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Last October, Tyler Brown and Harold Serero launched the independent label Heatwave Records. A few short months later, the company accounted for three of the top five records on Spotify in Nigeria for part of January: Fido’s “Joy Is Coming” and “Awolowo,” along with Kvng Vinci and Zerrdyl’s “Hausapiano” remix.
In the past, ambitious executives might have stayed inside a major label or management company for most of their careers. (Brown used to work as managing director of Syco Music, while Serero was an A&R executive at Ultra Music Publishing.) But more and more, they’re stepping out to start their own operations, pursuing a path that offers not just more freedom, but more potential upside if they catch a hit.
Still, running a record label is not easy, and all these fledgling operations would once have turned to more traditional record companies for the resources, back-end infrastructure, and promotional support that are required for success. These days, however, many of them have decided that partnering with a major is no longer necessary. And recently, a number of them are turning to a relative newcomer, the distribution company Too Lost, for those services.
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“We’ve beaten major labels to deals because of how quickly we move once we’ve discovered something,” Heatwave’s Brown says. “We aim to get that deal done within 24 hours. Too Lost backs us charging after these records and supports us fully — not only from an administrative point of view, but financially and in terms of manpower.”
Co-founded by Greg Hirschhorn, 26, Bjarki Larusson, 29, and Alex Silverstein, 27, Too Lost has grown rapidly since launching publicly at the end of 2020. More than 300,000 labels and artists — including established names like Chief Keef, Lil Tjay, YG and Ye — now distribute music through the platform, and its annualized gross revenue, based on the fourth quarter of 2024, was $56.1 million. The company’s emergence has helped enliven digital distribution, an absolutely necessary but resolutely unglamorous sector of the industry that seemed fairly settled just a few years ago.
At the most basic level, digital distribution companies provide artists with a technology service: the capability to upload their songs to streaming services and other digital stores around the world. Artists already had myriad options before Too Lost made its debut. The DIY side of the market — which is often hobbyists who make music for fun and push it to streamers for a low flat fee — relied on stalwarts like DistroKid and TuneCore. More commercially successful acts often found a home at long-running major-label-owned alternatives like The Orchard or ADA.
The distribution landscape “definitely was saturated,” says Connor Lawrence, COO of indify, a platform which helps pair emerging talent with financial and marketing resources. “But there are so many artists out there, I think if you deliver a good product, people will gravitate towards it.” He likens Too Lost’s appearance and upward trajectory to that of canned water company Liquid Death: There were more than enough water brands around in 2019, but Liquid Death launched and became wildly popular anyway. (Too Lost is an investor in indify.)
Hirschhorn, Too Lost’s CEO, prefers a coffee analogy. “There’s Starbucks, there’s Dunkin’, but you can be Blank Street,” which was established in 2020, he says. “You can still build a great coffee business, even in an ecosystem where there’s already existing competition. You need to execute differently, and you need to really emphasize what makes you stand out.”
Unlike many of its competitors, Too Lost aims to help both the DIY side of the market and successful artists who have achieved name recognition and charting hits. (Most distributors focus on one camp or the other.) Too Lost delivers music to, and provides analytics from, a number of streamers and digital stores that other distributors don’t always reach, including FLO and Melon in South Korea, AWA in Japan, or the exercise company Peloton, providing independent artists with more chances to earn revenue, and more opportunities to learn about their listeners.
Too Lost also has a publishing administration option, so artists don’t have to go to another platform to earn songwriting income; a block list function, which will automatically strike an artist’s track if it’s uploaded to Twitch or SoundCloud by a third party; and a breezy catalog ingestion tool, which lessens the technical headaches caused by moving music from one distributor to another. Artist collaborators can easily create free accounts just to receive royalties from projects they worked on — a featured artist might use this if their duet partner is on Too Lost, for example — even if they distribute elsewhere.
“My idea was always to capture market share by just building a very frictionless product,” Hirschhorn says. “People then build loyalty to something that fundamentally just works.”
Too Lost has started to take deals away from established competitors, and that fact, combined with Hirschhorn’s boyish demeanor — his old Instagram picture was Matthew Broderick in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off — has sparked skepticism in the music industry. “Other distributors aren’t the biggest fans” of Too Lost, Lawrence acknowledges. “That means that they must be doing something right.”
***
On a Tuesday in December, Laurent Hubert, CEO of the publishing company Kobalt, stopped by the Too Lost offices in Manhattan to meet Hirschhorn in person for the first time. Too Lost added its publishing administration option at the end of 2022 to provide distribution clients with a way to take home songwriting income. Over the last two quarters, that part of the business has grown from generating $200,000 in net revenue to $1 million.
Too Lost currently partners with BMG to collect publishing. (Coincidentally, while Hubert was visiting the office, BMG sent over cupcakes to celebrate the Too Lost founders’ appearance on Forbes‘ latest 30 Under 30 list.) Still, Hubert was interested in learning more about the new company on the block. The result was a genial CEO sparring session, heavy on economic jargon, that ranged from the cost of office leases in Manhattan to the bloated executive salaries at the major labels to the increasing importance of catalog.
The first time Lawrence got on a Zoom with Hirschhorn, he remembers the Too Lost co-founder “speaking a million miles an hour.” (“I ramble,” Hirschhorn says at one point, chalking up some of his conversational velocity to the military-grade cold brew in the Too Lost office.) While chatting with Hubert in December, Hirschhorn sometimes fired off a new idea before the Kobalt boss finished a thought.
