State Champ Radio Business
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The Recording Academy has announced the appointment of Taylor Hanson and the reappointment of Dani Deahl as co-chairs of its National Advocacy Committee, a group of performers, songwriters, producers, and engineers dedicated to championing creators’ rights at both the state and federal levels. The National Advocacy Committee plays a key role in shaping the organization’s legislative priorities in collaboration with the Recording Academy’s Advocacy & Public Policy team in Washington, D.C.
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Singer, songwriter, producer, and entrepreneur Taylor Hanson has spent more than three decades in the music industry. He is a member of the brother trio HANSON, which topped the Billboard Hot 100 in 1997 with “MMMBop.” The exuberant smash brought the trio three Grammy nods – record of the year, best best pop performance by a duo or group with vocal and best new artist.
A native of Tulsa, OK, Hanson has long supported music education and advocacy through such initiatives as the Recording Academy’s Grammys on the Hill and Music Advocacy Day as well as Save the Music. Hanson has also worked to expand the Academy’s state advocacy work in Oklahoma and founded Food on the Move, a nonprofit dedicated to combating hunger and food deserts in Oklahoma. This marks Hanson’s first term as co-chair of the Academy’s National Advocacy Committee.
Serving a second consecutive term as co-chair, Dani Deahl is a DJ, producer, former Recording Academy Chicago chapter president, and current Academy national trustee. An advocate for creators’ rights, Deahl testified before the Illinois House and Senate in 2024 in support of HB 4875, a bill modernizing the state’s right of publicity law to protect creators from AI misuse. Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D-Ill.) signed the bill into law last year.
Deahl has also participated in the Recording Academy’s annual Grammys on the Hill initiative and took part in the inaugural Grammys on the Hill Future Forum in 2024, where she joined Grammy-nominated artist Kokayi and Todd Dupler, the Academy’s chief advocacy and public policy officer, on a panel to discuss the positive potential of AI in music and creativity. Deahl has also served as the head of communications and creator insights at BandLab since 2022.
Additional new National Advocacy Committee members include Sean Patrick Flavahan, Matt Maher, Maggie Rose and Divinity Roxx. They join Dr. Chelsey Green, Recording Academy chair of the board of trustees; Harvey Mason jr, Recording Academy CEO; and Dupler as ex-officio members.
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It’s the tail end of September’s Climate Week: NYC when Maggie Baird gets on Zoom from her hotel in the city, ceramic mug of tea in hand.
The mother of Billie Eilish and FINNEAS, as well as a staunch activist for sustainability and plant-based food access, Baird calls her time at Climate Week a “mixed bag of emotions”: She has participated in troubling events addressing the grim effects of climate change, but has also learned about the more hopeful work that’s happening around the world to address it.
“It’s a very dark time and there’s a lot going on,” she says. “Climate change is a threat multiplier. Every single other issue you care about, climate is there making it worse.”
Maggie Baird will participate in a panel at Billboard‘s Live Music Summit, held Nov. 3 in Los Angeles. For tickets and more information, click here.
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But Baird, who quotes Joan Baez’s famous “Action is the antidote to despair” declaration, has been a force during the event. Support + Feed, the organization she founded in 2020 that provides hot, plant-based meals to people in need, distributed roughly 2,500 of these meals, along with pantry items, across New York. She and representatives from the nonprofit used this time in the community to talk about plant-based diets as crucial mechanisms of positive environmental impact, with the week’s efforts also connecting various community organizations with climate thought leaders. The week ended with a Support + Feed “friend-raiser” event that hosted climate activists, community members and celebrities like Martha Stewart and Eilish, who turned out to support her mother.
“The main thing I would say about this time is that it’s a moment for radical collaboration,” Baird says. “Every organization I know and work with, we’re just like, ‘How can we be better together?’ We have to multiply — exponentially.”
For Baird, however, every week is Climate Week. Having worked with her children and their respective teams to meaningfully integrate sustainability into their careers, she’s essentially a frontline reporter on sustainability within the music industry.
One sector where she’s seeing “really exciting advances” is merchandise. Baird is a longtime collaborator with Bravado, the merchandising and branding division of Universal Music Group that recently sent 400,000 obsolete and unsold tour T-shirts and other unused items by ship from Nashville to Morocco, where they were repurposed into new yarn by sustainability-focused textile manufacturer Hallotex. The yarn will be used to make new items in Europe to avoid the emissions of shipping them back.
Maggie Baird, Finneas, and Billie Eilish at the Support + Feed Fall Fundraiser Event on Oct. 24, 2023.
Zoe Sher
For Eilish’s merch, the Bravado team has successfully collaborated with upcycling and sustainability-focused clothing companies Rewilder and Suay and designer Iris Alonzo, the co-founder of the Everybody.World brand. Suay, for example, took hundreds of dead-stock work shirts, added sleeves and embroidered “Billie” on each piece, while some of Eilish’s old merch was repurposed into bags. “The upcycled items sold out so fast,” Baird says, “because there were limited quantities and they were extremely unique, and unique to Billie.”
