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Atlantic Records has hired veteran executive Luis “Lu” Mota as evp of A&R, the label announced on Tuesday (May 7). Mota, who’ll work out of Atlantic’s NYC headquarters and report to co-president of Black Music Lanre Gaba, arrives from Columbia Records where since 2018 he was instrumental in the signing and developing of hip-hop stars […]
Mexican hitmaker Peso Pluma has signed with CAA in all areas. The corridos singer has had a massive year leading regional Mexican music’s global movement, all while making history along the way. In 2023 alone, Peso Pluma entered 24 songs on the Hot 100, including the global smash hit “Ella Baila Sola,” his collaboration with […]
TikTok and parent company ByteDance have filed a federal lawsuit aimed at overturning recently-passed legislation requiring the Chinese company to sell the popular app or face a national ban, arguing that it violates the First Amendment.
In a complaint filed Tuesday in D.C. federal court, TikTok and Byte Dance called the law an “unprecedented” and unconstitutional action aimed at “singling out” one company and “silencing” more than 170 million Americans who use TikTok.
“For the first time in history, Congress has enacted a law that subjects a single, named speech platform to a permanent, nationwide ban,” lawyers for the two companies wrote. “There are good reasons why Congress has never before enacted a law like this.”
The lawsuit came just week after President Joe Biden signed the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which requires that ByteDance either divest ownership of TikTok by Jan. 19 or face a national ban on the app. Proponents have argued that TikTok presents a national security threat because of its connections to the Chinese government and access to millions of Americans.
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In Tuesday’s complaint, TikTok argued that such national security concerns were not sufficient to override the First Amendment’s protections for free speech. The company’s attorneys said lawmakers had failed to “articulate any threat posed by TikTok” and had cited only “speculative concerns,” meaning they were making an “extraordinary and unconstitutional assertion of power” without clear reason.
“If Congress can do this, it can circumvent the First Amendment by invoking national security and ordering the publisher of any individual newspaper or website to sell to avoid being shut down,” TikTok’s lawyers wrote.
The new lawsuit came just days after TikTok – an increasingly influential part of the music industry ecosystem – reached an agreement with Universal Music Group to end a months-long standoff over rights to the music giant’s catalog.
In the new complaint, TikTok argued that it had already spent billions of dollars addressing the potential security risks cited by lawmakers, and had reached voluntary agreements with executive agencies like the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States to safeguard user data and the integrity against foreign government influence.
“Congress tossed this tailored agreement aside, in favor of the politically expedient and punitive approach of targeting for disfavor one publisher and speaker,” TikTok’s attorneys wrote. “Congress must abide by the dictates of the Constitution even when it claims to be protecting against national security risk.”
TikTok has already had success in court over U.S. efforts to ban the app. Citing the First Amendment, a federal judge in 2020 blocked former President Donald J. Trump from carrying out an executive order barring TikTok from app stores. And last year, a federal judge in Montana overturned a law in that state banning the app, ruling that legislation not only violated free speech, but also encroached on federal authority to regulate foreign relations.
After an ugly weekend of diss-track crossfire, the beef between Kendrick Lamar and Drake now features unproven accusations of spousal abuse, drug use and even pedophilia. Those claims might be “slander” to many people, but are they defamatory? We asked the legal experts.
The long-simmering dispute between the two hip hop heavyweights went thermonuclear on Friday, when Drake dropped a track claiming Lamar had abused his fiancée. Minutes later, Lamar fired back with accusations about addictions, hidden children and plastic surgery. The next day he dropped another song accusing Drake and others of pedophilia.
With the allegations getting wilder by the minute, spectators on social media began to wonder if either rapper – but particularly Kendrick – could be setting themselves up for more than just another scathing response: “Has anyone ever filed a defamation lawsuit over a diss track before?” joked Matt Ford, a legal reporter at the New Republic, on Saturday night.
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An actual lawsuit seems unlikely, for the simple reason that any rapper responding to a diss track with a team of lawyers would be committing reputational suicide. But let’s play it out: Could a rapper like Drake or Kendrick sue over the kind of scathing insults we saw this weekend?