But Hubert held his own. He has a gift for distilling economic wisdom into pithy manifestos — “We must crush the majors on cost of capital!” — and slick catchphrases: “We build businesses on trend lines, not headlines.” “I might have to steal that one,” Hirschhorn says later.In a way, he already has. Because Too Lost was a late entrant in the distribution landscape — TuneCore and DistroKid, for example, are both well over a decade old — Hirschhorn says he was able to survey the available options and see what was working, and what wasn’t. His goal was to build “a DIY distribution service that could also service the upper middle class of artists.”
Historically, that has been tough to achieve. Several distributors abandoned the DIY side of the market — a low-margin volume game that comes with common headaches like streaming fraud and copyright infringement — to focus strictly on higher-performing clients, where they can take a cut of royalty income. And the distributors that do offer DIY services often lose clients once their songs start performing well: Wealthier competitors or major labels lure them away by offering a large advance or more personalized help with their careers.
Part of the reason it’s tough to cater to the DIY artist market and the “upper middle class” simultaneously is that their needs are fundamentally different. Hobbyists just need basic functionality, the ability to get their songs on a streaming service and ensure that royalties from any subsequent streams flow back to their bank account. But the upper middle class might want advance funding for their next album, help protecting a viral song from bad-faith takedowns, access to Spotify’s Discovery Mode program, or marketing money to fan the flames of a TikTok trend emerging in Indonesia, for example.
Nevertheless, Hirschhorn set out to satisfy both constituencies. He started working on Too Lost in earnest during the first months of the pandemic, putting $25,000 of his own money into the company. (Hirschhorn started a record label and sold it to Sony as a teen, leaving him some funds to play with.) “It was the first year I could grow a beard, and I grew a full beard,” he recalls. Subsisting largely on Chinese takeout, he gained weight.
Hirschhorn met Silverstein, who was working at +1 Records, through a mutual friend and convinced him to join up as a co-founder, offering a chance to be his own boss. (For a while, Silverstein slept on the couch in Hirschhorn’s midtown one-bedroom apartment.) Larusson was working as a freelance data scientist before he came aboard as chief technical officer.
While many companies call themselves distributors, they often rely on a third party like FUGA and AudioSalad to provide the digital “pipes” that beam music to streaming services. Choosing to provide services and outsource the distribution work means these outfits have to give FUGA or AudioSalad a cut of their earnings, reducing already thin margins. But this way, anyone can launch a distribution offering quickly and then focus on building a profile in a crowded marketplace — often by signing prominent artists.
For many distributors, “It’s less about, ‘Let’s build this out,’ and more about, ‘Let’s raise a lot of money and go do a lot of deals,’” Hirschhorn says. “I’m a true believer that distribution is a technology business, not a music business.”
As a result, Too Lost “built without dependency on any partners,” guided in part by Larusson, who had a computer science background and worked as an engineer on projects for banks, among other endeavors. The founders even built their own payment processing engine, so they didn’t have to pay fees to third parties for financial transactions.
“Greg was late to the game,” notes Josh Feshbach, who manages the singer Pink Sweat$ and works frequently with Too Lost. “What he did better than anyone was understand how today’s DIY artist operates and how they need to run their business. Then he basically tried to put every piece of functionality they would possibly rely on into one platform” — analytics for more than 15 streaming services, funding for advances, copyright registration, publishing administration, cover song licensing, Spotify Discovery Mode access, royalty splitting, reports on songs’ usage on social media, and more.
And it all comes on the cheap: The basic Too Lost account costs $19.99 a year. (For comparison’s sake, it’s $22.99 on DistroKid and TuneCore, though those companies are still much bigger than Too Lost). A label can sign up for an account for just $35.99 a year.
“You can run your entire business from Too Lost’s dashboard,” Feshbach says.
***
Two days after the Kobalt meeting, Hirschhorn rolled into the office fashionably late, a little rough around the edges. While it was an especially festive week for him — an event celebrating Forbes‘ 30 Under 30 inductees, Too Lost’s holiday party — he says he’s usually a homebody: “I put sweatpants on after work. I watch Netflix or answer emails from my couch with a blanket over me.”
But the previous night, Leon Morabia, an attorney at Mark Music & Media Law, had invited Hirschhorn to the firm’s East Coast holiday party, which didn’t start until 10:30 pm. Ron Perry, chairman/CEO of Columbia Records, and Tyler Arnold, president of Mercury Records, had both made appearances. “It was a very impressive group of folks,” Hirschhorn says. “I was like, ‘Well done. I can barely get these guys in a room one on one.’”
Early in 2024, Morabia had reached out to Corey Goldglit, Too Lost’s manager of A&R, to discuss one of his clients, the rapper Ayesha Erotica. “She had a lot of infringement” around her catalog, according to Goldglit — imposters were ripping her songs, uploading them and pocketing royalties from the plays they earned.
Too Lost worked to take down the pirated versions of Erotica’s songs and ensure her royalty income flowed properly to her artist account without even asking for up-front payment. “I’ve never seen it in the music business — someone said, ‘Let me just do this thing for you, and then we’ll take it from there,’” Morabia says. “Usually it’s, ‘Sign your life away here, and then we’ll underdeliver on our promise.’”
Erotica is now earning more than 9 million streams a week on Spotify alone. “She’d never seen a check off her music,” Goldglit says. “Now she’s seeing a lot of money.” She has since signed an official deal with Too Lost, and her team liked the company enough that they recommended it to another act who is now close to signing a deal.
As artists like Ayesha Erotica get bigger, Too Lost’s ability to hold on to them will be a test. But Hirschhorn is confident that, as long as his platform remains versatile, current and easy to use, even artists that choose to go elsewhere will eventually return to the fold.
“You might not always bank with Chase, but you’re not going to get rid of your Chase account,” he reasons. “They might leave to do a project with a major, but they’re going to come back, or they’ll keep their back catalog with us.”
