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Bravo Mondo, a growth equity firm founded by former Viacom and AOL executive Dermot McCormack, has partnered with Brandon Pankey‘s Artist Presented Experiences (APEX) to assist with strategic and capital needs for the emerging music, content and commerce platform. Pankey will also join Bravo Mundo as music partner as part of the agreement. Explore Explore […]
LONDON — Sweeping new laws regulating the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in Europe, including controls around the use of copyrighted music, have been approved by the European Parliament, following fierce lobbying from both the tech and music communities.
Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) voted in favor of the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act by a clear majority of 523 votes for, 46 against and 49 abstentions. The “world first” legislation, which was first proposed in April 2021 and covers a wide range of AI applications including biometric surveillance and predictive policing, was provisionally approved in December, but Wednesday’s vote formally establishes its passage into law.
The act places a number of legal and transparency obligations on tech companies and AI developers operating in Europe, including those working in the creative sector and music business. Among them is the core requirement that companies using generative AI or foundation AI models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude 2 provide detailed summaries of any copyrighted works, including music, that they have used to train their systems.
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Significantly, the law’s transparency provisions apply regardless of when or where in the world a tech company scraped its data from. For instance, even if an AI developer scraped copyrighted music and/or trained its systems in a non-EU country — or bought data sets from outside the 27-member state — as soon as they are used or made available in Europe the company is required to make publicly available a “sufficiently detailed summary” of all copyright protected music it has used to create AI works.
There is also a requirement that any training data sets used in generative AI music or audio-visual works are water marked, so there is a traceable path for rights holders to track and block the illegal use of their catalog.
In addition, content created by AI, as opposed to human works, must be clearly labeled as such, while tech companies have to ensure that their systems cannot be used to generate illegal and infringing content.
Large tech companies who break the rules – which govern all applications of AI inside the 27-member block of EU countries, including so-called “high risk” uses — will face fines of up to €35 million or 7% of global annual turnover. Start-up businesses or smaller tech operations will receive proportionate financial punishments.
Speaking ahead of Wednesday’s vote, which took place in Strasbourg, co-rapporteur Brando Benifei said the legislation means that “unacceptable AI practices will be banned in Europe and the rights of workers and citizens will be protected.”
Co-rapporteur Dragos Tudorache called the AI Act “a starting point for a new model of governance built around technology.”
European legislators first proposed introducing regulation of artificial intelligence in 2021, although it was the subsequent launch of ChatGPT — followed by the high-profile release of “Heart on My Sleeve,” a track that featured AI-powered imitations of vocals by Drake and The Weeknd, last April — that made many music executives sit up and pay closer attention to the technology’s potential impact on the record business.
In response, lobbyists stepped up their efforts to convince lawmakers to add transparency provisions around the use of music in AI – a move which was fiercely opposed by the technology industry, which argued that tougher regulations would put European AI developers at a competitive disadvantage.
Now that the AI Act has been approved by the European Parliament, the legislation will undergo a number of procedural rubber-stamping stages before it is published in the EU’s Official Journal — most likely in late April or early May — with its regulations coming into force 20 days after that.
There are, however, tiered exceptions for tech companies to comply with its terms and some of its provisions are not fully applicable for up to two-years after its enactment. (The rules governing existing generative AI models commence after 12 months, although any new generative AI companies or models entering the European market after the Act has come into force have to immediately comply with its regulations).
In response to Wednesday’s vote, a coalition of European creative and copyright organizations, including global recorded-music trade body IFPI and international music publishing trade group ICMP, issued a joint statement thanking regulators and MEPs for the “essential role they have played in supporting creators and rightsholders.”
“While these obligations provide a first step for rightsholders to enforce their rights, we call on the European Parliament to continue to support the development of responsible and sustainable AI by ensuring that these important rules are put into practice in a meaningful and effective way,” said the 18 signatories, which also included European independent labels trade association IMPALA, European Authors Society GESAC and CISAC, the international trade organization for copyright collecting societies.
At many of the more than 1,500 independent record stores in the United States, vinyl sales have been growing at a healthy clip for almost a decade — up 14.2% across all retailers in 2023 alone, according to Billboard’s data provider, Luminate. So why did Luminate track 47.3% fewer vinyl sales in January and February than it did for the same months in 2023?
