Business
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SiriusXM hosted an event in New York City on Wednesday (Nov. 8) in which the company unveiled a new-look version of its app, set to debut Dec. 14, while announcing a rebrand and a slew of new programming initiatives, including new channels run by John Mayer and Kelly Clarkson, among others.
In conjunction with the app, Sirius will also offer a streaming-only subscription tier for $9.99 per month, aimed at younger listeners who are interested in the service’s 400-plus channels of content and podcasts but don’t generally listen in the car, where Sirius has become dominant in recent years. The new-look app will include increased customization, a new playback experience, an audio library, a new home for its podcast content and improvements in search and discovery, executives stressed at the two-hour event.
The new channels will begin rolling out in the next few months, starting with Clarkson’s channel, called the Kelly Clarkson Connection, which will be available starting today. Clarkson appeared on stage at the event with her band and introduced her channel — which she said will be on Channel 12, as she isn’t a fan of odd numbers — that will include her music and a variety of other music she enjoys and is inspired by. To kick that off, she and her band performed a cover of Miley Cyrus’ “Flowers” — which she said they just learned hours before — and her own “Since U Been Gone.”
New channels from Shaggy (Shaggy’s Boombastic Radio), who also appeared on stage, and Smokey Robinson (Smokey’s Soul Town) are also available beginning today. A limited-edition channel from Dolly Parton, Dolly Parton’s Rockstar Radio, will go online Nov. 15, while Mayer’s show, which will be available year-round and is called Life With John Mayer, is set to debut Nov. 22. A weekly show by James Corden and a new true-crime channel from Crime Junkies podcast host Ashley Flowers will also soon come online.
“The introduction of the new SiriusXM streaming experience marks a pivotal moment in our history, one that kicks off a new era of innovation at our Company,” SiriusXM CEO Jennifer Witz said in a statement following the event. “And this launch is just the beginning; we will continue to iterate and develop our product offerings throughout the next year and beyond as we strive to deliver our subscribers the best listening experience on the go, in the car, and wherever they choose to tune in. From can’t-miss live moments to the perfect soundtrack for any occasion, with the new SiriusXM, we are putting our differentiators at the forefront and welcoming in a new generation of listeners, bringing them closer to what they love.”
The event opened with Witz introducing the new app, before turning the stage over to Sirius’ biggest and longest-tenured star, Howard Stern, who spoke about his frustrations during his time on terrestrial radio that led to him taking a chance on the then-nascent Sirius 17 years ago. “Everyone said it’s gonna fail, you’re stupid, you’re ugly — and those were my parents,” he joked. “To me, SiriusXM was an oasis in a desert of censorship. … My mission is to convince audiences that radio is worth paying for, and I think that mission continues to grow. I think there’s a bright future for Sirius. I banked my career on it.”
In addition to Clarkson and Shaggy, the event saw cameos from Conan O’Brien, Andy Cohen, Maren Morris, Flowers and Kevin Hart, while Corden and Mayer appeared in short video segments. And it ended with a performance from Def Jam rapper Armani White, who performed his hit song “Billie Eilish.”
As part of the rebrand — which includes a new logo — executives also re-introduced Sirius’ dog mascot, named Stella, after the Dog Star constellation from which Sirius took its name. The company also announced a new partnership with Audible to share content beginning next year, as well as renewed partnerships with car manufacturers and hotel chains. Next year will also see the company bringing on 160 new artist DJs, including Olivia Rodrigo and Morris, among many others.
Dreamliner Luxury Coaches has acquired Hemphill Brothers Coach Company, combining the two private bus and coach tour operators into the largest provider of entertainer busses in the world.
Formed just three years ago, the Nashville-based Dreamliner now boasts a fleet of 190 high-end luxury coaches, servicing approximately 50% of North American arena and stadium touring market, CEO Jeremy Maul estimates. The high-end bus company specializes in leasing and servicing artist and headliner buses with a client list that includes Beyoncé, Justin Timberlake, Drake, Jonas Brothers, Chris Stapleton, Olivia Rodrigo, Zach Bryan and more.
Hemphill Brothers was launched in 1980 by Joey and Trent Hemphill, Tennessee-based brothers who toured in the family Gospel band and eventually bought out their father’s two-bus leasing company. In 1995, Hemphill Brothers opened their current 55,000 square foot office complex and shop facility on 15 acres of land near Nashville.
Dreamliner was founded in late 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic by businessman Rich Thomson, managing partner at Caprice Capital Partners and Jeremy Maul, Thomson saw the revival of the touring business as potential investment opportunity for his LA based private investment firm focused mainly on small cap companies with at least $2 million in EBITDA.