***
Too Lost has been able to win some deals by undercutting competitors, not only on pricing, but on distribution rates — offering to take a 5% cut, for example, when competitors are asking for twice as much. Several executives at rival companies, speaking on the condition of anonymity, believe that this strategy is not sustainable in the long run. And these executives did not understand how Too Lost could be making money.
Feshbach offers a blunt rebuttal. “The people that say there’s no way Too Lost is making any money are just stupid,” he says. “Does [Too Lost] do some deals that I wouldn’t do in order to get people on platform? Sure. But in the long run, they’re weighing these decisions against all of their different revenue streams.”
Too Lost makes money from subscriptions, royalties from distribution deals with bigger clients, and data deals with consumer research companies, according to Hirschhorn. The average customer spends $8 a month between a subscription and other add-on services like cover song licensing, copyright registration and usage discovery, which shows where tracks are being played on various social media services. The company’s adjusted EBITDA for 2024 was $6.5 million.
beatBread, an artist funding platform, has pumped “tens of millions” into Too Lost artists. “I’d like to think that that has at least something to do with their growth,” says Peter Sinclair, the company’s founder, who spent five years at Universal Music Group before founding beatBread. “A lot of guys win deals by promising dream fulfillment,” he continues. “That is expensive. You need fancy offices, a big A&R force. To really focus on the digital nuts and bolts of something [like Too Lost does] can be cheaper. And I think that word is what drives some resentment.”
Too Lost is now in the process of raising $20 million to $40 million, capitalizing on a moment when both investors and major music companies are looking to snap up pieces of the independent distribution market. “I have been working off our balance sheet historically [to do deals], which has a ceiling,” Hirschhorn says. “I’ve had to turn down a lot of amazing opportunities just due to a lack of available capital.” He hopes that raising money will provide extra ammunition to win competitive deals.
Separately, Too Lost might also indirectly benefit from Virgin Music Group’s recent acquisition of Downtown Music Holdings, FUGA’s parent company. Some artists and labels still want to build their businesses outside of the major label systems. If they no longer see FUGA as an option because Virgin is part of Universal Music Group, they will search for other independent distribution companies to partner with, including Too Lost.
The majors “convince artists they’re going to become stars,” Hirschhorn says. But “when they don’t become stars, they still have a catalog making a lot of money every year.”
At that point, he’s making a bet: “Artists are gonna think, I’d rather manage my catalog with those guys over at Too Lost than with the guy who said he’s going to put me on Jimmy Kimmel.”
The U.S. Copyright Office posted a notice of inquiry on Monday (Feb. 10) in the Federal Registrar, requesting more information about issues related to American-based performance rights organizations (PROs).
More specifically, the Copyright Office is requesting public comment on “factors that may be contributing to the formation of new PROs”; whether there have been “increased financial and administrative costs imposed on licensees associated with paying royalties to additional PROs”; and “how to improve clarity and certainty for entities seeking to obtain licenses from PROs.”
The inquiry is a response to the House Judiciary Committee’s letter to the Register of Copyrights, Shira Perlmutter, six months ago, which requested an examination of “concerns” and “emerging” issues in the PRO sector. The letter was signed by the committee’s chairmen, Rep. Jim Jordan and Rep. Darrell Issa, and member Rep. Scott Fitzgerald.
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“It is difficult to assess how efficiently PROs are distributing general licensing revenue based on publicly available data,” the letter read. “For example, it is difficult to determine how accurately lesser known and independent artists as well as smaller publishers are being compensated compared to widely popular artists and major publishers.”
The letter added: “Licensees [like bars, venues, restaurants and small businesses] have reported receiving demands for royalties from new entities claiming to represent songwriters… Licensees are concerned that the proliferation of PROs represents an ever-present danger of infringement allegations and potential litigation risk from new and unknown sources.”
The Copyright Office’s notice of inquiry addressed this so-called “proliferation” of PROs as well, noting that for decades, ASCAP, BMI and the smaller SESAC were the only PROs in the U.S. However, in the last dozen years, this market has doubled in size with the introduction of Global Music Rights (or “GMR”) in 2013, PRO Music Rights in 2018 and AllTrack in 2019.
Around the world, most other countries only have one PRO representing all local rights holders’ interests — many also handle mechanical (or reproduction) rights as well — making the U.S. an especially unique and complex market for licensees.
Written comments concerning these matters must be turned in to the Copyright Office by April 11. After that, there will be a “reply comment” period that has a submission deadline of May 7.
Ozzy Osbourne is facing a copyright lawsuit over alleged social media posts featuring unlicensed photos of a famous rock star: Ozzy Osbourne.
The case, filed Monday in Los Angeles federal court, claims the Black Sabbath frontman illegally posted multiple images — of himself – that were snapped by prolific rock photographer Neil Zlozower.
The photographer’s attorneys say Ozzy posted the images to his massive followings on Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter) without seeking permission or paying Zlozower a licensing fee.
“The accounts are key components of defendant’s popular and lucrative commercial enterprise,” the lawsuit says. “Defendant has over 12 million followers on [Facebook], and over 6 million followers on [Instagram], and over 5 million followers on [X] — all of which are monetized and provide significant financial benefits to defendant.”
A rep for Ozzy did not immediately return a request for comment on the allegations.
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While it might sound unfair to a celebrity, the copyrights to a photo are almost always retained by the person who took it. Simply appearing in an image does not give a celebrity co-ownership of it, nor does it give them a right to repost it for free. To understand why, read Billboard‘s explainer here.
Ozzy is hardly the first celebrity to get sued over that legal reality. Over the last few years, Miley Cyrus, Dua Lipa, Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, Emily Ratajkowski, LeBron James, Katy Perry and others have faced copyright cases after they re-used photos of themselves snapped by someone else.
