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Warner Music Latin America and management and promotion company OCESA Seitrack are launching a booking and brand partnership agency for artists, together with broadcaster Sergio “Checho” Rodríguez. All Warner Music artists will have access to the services offered.
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The joint venture, called “Touring the World,” will be helmed by Rodriguez — operating from offices in Colombia, Mexico, Spain and the United States — and will offer artists support in different areas related to touring, brand partnerships, booking and other artist services. It will be supported by Warner Music’s expertise and infrastructure as well as OCESA Seitrack’s massive commercial structure in multiple countries. Touring the World will also have support from its existing artist services company, Get In, which is owned by Warner Music Spain.
The new joint venture, says Warner Music Latin America president Alejandro Duque, “signifies a pivotal moment, as we combine our experience to deliver professional services and global opportunities for artists.”
“This is a joint venture and the vision is for it to be independent,” adds Duque. “We want to avoid conflicts of interest, and for that to work, it has to be an independent agency.”
Not all Warner artists, for example, will be part of Touring the World nor will they be compelled to sign with the agency. By the same token, OCESA Seitrack, which is a massive concert promoter and management company with clients like Alejandro Sanz and Ha*Ash, will continue to operate its other businesses, separate from Touring the World.
Touring the World wants to “expand the concept of booking and provide a solution for artists so they can have both a touring strategy together with branding and sponsorship efforts,” says Alex Mizrahi, CEO and founder of OCESA Seitrack. The company will focus on artists “that are heating up and who we think have global potential.”
The list of artists currently signed to Touring the World include Piso 21, Manuel Medrano, Elena Rose, Yng Lucas, Blessd, Molotov, Lagos and Ximena Sariñana. Of note is that Touring The World is not looking to become a management company or a concert promotion company if one is already in place.
“We don’t want to take away business or management from anyone. We’ll work with existing managers if they’re interested […] But, it’s very important for us to have the best interests of the artists in mind,” says Mizrahi. “Over the past 20 years at OCESA Seitrack, we’ve meticulously built the touring commercial structure we possess today. This alliance between friends and renowned professionals promises immense benefits for the artists and managers we collaborate with.”
The notion of Touring the World was sparked over a friendly breakfast with Duque, Mizrahi and Rodríguez, a concert promoter who was also a director at GTS, UMG’s artist management and services company for Latin and Spanish artists. Under the GTS model, however, artists are managed or co-managed by GTS, while Touring the World will not be acting as management.
“Touring the World is created by and for artists and their fans,” says Rodríguez, who will oversee teams in Colombia and Mexico and work closely with Spain’s Get In. “This alliance fills me with excitement, standing alongside the finest partners one could ask for.”
Beyond their respective expertise, the partners also bring to the table in-culture and in-country expertise throughout Latin America and Spain.
Iñigo Argomaniz, founder and CEO of Get In, states: “The union of these forces for the creation of ‘Touring the World’ is exciting and will enable a wide range of opportunities to develop the careers of Spanish artists in America.”
Hulu has scrapped a reality show that was to follow Sean “Diddy” Combs and his family, according to a new report in Rolling Stone. Though it’s not clear when Hulu stopped making the show, the report comes after multiple allegations of sexual assault and abuse were lodged against the rapper and entrepreneur over the past month.
The project, which reportedly had a working title of Diddy+7, was being produced for Hulu by James Corden‘s production company, Fulwell 73, which also works on The Kardashians. A source with knowledge of the situation tells Billboard the show was in its nascent stages and is not currently in production.
Combs has been sued for sexual assault by a total of four women, including his longtime romantic partner, R&B singer Cassie, who accused him of rape and physical abuse, among other allegations. Though that case settled the day after it was filed, Combs was subsequently sued by three more women, all Jane Does, who say the hip-hop mogul sexually assaulted them. In the most recent case filed, the woman says she was “sex trafficked” and “gang raped” by Combs, former Bad Boy Records president Harve Pierre and another man in 2003 when she was 17. A separate case over that alleged incident was filed against Pierre and Bad Boy alleging sexual assault.
Combs has strongly denied all of the allegations; on Dec. 6, he released a public statement that said in part: “Sickening allegations have been made against me by individuals looking for a quick payday. Let me be absolutely clear: I did not do any of the awful things being alleged. I will fight for my name, my family and for the truth.”
In the aftermath of the allegations, Combs stepped down from his role as chairman at Black music TV company REVOLT on Nov. 28. The company simultaneously released a statement saying that while Combs “had previously no operational or day-to-day role in the business, this decision helps ensure that REVOLT remains steadfastly focused on our mission to create meaningful content for the culture and amplify the voices of all Black people throughout this country and the African diaspora.”
