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Just a week before a court-ordered auction of Damon Dash’s one-third stake in Jay-Z’s Roc-A-Fella Records, there’s a stunning new wrinkle: New York State says he owes more than $8.7 million in unpaid taxes and that the Roc-A-Fella proceeds must be used to pay down the huge debt.
In a motion filed Wednesday in Manhattan federal court, New York’s Department of Taxation & Finance asked to legally intervene in the proceedings ahead of the Aug. 29 auction, in which the United States Marshals Service will auction off Dash’s 33.3% interest in the storied record company.
The tax authorities claim that Dash owes more than $8.7 million in unpaid taxes and penalties from personal income he reported from 2005 and 2018 – and that the Roc-A-Fella auction might be their last shot at recouping a debt that has been “delinquent for far too long.”
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“To date, the Department has been unsuccessful in its efforts to collect the unpaid New York State tax debt owed by Dash,” attorneys for the state wrote. “Intervening in this matter may be the Department’s only opportunity to collect some of the unpaid taxes Dash owes to New York.”
The new wrinkle is sure to complicate an already-complex situation. The Roc-A-Fella auction is being held to satisfy an $823,000 judgment against Dash, won by movie producer Josh Webber in a civil lawsuit over a failed film partnership. But New York City’s Department of Social Services will actually have first dibs, since Dash also owes a total of $145,096 in unpaid child support.
In their filing on Wednesday, the tax department stressed that it does not seek to jump ahead of child services in pecking order for auction proceeds. But it offered no such promise to Webber – and pointedly noted that it had secured a lien against the Roc-A-Fella proceeds more a decade earlier than he had.
Set to take place next week at a Manhattan hotel, the Roc-A-Fella auction will have a minimum bid of $1.2 million. The sale will be for Dash’s stake in Roc-A-Fella Inc., an entity whose primary asset is Jay-Z’s iconic debut album Reasonable Doubt. The rest of the catalog of music released by Roc-A-Fella, which dissolved in 2013, isn’t involved.
The owners of the other two-thirds of Roc-A-Fella — label cofounders Jay-Z (Shawn Carter) and Kareem “Biggs” Burke — have already attempted to stop the auction, including making changes to the company’s bylaws and intervening in the lawsuit. But a federal judge rejected such opposition in February.
The auction will be coordinated by Webber’s attorney, Chris Brown, who told Billboard earlier this month that he had received numerous inquiries from potential bidders, including corporate investors, high-profile individuals and collectors. Brown not immediately return a request for comment Thursday on the Department of Taxation & Finance’s request to access the proceeds.
Though the auction’s minimum bid has been set at $1.2 million, it’s entirely unclear how much a potential buyer is going to be willing to spend on Dash’s one-third stake.
The royalties from Reasonable Doubt would likely provide them a revenue stream; since its 1996 release, Reasonable Doubt has racked up 2.2 million equivalent album units in the U.S., according to Luminate, including 21,500 units so far this year. But the eventual buyer also would be a minority owner in a company controlled by hostile partners, with little ability to perform typical due diligence on the asset they’re about to purchase. And Roc-A-Fella’s rights to Reasonable Doubt will potentially expire in 2031 thanks to copyright law’s termination right, which would allow Jay-Z himself to reclaim full control.
If any money from the auction is left over, it will go to Dash himself. In a statement to Billboard last month, his attorney Natraj Bhushan said that he and his client would be at the Aug. 29 event and “expect a robust auction with bids entering the several millions if not higher.” Bhushan did not immediately return a request for comment Thursday on the Department of Taxation & Finance’s request to access the proceeds.
Mr. David Washington stands on the grounds that he has tended for decades, amid the Georgia Pines that flood much of the property, as the early-morning June heat creeps across the lawns. Now in his 70s, he’s quick to laugh and does so often, each one punctuating his thick, Southern drawl as he tells the story of the day, some 35 years ago, when Mr. James Brown called out to him and changed his life.
It was the late 1980s, and Mr. Washington, as everyone calls him, had gotten off a 12-hour shift at the cotton mill in Graniteville, some 14 miles away, and gone straight to Mr. Brown’s estate in Beech Island, S.C., when the Godfather of Soul summoned him to the house’s front porch. He had a series of pointed questions for his groundskeeper: Did he smoke? Nothing other than his Newports, Mr. Washington said. Did he drink? He and his wife would have a glass on special occasions, but that was all. Well then, Mr. Brown wanted to know, why were his eyes so red? He explained about the mill job; that his part-time work for Mr. Brown was a way to make ends meet; that he had been on his feet, by then, for hours on end. Well, that wouldn’t do, Mr. Brown replied.