On its face, such a precipitous drop might appear troubling — and puzzling — given the surge of vinyl sales since the pandemic. In actuality, the decline is mostly a result of Luminate changing the decades-old methodology it had used since Billboard adopted SoundScan’s measurement system in 1991 to count sales at indie retail outlets — a change that Luminate had warned last year would make 2024’s vinyl sales numbers appear significantly lower. But some of the drop reflects a protest by independent retailers against that adjustment, which one indie community executive worries “may put a damper on one of the industry’s high-profile, feel-good stories.”
Frustrated by the methodology change, some of these indie stores have stopped reporting sales to Luminate, and the Coalition of Independent Music Stores (CIMS), the Record Store Day board, the Music Business Association and other organizations have launched an alternative chart to measure physical and vinyl sales.
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“There are consequences to every decision,” Music Business Association president Portia Sabin said in a statement.
Until the end of last year, Luminate extrapolated indie retailers’ physical album sales using a methodology that weighted actual sales by a small sample of independent stores — approximately 70 accounts totaling 140 storefronts, Billboard estimates — that represented 1,500 to 2,000 retailers of their ilk that are operating in the United States, according to label and distribution sources.
Last year, physical purchases such as vinyl and CDs at these independent retailers — even with weighting — accounted for less than 3% of total music consumption units in the United States.
Indie retailers say they don’t oppose more accurate measurement of their sales. Rather, they are incensed that Luminate stopped weighting sales just months before it plans to begin the beta phase of its upgraded Connect measurement platform, which it had designed to only count actual indie physical sales. (The final version of the enhanced platform is expected to launch in 2025.) They had wanted Luminate to delay the methodology change until it onboarded hundreds more indie music retailers to report their sales.
Until the Connect beta is launched, Luminate is basing indie physical sales solely on the actual sales retailers report, which due to the protest has been cut in half to about 33 accounts with 70 storefronts, Billboard estimates.
Indie stores say they are protesting because of concerns that they — as well as the indie labels and artists who rely on them for marketing — will lose influence if their sales suddenly appear significantly lower across the board.
Indie-label executives and their distributors say they, too, are worried about the methodology change because it might affect the marketing of developing artists. “We are extremely disappointed that Luminate chose to stop weighting indie retail sales without launching a serious program to enlist store reporting and to count the physical market,” Matador Records president Patrick Amory wrote in an email. “Independent labels and independent artists over index in physical, and especially at indie retail, and we need a level playing field with the majors to measure success. Luminate is penalizing serious, career-building, album-oriented artists on the charts. Their sales are not being counted. Their market share is being allotted to the majors. That is a disaster for independent musicians, labels and retailers.”
An additional concern is that smaller sales numbers and less weight on the Billboard charts, which are based on Luminate data, will “diminish the importance of the physical market to the music business ecosystem,” as four independent record store coalitions and indie retailing giant Amoeba Music put it in a statement issued in October.
The worry is that less music will be released in physical formats, which would financially hurt indie retailers. But a record label executive says given the booming demand for vinyl — a high-margin product for labels — those fears are unwarranted. “Right now,” says one major-label executive, “with the high prices that the growing vinyl format commands, labels are printing dollars with healthy profit margin.”
Indie retailers, many of them iconic local businesses that have served their communities for decades, have panicked ahead of big changes in the past. When the major record companies decided to change the official day for new music releases from Tuesday in the U.S. to a worldwide Friday street date in 2014, “indie stores told labels, ‘You are killing us,’” recalls the major-label executive. “And yet no stores disappeared in the aftermath of that change.”
Some chart mavens say the boycott could be a risky move. By intentionally shrinking their influence on Billboard’s charts, indie stores could drive fans — who, thanks to social media, are much more attuned to the metrics that determine chart positions — to start shopping at sites or stores where they know their purchases will benefit their favorite artist.
Artists and record labels hoping to climb Billboard’s charts, meanwhile, might opt to stage meet-and-greets and other in-store promotions at businesses that report their data, though plenty of acts and record companies still host such events in stores that don’t report to Luminate.
In response to the protest, Luminate says it’s working to lure back stores that stopped reporting and onboard a critical mass of indie merchants that have not reported their data before. Stores that have stopped reporting are now permitted to bypass Luminate’s standard four-week onboarding process if they commit to reporting data for at least a year. For the latter, Luminate offers an instructional video and a written guide to the process, although indie merchants say they have pressed for personalized assistance and simplified reporting requirements.