Meanwhile, a program developed by Eilish’s Live Nation touring team, Support + Feed and Reverb, the long-standing nonprofit focused on music industry sustainability, now requires that any venue hosting an Eilish show must sell at least three plant-based main courses — and some venues have even gone entirely plant-based for Eilish. (Her sold-out Hit Me Hard and Soft world tour began in fall 2024 and runs through November.) The team also hosts educational webinars for venue culinary staffers to educate them about plant-based eating.
“It’s about trying to help them understand that the arena has an obligation to clientele, to planet and to cost,” Baird says. “It’s all done in a friendly, helpful way. We’re very welcoming and excited that they’re willing to even take the call, frankly.” The goal is for venues to maintain more robust plant-based approaches long after Eilish leaves. “It’s really about helping people understand that you’re not just serving your customer better while being better for the planet,” Baird explains, “but that you can actually save money.” These savings are achieved by reducing reliance on meat and incorporating more dishes made with lower-cost ingredients like beans, lentils, grains, fruits and vegetables; meals built around whole-food ingredients are often significantly more affordable to produce.
She is aware that implementing such programs takes resources. Eilish has helped fund Support + Feed and Reverb to be on-site at shows by rising artists who don’t yet have the funds to host these groups themselves. “I think it’s important that we reach down,” Baird says. Fans can also buy more expensive “changemaker” tickets for Eilish’s shows, with 50% of the revenue from each tagged for sustainability projects. One dollar of every regular ticket sold is also donated.
While Eilish is among the most visible musicians promoting sustainability in the industry, Baird’s hope is that even if artists don’t want to publicly discuss their efforts, “they’ll still just do it. They don’t have to make it as outward as what we’re doing, but they can just do it as a given.”
Maggie Baird and Hayley Williams of Paramore deliver meals on June 28, 2023, as part of Baird’s volunteer work for her nonprofit organization, Support + Feed.
Zoe Sher
All these initiatives are happening in a year when Support + Feed has responded to a host of disasters. It fed locals in Los Angeles following the devastating California wildfires in January and in Tennessee after intense flooding in April. (Baird notes that in the wake of such events, Support + Feed representatives stay on the ground long after many other response organizations move on to the next crisis.) The communities Support + Feed serves have also been “very impacted” by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, “so we’ve had to really be nimble in how we feed people and how we convene,” Baird says.
Still, the organization is expanding its offerings, now providing, in addition to hot meals, free produce from local farmers and cooking classes and recipe cards for people who may be unfamiliar with the produce they’re receiving.
“We’re really increasing our education and our outreach as much as possible,” Baird says, “but also just feeding, feeding, feeding, feeding, feeding. The need now is tremendous with all the food programs being cut.
“It’s a very intense time,” she continues, “but there are so many people doing great things.”
This story appears in the Oct. 25, 2025, issue of Billboard.
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When Baz Halpin first spoke with Justin Timberlake to plan the star’s Forget Tomorrow World Tour, the concert production designer suggested: “Let’s talk broadly about concepts and what you want to say on the tour.” Timberlake cut him off. “No,” he said. “I want to understand lighting, special effects, pyro, video. I want you to tell me everything that’s new.”
Halpin compiled a 100-page deck, including links to the latest video technology, for the pop superstar to study. Together, they concocted the centerpiece of the 14-month tour, which concluded in July — a massive, five-sided monolith, 17 feet by 30 feet by 7 feet, festooned with tiny LEDs for elaborate videos. At the end of every show, Timberlake surfed atop the giant rectangle, floating above the audience as it displayed gravity-defying bubbles on every side. “Screens have gotten infinitely lighter. They’ve gotten infinitely cheaper,” says Halpin, founder and CEO of Silent House, a Los Angeles design and production company that has worked with Tyler, The Creator, P!nk, Doja Cat and others. “A lot of things came together to make the process easier and more achievable.”
Billboard‘s Live Music Summit will be held Nov. 3 in Los Angeles. For tickets and more information, click here.
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No longer are video screens confined to the giant postage stamps bookending every live stage. Because LED technology has rapidly advanced over the last 30 years, artists can display more detailed scenes bounded only by their imaginations, spread across screens of all shapes and sizes, for audiences. SZA sits on a ledge, silhouetted beneath a moon, clouds and stars that seem like a real night. Phish jam at Las Vegas’ Sphere amid psychedelic canvases ranging from the ocean floor to the cosmos to abstract patterns. And some concerts employ the fast-growing technology to simply magnify the fans in attendance, like that infamously canoodling couple caught on a circular stadium kiss cam in July at a Coldplay show.
“The quality of LED in terms of image projection is insane these days,” says Adrian Martinez, co-founder and creative director of STURDY, which has designed visuals for such stars as Bad Bunny, Kendrick Lamar and Drake. “We’re getting to the point of watching HDTV.”
Coldplay’s Music of the Spheres tour, which broke worldwide attendance records in January with two concerts in India, anchors its stage with huge screens — circular ones on either side of the performance as well as a half-circle constantly running behind the band. It’s no wonder that amid the nonstop larger-than-life video stream of frontman Chris Martin, neon rainbows and explosions of light that the unwitting couple found themselves on the kiss cam.