“ ‘You go back down to that plant and tell them you’re putting in your two-week notice — what you make down there, I’ll pay you double if you come work for me,’ ” Mr. Washington recalls the boss saying before breaking out in another laugh. “I said, ‘Yes, sir, Mr. Brown!’ ”
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Over the next 15-plus years, Mr. Washington became more than just Mr. Brown’s full-time groundskeeper. He became a driver, an assistant, a confidant and, after Mr. Brown’s maid fell ill, something of a jack of all trades. “I started working in the house: running his bathwater, doing his grocery shopping, making the bed, babysitting; I did a little bit of everything around here,” he says. “He didn’t like to be by himself, so sometimes I’d sit right in the house with him and we’d watch Westerns, Jeopardy!, Wheel of Fortune, the news.” Mr. Washington was the one who, in late December 2006, drove Mr. Brown to the hospital after his dentist heard something in the Godfather’s chest and recommended he get it checked out; and he was there, in the early hours of Christmas Day, when the Hardest-Working Man in Show Business succumbed to pneumonia and took his last breath.
More than 17 years after he made the drive back to Beech Island alone, Mr. Washington is still here. He has kept watch over Brown’s house through a succession of three estate trustees, a Christie’s auction, a 15-year legal battle among Brown’s heirs over his assets and, now, under the stewardship of Primary Wave, which purchased the assets of his estate in December 2021 for a reported $90 million. Primary Wave — the publishing, marketing, branding and content firm that touts itself as being in the “icons and legends” business and also has stakes in the rights of Whitney Houston, Bob Marley, Prince and more — acquired Brown’s publishing, master-royalty income, name and likeness rights and the Beech Island property, with its 60-plus acres, the mansion in which Brown lived since the late 1970s and everything in it, including a dozen cars, two tour buses and even the food that had remained in the cabinets since his death. The company also retained Mr. Washington to look after the place. “He’s our resident historian,” says Donna Grecco, Primary Wave’s asset manager who has overseen the cataloging and archiving of the estate. “He’s a treasure.”
James Brown, who grew up picking cotton so he could afford food and clothes, kept cotton branches in vases around his house to remind himself where he came from.
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The Brown estate in Beech Island sits on 62.8 acres on James Brown Boulevard, behind wrought-iron gates and down a sloping drive that passes through a lake and several other outbuildings. The house is built around an Asian garden in the center, where he liked to sit.
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Primary Wave, founded by veteran label executive Larry Mestel in 2006, has a long history of reinvigorating the intellectual property of music’s giants, both living and departed, whether through new remixes, samples or interpolations of their work, partnerships with brands (its first major success, in 2008, was a sneaker deal with Converse that featured Kurt Cobain lyrics on a line of shoes) or big-ticket content plays like the 2022 Houston biopic I Wanna Dance With Somebody. Several estate and asset deals the company has done came with troves of personal items and memorabilia that took months to sift through and organize.
But the Brown deal marked the first time the company acquired an actual house. (After finalizing the acquisition of 50% of the Prince estate in August 2022, Primary Wave now also owns a stake in Paisley Park.) And what the company found on the compound, which sits just across the Savannah River from Augusta, Ga., was a home almost entirely preserved as it was on the day Brown died, down to the Christmas tree that still stands in the foyer, with unopened presents underneath.
To walk through its rooms is to step into a moment frozen in time: big, clunky TVs and VCRs by brands long out of business; Christmas decorations on the mantel; a matching collection of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books in his office; phone books on the shelves. Mirrors, elephant motifs, bamboo poles and marble are everywhere. Inside Brown’s personal hair salon there’s a basket of dozens of hair curlers, with bottles and cans of hair product lining the shelves. A mix of cultural artifacts — African, Native American, Indian, East Asian — adorn every room; each light switch cover is a photo of Brown holding a street sign with his name on it. Grecco, with her team’s help and Mr. Washington’s expertise, has been working to restore everything to precisely where it was during Brown’s life, before a series of museums (including the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame) and the one-time auction resulted in some items shifting around and being moved in and out.
“When we first came into this house, there were boxes everywhere,” Grecco remembers. She and a team of archivists went room by room, photographing everything, scanning documents, protecting clothing, entering information into spreadsheets and documenting where things were found and where they should go. “We’ve had this estate for two-and-a-half-years — we’re still doing it,” she says. “You put together a plan of how to approach it from the most delicate and respectful angle knowing that this isn’t a museum — this was somebody’s living space.”
Mr. David Washington, who worked for Brown for decades later in the star’s life, with Brown’s Rolls-Royce, one of several luxury vehicles — including a red Thunderbird and a ’42 Lincoln Continental — that came with the estate when Primary Wave purchased it. Mr. Washington’s favorite? “Big Red,” the lawnmower he stores at the top of the hill.
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Brown’s bedroom was a centerpiece of his house; opposite the bed (with his monogrammed pajamas), heart- shaped mirrors flank an old TV on the wall. In the corner is a movie director’s chair, from the set of either The Blues Brothers or Rocky IV, both of which he appeared in.
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At the same time, the rest of Primary Wave got to work, and the executive team went down to Beech Island to walk through the property. “When we are stepping into the full gamut of an artist’s life and you can touch the cars and go on the tour bus, it helps us with our ideation and what we’re going to do on a marketing level and a content level,” says Ramon Villa, Primary Wave’s COO. “The closer we are to the assets and we see how the artist lived, it helps us ideate more.”