Luminate also recently hired respected veteran music data executive Chris Muratore as its director for partnerships. Muratore worked for 18 years in various positions at Luminate’s previous iteration, Nielsen SoundScan, and more recently founded Border City Media, the startup behind music consumption data tool BuzzAngle Music (now Alpha Data, and, like Luminate, a subsidiary of Billboard’s parent company, Penske Media Corporation). He will focus on building and maintaining relationships with the independent music retail sector “to ensure physical music sale data collection is as accurate and representative as possible,” according to the release announcing his appointment.
When Billboard began tabulating charts using SoundScan data in May 1991, mass merchant sales, such as those by chain stores and, later, internet or other mail-order operations — were based on actual sales. But the data company used weighted samples of independent store sales because not all stores back then had the point-of-sale (POS) technology, nor the capability to transmit store reports. So, to compensate, stores were assigned weighting depending on how many other non-reporting stores were in their DMA, or designated market area. But over the years, that process became more difficult, and less scientific, as thousands of stores closed, sources say.
Using data from a confidential Luminate report shown to labels, Billboard estimates that last year, the data platform counted each album scanned by 140 indie retailers as 8.54 physical albums. Based on that extrapolation, Luminate reported that an average of close to 72,000 physical album copies — vinyl and CDs — sold each week, totaling 31.9 million copies sold in indie stores for the year.
Overall, in 2023, U.S. physical sales totaled nearly 87 million copies, of which 49.6 million was vinyl while 36.8 million was CDs. Of that total, indie stores, when they were still weighted, accounted for 36.7% of sales; non-traditional, which includes internet, mail order, Christian retailers and stores like Urban Outfitters, comprised 41.5% of physical sales; mass merchants like Target and Walmart, 16.5%; and chains like Barnes & Noble, 5%. As a result of the methodology change and boycott, Luminate reported a 40.2% drop in total physical sales (including vinyl and CDs at indie shops, chains and big-box stores) for the first eight weeks of 2024 compared with the same period in 2023 — from 13.6 million albums to 8.1 million. Within that, indie store sales fell 95.4%, from 5.71 million albums when weighted last year, to 262,000 copies.
Meanwhile, the aforementioned unweighted average weekly physical sales of nearly 72,000 averaged reported by indie retailers from January to November 2023 are now averaging 27,000 per week for the first eight weeks of 2024 because of the stores that have stopped reporting to Luminate.
As part of its plans to calculate actual sales instead of extrapolating them from a weighted sample, Luminate revealed in October that it had identified 570 indie accounts — with, industry sources say, the aid of labels, distributors and store coalitions — that it wanted to add as reporters. But as of Dec. 19, with the change in methodology looming, Luminate’s Music Connect website indicated that only six more indie sales reporters had been added, with the indie account total growing from 72 to 78. After the apparent boycott began, that fell to 36 reporters, and as of Feb. 22, to 33 indie store reporters.
Some of the retailers that have stopped reporting to Luminate are now sending their numbers to music data analysis platform StreetPulse, which is tabulating the Indie Retail Top 50 published by Hits Daily Double. Sources familiar with the chart say approximately 82 accounts operating about 185 indie stores are providing sales data, and another 50 stores are reporting online sales only.
Indie stores that have switched to StreetPulse claim it is more user-friendly because “Luminate expects the store reporters to do all the work to prepare the data for ingestion,” says one source familiar with the situation. “That takes time and [requires] a system able to make the reports. Luminate expects an indie store owner, who may be a one-man operation, to have the technical capabilities and manpower of a chain like Target.”
The source says the StreetPulse system “is cloud-based and has already integrated all the preeminent POS systems like Square for Retail Free, Shopify Clover and even some of the legacy systems like Lightspeed and Fieldstack, so it’s much easier to report.”
CIMS and ThinkIndie Distribution executive director Andrea Paschal says she supports the alternative chart because she felt her organization was “brushed aside” by Luminate.
As this conflict continues, it’s worth noting that vinyl sales keep growing. Even if indie store vinyl counts were eliminated for the first eight weeks of this year and last, Luminate’s Connect system indicates that year-to-date vinyl sales for the other nonweighted store sectors — chain, mass merchants, internet/mail order/venues and nontraditional retail — are still up nearly 7%. And the vinyl sales bonanza Record Store Day that was launched by independent record stores in 2007 is slated for April 20, less than six weeks away.