The bet on Dreamliner was fairly simple – while the pandemic had completely devastated the touring and concert business, the industry was expected to come back strong in mid-to-late 2021, as evidenced by ticket purchases during the pandemic and pent-up demand. Artists returning to the road would encounter a shortage of high-end luxury buses due to a pivot in the transportation industry away from concert touring.
The tour bus shortage, coupled with the explosion in demand, caused the leasing price for tour buses to nearly double overnight and created a backlog of demand for the industry, Maul explained.
Dreamliner’s first tour was the Jonas Brothers’ August 2021 tour. In June 2022, Dreamliner purchased Diamond Coach leasing from founder Kyle Ervin, growing the company’s fleet from 12 buses to 75 buses while establishing the company’s headquarters in Nashville.
Maul told Billboard that the Hemphill purchase took approximately one year to finalize. The combined business is expected to generate $100 million in business in 2024 from a fleet of 190 coaches, Maul said.
That puts Dreamliner ahead of Encore Luxury Coach, which briefly held the title of largest entertainment coach leasing company in North America following its acquisition of Nitetrain in September.
“As we further our goal of redefining the art of tour travel, we will leverage the strengths and experience at the heart of both Dreamliner and Hemphill to become the industry’s largest and most sought-after resource for high-end tour coaches,” Maul said in a recent press release.
Diaa El All, CEO/founder of generative artificial intelligence music company Soundful, remembers when the first artists were signed to major label deals based on songs using type beats — cheap, licensable beats available online that are labeled based on the artists the beat emulates (i.e. Drake Type Beat, XXXTentacion Type Beat). He also remembers the legal troubles that followed. “Those type beats are licensed to sometimes thousands of people at a time,” he explains. “If it becomes a hit for one artist, then that artist ends up with major problems to unravel.”
Perhaps the most famous example of this is Lil Nas X and his breakthrough smash “Old Town Road,” which was written over a $30 Future type beat that was also licensed by other DIY talents. After the song went viral in early 2019, the then-unknown rapper and meme maker quickly inked a deal with Columbia Records, but beneath the song’s mammoth success lay a tangle of legal issues to sort through. For one thing, the song’s type beat included an unauthorized sample of Nine Inch Nails’ “34 Ghosts IV,” which was not disclosed to Lil Nas X when he purchased it.
El All’s solution to these issues may seem counter-intuitive, but he posits that his AI models could provide an ethical alternative to the copyright nightmares of the type beat market.
Starting Wednesday (Nov. 8), Soundful is launching Soundful Collabs, which is partnering with artists, songwriters and producers in various genres — including Kaskade, Starrah, 3LAU, DJ White Shadow, Autograf and CB Mix — to train personalized AI generators that create beats akin to their specific production and writing styles. To create a realistic model, the artists, songwriters and producers provide Soundful with dozens of their favorite one-shot recordings of kick drums, snares, guitar licks and synth patches from their personal sonic libraries, as well as information about how they typically construct chord progressions and song structures.
The result is individualized AI models that can generate endless one-of-a-kind tracks that echo a hitmaker’s style while compensating them for the use of their name and sonic identity. For $15, a Soundful subscriber can download up to 10 tracks the generator comes up with. This includes stems so the user can add or subtract elements of the track to suit their tastes after exporting it to a digital audio workstation (DAW) of their choice. The hitmaker receives 80% of the monies earned from the collaboration while Soundful retains 20% — a split El All says was inspired by “flipping” major record labels’ common 80/20 split in favor of the artist.
The Soundful leader, who has a background as a classical pianist and sound engineer, sees this as a novel form of musical “merchandise” that offers talent an additional revenue stream and a chance at fostering further fan engagement and user-generated content (UGC). “We don’t use any loops, we don’t use any previous tracks as references,” El All says. As a result, he argues the product’s profits belong only to the talent, not their record label or publishers, given that it does not use any of their copyrights. Still, he says he’s met with “a lot of publishers” and some labels about the new product. (El All admits that an artist in a 360 deal — a contract which grants labels a cut of money from touring, merchandise and other forms of non-recorded music income — may have to share proceeds with their label.)
According to Kaskade, who has been a fan of Soundful’s since he tested the original beta product earlier this year, the process of training his model felt like “Splice on crack — this is the next evolution of the Splice sample packs,” where producers offer fans the opportunity to purchase a pack of their favorite loops and samples for a set price, he explains. “[With sample packs] you got access to the sounds, but now, you get an AI generator to help you put it all together.”