Already, some of the team’s ideas have had an impact. In 2022, Primary Wave licensed Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” to Amazon for its Mother’s Day “Woman’s World” campaign; the ad won a Clio Award in January for best use of music in film and video. The following month, plant-based milk company Silk featured Jeremy Renner singing Brown’s “I Got You (I Feel Good)” in a Super Bowl ad. The Netflix films You People (“The Payback”) and Shirley (“Think [About It]”) also dipped into the catalog, while the upcoming Peacock film Fight Night incorporated “The Boss” into its trailer and The Wonder Years used “I’m Black and I’m Proud” in a period-specific scene. “A lot of what we’re trying to connect the dots to is either period-specific projects in film and TV or just more generally catalog-based projects,” Primary Wave head of global synch Marty Silverstone says. In partnership with Republic Records, the estate also put out a previously unreleased archival song, “We Got To Change” — recorded in August 1970 — in tandem with the February release of a four-part A&E docuseries, James Brown: Say It Loud.
In fact, one of the challenges Primary Wave faces as it looks at content opportunities for the Brown estate is that so many things have already been done. In 2014, a biopic starring Chadwick Boseman, Get On Up, was released to positive reviews. Around a dozen other documentary-style or live performance-based films on Brown have come in the past 20 years. “There’s been a lot done,” Primary Wave partner/chief content officer Natalia Nastaskin says. “But there are so many stories that are part of Mr. Brown’s life.”
Brown’s salon, which also contained a spa and footbaths (for feet that were constantly dancing onstage), was full of dozens of the same product — he was so meticulous about his hair and appearance that when he found something he liked, he would often buy it in bulk out of fear it would sell out or be discontinued.
Andrew Hetherington
This photo of Brown holding the street sign that leads to his home adorns nearly every light switch in the house.
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Nastaskin cites films such as 2023’s Air, about the creation of Michael Jordan’s Nike empire, and 2020’s Academy Award-nominated One Night in Miami…, centered on a meeting between Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, Sam Cooke and Jim Brown, as examples of how a figure like Brown could appear in a major film without making another cradle-to-grave biopic. “It’s about isolating these very important moments in time and focusing on them, and focusing on ways that they haven’t been dissected before,” she says. A live-theater project is also in the works.
But for an artist who dominated music for decades, then earned a second life as one of the most-sampled talents in hip-hop, Primary Wave is looking far beyond the obvious opportunities to keep Brown’s legacy front and center for future generations. “With new media and emerging platforms and things like [artificial intelligence], we get a ton of incoming traffic with wanting Mr. Brown, wanting to create the next ABBA: Voyage experience that is based on Mr. Brown’s live performances,” Nastaskin says, referencing the successful virtual concert series of the Swedish band that debuted earlier this year. “We’re having those conversations, but we’re very selective because it’s very hard to get Mr. Brown right as an avatar. It has to be perfect, and if it’s not perfect, then we’re not interested in doing it.”
The first thing most people notice when they get to Augusta is the heat. The summer has barely begun, but the heat already wraps the city like a cocoon, standing at 98 on the thermostat but more like quicksand on Broad Street. Anyone in their right mind is indoors, giving the streets an almost Potemkin feel, though one man lounging in the shade with a trumpet outside an empty club called The SOUL Bar hints at the history that thrums below the surface.
Brown was born in South Carolina but raised in Augusta, and the murals, statues and soul references that permeate the city reflect his continuing influence. He’s an icon, a genius and means many different things to many different people. “Entrepreneur, self-made, proud, confident,” says Bennish Brown, president/CEO of Destination Augusta, which promotes tourism in the city. “A lot of Augusta’s history and progress is tied to the way James Brown lived his life: constantly innovating, evolving and always looking for opportunities that made sense.”
Primary Wave takes special care of Brown’s iconic suits and jumpsuits, which can be particularly susceptible to the passage of time.
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The front living room of Brown’s home, featuring a photo of him and his eldest son, Teddy, above the fireplace; a phonograph on the hearth; and a bar in the corner. The house is full of mirrors, bamboo and motifs such as elephants.
Andrew Hetherington
Though the Brown house is technically in South Carolina, Augusta lies just 8 miles away. And the city will be an important partner in Primary Wave’s ultimate vision for the house: a Brown version of Elvis Presley’s home-turned-museum, Graceland.
In pursuit of that, Primary Wave will document the continuing restoration process through a development deal with Page Turner, the licensed real estate agent/TV producer who hosts HGTV’s Fix My Flip. “We want people to be able to come and peek behind the curtain of James Brown’s home and have a space with some creative and educational opportunities, too, because education was pretty important to him,” says Primary Wave’s Songhay Taylor, who runs point on all things house-related.
But there is one important distinction between Graceland and the Brown home. “Memphis is a city that gets a lot more tourists and traffic as a music city,” Villa says. “So as we look at what is a realistic approach to having his house be open to the public, we’re working with the city of Augusta as they try to build up their tourism to make a comprehensive plan.” That, Destination Augusta’s Brown says, could include marketing the estate as the focal point of a regionwide attraction with James Brown at its center — “a dream come true.”
