all done in a pay-what-you-want model, where the fan decides its value, with a minimum preset by the artist.”
“We aren’t taking away from the traditional models that exist,” Rodriguez adds. “No one is squeezing the lemon in this way.”
Primary Wave Music has forged a partnership with the alternative rock band Spin Doctors. The company will now collect the group’s publishing and artist royalties as well as administer their new album, coming later this year. As part of the partnership, Spin Doctors will also have access to Primary Wave’s marketing team and publishing infrastructure, including digital strategy, licensing, synch opportunities, and TV production. The NYC-based band shot out of a cannon in the early 1990s with their debut album, Pocket Full of Kryptonite, which yielded the hits “Two Princes” and “Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong” and went on to be certified 5x platinum by the RIAA. A follow-up LP, Turn It Upside Down, also went platinum and the Chris Barron-led band has gone on to release four more studio albums, the latest being 2013’s If the River Was Whiskey.
Cutting Edge‘s White Stork Music division, the publishing company founded by UK composer Tom Howe, has entered a partnership with UK production company Touchdown Films. White Stork will now provide Touchdown with finance, world-class music services and access to White Stork’s catalog of music for current and future productions. White Stork retains IP rights to its original music composed for Touchdown’s slate of projects.
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OTM Music, a boutique publishing company, has signed Stones Throw’s violinist and singer Sudan Archives, Metronomy, Still Woozy, and HONNE to new publishing deals. The deals encompass each act’s back catalog and future works. Launched in 2017 by CEO Alex Sheridan, OTM Music has a curated roster that includes Dot Da Genius and Gianluca Buccellati. Within a year, the company courted investment by Sony Music Publishing. Later, after recouping SMP’s initial investment many times over, it partnered with Firebird Music Holdings with support from Raine Group.
Concord Music Publishing has signed electronic duo Mount Kimbie (Dom Maker, Kai Campos) to a global publishing deal. The deal covers all works made by the duo moving forward, including its new album The Sunset Violent which released earlier this year. Additionally, Maker and Campos have both signed individually to Concord for publishing.
BeatStars celebrates winning two BMI Pop Awards with producer Dan Darmawan for the 3x platinum “Romantic Homicide” and 2x platinum “Here With Me” by d4vd, both of which were licensed on its marketplace. The company has surpassed $325 million in payouts to its 10 million creators, highlighting its commitment to empowering artists globally.
Producer/writer Rogét Chahayed‘s TruSauce Publishing has signed artist Amindi to its expanding roster of songwriters. The Jamaican American artist calls her melodic rap and dancehall inspired style of songwriting “pastel rap.” She is perhaps best known for her feature on Isaiah Rashad’s The House Is Burning and for touring with the likes of Amaarae, Dreamer Isioma and Saba.
Warner Chappell has signed South Carolinian singer-songwriter Ricky Young to a global publishing deal. An up-and-coming country act, Young has already collaborated with Lee Brice (“I Carry It With Me”), Bubba Sparxx (“Baby Wussup”) and John Driskell Hopkins. He also toured with Luke Combs, Luke Bryan and Darius Rucker.
Concord Music Publishing ANZ has inked a new publishing agreement with Aussie songwriter John Butler. The deal includes representation for his whole catalog in all territories, apart from Japan. This includes back catalog hits like “Better Than,” “Zebra,” and “Ocean.”
Tanner Adell, known for her breakthrough hit “Buckle Bunny” and her contributions to Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter album, has signed with Love Renaissance (LVRN).
The Atlanta-based Love Renaissance was founded in 2016 by Tunde Balogun, Justice Baiden, Junia Abaidoo, Carlon Ramong and Sean “Famoso” McNichol, and features a roster including 6LACK, Summer Walker, DVSN, SPINALL, and TxC. The multi-faceted label and management company offers creative direction, production, marketing and strategic partnerships. LVRN also operates the Atlanta-based LVRN Studios to further cultivate musical talent in the Atlanta area.
“They made it so obvious that they knew exactly who I was and exactly how they were going to help me achieve what I want to achieve,” Adell tells Billboard of her decision to sign with LVRN Records.
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Adell’s upbringing in both California and Wyoming has helped the singer-songwriter in crafting a unique fusion of country, pop and hip-hop on songs such as “Whiskey Blues” and “FU-150,” as well as a signature brand that blends big-city glitz and rural roots. Adell moved to Nashville three years ago with her sights set on a career in country music.