While diss tracks filled with extremely specific invective (and we mean extremely) could certainly lead to a libel lawsuit in theory, legal experts tell Billboard that such a case would face not just legal challenges but also practical problems. First and foremost? That the accuser would open themselves up to painful discovery by opposing lawyers.
“Any plaintiff suing for defamation is putting their entire life and reputation on the line,” says Dori Hanswirth, a veteran litigator who heads the media law practice at the law firm Arnold & Porter. “If someone decided to sue over a statement that they preyed upon underage women, for example, then that person’s entire dating history would be fair game in the litigation.”
While the term “slander” gets thrown around on the internet a lot these days, actual legal defamation is pretty hard to prove in America, thanks to the First Amendment and its robust protections for free speech. Winning a case requires that an accuser show that a statement about them was factually false; mere statements of opinion don’t count, and neither do bombastic exaggerations.
“The public … has to believe that the speaker is being serious, and not just hurling insults in a diss fight,” Hanswirth says. “If the statements are not taken literally, then they are rhetorical hyperbole and not considered to be defamatory. The context of this song-by-song grudge match tends to support the idea that this is rhetorical, and a creative way to beef with a rival.”
Another legal roadblock is that both Drake and Kendrick are so-called public figures — a status that makes it very hard to win a defamation lawsuit. Under landmark U.S. Supreme Court precedents, a public figure must show that their alleged defamer acted with “actual malice,” meaning they knew their statement was false or they acted with reckless disregard for the truth.
In practice, the “actual malice” rule has made it nearly impossible for prominent people to sue for libel. And that’s by design. Without strong protections, defamation lawsuits would allow government officials, business leaders and other powerful people to harass and silence anyone who criticizes them, stifling free speech about important public issues.
“The Supreme Court has held that this heightened standard always applies where the plaintiff is a public figure, and it is designed to promote robust expression and debate,” said Adam I. Rich, a music and First Amendment attorney at the law firm Davis Wright Tremaine.
So, what’s the verdict? No matter how ugly the insults between Drake and Kendrick, it seems like the beef between them is probably going to remain in the form of verse rather than legal briefs.
“As both a lawyer and a fan,” Rich says, “I hope Drake and Kendrick turn the heat down and play the next round out in the studio, not the courtroom.”
In March, a Spotify account named Lucky Socks uploaded a sped-up version of Mark Ambor’s “Belong Together” to the platform. More than six weeks later, this jaunty take on the folksy original is still earning around 350,000 streams a day, and various high-speed versions of “Belong Together” have been used in more than 400,000 TikTok videos to date.
This is just the latest sign that sped-up remixes — often made at home by amateurs — drive both music discovery and streaming activity. “A big percentage of the population is engaging with music in this way,” says Ben Klein, president of Ambor’s label, Hundred Days Records. “If you’re an audio platform, you need to start allowing people to tap into that.”
That’s exactly what the platforms are doing. At the end of 2023, the streaming service Audiomack quietly rolled out Audiomod, a new set of tools that allow users to fiddle with tracks by changing the tempo, modifying the pitch, or swaddling them in reverb. In March, the company Hook announced that it had raised $3.5 million to further develop a platform that will help artists “monetize the use of fan-generated remixes on social media.” And in April, The Wall Street Journal reported that Spotify plans to introduce its own remixing tools.
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These initiatives signal a growing awareness that user remixes cannot be prevented — kids can make them easily on their phones. Since almost all of these reworks are unauthorized, labels and publishers will stand to gain if fans make and listen to remixes on streaming platforms where these can be paid out like a normal track. (“The next big forefront will be how we get paid for UGC,” Warner Chappell CEO/co-chair Guy Moot recently told Billboard, noting “the real challenge” of identifying all “those really sketchy sped-up versions.”)
And platforms can also benefit if new audio manipulation tools increase engagement or even attract additional users. “We think it can be a way to encourage more users to subscribe,” says Audiomack co-founder Dave Macli.
