Business
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RCA Records has signed BERWYN in the U.S. as the Trinidad-born, London-raised rapper looks to plant his feet in America with his debut 12-track studio effort, WHO AM I. “[It’s] amazing to have the backing of a label like RCA, which has an incredible history of working with some of the greatest artists in black […]
Welcome to a steamy edition of Executive Turntable, Billboard’s comprehensive(ish) compendium of promotions, hirings, exits and firings — and all things in between — across music. Check out this year’s Pride List of top LGBTQ+ executives in the industry. We also have a weekly interview series spotlighting a single executive and a regularly updated gallery honoring many of the industry figures we’ve lost throughout the year.
Big Loud Records promoted Stacy Blythe to executive vp of promotion, effective immediately. Much like her fellow recent promotee Patch Culbertson, she reports directly to partners Seth England, Joey Moi and Craig Wiseman at the Nashville-based label. Blythe joined Big Loud in 2015 and most recently held the position of svp of radio promotion. She and her promo team are credited with pushing two dozen No. 1 singles to radio during her nine-year stretch, starting with Chris Lane’s “Fix” and most recently hitting the mark with Post Malone and Morgan Wallen’s “I Had Some Help.” In addition to Wallen, Big Loud’s roster includes ERNEST, HARDY, Lauren Alaina, Lily Rose, Maggie Rose, HIXTAPE and others. Blythe is a fixture in assorted Billboard lists of influential executives, including Women In Music, Indie Power Players and Country Power Players. “Stacy is a day-one believer in Big Loud,” England said. “She is not only a radio expert, but a relationship builder and an investor in people, as well as a trailblazer within the industry at large that helped us build this company from the ground up. Stacy is integral to the success of our organization, and on behalf of all of the partners, we are honored to continue growing with her.”
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After roughly 18 years in the thick of Japan’s music industry, first at MTV, then Universal and Amazon before spending the last two years in the C-suite at Warner Music Japan, veteran executive Kazuhiro Shimada is taking a break. Shimada said earlier this week that Tuesday (July 9) was his last day as WMJ’s chief operating officer, a post he took on in late 2022 following a celebrated two-plus years as director and general manager of Amazon Music Japan. Prior to that he clocked a decade overseeing business affairs at UMG, and in the aughts was a vp of strategy at MTV Networks Japan. “I would like to express my deepest gratitude to all my colleagues whom I have worked with, business partners, artists and artist managers who have supported me throughout the time,” he said. “I plan to take a break for a while to recharge myself and look forward to the next challenge in the near future.”
Guitar Center appointed Adolfo Rodriguez as executive vp and chief technology & information officer, effective immediately. Reporting to CEO Gabe Dalporto, Rodriguez will harness the senior leadership experience he acquired at companies such as Advance Auto Parts, Citrix and IBM to develop and execute innovative technological advancements at the musical instrument retailer. Guitar Center’s biggest competitor in online retail is Sweetwater, but in the brick-and-mortar game — it has 300-plus stores in the U.S. — the company is about to be the only major player following the pending closure of all Sam Ash stores. “I am thrilled to join Guitar Center at such a pivotal time in its history,” said Rodriguez. “As a passionate musician and advocate for leveraging technology to drive business growth, I am eager to blend my professional expertise with my personal experience.”
Sony Music Latin-Iberia promoted Sergi Reitg to vice president of premium content, a role in which he’ll oversee various audiovisual initiatives throughout Spain and Mexico. Based in Spain, Reitg reports to Fernando Cabral, SML-I’s evp of strategic partnerships. Reitg has spent the last six years leading the company’s premium content team in Spain — recent productions include the documentary Sintiéndolo Mucho and the MAX series Acoustic Home — and will now broaden his remit overseas to North America. “Sergi’s vast experience and innovative approach to the film and television space makes him the perfect creative for this role,” said Cabral.
The Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame & Museum said longtime executive director Chris Joslin will step down later this month. Joslin, who joined the Owensboro, Ky.-based organization in 2015, is headed to suburban Nashville to oversee development and fundraising for Mission Lazarus, a faith-based nonprofit with operations in Honduras and Haiti. During his tenure, the Hall moved offices, rebranded, launched a magazine during the pandemic and grew its signature ROMP Festival into a premiere destination event for bluegrass fans. “Chris led our organization through a crucial era, and under his stewardship the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame & Museum has flourished into a destination point for bluegrass music fans from all over the world,” said Chris Love, board chair of the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame & Museum.
NASHVILLE NOTES: Red Street Records promoted Cambria Sojka to creative director, serving both country and Christian rosters at the Jay DeMarcus-founded label. Working closely with Sojka is newly hired Gianna Robinson as the label’s digital content coordinator. Both report directly to vp Michael Steele … Former RCA Nashville svp of promotion Dennis Reese joined artist management company Neon Coast. Their marquee artist? RCA Nashville superstar Kane Brown … Business management firm FBMM promoted Nashville-based Beth Tyson and New York-based Brian Gordner to associate business manager from account manager.
There’s been a C-suite shuffle at Muse Group, home to musician-focused digital tools like Ultimate Guitar, MuseScore and Audacity, as well as sheet music publisher Hal Leonard. Joining the company as chief growth officer is Sven Ahrens, who will oversee a team driving acquisition, engagement and retention of Muse’s apps and products. He arrives from Spotify, where he ran the streaming giant’s subscription growth team. Sliding over from Hal Leonard is the publisher’s longtime chief financial officer Debbie Diekelman, who is now CFO of the whole shebang. Finally, Mo Chahdi joined Muse as COO following a 20-year career that has included stops at AI company Aspen and Dell Technologies. “Sven, Mo and Debbie bring deep and diverse experience to our senior leadership team,” said Eugeny Naidenov, CEO of Muse Group. “Their visionary approach, proven success in scaling businesses and passion for our mission will be invaluable as we continue to evolve to best serve our global community of musicians, educators and learners.”
Nielsen hired advertising veteran Akhil Parekh as its chief solutions officer of digital product, responsible for overseeing the audience measurement company’s ads products, as well as forging strategic partnerships. He arrives from French ad conglomerate Publicis Groupe, where he was most recently executive vp and managing director … Nielsen also announced that former Snapchat, Chime, AOL, Spotify and HuffPost executive Jaren Grusd has joined the company as CEO of its metadata unit Gracenote. The data firm was previously led by Sujit Dasmunshi, who now assumes the role of chief operation officer.
Cinq Music promoted Diana Schweinbeck from director of marketing to senior director of artists and label services. In her new role, Schweinbeck and company will focus on optimizing the end-to-end release process for Cinq artists and labels. Prior to joining the Los Angeles-based distributor, label and publisher, Schweinbeck ran Schweinbeck, LLC, where she offered branding and management services to new artists. “Diana is a seasoned operator with artist management experience and a strong network, making her the perfect fit for understanding artist needs and running this department,” said Barry Daffurn, Cinq Music president and co-founder.
Evelyn Ingram joined Austin-based venue booking software company Prism.fm as senior director of strategic partnerships. Ingram is a veteran of the business, most recently at EventBooking and earlier at Ungerboeck and Momentum Technologies, and has carried on a “very friendly rivalry” with Prism.fm CEO Matt Ford for years, he said. “One of my favorite parts of running a company is building out an awesome team and Evelyn certainly adds to that,” Ford added. “Her experience, her love for life, the intelligence in her approach… Very excited for the future!”
Ex-Directors Guild of America general counsel David Korduner joined KM&M as partner in Los Angeles in the firm’s entertainment and labor practice. Most recently, Korduner served as svp and associate general counsel of labor relations at indie studio Fifth Season. “David’s impressive experience in union relations, contract negotiations, and overseeing legal and labor issues in the entertainment industry complements our entertainment labor practice,” said Bill Zuckerman, KM&M’s managing partner and entertainment group leader.