“Privacy is a big issue, but we’ve always looked into, ‘How can we get the audience to actually be part of the show?’ ” says Joris Corthout, CEO of Prismax, a visual production company that recently worked with promoters Insomniac and Tomorrowland to create the EDM show UNITY at Sphere. Prismax is developing an on-site concert photo booth that transfers fans’ snapshots (with their permission, of course) to a huge stage combining lights and Polaroids. According to Silent House Studios president Alex Reardon, camera technology has improved to “pick up people in lower-light scenarios than [it] used to,” which helps artists integrate fans into the video aspect of the show. Silent House client Maroon 5 plans to do the same for its upcoming tour, “capturing the audience and trying to use those images as something emotional, something musical,” Halpin adds. “Think of it as another paint in the paint box.”
Nine Inch Nails perform during the Lights in the Sky Tour at the Mohegan Sun Arena on August 7, 2008 in Uncasville, Connecticut.
Courtesy of Moment Factory
Video technology for today’s concerts is basically limitless, thanks in part to groundbreaking tours like Nine Inch Nails’ 2008 outing Lights in the Sky, which spread tapestries of striking LEDs throughout all sides of the stage and ceiling, sometimes in the form of brightly colored grids or swirling mist. “LED in 2008 was very rare,” says Daniel Jean, producer/director of the music department for Moment Factory, which designed that tour. “It was more expensive and it was low resolution.” Ten years later, Childish Gambino’s Pharos concerts in New Zealand were among the first to present an elaborate animated world, toggling between fish, burning trees, colorful coral shapes and industrial sculptures. “I likened it to a planetarium,” says Christian Coffey, tour director for those shows and others by Lamar, A$AP Rocky and more. “The band is performing, but you’re watching the screen for so much of it.” In 2024, multiple suspended screens displayed flickering lights and images of Billie Eilish singing throughout her video-heavy Hit Me Hard and Soft tour.
It was in 1997, while watching colorful LEDs flash behind U2 during Las Vegas dress rehearsals for the band’s seminal PopMart stadium tour, that special-effects whiz Frederic Opsomer turned to his wife and said, “You are now looking at the future for the rest of my career.” According to Opsomer, CEO of the 30-year-old production company PRG, PopMart was when concerts first took advantage of the blue LED, invented by Japanese engineers in 1993. Enabling use of every color rather than just red and green, the development kicked off the LED era in lighting and video, replacing Jumbotrons using heavy and expensive cathode-ray technology.
By the time PopMart rolled around, Opsomer adds, video equipment that historically required 14 touring trucks needed two. And installation time took two hours rather than two days. “Suddenly, all the possibilities are open,” he says. “We’ve been playing with it ever since.”
The U2 PopMart Tour stage set at Sam Boyd Stadium on April 25, 1997 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Rob Verhorst/Redferns
In addition to unlocking limitless shapes, sizes and images at concerts and festivals, state-of-the-art camera and LED technology has let production experts be more nimble and improvise along with the artists. For its four-night 2024 run at Sphere, Phish hired producers at Moment Factory, which also works with stars like Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo, to “play the visuals in real time,” as Jean puts it; in one widely shared moment, an intricate, rainbow-colored forest transformed into fireworks exploding above the stage. “We’re playing miniature video games,” adds Manuel Galarneau, the company’s multimedia director. “Depending where we were at in the music, we could have trees grow, turn into fireworks.”
As video technology has expanded, production companies have boomed alongside it. High Scream, which puts on large events starring David Guetta and DJ Snake, among others, has increased its employees from two in 2012 to 240 today. “We went very, very big for the last five, six years,” says Romain Pissenem, the company’s founder and show producer. “It’s a lot of work, not a lot of sleep.” Moment Factory launched with six workers in 2001 and employs 480 today.
A crucial period for some concert video specialists was the coronavirus pandemic, when they could stop focusing on the day-to-day grind of setting up shows and contemplate innovation. Corthout pivoted to virtual festivals, including a digital iteration of Tomorrowland, and when traditional live events returned, “We just decided to work on that methodology we created for the virtual festivals,” he says. “We used to be and mix video files, but now we build a whole world.” Artificial intelligence, Corthout adds, has been a “fantastic tool” that reduces production costs.
Almost every video designer refers to some aspect of world-building. For this year’s Grand National stadium tour co-starring Lamar and SZA, the rapper’s world was “street and concrete and very raw,” according to tour director Coffey, while the R&B star’s landscape was “very lush.” The challenge, he says, was to use screens and high-resolution video content to “transport one world to another and make it seem seamless so it’s not jarring.” Corthout adds: “That’s the future of live entertainment — you can transport people to a completely different world.”