A photograph of Brown and his father, above the service flag that adorned his dad’s casket during his funeral. Brown had a sometimes contentious relationship with him, though he later purchased a house for the elder Brown in Augusta in the ’60s.
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James Brown’s “Sex” jumpsuit in the music atrium of Brown’s home in Beech Island, S.C.
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To many, Augusta is most synonymous with The Masters, the crown jewel of global golf tournaments, played each April at Augusta National Golf Club. But Brown’s story aligns better with how locals see themselves and their city than The Masters, the Hardest-Working Man in Show Business a better avatar than the golfers who visit once a year to play an exclusive course. Brown, after all, pulled himself up from sharecropping roots to the top shelf of culture; from picking cotton to shaking hands with the Pope; from dropping out of school to working with a half-dozen successive American presidents on free education initiatives for kids across the country. (His estate stipulates that his master-recording royalties support educational opportunities for Georgia and South Carolina youth; Primary Wave has honored this by contributing a portion of all revenue to a permanent trust run by Brown’s family.)
His story was one version of the American dream — good, bad and ugly. And there was an ugly. Brown’s sterling musical reputation is deeply scarred by allegations of domestic violence against a series of wives and girlfriends, often spurred by alleged drug use, as well as arrests for assault and drug possession for which he served a prison sentence in the late 1980s, among other lurid incidents and accusations, particularly near the end of his life. “We’re not running from that aspect of him, but we’re also paying homage to what he did throughout history, the trails he blazed and the things he stood on from education to Black empowerment, entrepreneurialism, his principles,” Taylor says. “It’s about not ignoring the human elements of him, but also celebrating him as well.”
If things go to plan, Augusta will soon be even more widely known as the home of James Brown — the City of Soul, perhaps, or of Funk — where his legacy and influence are on full display. (As Brown put it in an interview featured in the A&E docuseries, “I created funk. God and me.”) “In order to create an overall immersive experience, we need the city of Augusta to help tell those stories,” Taylor says. “Where he shoeshined, where he buck-danced, where he would do shows, where he went to church — all of those things that are part of the overall story.”
Brown died on Christmas Day in 2006, and this tree has remained standing — with presents underneath — in the foyer of his home ever since.
Andrew Hetherington
Two tour buses parked on the lawns of the Brown estate from the Living in America Tour in the ’80s. One housed the band, the other equipment.
Andrew Hetherington
And for some, that story is not entirely in the past. Mr. Washington recounts that long, lonely drive back to Beech Island from the hospital on Christmas Day, passing through the wrought-iron gates for the first time since the boss had gone.
“I come down the hill — you could see right to the porch — and it looked like he was standing out there with his hands folded up,” he says. “I was like, ‘Mr. Brown, you know you got pneumonia, you need to get back in the house!’ And then the closer I got, his spirit just faded away.” For a few days afterward, he remembers the house alarm going off for no reason, lights flickering in different rooms, an unsettling feeling.
He has other memories, too — driving back-and-forth with Mr. Brown to Atlanta, going down to church on Sundays and then visiting Mr. Brown’s mother in the nursing home afterward, stopping for fried chicken on the way back. “I’ve got a lot of good memories of him,” he says. “Any time he’d crack a joke or something…” Mr. Washington trails off, then laughs again. “I could visualize his face right there. I know it’s been some years, but it seems like he’s been gone just yesterday.”
For more exclusive photos of the James Brown home, read here.
This story will appear in the Aug. 24, 2024, issue of Billboard.
LONDON — The U.K. competition regulator has closed its investigations into Apple’s App store and Google’s Play Store on the grounds of shifting “administrative priorities” as it prepares to rollout stronger enforcement powers over tech companies.
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) opened an investigation into Apple in 2021 following complaints from developers over the way that the California-based tech giant operates its app store.
For many years, developers and app makers have complained about Apple’s restrictions to outside developers and the up-to-30% fee it charges them on all purchases made through its app store.
Two of the company’s biggest critics have been Spotify and Fortnite developer Epic Games with the latter taking its fight against Apple through the U.S. courts (Epic eventually lost the case, but in the process a California ordered Apple to make changes to how its store operates, including allowing links to outside platforms and third-party services).
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The CMA opened a separate investigation into suspected anti-competitive conduct by Google in relation to its own app store in June 2022.
Both of those probes have now been dropped, the competition watchdog announced Wednesday (Aug. 21), pending reforms to U.K. competition and consumer protection laws, which are due to come into force later this year under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act (DMCCA).
The act, which was passed by the previous government administration in May, grants the CMA new and expanded powers over how large digital companies operate in the United Kingdom, including the ability to directly impose fines of up to 10% of global annual turnover for firms found to be breaching consumer protection and competition laws.