Audiomack Quarterly Uploads of Manipulated Songs
Courtesy of Audiomack
Creating new remixing capabilities will require the music industry to become comfortable with more flexible licensing agreements that legitimize what was previously a black-market activity — for fans, creating a remix at home without permission is fun; for labels, it’s technically copyright infringement. It remains unclear how artists will feel about labels sanctioning random reworks of their work, and whether listeners will connect with these homemade remixes when they’re not attached to addictive videos on TikTok or Instagram Reels.
While user remixes and edits are not a new phenomenon, there is a sense around the industry that this behavior — pushing a song’s tempo recklessly fast, or slathering the track in distortion — is especially dear to a new generation which sees altering music as a way of expressing fandom. Audiomack has found that “modders,” who alter more than 100 songs a month, are 50% more likely to be under the age of 20 relative to the average platform user.
“The younger users want to have some control over the sound on their own: ‘hey, what if we f—ed with this a little?’” says Tyler Blatchley, co-founder of the label Black 17 Media.
As a result, artists and labels often encourage fan remixing because it can be an effective promotional tool. At the same time, they frequently take down the unauthorized reworks that they find on major streaming services, because those divert money from artists’ pockets. Some acts release their own official sped-up or slowed versions to try to capitalize on the popularity of the form. (Audiomack data shows this trend really accelerated at the end of 2022.)
For the music industry, this patchwork system remains unsatisfactory. “There’s little visibility into what people are doing with the music, the artists don’t get to play a role in how their fans engage, and often they’re not getting paid for [the] consumption” of unofficial remixes, says Gaurav Sharma, the CEO of Hook.
Hook’s app, which recently launched a private beta, offers a more controlled environment for remixing activity, where users can select pre-cleared songs to manipulate and mash together. If a fan creates a new version they love — and, crucially, rightsholders have given permission — they will theoretically be allowed to export that alternate to other platforms when the app launches publicly later this year. In other words, a fully licensed and track-able remix or mash-up could be created on Hook and then go viral on a short-form video platform or in a video game.
While Audiomod allows users to play with tempo, distortion, and more, they cannot mash one song up with another or export their beloved remix to other platforms. They can share their preferred settings with friends, though, so pals can easily replicate their favorite mix. Plays of an altered version of a song on Audiomack will be paid out the same as plays of official recordings.
Audiomack has Merlin — the global digital licensing agency for the independent music industry — “signed up for this,” says co-founder Dave Macli. “We are in talks with the majors.”
At the moment, Spotify appears mostly to have a plan to create some remixing tools in the future. (A rep for the service declined to comment.) The company has been interested in figuring out ways to let users “play with and manipulate music” for years in contexts like a DJ set, according to a former executive. On top of that, “Spotify is trying to seize a lot of creator engagement moments, because TikTok is much more of an engagement platform.”
While The Wall Street Journal reported that Spotify does not yet have licensing agreements in place for remixing tools, the former exec believes labels “will be all-in for anything that increases plays and gets them a bigger share of the royalty pool.”
And labels do appear more open to sanctioning user manipulation of their audio recently. In December, for example, the video game Fortnite introduced a new musical experience called “Jam Stage,” which allows gamers to play music with their friends — but every person can be noodling on a different song, creating a strange, cacophonous mash-up in real (virtual) time.
The former Spotify exec believes the real obstacle to getting official remixing tools in place will come from artists being protective of their work. “What are [labels] permitted to do in their contracts with artists, and how will artists feel about it?” he asks.
At Audiomack, Macli says “we respect an artist’s decision if they don’t want to be a part of [allowing users to remix their songs]. But I think in a way you’re fighting the tide.”
Once platforms and labels sort out licensing, one big question remains: will users make and listen to sped-up remixes on streaming services without the enticement of a compelling visual trend or the possibility of going viral?
Audiomack users already appear to like sending around the tracks they pitch up or alter in other ways. “Over 9% of all shares on the platform are modifications of songs,” according to Macli.
Though Klein agrees that “there is an appetite for listening to sped-up stuff,” he believes “there’s a much smaller use case in that context.” “Sped-up sounds are really breaking through on audiovisual platforms” — especially TikTok, which has had a fraught relationship with the music business lately.