Phish perform during night three of their four-night run at Sphere on April 20, 2024 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Courtesy of Moment Factory
With all the fantastical potential, for many in the touring business, one risk is overstimulating the audience. “The resolution and the processing have gotten better,” says LeRoy Bennett, the longtime concert production designer currently working on Paul McCartney’s tour, in which the singer duets seamlessly with his late Beatles partner John Lennon on “I’ve Got a Feeling,” with assistance from documentary director Peter Jackson. “But we’ve got 30 songs in the show, so there’s not all content all the time. We try to give it a break. It becomes redundant if every single song has video on it.” Shows at Sphere, Bennett adds, are perfect for EDM artists who don’t necessarily need the audience to look at them, whereas pop and rock stars want to avoid “the whole audience looking up at the ceiling and not looking at you.”
Still, Sphere lets designers innovate in ways they can’t on traditional tours. “Sphere allows us to immerse people 100% as far as the eye can see,” Corthout says. “An old stage would give you physical boundaries. Sphere takes those boundaries away.”
Sphere productions like UNITY use innovative ideas that point the way for others to follow. “I haven’t personally worked with an artist who has said, ‘Look what Sphere is doing, I want to do that,’ ” Coffey says. “But Sphere is pushing the envelope forward.” In this way, according to Martinez, Sphere productions offer “proof of concept” for experimenting with video ideas. “The bar has been set so high,” he says, “it has opened the door for those of us on the creative side to say, ‘We know this works. How about we try this?’ ”
This story appears in the Oct. 25, 2025, issue of Billboard.
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When Chappell Roan began contemplating her return to the stage after the biggest year of her professional career — one that included a series of record-breaking festival performances and culminated in a Grammy for best new artist — she had a clear vision for how she wanted to do it.
“She loves the feeling of a festival-style show, where people can dance and be free of fixed systems,” says Kiely Mosiman, one of Roan’s agents at Wasserman Music. “So we came up with the initial idea of, essentially, building festival sites — but just for Chappell’s show.”
Members of Roan’s live team will speak at Billboard‘s Live Music Summit, which will be held Nov. 3 in Los Angeles. For tickets and more information, click here.
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Together with Mosiman and Roan’s team at Foundations Management, Roan devised a series of fall pop-up performances in New York, Los Angeles and Kansas City, Mo. — the biggest city in her home state — directly catering to her biggest fans. But Roan’s camp was concerned that, rather than reaching the hands of those fans, the bots and scalpers that troll high-demand concert on-sales would scoop up tickets for the shows, looking to flood the secondary market with up-charged tickets and make a healthy profit on resales.
Roan outlined that focus in a July Instagram post announcing the eight dates that would begin Sept. 20 in New York and run through Oct. 11 in L.A. “Because we’re only coming to three cities,” she wrote, “I wanted to make sure 1. we’re keeping ticket prices as affordable as possible and 2. we’re trying to keep them away from scalpers.”
That’s easier said than done. In an era of soaring concert ticket prices and a bot issue that has become so pervasive that Congress has gotten involved, star artists — particularly those who exploded in popularity as quickly as Roan did over the past 12 months — are often frustrated by the difficulties in reaching their biggest fans and catering to those who supported them from the beginning.
To do so, Roan and her team turned to Fair AXS, a program by ticketing partner AXS that aimed to deliver on her vision. As opposed to typical tour rollouts, which usually employ a presale and a general on-sale and are often inundated by bots that buy out inventory instantaneously and astronomically inflate prices on the secondary market, Fair AXS took a slower, more methodical approach. Fans signed up over a three-day period, after which AXS used a proprietary system to verify that each registrant was a real person who maybe even had purchased Roan tickets in the past. AXS then delivered a list of such registrants to her agents at Wasserman. The AXS team released a tranche of ticket-purchasing invitations to fans across a 24-hour period and then, based on the ratio of those fans who actually purchased the tickets, released a second tranche the following day and a third the day after. The result takes much longer than a traditional on-sale — and naturally eschews the “instant sellout” publicity rush — but the demand for Roan was such that there never needed to be a fully open public on-sale, and the process delivered on her goals.
“When you have an artist that wants to do something like this and then you have really strong agents and managers in their corner who will take the time to agree on a plan, it’s incredibly effective,” says Dean DeWulf, head of venues, North America at AXS. “She chose to focus on fairness for her fans, even when she could have priced tickets higher.”
Still, for Roan, the result paid off handsomely: The first six shows of the run — four at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens and two at Liberty Memorial Park in Kansas City — grossed $15.4 million and sold 123,000 tickets, according to Billboard Boxscore, with the two L.A. dates yet to be reported. The process took around two weeks, between the three-day registration window, the seven days during which AXS vetted millions of registrations and the three days of offering the approved fans tickets. But just as important to her team at Foundations, Wasserman and AXS was the response to the shows, where almost every attendee was outfitted in cowboy hats, glitter and hand-made costumes.
“It really did feel like everyone was a part of a community in a way that I haven’t felt at a show in a really long time,” Mosiman says. “I think sometimes it gets lost how much Kayleigh [Amstutz, Roan’s real name] really does care about fans and their experience. And she absolutely was part of this process, putting in the work from day one to do it at this scale.”