“Once the new pro-competition digital markets regime comes into force, we’ll be able to consider applying those new powers to concerns we have already identified through our existing work,” said Will Hayter, executive director for digital markets at the CMA, in a statement.
The CMA said that should Apple or Google each or both be designated as having “strategic market status” – a categorization that requires global turnover of more than £25 billion or U.K. turnover of more than £1 billion — it will be able to use its new powers to investigate the companies “more holistically” than it could under its now-closed probes.
The regulator said it expects to launch three to four investigations into companies with strategic market status (SMS) within the first year of its new powers coming into force. If the CMA finds businesses are using their status to gain an unfair competitive advantage, it says it will take “targeted and proportionate action” to address their behavior.
The CMA also said that it has rejected new commitments from Google that would have given app developers the choice of using alternative payment options to Google Play’s billing system, under proposals known as “Developer Only Billing” and “User Choice Billing.” Those proposals failed to “address its competition concerns effectively,” said the CMA.
In response, a spokesperson for Google said the company has actively engaged with the regulator throughout their investigation and has “made a number of significant commitments to further broaden the billing options available to developers through Google Play.”
Google says that its fees are the lowest charged by major app stores with 99% of developers qualifying for a service fee of 15% or less. The company says that in 2022 its Android app business generated almost £10 billion in revenue for British developers and supported over 457,000 jobs in the U.K. Apple did not respond to requests for comment when contacted by Billboard.
The CMA’s warning that it will continue to closely monitor the tech sector over competition concerns and may reopen further inquiries in the not-too-distant future comes as regulators and politicians around the world look at ways to curb the dominance of tech giants like Apple, Amazon, Google and Meta.
In March, the European Commissioned fined Apple 1.8 billion euro ($1.95 billion) for breaking competition laws and unfairly favoring its own music streaming service over rivals including Spotify. [Apple appealed in May.]
The company has also been forced to make a number to how its App store operates in the 27-member EU trading bloc as a result of the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), which officially came into force in 2022, although companies had until March this year to comply with its terms.
The Digital Markets Act requires tech companies trading within the EU region to open up their services and platforms to other businesses and allow them to operate more freely.
For music streaming services like Spotify that means it is now able to list pricing information inside its app for European users – an update that is “something as obvious as it is overdue,” the company said in a blog post earlier this month. Freemium Spotify users looking to upgrade can also see special introductory offers and the pricing once a promotion ends.
While Spotify has welcomed the gradual loosening of restrictions, it says its long-running battle with Apple isn’t over and continues to criticize the company for preventing EU iOS users from purchasing subscriptions in-app because of what it describes as “illegal and predatory taxes Apple continues to demand, despite the [European] Commission’s ruling.”
Talent, entertainment, sports and advisory company UTA has launched a new Christian Music Division, led by Jonathan Roberts, who joined UTA in May. Additionally, four-time Billboard Christian Airplay chart-topper Phil Wickham recently signed with UTA and will be represented by Roberts. UTA’s Christian music division serves as an extension of UTA’s Heartland initiative, which UTA […]
Downtown Music has struck a deal with Hook, an AI social music app, which will pave the way for fans to create authorized remixes of the millions of licensed recordings in Downtown’s catalog.
In a time when many of music’s biggest stars are releasing sped up or slowed down remixes of songs, and fans are taking to TikTok to post all kinds of musical mashups and edits, it’s clear that listeners want to do more than just play songs, they want to play with songs, but often these remixes are made without proper licenses or authorization in place.
According to a recent study by Pex, nearly 40% of all the music used on TikTok is modified in some way, whether its pitch-altered, sped up, slowed down, or spliced together with another song. Hook hopes to create a legal, licensed environment for users to participate in this rapidly growing part of online music fandom.
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With Hook’s license in place, Downtown Music will receive financial compensation when their works are used in these user-generated content (UGC) remixes. Hook’s platform also gives Downtown’s artists and labels access to valuable data insights, showing them how and where their augmented music, created on Hook, is being used.
Hook sees their AI-powered remix app as a viable new revenue source for artists and labels, allowing them to better capitalize on the fact that much of music culture and fandom has shifted from traditional streaming services and over to short-form apps like TikTok. Hook’s founder/CEO Gaurav Sharma says, “we are challenging the idea that music on social media and UGC only provides promotional value. We believe fan remixing and UGC is a new form of active music consumption and rights holders should be paid for it. This deal represents a new model for music, social, and AI. The team at Downtown understands our mission and we’re humbled by their support.”
Previous to Sharma founding Hook, he served as chief operating officer for JioSaavn, India’s largest music streaming platform and one of the first platforms to secure global streaming licenses with record labels. During his time at the company, Sharma and his team grew JioSaavn to more than 100 million active monthly users.
Harmen Hemminga, vp of product & services strategy at Downtown Music, says of the deal, “Whilst music consumption continues to increase, broaden and localize, the trend of music “prosumption” on social platforms is ever-growing. Users of these platforms are including music in the experiences they share with others across a variety of contextual, inventive ways. Hook offers rights holders the ability to monetize these new and creative forms of use.”