Still, Macli says, “the industry is going to have to lean into this one way or the other. They should lean into it as a tech problem that the DSPs should solve.”
Cinq Music has acquired the music catalog of hitmaker Flow La Movie, Billboard can announce. The late producer’s robust catalog includes reggaetón megahits “Te Boté” and “La Jeepeta” — the former topped Billboard‘s Hot Latin Songs for 14 weeks in 2018. The catalog acquisition comes nearly three years since Flow La Movie (born José Angel […]
A Los Angeles judge has dismissed a lawsuit accusing Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee of sexually assaulting a woman in a helicopter in 2003, ruling that her case was filed too late.
The case against Lee, launched last year by an anonymous Jane Doe accuser, was filed under a newly enacted California law that temporarily lifted the statute of limitations for years-old sexual assaults – one of several such laws passed around the country in recent years.
But in a decision issued Monday, Judge Holly J. Fujie ruled that Lee’s accuser had failed to show that Lee’s alleged assault had been followed by any kind of “cover-up” – a key requirement under the provision she cited.
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“The court finds that plaintiff has not pled facts sufficient to support the theory of the necessary ‘cover up’ because plaintiff has not asserted facts evidencing defendants’ concerted effort to hide evidence relating to sexual assault,” the judge wrote. “Plaintiff instead makes vague allegations that the court finds insufficient to support the revival of a claim.”
Though the ruling is a setback for Lee’s accuser, the case is not yet over. The judge gave her and her attorneys 20 days to file an updated version of her complaint if she has additional information that would fix the flaws in her case. Her attorneys did not immediately return a request for comment.
In her December complaint, the Jane Doe plaintiff claimed she had been “lured under false pretenses” by Lee’s personal helicopter pilot into taking a ride from San Diego to Los Angeles in February 2003. Once onboard, she claimed that Lee and the pilot “consumed several alcoholic beverages, smoked marijuana, and snorted cocaine” before the rock star assaulted her.
“Tommy Lee then proceeded to sexually assault plaintiff by forcibly groping, kissing, penetrating her with his fingers, and attempting to force her to perform oral copulation,” her lawyers wrote. “As a result of Tommy Lee’s sexual assault, Plaintiff has suffered severe emotional, physical, and psychological distress.”
The case, over an incident that allegedly occurred more than two decades ago, was filed under the Sexual Abuse and Cover-Up Accountability Act – a California law that created a three-year window starting last year for alleged survivors to file sexual assault lawsuits that would normally be barred by the statute of limitations.
The case against Lee was one of many cases filed during the “look-back windows” created by similar statutes, including New York’s Adult Survivors Act. Just before that law expired in November, a flood of years-old abuse cases hit the courts, most notably against Sean “Diddy” Combs.
But such laws have strict requirements. In the case of the Sexual Abuse and Cover-Up Accountability Act, an alleged victim must show that the defendant “engaged in a cover up or attempted a cover up,” meaning a “concerted effort to hide evidence relating to a sexual assault or other inappropriate conduct” or conduct that “incentivizes individuals to remain silent.”
In her complaint, Lee’s accuser claimed that the drummer and other defendants “engaged in a concerted effort to prevent information or evidence of such sexual assaults from being made public or disclosed to anyone.” But in her ruling on Monday, Judge Fujie said that simply spelling out the statute’s requirement was not enough.
“These allegations are conclusory in nature and do not allege specific actions directed to plaintiff,” the judge wrote. “As such, plaintiff’s action as alleged is effectively time-barred.”
In a statement to Billboard, Lee’s attorney Sasha Frid said: “We applaud the court’s decision. The court got it right in finding that the plaintiff cannot assert a claim against Tommy Lee. From the outset, Mr. Lee has vehemently denied these false and bogus accusations.”
Live Nation Urban has announced its collaborative, renewed partnership with Polly Irungu’s Black Women Photographers Organization. For the third straight year, the leading source of live entertainment will invite a select cohort of black women photographers and videographers to shoot its much-anticipated slate of upcoming summer and fall festivals. The initiative will offer a paid opportunity for black creatives to […]
The anniversaries are piling up on Curb | Word Entertainment chairman Mike Curb.