Scale, now, is the big test for this program. It has been around for several years but has been used most often for one-off specialty shows, such as big-name underplays at small venues (Paul McCartney used it, for example, when he played California’s 4,500-capacity Santa Barbara Bowl in September) or at special venues like Red Rocks in Colorado. Acts such as ODESZA, Vampire Weekend, Billy Strings and Sturgill Simpson have used it, while perhaps the biggest proof of concept came from Zach Bryan’s tour in 2023, which utilized the program across its entire 32-date run, with face-value resale exchange. In late October, the Iowa festival Hinterland announced that it will use Fair AXS for its 2026 edition, becoming the first festival to deploy it.
And while artists may be leaving money on the table — the general admission price for Roan’s shows was $99 when they could have easily been priced much higher — there are other benefits the program provides artists, in addition to fostering community and rewarding the loyalty of devoted fans. “Artists are so disintermediated from their fans today,” DeWulf says. With this program, “they can actually know who the fans are. Being able to give that information to not only the artist camp but also to the promoter is very helpful for them to understand where the fans are, to route the tour to bigger venues next time and add more shows.”
Roan’s next move, as she put it in her announcement, will be “going away to write the next album.” And when she tours behind that release, it will be on the arena — or, perhaps, even the stadium — level. But her connection with her fans in the live environment has now been cemented — and AXS may have a solution to the increasingly impersonal process involved in establishing that connection.
“Ticketing, over the last 20 years, has become so monolithic, so opaque, so confusing, and it’s made it easy for bad actors to completely arbitrage the tickets, create scarcity and inflate prices,” DeWulf says. “But at the end of the day, ticketing is deeply personal. We’re in the fan connection business, and people care so deeply about these artists. That connection that we’re powering is so human and personal. And this is a very personal approach.”
This story appears in the Oct. 25, 2025, issue of Billboard.
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SoundCloud, a leading platform for independent artists and their fans, is debuting new features to make streaming more financially rewarding for its customers. On Thursday (Oct. 30), the company announced new components to its all-in-one offerings that will put more money into artists’ pockets.
“We’ve got an opportunity to solve the problem that streaming is not enough for artists or fans, because this is going to be new dollars on the table for artists and new ways for fans to express their fandom,” CEO Eliah Seton tells Billboard.
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For music distributed through SoundCloud, artists signed up to the Artist and Artist Pro plans will now keep 100% of royalties from streams on other platforms such as Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple Music and TikTok. Previously, SoundCloud took a 20% cut of those royalties as a distribution fee. This change mirrors the existing 100% payouts on royalties generated from streams on the SoundCloud platform.
In addition, SoundCloud is launching a new patronage feature. Artists will also keep 100% of the money received from a new feature on artist profiles, Fan Support. Fans can donate from $1 to $1,000 at a time in exchange for their names being acknowledged on the artists’ pages. At launch, Fan Support is available only to Artist Pro subscribers in the U.S.
Early results of Fan Support have been promising. According to Seton, artists who have tested Fan Support have earned more than they’ve received from streaming in their entire careers. “This can really unlock a major new opportunity for a middle class of artists that a lot of people have been talking about for a long time,” he says.
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The Artist plan is billed annually for $39 and allows distribution of up to two tracks per month. The $99-per-year Artist Pro plan offers distribution of an unlimited number of tracks. The new distribution terms and Fan Support feature are not available on the free Basic tier, which does not include distribution to other streaming providers.
SoundCloud’s latest moves are an attempt to address the financial problems faced by independent artists on its platform. Music streaming has revitalized the larger music industry, attracting major investors to artist and songwriter catalogs and driving the global industry’s decade-long winning streak. For many independent artists, however, streaming itself isn’t financially sustainable.
More than 40,000 new creators upload music to SoundCloud each week, according to Seton, and new music accounted for 50% of streams on the platform in 2024, according to the company’s Music Intelligence Report from March. But the volume of new music is itself seen as a hindrance: 67% of independent labels believe the glut of new tracks uploaded to streaming services — including AI-generated music — makes it harder to develop new artists, according to MIDiA Research.
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In a prior attempt to make streaming more equitable, in 2021, SoundCloud changed how it pays royalties to help emerging, less popular artists. Called “fan-powered” royalties, the scheme gives artists a share of the fees from users who stream their music. That’s different from the traditional “pro-rata” method, which pools subscription fees and pays royalties based on aggregate streams. In a pro-rata model, independent artists share a revenue pool with superstars. SoundCloud’s approach, which attracted Warner Music Group and independent rights organization Merlin, is more favorable to independent artists, according to a 2024 report.
Artist and Artist Pro have additional components, such as on-demand vinyl manufacturing through a partnership with Elastic Stage that was announced in July. Both tiers also allow artists to create merch storefronts on their pages. The goal, Seton explains, is to provide a menu of options for artists to build a career in different ways. “We want to be able to unlock all those possibilities,” he says.
Thursday’s announcement is a bet that giving artists a larger share of royalties will be good for business. Unlike most streaming platforms, SoundCloud is a two-sided marketplace that generates income from both artists and listeners — a symbiotic relationship that creates a “virtuous circle,” Seton explains. Luring and retaining artists with career-building tools and attractive terms not only generates more income, it makes SoundCloud a more attractive destination for fans.
