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Independently released songs and albums accounted for almost one-third of all music consumption in the United Kingdom last year, marking the sixth consecutive year of growth for the country’s indie sector, according to new figures from labels trade body BPI.
In total, the equivalent of more than 53 million independently released albums were streamed or purchased in 2023 across digital and physical formats, representing 29.2% of all music consumption in the U.K. That number is up 12% on 2022’s figure and marks an increase of almost 30% over the number seen in 2017 when indies accounted for just over one-fifth (22.1%) of music consumption.
Helping drive growth across the indie sector was the booming popularity of physical formats, with nearly four in every 10 vinyl LPs (39%) and just under one-third of CDs (33%) bought by British music fans last year having been released by artists signed to or distributed by an independent label, reports BPI.
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Arlo Parks, Kylie Minogue, Enter Shikari, The Prodigy and homegrown rappers Dave and AJ Tracey were among the most popular indie acts in the U.K. across digital and physical formats, along with recently-crowned multi-Brit Award-winning singer-songwriter Raye, whose single “Escapism” featuring 070 Shake was one of the U.K.’s biggest hits last year with 142 million streams.
However, there are a number of provisos to consider when analyzing the apparent growth of the U.K. indie market. BPI’s analysis of the sector is based on the Official Charts Company’s (OCC) data and definitions for what counts as an independent release. In essence, that means any album or song not attributed to the three majors — Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group — on the OCC database.
However, in addition to fully independent or self-released records, that broad classification includes some “indie” albums and songs distributed by major-owned companies like Sony-owned The Orchard or Warner-owned ADA. Raye, for example, is distributed by Sony-owned independent distributor Human Re Sources. BPI said it was unable to provide a more detailed breakdown of indie music consumption.
According to the London-based trade body, almost 400 indie singles and albums achieved BRIT-certified platinum, gold or silver sales status in 2023. (Platinum status in the United Kingdom is awarded for album-equivalent sales — representing combined consumption across formats — of more than 600,000 units for singles and more than 300,000 units for albums, with gold and silver awards having incrementally lower thresholds.)
In terms of vinyl releases, more than 200 indie titles sold more than 1,500 copies last year, including albums by alternative rock band Bdrmm and R&B singer Jorja Smith.
“It’s great to see independents thriving, and not just the more celebrated labels and their artists, but increasingly also a dynamic and entrepreneurial community of much smaller micro-labels and self-releasing artists that are redefining the sector and who, with support, can drive further growth,” said Femi Olasehinde, founder of U.K. indie imprint Just Another Label and BPI Council independent representative, in a statement.
Total U.K. recorded music revenue— comprising digital and physical revenues by majors and indie labels, public performance rights and synch — climbed 8.1% to 1.43 billion pounds ($1.8 billion) in 2023, BPI reported earlier this year. That’s the highest number ever achieved in the U.K. in one year, not adjusting for inflation, helping to maintain the U.K.’s long-held status as the world’s third-biggest recorded music market in IFPI’s annual rankings behind the United States and Japan.
BPI’s latest figures on the independent sector are taken from “All About The Music 2024,” the 45th edition of its yearbook measuring the state of the U.K.’s recorded music industry, which was published Tuesday (Apr. 16).
Included among BPI’s analysis are newly released statistics about the U.K. vinyl market, which climbed 18.6% to 142 million pounds ($181 million) in 2023, marking the 16th consecutive year of growth.
BPI said the rising popularity of pop releases helped drive the rise in vinyl revenue, with the genre accounting for nearly a quarter of the market (23.7%) of U.K. vinyl sales, up from 19.6% the previous year, on the back of big-selling albums by Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo and Lewis Capaldi.
Hip hop/rap also grew its share of the vinyl market to 5.3% in 2023, led by a re-issue of De La Soul’s 1989 debut, 3 Feet High and Rising, although rock comfortably remained the biggest genre among vinyl fans with a dominant 55% share of the market.
Amazon Music has announced a new AI-powered playlist feature that allows users to turn text prompts into entire playlists. Called Maestro, the offering is still in beta and available only to a small number of Amazon Music users on all tiers in the United States on iOS and Android. It can be found on the […]
Seventeen cartoon renditions of Taylor Swift — wearing pink sunglasses, posing in her purple Speak Now dress, posing in a “Not A Lot Going On At the Moment” t-shirt — are stamped onto an Amazon page for a 24-piece cupcake-topper set. “Our Singer cake decorations are made of high-quality food-grade cardstock,” reads the description. “Can be applied safely!” The $12.99 birthday party set, listed by the brand wgzftrys, which is headquartered in Guangdong Shen, China, is among the hundreds of Swift products available on Amazon — some bearing the megastar singer’s name and likeness, others using “TS” or a generic Taylor-ish young-blonde-woman image.