A version of this story originally appeared in the March 9, 2024, issue of Billboard.
HarbourView Equity Partners, the Newark, NJ-based investment firm that has acquired rights to music by Wiz Khalifa and Fleetwood Mac’s Christine McVie, among many others, raised approximately $500 million through an asset-backed securitization [ABS], the company announced Wednesday.
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The private ABS, backed by royalties generated by its music catalog, was led by global investment firm KKR. Investment accounts advised by Kuvare Asset Management also participated. Guggenheim Securities was the structuring advisor, and Guggenheim Securities and Barclays acted as co-placement agents.
“We are grateful to KKR for working with us to deliver a flexible and innovative financing structure that will support HarbourView in expanding its reach,” HarbourView founder and CEO Sherrese Clarke Soares said in a statement. “This capital will allow us to further our mission of investing in assets and companies driven by premier intellectual property while striving to ensure that creators are appropriately valued for their contributions to the world.”
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“This transaction is a testament to the scale and versatility of our High-Grade Asset-Based Finance [ABF] strategy, which is a fast-growing segment of our private credit business,” Avi Korn and Chris Mellia, co-heads of U.S. ABF at KKR, said in a statement. KKR’s ABF segment has amassed approximately $48 billion in assets under management since 2016. “Music IP is one of many areas where we see opportunity and we are pleased to finance a scaled and high-quality portfolio in this space.”
Founded in 2021, HarbourView launched with $1 billion of financial backing from investment giant Apollo Global Management. The company increased its buying power in December by increasing its credit facility by $100 million to $300 million. To date, it has acquired over 50 catalogs — including Brad Paisley, Jeremih, Nelly, Luis Fonsi and Eslabon Armado — and has $1.6 billion in regulatory managed assets.
The ABS will give HarbourView additional ammunition to pursue music rights. When a music company raises money through an ABS, it sells debt that will be repaid by royalties from its music catalog. A large music catalog filled with established songs provides to type of diversified, predictable income that’s attractive to investors. Music companies often prefer an ABS because it tends to have a higher loan-to-value ratio than traditional debt. That means the music company can raise more funding from a specific portfolio through an ABS than a bank would be willing to lend against the same assets.
A handful of companies have raised enormous sums of money through music royalties ABS deals in the past two years. In 2021, Lyric and Northleaf launched a $304 million ABS backed by 52,000 assets in Spirit Music Group’s portfolio. In 2022, Concord did a $1.8 billion ABS and Chord Music Partners, a venture of KKR and Dundee Music Partners, raised $733 million. Most recently, Kobalt raised $267 million in February through a security backed by publishing royalties from a 5,000-song catalog.
The growth of the music streaming market has helped create the current climate for music-backed ABS deals — and should result in more deals in the future. A large music catalog’s streaming royalties makes music assets “more suitable” for securitization, ratings agency S&P Global wrote in February. “The uptick in global music industry revenue over the last several years, and the desire of market players to diversify funding sources suggests that we may continue to see more of these types of transactions in the coming years.”
Neil Young is bringing his music back to Spotify more than two years after requesting its removal from the platform, the singer-songwriter announced Tuesday (March 12).
In January 2022, Young published an open letter asking Spotify to pull down his catalog, citing what he called the spread of vaccine misinformation on the wildly popular Joe Rogan Experience podcast, which was then hosted exclusively on the streaming platform. Several other artists, including Joni Mitchell, Indie.Arie and Young’s Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young bandmates David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash, subsequently followed suit, though CSN/CSN&Y and Arie’s music have since been restored to the service; Mitchell’s catalog remains absent.
In a new post on his Neil Young Archives website, the legendary artist said the end of Spotify’s exclusive deal with Rogan led to his decision to restore his music to the service. “My decision comes as music services Apple and Amazon have started serving the same disinformation podcast features I had opposed at Spotify,” the post reads – a clear reference to the Joe Rogan Experience, though Young never mentions it by name.
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“I cannot just leave Apple and Amazon, like I did Spotify, because my music would have very little streaming outlet to music lovers at all, so I have returned to Spotify, in sincere hopes that Spotify sound quality will improve and people will be able to hear and feel all the music as we made it,” Young continued, before shouting out Qobuz and Tidal, where his catalog also lives, as “High res” streaming options.