“We feel like we’ve really begun to crack the code on being a two-sided marketplace and what really distinguishes us,” says Seton.
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Stem co-founder Tim Luckow has launched a new platform that aims to help artists and songwriters claim so-called “black box” royalties, it was announced Thursday (Oct. 30).
The platform, called Notes.fm, seeks to simplify the process of claiming these royalties. It requires only an artist or songwriter’s name to scan streaming services, collection societies and registries, including the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC), to identify missing recording, publishing and performance rights royalties and fix issues to ensure future income flows to them directly. In addition to Luckow, the founding team includes Derek Davies and Montalis Anglade.
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Now open to the public, Notes.fm does not take a cut of royalties but instead boasts a subscription model beginning at $5 a month. It previously held a year-long beta with more than 400 artists, from established names like Mt. Joy, James Blake and Girl in Red to emerging artists like Adam Melchor and Adam Wise, along with the estates of artists including Howlin’ Wolf. During that time, Notes.fm identified more than $10 million in missing or unclaimed royalties from songs encompassing more than 50 billion streams — an average of $15,500 per artist, according to the company.
The company adds that some artists saw six-figure payouts by participating in the beta, including Mt. Joy, who collected six figures across corrected historical registrations and new registrations for songs including “Highway Queen,” which was the first song to secure 100% royalty registration from delivery by Notes.fm on its release in 2024. Additionally, Blake discovered that around a quarter of all songs in his catalog had missing or incomplete registrations and was able to recover unclaimed royalties from those works.
“When it comes to music royalties, complexity is the enemy,” said Luckow in a statement. “For over a century, musicians have struggled to get paid because of disconnected systems that were not designed for the digital streaming era. Notes.fm fixes that, handling the complex work in the background so artists can focus on the music. Every musician deserves every dollar they’ve earned, and we’re here to make sure that happens.”
Added Steve Bursky, founder and partner at Foundations, which was an early investor in Notes.fm: “What sets Notes.fm apart is its ability to move artists and their teams from insight to action. Rather than merely flagging unclaimed royalties, Notes.fm empowers users to identify, correct, and directly recover what’s rightfully theirs, representing a fundamental leap forward in artist-first rights management.”
More information can be found at the Notes.fm website.
Trending on Billboard Universal Music Group and Stability AI have announced a strategic partnership to develop music creation tools powered by “responsibly” trained generative AI. The two companies said on Thursday that the collaboration will aim to support artists, producers and songwriters by integrating AI into the creative process while ensuring commercial safety and proper […]
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The Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) has unveiled its full hosting lineup for the 2025 ARIA Awards, with Nova radio personality Tim Blackwell and triple j presenter Concetta Caristo confirmed as co-hosts for the main event.
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The ceremony, presented in partnership with Spotify, is set to take place Wednesday, Nov. 19, at the Hordern Pavilion in Sydney on Gadigal land. The 2025 broadcast will air live on Paramount+ from 5 p.m. AEDT, with a free-to-air broadcast of the red carpet from 7 p.m. AEDT on 10, followed by the awards show later in the evening.
ARIA also confirmed that Latifa Tee will join the co-hosting team for the main event, while Angela Bishop, Georgie Tunny and Latifa will lead the red carpet coverage.
Returning for his second consecutive year as host, Blackwell brings more than two decades of radio experience, currently anchoring the number-one rated drive-time show Ricki-Lee, Tim and Joel on Nova. Caristo, who co-hosts triple j Breakfast with Concetta and Luka, has emerged as a vibrant voice for youth audiences, and previously co-hosted ABC’s Logie-nominated New Year’s Eve special.
Latifa Tee, DJ and broadcaster, currently hosts triple j’s House Party and The Nudge, and will help bridge the red carpet and mainstage moments. Rounding out the coverage team, Bishop and Tunny return with extensive live entertainment and awards coverage experience on Network 10.
Blackwell said in a statement, “Australian music has had an incredible year. We’re punching way above our weight all over the world! To be back as your host for the second year in a row, I couldn’t be prouder to be part of the night celebrating the best artists on the planet.”
Caristo echoed the excitement: “Co-hosting the ARIA Awards and celebrating Australian music on the big stage is truly a dream come true! I get to hang out with so many incredible artists at triple j, and I can’t wait to celebrate them all on Australian music’s night of nights.”
The 2025 ARIA Awards will be streamed on Paramount+, with additional highlights, performances and moments shared across ARIA’s official social channels. The show is supported by the NSW Government through Destination NSW.
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On Wednesday (Oct. 29), Universal Music Group came to a landmark agreement with AI music company Udio. The deal ends UMG’s involvement in the lawsuit against Udio, which it filed last summer with the two other major music companies — Sony Music and Warner Music Group. In the lawsuit, the labels accused Udio of infringing on its copyrighted sound recordings to train its AI music model, which can generate realistic songs in seconds.
Wednesday’s deal went beyond a “compensatory” legal settlement for UMG and Udio, as stated in the press release; it also provides licensing agreements for UMG’s recorded music and publishing assets, creating a new revenue stream for the company and its signees. Participating UMG artists and songwriters will be rewarded for both the training process of the AI model and for its outputs, according to a source close to the deal.