The new Soundful product is illustrative of a larger trend in AI towards personalized models. On Monday, OpenAI, the leading AI company behind ChatGPT and DALL-E, announced that it was launching “GPTs” – a new service that allows small businesses and individuals to build customized versions of ChatGPT attuned to their personal needs and interests.
This trend is also present in music AI, with many companies offering personalized models and collaborations with talent. This is especially popular on the voice synthesis side of the nascent industry. So far, start-ups like Kits AI, Voice-Swap, Hooky, CreateSafe and more are working with artists to feed recordings of their voices into AI models to create realistic clones of their voices for fans or the artists themselves to use — Grimes’ model being the most notable to date. Though much more ethically questionable, the popularity of Ghostwriter’s “Heart On My Sleeve” — which employed a voice model to emulate Drake and The Weeknd and which was not authorized by the artists — also proved the appetite for personalized music models.
Notably, Soundful’s product has the potential to be a producer and songwriter-friendly counterpart to voice models, which present possible monetary benefits (and threats) to recording artists and singers but do not pertain to the craftspeople behind the hits, who generally enjoy fewer financial opportunities than the artists they work with. As Starrah — who has written “Havana” by Camila Cabello, “Pick Up The Phone” by Young Thug and Travis Scott and “Girls Like You” by Maroon 5 — explains, Soundful Collabs are “an opportunity for songwriters and producers to expand what they are doing in so many ways.”
El All says keeping the needs of the producer and songwriter communities in mind was paramount in the creation of this product. For the first time, he reveals that longtime industry executive, producer manager and Hallwood Media founder Neil Jacobson is on Soundful’s founding team and board. El All says Jacobson’s expertise proved instrumental in steering the Soundful Collabs project in a direction that El All feels could “change the industry for the better.” “I think what Soundful provides here is similar to what I do in my own business,” says Jacobson. “I supply music to people who need it — with Soundful, a fan of one of these artists who wants to make music but doesn’t quite know how to work a digital audio workstation can get the boost they need to start creating.”
El All says the new product will extend beyond personalization for current songwriters, producers and artists. The Soundful team is also in talks with catalog owners and estates and working with a number of top brands in the culinary, consumer goods, hospitality, children’s entertainment and energy industries to train personalized models to create sonic “brand templates” and “generative catalogs” to be used in social media content. “This will help them create a very clear signature identification via sound,” says El All.
When asked if this business-to-business application takes away opportunities for synch licensing from composers, El All counters that some of these companies were using royalty free libraries prior to meeting with Soundful. “We’re actually creating new opportunities for musicians because we are consistently hiring those specializing in synch and sound designers to continue to evolve the brand’s sound,” he says.
In the future, Soundful will drop more artist templates every four to six weeks, and its Collabs will expand into genres like Latin, lo-fi, rock, pop and more. “Though this sounds good out of the box … what will make the music a hit is when a person downloads these stems and adds their own human imperfections and style to it,” says El All. “That’s what we are looking to encourage. It’s a jumping off point.”
When artists announce a new tour, ticket sales tend to exhibit a pattern: An initial surge of fan enthusiasm followed by a gradual decline in interest.
So, Tim Collins, who manages the Swedish artist Benjamin Ingrosso, was surprised to see demand for tickets to see his client increase throughout his summer tour. “At the beginning of the tour, we hadn’t sold out,” Collins says. “With every show we did, interest in him became bigger. And it was mainly because of how TikTok talked about him throughout the tour.”
TikTok marketing has been a central part of promoting music for more than three years at this point, almost entirely reshaping record labels’ strategy. When the platform started to regularly mint hit singles in 2020, however, the concert business was mostly shut down due to the coronavirus pandemic and shows didn’t get the same sort of attention.
This year, though, TikTok has become the new frontier for marketing tours. “Traditional promoters are starting to really wake up to it,” says Sanu Hariharan, co-head of music partnerships at Creed Media, a marketing company focused on Gen Z.
“It’s opened up a new revenue model for me,” adds Johnny Cloherty, co-founder of the digital marketing company Songfluencer. “A lot of the heavier touring acts are interested in, ‘I’ll pay a handful of creators to come to my VIP section to film content with me backstage to help sell tickets.’ We can get influencers to talk about the merch and do promotion that way.”
What took so long? “In general, live music lags behind the rest of marketing,” according to William Van Orsdel, chief growth officer of the live promotions company Breakaway. “Larger companies out there can’t change the way they’ve been doing things because they’ve always been doing them that way” — relying on tried-and-true techniques like print advertisements, billboards and posters.