And in allegedly using photographs snapped by Zlozower, Ozzy picked the wrong guy to test. Since 2016, court records show the litigious photographer has filed nearly 60 copyright cases against a range of defendants over images of Elvis Costello, Guns N’ Roses, Mötley Crüe and more.
In Monday’s lawsuit, Zlozower’s attorneys say Ozzy used several different photos. Five are staged portraits of the rocker standing alongside Zakk Wylde, the lead guitarist for Osbourne’s backing band since 1987; another features Osbourne onstage embracing Randy Rhoads, who served as guitarist on Osbourne’s first two solo albums before dying suddenly in a 1982 plane crash.
Zlozower says his team reached out to Ozzy about the allegedly infringing social posts in June – and then again in August and September. But he says the star “failed to respond,” meaning he was “forced to seek judicial intervention for defendant’s infringing activity.”
Warner Music Group has expanded its corporate development team by appointing Alfonso Perez-Soto as executive vp of corporate development, focusing on recorded music, and Michael LoBiondo as senior vp of corporate development, focusing on publishing. Both will report to Michael Ryan Southern, executive vp and chief corporate development officer, who has led WMG’s global M&A activities since August.
The company said this new structure provides WMG with dedicated dealmakers for each side of the business, enabling targeted investments and acquisitions across music rights and technology. Due to this reset, the leaders of Warner Music’s Emerging Markets territories, who previously reported to Perez-Soto, will now report directly to Simon Robson, president of Europe, the Middle East and Africa, recorded music.
Perez-Soto has spent much of the last two decades at Warner Music, having joined the company in 2005 as vp of business development for Latin America and US Hispanic markets. He was bumped up to senior vp in 2012 and in 2017 originated the position of senior vp, global business development and chief commercial officer, emerging markets. A year later he was elevated once again to executive vp of Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa, and in 2021 was promoted to president of emerging markets. In that role, he has designed and implemented a growth strategy based on M&A, geographical expansion and organic artistic success that significantly expanded Warner’s footprint in these emerging territories. Earlier in his career, Perez-Soto held stints at Telefonica, Universal Music Group and Nokia.
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LoBiondo has been serving as head of business development for Warner Chappell Music, WMG’s music publishing arm, since 2021. In this role, he’ ha’s been responsible for identifying and executing strategic acquisitions and partnerships to benefit the publisher’s frontline songwriters and its iconic song catalog. Prior to this, he held various positions at WMG, where he had a hand in numerous major initiatives, including the acquisition of Parlophone Label Group and several Series A music technology investments. Between his tenures at Warner, LoBiondo worked at the artist development company mtheory. He began his career as an analyst at Goldman Sachs.
Southern expressed confidence in Perez-Soto and LoBiondo, calling them “tenacious and curious leaders with a deep understanding of the music industry and its key players… We’ve committed to grow WMG through a mixture of organic and M&A activity. Now we’ve got a dedicated dealmaking beacon for each set of rights that’ll enable us to continue to improve our service to artists and songwriters.”
Of all the ultra-familiar songs appearing in Super Bowl LIX ads — from Bruce Springsteen‘s “Born to Run” to Van Halen‘s “Panama” to Louis Armstrong‘s “What a Wonderful World” to Seal‘s “Kiss from a Rose” — the most sentimental may be the Bellamy Brothers‘ “Let Your Love Flow,” used in a Budweiser spot about a horse rescuing a keg from a raging river and rolling it into a bar.
It’s sentimental, anyhow, for Concord Music Publishing. In the early ’70s, Larry Williams, a Neil Diamond roadie, penned the track, and a producer put it in the hands of the Bellamy Brothers. Their breezy, mid-tempo version hit No. 1 in 1976. By then, Williams had signed with a new publisher, Bicycle Music, and as the company changed hands over the years, including a sale to Concord in 2015, “Let Your Love Flow” endured as a sort of Song Zero. “That was literally the very first song technically signed to Concord,” says Brooke Primonte, the company’s executive vp of global sync. “It’s very dear to everybody who’s been here since day one.”
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The song’s story, and its timeless feel, exemplify the Super Bowl synchs this year; viewers won’t hear much contemporary music a la 2024’s Ice Spice-enhanced Starry spot featuring the rapper’s hit “Deli.” H.E.R.‘s version of “Born to Run” is in a Dove commercial about empowering young girls to appreciate their bodies; “Panama” is in an ad starring Glen Powell as a dad reading “Goldilocks” to kids and fantasizing about fighting dragons in Dodge Rams; Shaboozey sings “What a Wonderful World” as Nerds characters parade around him in New Orleans; and in a surreal, star-studded Mountain Dew spot, Seal appears as … a seal.
“These are songs pretty much guaranteed to accomplish what the agency or brand are trying to do,” says Tom Eaton, senior vp of music for advertising at Universal Music Publishing Group, which has represented Seal for more than seven years. “They’re choosing songs familiar to a wide assortment of people. They can’t miss.” Adds Frank Di Minno, vp of creative sync at Warner Chappell, one of the publishers for “Panama”: “This was definitely the catalog Super Bowl.”
The Dove spot is the first-ever commercial to use Springsteen’s signature 1975 anthem, more than three years after he sold his catalog to Sony Music Publishing for $550 million. Springsteen retains approval rights for the song, and after Brian Monaco, Sony Music Publishing’s president/global chief marketing officer, shared the spot with the singer-songwriter’s team a month or two ago, they approved it quickly. “There’s definitely demand for his catalog, as well as other ones we’ve purchased — we have Paul Simon and Queen,” Monaco says, adding that with Super Bowl ads costing a reported $7 million to $8 million, “brands want to get the most bang for their buck by using songs that people know.”