This year is the 60th anniversary of Curb Records’ founding. April 29 marked 30 years since Belmont University announced its highest-profile program was being renamed the Mike Curb College of Entertainment & Music Business. And the school just wrapped the 50th-anniversary campaign that celebrated the department’s founding. All those milestones come as Curb approaches his 80th birthday on Christmas Eve.
“I like everything except the last statistic,” he deadpans near the start of a three-hour interview.
The conversation acknowledges the landmarks, but it comes, more importantly, as Curb’s latest investment wraps some of his deepest passions — education, music preservation and legacy — in a structure likely to enhance the relationship between Belmont and Music Row. Belmont announced April 9 that the Curb Foundation made a $58 million donation that will seed a multipurpose Curb College building on Music Circle South, wedged between the BMG offices and the historic Columbia Studios.
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Neither Curb nor Belmont president Greg Jones could specify the breakdown of the $58 million — both called it “complicated” — but the figure encompasses the value of the land, which Curb donated; future rent; and cash. It also includes an expansion of the Buddy Lee Attractions building that’s adjacent to Columbia, while the school attempts to raise an additional $40 million for the project, which will encourage interplay between Belmont students and working music professionals. A 150-capacity performance space will provide an ideal concert-audio learning facility and offer label showcase options. Songwriting rooms will serve the college and, perhaps, some independent writers. And a coffee shop is expected to lure lunchtime visits from nearby businesses, setting up the possibility for students that a springboard for their careers could be just a handshake away.
The building is in the works at a time when large chunks of Music Row have been overtaken by non-music developers. Curb owns 12 properties on the Row — including RCA Studio B, Ocean Way and the former Masterfonics building — and he’s doggedly determined to maintain the character of the neighborhood, where he has control. That’s particularly true on Music Circle South, a block with numerous studios that have yielded hits by Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, George Strait, Tom T. Hall and Dan + Shay — just for starters — through the decades.
“We made it impossible for the developers to get to it,” Curb says. “Even the WNAH radio building is just the way it is. Even the buildings that we’re using for Curb Records or for Word Records. Those are staying exactly the way they are. So we’ve got it pretty locked.”
Curb established his label as an 18-year-old college student at Cal State Northridge who was too young to sign the startup papers without a co-signer. He made a deal with Capitol, wrote a Honda commercial and landed a bundle of songs on movie soundtracks, including the 1968 Clint Eastwood picture Kelly’s Heroes. Curb became the president of MGM in his 20s, working with The Osmonds, Lou Rawls, Sammy Davis Jr. and Hank Williams Jr., and by the end of the ’70s, he was California lieutenant governor, serving alongside Ronald Reagan.
Post-government, he extended the Curb label’s independent run by partnering with the majors in the careers of Williams, The Judds, T.G. Sheppard, Lyle Lovett and Debby Boone, among others.
“Back then, you could walk up and down Hollywood Boulevard or Sunset Boulevard, there were hundreds of independents,” he remembers. “Now they’re all owned by the three majors. That’s one of the big issues now, you know: The deep catalog of our industry is owned and controlled by three majors.”
Curb arrived in Nashville in the early 1990s, earning multiplatinum sales from Tim McGraw and LeAnn Rimes along with hits by Sawyer Brown, Hal Ketchum, Jo Dee Messina and, in the 2000s, Rodney Atkins. McGraw and Rimes had public spats involving their Curb deals, and Curb ended up in litigation with Big Machine Label Group over McGraw, who ultimately moved on. Despite that battle, Curb is on good terms with BMLG president/CEO Scott Borchetta, who has partnered with him in auto racing.
“I consider Mike a genius, I consider him a friend, I consider him misunderstood by a lot of people,” Borchetta says. “The guy’s a walking encyclopedia.”