Sure enough, Cloherty says when he pitched live music companies on using modern TikTok marketing techniques in 2019 and 2020, he “got laughed out of the room.” “People were like, ‘No way are you going to do this,’” he recalls. But, Van Orsdel continues, “you can’t market in just one silo and expect to be successful.”
The saturation of the post-COVID touring market has also spurred artist managers and event promotion companies to try new concert-marketing techniques. Prices are high; competition for fans is fierce. “The interest in seeing shows is bigger than ever before,” Collins says. “But at the same time, the financial situation is worse than ever before in regards to what you actually can afford to go to. To win a fan, you really have to stand out.”
On top of that, labels have started to see that a tour with buzz leads to streaming gains for the artist on the road, which ultimately helps the record company’s bottom line. Labels don’t participate in artists’ touring income — unless the artist has signed a “360 deal” — which often disincentivizes them from investing in their acts’ live business. “What they’ve realized is that there’s a correlation between having a tour or a set of shows that are relevant and streaming,” Hariharan says.
“Touring goes hand in hand with cultural significance,” adds Andy Serrao, president of Fearless Records. “The moments that are created on touring or in festivals, those don’t just happen and go away. We don’t participate in our artists’ touring revenue, but what we can do to drive the rest of our marketing going into releasing new music is huge.”
Those “moments” from a show depend a lot on the charisma of the artist on stage, of course. “If people are seeing you live and not filming you, that’s a bad sign,” Serrao says.
But marketers can work to make sure that anything exciting that happens is talked about by as many people as possible. “Having influencers at the show is the most important piece of it, because they are really essentially megaphones for the tour,” says Laura Spinelli, digital marketing manager at Shopkeeper Management. “Within the past year, this has become something that we’ve devoted a more significant budget to” for artists like Miranda Lambert and Tenille Townes.
Creed Media recently ran a two-week campaign in Europe for the group Chase Atlantic, using influencers to “create and convey a sense of hype and FOMO around the experience of going to their show,” Hariharan explains. “We wanted to do this early in the tour so that we’re getting consistent relevance and engagement as the tour progresses.” The most successful post — about a guy who takes his girlfriend to see Chase Atlantic — earned nearly 3 million views.
Demand for this sort of marketing is on the rise. “It feels very similar right now to a few years ago when we were trying to convince our label partners to really see the value in influencer marketing for their releases,” Hariharan. “Talking about what we can do for live and touring is a fresh new thing.”
“I’ve gone to a lot of country labels and management companies with this,” Cloherty adds. “Entering 2023 marketing anything without an influencer plan doesn’t seem like it’s very holistic, and that’s especially true if you’re trying to get a younger audience.”
Starting Wednesday (Nov. 8), Spotify subscribers in the United States can effortless transition from Britney Spears’ music to her recently released audiobiography, The Woman in Me, thanks to the launch of its previously announced offering of 15 hours of free audiobook streaming per month in Spotify Premium.
The Spotify Premium audiobook catalog includes more than 200,000 titles, over 70% of them bestselling titles from all five major book publishers (Hachette, HarperCollins Publishers, Macmillan, Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster and RB Media) as well as independent publishers such as Bolinda, Dreamscape and Pushkin. Although Spotify has offered audiobooks since Sept. 2022, the user experience has been less than optimal. Users could listen to audiobooks in the Spotify app but, because Spotify wants to avoid costly in-app fees, users must purchase titles at its website.
Spotify announced its audiobook strategy on Oct. 3 and initially gave access to the company’s audiobook catalog only to subscribers in the United Kingdom and Australia. Rolling out audiobook streaming in its largest market will allow Spotify to better capture the expected benefits of offering free listening to a segment of its 226 million subscribers. “This greatly improves our offering, which will increase engagement on Spotify, which will then, of course, reduce churn,” explained CEO Daniel Ek at an Oct. 3 event.
Listeners who exceed the 15-hour monthly allotment can purchase additional listening time. In the early days of the audiobook offering in the United Kingdom and Australia, Spotify has “already seen consumers doing that in ways we probably wouldn’t have imagined, where some consumers are heavily upgrading and being really heavy audiobook listeners [from] day one,” Ek said during the company’s Oct. 24 earnings call.
To help listeners find audiobooks, Spotify offers an audiobook button on the search page and offers an editorially curated selection of popular titles at its audiobooks hub. Listeners can search by category — such as mystery & thriller or self-help — and scroll through lists such as “From book to screen” and “As seen on social media.”