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The deal also means that Udio will significantly revamp its existing business. In 2026, Udio and UMG plan to work together to launch a new collaborative platform that will combine music creation with streaming capabilities. According to the press release, the new platform will be “powered by new cutting-edge generative AI technology that will be trained on authorized and licensed music. The new subscription service will transform the user engagement experience, creating a licensed and protected environment to customize, stream and share music responsibly, on the Udio platform.”
The source close to the deal says that Udio users will not be able to export works made within Udio’s forthcoming platform. Instead, they can enjoy their creations within the service, which will be geared towards superfans.
To talk about the new deal, along with Udio’s plans for 2026, Billboard got on the phone with Udio CEO Andrew Sanchez minutes after the deal was announced. You can read the Q&A below.
What was the turning point in negotiations with UMG when you felt like both companies could actually become partners?
Sanchez: We share a really similar vision about what we want to do. The thing that I think is going to be the most extraordinary thing for the music industry in general is when people can do things with their favorite artists and their favorite music. Actually, I think that we had agreements with UMG across the board on this. We said, “Look, we want the human to be centered in this. We want the AI to empower human creators. And we also think, by the way, that that’s actually going to really expand the market.” There actually was a lot of — we had a philosophical alignment on that throughout the whole process. And then the question was, it’s incredibly complex. It’s not something [where] we can pull something off the shelf. We had to actually walk through and figure out how it would all work, and that’s just based on time.
How long did your negotiations with UMG last?
Many months.
One of the things that I thought was really interesting in the press release about this deal is that it notes that Udio will be a “creation, consumption and streaming” destination. Right now, I think of Udio as a place for creation. Can you provide more insight about your vision for this forthcoming 2026 platform with UMG that will do it all?
You’re a keen reader. We believe there’s an incredibly exciting market that combines creation and consumption, both of human-generated songs and of AI-generated songs. We are building a platform that is going to allow you to engage in both of those activities, because that’s where we think the market and users want to go. By the way, we also think that’s the way that artists are going to benefit from this enormously. Because if you can go and you can do stuff with your favorite artists, make a song in their style or remix [a] favorite song, you’re also going to listen to their own music. And we want to be able to meet the users and provide them one place to do that.
It sounds like some of the capabilities you’ll provide with this new platform include mash-ups, remixes and speed controls of existing music. There’s already a few things on the market that do these sorts of things — MashApp, Hook and even Spotify sounds like it’s working on tools like that. How will you make Udio stand out from the pack?
There’s a couple of ways. It’s not just remixing and mashing up. It’s also creating in the style of artists with their opt-in. There’s a huge amount of desire for this, and we know that when we do this the right way with the artist, a huge amount of value will be made for the fan and revenue for the artist.
If I were to say I want to make a pop ballad in the style of Taylor Swift, I can now do that because it’s all licensed?
Well, I don’t want to get specific with artists. It’s their choice, but yeah, in the new service, you would be able to do that, and you’d be able to make extraordinary music. I mean, our model is already really powerful. You can imagine what it’s like when you get to do it directly with the artist’s input and their voice and style, and then the artist gets to benefit from that in multiple ways. They get the financial upside from it. They can increase their brand. And the user gets to go deeper in their connection with you as a fan.
Can users export what they make in Udio to streaming services now?
Not now. That’s an important component of this deal. As we’re entering this transition period, when we’re building out our new models and functionality, you’re not able to have songs leave the platform.
Sony and Warner still have active lawsuits against Udio. Are you confident that they will come to the table now that you’ve reached a deal with UMG?
This is something I need to pass on answering.
There are three parts to this. You have your “compensatory” deal with UMG that settles the lawsuit. Then you also have licenses with UMG on the publishing and recorded music side for this future Udio platform. Does this first part mean you are now retroactively paying UMG for the licensing of their recordings for training data?
To be honest, I think I’d be a little bit over my skis on this, and there’s a lot of legal complexity around that. I don’t think I’m in a position to actually speak about that directly.
Now that you have publishing and recorded music licenses in place with UMG, how does the process of compensating participating artists work? Are you doing a system of attribution or digital proxies for payment?
I wish I could give more details about this right now, but it’s something that we have a clear plan for. This is a trade secret for the moment.
Given this past history with this lawsuit, I imagine that a number of artists will be hesitant about opting in and working with your team. How do you plan to reassure UMG artists who might be hesitant but are interested in diving into AI?
So I think the way to do this is to say you have control, right? We’re very clear about this: If you want to participate, that’s great. If you’re unsure about participating, call me, I’ll sit down with you, and we will talk about it. Call Universal. They’ve been working and thinking about this alongside us. We’ve built and invested an absolutely enormous amount into controls. Controls over how artists’ songs can be used, how their styles can be used, really granular controls. And I think that the way for artists to become comfortable with this is to just talk to me or anyone on the team, and we can walk them through what’s possible.
One of the things that you’ll see is we’re going to launch with a set of features that has a spectrum of freedom that the artist can control. There are some features that will be available to users that will be more restrictive in what they can do with their artists or their songs. And then there will be others that are more permissive. The whole point of it is not only education but just meeting artists at the levels they’re comfortable with.