As a result, synchs, a multibillion-dollar industry for music publishers, are especially expensive for brands this year. According to music business sources, costs on the publishing side range from $400,000 to $2.5 million, not counting the separate fees for licensing master recordings.
“The numbers are showing [that] people are streaming classic music at very high rates, as opposed to music of the last 10 or 15 years, just in their daily lives,” says Marty Silverstone, president of global sync for publisher Primary Wave, whose Super Bowl synchs this year include Smokey Robinson‘s “Cruisin’” for Haagen-Dazs and Huey Lewis & the News‘ “The Power of Love” for Bud Light. “I’m seeing, even more than usual, the appetite for nostalgia-driven music.”
Super Bowl ads often mirror the times, and this year’s familiar-songs trend may have deeper cultural relevance. “The country is trying to find its way in very challenging times,” says Dan Rosenbaum, vp of commercial licensing for BMG, whose three synchs include a share of “What a Wonderful World.” “Using a song that has resonance from a time that was simpler gives a certain comfort to the viewer.” Adds Steve Nalbert, vp of sync licensing and digital for Round Hill Music, another “What a Wonderful World” publisher: “More than ever, we need unifying music that bring us together, rather than pulls us apart. Luckily, the brands realize that, too.”
Billboard asked top publishers to tally their own synchs scheduled to appear as national spots during the game — including movie and TV trailers but not Fox broadcast promos, teasers or halftime show performances. Sony Music Publishing scored the most, with 14; Universal Music Publishing Group had 11; Warner Chappell, seven; Primary Wave, six; Kobalt, five; Reservoir Media, four; Concord and BMG, three apiece; and Round Hill, one.
This year’s trend towards familiar songs does not mean all the songs are older classics. Childish Gambino‘s 2018 anti-racist anthem “This Is America” appears in a Hims & Hers ad about a weight-loss drug: “Historically, Donald [Glover, who performed and co-wrote the song] and his team have been pretty selective about where they license ‘This Is America.’ They don’t pursue much,” says Rob Christensen, executive vp/head of global sync for Kobalt, the rapper’s publisher. “They thought this one was a good one to pursue.” (A few days before the game, the Partnership for Safe Medicines and two U.S. senators asked the FDA to block the ad due to not disclosing potential side effects.)
Reservoir Media’s synch total includes one “contemporary hip-hop song,” according to Scott Cresto, the publisher’s executive vp of synchronization and marketing, although he declined to reveal it before the game. Instead, he pivoted to a classic: A Michelob Ultra spot starring Willem Dafoe and Catherine O’Hara playing pickleball with famous athletes (and not-so-famous pickleball stars) synchs to “Papa Loves Mambo,” a Perry Como hit that dominated the Billboard charts in 1954. The brand, he says, requested in its brief “something that played with humor, that a certain generation identified with, but all generations would recognize it.”
“It’s definitely cyclical,” Cresto adds. “There have been years where [brands] are looking for more contemporary pop hits. This year and last year have definitely leaned more catalog.”
Spotify led all music stocks this week with a 13.6% gain after its fourth-quarter earnings results on Tuesday (Feb. 4) showed that the company posted its first-ever net profit. The streamer’s share price reached an all-time high of $632.41 on Friday (Feb. 7) before closing at $622.99, slightly lower than its closing prices on Wednesday ($626.00) and Thursday ($625.87). Fewer than six weeks into 2025, the Swedish streaming company’s stock has risen 39.3%.
With 203.8 million shares outstanding, according to its 2024 annual report released this week, Spotify’s market capitalization briefly reached $128.9 billion. A week ago, Spotify was worth nearly as much as the three major music groups. As of Friday, after gaining another 13.6%, Spotify is worth more than Universal Music Group (UMG), Sony Music and Warner Music Group (WMG) combined.
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Guggenheim was among a host of analysts to increase its Spotify price target, raising the streaming company’s shares to $675 from $520 and increasing its forecast for 2025 operating income to 2.61 billion euros ($2.7 billion) from 2.46 billion euros ($2.54 billion). Others that raised their price targets for Spotify were Evercore ISI (to $700 from $500), Morgan Stanley (to $670 from $550), DA Davidson (to $680 from $350) and Deutsche Bank (to $700 from $550).
Led by Spotify, the 20-company Billboard Global Music Index (BGMI) rose 7.7% to a record 2,635.41, bringing its year-to-date gain to 24.0%. The index’s most valuable companies were among the 13 gainers while the seven companies that lost ground have relatively small market capitalizations. In contrast to music stocks’ gains, major indexes were muted this week. In the U.S., the Nasdaq composite index and S&P 500 fell 0.5% and 0.2%, respectively. In the U.K., the FTSE 100 rose 0.3%. South Korea’s KOSPI composite index gained 3.0%. China’s SSE Composite Index was up 1.6%.
Chinese music streamer Cloud Music had the week’s second-best performance, rising 6.6% to 130.30 HKD ($16.73). SiriusXM was third-best after rising 6.0% to $25.44. Another Chinese music streaming company, Tencent Music Entertainment, improved 4.7% to $12.54. And K-pop companies all fared well: SM Entertainment was up 4.9%, HYBE improved 4.2% and JYP Entertainment rose 3.6%.
While record labels and publishers have benefitted from Spotify’s price increases, their stock prices haven’t followed the same trajectory. WMG gained 2.9% to $32.72 following its quarterly earnings report on Thursday (Feb. 6) and is up 5.5% year to date. Reservoir Media, which released earnings on Wednesday (Feb. 5) and raised its full-year guidance, closed the week down 4.2% to $7.96 and has lost 12.0% in 2025. UMG, which will announce its fourth-quarter earnings on March 6, rose 0.1% to $26.98 and is up 9.1% year-to-date.