Beyoncé‘s record label has sent a cease-and-desist to Donald Trump‘s presidential campaign over its use of the megastar’s song “Freedom” in a social media video, according to Rolling Stone, which reports that the campaign did not have permission to use the track. In the offending clip, which was posted to Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung‘s […]
A California appeals court has issued a final ruling that Michael Jackson’s estate can proceed with a $600 million sale of the singer’s catalog to Sony Music, rejecting objections from his mother that aimed to block the deal.
A month after the appeals court issued a tentative ruling against Katherine Jackson, the court finalized that decision on Wednesday – ruling that the estate’s executors (John Branca and John McClain) didn’t violate the terms of Michael’s will when they inked the gargantuan deal with Sony.
“The will gave the executors broad powers of sale, with no exception for the specific assets at issue in this case,” the court wrote. “As such, [a lower judge] did not err in concluding that it was Michael’s intent to allow the executors to sell any estate assets, including those at issue in the proposed transaction.”
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Beyond the merits of the deal, the court also rejected Katherine’s appeal for a simpler reason: that she had “forfeited” her arguments by failing to make them before a lower probate court.
Katherine’s attorneys did not immediately return a request for comment. She can still appeal the ruling to the California Supreme Court, though her odds of overturning the ruling are low.
As reported by Billboard earlier this year, the Jackson estate and Sony Music have reached a deal that will see the music giant buy half of the singer’s publishing and recorded masters catalog for more than $600 million.
But because the Jackson estate is still pending before a Los Angeles probate court more than 15 years after his 2009 death, his executors took the then-confidential deal to Judge Mitchell Beckloff for approval. When they did so, Katherine filed objections — among them that the sale “violated Michael’s wishes” and that the catalog would likely continue to gain value over time if retained.
In April 2023, Beckloff rejected those objections and ruled that the deal could move forward. Katherine then filed an appeal, resulting in Wednesday’s ruling.
In the new decision, the court rejected a number of key arguments from Katherine, including her claim that the sale would violate basic inheritance rules because it would prevent all of Michael’s assets from being transferred to his heirs. In doing so, the court said Michael’s will vested Branca and McClain with “full power and authority” to make such deals while in control of the estate.
“The proposed transaction is not a gift or distribution of estate assets—it is an asset sale, pursuant to which the estate receives a significant monetary payment and interest in a joint venture,” the court wrote. “While the proposed transaction will result in the estate exchanging assets for cash and other valuable rights, it neither diminishes the estate’s value nor impairs the executors’ future ability to transfer the estate’s assets to the trust.”
The wrangling over the Sony deal has exposed rifts among Jackson’s heirs. In March, Jackson’s son Blanket asked the judge to stop his grandmother from using estate money to fund her efforts to block the Sony deal. Though both had initially opposed the sale, Blanket and Jackson’s other children accepted the probate judge’s decision allowing it to move forward.
Later that same week, the estate responded to claims from Katherine’s attorneys that she needed estate money to pay for her legal battle, arguing she had received more than $55 million since the singer’s death. The estate’s executors argued that “virtually no request of Mrs. Jackson for her care or maintenance has been declined,” including more than $33 million in cash.
A rep for the estate’s executors declined to comment on Wednesday’s ruling.
A disastrous redesign of Sonos’ mobile app that led to customer complaints, hurt sales and caused the delay of two key product launches cannot be fixed by resurrecting the speaker and headphone company’s old app, Sonos CEO Patrick Spence said on Tuesday (Aug. 20). Since its launch in May, customers have complained that the updated app […]
These days, many in the music business are trying to harness the power of the “superfan” — the highly engaged segment of an artist’s audience that regularly shows up to concerts, buys t-shirts, orders physical albums and obsesses over the artist online. In the digital marketing space, that has meant agencies are increasingly turning their attention to fan pages, hoping to capture the attention of that top tier of listeners online.
“The TikTok influencer campaign has been front and center for marketing songs for a while,” says Ethan Curtis, founder of PushPlay, a digital marketing agency that has promoted songs like “Bad Habit” by Steve Lacy, “Golden Hour” by JVKE and “Glimpse of Us” by Joji. “But as it’s gotten more saturated and more expensive, we found there was interest in creating your own fan pages where you can have total control of the narrative.”
“Fan pages” made sneakily by artists’ teams may have become the digital campaign du jour in the last year or so, but the idea isn’t new. Even before TikTok took over music discovery, management and digital teams quietly used anonymous accounts to pose as fans on sites like Tumblr, Instagram and Twitter, sharing interviews, videos and other content around the artists because, as Curtis puts it, “It is a space you can own.”
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Curtis is now taking that concept a step further with his innovative, albeit controversial, new company WtrCoolr, a spinoff of his digital firm that’s dedicated to creating “fan fiction” pages for artists. To put it simply, WtrCoolr is hired to create viral-worthy fake stories about their clients, which include Shaboozey and Young Nudy, among others. While Curtis says he is open to creating videos with all kinds of “imaginative” new narratives, he says he draws the line at any fan fiction that could be “negative” or “cause backlash” for the people featured in the videos.