They’re mostly illegal bootlegs, according to music industry sources — a form of international intellectual property rights infringement that costs clothing, electronics, toy and sporting goods companies billions of dollars annually. In 2023, U.S. Border and Customs Protection seized nearly $2.8 billion in copyright-infringing goods shipped from multiple countries — most prominently China, Turkey and Canada. Jeff Jampol, CEO of Jam Inc., which manages the estates of the Doors, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane and others, says that his lawyers serve “dozens and dozens” of cease-and-desist orders monthly to suspected bootleggers on a variety of e-commerce sites and other webpages who cost artists roughly $20,000 to $50,000 for every $1 million in annual t-shirt sales.
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“In terms of how much money we lose, who knows?” says Steve Culver, president of Dreamer Media, a Nashville merchandising company that works with Billy Joel, Paul Simon, Melissa Etheridge and others. “It’s just so easy to set up an Amazon store — if you get shut down, you just put it back up again.”
Reps for Swift and her label, Republic Records, didn’t respond to requests to comment for this story as they prepare to release her new album, The Tortured Poets Department, on April 19. But music merch companies have been battling this kind ofonline bootlegging for years, and they say the problem is getting worse. In 2021, Global Merchandising Services, citing rampant Motörhead trademark violations and counterfeiting, filed a lawsuit against 278 companies that “employ no normal business nomenclature and, instead, have the appearance of being made up.” These online stores sell knock-off t-shirts and other products, according to the suit, and each seller is “likely to cause and has caused confusion, mistake and deception by and among consumers.”
“It’s a game of Whack-a-Mole, and it’s a constant every day,” says Barry Drinkwater, executive chairman for the 15-year-old merchandiser, which handles products for Guns N’ Roses, Iron Maiden, Niall Horan and others. He estimates that the company issues “hundreds of thousands” of takedown notices annually: “All we can do is keep on top of it and spend some dollars,” he adds
Swift’s popularity is so immense that companies everywhere have co-opted her name, likeness and song titles to market and sell products big and small, from a Royal Caribbean International cruise for Swifties to “Tayl-gating” donuts to Swift flashing double middle-fingers on a t-shirt sold on eBay to the more than 1,000 Swift-themed items on handmade retailer Etsy. “There’s definitely bootleg and unauthorized stuff sold on Etsy, too,” says a representative for a major artist. “But are you going to go after the person who makes a necklace? No, you don’t want to be that guy.”
The Swift-branded knock-off products on Amazon — clearly different than those sold on her official store — include pillows, socks, pantyhose and keychains. A 14-piece friendship bracelet set, sold for $12.98 from GOIPKO, lists several of her albums and “I ❤️ TS”; a “Tay Tay Cheerleader Costume” for women, priced at $32.99 from Mokkin, bears the initials “TS.” A knit hat with the Nirvana logo (but not the Nirvana name), sold by a China-based company, goes for $9.99, while a pair of purple “Best Gaga Ever” socks, from the Chinese store ZJXHPO, is $14.99.
Some of these products brazenly use the artists’ names and likenesses, while others are more ambiguous. Regarding a t-shirt with an “It’s Me Hi I’m the Birthday Girl It’s Me,” intellectual property attorney Michael N. Cohen says, “It invokes a Taylor Swift lyric, but it is modified, so is it transformative enough? Possibly.” A Swift representative could send a take-down notice, in which case Amazon could answer that question – or, in the case of a lawsuit, a jury could decide.
(Several companies listing these kinds of Swift products on Amazon did not respond to interview requests by email, although one seller responded “sorry” and another wrote, “Sorry. We are not interested in it.”)
Amazon declined interview requests, but a representative cited its intellectual property policy for sellers, which prohibits violating the rights of “brands or other rights owners” and advises consulting a lawyer. Amazon has algorithms that suss out unauthorized or illegal products posted by sellers, but they can take time to detect and take down, especially if they’re ambiguous, like a t-shirt image that somewhat resembles Taylor Swift containing words that somewhat recall lyrics from her songs. Since 2020, according to the company, Amazon has spent $1.2 billion and employed 15,000 people to combat counterfeit and fraud on the site, and “valid notices of infringements submitted by brands” have declined 30% despite overall sales growth at the company. Amazon’s Counterfeit Crimes Unit is the department responsible for removing “bad actor accounts,” according to the company’s website.