ICYMI:
James Dolan
Universal Music U.K. reorganized operations into what CEO David Joseph called “two new powerhouse frontline label groups” — Island EMI Label Group, headed by Louis Bloom as president, and the newly formed Polydor Label Group, led by Ben Mortimer … James Dolan got a three-year contract extension to continue running Sphere Entertainment … and BMI welcomed Tom Kershaw as chief technology officer and Justin Rohde as chief transformation officer.
Last Week’s Turntable: Bertelsmann Boards Up BMG Boss
The ASCAP Foundation has launched the new “In Her Voice” scholarship which will provide funds to female-identifying music makers who are trying to break into the songwriting field. “In Her Voice” Scholarship will be granted to two undergraduate or graduate students who are female-identifying and are ASCAP members or have not affiliated with any other performing rights […]
The board of directors of Downtown Music Holdings is exploring a sale of the nearly 20-year-old music company in part because the family of its longtime backer, the late Sir Douglas Myers, is considering winding down its stake. But who was Douglas Myers and how did he get involved in Downtown?
Before Myers’ investment in what was then known as Downtown Records helped catapult Gnarls Barkley‘s 2006 hit “Crazy” to No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and earn the duo a Grammy nomination for record of the year, he was the heir of one Australasia’s most successful brewing dynasties.
Myers was a fourth-generation brewer and the descendant of Polish Jewish immigrants to New Zealand. In 1965, he joined the brewing company that would become Lion Nathan and eventually spend around 15 years there as MD, CEO and ultimately chairman, a post he ascended to in 1997, according to 2007 biography The Myers by Michael Bassett and Paul Goldsmith. In 1998, Myers sold the majority of his Lion Nathan share to Japan’s Kirin Brewery Company.
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In retirement, Myers threw himself into philanthropy and some alternative investments, including, at 69, Downtown.
The success of Gnarls Barkley’s led to Douglas attending the 2007 Grammys, where he saw the duo, which was composed of Cee Lo Green and Danger Mouse, pick up two awards: best urban/alternative performance for “Crazy” and best alternative music album for St. Elsewhere. In a subsequent interview on the New Zealand TV evening news show Sunday, Douglas described feeling starstruck.
“It’s not my thing,” Douglas said, describing the event as “amazing. Lionel Richie was there, Tony Bennet, Sting was there….Beyoncé was there.”
Myers reportedly invested in Downtown because of his son Campbell Myers‘ love of music. Campbell Myers later served as Downtown’s director of business development for a year from 2009-2010, according to his LinkedIn profile, and more recently founded and served as co-CEO of CreateMe, a San Francisco-based technology-focused clothing manufacturer.
Douglas died in 2017 after a long battle with cancer.
AI music companies Suno and Udio have hired elite law firm Latham & Watkins to defend them against lawsuits filed by the three major labels in late June, according to court documents.
Filed by plaintiffs Sony Music, Warner Music Group (WMG) and Universal Music Group (UMG), the lawsuits claim that Suno and Udio have unlawfully copied the labels’ sound recordings to train their AI models to generate music that could “saturate the market with machine-generated content that will directly compete with, cheapen and ultimately drown out the genuine sound recordings on which [the services were] built.”
Latham & Watkins has already played a key role in defending top companies in the field of artificial intelligence. This includes the firm’s work to defend Anthropic against allegations of infringement levied by UMG, Concord Music Group and ABKCO last October. Latham represents OpenAI in all of its lawsuits filed by authors and other rights owners, including the case filed by the New York Times and a case filed by comedian Sarah Silverman and other writers.
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The Latham team is led by Andrew Gass, Steve Feldman, Sy Damle, Britt Lovejoy and Nate Taylor. Plaintiffs UMG, WMG and Sony Music are represented by Moez Kaba, Mariah Rivera, Alexander Perry and Robert Klieger of Hueston Hennigan as well as Daniel Cloherty of Cloherty & Steinberg.