According to Rolling Stone, a total of 23 brands have severed ties with Combs’ e-commerce marketplace Empower Global, which officially launched in July, since the allegations came out. The outlet also reports that in the wake of the lawsuits, liquor company Diageo — with which Combs has been embroiled in a bitter legal battle over his DeLeon Tequila brand for months — filed a request asking a judge to deny Combs’ request to control a $15 million marketing budget for DeLeon, which would entail his image appearing in new ads for the spirit.
Combs released a new album, The Love Album: Off the Grid, in September via his Love Records imprint.
If you or someone you know has experienced sexual violence and need support and/or resources, reach out to RAINN and the National Sexual Assault Hotline (800-656-HOPE) for free, confidential help 24/7.
A California appeals court ruled Wednesday (Dec. 13) that Marilyn Manson’s former assistant can sue him for sexual assault, overturning an earlier decision that said she waited too long to bring her case.
In a 24-page opinion, California’s Second Appellate District revived a lawsuit filed by Ashley Walters that claims Manson subjected her to brutal treatment, including sexual harassment and discrimination, during the year that she worked for him from 2010 to 2011.
A lower court had ruled last year that Walters’ lawsuit, filed in 2021, was barred by the statute of limitations, which requires such cases to be filed within two years. But on Wednesday, the appeals court said Walters’ case was fair game under the so-called delayed discovery rule, as she claims the trauma of the incidents caused her to suppress the memories until 2020.
“Until she received diagnosis and treatment, Walters [says she] was unable to remember the repressed events, and once she did recall them, she was unable to immediately identify these events as abuse,” the court wrote. “These allegations of suppressed memories and psychological blocking are sufficient to withstand [dismissal].”
A representative for Manson declined to comment on the ruling. An attorney for Walters did not immediately return a request for comment.
Walters was one of several women who accused Manson of sexual abuse in 2021. His former fiancé Evan Rachel Wood accused him of grooming and sexual abuse on Twitter in February 2021, and then others, including Game of Thrones actress Esmé Bianco and model Ashley Morgan Smithine, filed lawsuits against him.
Manson has denied all of the accusations, and several of the cases have been dismissed or settled. Manson later sued Wood for defamation, claiming she had “secretly recruited, coordinated, and pressured” other women to make such allegations, though that case was largely dismissed earlier this year.
In her lawsuit, Walters claimed that Manson subjected her to “sexual exploitation, manipulation and psychological abuse” while she worked for him as a personal assistant. The alleged abuse included whipping her and throwing her against a wall in a “a drug-induced rage”; forcing her to stay awake for 48 hours by feeding her cocaine; and having “offered” her sexually to friends and associates.
In June 2022, the case was dismissed for being filed past the statute of limitations. Walters argued then that she had suppressed the memories of Manson’s abuse until other women began coming forward, but the judge said during a hearing that he had not seen “sufficient facts” to invoke the delayed-discovery rule.
In Wednesday’s ruling overturning that decision, the appeals court did not say that Walters’ accusations against Manson were true. Instead, it merely said that her allegations were enough for the case to survive being dismissed at the outset. The court recounted various claims that, if proven true, would mean that Walters had truly not discovered the abuse until 2020.
“The complaint described the support group Walters joined in October 2020 and recounted the stories shared by the other abused women that ‘began to unlock new memories [Walters] repressed long ago as a result of her psychological trauma by being manipulated and threatened by Warner during and after her employment,’” the court wrote. “The complaint also described how Walters began therapy in November 2020 and was diagnosed the following month with complex posttraumatic stress disorder, major depressive disorder, and generalized anxiety disorder.”
The ruling sends the case back to the trial court, where the parties will engage in more litigation, conduct discovery and move toward an eventual trial.
If you or someone you know has experienced sexual violence and need support and/or resources, reach out to RAINN and the National Sexual Assault Hotline (800-656-HOPE) for free, confidential help 24/7.
Starting a nonprofit radio station from scratch is enough of a cliff to scale in the digital era – even more so when you’re doing it in a famed music mecca like Memphis. How do you capture the essence of the city that nurtured Stax Records, Sun Records and influential heavy hitters from Al Green to Elvis Presley to Three 6 Mafia? For the folks behind WYXR, a station at 91.7 FM that’s now in its third year, you keep your ears open – to the city’s musical past, present and to ongoing feedback from the community. “We want give every Memphian, and person who cares about Memphis, an opportunity to say whether they enjoy our programming,” says Jared “Jay B.” Boyd, the station’s program manager.