Retail apparel bootlegging — as opposed to the separate problem of unauthorized t-shirts sold in concert parking lots — has increased over the last 15 years, Jampol says. During that period, three-dimensional printers have become more sophisticated and enabled the print-on-demand industry. “One of the barriers to entry for doing apparel is, ‘I’ve got to have five designs and four colors each both for men and women, in extra-small, small, medium, large, extra-large,’ then have a place to store it,” he says. “Now, with print-on-demand, I can put out 5,000 designs in 182 colors, and when somebody orders an extra-small in pink, of this style, I just print it.”
The bootleg merch is prevalent on many retail sites, including “fake e-commerce storefronts,” as the Motörhead suit alleges, which counterfeiters have set up to match artists’ official websites. With reputable retailers like Amazon, artists can file takedown notices — but it helps, Cohen says, for artists to trademark their names in advance. “Whatever platform it is, they’ll do their own formal review and make a decision whether to take it down,” Cohen says. “That’s why filing is so critical. That proves there’s validity. Amazon and platforms like that want to see: ‘Do you have the registration number?’”
In the United States, solo artists and bands have “trademark rights” for their names and likenesses, so they can send cease-and-desist letters or file lawsuits against unauthorized merchandisers. The process is trickier in a different territory. “You can own rights in one country, but not in another country,” says Douglas Masters, an intellectual property attorney in Chicago. “It’s a big world.” And even for artists who are aggressive about pursuing international copyright infringers, “People are sometimes hard to find,” Masters adds.
That’s why Gene Simmons, bassist for KISS, contacts his management company roughly every other day to flag an infringer on the band’s trademarked merch. “Gene is online all the time and comes up with more of them than anybody,” says Doc McGhee, the band’s manager. “It certainly is a big problem. We go after them. We have a team of lawyers. It’s just stealing.”
Pandora is firing back at a lawsuit filed by the Mechanical Licensing Collective (the MLC) that claims the company has failed to properly pay streaming royalties, calling the case a “gross overreach” based on a “legally incoherent position.”
The MLC — the group created by Congress in 2018 to collect streaming royalties — filed the lawsuit earlier this year, accusing Pandora (a unit of SiriusXM) of misclassifying the nature of its streaming service to avoid paying the kind of higher royalties owed by “interactive” platforms like Spotify.
But in its first response to the case filed on Tuesday (April 16), Pandora calls the MLC’s lawsuit a “wild overreach” that “distorts the Pandora experience” — and one filed by an entity that is not even legally empowered to bring such cases.
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“The MLC … was intended to be a neutral intermediary charged with collecting and distributing royalties under the blanket license,” Pandora writes. “It is not authorized to play judge and jury over a streaming service’s legal compliance, nor was it created … to pursue legal frolics and detours such as this one.”
Pandora’s lawyers also say the lawsuit is based on a “a legally incoherent position” that has never been raised by the music companies for whom the MLC is collecting royalties: “The MLC seems to think it knows something the entire music industry does not.”
A rep for the MLC did not immediately return a request for comment.
At the heart of the lawsuit against Pandora is the distinction between “interactive” platforms like Spotify or Apple Music, which allow users to pick their songs on demand, and “noninteractive” platforms that provide an experience more like radio. It’s a key dividing line since interactive and noninteractive services pay very different royalties under different systems.
Though Pandora offers a premium tier with on-demand functionality, it has long treated Pandora Free — the core radio-like product that fueled the company’s rise in the late 2000s — as a noninteractive service, since it largely serves users a mix of songs based on their preferences.
But in a February lawsuit, the MLC argued that Pandora Free had crossed the line into “interactive” status by offering so-called “Sponsored Premium Access” sessions, which allow users to briefly play specific songs in return for watching ads. As a result, the MLC argued that Pandora owed the same kind of royalties for Pandora Free as services like YouTube or Spotify pay.
“Pandora provides even greater interactive access and functionality than these other ad-supported interactive streaming services,” the MLC wrote. “Despite the interactive functionality of Pandora Free, Pandora has failed to report in full Pandora Free usage to The MLC.”