MSG Entertainment gained 1.1% to $36.73. On Thursday (Feb. 6), the concert promoter reported that revenue increased 1% to $407.4 million and adjusted operating income improved 2% to $164 million in the fiscal second quarter ended December 31, 2024. Event-related revenue fell $22.5 million due to lower revenue from concerts and a drop in other live entertainment at the company’s venues.
LiveOne had the largest decline of the week, falling 19.3% to $1.17. The music streaming company will announce earnings on Feb. 14.
Megan Thee Stallion can proceed with a defamation lawsuit accusing social media personality Milagro Gramz of waging a “campaign of harassment” against the star on behalf of Tory Lanez, a federal judge says.
The rapper sued Gramz (Milagro Cooper) last year, claiming the YouTuber had been “churning out falsehoods” about the high-profile criminal case against Lanez, in which he was convicted of shooting Megan in the foot during a 2020 dispute in the Hollywood Hills.
In a 25-page decision on Friday (Feb. 7), Judge Cecilia Altonaga denied a request by Gramz to dismiss the case, saying Megan had made a “compelling case” that the blogger had defamed her by claiming the star lied during Lanez’s trial and that she was “mentally retarded.”
“Plaintiff’s claims extend far beyond mere negligence — they paint a picture of an intentional campaign to destroy her reputation,” the judge wrote. “That is more than enough to [deny the motion to dismiss].”
The judge also refused to dismiss Megan’s other claims against Gramz, including that Gramz had violated a Florida state law by sharing a pornographic “deepfake” of the rapper. Defense attorneys had argued that Gramz had not actually shared the clip merely by “liking” it on X, but Judge Altonaga noted Friday that she’d allegedly done more than that.
“By ‘liking’ an X.com post that featured the deepfake video, the video was exhibited on defendant’s X.com account’s ‘Likes’ page,” the judge wrote. “Defendant also brought the video ‘before the public’ when she allegedly directed viewers of her post to click on her ‘Likes’ page where the video had been archived.”
The judge did dismiss one claim — Megan’s accusation of cyberstalking — but allowed her to refile the case this month to try to fix the error.
In a statement to Billboard, Gramz’s attorney Michael A. Pancier stressed that the decision was an early-stage ruling subject only to a “more lenient legal standard” and that “many of these issues will be revisited at a later stage following the completion of the discovery process.”
“This decision does not reflect a determination on the merits of the case,” Pancier said. “The plaintiff must now substantiate her claims with credible and admissible evidence.”
A rep for Megan declined to comment on the ruling.
Lanez (Daystar Peterson) was convicted in December 2022 on three felony counts over the violent 2020 incident, in which he shot at the feet of Megan during an argument following a pool party at Kylie Jenner’s house in the Hollywood Hills. In August 2023, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison. He has filed an appeal, which remains pending.
In an October lawsuit, Megan’s attorneys accused Gramz of repeatedly spreading falsehoods about that criminal case, including questioning whether Megan was even shot and claiming she was “caught trying to deceive the courts.” More recently, they said Gramz had pushed the “outlandish claim” that the gun Lanez used in the shooting had gone missing from evidence.
The lawsuit claimed the blogger made those claims because she was serving as a “mouthpiece and puppet” for Lanez as the singer sat behind bars. In an updated version of the lawsuit filed in December, Megan’s attorneys said prison call logs suggested that Lanez and his father had arranged to pay Gramz.
In seeking to dismiss the case, defense attorneys argued that Megan could not meet the difficult requirement of showing that Gramz had acted with “actual malice” — that she had either intentionally lied about Megan or had acted with a reckless disregard for the truth.
But in Friday’s ruling, Judge Altonaga said that the rapper’s claims, if later proven with evidence, would likely be enough to win a defamation case.
“The [lawsuit] makes a compelling case that defendant acted with reckless disregard for the truth,” the judge wrote. “Plaintiff asserts that readily available information contradicted defendant’s statements at the time of publication [and that] defendant knowingly spread these falsehoods at Peterson’s direction, fully aware they were fabricated to harm plaintiff.”
“Finally, defendant seemingly profited from the defamation — gaining a larger social media following, online notoriety, and lucrative sponsorship opportunities,” the judge added.
For two decades, the price of a music streaming service was frozen at $9.99 per month. Prices only began rising in 2022, leading to improved economics for both streaming companies and rights holders. Now, streaming platforms are closer to taking another leap forward in monetization.
The next phase of the music business, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said during the company’s earnings call on Wednesday (Feb. 5), is tailoring experiences to “different subgroups” such as lucrative superfans. In fact, Spotify has already developed something for these subscribers, and Ek is currently testing the unnamed product. “I’m personally super excited about this one, and this is a product I’ve been waiting on for quite some time as a super fan of music,” he said. “And I’m playing around with it now, and it’s really exciting.”
Targeting superfans is part of Spotify’s current focus on launching new products. Ek called 2025 “the year of accelerated execution,” meaning the company “can pick up the pace dramatically when it comes to our product velocity.” Exactly how these new products will be monetized and ultimately impact artists and rights holders is unknown. But Alex Norström, Spotify’s co-president/chief business officer, hinted at both higher price points and an a la carte approach when he told analysts that “future tiering” and “selling add-ons to our existing subscribers” are two of the ways Spotify thinks about increasing average revenue per user.
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Recently updated licensing agreements with Universal Music Group (UMG) and Warner Music Group (WMG) also hint at the pending arrival of superfan products and additional pricing tiers. In announcing renewed deals with Spotify, both UMG and WMG cited their agreements’ ability to enable new paid subscription tiers and exclusive content bundles.