The results speak for themselves. One popular WtrCoolr-made TikTok video that falsely claimed that Dolly Parton is Shaboozey’s godmother has 1.1 million views and 121,500 likes to date. Posted to the digital agency’s fan account @ShaboozeysVault, Curtis says that the popular video was made by splicing together old interview clips of the artists, along with some AI voiceovers.
“We are huge fans of pop culture, fan fiction and satire,” says Curtis. “We see it as creating our own version of a Marvel Universe but with pop stars.”
All of the TikTok accounts made by WtrCoolr note in their bios that their content is “fan fiction.” The videos on these pages also include “Easter eggs,” which Curtis says point to the fact that the videos are fabrications. But plenty of fans are still falling for it. Many viewers of the Parton video, for example, took it as gospel truth, posting comments like “how many god children does Dolly have and where can I sign up?” and “Dolly is an angel on Earth.”
In the future, Curtis thinks this novel form of “fan fiction” will be useful beyond just trying to engage fan bases online. He sees potential for the pages to serve as “a testing ground” for real-life decisions — like an artist choosing to collaborate with another — to see how the fan base would react. “Traditionally, you don’t get to look before you jump,” he says. “Maybe in the future we will.”
What was the first “fan fiction” post that took off for WtrCoolr?
It was the video of Shaq being a superfan to the rapper Young Nudy [10.4 million views, 1.7 million likes on TikTok]. We had been working on [promoting] the Young Nudy song, “Peaches & Eggplants,” mostly on the influencer side. We had dances and all sorts of different trends going. It was becoming a top rap song by that point and then we sold the client [Young Nudy’s team] on doing one of these fan pages where we just tested out a bunch of stuff. The first narrative video we tried was this video where we found some footage of Shaq — I think it was at Lollapalooza — where he was in the front of the crowd [for a different artist], vibing and head banging. It was a really funny visual. We just got clever with the editing and created the story that Shaq was showing up at every Young Nudy show, and then it went crazy viral.
It was really exciting to see. It brought fans to Nudy and also made existing Nudy fans super excited that Shaq was engaging. Then there was tons of goodwill for Shaq that came from it too. Lots of comments like “protect Shaq at all costs” or “Shaq’s a damn near perfect human being.” It was all around a positive experience. We put on our pages that this is a fan page and fan fiction. We don’t really push that it’s the truth. We’re just having fun and we let that be known.
There was some pickup after that video went viral. Weren’t there some rap blogs posting about the video and taking it as truth?
I don’t know if they were taking it as true necessarily. We didn’t really have any conversations with anyone, but it was definitely getting shared all around — whether it was because of that or just because it was such a funny video. Even Nudy reacted and thought it was funny. I think the label may have reached out to Shaq and invited him to a show, and he thought it was funny but was on the other side of the country that day and couldn’t make it.
I’m sure there’s some people who thought it was true, but a lot of the videos we’ll put Easter eggs at the end that make it obvious that it’s not true. Then in our bios we write that it is fan fiction.
Do you think that there’s anything bad that could come from fans and blogs believing these videos are real — only to later realize later that it was fake?
I don’t know if anything is really bad. We don’t claim for it to be true, and we’re just having fun, weaving stories and basically saying, “Wouldn’t it be funny if?” or, “Wouldn’t it be heartwarming if?” I don’t think we’re really ever touching on stuff that’s of any importance, that could lead to any negative energy or backlash. We’re just trying to make fun stuff that fans enjoy. Just fun little moments. It’s no different from taking a video out of context and slapping meme headings on it.
Do you see this as the future of memes?
I do. I also think there’s a future where what we’re doing becomes sort of like a testing ground for real-life collabs or TV show concepts. I could see a label coming to us and asking us to test how a new post-beef collab between Drake and Kendrick would be received, for example. They could say, “Can you create a post about this and we can see if people turn on Kendrick for backtracking, or if fans will lose their shit over them coming together?” We could see if it’s a disaster or potentially the biggest release of their careers. Traditionally, you don’t get to look before you jump. Maybe in the future we will. But even now with the Shaq video, it basically proved that if Shaq went to an unexpected show and was raging in the front row people would love it. I mean, if it’s been so successful on socials, why wouldn’t it be so successful in real life?
It seemed like the Shaboozey and Dolly Parton video inserted Shaboozey’s name and other new phrases using an AI voice filter. Do you rely on AI in these videos a lot or is it primarily about careful editing?
The majority of it is just clever editing. Every now and then we may change a word up or something [using AI], but the majority of it is just collaging clips together.
How time intensive is it to create these videos?
The process has been changing. It used to be much more time intensive back before we realized that clever editing was more efficient. In the beginning, we would write scripts for the videos, run them through AI and then try to find clips to match the scripts and stuff like that. You have to match the edit up with the artist’s lips so it looks like lip synching. That’s just super time intensive. Then we started realizing that it’s easier to just define a basic objective, go out on the internet and see what we can find. We develop a story from there so that we only have to do a few fake [AI-assisted] words here and there, and then we’ll cut away from the video, show some footage from a music video or something like that. It makes it more efficient.