“I was writing in my bedroom, using beats I’d find on the internet. I moved here and just put my head down, working, and kept my vision as straight as I possibly could in trying to create a sound that I felt was unique to me, but relatable,” Adell told Billboard.
Adell, who was previously signed with Columbia Records, issued the song “Honky Tonk Heartbreak” in 2021, followed by her EP Last Call the following year. Most recently, she released her Buckle Bunny debut mixtape last year, followed by a deluxe version of the project, including “Love You a Little Bit,” “Throw It Back,” and “I Hate Texas.”
Then Queen Bey came calling.
On Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter, Adell joined with Brittney Spencer, Tiera Kennedy and Reyna Roberts on the song “Blackbiird,” and provided background vocals on “Ameriican Requiem.” Like her Cowboy Carter cohorts, Adell saw a surge in streaming. According to Luminate, the week after Beyonce released “Texas Hold ‘Em,” Adell saw a 188% increase in streaming activity.
This year, she’s built on that surge by performing at top festivals including CMA Fest, Stagecoach and C2C. Adell also wrote and recorded the song “Too Easy” for the soundtrack of the movie Twisters, with her work residing alongside music from artists Luke Combs, Jelly Roll and Miranda Lambert.
Baiden, head of A&R for LVRN, said in a statement, “It’s rare these days to be wowed and instantly connect to an artist. Tanner is a generational talent who will change how people feel, perceive, and digest country music. We believe in the stories she tells and her ability to relate to the everyday person; she will touch a global audience. Our decision to support her journey reflects how we at LVRN came into the business and how we see things: fearless, rebellious, loving, Renaissance!”
Amber Grimes, evp/GM of LVRN, added, “Given our profound affinity for storytelling, we were determined to collaborate with Tanner. She has a jaw-dropping story waiting to be shared through her songwriting. We are thrilled to welcome Tanner to our family, amplify her narrative, and continue to cultivate her success as an artist. Our commitment to nurturing talent and supporting artistic integrity extends across all genres.”
Adell recalled the detailed plan the label created for a forward-facing career vision.
“They had about 30 pages of where they felt my trajectory was going, showing how they understood my brand,” Adell told Billboard. “They had a vision for touring, and a deep dive into how the partnership would go if I signed with them. You never see that—it felt like these are real people who really care and understand me.”
Over the past year, Adell has been writing for a new project, one that will draw fans deeper into her story.
“I haven’t talked too much about my family, and my birth family and being adopted and how I’ve dealt with that,” Adell said. “I’m biracial. I was adopted by a white family, but they also adopted my siblings. I haven’t talked about finding my birth family, or any of that. I feel like my fans are ready, and I’m ready to give that part of myself to them. I’m ready to share that side of me. I feel like there will be a lot of people who will be healed.”
Multimedia platform Verzuz, co-founded by Swizz Beatz and Timbaland, has secured a distribution partnership with Elon Musk’s X. The news was announced by Beatz and Timbaland during an activation in Cannes, France today (June 19).
Under the terms of the new partnership, the Verzuz co-founders maintain their full 100% ownership and creative control of the platform, while X has exclusive distribution rights. Now viewers will be able to watch the livestream series for free through X, which reaches an audience of more than 550 million active users.
Earlier this year, Beatz and Timbaland reacquired the Verzuz platform from previous partner Triller. At the same time, the pair retained their equity — along with the artists who participated in Verzuz — in Triller.
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In a release announcing the X alliance, Beatz said, “We are beyond thrilled to have found the best partner for Verzuz. Not only are we excited to have Verzuz on X, we’re excited to help X build the biggest entertainment company in the world. I would like to thank Elon Musk, Linda Yaccarino, Brett Weitz, Mitchell Smith and the entire X team for believing in the Verzuz vision. We can’t wait to get to work.”
“We are thrilled to partner with X, the most innovative platform globally,” commented Timbaland. “Our goal has always been to bring Verzuz to the world, which we can now do bigger than ever.”