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It seems like they’re hitting the right notes. From 2021 to 2022, the station enjoyed 50% audience growth. And on Saturday, Dec. 2, WYXR hosted its second annual Raised by Sound Fest. The 2022 fundraiser boasted an all-star salute to Memphis power pop icons Big Star, led by surviving founding member Jody Stephens. This year, Cat Power – whose Matador debut What Would the Community Think (1996) and breakout LP The Greatest (2006) were recorded in Memphis – headlined Raised by Sound, fighting through a cold to deliver an astonishing recreation of Bob Dylan’s infamous Royal Albert Hall concert from 1966. (Throughout the acoustic-then-electric set, Tennessee State Rep. Justin J. Pearson was grooving in the front row. Cat Power raised her fist in solidarity with the Democrat – who was briefly expelled earlier this year for participating in a gun control rally – more than a few times.)
Like the station itself, Raised by Sound Fest is situated in Crosstown Concourse, an old Sears distribution center that was transformed into a bustling hub of food, music and residential apartments in the late 2010s. The expansive space — which also houses the meticulously vintage Southern Grooves studio and the Memphis Listening Lab, a treasure trove for audiophiles — lends itself well to fortuitous run-ins. Prior to her acoustic solo set at the festival, Seratones singer A.J. Haynes chatted with Ari Morris, a mixer for Lil Durk and Moneybagg Yo. A few hours earlier, a WYXR volunteer ran into a supporter of the station whose son lives in Crosstown Concourse; she revealed she would be doubling her 2022 donation in honor of Shangri-La Records owner (and occasional WYXR host) Jared McStay, who died of cancer just last month.
The station officially launched in late 2020, but began gestating in 2019 when the University of Memphis approached Crosstown Concourse and The Daily Memphian, looking to shake up a university-affiliated jazz station at 91.7 FM. Robby Grant — part of the Memphis rock outfit Big Ass Truck, which formed in the ‘90s — initially got involved as a consultant, but was inspired to join the station as a founding partner; now, he serves as the executive director.
Boyd’s path to WYXR dovetailed with Grant’s. After returning to his hometown following a news reporter gig in Mobile, Ala., Boyd began writing for The Daily Memphian. Around that time, he was also drawing on his encyclopedia knowledge of local music history to create a playlist of Memphis-related songs for Crosstown Concourse. (People working in the building complained about hearing the same four-hour mix on repeat every day. To alleviate the issue, Boyd crafted a 21-hour playlist that’s now well north of 100 hours.) After interviewing Grant for a piece on the nascent WYXR, Boyd – who graduated from the same high school as Grant, just two decades later – began envisioning a more permanent role at the station. Before long, he became a founding partner and continues to operate as the station’s program manager.
Cat Power at Raised by Sound Fest
Andrea Morales
His DJ connections (Boyd spins as DJ Bizzle Bluebland) and Memphis-centric record collection helped inform some of the people he brought in as WYXR hosts. Pastor Juan Shipp, for instance, released gritty gospel records on his D-Vine Spirituals label back in the ‘70s (those 45s now fetch a few hundred dollars on Discogs). But he was essentially a whispered legend in Memphis music lore until WYXR put him back on the air for a lively Saturday gospel program — marking a second coming of sorts for the cult favorite.
Grant tapped his network, too – which included some recognizable names in the indie music world. “We wanted Memphis connections and some bigger names because it draws attention,” Grant tells Billboard. To that end, Wilco’s Pat Sansone — whom Grant played with in the project Mellotron Variations — got involved as a host, as did one half of MGMT. “Andrew VanWyngarden went to the same high school Jay B. and I did,” Grant says with a wistful smirk. “His band — not MGMT — used to open for my band.”
With WYXR broadcasting live from a studio in Crosstown Concourse’s main lobby, some of the bigger names brought out curious onlookers to watch the action (separated by a soundproof window, of course). Olivia Cohen, who used to watch VanWyngarden’s show in the lobby as a high schooler, now works as the station’s membership and community engagement coordinator.
The station also inadvertently facilitated a marriage (between members of the DJ collective bodywerk) and an unlikely friendship between Memphis hip-hop legend DJ Spanish Fly and local EDM-trap DJ Madeleine “mado” Holdford. “She was so nervous [when she met him],” Boyd recalls. “But we put their [Thursday] shows back-to-back and now they’re fast friends. One night they were having a Christmas dad-joke contest. This is a 29-year-old white girl and a 52-year-old Black man who’s known as a godfather of hip-hop. There are grown men who are afraid of Spanish Fly.”
He also points to Khi Da Godd, a young DJ who “a year and a half ago thought no one else liked house music in Memphis.” Fast forward to 2023: He hosts a show on Saturdays and recently met genre pioneer Larry Heard. “He’s bringing out other kids, and now they have a network and they’re getting gigs. They’re self-sufficient in a way they weren’t [before]. They’re finding commonalities with each other. I see those social connections happen all the time.”