As far as you know, is WtrCoolr the first team in digital marketing that is trying to do these false-narrative, storytelling videos, or is this something that is seen all over the internet?
We were definitely the first to do it. There’s definitely people that are imitating it now. We see it generally in the content that exists online, especially on meme pages. It’s becoming part of the culture.
Do you run your ideas for fan fiction narratives by the artist before you do them?
We’re working with them, and we’re talking through ideas. There’s as much communication as they want. Some artists want to know what’s going on, but some artists just don’t care to be involved.
It seems like, so far, no one has had any issues with being used in the videos — they even see this positively — but are you concerned about the legal implications of using someone’s likeness to endorse an artist or idea that they haven’t really endorsed?
We’re not claiming it to be true. We include disclaimers that it’s just fan fiction. So, I think if we were claiming for it to be true then that’s a different story, but that’s not what we are doing.
That’s listed on all the page bios, but it isn’t listed on the actual video captions, right?
It’s listed on the profiles, and then a lot of videos we just do Easter eggs at the end that make it sort of apparent that it’s a joke.
I found the idea that you mentioned earlier to be interesting — the idea that you could test out collaborations or things without having to get the artist involved initially, whether it’s Drake and Kendrick collaborating or something else. It reminds me of when people tease a song before they slate it for official release. Do you feel that is a fair comparison?
Totally. What TikTok did for song teasing, this has done for situation teasing.
This story was published as part of Billboard’s new music technology newsletter ‘Machine Learnings.’ Sign up for ‘Machine Learnings,’ and Billboard’s other newsletters, here.
Vans and a Brooklyn art collective have reached a settlement to end a long-running trademark lawsuit over Tyga‘s “Wavy Baby” sneakers – a parody of the company’s classic Old Skool.
Vans claimed the shoe, released in 2022 by a group called MSCHF, was “blatant” infringement. The creators argued it was legal parody protected by the First Amendment since it was designed to criticize “sneakerhead” consumerist culture. But federal courts repeatedly ruled for Vans.
On Tuesday, attorneys for both sides told a federal judge they had agreed to resolve the lawsuit. MSCHF agreed that the “Wavy Baby” had infringed Vans’ trademarks and agreed to never sell it again. Other terms of the “confidential settlement agreement,” including a potential monetary payment, were not disclosed in court filings. Neither side immediately returned request for comment.
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Tyga announced the Wavy Baby in April 2022, sparking plenty of buzz but also immediate comparisons to Vans. Footwear News said the shoe “appears to be loosely based on the classic Vans Old Skool” that had been altered with a “wave-like aesthetic.” The site HighSnobiety went with a bolder headline: “MSCHF & Tyga’s Insane Skate Shoes Look Like Liquified Vans.”
Three days before the shoes were set to drop, Vans filed a lawsuit – claiming MSCHF’s sneakers violated its trademark rights and demanding an immediate restraining order. The lawsuit targeted only MSCHF itself and did not name Tyga (real name: Micheal Stevenson) as a defendant.
Legal trouble was nothing new for MSCHF: the group had previously partnered with Lil Nas X to release a “Satan Shoe” that looked like a pair of Nikes – and had been promptly hit with a similar infringement lawsuit from that sneaker giant. They quickly reached a settlement that saw MSCHF issue voluntary recall on the shoes and offer a buy-back program.
In the case over Tyga’s sneaker, Vans argued that consumers would think Wavy Baby was an authorized product artist endorsement deal rather than a parody by a separate company. The company cited previous partnerships with A$AP Rocky, Metallica and Foo Fighters.
“Given Vans’ history of collaborations with musical artists, on information and belief, the collaboration between MSCHF and Michael Stevenson is intended to deceive consumers into believing they are purchasing a product made by, sponsored by, approved by, or otherwise associated with Vans,” the company’s lawyers wrote at the time.
Unlike the Nike case, MSCHF fought back against the case filed by Vans. It admitted that the Wavy Baby was based on the Old Skool, but said it had a legal right under the First Amendment to use the shoe as “the cultural and physical anchor when creating its art.” The company said it wanted to critique “consumerism inherent in sneakerhead culture” and “the phenomenon of sneaker companies collaborating with anyone to garner clout and shoe sales.”
But a federal judge quickly rejected those arguments and issued a restraining order banning MSCHF from selling any more Wavy Babys. In issuing his ruling, Judge William F. Kuntz said that he – and, more importantly, consumers – didn’t quite get the joke.
“Whatever the actual artistic merits of the Wavy Baby shoes, the shoes do not meet the requirements for a successful parody,” the judge wrote in his April 2022 decision. “While the manifesto accompanying the shoes may contain protected parodic expression, the Wavy Baby shoes and packaging in and of themselves fail to convey the satirical message.”
A federal appeals court later upheld that ruling.