Young concludes his post by stating his hope that Spotify “will turn to Hi Res as the answer and serve all the music to everyone. Spotify, you can do it! Really be #1 in all ways. You have the music and listeners!!!! Start with a limited Hi res tier and build from there!”
Spotify announced plans to roll out a HiFi tier in February 2021, though those plans have yet to come to fruition. In June 2023, Bloomberg reported the streaming giant would finally launch the product later in the year, but the company declined comment when reached by Billboard – and the calendar rolled over without the tier materializing.
Young has long been an advocate of high-resolution audio, even launching his own (now-defunct) high-res audio download platform, Pono, in 2015 before shuttering it two years later.
In September, Billboard estimated that the absence of Young’s catalog on Spotify had cost him roughly $300,000 in lost recorded music and publishing royalties to that point.
At press time, Young’s music catalog had yet to be restored to Spotify, which did not immediately respond to Billboard‘s request for comment.
Music monitoring company MonitorLATINO has expanded its services to Spain, giving the music community in the country “access to a platform with advice, data and accurate song playback information on radio and digital platforms,” according to a press release. Founded more than 20 years ago in the United States, the reputable music industry firm — […]
Drake is pushing to be dismissed from the sprawling litigation over the 2021 disaster at Travis Scott‘s Astroworld festival, arguing that he had nothing to do with planning the deadly event and can’t be sued for simply showing up for a brief guest appearance.
More than 2,500 people have sued over the 2021 Astroworld event during which a crowd of fans rushed toward the stage during Scott’s Nov. 5 performance, leaving 10 dead and hundreds injured. Though the lawsuits mainly target Scott, Live Nation and other organizers, Drake was also named as a defendant in some cases because he appeared on stage during Scott’s deadly performance.
But in a motion filed Friday (Mar. 8) in Houston court, attorneys for Drake (real name Aubrey Drake Graham) argued that the star should not be involved in the case at all. They said he had no involvement in Astroworld beyond being asked to take the stage — and that festival organizers had “confirmed under oath that Mr. Graham was not involved in any planning.”
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They also say that Drake was unaware of any safety problems before he took the stage. “Mr. Graham did not receive any security briefings, was not informed of any crowd control issues, injuries or deaths in the crowd, or any stop show orders at any time either before or during his 14-minute performance.”
Instead, they say that Drake merely “arrived at the venue at approximately 7:30 PM and remained largely secluded backstage in a trailer until approximately 9:54 PM,” at which time he was “informed to take the stage.” The star then “immediately took the stage as requested, performed for approximately 14 minutes, and then exited the stage at 10:08 PM.”
The lawsuits over Astroworld claim that organizers were legally negligent in how they planned and conducted the event, including by failing to provide adequate security and emergency support. The cases, combined into one single large action in Houston, are seeking billions in potential damages. Much of the last two years has been spent in discovery, as the two sides exchange information and take depositions of key figures.
In Friday’s motion, Drake’s lawyers argued that the discovery process had resulted in “hundreds of hours” of depositions and “hundreds of thousands of pages of documents,” but that none of it had established that Drake could be held liable for negligence.
“Plaintiffs produce no evidence that Mr. Graham actually knew of any risk in the Festival site design and layout, competence or adequacy of Festival staffing and personnel, or emergency procedures such as show stop authority,” his lawyers wrote.
The alleged victims, represented by an array of plaintiffs law firms, will have a chance to respond to Drake’s motion in the weeks ahead.
A dozen years after Spotify launched in the United States and 18 years into the existence of YouTube, streaming music is so ingrained in Americans’ behavior that 91% of the U.S. internet population used a music streaming service in the last year, according to the 22nd edition of MusicWatch’s U.S. Annual Music Study.
According to the report, released Monday (Mar. 11), the number of U.S. subscribers to music services such as Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music Unlimited reached 109 million in 2023 — meaning over half of U.S. internet users aged 13 and over now pay for a music streaming service. That number increases to 136 million if SiriusXM and Amazon Prime Music are included. SiriusXM is predominantly a satellite radio service that also has an internet product. Amazon Prime provides music streaming to customers who sign up for Prime for free shipping and other perks.
In 2012, just 56% of Americans used any type of music streaming service. That number jumped to 69% in 2014 and surpassed the 80% mark in 2018. But 2023 was the first time music streamers surpassed 90% of the internet population. MusicWatch counts music streaming on ad-supported audio platforms such as Spotify and Pandora, paid services such as Apple Music, and video services such as YouTube. For the sake of this survey, short-form video platforms such as TikTok and Instagram Reels are not considered to be music streaming platforms.