Curb’s ability to maintain relationships, even amid sharp disagreements, is a skill he perfected during his political career. His relationship with Belmont, for example, continues despite his previous opposition to the university’s firing of a lesbian coach. (The school ultimately amended its policies.) In 1978, Curb helped defeat a California proposition that would have banned gay teachers from schools, convincing conservative icon Reagan to join the battle. Currently, he continues to speak highly of Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), who agreed to a meeting with his gay employees, though they were unable to change her position on key issues. Writing people off, he reasons, is a poor long-term strategy.
“What I always tried to do was not criticize the people who disagreed with me, but tried to bring them together,” he says. “As I learned from Ronald Reagan, you just need 51%.”
Curb has certainly won over Belmont’s Jones. He suggested doing something with the Music Circle South property to benefit the music business program shortly after Jones became university president in 2021. The school already had an ideal location at the Southern edge of Music Row. With the new building, it will be in the heart of the district.
“We weren’t just thinking of the present and then making incremental changes,” says Jones. “We wanted the next 50 years of music business to be really transformational.”
It’s a goal that Curb shares. His label’s 60th anniversary will be celebrated June 6 with a CMA Fest show at Nashville’s Ascend Amphitheater featuring Atkins, Sawyer Brown, Dylan Scott, Hannah Ellis, Kelsey Hart and Lee Brice, among others. Curb is excited over the prospects of Brice’s new single — “Drinkin’ Buddies,” featuring Nate Smith and Hailey Whitters — which debuts at No. 26 on the Country Airplay chart dated May 11 (see page 4). But he’s just as enthusiastic about Brice’s collaboration with Christian band for King & Country on “Checking In,” which could — like Curb’s efforts for Belmont and for marriage equality — make a lasting mark. The anniversaries are important, but the future still beckons.
“We’re impacting the culture of Nashville, of country music — maybe pop music, the culture of the nation,” he says with youthful enthusiasm. “That’s what’s so exciting about what we do.”
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Don Passman had been teaching a course on music law at USC for several years when he realized his class notes were the outline of a book. “Because musicians are oriented to their ears,” he says, there was an opportunity to write “an easy-to-read overview of the business for people who don’t like to read.” Think “big print, lots of pictures, analogies, simple language.” When the first edition of All You Need to Know About the Music Business came out in 1991 — the 11th edition arrived this past October — “there was only one book on the music business at the time that was of any consequence,” Passman recalls. “And it was a bit difficult to read.”
Recently, however, music business education appears to be an increasingly hot topic. Thanks to technological advances, the number of aspiring artists releasing songs with little-to-no understanding of the music industry has ballooned. Many of these acts start releasing tracks in their early teens, long before they might get the chance to take a college-level course on the music business, much less master the nuances of copyright law. And they often hire a similarly-inexperienced friend to serve as a “manager,” ensuring that even their closest advisors lack experience in navigating the industry.
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As a result, there is a dire need for quality, accessible music business education. Many of the platforms that allow artists to create, listen to, or distribute music today see educational initiatives as a way to foster loyalty and community — which will in turn help them stand out in the neverending battle for users and attention — and possibly as an additional revenue stream as well.
Some of these educational efforts are in their early stages: Spotify started testing video learning courses in the U.K. in March, for example, while TIDAL has said education will be a cornerstone of its new era as it works to build financial tools for artists. (It was acquired by Block in 2021.)
The company Creative Intell is further along — it has raised money from around the music business and created an animated series to teach young artists the inner workings of the industry, from record deals to publishing. And the platform Bandlab, which allows its 100-million-plus users to create songs on their phones, has been releasing a steady stream of free tutorials and blog posts.
Helping aspiring artists grasp the intricacies of the music industry is “something that we’re investing a lot in,” says Krevin Breuner, Bandlab’s head of artist development and education. “The industry is more complex than ever, and understanding the business from day one is not just an advantage; it’s essential. Bandlab has such a young audience, it’s growing, and we want those artists to feel like they have a partner — somebody they can trust.”
Austen Smart agrees: The DJ, who co-founded the U.K. music-education company PLAYvirtuoso in 2020 with his brother, sees “huge potential in this space.” “I look at it like, there will be one in eight people, at least, learning at home,” he says, and a portion of those will be interested in the music industry.