In Tuesday’s response, Pandora’s lawyers argued that the MLC’s lawsuit “badly distorts reality” by making a “blatant mischaracterization of Pandora’s offerings.”
In their telling, the disputed “Sponsored Premium Access” sessions are merely brief previews of the company’s on-demand tier with “strict caps” on usage — not a wholesale feature that would “transform” Pandora Free “into an interactive service like Spotify or Apple Music.”
What’s more, Pandora says that feature was explicitly negotiated with music companies, who have never once objected to it or argued that it required Pandora to “fundamentally change its approach to licensing.”
“The MLC apparently thinks it knows better than the entire music publishing industry,” Pandora wrote. “Not only is the MLC operating far outside its administrative bounds, but it is also completely wrong on the law.”
Speaking with Billboard on Tuesday, George White, senior vp of music licensing at SiriusXM and Pandora, echoed the claims made by Pandora in the legal response.
“The lawsuit is really a gross overreach, especially when you consider that Pandora is such a well-known and well-established non-interactive music streaming service,” White said. “There are no checks and balances on the MLC. We believe that’s something, as part of the MLC redesignation, that the Copyright Office really needs to consider.”
White was alluding to the Copyright Office’s ongoing “redesignation process” of the MLC — a five-year check-up required by Music Modernization Act to ensure that the organization is functioning effectively. The first-ever redesignation started in January and is set to wrap up later this year.
The Rights, a synch licensing clearance platform, launched publicly on Tuesday (April 16) following a beta test period that involved participation from two major music companies, Kobalt Music Group and Believe. Founded by a team of synch and licensing veterans with funding from a motley cast of investors, executives and entrepreneurs, the company is trying to build a better mousetrap that simplifies a time-consuming process and, possibly, reduces the threat from emerging technology.
Created in partnership with Dequency, a blockchain-based synch licensing company, The Rights purports to be a useful tool to handle the increasingly high volume of synch licensing requests from small productions like limited-release films, podcasts, content creation and concert footage. The goal is to make the process easier at scale by allowing a track with multiple rights holders to be cleared in a single transaction.
“We can match the agility of production music libraries and one-stop catalogs, yet offer the pricing flexibility, consent rights and customized terms required to maintain the premium value of commercial music,” said Tres Williams, founder/CEO of The Rights, in a statement.
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Williams is a former executive vp of business affairs at iHeartMedia who had similar duties at Thumbplay, a subscription music streaming service acquired by Clear Channel — later renamed iHeartMedia — in 2011. Williams is joined at The Rights by president Keatly Haldeman, who is founder/CEO of Dequency as well as co-founder/CEO of Riptide Music Group; and chief business officer Scott Marshall, another former executive at both iHeartMedia and Thumbplay.
The Rights has raised $7.5 million to date from the likes of film and TV production company Spyglass Media Group; Endeavor Entertainment; venture capital firm Borderless Capital; blockchain developer Algorand; Grit Capital Partners; iHeartMedia chairman/CEO Bob Pittman; and Elon Musk’s siblings: entrepreneur Kimbal Musk and Tosca Musk, the latter a filmmaker and co-founder of video streaming platform Passionflix.
Despite an explosion in opportunities for placement in streaming content, synch license revenue has grown at a slower rate than subscription streaming royalties. The global synch license market, as measured by the IFPI, grew 4.7% to $632 million in 2023 — a figure that covers recorded music only, not music publishing, and excludes production music libraries. That’s less than half the 11.2% growth in subscription revenue. In the United States, synch revenue grew 7.4% to $411 million last year, according to the RIAA, well behind the 10.6% growth in subscription revenue.
Now, synch licensing faces a threat from the sudden rise of artificial intelligence-created music. The Rights warns that AI-created music could grow into a multi-billion-dollar business in less than a decade, “siphoning revenue away from the artists and writers of the world’s most-desired songs,” it said in a press release. While technology has transformed everything from music distribution to marketing, the process of clearing synch licenses remains “untouched by tech efficiencies,” Haldeman said in a statement. “Our goal is to create infrastructure for the industry to make the clearance process smooth for both rights holders and licensees.”
Artificial intelligence and user-generated content music tool company Mayk has announced the launch of its latest product, popstarz.ai. With the promise of helping anyone playfully assume the identity of a popstar and let a user sing their favorite song, the company hopes to revolutionize karaoke and strengthen the artist-fan relationship. Explore Explore See latest videos, […]
An eccentric Florida real estate mogul who lost millions investing in two West Coast festivals linked to Virgin Group co-founder Richard Branson won a bittersweet legal victory Friday (April 12) when a Delaware judge awarded him a $2 million breach of contract verdict over the collapse of KAABOO festival — but rejected larger fraud claims that could have netted him millions in damages.