The impetus for audiobook streaming harkens back to Spotify’s origins as a friction-less substitute for digital piracy that had decimated record label revenues by the time Spotify was founded in 2006. “We looked at the world and we thought the only way to beat piracy was to offer a much better experience,” said Ek during the Oct. 3 event. In 2018, Spotify applied the lessons it learned in music to a new format, podcasts, and, Ek claimed, added more than 100 million to podcast listeners to the ecosystem. “This created a win-win,” he explained. “The more people listened to podcasts, the more music grew. And the more people listened to music, the more podcasting grew as well.”
Now, Spotify sees audiobooks as the next opportunity to revitalize an underserved ecosystem with a single dominant player — Amazon-owned Audible in this case. “And just like in music and podcasting,” said Ek, “we’re really excited to be able to bring all the amazing tools that we built for creators and consumers alike to enable more discovery of these amazing audiobooks to the world.”
High-flying former Columbia Records executive Jay Schumer joins Island Records, where he’s named as executive VP, head of marketing & business development.
Announced today (Nov. 8), Schumer will oversee all marketing initiatives for the label’s frontline roster and historic catalog. Based in New York, he reports to Mike Alexander, GM, Island Records.
Justin Eshak and Imran Majid, co-CEOs of Island Records, welcomed the new recruit as one of the top creative minds in the business.
“Jay is one of the most creative, experienced, and respected executives in the industry today. He’s also a music fan first. His passion and dedication to artists and artistry is a huge addition to the Island staff, artists, and our partners,” comment Eshak.
Schumer’s ability to “foster creativity while executing strategic planning is unmatched in every campaign he touches,” adds Majid. “Nothing speaks louder than the relationship he has with his artists and the global success they have had.”
Schumer’s appointment follows the recent decision by ex-head of marketing Sharon Timure to “pursue new opportunities” after 19 years at the label, reads a company statement.
At Columbia Records, Schumer served as senior VP / co-head of marketing, and earned the title of Billboard’s Executive of the Week in 2021, following his contributions to the chart-topping success of Tyler, The Creator, Polo G, and campaigns for Miley Cyrus, blink-182, Pharrell, AC/DC, Dominic Fike and others.
In his new role, Schumer is reunited with Eshak and Majid, whom he worked closely with at Columbia Records, a division of Sony Music.
“I’m so appreciative that Imran and Justin have given me this opportunity to be a part of the exciting culture they’re building at Island.” Schumer comments. “I couldn’t be more honored to reconnect with them at such an iconic and historic label, shaping the future together. I’m thrilled to be working with an incredible roster of artists, staff and the leadership of Justin, Imran and Mike.”
With Young Thug’s gang trial set to start later this month, Atlanta prosecutors are defending their plans to cite his rap lyrics as evidence against him — including by arguing that a manifesto written by the infamous Unabomber would not be inadmissible in court merely if it had been “set to music.”
Thug’s lawyers say his music should be off-limits at the upcoming trial, echoing widespread criticism that the tactic violates the First Amendment and unfairly sways juries. But with a judge set to decide that issue this week, prosecutors aren’t exactly shying away from the controversial practice.
In a motion filed Friday (Nov. 3), the Fulton County District Attorney’s office argued that the lyrics are clearly fair game because they allegedly show Thug (real name Jeffery Williams) and others admitting to being members of a criminal enterprise called YSL — the very crime they’re accused of committing.
“Gang lyric evidence pertaining to the predicate offenses, YSL, its rivals, expectations, and behaviors are all highly pertinent to the defendants’ states of mind and intent in this case,” the DA’s office wrote. “The defendants associated with YSL for criminal purposes.”
In making those arguments, prosecutors also attacked the broader claim that rap music is often unfairly targeted in criminal cases. They accused Thug’s lawyers of seeking an unreasonable “genre-based blanket exclusion” against any evidence that was set “to a beat” — an outcome they said would lead to “an absurd result.” To illustrate how “ridiculous” that position is, prosecutors made a striking comparison.
“Taken to its logical outcome, the defense would seem to opine that if the Unabomber’s manifesto had been set to music, it could not be used against him in any court,” the DA’s office wrote. “According to the defense’s argument, had the Turner Diaries been read with background music, it could not have been introduced against Timothy McVeigh.”
The “Unabomber” refers to terrorist Ted Kaczynski, who killed three and injured dozens by mailing bombs to victims between 1978 and 1995. McVeigh was the white supremacist behind the Oklahoma City bombing in 1994, which left 168 people dead, including 19 children.
In court documents, prosecutors also laid out exactly which Thug lyrics they plan to quote in court during the trial, including: “F– the snitches, need to be in ditches”; “Gave the lawyer close to 2 mil’ he handle all the killings;” and “I was a capo in my hood way before a plaque or a mention.” Prosecutors also listed many other lyrics, including by other YSL members, that they might reference to jurors.
Civil liberties activists and defense attorneys have long criticized the use of rap lyrics to win criminal convictions. They argue that it unfairly targets constitutionally protected speech, treating hyperbolic verse as literal confessions; they also say it can unfairly sway juries by tapping into racial biases.
Lawmakers in California passed legislation last year restricting the use of rap lyrics and other creative expression as evidence in criminal cases, and a federal bill in Congress that would impose similar restrictions has been widely supported by the music industry. But absent such statutes, courts around the country have mostly upheld the right of prosecutors to cite rap lyrics, particularly in gang-related cases.
Thug and dozens of others were indicted in May 2022 over allegations that his “YSL” group was not really a record label called “Young Stoner Life” but a violent Atlanta gang called “Young Slime Life.” Prosecutors claim the group committed murders, carjackings, armed robberies, drug dealing and other crimes over the course of a decade.
After months of delays, a jury was finally seated last week, clearing the way for the trial to kick off on Nov. 27 against Thug and five other remaining defendants. But before then, Judge Ural Glanville must decide on whether the jury can hear his lyrics as part of the prosecution’s case.
In a motion last year, Thug’s attorney, Brian Steel, argued that using the lyrics as evidence was “racist and discriminatory” and would leave the jury “poisoned” against his client. The use of that term was perhaps an allusion to a 2014 ruling by the New Jersey Supreme Court, which overturned a shooting conviction on the grounds that “inflammatory rap verses” had risked “poisoning the jury against the defendant.”
“The admission and use of these lyrics/poetry/artistry against Mr. Williams in his upcoming trial would be a Constitutional violation and an abuse of discretion,” Steele wrote last year in his motion to exclude them from the case. “Mr. Williams has the absolute right, like all persons in America, to exercise lawful speech/expression.”
A hearing over the admissibility of lyrics is set for Wednesday morning (Nov. 8).
Upon its Oct. 27 release, Taylor Swift’s 1989 (Taylor’s Version) quickly eroded both sales and streams of the original 2014 version released by Big Machine Records.
In the week Swift released her album of 1989 re-recordings, the original 1989 had 21,000 album equivalent units (AEUs) — down 43.6% from the previous week and down 36.9% from the trailing 12-week average, according to Billboard analysis of Luminate data for the United States. That was a deeper first-week decline than the previous two times Swift released re-recordings. The original Red lost 38% of its AEUs — a metric that combines physical and digital album sales, track sales and streams — the week Red (Taylor’s Version) was released in November 2021. The original Speak Now dropped 40% the week that Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) came out this past July.
On-demand audio streams for the original 1989 declined 56.4% while track sales — a smaller component of 1989’s total consumption — fell 67.8%. Video streams declined 56.4% and programmed streams (from non-interactive internet radio services such as Pandora) dropped 23.6%. At the same time, 1989 (Taylor’s Version) amassed over 375.49 million on-demand streams — compared with just 27.8 million total on-demand streams for the original over the same period.
The Taylor’s Version series of re-recordings stemmed from Swift’s outrage that her catalog had been acquired by Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings in 2019. News that Braun took ownership of her catalog brought her back to “the incessant, manipulative bullying I’ve received at [Braun’s] hands for years,” she wrote at the time. “Now Scooter has stripped me of my life’s work, that I wasn’t given an opportunity to buy,” she continued. By the end of that year, Swift was talking about recording new versions so her music “could live on,” she told Billboard in a December 2019 interview. “I do want it to be in movies, I do want it to be in commercials. But I only want that if I own it.”
Swift released her first album of re-recordings, for the 2008 album Fearless, in April 2021, and licensed the lead-off single, “Love Story,” to a Match.com television ad. The track debuted at No. 1 on the Hot Country Songs chart and No. 11 on the Hot 100 in February 2021. Fearless (Taylor’s Version) debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 albums chart with 291,000 AEUs.
With each new Taylor’s Version, Swift changes the playbook on how an artist can repackage previously released material for a growing legion of diehard fans. While it’s remarkable that Swift’s album releases have become pop culture moments unto themselves, each new wave of re-recordings carries large business and financial implications, too. If 1989 (Taylor’s Version) performs like its predecessors, the re-recordings will crowd out the original version and further erode the value of the Big Machine original catalog that Shamrock Holdings paid a reported $300 million to acquire in 2020.