Creative Intell co-founder Steven Ship divides the music education field into three buckets — how to create music, how to market music and the business of music. While YouTube alone is littered with free videos on the first two topics — not to mention all the Reddit threads, blog posts and TikTok tutorials — finding reliable and accessible information on the third is more challenging. “The business of music is probably the most important; it has to be the most accurate, and it’s often ignored,” Ship says.
If an aspiring artist produces a track poorly or markets it clumsily, that song probably won’t do well — a temporary setback. In contrast, if they don’t understand how the industry works, the consequences can be far more damaging: They could sign a contract with a manager, label, or publisher that cedes control of their output for decades. “Artists were horribly taken advantage of in the early days of the music business, because they just didn’t know what they were doing,” Passman says. And today, “the industry is changing so fast,” Breuner adds, making it even harder to “know what’s important and what’s not.”
When Smart signed a major label deal with his brother — just “two hungry young artists living in London” — he admits the pair “didn’t have the knowledge and the understanding of what we were ultimately signing.” An attorney would have helped, but they didn’t have the cash “to engage with lawyers who could help us interpret it.”
Contracts are often “murky and complicated,” Smart continues. “You get offered a relatively big advance; it’s quite a big number when you’re 25 and 22. What does it actually mean? What does it mean ten years later?”
If he could rewind the clock, he imagines going through the process again — but this time, “we’ve got that course on understanding label deals” available. And if necessary, he could “book a one-on-one session with someone for 30 pounds” to help provide extra context. This is part of the reason that one of PLAYvirtuoso’s “three pillars” of educational material centers on understanding the music industry.
PLAYvirtuoso is one of four companies that partnered with Spotify initially to provide courses on a variety of topics. The streaming service’s decision to test new education materials came about because it saw data indicating that some users were eager to acquire more knowledge.
“If I take you 10 years back, most of the people that came to Spotify came with a single intent: listening to music,” says Mohit Jitani, a product director at Spotify. “But in the last few years, as we brought on podcasts and audiobooks, people started to come to Spotify to listen to an interview or learn leadership and finance.”
Currently Spotify’s courses are offered via a freemium model: Users are able to access the first few lessons for free, but they must pay to complete a full course.
While Spotify’s exploratory foray into education stemmed from the fact that “people started coming to [us] for casual learning,” as Jitani puts it — and it potentially offers the platform another new revenue stream — TIDAL’s recent drive to help artists raise their business IQ is driven in part by its new owner, the payments company Block.
“Building tools and services for business owners, we saw that the moment that you get a little traction outside of your friends and family, the world becomes a lot more complicated,” says Agustina Sacerdote, the TIDAL’s global head of product. “You have to start to understand your numbers to understand where the next big opportunity is going to come from.”
The same principle applies to artists. Understandably, they tend to focus on the art. But as Ship notes, “The moment you release a song, you’re in business” — whether you like it or not. So TIDAL has started offering webinars and rolled out a new product called Circles, which Sacerdote likens to “a very curated version of Reddit, where we have the topics that we believe most artists have questions about,” including touring and merchandise.
For now, TIDAL’s products are free. “Once an artist does get a really good piece of advice that they would have never gotten [elsewhere] on Circles, then we’ll start to think about, how do we monetize?” Sacerdote says.
Creative Intell’s materials on the music business are currently far more comprehensive than TIDAL’s or Spotify’s: The company has created 18 animated courses to help aspiring artists — the vast majority of whom don’t have a manager or lawyer — “understand what they’re signing, learn how to monetize themselves better and learn how to protect themselves,” Ship says.
Creative Intell releases some materials for free and charges for access to everything ($29.99 a month). It’s also aiming to work with distributors like Vydia as marketing partners. Vydia is not the only company looking to provide this type of resource — Songtrust, for example, has built out its own materials to help songwriters understand how to collect their money from around the world.
“Other industries have all kinds of corporate resources for training and the music industry is lacking those,” Ship says. “We’re trying to fill that void.”