Sony Music and independent distributors and publishers have not announced a similar renewed agreement, however, and new licensing agreements with all of them would be necessary for the kind of product Spotify has described, says Vickie Nauman of digital music advisory and consultancy CrossBorderWorks. “If there is a superfan layer that is built around sound recordings, then it’s going to require licensing with revenue share between platform, publishers, labels and PROs,” she says.
Exactly what Spotify’s superfan product will look like and require from artists remains to be seen. Nauman hopes Spotify will learn from past mistakes. “I’m not sure what the killer features for a superfan might look like, but whether niche apps or DSPs, this cannot require the artist to do much if anything,” she says. “We have a long history of failure of initiatives requiring artists to post on social, port their fans to a new app and deliver custom content, and this simply doesn’t work. Artists want to be artists.”
New licensing deals also open the way for a more expensive, high-resolution audio tier which Spotify first began teasing in 2021. “Of course, the success of launching with a limited content pool depends on what’s on offer with the new service, but there’s not a big downside to launching a new service that has limited hi-res music, where the selection of music is highly likely to increase over time,” says digital music veteran Dick Huey of consultancy Toolshed. “I doubt that adding hi-res music to Spotify will be particularly controversial, in particular because they’ll bring an upsell to labels, that of higher subscription costs. Also, because other services already offer hi-res music.”
Whatever the final product, streaming services’ targeting of superfans — if history is any precedent, competitors will follow Spotify’s lead — will produce incremental revenue for Spotify and more royalties for creators and rights owners. The new additions could also help reduce artists and songwriters’ frustrations about the economics of streaming music that have plagued Spotify. As for subscribers who opt into the new offerings, they’ll get more features and artist access in return for higher fees. In short, these new iterations of Spotify should create a win-win-win for all parties in the equation.
This might have been the year that both The Beatles and The Rolling Stones won Grammy Awards, but older demographics who watched the show are wondering why rock music had such a low profile during the televised ceremony.
Sure, rock music had a token presence during the telecast: The show began with an uplifting performance from Dawes covering Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.,” backed by an all-star band consisting of Brad Paisley, John Legend, Sheryl Crow, Brittany Howard and St. Vincent as a tribute to the people of Los Angeles who are still trying to recover from the devastating wildfires in January. Also, the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Anthony Kiedis and Chad Smith presented the best pop vocal album Grammy to Sabrina Carpenter for Short n’ Sweet, while the alternative band Khruangbin played a very abbreviated segment of their shoe-gazing song “May Ninth”; and Coldplay’s Chris Martin played a ballad during the In Memoriam section.
But the awards for best rock album, best metal performance and best alternative music album, among others, were relegated to the non-televised afternoon Grammy Award presentation.
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Why weren’t there any artists from that genre rocking out during the telecast? After all, rock music still dominates the live show marketplace. And while there are many ways that various genres can be measured against one another, Luminate’s audio consumption album units genre report shows rock music is still the second biggest genre at 22.3%, Billboard calculates, when unassigned albums are deducted from the total. That’s almost two and a half times as large as Latin, which has an 8.3% market share; and slightly more than twice as large as country, which has a 10.4% market share.
In album units, rock is 50% larger than pop music, which has a 14.8% market share, but pop was featured prominently during the show. As was R&B/hip-hop, which is still the biggest genre at a 27.8% market share.
But even though rock may have a big presence collectively, it also has some missing ingredients that probably make it difficult to include it in the televised Grammy Awards these days.
Age is a factor — not only the demographics of the Grammy show viewers, which undoubtedly plays a role in what artists and music are featured on the TV broadcast, but the age of the rock music that makes up those market share numbers. Luminate tracks releases in two age brackets: current, which counts all sales and streaming activity in the first 18 months after a song or album is released; and catalog, which counts everything older than 18 months.
That is one of rock’s biggest issues: By the catalog category — again using audio consumption units minus activity from titles unassigned to a genre — its 25.5% of the market is comfortably No. 2 in the industry, still behind R&B/hip-hop. But by current releases, rock slips all the way to fourth, at 11.9%, behind R&B/hip-hop (27.2%), pop (18.7%) and country (14.8%) and barely ahead of Latin (10.6%).
And the Grammy Awards are all about current music; in fact, current music is literally written into the eligibility criteria of which music releases can be considered for its awards. For the 2025 Grammys, the Recording Academy only considered recordings released from Sept. 16, 2023, to Aug. 20, 2024. Mathematically speaking, all the releases that meet that criteria to be eligible for a Grammy Award, and thus to be included in the show, would be current releases.
But there could be another, more significant factor as to why rock music wasn’t front and center during the televised portion: The sales and streams for the nominees in the rock categories paled in comparison to those of other genres. Big sales and streaming activity clearly indicate widespread popularity and TV shows are all about drawing big viewing audiences. And the nominees in the rock categories turned in the weakest collective performance when it came to sales and streaming activity among the genres highlighted on the show.
Of the albums nominated for album of the year, only Billie Eilish’s Hit Me Hard and Soft could be remotely considered rock — and alternative at that, or more accurately dark pop. The other albums, not so much: Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department, Chappell Roan’s The Rise and Fall of A Midwest Princess and Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet got pop covered; Charli XCX’s Brat represents electro-pop; and Andre 3000’s New Blue Sun and Jacob Collier’s Djesse Vol. 4 are R&B and jazz, with smatterings of funk thrown in. In fact, Beyoncé’s country album, Cowboy Carter, has been cited for bringing other genres into the mix.
Collectively, the eight albums nominated for album of the year averaged 2.043 million album consumption units in 2024, even with the Andre 3000 album only hitting 44,000 units and the Collier album lower, at 33,000 units.