Added X CEO Yaccarino, “X is so proud to partner with trailblazing creators, artists and entrepreneurs Swizz Beatz and Timbaland. Our platform stands at the forefront of innovation, and Verzuz defines the essence of an innovative content experience. As we continue to work with the most exciting voices to bring premium content to X, there is no better fit than this series. Together we will redefine how consumers engage with their favorite entertainment, one Verzuz at a time.”
The last sing-off presented by Verzuz, whose president is Steve Pamon, was between R&B stars Omarion and Mario in Los Angeles in summer 2022. Also featuring a pre-show with Ray J, Bobby V, Pleasure P and Sammy, the battle drew over 5.1 million total viewers across Instagram, Fite TV, Triller, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Twitch.
Under its partnership with Uncontained Media, headed by Christian Sarabia and Raymond Garcia, Verzuz has also produced such shows as the Emmy-winning Drive with Swizz Beatz. Uncontained Media will serve as the production company and executive producers of Verzuz.
Vinyl sales were up 14.2% across all U.S. independent retailers in 2023, according to Luminate, marking the continued growth of a format whose renewed popularity has coincided with a growing industry focus on sustainability — one that has consistently identified vinyl’s carbon footprint as problematic.
Now, the Vinyl Record Manufacturer’s Association (VRMA) and the Vinyl Alliance (VA) have released a study that looks at the carbon footprint of the manufacturing process and offers recommendations on how to mitigate it.
“We hope this report — and a series of subsequent updates — encourages everyone in the vinyl record industry to be radically transparent about the environmental impact of making vinyl records, and what steps we can take to reduce that impact,” the report reads, adding that the data backing it up is “based on a very limited number of businesses in the supply chain.” However, it continues, “we have a range of other companies who are in the process of contributing their carbon footprints, and we hope this report will encourage many more businesses in the supply chain to participate as well.”
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The study considers the vinyl industry’s scope one, two and three emissions, which are involved in the entire lifespan of a vinyl record. Respectively, they encompass a company’s direct emissions; indirect emissions from electricity purchased; and all other indirect emissions in a company’s value chain. The study was made in accordance with Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol, which standardizes, on an international level, how businesses measure, report and manage their greenhouse gas emissions.
According to the report, the “cradle-to-factory gate” footprint of a single vinyl album is approximately 1.15 kg CO2e, or the equivalent of driving a car for three miles. Fifty percent of those emissions come from the plastic PVC compound used to press the records, another 30% are from energyconsumption at the factory and 13% of emissions are from print packaging like jackets, inserts and sleeves. The remaining percentage includes the manufacturing of lacquers, cutting tools and stampers, and other packaging.
But while vinyl emissions are an oft-cited problem, the report goes a step further by offering five recommendations vinyl manufacturers can take to reduce carbon emissions from their production processes.
The first is to eliminate air freight. “If a label or artist presses at a single location, then ships records to global markets by air freight,” the study states, “these shipping emissions will dwarf anything else you might do to reduce the carbon footprint of your release.”
The next recommendation is to switch to “bio-attributed” PVC compound. A relatively recent invention, “bio-attributed” PVC is made from a waste product created during paper production and uses plant-based raw materials to replace the petroleum that PVC is typically made with. Such usage could cut an album’s carbon footprint by roughly 44%, according to the report.
The report also recommends that manufacturers press on lighter 140-gram, versus 180-gram, vinyl. Heavier weights can increase a record’s footprint by between 14% and 26%, as can the use of splatter vinyl, which entails sprinkling various colors onto a background color before the record is pressed. The report also advises manufacturers to keep their packaging simple, noting that a jacket gatefold on a single record adds 10% to 15% to the typical footprint of a record compared to a standard 3mm spine jacket.
Finally, the report advises all companies in the supply chain to transition to zero-carbon energy. “Pressing plants often have gas boilers, and replacing these with electric or hydrogen boilers represents a huge challenge,” the report states, “but one that has to be grasped.”
The inaugural report was compiled by a working group led by Peter Frings of Stamper Discs alongside Adam Teskey and Alex Deninson of Vinyl Factory Manufacturing Ltd; Ryan Weitzel of A to Z Media; Karen Emanuel and John Service of Key Production; Ian Stanton of Beggars Group; Kamal Nasseredine of Precision Pressing; Vladimir Visek of GZ Media; Ryan Mitrovitch of Vinyl Alliance; Bryan Ekus of VRMA; and Ruben Planting of Deep Grooves.
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