Delaware judge Paul Wallace found that KAABOO’s previous owners had lied and misrepresented the financial health of the festival to investor Marc Hagle, who bought KAABOO in 2019, but ruled that Hagle likely knew the projections were fake because one of the festival’s board members had been sharing confidential data with Hagle during sales negotiations.
All told, Hagle, a 75-year-old Orlando commercial real estate developer, is estimated to have lost approximately $23 million investing in the festival business, including spending $10 million to buy the ill-fated KAABOO festival in September 2019, before going on to lose millions more unsuccessfully developing the Virgin Fest in Los Angeles.
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While the loss certainly stung, Hagle isn’t hurting for cash, having made his fortune building shopping centers for Walmart. In 2020, he donated $10 million to his alma mater, Purdue University, and two years later pledged $5 million to the University of Central Florida. In 2022, Hagle and his wife became the first married couple to travel to space on a flight from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and are currently constructing a massive $33 million, 45,000-sq.-ft home in Winter Park, Fla., that will include a basement gun range and an indoor pool.
Friday’s ruling, absent an appeal, likely represents the end of Hagle’s attempt to recoup his $23 million loss through the court system. Earlier this year, a California appeals court refused to overturn a 2022 Los Angeles Superior Court decision allowing Lizzo, Ellie Goulding and Kali Uchis to keep millions in fees Hagle had advanced the artists in February 2020 to secure their performances at Virgin Fest. Weeks after the artists were announced, much of the United States went into lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, forcing the cancellation of the festival.
Former Bear Stearns investment banker Bryan Gordon launched KAABOO in 2015, modeling the event’s high-end food and hospitality offerings around Napa’s BottleRock festival with headliner talent that included Pink, Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Foo Fighters.
Marketed to an older, more affluent audience, KAABOO quickly grew in popularity, but behind the scenes, Gordon’s brash style led to lawsuits from former investors, ex-employees and former partner Brett Mosiman, a Kansas promoter who won a $7 million judgement against Gordon in 2020.
While Gordon allegedly presented himself to Mosiman and others as a highly successful businessman who “owned so many hotels” he couldn’t “even count them” and regularly bought “$400 bottles of wine like they’re Chiclets,” financial documents obtained by Billboard showed Gordon had lost $30 million on KAABOO in less than five years.
Without an immediate capital infusion, Gordon would have to cancel the 2019 version of the festival, bankrupting KAABOO and prompting dozens of class-actions lawsuits from ticketholders that could have spread to Gordon’s other festival investments, like Virgin Fest, which Gordon co-owned with KAABOO’s chief marketing officer Jason Felts.
At the time, Virgin Fest was a holding company that owned the rights to license the Virgin trademark for music events and festivals from Branson. Running out of options for saving KAABOO, Gordon entered negotiations with Hagle for a deal that would eventually see Gordon resign from his position at Virgin Fest and sell his controlling shares in KAABOO to Virgin Fest in a $10 million deal financed by Hagle. As part of the agreement, Gordon would continue to produce KAABOO on behalf of Virgin Fest.
While the last-minute acquisition averted cancellation, it wasn’t long before both sides ended up in court, kicking off a five-year legal battle over the sale of KAABOO, which has been defunct ever since.
Gordon fired the first shot in the legal battle, filing suit against Virgin Fest weeks after the sale closed, alleging that Hagle and Virgin Fest had failed to pay KAABOO’s invoices in retaliation for Gordon’s decision to fire most of the KAABOO staff and place his daughter in charge of the company. Hagle and Virgin Fest countersued, arguing that Gordon had misled them about the festival’s financial outlook and falsified KAABOO’s financial records.
After a seven-day trial took place in a Delaware courtroom in January, Judge Wallace issued his ruling on Friday, finding that email evidence in the case indicated Gordon and company officers Robert Walker and Seth Wolkov spent hours systematically deleting expenses and overstating revenue so that KAABOO’s 2019 financial projection would show a modest $275,000 profit for the year instead of the more accurate $3 million loss company officials had previously forecast.
Wallace wrote that “KAABOO management made knowingly false representations” to Hagle and his attorneys and accused Gordon, Wolkov and Walker of “deliberate acts of concealment” and having “a clear motive to commit fraud.”