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The number of people who stream music has grown even faster than the proportion of the population that does so. In 2012, the U.S. internet population stood at roughly 125 million. By 2023, it had grown by nearly 60 million to 193 million. The way people access the internet has changed over that period. In the early days of the internet, people mostly had a dial-up home internet connection, but over time, home internet access improved while mobile internet usage exploded.
The prevalence of mobile internet has played an important role in music streaming adoption. Not long ago, MusicWatch principal Russ Crupnick noticed a change in the reasons why people paid for subscription services. Early subscription adopters were heavy users who found value in features such as playlists, connecting to their social networks and recommendations. Then, about five years ago, Crupnick found new subscribers’ reasons for paying a monthly fee started to change.
More recent adopters of paid music streaming services care more about access, not features, says Crupnick. As more people had smart speakers, bluetooth headphones and in-dash entertainment systems in their cars, it was important for services to offer a seamless listening experience as they moved from place to place. “It just works,” he says of subscribers’ rationale for paying. “It works everywhere that I want and works on all of my devices.”
Per-capita spending on recorded music increased 7% from 2022 as music subscriptions, CDs and vinyl all saw double-digit gains. That improvement came from both organic growth and price inflation, says Crupnick. Music subscription services pushed through a string of price increases after keeping their prices mostly untouched for many years — Apple Music in Oct. 2022, Spotify in July, YouTube Music also in July and Amazon Music in August.
Dear Industry Leaders,
Last year, the Black Music Action Coalition and the Academy of Country Music joined together to launch OnRamp, a new initiative designed to create economic empowerment and access to the music industry for young Black creatives and industry executives, giving them a year of guaranteed income and a menu of mentorship services from music industry leaders.
Following the success of the OnRamp program, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame has united with the BMAC to continue this important work and support both young female and Black creatives and industry professionals in search of careers as musicians, songwriters, producers and executives.The program assists young creatives with basic needs such as rent, utilities and food, as well as opens the door for previously challenging activities such as studio time, travel for shows or networking opportunities, marketing and even legal services. It also provides mentorship focused on improving inclusivity and equity within music and empowering the next generation of leaders in the early stages of their careers by granting access to professional development opportunities, mentorship and industry exposure. The BMAC will facilitate the program as well as document and track the artists’ and young professionals’ journeys as they share their stories of success and triumph from the year of empowerment.
After reviewing applications in 2023, the BMAC has selected 20 female and Black emerging creatives for the program. We are currently fundraising in order to begin the program during Black Music Month in June.
As we are all very aware of the incredible contributions female and Black creatives continue to make to the growth of our industry, we see the BMAC Music Maker Guaranteed Income and Mentorship Program as a valuable long-term partner that will provide a structured system that will open doors and train the next generation of creatives and executives in the music industry. We ask that you become an inaugural partner with us on this important initiative so that we can create the true scale needed to open the doors to the future creators and leaders in our industry.
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As part of Grammy Week 2024, BMAC co-founder and president/CEO Willie “Prophet” Stiggers hosted John Sykes, chairman of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation; Michael Tubbs, founder of Mayors for a Guaranteed Income; Maura Cuffie-Peterson, director of strategic initiatives for guaranteed income for Creatives Rebuild New York; and Billboard editorial director Hannah Karp for an economic justice summit at UTA to galvanize the music industry to take action.
We now look to our industry and partners to donate to this initiative. We would be so grateful for your support.
WILLIE “PROPHET” STIGGERS, Co-founder and president/CEO Black Music Action Coalition
HANNAH KARP, Editorial director Billboard
JOHN SYKES, Chairman Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation
IRVING AZOFF, Chairman/CEO The Azoff Company
ROB LIGHT, Managing partner/ head of worldwide music CAA
To support this program, please visit bmacoalition.org/halloffame.
This story originally appeared in the March 9, 2024, issue of Billboard.
Foxwoods Resort Casino in Mashantucket, Conn., has signed a new partnership with Danny Wimmer Presents (DWP) to book the property’s Premier Theater. “The team at DWP is second to none when it comes to understanding the nuances of booking entertainment for casinos, and we are very excited to work with this dedicated team,” said Christian […]