It is common for AI companies to argue that training is protected by copyright’s fair use doctrine — an important rule that allows people to reuse protected works without breaking the law — and it is likely this will become a core part of Latham’s defense of Suno and Udio’s practices. 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.
So far, both Suno and Udio have declined to comment on whether or not they have used unlicensed copyrights in their datasets. However, the music industry started to question what was in those datasets after a series of articles written by Ed Newton-Rex, founder of AI music safety nonprofit Fairly Trained, were published by Music Business Worldwide. In one of them, Newton-Rex said he was able to generate music from both Suno and Udio that “bears a striking resemblance to copyrighted music.”
The lawsuit cites circumstantial evidence to support the labels’ belief that their copyrighted material has been used by Suno and Udio in AI training. This includes generated songs by Suno and Udio that sound just like the voices of Bruce Springsteen, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Michael Jackson and ABBA; outputs that parrot the producer tags of Cash Money AP and Jason Derulo; and outputs that sound nearly identical to Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” The Beach Boys’ “I Get Around,” ABBA’s “Dancing Queen,” The Temptations’ “My Girl,” Green Day’s “American Idiot” and more.
The Beastie Boys are suing the owner of Chilis over allegations that the restaurant chain used the rap trio’s iconic 1994 song “Sabotage” in a social media advertisement without permission.
In a lawsuit filed Wednesday (July 10) in Manhattan federal court, the hip-hop legends accused Brinker International of infringing their copyrights by using the song without a license — an especially serious allegation from a trio that famously doesn’t allow its music to appear in ads.
“Use of the ‘Sabotage’ sound recording, music composition and video was all without permission,” the group’s attorneys write. “The plaintiffs do not license ‘Sabotage’ or any of their other intellectual property for third-party product advertising purposes, and deceased Beastie Boys member Adam Yauch included a provision in his will prohibiting such uses.”
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The Beastie Boys says the Chilis ad in question featured three men in “70s-style” wigs, fake mustaches, and sunglasses carrying out a “robbery” of food ingredients from a Chilis. The group says it clearly “intended to evoke” the music video to “Sabotage,” a parody of 1970s “crime drama” television programs that featured Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz, Michael “Mike D” Diamond and the late Adam “MCA” Yauch in similar attire.
The band’s lawyers say using the song was bad enough, but that by recreating a video that featured “unauthorized video impersonations of Diamond, Horovitz and Yauch, Brinkers also violated federal trademark law by duping consumers with a false endorsement.
“The public was confused into believing that plaintiffs sponsored, endorsed and are associated with defendant Brinker in promoting defendant Brinker’s ‘Chili’s’ restaurants and products,” the lawsuit reads.
A spokesperson for Brinker did not immediately return a request for comment.
The Beastie Boys are infamously protective of their music when it comes to advertising, a stance underscored by the fact that Yauch’s will featured a provision prohibiting the use of his image, music and any art he created in advertising.
In 2013, the group sued a toy company called GoldieBlox after it released a viral parody of the group’s 1987 song “Girls” to promote its engineering and construction toys for girls, eventually winning a settlement in which the company apologized and donated a portion of its revenues to charities. And in 2015, the group won a $1.7 million verdict against Monster Energy over a video used by the energy drink company that used several of the group’s songs in a promotional video.
But they’ve also given certain uses of their music their blessing. In 2016, “Sabotage” appeared in a trailer for Star Trek Beyond; the next year, the group permitted the song to be used in an advertisement for the video game Destiny 2. Though those were advertisements, both of them were promoting artistic works rather than products.
Morgan Wallen has signed with his longtime booking agent Austin Neal for management via Neal and Wallen’s newly formed firm, Sticks Management, Billboard has confirmed. Wallen will be the firm’s only client. Wallen was previously managed by Big Loud partner/CEO Seth England alongside K21’s Kathleen Flaherty, who will now serve as executive director of the […]
For a little over a year, since the Fake Drake track bum rushed the music business, executives have been debating whether generative artificial intelligence is a threat or an opportunity. The answer is both — creators are already using AI tools and they already compete with AI music. But the future will be shaped by the lawsuits the major labels filed two weeks ago against Suno and Udio for copyright infringement for allegedly using the labels’ music to train their AI programs.
Like most debates about technology, this one will be resolved in real time — Internet start-ups tend to believe that it’s easier to ask forgiveness than to get permission. Although neither Suno nor Udio has said that it trained its program on major label music, the label lawsuits point out that both companies have said that using copyrighted works in this manner would be “fair use,” a defense for otherwise infringing conduct. They’re not admitting they did it — just defending themselves in case they did.
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Whether this qualifies as fair use is well over a million-dollar question, since statutory damages can reach $150,000 per work infringed. The stakes are even higher than that, though. If ingesting copyrighted works on a mass scale to train an AI is allowed under fair use, the music business could have a hard time limiting, controlling, or making money on this technology.
If it’s not, the labels will gain at least some control over these companies, and perhaps the entire nascent sector. There are other ways to limit AI, from legislation to likeness rights, but only copyright law has the kind of statutory damages that offer real leverage.
Although neither Suno nor Udio has issued a legal response, Suno CEO Mikey Shulman released a statement that said the labels had “reverted to their old lawyer-led playbook.” The obvious reference is Napster, since most people believe that in the late ‘90s the music business saw the future and decided to sue it.
That’s not exactly what happened. The major labels knew that the future was digital — they lobbied for the 1995 Digital Performance Right in Sound Recordings Act, which ensured that streaming services had to pay to play recordings in the U.S., even though traditional radio stations don’t. They just didn’t want peer-to-peer services to distribute their content for nothing — or to have to negotiate with them while they were doing so. In July 2000, three months after the major labels sued Napster, leading executives sat down with the company to try to figure out a deal, but they couldn’t agree; the labels negotiated as though Napster needed a license and Napster negotiated as though it didn’t. In the end, after a decade of lawsuits and lost business, creators and rightsholders established their right to be paid for online distribution and the music sector began recovering.
And here we are again: History isn’t repeating itself, but it seems to be rhyming. If the labels negotiated with Suno and Udio now, how much would those companies be willing to pay for rights they may or may not need? It’s easy to make fun of either side, but it’s hard to know how much to charge for rights, or pay for them, before you even know if you need them.
These lawsuits aren’t about whether creators and rightsholders should embrace or avoid AI — it’s coming, for good and ill. The question, in modern terminology, is whether the embrace will be consensual, and under what terms. Most creators and rightsholders want to do business with AI companies, as long as that actually means business — negotiating deals in something that resembles a free market.
What they’re afraid of is having technology companies build empires on their work without paying to use it — especially to create a product that creates music that will compete with them. That depends on the outcome of these lawsuits. Because if you don’t have the right to say no, you can’t really get to a fair yes.
A couple of weeks ago, at a culture conference organized by the German recorded music trade organization, I heard German Justice Minister Marco Buschmann put this as well as anyone I’ve ever heard. “The moment people have the opportunity to say ‘No’ and to enforce this ‘No,’ they gain a legal negotiating position,” he said in a speech. (Buschmann also makes electronic music, as it happens.) In the European Union, rightsholders can opt out of AI ingestion, which is far from ideal but better than nothing.
What happens in the U.S. — which often shapes the global media business — might hinge on the results of these lawsuits. There are two dozen copyright lawsuits about AI, but these look to be among the most important. Some of the others are mired in jurisdictional maneuvering, while others simply aren’t as strong: a lawsuit filed by The New York Times could involve a different fair use determination if the ingested articles are used as sources but not to generate new work. These cases are straightforward, but they won’t move fast: It’s easy to imagine the issue going to the Supreme Court.