I think this is something that, when done right, can bring an enormous amount of interest and fan engagement. By the way, data is a huge thing for artists. So imagine that you’re an artist, you’re a hip-hop artist, people are on the platform, and 60% or 70% of them are remixing your songs or using your style in a country song. That’s amazing information that we will provide artists in the back end. They’re going to have this new insight into what people like and want. And I also hope that will inform their own music making.
Interesting. So it sounds like artists aren’t just doing a blanket opt-in here. It’s more granular, and artists can pick and choose what they want to say yes to?
One hundred percent. I also think what we’ll see is, artists at different points in their career are going to also have different views on this — when they’re trying to break, and they want to get their name out there, you know, versus when they’re at the peak of their career. We are ready to learn about that, and we’ll meet them where they’re at.
Since this is a destination for creation and streaming, it feels like an interactive product. Do you have any plans to integrate social features into this, too?
Yeah, for sure. I think that we want to build a community of superfans around creation. As we say internally, it’s connection through creation — whether that’s with artists or that connection with other music fans. We want to lean into that. I think it’s going to be a huge asset for artists and fandoms.
So this platform will now include artists’ voice models, correct?
It’s going to involve all kinds of AI models, like a base model, and then we will have a specific…it’s hard to describe. The best way to explain it, [is it] will have sort of like flavors of the model that will be specific to particular styles or artists or genres. And this, again, provides an enormous amount of control.
Who is your ideal user base for this, since it’s a departure from what you’re doing right now?
I think our ideal user is a passionate music fan who maybe hasn’t created yet, but has the impulse to do so. And if they’re given tools, or they’re given experiences that are straightforward, and they’re given a community that they can engage with, they’re going to want to go deeper. I think that people are going to create songs, or there’ll be songs for you made by people in the communities that you love. I think it’ll be an interesting combination of creation and consumption. I think it goes towards people who are just deep music lovers, who want to go further than is possible today, further than is possible on any of the normal forms of music consumption that we have right now.
Now that Udio is moving forward with this partnership with UMG, I’m wondering, how do you feel this deal can help differentiate the direction that Udio is going in versus Suno, since so many people have lumped the two companies together for so long?
I think that we’re clearly building into a totally new space. I mean, what I’ve described to you isn’t even a question of Udio versus other players. Today, we are breaking new ground on a market that combines new forms of AI and artist interaction — creation and consumption. We’re making a new market here, which we think is an enormous one. I think that we’re already incredibly differentiated just today, just by saying all of this.
Anything else to add?
Partnership is absolutely vital to doing this. This has to be done with artists and songwriters and rights holders, and we are super thrilled about this announcement today, and we want to do this with other artists across the board. So we’re ready to build alongside the entire user community.
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Sean “Diddy” Combs is trying to expedite his criminal appeal, saying he could be close to getting out of prison by the time his case is heard if forced to follow the typical, drawn-out argument timeline.
Combs is challenging both his July conviction and the resulting four-year prison sentence for arranging the drug-fueled sex marathons, known as “freak-offs,” between his girlfriends and male escorts. Jurors found Combs guilty of illegal prostitution, but they acquitted him of more serious racketeering and sex-trafficking charges.
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As is the case in much of the court system, appellate procedure is usually slow. In the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, where Combs’ case will be heard, it takes nearly a year and a half on average to get a criminal appeal decided.
Combs’ lawyers don’t want to wait that long. They say in a Wednesday (Oct. 29) court filing that he could complete most of his prison sentence during the typical appeal timeline; Combs is getting credit for the year he’s already spent in jail, plus the sentence could be further trimmed down for good behavior or participation in a drug abuse rehab program.
“An expedited briefing and argument schedule is critical to ensure that Mr. Combs’s appeal of his sentence does not become moot while the appeal is pending,” writes his attorney, Alexandra Shapiro. “To ensure that Mr. Combs could meaningfully benefit from any appellate ruling vacating his sentence, we have proposed a schedule that would expedite this court’s consideration of Mr. Combs’s appeal.”
Shapiro suggests that the lawyers submit all their legal briefs by March and deliver oral arguments in April — that is, she wants the case heard just six months after Combs’ notice of appeal last week.
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Wednesday’s court filing says prosecutors have consented to this expedited briefing schedule. This means it’s likely to get approved, absent scheduling conflicts from the Second Circuit.
A rep for the prosecution did not immediately return a request for comment. Shapiro said in a statement to Billboard, “Sean’s appeal will challenge the unfair use of the Mann Act, an infamous statute with a sordid history, to prosecute him for sex with consenting adults.”
The Mann Act, which makes it illegal to transport people across state lines for prostitution, indeed has an ugly past. Originally called the White-Slave Traffic Act of 1910, it has its roots in a government campaign to criminalize interracial relationships. Combs’ legal team said from the beginning of the case that Mann Act prostitution counts were improperly tacked onto his sex-trafficking indictment, and this argument has taken center stage since Combs defeated the heftier charges at trial.