Sales and streaming activity was also a likely distinguishing factor in determining if the big awards of the Latin, pop, country and R&B genres were featured on the televised show. Let’s take best pop vocal album, with the Grammy nod going to Carpenter’s Sweet album, which garnered 2.504 million U.S. album consumption units. Collectively, the five nominees in that category averaged 3.01 million album consumption units, with Swift’s Tortured Poets leading the way with 6.962 million.
In best rap album, Doechii’s Alligator Bites Never Heal won the Grammy, despite having the second-lowest sales/activity of the nominees at 133,000 album consumption units. Collectively, the five nominated albums averaged 712,000 units, led by Future & Metro Boomin’s We Don’t Trust You at 2.046 million units and Eminem’s The Death Of Slim Shady (Coup De Grace) at 1.01 million album consumption units.
In best country album, the Grammy nominees collectively averaged 856,000 album consumption units, with a pair of artists new to the genre leading the way in Post Malone’s F-1 Trillion, with 1.598 million units, and winner Cowboy Carter, with 1.42 million album consumption units.
Shakira, who performed and was acknowledged for her historic role in bringing Latin music to the masses, won best Latin pop album with her Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran album, which had 306,000 album consumption units. Collectively, her activity combined with the other four nominees for best Latin pop album averaged 171,000 album consumption units.
Even dance/electronic music, which ranks sixth with 3.8% in U.S. market share as calculated by Billboard based on Luminate data, made the cut for the televised portion of the show. While its overall market share is meager compared to rock, its collective current album consumption units were bolstered by Charli XCXs Brat album, which garnered 1.159 million album consumption units. In total, the five nominees in the category earned a collective average of 273,000 units.
Rock, in comparison, is a different story. The Rolling Stones won the best rock album award with 91,000 album consumption units for its Hackney Diamonds, while Green Day, which was the category leader, had 158,000 units. Collectively, the rock category nominees averaged just 81,000 units, by far the smallest of the bigger genres.
There may be plenty of reasons why rock was relegated to the back burner at this year’s Grammy Awards — the Stones and the Beatles, after all, are not the hottest names with kids these days. But the numbers certainly tell at least part of that story.
MTV owner Viacom has filed a lawsuit claiming that Nick Cannon’s new comedy battle rap game show — called Bad vs. Wild — is a “flagrant” copycat of his long-running series Wild ’N Out.
In a case filed Monday (Feb. 7) against the streaming service Zeus Network, the cable giant claimed that the new show “goes far beyond mere imitation” and instead steals “each and every” element of Wild ’N Out, a popular hip-hop comedy show that’s aired for more than 20 seasons on MTV and VH1.
The lawsuit doesn’t name Cannon as a defendant but instead accuses Zeus of essentially poaching him. It says the new show is “cosplaying” as a Wild ‘N Out “successor,” profiting from Viacom’s years-long investment “without having to do the work of creating original content itself.”
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“In an era where original content is at a premium, Zeus has chosen the path of least resistance: stealing the fruits of Viacom’s goodwill and decades of labor and innovation, and pawning it off as its own original idea for its own financial gain,” Viacom’s lawyers wrote.
Worse yet, the lawsuit says, episodes of Bad vs. Wild (which debuted in March) have repeatedly featured “offensive and inappropriate content that glorifies violence, objectifies women, and perpetuates insidious stereotypes,” threatening to tarnish the legacy of Wild ‘N Out.
“The potential damage to Viacom and Wild ‘N Out cannot be overstated,” the company’s lawyers continued. “This blatant copying and association with offensive content threaten to erode two decades of Viacom’s carefully built reputation and goodwill. It is an attack not just on Viacom’s intellectual property, but on its very brand identity.”
The lawsuit accuses Zeus of infringing both Viacom’s copyrights to the show and also its trademarks, saying that consumers have been duped into thinking the two shows are somehow connected. The filing cites a press release that explicitly referred to the show as “Wild ‘N Out on steroids.”
Wild ’N Out, which debuted on MTV in 2005, features teams of comedy and hip-hop stars battling in a series of competitions, capped off by a freestyle battle and then a musical performance. Over the years — the show has run for 21 seasons — it has boasted guests including Snoop Dogg, Kanye West, A$AP Rocky and Lil Wayne.
In this week’s lawsuit, Viacom claimed that Zeus had stolen almost all of the show’s core elements when it created Bad v. Wild. The two names are “extremely similar”; the new logo “copies the look, typeface, and arrangement”; the format and stage design of the two shows are “nearly identical”; and, of course, they feature the same host.
“Zeus enlists Mr. Cannon as host of a show that maliciously infringes upon the intellectual property of Wild ‘N Out … and has tainted Mr. Cannon’s image as on-camera talent for Wild ‘N Out,” Viacom’s lawyers wrote.
Though it doesn’t name him as defendant, the lawsuit does accuse Cannon of wrongdoing.
Viacom’s lawyers say he’s currently subject to his contract from Wild, which prohibits him from doing anything that that would “tarnish” his image as the show’s host and bans him from using “any characters or materials” from the show in other projects. By producing and hosting Bad v. Wild, the lawsuit says Cannon has violated that agreement.
But rather than sue Cannon directly for that alleged breach of contract, the lawsuit instead pins the legal blame entirely on Zeus — accusing the network of “intentional interference” with Viacom’s deal with Cannon by “inducing” him to break it. And the company claims it’s not the first time.
“Zeus — having previously violated exclusivity provisions when working with Viacom talent, and having knowledge of industry custom and practice — was aware that Mr. Cannon is under contract,” the company’s lawyers wrote. “The damage caused by Zeus’s interference with Mr. Cannon’s contract is magnified by the wave of negative publicity which emanated from Zeus’s unoriginal content and colorist and sizeist stereotyping.”
Reps for both Zeus and Cannon did not immediately return requests for comment.
Read the entire complaint here: