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Paris-based music company Believe delivered strong results in its first year as a privately held company. Full-year revenue rose 12.3% to 988.8 million euros ($1.05 billion), with 11.5% of organic growth, the company announced Thursday (March 13). Adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA), a common measure of profitability, improved 33.5% to 67.1 million euros ($71 million). Revenue had been up 14% at the year’s mid-point.
This year should be equally strong: Believe forecasts organic growth of 13.0% in 2025 despite “limited ad-funded streaming growth” and assuming “no significant subscription price increases” at large music streaming platforms.
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Believe’s major event of the year was a successful bid by a consortium formed by TCV funds, EQT X and CEO Denis Ladegaillerie to take the company private. The consortium owns 96.6% of Believe’s share capital, leaving the company with a small public float. After the deal was completed, Believe’s board of directors added a new director representing EQT X, former Shazam CEO Andrew Fisher. A director representing Ventech, which sold its shares to the consortium, departed the board.
The company was also active in acquiring, partnering on and launching new businesses last year. It debuted two new imprints in Asia in 2024: PlayCode in Japan and Krumulo in Indonesia. It also fully acquired Turkish record label DMC in August; launched EDM label All Night Long in partnership with artist management company Kidding Aside; acquired Indian record label White Hill Music; and formed a partnership with EDM company Global Records, in which Believe acquired a 25% stake in July.
Believe saw strong growth in both its premium solutions and automated solutions divisions. Premium solutions, which mainly consists of the sale and promotion of digital content for artists and labels, had revenue of 942.2 million euros ($997 million), up 12.0% year over year. Automated solutions fared even better, improving 17.0% to 64.6 million euros ($68 million).
Digital sales grew above 10% throughout the year. Non-digital sales, which includes music publisher Sentric Music Group, which Believe acquired in 2023, were strong until September but were hurt in the fourth quarter by accounting changes in publishing in automated solutions, which includes digital distributor TuneCore, and lower concert activity and physical sales in premium solutions.
In Believe’s home country and largest single market, France, revenues grew 10.3% to 162.9 million euros ($172 million). Non-digital sales in France fell in the fourth quarter due to a drop in concert activity. Germany, the company’s second-largest single market, was up just 0.4% to 111.3 million euros ($118 million). Non-digital sales in Germany fell due to Believe’s decision to accelerate its exit from contracts the company called “too heavily reliant on physical sales and merchandising.”
European revenues (excluding France and Germany) rose 23.3% while the Americas grew 18.0% to 151.2 million euros ($160 million), due in part to “significant progress” in the U.S. and the performance of TuneCore. Revenue growth in Asia Pacific and Africa was far softer at 3.5%, to 237 million euros ($251 million), due to weak ad-supported streaming revenues and foreign exchange changes. Paid streaming, while less valuable than ad-supported streaming in Asia Pacific and Africa, “remained solid” but was negatively impacted in India by the shutdown of the streaming platform Wynk.
Offset is suing a producer who worked on his 2023 album Set It Off, claiming the one-time collaborator has been demanding a large increase in fees and royalties long after the deal was done.
In a lawsuit filed in Los Angeles federal court, attorneys for the former Migos member say that reps for ChaseTheMoney (Chase Rose) signed a contract ahead of the album’s October 2023 release, covering payment for his production work on the track “Worth It.” But months later, ChaseTheMoney’s new manager allegedly reached out to demand more money for the same work.
“The new manager proposed new terms for the producer agreement, including a producer fee that was more than five times the amount of the producer fee that was agreed upon, and a royalty percentage more than double,” Offset’s lawyers write in their Tuesday (March 11) court complaint.
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After Offset’s team “promptly responded” the deal had already been locked down and “would not be re-negotiated,” his lawyers say reps for ChaseTheMoney repeatedly offered other versions of the contract, each containing “different proposals as to the financial terms.”
When Offset’s team allegedly continued to refuse to alter the deal, the lawsuit claims that ChaseTheMoney began claiming that the previous manager who had negotiated the Set It Off deal — a man identified only as J Hill in court documents — was actually “not his manager” at the time the original deal was struck.
But according to Tuesday’s lawsuit, ChaseTheMoney clearly sent them to J Hill to work out the deal, saying the producer told Offset and his team via text message that Hill would “figure logistics” for clearing his contributions to “Worth It.”
“ChaseTheMoney referred to J Hill as his manager in various correspondence to Offset and his A&R team [and] ChaseTheMoney directed Offset and his A&R team to discuss the clearance of the recording with J Hill on ChaseTheMoney’s behalf,” Offset’s lawyers write. “J Hill had confirmed in writing that he represented ChaseTheMoney as his manager, and no person affiliated with or connected to ChaseTheMoney had ever claimed or contended prior to July of 2024 that that J Hill was not ChaseTheMoney’s manager.”
The terms of the original deal, according to Offset, gave Chase a $10,000 producer fee and half of the 2 percent producer royalty, minus certain amounts that were deemed recording costs and recoupable advances.
When reached for comment Thursday (March 13) via direct message on Instagram, ChaseTheMoney said: “I’m not being sued. It’s the other way around lol.” He declined to comment further, then deleted those messages. After a review of court records, Billboard was not able to locate a lawsuit filed by Chase against Offset.
Reps for Offset did not immediately return requests for comment on Thursday.
In technical terms, the lawsuit filed this week is what’s known as a “declaratory judgment” action —meaning Offset is not accusing Chase of legal wrongdoing but instead is arguing that Chase is improperly accusing him of doing something wrong. By filing such a case, Offset is asking a judge to rule that the original contract is valid and enforceable and that he has complied with all of its requirements.
Tuesday isn’t the first time Offset has filed such a lawsuit over a music contract.
Back in 2022, the rapper filed a similar declaratory judgment lawsuit against Quality Control Music, the record label that helped launch his career as a member of Migos. In it, he claimed the company was continuing to seek to control of his solo work, even though he had “paid handsomely” for the right to break free from his original record deal: “Offset now brings this action to vindicate his rights and to make it clear to the world that Offset, not Quality Control, owns Offset’s music.”
The star later dropped that lawsuit in August 2023.
For decades, rock music dominated the sales charts, with bands like the Beatles, AC/DC, the Eagles, the Rolling Stones, Fleetwood Mac and Led Zeppelin among some of the top-selling acts in recorded music history. But while rock music remains the second-biggest genre in the U.S., it lags far behind market leader R&B/hip-hop and third-placed pop when it comes to streaming.
For the prior year ended Jan. 2, 2025, R&B/hip-hop led the U.S. industry with 27.2% of audio consumption units, besting rock by just 1.7%, the latter coming in at 25.5%, according to Luminate. (These figures subtract activity from titles unassigned to any genre.) But for current market share — defined by Luminate as releases from the last 18 months — rock’s share of the market slips to 11.9%, less than half of that 25.5% mark that includes catalog titles, too.
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That might help explain some of the weakness of rock’s biggest acts in the streaming era. For decades, the music industry measured success using numbers in the millions: an album or song that sold 1 million copies was a platinum record; a diamond record, at 10 million copies, was a smash success. But while those milestones still apply for albums, the streaming era means the industry measures success in the hundreds of millions — and, increasingly, in the billions for huge success stories.
That makes 1 billion annual on-demand U.S. streams a reliable barometer of success for the biggest acts in the country, with the 2 billion stream plateau seemingly the measure of superstar status. But it’s heavily skewed towards genres — like R&B/hip-hop and pop — that have thrived in the streaming format. In 2024, streaming accounted for 91.2% of U.S. album consumption unit totals, vs. 8.8% from sales; while rock leads in market share for the sales formats with 35.8%, it trails R&B/hip-hop in streaming by a whopping 10 percentage points, 19.69% to 29.78%, respectively.
Last year, 51 artist catalogs passed the 2 billion stream mark in the U.S., not including any collaborations, according to Luminate. Of those artists, only one core rock artist hit that milestone: Linkin Park, at 2.25 billion. Meanwhile, four country artists — Morgan Wallen, Zach Bryan, Luke Combs and Chris Stapleton — achieved that distinction, as did three Latin artists, Bad Bunny, Peso Pluma and Fuerza Regida. Another 11 artists that passed the 2 billion stream mark could be considered pop, including Taylor Swift (16.5 billion on-demand streams); Billie Eilish (5.16 billion); and Noah Kahan (3.2 billion). That means the vast majority of artists with over 2 billion streams in 2024 — 32, to be exact — could be considered R&B/hip-hop, led by Drake, the artist with the second-biggest stream count in the U.S. at 10.1 billion streams in 2024, down slightly from the prior year’s 11.5 billion. (Equivalent album units and streaming figures cited in this story include user generated content (UGC) on-demand streams, which are not factored into any of Billboard‘s chart rankings.)
So while it might be easy to think that rock bands like Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Elton John, the Beatles, the Eagles, Metallica, Bruce Springsteen and the Rolling Stones are among the biggest artists in the U.S, the big names in R&B/hip-hop swamp the iconic rock bands when it comes to streaming counts.
For example, not only did none of the above recording acts pass the 2 billion stream mark in 2024, but none of them have hit that milestone in the last five years. By comparison, attaining the 2 billion stream milestone is fairly routine for R&B/hip-hop acts — in fact, a strong contingent of R&B/hip-hop and pop artists annually surpass even 3 billion on-demand streams each year.
Billboard analyzed more than 90 of the top acts in the U.S. and compiled an average of each act’s annual stream count over the five-year period of 2020-2024, with Taylor Swift (10.74 billion average annual streams) and Drake (9.2 billion annually) leading the way. And many of the R&B/hip-hop artists analyzed showed hugely impressive averages. For that 2020-2024 period, those artists include NBA YoungBoy, whose five-year annual average for the U.S. on-demand streams stands at 6.2 billion; Juice WRLD (4.8 billion); The Weeknd (4.6 billion); Kanye West (4.043 billion); Eminem (4.037 billion); Future (3.7 billion); Kendrick Lamar (3.3 billion); J. Cole (3.15 billion); and Travis Scott (2.79 billion), according to Billboard calculations based on Luminate data.
Among rock artists, it’s a completely different story; only in the last two to three years have some of the other big-name rock artists hit the latter milestone.
Nevertheless, of the 45 or so big-name rock acts that Billboard examined for this article, eight have achieved the 1 billion milestone in each of the past five years, and one band — Imagine Dragons — reached 2 billion twice (2.3 billion in 2022 and 2.47 billion in 2023), making it the only rock act to average north of 2 billion over the period (2.04 billion).
Of the remaining bands with five years all over the 1 billion stream mark, one of those rock acts is the most famous band in the world, the Beatles; and, at a 1.91 billion average, they are the only other rock act even close to 2 billion annual streams. The other rock acts to reach the mark every year are Queen (1.38 billion annual average streams); AC/DC (1.2 billion annual average); Linkin Park (1.5 billion average, having broken the 2 billion mark in 2024); Maroon 5 (1.73 billion); Coldplay (1.6 billion); and Twenty One Pilots (1.24 billion).
Four other rock acts averaged over 1 billion streams annually during the period, but only hit the mark four times: Metallica (1.26 billion); the Red Hot Chili Peppers (1.15 billion); Panic! At the Disco (1.1 billion); and the Eagles (nearly 1.1 billion). Elton John (1.02 billion average) hit the mark in three of the years from the five-year period, as did Elvis, whose annual average was just shy of 935 million.
The Rolling Stones (958 million annual average) and Creedence Clearwater Revival (955 million) each hit 1 billion streams twice during the past five years, while Green Day, Billy Joel and Radiohead accomplished it once.
That leaves some major names that have yet to reach the 1 billion mark. Of the bands Billboard chose to examine, that includes Led Zeppelin, who averaged nearly 931 million streams annually over the last five years; and Pink Floyd, at an annual average of 844 million streams. Guns ‘N Roses, Aerosmith, Van Halen, The Beach Boys and the Killers all averaged between 500 million and 800 million streams annually for the period, while David Bowie, the Police, Grateful Dead and Creed were between 300 million and 500 million annually.
Still, 300 million streams is nothing to sneeze at. These days, that would bring in nearly $1.6 million in master recording revenues alone, Billboard estimates.
Free Our Art, a new non-profit dedicated to safeguarding First Amendment creative freedoms for artists, has officially launched with widespread support from major arts advocacy groups and creative industry leaders.
The nonprofit focuses on the growing trend of creative works being used as confessions in court, advocating for state and federal legislation to limit this practice, supporting legal aid for defendants and funding research.
Free Our Art backs legislation establishing a single standard for admitting creative expression as evidence in court. The bipartisan federal Restoring Artistic Protection (RAP) Act was reintroduced in 2023, and states including Georgia, Maryland, Missouri and New York are considering similar bills. This follows cases where courts have overturned convictions due to prejudicial use of lyrics as evidence.
The movement began in the music industry, where artists have faced increasing legal scrutiny, particularly in hip-hop.
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Supporters include the Recording Academy, Black Music Action Coalition, Recording Industry Association of America, Songwriters of North America and SAG-AFTRA, among others. The organization’s leadership includes Harvey Mason jr., Julie Greenwald and Lyor Cohen, with advisory boards co-chaired by advocates and scholars including Dina LaPolt, Willie “Prophet” Stiggers, Dr. Erik Nielson and Lucius Outlaw III.
“RIAA is proud to stand with the creative community supporting free expression,” said Michele Ballantyne, president and COO of RIAA. “Free Our Art stands for responsible, balanced legislative approaches that protect the First Amendment and safeguard and encourage all forms of creative expression while allowing reasonable, limited use of artist works in court only where they are truly relevant and necessary and not being used to inflame and distort the process.”
Mason jr. added: “Music has always been a powerful tool for storytelling and self-expression, and unfairly silencing any genre or form of creativity is a violation against all music people. With the Free Our Art coalition, the Recording Academy will continue leading the fight to protect artists’ right to create freely, without fear of their work being criminalized.”
According to Free Our Art, scholars have documented nearly 700 cases where lyrics, primarily in hip-hop, were used in legal proceedings — with actual instances likely much higher. The group also cites a 2019 study at Arizona State University School of Law that found judges often fail to exclude creative works as character evidence, underscoring the need for legislative action.
Calling an artist’s right to create without fear “non-negotiable,” LaPolt, co-founder of SONA, said that “twisting creative expression into courtroom evidence isn’t just wrong—it’s a blatant attack on our First Amendment rights. This isn’t about one artist or one genre; it’s about protecting every creator from a dangerous legal precedent.”
The issue of lyrics being used in court gained renewed attention following the May 2022 indictment of rappers Young Thug and Gunna on RICO charges, where prosecutors cited song lyrics as evidence of gang affiliation. Young Thug received a 15-year probation sentence, while Gunna was released in December 2022 after pleading guilty to a gang-related charge.
Free Our Art aims to prevent similar cases from unfairly targeting artists based on their creative expression. More information on the organization’s efforts can be found here.
Memphis rapper Key Glock is officially joining Republic Records. As he continues to tease his upcoming album, Glockavelli, Republic announced exclusively with Billboard that Glock will be joining their roster. In addition to this new partnership, he’ll also remain under the late Young Dolph’s label, Paper Route Empire (PRE). The signing marks an exciting new […]
Last month, Vice President J.D. Vance represented the U.S. at the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris. In a speech addressing top leaders from around the world, he declared, “I think our response [to AI] is to be too self-conscious, too risk-averse, but never have I encountered a breakthrough in tech that so clearly calls us to do precisely the opposite. […] We believe excessive regulation of the AI sector could kill a transformative industry just as it’s taking off.”
Vance’s comments marked a stark shift from the Biden administration, which often spoke about weighing AI’s “profound possibilities” with its “risks,” as the former president put it in his farewell address in January. In the wake of Vance’s remarks in Paris, it’s clear that in the Trump White House, AI safety is out and the race for dominance is in. What does that mean for the music business and its quest to protect copyrights and publicity rights in the AI age?
“All the focus is on the competition with China, so national security has become the number one issue with AI in the Trump administration,” says Mitch Glazier, CEO/president of the Recording Industry Association of America. “But for our industry, it’s interesting. The [Trump administration] does seem to be saying at the same time that we also need to be ‘America First’ with our [intellectual property] too. It’s both ‘America First’ for IP and ‘America First’ for AI.”
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That, Glazier thinks, provides an opportunity for the music business to continue to push its AI agenda in D.C. While the president does not have the remit to make alterations to copyright protection in the U.S., the Trump administration still has powerful sway with the Republican-dominated legislative branch, where the RIAA, the Recording Academy and others have been fighting to get new protections for music on the books. Glazier says there’s been no change in strategy there — it’s still full steam ahead, trying to get those bills passed into law in 2025.
Top copyright attorney Jacqueline Charlesworth, partner at Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz, still fears that Vance’s speech — as well as President Trump’s inauguration in January, where he was flanked by top executives from Apple, Meta, Amazon and Alphabet — “reflected a lot of influence from the large tech platforms.” Many major tech companies have taken the position that training their AI models on copyrights does not require consent, credit or compensation. “My concern is that creators and copyright owners will be casualties in the AI race,” she says.
For David Israelite, president/CEO of the National Music Publishers’ Association, it’s still too early to totally understand the new administration’s views on copyright and AI. But, he says, “we are concerned when the language is about rushing to train these models — and that becoming a more important principle than how they are trained.”
Glazier holds out hope that Trump’s bullish approach to trade agreements with other nations could benefit American copyright owners and may influence trade partners to honor U.S. copyrights. Specifically, he points to the U.K., where the government has recently proposed granting AI companies unrestricted access to copyrighted material for training their models unless the rights holder manually opts out. Widely despised by copyright holders of all kinds, the music industry has protested the opt-out proposal in recent weeks through op-eds in national newspapers, comments to the U.K. government and through a silent album, Is This What We Want?, co-authored by a thousand U.K. artists, including Kate Bush, Damon Albarn and Hans Zimmer.
Organized by AI developer, musician and founder of AI safety non-profit Fairly Trained, Ed Newton-Rex, Is This What We Want? features silent tracks recorded in famous studios around London to demonstrate the potential consequences of not protecting copyrighted songs. “The artists and the industry in the U.K. have done an incredible job,” says Glazier. “If for some reason the U.K. does impose this opt-out, which we think is totally unworkable, then this administration may have an opportunity to apply pressure because of a renewal of trade negotiations.”
Israelite agrees. “Much of the intellectual property fueling these AI models is American,” he says. “The U.S. tackles copyright issues all the time in trade agreements, so we are always looking into that angle of it.”
It’s not just American music industry trade groups that have been following the Trump administration’s approach to AI. Abbas Lightwalla, director of global legal policy for the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), the global organization representing the interests of the recorded music business, says he and his colleagues followed Vance’s Paris speech “with great interest,” and that future trade agreements between the U.S. and other nations are “absolutely on the radar,” given that IFPI advocates across the world for the music industry’s interests in trade negotiations. “It’s crucial to us that copyright is protected in every market,” he says. “It’s a cross-border issue… If the U.S. is doing the same, then I think that’s a benefit to every culture everywhere to be honest.”
Charlesworth says this struggle is nothing new; the music industry has dealt with challenges to copyright protection for decades. “In reflecting on this, I feel like, starting in the ‘90s and 2000s, the tech business had this ‘take now, pay later’ mentality to copyright. Now, it feels like it’s turned into ‘take now, and see if you can get away with it.’ It’s not even pay later.”
As the AI race continues to pick up at a rapid pace, Israelite says he’s “not that hopeful that we are going to see any kind of government action quickly that would give us guidance” — so he’s also watching the active lawsuits surrounding AI training and copyright closely and looking to the commercial space for businesses in AI and IP that are voluntarily working out solutions together. “We’re very involved and focused on partnerships with AI that can help pave the way for how this technology provides new revenue opportunities for music, not just threats,” he says.
Glazier says he’s working in the commercial marketplace, too. “We have 60 licensing agreements in place right now between AI companies and music companies,” he says. Meanwhile, the RIAA is still watching the two lawsuits it spearheaded for the three major music companies against AI music startups Suno and Udio and is working to get bills like the NO FAKES Act and NO AI FRAUD Act passed into law.
“While IP wasn’t on the radar in Vance’s speech, the aftermath of it totally shifted the conversation,” says Glazier. “We just have to keep working to protect copyrights.”
Bad Bunny’s sports agency, Rimas Sports, and the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA) reached an agreement this month (March 6) to settle a lawsuit over penalties tied to improper inducements, according to Associated Press. The parties filed a stipulation with U.S. District Judge Jennifer H. Rearden in Manhattan, confirming that they had resolved the […]
Streaming remained the dominant force in the recorded music in 2024, but its impact dropped slightly.
For the first time, streaming’s share of total recorded music revenue did not increase from the previous year, according to MIDiA Research’s latest annual tally. In 2024, streaming accounted for 61.3% of total revenue, down from 62.4% in 2023.
Streaming revenue also had a slower rate of increase than in prior years, growing 6.2% compared to 10.3% in 2023 and 8.3% in 2022. And streaming drove less industry growth than in years past. In 2024, streaming accounted for 58.5% of annual revenue growth, down from 64.6% in 2023.
Platforms such as Spotify accounted for $22.2 billion of revenue last year and accounted for the lion’s share of the $36.2 billion of global revenue. That, too, marked a slowdown, as the 6.5% increase in total revenue was down from 9.7% in 2023 and 6.7% in 2022.
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As MIDiA Research succinctly put it: “The much anticipated streaming revenue deceleration—despite recent price increases—has now arrived.”
Price increase in 2023 by Spotify, YouTube Music, Amazon Music Unlimited and Apple Music helped fuel that year’s near-double-digit streaming gain. Spotify raised prices in the U.S. in 2024, too, and gave subscribers the option to opt into a less expensive, audiobook-free tier, although a Morgan Stanley survey found that just 17% of individual premium subscribers had done so last year.
Faced with the realities of market growth, the growth-minded record industry is looking to streaming services to continue raising prices and offer super-premium tiers at elevated prices for subsets of subscribers. In March, Universal Music Group chief digital officer Michael Nash stated the company is in talks with multiple streaming platforms about super-premium tiers. “We think this is going to be an important development for segmentation of the market,” he said.
The decline in streaming’s influence aren’t likely to be seen in other organizations’ annual figures because MIDiA Research’s global revenue estimates includes expanded rights such as merchandise, licensing and touring (as well as production music). In 2024, global expanded rights revenue reached $4.1 billion, up from $3.5 billion and $3.0 billion in 2023 and 2022, respectively. As a share of total revenue, expanded rights rose to 11.3% in 2024 from 10.0% in 2023 and 9.7% in 2022. If expanded rights are removed from the total figures, streaming’s share of revenue falls just barely to 69.2% in 2024 from 69.3% in 2023.
Elsewhere in the global industry, segments other than Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group gained market share in 2024.
UMG again had the largest market share with revenue of $10.5 billion, but the company’s percentage share of the global market fell one percentage point. Sony Music Group grew its market share to 21.7% and was the fastest-growing major label for the second consecutive year.
Artist direct revenue—which covers independent artists that use do-it-yourself distributors such as TuneCore, CD Baby and DistroKid—were $2.0 billion, and the 4.7% growth rate bested the 4.5% growth of 2023. The growth of the number of independent artists using these distributors grew three and a half times as fast as revenue.
Non-major labels increased their market share for the third straight year, improving to 29.7% in 2024 from 29.2% in 2023. Those non-majors had revenue of $10.7 billion, up 8.2% from the prior year. Non-majors’ streaming revenue increased 8.4% to $5.4 billion. Expanded rights income—companies such as HYBE and SM Entertainment in South Korea represent multiple aspects of their artists’ careers—grew to $1.6 billion, and 66% of that revenue came from four Asian record labels. Non-majors’ physical sales fell 6.4%, however.
Avant Gardner revealed the new look for the Brooklyn Mirage today, releasing new renderings for the marquee dance venue that doubles as the inner courtyard for the 80,000-sq.-ft. live music compound in East Williamsburg. Closed in November to begin renovations, CEO Josh Wyatt says the new Brooklyn Mirage will keep its open sky outdoor aesthetic while expanding its dance floor from a 4,500-person capacity to 6,250 when it reopens May 1.
Wyatt, who has two decades of experience in nightlife, including management at the members-only social club NeueHouse, describes the bold new look of Brooklyn Mirage as “operatic grandeur” created as an “open air sanctuary” where “world-class artists and audiences unite” across a multilayered tapestry of light, sound and kinetic energy. Created by Avant Gardner’s in-house design and production team, in partnership with design studios Hard Feelings and Studio Greenbank, Brooklyn Mirage’s dance floor, elevated seating tiers and artist end stage all connect in a horseshoe-style configuration.
“It’s a huge dance floor, really, the largest in New York City,” Wyatt tells Billboard “And then when you’re looking at the overall structure, it’s three stories high and reveals itself as you traverse the structure through different sight lines and experiences. That’s something that the Mirage has always excelled at; providing these different moments from different perspectives within the venue.”
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The massive structure, which climbs up to 65 feet and its highest point, is built almost entirely from pre-manufactured and CNC-cut timber, making it one of the largest timber structures in the U.S. The 30k resolution wraparound LED wall features the first fully kinetic shutter system in live music, curtaining the length of the venue and giving artists full control over the venue’s comprehensive performance features. Brooklyn Mirage’s sound system is powered by L-Acoustics and includes more than 100 loud speakers and subwoofers strategically configuered for maximum sound balance and acoustic coverage. Brooklyn Mirage’s 90-foot stage is designed to accomodate modern touring shows, whether it be a global headliner DJ or a ten-piece rock group, with more than 20,000 tons of rigging capacity and seamless load-in and load-out.
Wyatt said his team has also made key upgrades to safety with new perimeter lighting, clear venue signage, and well lit and monitored rideshare drop-off zones. His team also invested in upgrading cell service at the venue to improve guest navigation and connectivity. Wyatt said the renovations were done with sustainability in mind, noting the facilities extensive use of pre-fabricated timber.
“Wood is a heck of a lot easier to engineer than other materials,” Wyatt said. “We have a commitment to sustainability and adaptive reuse and wanted to upcycle the wood components here. We felt that it would be a lot more friendly and like lower carbon footprint to be able to build it with predominantly with wood. Obviously, there are some steel elements but for building quickly and building efficiently, wood is more effective for engineering and for sustainability.”
More than 100 shows are confirmed to follow Brooklyn Mirages May 1 & 2 reopening with Sara Landry and upcoming shows from Cityfox (May 3), Cloonee (May 10), Empire of the Sun (May 21), two nights of Chainsmokers (May 22 & 23) and two nights of Excision (May 24-25).
For tickets and the latest event updates, visit Avant-Gardner.com.
Sony Music is suing the University of Southern California (USC) for more than $25 million over claims that the college sports powerhouse illegally used songs by Michael Jackson, Beyonce and AC/DC in TikTok and Instagram videos hyping its teams.
In a complaint filed Tuesday (March 11) in New York federal court, the music giant says the school posted more than 250 videos featuring over 170 unlicensed tracks to its social media channels, including those by Britney Spears, Harry Styles, SZA, Mariah Carey, OutKast, Pink Floyd and Travis Scott.
“USC has one of the most lucrative college sports programs in the world, realizing over $200 million annually in revenues from its participation in a multi-billion dollar college sports,” the label’s attorneys write. “Despite having been on notice of its infringing conduct, USC has repeatedly failed to obtain licenses for its use of Sony Music sound recording.”
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Seeking $150,000 in so-called statutory damages for every song used, the lawsuit is demanding more than $25 million in potential damages — or more, if Sony can prove that it suffered even greater losses.
According to Sony Music, USC was notified of the problem as early as June 2021 and has been repeatedly warned since
“Rather than cease this infringing conduct, USC chose to flout copyright law, repeatedly posting new videos to the USC Social Media Pages that use Sony Music sound recordings knowingly and willfully and without permission,” the company wrote. “USC even left many uses available online after being put on notice from Sony Music that they were infringing.”
Social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram provide huge libraries of licensed music for users to add to their videos. But there’s a key restriction: The songs can’t be used for commercial or promotional videos posted by brands. That kind of content requires a separate “synch” license, just like any conventional advertisement on TV.
That crucial distinction has led to numerous lawsuits in recent years.
Beginning in 2021, all three majors sued drink maker Bang Energy over its TikTok videos, with Universal Music Group (UMG) and Sony Music eventually winning large judgments. In May, Sony filed a case against Marriott over accusations that the hotel chain had used nearly 1,000 of its songs in social media posts. In July, Kobalt and other publishers sued more than a dozen NBA teams over the same thing. The restaurant chain Chili’s has been sued twice, once by the Beastie Boys and later by UMG over tracks from Ariana Grande, Justin Bieber and dozens of other artists.
In Tuesday’s case against USC, attorneys for Sony say that the school’s own social media brand guidelines expressly warned against using copyrighted music in videos: “If you want to feature ‘popular music’ in your video, as in music you hear on the radio, you must license it from the publishing company and or record company,” USC’s guide allegedly reads.
“In flagrant disregard of this clear guidance, USC itself has distributed hundreds of videos (if not more) which contain infringing uses of Sony Music’s sound recordings,” Sony’s lawyers write in the lawsuit. “These uses were made without permission, without compensation to Sony Music and its artists, and in violation of USC’s own written guidelines.”
A spokesperson for USC did not immediately return a request for comment on Wednesday (March 12).