It’s easy to see how the station’s vibe – passionate but informal, anchored by hosts who are authoritative yet loose – fosters relationships. When Grant swung by a late-night underground rock show helmed by author/journalist Andrew Earles, the Hüsker Dü biographer grilled his boss on whether the Cat Power/Dylan concert featured an audience plant shouting “Judas!” at the appropriate moment (it did not). And late on Friday nights, hip-hop DJ Nicole Covington sometimes veers off into detailed detours on wrestling.
“Robert Gordon, who is a documentarian and rock writer from here — his whole thing is, ‘I’m messing up the whole time,’” says Grant of Gordon’s anything-goes Tuesday show. “It’s a little bit of a bit, but it’s also true. Especially late at night.”
“My show [can go] off the rails,” Boyd laughs. “We don’t micromanage whether [the music is] old, new or otherwise – it’s really about curating the people. There are plenty of DJs who play way more cutting-edge music than I do, and it’s all about their tastes, their intuition.”
As the station approaches its fourth year, the WYXR team is hoping to raise even greater awareness of the station within the demographically diverse metropolitan area. “I want more buy-in from the community,” Boyd says, adding that “some of our hosts had no idea that this format of radio and opportunity existed” before he reached out to them. In addition to hitting pockets of Memphis that don’t normally tune into community radio, an ongoing challenge is keeping existing listeners and donors invested in the station’s success. “We’re more than a radio station – we’re an arts and culture organization,” Grant says. “We are a nonprofit. We’re not commercial radio. We have about a thousand donors who give on a yearly basis and a couple hundred monthly donors. [Our job is] keeping them engaged and letting them know what’s going on at the station – because there’s so much going on.”
Raised by Sound Fest, of course, is a big part of that. “From a fundraising point of view, we try to line up sponsors a few months before. For the fundraising concert, we price the VIP tickets in such a way where we can make money – and it was a huge success,” Grant shares of the 2023 edition, which raised 60% more than the inaugural 2022 festival.
“This year felt like we settled into the groove,” Boyd agrees. “People are assured that we have their best interests in mind when it comes to demonstrating how music can move this community.”
“It’s figuring out how to scale smartly,” says Grant, who is realistic about the fact that the station is unlikely to boast another 50% listener growth rate as it moves into 2024. “We have a podcast network we’re working on expanding. We’re archiving shows, working on the website and apps. Not everyone listens to radio the way they used to, so we’re trying to meet people where they are.”
“Music is at the center of our culture,” says Boyd of Memphis. “Tulsa, Oklahoma might be a nice place to live — there are business magnates there, you can see music there — but the feeling that you own music and are part of a music culture? It’s an asset of [this] community. People feel like they have collective ownership of the sound and what it means to us. The way some families connect over food, we connect over music.”
WYXR covered Billboard’s accommodations during the weekend of the Raised by Sound Fest.
Most corporations would love to rake in revenues well over $1 billion in a single year. In 2023, Taylor Swift has done it — and plenty more — by herself.
Billboard estimates that the 2023 Time Person of the Year honoree has grossed approximately $1.82 billion in music sales and royalties, concert tickets, merchandise sales at concerts and movie ticket sales in 2023 through Dec. 7.
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That figure represents the total amount generated in these handful of segments of Swift’s business career, not the amount she personally pocketed. Because none of this financial information is publicly available, Billboard calculated music royalties based on data from Luminate, concert ticket sales using publicly available information and her concert merchandise revenue was estimated based on Billboard’s reporting.
While impressive, $1.82 billion isn’t even the entirety of the income Swift has derived from her music career. Billboard left many items out of the calculations due to the inaccessibility of data, including synchronization royalties for her music’s use in advertisements, films and television shows, sponsorships, and merchandise sales from her website and licensing deals.
To put Swift’s year in perspective, she took in more than the $1.4 billion global gross of the motion picture Barbie. She exceeded the $1.6 billion fetched last year by the auction of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s art collection of works by the likes of Vincent van Gogh, Georges Seurat and Gustav Klimt. And it’s almost four times the 2022 annual revenue of Deezer, a publicly traded music streaming company with 9.4 million subscribers. In fact, she grossed more than every record label besides the three majors.
Spending on tickets and concert merchandise accounted for the lion’s share of Swift’s business this year. Swift’s The Eras Tour generated approximately $900 million in ticket sales in 2023. That figure is based on Billboard’s estimate that Swift sold 3.3 million tickets to 53 concerts in the U.S. at about $250 per ticket. An additional 13 shows in Latin America likely earned another $60 million to $75 million from 750,000 ticket. At those concerts, Swift sold an estimated concert merchandise sales of $132 million of merchandise. Her per-show average merchandise sales at roughly $2 million, based on Billboard’s reporting.
Swift’s music grossed an estimated $536 million from streaming royalties, purchases — tracks, digital albums, CDs, LPs and cassettes — and broadcast radio play through Dec. 7. Swift is this year’s leading U.S. artist in terms of on-demand audio streams, album sales and track sales.
Sales and streams accounted for roughly 86%, or $461 million, of her recorded music revenue. Most of that money was collected by her label, Republic Records, and the owner of her Big Machine Music Group catalog, Shamrock Capital. These amounts include the gross amount from music purchases (CDs, LPs and downloads) and includes mechanical royalties paid by record labels to songwriters and music publishers.
Swift’s songwriting catalog generated an estimated $75 million from streaming and radio play. (Publishing royalties from streaming are not counted in the recorded music gross revenue. Unlike the mechanical royalties from purchases, mechanical royalties from streams are not passed through record labels.) The radio royalties are paid to Swift’s performance rights organization, BMI, and will be distributed to Swift, her co-writers and the various music publishers and administrators that have rights to the compositions.
Additionally, Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour movie has an international gross of $250 million, according to Box Office Mojo. In the U.S., the movie grossed $179 million and debuted at No. 1 with first-week ticket sales of $95 million to $97 million. Depending on the production costs, the movie could be a financial boon for Swift considering she circumvented the traditional Hollywood distribution system and made a deal directly with AMC, the country’s largest movie theater chain. Additionally, the film is now available to rent on streaming and Swift retains the rights to license to a streaming service — both of which will earn her even more money.
Swift’s true economic impact is far larger than her gross sales outlined here. Many experts have been thinking of Swift’s business as the center of a larger economic impact that expands like concentric circles around her fans’ insatiable demand and willingness to travel to experience her concerts. The U.S. Travel Association stated in September that it believed The Eras Tour’s total economic impact will exceed $10 billion. Swift’s tour reached 20 U.S. cities and her fans averaged $1,300 of spending on travel, hotel stays and food. The association figures Swift’s fans spent about $5 billion in those destinations. Including indirect spending by others “who came to join the action around the events but did not actually attend the shows,” the association estimates the total economic impact is twice the $5 billion of direct spending. Another estimated found that her six sold-out shows at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California, alone brought an estimated $320 million to the Los Angeles area’s gross domestic product, according to the California Center for Jobs & The Economy and California Business Roundtable.
Rauw Alejandro and his longtime manager, Eric Duars, have officially parted ways, sources tell Billboard. For the past several months, lawyers for the Puerto Rican superstar and the Puerto Rican impresario have engaged in conversations to wind down a relationship that began in 2017 when Alejandro (born Raul Alejandro Ocasio Ruiz) was 23 years old and Duars signed him as an emerging talent
Aside from being managed by Duars, an experienced promoter, Alejandro was also signed to his independent label, Duars Entertainment, with his music released via a licensing agreement with Sony Music Latin. Duars also promoted many of Alejandro’s tour dates via the tour promotion arm of his company, Duars Live.
In a crowded world of new reggaetón acts who came up in the mid and late 2010s, Alejandro stood out as an artist who also performed dazzling choreography and who was willing to experiment with genres like dance. That mix has continued to yield hits; to date, Alejandro has placed 47 songs on Billboard’s Hot Latin Songs chart, including two top 10s, as well as seven hits on the Billboard Hot 100.
On the touring front, 2023 was the year Alejandro consolidated as a major touring act. His Saturno tour, produced by Duars Live in partnership with Outback Presents, sold 551,000 tickets across 36 shows reported to Billboard Boxscore, grossing $50.1 million. It landed as the sixth highest-grossing tour on Billboard’s year-end Latin tally and at No. 46 overall, breaking 15,000 tickets in Miami, New York and San Jose, Calif., among many others. It also sold 58,000 tickets in Mexico City’s Foro Sol.
Duars will no longer promote Alejandro’s tours.
Several sources say there are active conversations regarding new management for Alejandro with an established Latin manager, but nothing has yet been announced or confirmed to Billboard.
Duars will continue to manage a roster that includes Baby Rasta & Gringo, Cauty, Sie7e, Eix and Sanchz.
Neither Alejandro’s attorneys nor Duars’ attorneys replied to requests for comment.
Luke Combs apologized Wednesday after he accidentally sued one of his fans in federal court and won a $250,000 judgment against her, saying she had been caught up in a lawsuit aimed at “illegal businesses” and that she was “never supposed to be involved.”
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The apology came a day after news broke that lawyers representing the country star had sued a woman named Nicol Harness for selling Combs-themed mugs on Amazon. Harness, who suffers from congestive heart failure, sold only 18 tumblers for a total of $380 but was ordered to pay a whopping $250,000 in damages for infringing Combs’ intellectual property — all before she ever realized she had been sued.
In an Instagram post on Wednesday, Combs said he had just learned about the situation and that it “makes me absolutely sick to my stomach.” He said he had already contacted Harness directly and apologized for the incident.
“I spent the last two hours trying to make this right and figure out what’s going on, because I was completely and utterly unaware of this,” Combs said in the video. “We do have a company that goes after folks only, supposedly large corporations operating internationally that make millions and millions of dollars making counterfeit tee shirts, things of that nature, running illegal businesses. Apparently, this woman, Nicol, has somehow gotten wrapped into that.”
The lawsuit against Harness, filed in June in Illinois federal court, accused more than 200 online entities of selling unauthorized Combs merchandise on the internet. It included screenshots of unauthorized t-shirts sold on Amazon that directly copied real apparel the country star sold on his own site.
“This action has been filed … to combat online counterfeiters who trade upon the reputation and goodwill of the American artist Luke Combs,” his lawyers wrote. “The aggregated effect of the mass counterfeiting that is taking place has overwhelmed the plaintiff and his ability to police his rights against the hundreds of anonymous defendants which are selling illegal counterfeits at prices.”
The case highlights a common legal tactic used by big brands like Nike and Ray-Ban to fight fake products on the internet. Filed against huge lists of URLs, such actions enable brands to shut down pirate sellers en masse, win court orders to freeze their assets, and continue to kill new listings if they pop up. They usually result in large “default judgments” against many defendants who never even saw the lawsuit, ordering them to pay large sums in damages.
Though they’re more often employed by retail brands, artists and bands have increasingly turned to such lawsuits to combat counterfeit merch. Nirvana sued nearly 200 sites for selling fake gear in early 2022; a few months later, the late rapper XXXTentacion’s company filed a similar case; in January, Harry Styles filed one.
Such lawsuits are effective at combating a difficult problem, but they’re also increasingly controversial. In a study released last month, professor Eric Goldman of Santa Clara University’s School of Law called the mass-defendant counterfeiting cases “abusive,” saying they allow rightsholders to bypass “basic procedural safeguards” like making sure each defendant is properly served with notice of the lawsuit.
Harness says that’s what happened to her. As reported by Tampa’s local NBC outlet WFLA, she says she had no idea she had been sued until she returned from a hospital visit and saw her Amazon account had been frozen. Harness says she later found an email from Combs’ lawyers, sent to an address she rarely uses and stuck in her spam folder, notifying her of the lawsuit. By the time she was fully up to speed, she says the case had been closed and a judge had granted a default judgment ordering her to pay Combs $250,000.
Though the lawsuit was filed directly in his name, Combs’ Instagram post on Wednesday suggests that it was handled entirely by outside attorneys or other entities empowered to enforce his rights. The attorney who filed the case, Keith A. Vogt, did not immediately return a request for comment.
Combs’ manager Chris Kappy declined to comment on how the case came to be filed, but confirmed that Combs had absolved Harness of any legal debt. And in his Instagram post on Wednesday, Combs said he was committed to making things right.
Since a total of $5,500 was still frozen in her Amazon account, he said he was “going to double that, send her $11,000 today, just so she doesn’t have anything to worry about.” Combs also said that he was going to make his own tumblers to sell in his official online merchandise store and that money from sales of those tumblers will also go to Harness to help with her medical bills.
“This is not something I would ever do,” Combs said. “This is not the kind of person I am, greedy in any way, shape or form. Money is the last thing on my mind, I promise you guys that. I invited Nicol and her family out to a show this year so I can give her a hug and say sorry in person.”
WME‘s music leadership team outlined a new organizational structure for the company’s contemporary music department today in a company-wide memo, detailing strategic changes for the Endeavor-owned agency built around A&R, bookings and crossover opportunities.
In a memo to WME’s contemporary music department, global head of contemporary music Lucy Dickins and global co-head of contemporary music Kirk Sommer further detailed their plans, introduced over the summer months, to build upon the 45,000 concerts their team booked in 2023.
For A&R, which covers new artists signings and artist development, “new artist discovery will be coordinated across all genres and regions,” the memo explains. “Given the globalization of our business and the speed at which new artists break today, we believe this is a critical piece to identifying new talent. Kevin Shivers will be leading these efforts on behalf of the team, working with regional and genre leads.”
For booking, Dickens and Sommer explained, WME will continue to build upon its “multiple regional servicing groups, including an Asia-Pacific presence, Latin-American team, and a robust European operation,” the memo reads. Ron Opaleski will lead global bookings and international touring strategy across North America, while Tony Goldring will lead similar efforts for the company’s international clients. Josh Kurfirst will lead efforts on behalf of festivals, Clint Mitchell will lead non-traditional touring and Ryan Jones will cover the company’s private and corporate events.
Dickens and Sommer wrote also detailed changes at the company’s crossover department, which the two leaders said “is our #1 differentiator.”
“Given its importance,” the memo explained, “WME partner Keith Sarkisian will be stepping in to oversee the coordination of non-touring services for the agency’s roster, working with divisions from across WME and Endeavor.” That includes working with Dvora Englefield, WME partner/head of new music strategy, “who will continue to identify new business opportunities and strategic partnerships on behalf our artists.”
Citing “the growth across each of our offices,” Dickens and Sommer also announced the appointment of the company’s first-ever regional office leads, managed by Brian Aherns who oversees operations for the music team. The leads for WME’s international officers are Kevin Shivers (Beverly Hills), Michael Coughlin (Nashville), Stephanie LaFera (New York), Josh Javor (London) and Brett Murrihy (Sydney).
“These new roles and areas of responsibility reflect the evolution of our business today — we are a truly global operation, we have unparalleled scale, and we have more opportunities to provide our artists than ever before,” the memo continued. “With this new structure highlighting key areas of responsibility and the leadership behind it, we will now be even better equipped to provide best-in-class services to our music clients and partners.”
The memo also announced the promotion of seven agents — Kyle Bandler, Mark Claassen, Andrew Colvin, Beth Hamilton, Sloane Logue, Austin Mullins and Travis Wolfe — to partner at WME, along with the promotion of 16 employees to agent: Sam Dolen, Janelle Flint, Jacob Fox, Josh Green, Lindsey Hastings, Carly Huffman, Dan Kuklinski, Sean McHugh, Meera Patel, Adam Sherif, John Showfety, Jeremy Upton, Carlile Willett, Laura Williams, Cecilia Yao and Ben Yekuel.
A songwriter recently posed a distressing question with me: Do the songs he writes for the church that are classified as “Christian Music” get treated differently by the performing rights societies (PROs)?
The inference that a song is penalized in some way by an organization collecting royalties is not correct, but the songwriter was onto something. Songwriters who write music categorized as Christian often do feel they earn less than their secular counterparts. There needs to be an explanation as to why the perception exists and what can be done to change it.
The explanation goes back to how performance royalties are collected. They flow from three key segments of the market:
Digital service providers (DSPs), such as Spotify and Apple Music
General licensing from bars, nightclubs, restaurants, and live venues
Broadcast media including terrestrial radio and television stations
All genres are treated equally on digital services, in terms of tracking, but Christian music is not your typical soundtrack at most bars, nightclubs and restaurants. And venues for Christian music concerts tend to be small community locations, such as churches. Promoters at these venues are unaware (either genuinely or deliberately) that licensing is required, even though they are holding a commercial concert with ticket sales.
That leaves television and terrestrial radio, and this is where I believe the system is fundamentally broken. The Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) allows “educational” radio stations, typically small nonprofit community stations, to operate with a significantly lower rate structure that is not set on a percentage of revenue such as commercial stations, but rather a fixed fee structure based on the population of the community where the station is located.
For example, here in New York City the station WPLJ 95.5FM broadcasts Christian music to more than 8 million people, and in 2023 will pay a capped amount of performance licensing fees to ASCAP, BMI and SESAC, a total of $15,029, combined. These fees will not vary, no matter how much revenue is generated by the station.
WPLJ is part of the Educational Media Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that runs a network of almost 500 terrestrial radio stations that broadcast Christian music. They claim the lower non-commercial rate under Section 118 of the Copyright Act and the related CRB rules because it is a nonprofit. When you look at the network’s publicly available information and the CRB rate sheet, you can see that they are paying an estimated combined total of around $1 million dollars in performance license fees.
It may seem reasonable for a non-profit to pay such limited amounts to perform music. But here is where the current regulatory regime is broken. The publicly available 2022 financials show the nonprofit collected $238 million in revenue, primarily through donations and sponsorships to the Christian content focused broadcast network. The network now has over $1 billion in assets, adding $50 million to those assets in 2022. Additionally, the salaries of the executive team for 2022 totaled $5.4 million. This is a far cry from the small volunteer-run community stations the CRB rates are meant to protect. How can it be that executives earn more than five times the total amount the network pays the entire song writer and music publisher community that create the songs upon which its network depends?
It must be said very clearly this network and others like it have done nothing wrong and they are a great resource to the wider community. However, just because it’s not wrong doesn’t make it right. I believe that it’s inherently unfair for these networks to exploit the CRB rate structure that’s available to educational radio stations given their financial profiles and the significant amount of money they raise using music to build a large audience. No matter how much money large non-commercial networks collect, and in this case primarily using Christian music to generate those revenues, the CRB license fee structure is capped. Commercial radio pays rates that are generally set as a percentage of revenue and not capped. Many high-earning Christian stations are paying as low as 10% of what commercial stations earning the same revenue would pay.
So back to the songwriter who felt his work was penalized. The answer is yes, he’s partially right; he is indeed paid less, but not due to prejudice on the part of PROs. The lower earnings are due to the lower royalty fees collected across the broader market that uses Christian music.
If we and the Christian songwriter and publisher communities believe that Christian songwriters should be paid on par with other writers, then the PROs as well as the Church Music Publishers Association (CMPA), should work together to create a dialogue with these high- earning broadcasters and ask that they opt out of the CRB rate structure and negotiate fair license fees for the Christian songwriter community. Or alternately, advocate for a revision of section 118 of the Copyright Act that would exclude wealthy “educational” broadcasters. This, along with financial transparency regarding the revenue collected and music licensing fees paid by anyone who gets a US Government-approved discount, should help level the playing field for all songwriters, regardless of what kind of songs they compose.
Malcolm Hawker serves as chief operating officer for SESAC Music Group, where he is charged with overseeing the operations of all the organization’s portfolio companies. Prior to joining SESAC, Hawker served as the president and CEO of CCLI (Christian Copyright Licensing International), a global rights licensing and resource company.
Lance Freed‘s All Clear Music and the Fuji Music Group have jointly acquired the catalog of Will Jennings, the superstar lyricist behind such hits as Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On,” Steve Winwood’s “Higher Love” and Eric Clapton’s “Tears In Heaven.”
The joint venture deal, first announced in October as an agreement, has apparently just closed. While terms of the deal were not revealed, sources tell Billboard that the catalog carried a valuation in the range of $60-$70 million.
The pact is for 100% of Jennings catalog and includes both publishing rights and writers’ share. Other songs in the catalog include Joe Cocker & Jennifer Warnes’ “Up Where We Belong,” Winwood’s “Roll With It” and “Back in the High Life Again,” Barry Manilow’s “Looks Like We Made It,” Tim McGraw’s “Please Remember Me,” and Whitney Houston’s “Didn’t We Almost Have It All.” Jennings has been inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame.
Freed founded All Clear Music, which includes the Nashville arm of Sheltered Music, in 2020. He has deep ties with Jennings, dating back to 1974 when he signed the lyricist to Almo/Irving Music, then a unit of A&M Records.
“Having worked so closely with Will throughout his career, it’s very personal to me, as he is a cherished friend and I have been honored to know and help support him throughout his career,” Freed, who is the son of the late legendary DJ Alan Freed, said in a statement. “When the opportunity to acquire the song catalog presented itself, I called my long-time friend [and chairman of Fuji Music Group] Ichi Asatsuma who had expressed he wanted to work together on something we truly loved. We agreed that this could be that labor of love, and we feel a deep responsibility to take care of his beautiful songs and legacy.”
Freed’s All Clear Music and the Fuji Music Group will administer the catalog globally.
“We are very honored to represent one of the world’s finest songwriters with Lance Freed’s All Clear Music, and will give Will Jennings’ music the very best promotion and all the respect it richly deserves,” Asatsuma said in a statement.
The deal was shopped by Jennings’ long time accountant Charles Sussman of Sussman & Associates, with Jennings’ family input. The deal places Freed, All Clear Music and Fuji Music Group as the caretakers of the “lyricist’s legacy, fostering creative opportunities and ensuring the timeless songs are exposed to new audiences for generations to come,” according to the announcement.
Since its inception, All Clear Music and its Sheltered Music unit have signed deals to represent Rodney Crowell, Emmylou Harris, Dann Huff, Marty Stuart, and the later period catalog of Burt Bacharach, while recent signings include Big Pond and Gordie Sampson, Melissa Peirce and Sara Haze in addition to producer/writer Cameron Jaymes. On the artist development side, the companies have signed up-and-coming artists like Jenna LaMaster and Kelsey Waters.
The Fuji Music Group has made news in recent years by selling its stake in Pulse Music Group to Concord in 2020, and before that a majority interest in its stake of Arc Music to BMG in 2016. While this joint venture appears to mark its return to the acquisition front, sources indicate that the company has been actively monitoring deals being shopped in the music asset marketplace in recent years.