Despite the high stakes — and what will almost certainly be a rap beef’s worth of sniping back and forth — determinations of fair use involve a considerable amount of nuance. Fair use makes it legal in some cases to excerpt or even use all of a copyrighted work without permission, usually for the purposes of commentary. (An iconic Supreme Court case involved 2 Live Crew’s parody of the Roy Orbison song “Oh, Pretty Woman.”) This is far from that, but Suno and Udio will presumably argue that their actions qualify as “transformative use” in the way the Google Books project did. Next week I’ll write about the arguments we can expect to hear, the decisions we could see, and what could happen while we wait for them.
Film composer Danny Elfman is facing a libel lawsuit over statements he made to the media last year defending himself from claims that he sexually abused a former friend and fellow composer.
In a case filed Wednesday (July 10) in Los Angeles court, Nomi Abadi accused Elfman of defaming her in his response to a July 2023 article in Rolling Stone, which detailed Abadi’s allegations that Elfman had repeatedly sexually harassed her, exposed himself and masturbated in front of her.
Her lawyers say that after Abadi “truthfully relayed facts” to Rolling Stone, Elfman attempted to “prop up his checkered reputation by destroying Nomi’s credibility” with “appalling lies” that branded her as a “liar, homewrecker, and an extortionist.”
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“Defamation law provides a remedy to those individuals who, because of wretched lies about their integrity, can no longer succeed on their merits in the marketplace,” her attorneys write in the lawsuit, obtained by Billboard. “It would be difficult to find an individual more meriting such a remedy than plaintiff Nomi Abadi.”
A representative for Elfman did not immediately return a request for comment on Thursday (July 11).
Last year’s Rolling Stone article reported that Elfman and Abadi had entered into a previously unreported $830,000 settlement in 2018 to resolve her accusations. It also reported that Abadi had recently sued Elfman for breach of contract, claiming he had missed payments required by the earlier settlement.
The article detailed Abadi’s allegations against Elfman at length. In a police report cited in the story, she claimed that over the course of nearly a year, Elfman had exposed himself and masturbated multiple times in front of her without her consent. In one particularly graphic accusation from the police report, Elfman allegedly presented her with a martini glass that Abadi claimed Elfman said was filled with semen.
Elfman — a prolific film composer who has written more than 100 film scores and composed the famous intro to The Simpsons — responded in the article with an extensive statement. Calling the allegations “vicious and wholly false,” he described Abadi as having a “childhood crush” on him and intending to “break up my marriage and replace my wife.” Elfman said that when he attempted to distance himself from her, “she made it clear that I would pay for having rejected her.”
According to Abadi’s new case, those statements to Rolling Stone were clearly defamatory — falsely portraying her as “a scorned woman seeking revenge and money.”
“In so doing, Elfman and his agents left Nomi’s career ambitions in tatters, requiring the commencement of this action,” her lawyers write. “In publicly branding Nomi as a liar, and a failed temptress who lied about him for reasons of revenge and greed, Elfman and his representatives defamed Nomi.”
Rolling Stone (which is owned by the same parent company as Billboard) is not named in the lawsuit nor accused of any wrongdoing.
Beyond Elfman’s statement, the new case also takes aim at two more factual assertions relayed by an unnamed “rep for Elfman” to Rolling Stone. In one, the representative denied the martini glass allegation, claiming it had actually been filled with “moisturizing cream” and was intended as a joke. In another, the rep addressed a claim that Elfman had snapped nude images of Abadi, arguing that it had been her idea and that she had “disrobed almost immediately without any encouragement.”
In her new lawsuit, Abadi said those claims were also false and defamatory: “Nomi did not initiate the nude photography,” her lawyers write in their complaint. “Elfman coerced her into it. Elfman masturbated in front of Nomi, afterwards apologizing to her and promising not to do so again.”
The lawsuit does not specify how much money Abadi is seeking in damages.
The board of Downtown Music Holdings, the parent company of independent distributors CD Baby and FUGA as well as a number of other publishing and rights administration businesses, is exploring a sale, sources familiar with the deal tell Billboard.
The publishing administrator for the catalogs of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Miles Davis and the Wu-Tang Clan, among many others, Downtown has held talks with private equity firms and at least one major music company, as its longtime backer, the family of the late Douglas Myers, looks to exit its investment, according to two of those sources who spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks are private.
The fast-growing independent sector of the music industry has seen a flurry of dealmaking activity in the past year, as both outside investors and traditional music companies shop for ways to control more of the market that services and distributes the music of do-it-yourself artists, songwriters and indie labels.
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In June, the consortium composed of Denis Ladegaillerie, EQT and TCV bought 95% of the outstanding shares of of French music company Believe after Warner Music Group backed out of an acquisition bid the major floated earlier in the year. Later that same month, the Chicago-based private equity firm Flexpoint Ford bought a stake in Create Music Group for $165 million. Last year, Apple veteran Larry Jackson raised about $1 billion and purchased distributor Vydia as the engine to launch his new company gamma, while Exceleration Music bought indie distributor Redeye for an undisclosed sum.
Downtown declined to comment on a possible sale beyond an emailed statement that said, “There has always been strong market interest in and excitement for our platform. We remain steadfastly focused on serving our clients and expanding our business by continuing to drive innovation across the global music industry.”
The market share of recorded music revenue generated by labels and artists that release music outside of the major-label system has been growing globally for around a decade. Non-major labels and self-releasing artists’ collective share of the recorded music revenue market grew from 28.6% in 2015 to 36.7% in 2023, according to research by MIDiA.
Founded by Justin Kalifowitz in 2007 as a publisher in New York, Downtown quickly grew into a global company with more than 20 offices around the world, and its scale makes it among the more attractive acquisition targets in this segment of the music industry. It reaches more than 4 million creators and services some 50 million tracks from 5,000 business clients.
Downtown has explored a sale before, and that process led it to sell its 145,000-song publishing catalog in 2021 to Concord for around $400 million. In recent years, Downtown has transformed from a leading indie publisher to a full-stack music company.
It has made over a dozen acquisitions in recent years, including the direct-to-creator distributor CD Baby, and the direct-to-business technology and distribution platform FUGA, as well as rights management company AdRev and service providers DashGo, Soundrop, Simbals, Found.ee, Curve and Sheer Music Publishing.
Operated in four divisions — artist & label services, which includes CD Baby; distribution services, which includes FUGA; publishing services, which includes administrator Songtrust; and royalty and financial services, which includes Curve — Downtown is expected to generate about $40 million in EBITDA on about $130 million in net revenue, or $900 million in total revenues, according to three sources familiar with the company’s financials.
Sources say Downtown uses the agency accounting model to record its financials, which counts only the fees from companies like FUGA toward the company’s overall revenue.
Sir Douglas Myers was a New Zealand businessman and longtime chief executive of the beverage company Lion Nathan, who sold his stake in that company to Japanese brewer Kirin in 1998. Myers, who died in 2017, reportedly invested in Downtown because of his son Campbell Myers‘ love of music. Cambell Myers served as Downtown’s director of business development for a year from 2009-2010, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Billboard was unable to determine which companies are in talks with Downtown. But Warner Music Group CEO Robert Kyncl told investors in May it is exploring mergers and acquisitions that could expand its “lower-touch” services for independent creators and labels, and in June, it hired Goldman Sachs’ global head of music & live entertainment investment banking Michael Ryan-Southern to lead M&A.
Kyncl said on a conference call discussing WMG’s quarterly earnings on May 9, “We have a clear plan to develop this area of our ecosystem, and we’re building solutions in-house while staying vigilant about M&A opportunities, which could accelerate our capabilities.”