Surprisingly, while Swift collectors scooped up 1.36 million units of the 1989 (Taylor’s Version) album — it has five versions on vinyl, eight versions on CD and two versions on cassette — consumers still purchased about 1,000 units of the 1989 album in physical or digital formats during the same period.
Expect more of the same in the coming weeks. If 1989 (Taylor’s Version) follows the trends of the two most recent Taylor’s Version albums that came before it, the original 1989 will lose close to half or more than half of its weekly AEUs. Average weekly consumption of the original Red dropped 40% in the 12 weeks following the release of Red (Taylor’s Version). The original Speak Now lost 59% of its average weekly consumption in the 12 weeks after its counterpart was released.
The lone bright spot for the original 1989 was radio: U.S. airplay spins from the original recordings jumped 57.4% last week. Combined with airplay of the Taylor’s Version recordings, U.S. spins rose an astounding 157.4%. The catch, however, is that recordings do not earn royalties from broadcast radio performances in the United States. As a result, the original recordings’ owner, Shamrock Holdings, benefits only from the promotional value of those radio spins. Swift, however — along with various co-writers and publishing companies — earns publishing royalties when either version of 1989 recordings are played at radio.
Madison Square Garden Entertainment (MSG Entertainment) had revenue of $142.2 million in the quarter ended Sept. 30, down 3% year over year, as it started its first full fiscal year as a standalone live entertainment company.
MSG Entertainment, which spun off from MSG’s Sphere and MSG Networks businesses in April, had lower event-related revenue and faced a tough comparison to the prior-year quarter. Not only did the prior-year quarter benefit from some concerts that were rescheduled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but Madison Square Garden enjoyed a 15-show run from Harry Styles from Aug. 20 to Sept. 21, 2022, that grossed $63.1 million from 277,000 ticket sales, according to Billboard Boxscore.
The company saw “significant” merchandise spending from Styles’ fans at those shows, said Dave Byrnes, MSG Entertainment executive vp/CFO, during Tuesday’s earnings call, and per-capita merchandise spending was down last quarter as a result. Fan spending on food and beverage “was up meaningfully” in the latest quarter, however, and MSG Entertainment is seeing “strong in-venue spending from our guests,” he said.
Strong demand for concerts, also seen in Live Nation’s latest earnings results, will help MSG Entertainment achieve a low double-digit percentage increase in event bookings this fiscal year. The company is getting help from a new generation of musicians who have graduated from smaller buildings in its portfolio to its flagship venue, Madison Square Garden. “This fiscal year, there are a number of acts, including Olivia Rodrigo, Tyler Childers and Niall Horan, who previously performed at either The Beacon [Theatre] or Radio City [Music Hall] that will soon headline the Garden for the first time in their careers,” said Byrnes. What’s more, he added, “a number of these first-time acts” are playing multiple nights and experiencing “strong ticket demand for their entire run.”
Beyond the concert business, MSG Entertainment has high expectations for its family shows. The company has 187 planned shows of its Christmas Spectacular at Radio City Music Hall, up from 181 shows in the prior fiscal year. MSG Entertainment expects paid attendance of about 1 million, bringing the holiday run back to pre-pandemic levels. In addition, Cirque du Soleil’s holiday show is returning after it took the year off in 2022, with 66 shows scheduled across The Theater at Madison Square Garden and the Chicago Theatre.
“We’re currently on sale with more concerts at our venues than we were at this time last year for the second half of fiscal ’23,” said Byrnes, “and of those on-sales, a majority of those tickets are already sold, and sell-through on those shows is currently up [a] high single-digit percentage as compared to the second half of fiscal ’23.”
MSG Entertainment repurchased about 3.5 million shares during the quarter, including repayment of a delayed draw term loan facility from Sphere Entertainment with 1.9 million shares. About 1.6 million shares were repurchased at $31.20 per share as part of the secondary underwritten offering by Sphere Entertainment in September.
Looking forward to the full year, MSG Entertainment reaffirmed its previous guidance of revenue from $900 million to $930 million and adjusted operating income of $160 million to $170 million. It lowered guidance for operating income to $85 million to $95 million, down from $100 million to $110 million.
Shares of MSG Entertainment fell as much as 9.8% to $27.55 on Tuesday morning before recovering to $29.09 by midday, a 4.7% decline from Monday’s closing price.
Fiscal first quarter financial metrics:
Revenue of $142.2 million, down 3% year over year.
Operating loss of $33.4 million, up 196% year over year.
Adjusted operating loss of $700,000, down from a $11.5 million operating profit.
Net loss of $50.7 million, up 183% year over year.
This is The Legal Beat, a weekly newsletter about music law from Billboard Pro, offering you a one-stop cheat sheet of big new cases, important rulings and all the fun stuff in between.
This week: Mariah Carey is hit with a copyright lawsuit over “All I Want for Christmas Is You”; a federal appeals court issues a first-of-its-kind ruling on copyright protections for dance routines; Taylor Swift gets named-dropped at the Supreme Court; and much more.
THE BIG STORY: Mariah Sued Over Iconic Christmas Track (Again)
Just in time for the holidays, Mariah Carey is facing rebooted allegations that she ripped off her perennially-chart-topping “All I Want for Christmas Is You” from an earlier song of the same name.
Vince Vance (real name Andy Stone) first sued Carey last summer, claiming her 1994 holiday blockbuster infringed the copyrights to a 1989 song of the exact same name recorded by his Vince Vance and the Valiants. But the bare-bones complaint included few details about the alleged infringement, and the case was quickly dropped a few months later.
Now, Stone is back — both with new lawyers and with a more fleshed-out lawsuit.
Those new attorneys hail from Gerard Fox Law, the same firm that represented two songwriters in their lawsuit accusing Taylor Swift of stealing the lyrics to “Shake It Off” from 3LW’s “Playas Gon’ Play,” which also featured lyrics about “playas” and “haters.” After five years of litigation against the biggest pop star in the world, including a successful trip to the Ninth Circuit, Stone has certainly found himself battle-tested plaintiff lawyers to go after Carey.
And where the original complaint was short on specifics, the new one is chock full of them, including that she made up the story of how she wrote the song and that her own co-writer, Walter Afanasieff, has disputed that story.
“Carey has without licensing, palmed off these works with her incredulous origin story, as if those works were her own,” Vance’s new lawyers wrote in the re-filed complaint. “Her hubris knowing no bounds, even her co-credited songwriter doesn’t believe the story she has spun. This is simply a case of actionable infringement.”
Go read our entire story here, including the full complaint filed against Carey.
Other top stories this week…
CHOREOGRAPHY COPYRIGHTS – The Ninth Circuit issued a first-of-its-kind ruling on copyright protections for dance routines, reviving a case that accuses Fortnite creator Epic Games of stealing copyrighted moves from choreographer Kyle Hanagami, who’s worked with BTS, Jennifer Lopez, Justin Bieber and Britney Spears. The decision came after years of efforts by other dancers to secure better ownership of their routines, including Beyoncé and Megan Thee Stallion choreographer JaQuel Knight, as detailed by Rebecca Milzoff in her excellent 2020 Billboard cover story.
SCOTUS SWIFTIES? – Capping a year in which Taylor Swift’s name has dropped on Capitol Hill, at the Department of Justice and on NFL broadcasts, it came up last week during Supreme Court arguments in a major case over social media and the First Amendment, as part of legal hypothetical raised by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
YSL CASE SET FOR TRIAL – After months of delays, a jury was finally seated in the massive criminal case against Young Thug and other alleged members of an Atlanta street gang, clearing the way for a trial to begin later this month. But will it feature rap lyrics as evidence? Stay tuned this week…
STEVEN TYLER ACCUSED AGAIN – The Aerosmith frontman was hit with a second lawsuit accusing him of sexually assaulting a minor decades ago, this time by a woman who says he forcibly kissed and groped her in New York City in 1975 when she was just 17.
AI FAIR USE ARGUMENT – Artificial intelligence firm Anthropic PBC told the U.S. Copyright Office this week that the massive scraping of copyrighted materials to train AI models ought to be considered “quintessentially lawful” – perhaps offering a preview of arguments the company will make in its upcoming legal battle with Universal Music Group (UMG) over those very same issues.
TICKET BOT CRACKDOWN – As reported by Billboard’s Dave Brooks, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) announced that she would roll out new legislation to beef up the BOTS ACT — a rarely-enforced 2016 law that outlawed the use of bots to attack ticket sales and jump the line to buy tickets ahead of consumers. If passed, the amendment will create a new forum for online ticket sellers to report successful bot attacks to the Federal Trade Commission, which is tasked with enforcing the statute.
CONTRACT RESTRICTIONS (TAYLOR’S VERSION) – Will trying to prevent the next ‘Taylor’s Version’ backfire on record labels? Following up on Steve Knopper’s reporting on new contractual restrictions pushed by labels in the wake of Taylor Swift‘s massively-successful re-recording campaign, music attorney Chris Castle argues that record companies might want to think twice.