That wasn’t enough to win a fraud ruling, however, Wallace wrote in his 70-page decision. That’s because Hagle didn’t adequately prove he relied on the financial documents handed over by Gordon’s team and likely knew the claims were fake, Wallace explained. Emails produced during the trial showed that Felts — who was on the board of KAABOO at the same time his company, Virgin Fest, was trying to buy KAABOO, had been sending updates about the festival’s worsening financial health to Hagle, encouraging the real estate investor to play hardball with KAABOO and win concessions to sweeten the deal.
Wallace did, however, find that Gordon’s misrepresentations breached a transparency clause in the asset purchase agreement between KAABOO and Virgin Fest. According to the asset purchase agreement’s own guidelines, damages resulting from the breach of the document are capped at $2 million. Wallace thereby ordered KAABOO to pay Virgin Fest $2 million in damages, plus attorney fees.
For his part, Gordon was awarded a $360,000 consulting fee that Virgin Fest never paid him after he resigned from the company.
It’s unclear if Hagle plans to appeal the verdict. Without a legal option for recouping his investment, Hagle’s chances of recovering his investment hinge on the success of a group of new investors who have reportedly begun trying to raise money to license the KAABOO brand from Hagle as part of a brand revival. The investment group has not yet announced whether they will be reviving the festival brand in 2024 or 2025.
The U.S. Department of Justice is planning to sue Live Nation over alleged violations of federal antitrust laws, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal.
A lawsuit will be filed within weeks that alleges the concert giant leveraged its dominance over the live music industry to undermine competition for ticketing, the Journal reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter. Few other details about the planned case were revealed.
Live Nation has faced widespread criticism from angry fans and lawmakers since its botched handling of Taylor Swift’s “Eras” tour in 2022. Days after the incident, news broke that the DOJ had already been investigating Live Nation for months over potential antitrust violations.
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Representatives for Live Nation and the DOJ did not immediately return requests for comment from Billboard.
Since Live Nation and Ticketmaster merged in 2010, the company has long faced criticism that it exerts an unfair dominance over the market for live concerts. The DOJ approved the merger at the time, but imposed a so-called consent decree designed to prevent the company from abusing its position. Those restrictions were set to expire in 2020, but they were extended by five years after the DOJ accused Live Nation of repeatedly violating the decree.
That same criticism resurfaced in late 2022 with the disastrous roll out of tickets to Swift’s tour, which saw widespread service delays and website crashes as millions of fans tried – and many failed – to buy tickets. Live Nation pinned the blame on a “staggering number of bot attacks,” but lawmakers quickly argued that the incident was the result of a market dominated by one company.
“Ticketmaster’s power in the primary ticket market insulates it from the competitive pressures that typically push companies to innovate and improve their services,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), the chair of the Senate subcommittee for antitrust issues.
In December 2022, the New York Times reported that DOJ had already been investigating Live Nation for months before the Swift debacle, including reaching out to venues across the country to ask about the company’s conduct. A year later, Reuters reported that the probe was ongoing, with federal investigators focusing on whether Live Nation imposed anticompetitive agreements on venues.
Last year, Live Nation hired Dan Wall, a veteran competition attorney who previously headed the antitrust practice at the law firm Latham & Watkins, as an executive vice president for corporate and regulatory affairs. In a blog post last month, Wall publicly defended the company against allegations similar to those that could be coming in the DOJ’s lawsuit, arguing that ticket prices were set by artists and driven up by the forces of supply and demand.
“In the ongoing antitrust attacks on Live Nation and Ticketmaster, a constant theme is that their alleged ‘monopolies’ are responsible for high ticket prices,” Wall wrote. “Rhetorically, that’s understandable, because if you want to rile up fans against Live Nation and Ticketmaster, there is no better way than to blame them for something you know fans dislike.”
Cindy James has been promoted to general manager of Virgin Music Group‘s operations in North America, the company announced on Tuesday (April 16). The former executive of the week — and regular entry on Billboard’s Indie Power Players lists — joined the UMG-owned indie music distributor and label services company in 2019 as head of […]
Joseph Oerke has been promoted to executive vice president, Decca Records U.S., the Verve Label Group announced on Tuesday (April 16). “I love classical music,” Oerke said in a statement. “In fact, I moved to New York to study oboe and got my first job in the gift shop at the Metropolitan Opera. I think […]