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Hipgnosis, the catalog company with rights to songs by artists including the Red Hot Chili Peppers that became the face of music-as-an-asset-class for Wall Street investors, is being renamed Recognition Music Group, the company said on Wednesday (March 12).
The new name covers what was previously three separate companies that each had Hipgnosis in the name: Hipgnosis Songs Fund, a publicly traded music royalty investment fund formerly listed on the London Stock Exchange; Hipgnosis Songs Assets, a privately-held royalty fund backed by Blackstone; and Hipgnosis Song Management, the investment manager previously run by founder Merck Mercuriadis that worked to generate a return on the song rights held in the catalog funds.
Mercuriadis did not respond to a request for comment.
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Since Blackstone acquired Hipgnosis’s public fund for $1.47 billion and Mercuriadis stepped down from his role as chair of the investment manager last year, the company decided it was time to shed the old name, CEO Ben Katovsky tells Billboard.
Recognition’s portfolio of publishing and master recording rights to some 45,000 songs include stakes in megahits like Shakira‘s “Whenever, Whereever,” The B-52s’ “Love Shack,” Fleetwood Mac‘s “Go Your Own Way” and Diana Ross‘ “I’m coming out.” A video made by the company to promote its new name to its roughly 40 employees weaves together lyrics from these and other songs in its portfolio to send a message that despite their history as separate entities, the Hipgnosis companies are meant to “get together,” even if one almost went its “own way” during Blackstone’s billion-dollar bidding war with Concord. Nearly a year after it consolidated ownership, Blackstone and Katovsky “want the world to know” this is a new company.
“It’s impossible not to have those songs resonate in your mind,” Katovsky says from Recognition’s London offices. He tells Billboard that the new name refers to “a combination of how easy it is to recognize those songs day to day and also to recognize the talent of the artists and songwriters and musicians who made those songs.”
Qasim Abbas, Blackstone’s head of tactical opportunities international, the division of the global financial fund that owns Recognition, said in a statement that last year showed “strong investor conviction in this asset class.”
“The company is now set to build on its position as a leading independent investor in music rights; owning and managing an incredible portfolio of songs and recordings,” Abbas added.
Hipgnosis was known for acquiring dozens of catalogs a year between 2018 and 2021, earning it a reputation of contributing to a run-up in the market for music royalties. In contrast, Recognition intends to be a “selective buyer” of music rights, Katovsky says.
“Our ambition is to continue to grow the portfolio, and we already have scale as a business,” Katovsky says. “The scale allows us to invest … but it also means we’re not under any pressure to deploy capital.”
Recognition’s portfolio remains heavily weighted to publishing rights, which comprise roughly 80% of its assets; the remainder are mostly master recording rights. Blackstone still owns Hipgnosis Songs Group, the subsidiary that has housed Big Deal Music’s administration business since Hipgnosis acquired the independent publisher in 2020. The company has said the division is under strategic review, and Recognition is now looking to partner with publishers and music companies for the administration of its assets.
“Recognition Music will be a very collaborative player in this space in ways that it was not historically,” Katovsky says. “We want to work with other partners in this industry to do that.”
Spotify released its annual Loud & Clear report on Wednesday (March 12), trumpeting the growing number of musicians earning robust royalty income from the platform, along with its users’ increasingly global listening patterns.
“The number of artists generating $10,000, $100,000, and $1 million dollars on Spotify alone has at least tripled since 2017,” says Sam Duboff, the platform’s global head of marketing and policy, music business.
And those artists are coming from a wider variety of countries. “Ten years ago, you probably had to be singing in English and maybe Spanish to have a really high ceiling,” Duboff adds. “Now we see eight languages where songs are generating $100 million a year [in royalties] just on Spotify” — not only English and Spanish, but also German, Portuguese, French, Japanese, Korean and Italian. In addition, “the majority of artists generating significant revenue on Spotify have the majority of their royalties coming from outside their home market.”
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Perhaps more than past iterations of Loud & Clear, the latest report aimed to push back on popular complaints about the streaming era.
One frustration voiced frequently about streaming is that the platforms’ payouts have crippled most aspiring artists’ ability to build a career. Last year, for example, Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) introduced the Living Wage for Musicians Act in the House of Representatives; the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW), which helped draft the act, said it was necessary because “artists continue to be underpaid, misled and otherwise exploited by streaming platforms.” Across the Atlantic, members of the European Parliament also called on the music industry to explore “fairer models of streaming revenue allocation.”
Spotify has a sunnier view of the streaming economy: Loud & Clear notes that “more artists than ever before are generating royalties at every career stage.” The company argues that much of the discontent with the modern music landscape stems from the fact that an unprecedented number of people are uploading music to streaming services, and “the sheer volume of uploaders means the fraction [of acts] who find success appears smaller over time.”
On Spotify, the number of artists making at least $10,000 grew nearly 8% in 2024, to 71,200, according to the platform’s data, while the number of acts making at least $100,000 from Spotify increased a similar percentage, rising to 12,500.
Those royalty-income brackets on Spotify grew faster than total music consumption in the U.S. last year (5.6%, according to Luminate) but not as fast as they did in 2023. “There are always fluctuations,” Duboff says. He is unconcerned by chatter about streaming growth tapering off, especially in the U.S. and Western Europe. “We still see a ton of growth in mature markets,” he says. “We also see a lot of really exciting growth in emerging markets.”
Another idea targeted by Loud & Clear as a “misconception”: the notion of per-stream payouts. “One of the top conversations we have with artists is about this perception of our per-stream rate,” Duboff explains. “The way you hear people on social media talk, you’d think every streaming service pays out based on per-stream rate.
“But no major streaming service pays out based on a fixed per-stream rate,” Duboff continues. “Every major streaming service pays out based on stream share,” meaning the royalty pool is divided up according to rights holders’ portion of total streams.
Duboff hopes that Loud & Clear can start to “demystify the idea of stream share” and “help artists think through the actual ways in which royalties are generated.” Though it’s possible that, even after thinking this through, acts might still advocate for alternative payout methods, like the user-centric model that was in vogue a couple of years ago. The Living Wage for Musicians Act proposed to fund additional royalty payments — one penny per stream partially generated by charging an extra fee for every streaming subscription — on top of the current payout system.
Spotify also hopes to change perceptions about its highest earners. “When I ask people what type of artist would be generating $1 million a year just from Spotify, the first assumption is it’s the biggest stars with the biggest hits,” Duboff says. “The second thing we hear a lot is, ‘It’s just a lot of legacy acts who were popular decades ago.’ The third is that it must be American, Canadian and Western European artists.”
Spotify’s data flies in the face of those assumptions, according to Duboff. For the second year in a row, 80% of the $1 million earners — close to 1,500 artists — never had a track crack Spotify’s Global Daily Top 50, he says, and more than half of them started their career after 2010. Plus, those acts sing or rap in 17 different languages.
With “momentum on Spotify, you have access to hundreds of millions of listeners all over the world,” Duboff adds, “and the revenue that they bring in.”
Concord is an advanced talks to acquire music distributor Stem, according to multiple sources close to the talks.
Los Angeles-based Stem is a 10-year-old digital distributor that gives independent artists ownership of their works and retains a distribution fee. Nashville-based Concord has vast music publishing and recorded music catalogs that include the compositions of Rodgers & Hammerstein, classical music publishing company Boosey & Hawkes, and the catalog of Round Hill Music, which it purchased in 2023 for $469 million.
Financial terms are unknown, but a report at Music Business Worldwide claims the deal could reach $50 million. The Hollywood Reporter cites sources as saying that figure “is wildly inaccurate” and that negotiations could result in a partial sale.
Stem would help Concord in its ambition to develop its frontline business. While Concord’s annual revenue is split roughly 50-50 between its publishing and recorded music divisions, it has notched more publishing hits, such as Miley Cyrus’ “Flowers,” which Concord owns a piece of through Tyler Johnson’s co-writing credit. In September, Concord merged its Concord Records and Fantasy Records into a single label, naming Margi Cheske and Mark Williams as co-presidents.
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Concord’s frontline record label business includes Rounder Records, Concord Jazz, Fearless Records, Concord Theatrical Recordings and the Kidz Bop franchise. Concord also has joint ventures in Loma Vista Recordings with Tom Whalley; Easy Eye Sound with Dan Auerbach; and PULSE Records with PULSE Music Group. Launched in 2023, PULSE Records saw major success with Tommy Richman’s 2024 hit “Million Dollar Baby.” Billboard estimates the song generated $4.99 million from on-demand audio streams and digital song sales, based on Luminate data.
Stem, which raised $40 million in three fundraising rounds from 2017 to 2022, has been looking for a strategic investor since at least last year to give it access to more funding for artist advances after losing a series of stars to major labels. Competition for artists seeking distribution deals had picked up enough that Stem “lost numerous deals historically as it wasn’t able to be competitive with advances,” according to a Stem pitch deck Billboard obtained in 2024.
In 2023, Stem secured a $250 million credit facility from Victory Park Capital to expand its advance check product, which has funded projects by Brent Faiyaz and Justine Skye. That line of credit was “restrictive,” a source with knowledge of the company tells Billboard, because it was doled out on a deal-by-deal basis, requiring each artist’s project to recoup its own advance. Lewis says a better option is to borrow against the whole company’s balance sheet so that if one artist’s project flops, the loan can be repaid by a successful one.
“Music is a hit-driven business, and you need to have capital that understands that and is willing to allow you to take the risk across multiple projects, knowing that the overall portfolio will perform,” this person says.
It was for that reason that Stem was looking for equity investors rather than debt. Outside investors, many from the venture capital world, already own a majority of Stem’s equity. Stem’s decision to provide artists with advances came at a time when interest rates were lower than they are today, and one industry source speculates that rising interest rates were a pressing matter for Stem. Concord would likely be able to provide Stem with a lower cost of capital, this source tells Billboard. Concord has raised more than $3 billion from three asset-backed securities led by Apollo Global Management.
Warner Music Group (WMG) has also been in the market for a distribution company, having passed on an opportunity to acquire TuneCore owner Believe in 2024. But speaking at a Morgan Stanley conference on Monday (March 11), WMG CEO Robert Kyncl suggested the company could build rather than buy a distributor at the going rates. “I’ve looked at all distribution companies over the last 18 months … and what I can tell you is that we’re not willing to grow this at all costs,” Kyncl said.
The U.K. streaming market rose to record levels in 2024 as it crossed the £1 billion ($1.28 billion) revenue barrier for the first time, according to annual figures from labels trade body BPI published Wednesday (March 12).
Subscription, ad-supported and video-streaming revenue totaled £1.02 billion ($1.3 billion) to make up 68.1% of the country’s recorded music revenue, a rise of 5.7% compared to the previous year. In an accompanying statement, the BPI suggested that the increase is in part the result of multiple streaming platforms raising their subscription prices.
Combined with sales of physical music and digital downloads, along with synch and public performance revenue, the U.K. recorded music market saw total revenue rise 4.8% to £1.49 billion ($1.9 billion), marking a decade of continuous growth. The report notes that since 2014, annual streaming revenue has increased by more than 800% to become the dominant format for recorded music in the U.K.
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The 2024 revenue figure is the highest ever achieved in the U.K. in one year. However, after adjusting for inflation, annual revenue is still hundreds of millions of pounds lower compared to where the music industry should have been in real terms since 2006, the first year when public performance and synch were included in the annual total, reports the BPI.
Breaking down streaming revenue, ad-supported streams enjoyed the biggest annual growth in the market last year with an 8.9% increase to £77.9 million ($100 million). However, paid subscriptions to services such as Amazon, Apple, Spotify and YouTube continue to make up the vast majority of total streaming revenue, bringing in £875.5 million ($1.13 billion) in 2024.
Although the physical market generated more revenue in the U.K. than in any year since 2017, growth slowed last year despite high vinyl and CD sales of new albums by artists including Coldplay (Moon Music), Sabrina Carpenter (Short n’ Sweet) and Taylor Swift (The Tortured Poets Department). Total revenue from vinyl, CD and other physical music formats increased by 1.3% in 2024 to £246.5 million ($317.9 million) after climbing 12.8% the year before. Within this, revenue generated by vinyl LPs rose by 2.9% to £145.7 million ($188.2 million), while CD revenue fell by 0.5% in 2024 to £96.7 million ($124 million).
Despite slowing growth in physical formats, the BPI attributed the continued strength in vinyl partially to the enthusiasm of new generations of music fans. In 2024, eight of the year-end top 10 across vinyl were current records, led by Chappell Roan (The Rise And Fall Of A Midwest Princess), Charli XCX (Brat) and Fontaines D.C. (Romance). In 2014, half of the top 10 sellers were catalogue titles.
At the start of the decade, CD revenue in the U.K. suffered from a series of year-on-year double-digit percentage declines, but over the last three years, it has stabilized. Like vinyl, the CD market is led by new releases.
Elsewhere, public performance revenue climbed 5.6% year-on-year to £161.7 million ($206.5 million), while synch revenue ended the year with a new annual high of £43.9 million ($56.7 million).
In terms of individual songs, four singles generated more than 200 million audio and video streams last year: Noah Kahan’s “Stick Season” with 233.1 million streams, Benson Boone’s “Beautiful Things” with 219.3 million streams, Carpenter’s “Espresso” with 202.8 million streams and Teddy Swims‘ “Lose Control” with 201.6 million streams. Kahan and Carpenter’s tracks each spent seven weeks atop the Official U.K. Singles Chart, while Boone enjoyed two weeks atop the summit. Swims, meanwhile, peaked at No. 2 but earned the most-downloaded single of 2024 in the U.K., with 67,000 units sold.
More than a dozen other tracks scored over 100 million audio and video streams in the U.K. in 2024. These included “Stargazing”, the breakthrough hit by BRITs Rising Star 2025 winner Myles Smith, as well as releases by fellow British artists Cassö, RAYE, D-Block Europe (“Prada”), and Artemas (“I Like The Way You Kiss Me”).
Despite gains in each area of the U.K. recorded music market, Dr. Jo Twist, BPI’s CEO, stressed the importance of raising awareness around the government’s potential future approach to generative artificial intelligence training. At present, a data mining exception to copyright law is being discussed, meaning that AI developers could use songs for AI training in instances where artists have not “opted out” of their work being included.
Last month, over 1,000 artists, including Kate Bush, Damon Albarn, Annie Lennox and Hans Zimmer, contributed to a new “silent” album to protest this proposal. Titled Is This What We Want?, the album featured recordings of empty studios. In an accompanying statement, the use of silence was said to represent “the impact on artists’ and music professionals’ livelihoods that is expected if the government does not change course.”
“After a decade of growth, it is all too easy to take for granted the success of UK recorded music and the vital role record businesses play in this, underpinned by copyright, by investing billions to nurture and promote diverse talent from across the UK,” said Twist in a statement. “But in the face of intensifying global competition, it’s essential they’re empowered by a supportive policy environment to keep British artists on the world’s top step.
“Crucially, this requires the exciting potential of AI to be realised by the government safeguarding the UK’s gold-standard copyright framework and not siding with global big tech at the expense of human artistry and our world-leading creative industries,” Twist continued.
Three months after SiriusXM pivoted away from its streaming app in favor of its core in-car satellite listeners, the company further thinned its ranks on Monday (March 10) with a new round of layoffs. The cuts came primarily in the company’s product and technology group and were part of the strategic shift announced in December, according to a company spokesperson. The company did not specify the number of employees affected.
Monday’s layoffs mark the third time in as many years that SiriusXM has cut its workforce. The company also laid off 3% of its employees in February 2024 and 8% of its employees in March 2023. The company described the previous two rounds of layoffs as necessary to build its platform and invest in technology to generate growth. Satellite subscription growth has stalled in recent years, though, and the company’s effort to attract new subscribers with a lower-priced streaming app brought disappointing results.
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In December, the company returned its emphasis to satellite listening, planning to “tak[e] steps to drive profitability and cash flow as we face marketplace headwinds impacting the company’s growth trajectory,” CEO Jennifer Witz said in December. At the same time, SiriusXM named former Google and Viacom executive Wayne Thorsen as COO in charge of the company’s product and technology, corporate strategy and parts of the commercial business. Thorsen’s arrival coincided with the departure of chief product and technology officer Joseph Inzerillo.
One of the products SiriusXM is using to bring in new subscribers is a lower-cost, ad-supported satellite service that had a limited launch in 2024. “In having an ad-supported tier, it gives us a place where we can market to these individuals,” CFO Tom Barry said Tuesday (March 11) during the Deutsche Bank Media, Internet & Telecom Conference. “We can bring them up to a higher price point as they appreciate and they increase their engagement in the product.” The full roll-out is expected to happen at some point in 2025, “but it could slip,” he added.
Advertising continues to be a problem, however. As concerns build over the Trump administration’s tariffs on China, Mexico and Canada, SiriusXM started “to see a drop-off” in advertising in the last “couple of weeks,” particularly in consumer-packaged goods brands, said Barry, adding, “I would say we’re cautious about where the ad industry is going right now.”
More subscriber losses are expected in 2025. SiriusXM is reducing its marketing spending on the streaming app and will “tighten” the terms of promotional plans, Barry said, which should result in the loss of approximately 200,000 subscribers this year. That drop would follow a 4% decline in subscribers in 2024, when SiriusXM revenue fell 3% to $8.7 billion.
The numbers don’t look good for festival promoters — and they’re getting worse.
Since the end of the pandemic, the economics of stadium concerts have become so much more favorable for fans and artists that major festival promoters are losing headliners who can dependably drive ticket sales.
Take Zach Bryan. In 2023, the then-rising star headlined the Railbird Festival in Lexington, Ky.; the Two Step Inn Festival in Georgetown, Texas; the Pilgrimage Festival in Franklin, Tenn.; and Under the Big Sky in Whitefish, Mont., among the eight that he performed at that year.
After playing just two festivals last year and releasing a wildly successful fifth studio album in July, Bryan, now a superstar, had festival buyers rejoicing in September when he was announced as the opening headliner for 2025’s Stagecoach festival. But instead of signing on as the top draw for other country festivals like Faster Horses or Tortuga, Bryan opted to partner with Stagecoach producer AEG Presents for 10 large-scale shows this summer, including stadium dates in New York, San Francisco and Ann Arbor, Mich., at the newly rebuilt Michigan Stadium, the largest such venue in the country, which will host Bryan as its inaugural concert.
He’s not alone. Festival staples like Post Malone and Kendrick Lamar, who performed at 10 apiece in 2023, are mostly ditching those live events this summer in favor of stadium concerts in major markets like Los Angeles, where the SoFi Stadium is hosting a record 19 shows from Beyoncé, The Weeknd, Shakira, Blackpink and more during the first half of the year.
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Add in stadium dates from Coldplay and Metallica and a co-headliner tour with Chris Stapleton and George Strait, and it’s easy to see why festival promoters are feeling suffocated by the abundance of stadium concerts in most major markets.
“The popularity of stadium concerts represents a significant challenge to festivals,” says Josh Kurfirst, a partner at WME who runs the agency’s 40-person festival department. From a competitive standpoint, festivals face a number of disadvantages compared with stadium concerts “that are very difficult to overcome,” he explains.
The biggest of those drawbacks is the economics. At most, festival headliners earn $5 million to $6 million per appearance, while an artist with an aggressively priced stadium show can generate double that amount. The trade-off is the costs an artist pays — a festival slot has little to no costs to cover, while a stadium headliner is responsible for nearly all of the show’s expenses. On a one-to-one basis, an artist’s net from a big festival date might be the same as what the artist would earn from a stadium show. But when those costs are amortized over a dozen stadium dates, the economics heavily favor the stadiums. That’s especially true in 2025, when the number of festivals capable of paying out high-seven-figure headliner slots has dropped significantly while the number of markets hosting stadium shows has increased.
The numbers work in favor of consumers as well. Most stadium concert tickets cost $200 to $300, while festival tickets have climbed considerably in recent years to offset rising costs, often averaging $400 to $700 per attendee. And while most festivals stretch out to several days and include access to dozens of artists, “many fans would prefer to spend an afternoon at a concert seeing their favorite artists and knowing that they have a seat to sit down in and access to basic creature comforts,” says Jarred Arfa, executive vp/head of global music at Independent Artist Group.
“It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, and there’s significantly more work involved in promoting a stadium concert than booking an artist on a festival,” Arfa continues. “But in general, a stadium concert is more appealing to older fans than a GA pass to a festival.”
That said, Arfa points out that the number of acts capable of leaping from festival headliner to the top of a stadium tour lineup is quite small and that as early incubators of artists, festivals have the resources and reach needed to cultivate a new generation of top talent.
Kurfirst adds that the headliners come and go for most major festivals and that the best brands tend to be defined by their cultural significance, the fan experience and the community that supports the festival. To remain relevant, maintain ticket demand and attract star acts, he says festival organizers need to understand the appeal of their brand and “double down on superserving the fan. Find out what your audience wants and deliver it to them in a way that no one else can.”
This story appears in the March 8, 2025, issue of Billboard.
The Abbey Road Institute is set to launch its newest campus in Los Angeles this summer, it was announced Tuesday (March 11). The state-of-the-art facility will be led by Grammy-winning engineer, mixer, producer and musician Rafa Sardina.
Designed to provide students with a unique professional experience, the West Coast campus will feature the institute’s renowned curriculum along with a faculty of Los Angeles-based producers, engineers and musicians, including Alan Meyerson, Barry Rudolph, John Boylan and Vanessa Garde.
“Abbey Road Institute Los Angeles is the culmination of a long-held dream,” said Sardina — who has worked with Stevie Wonder, Rosalia, Alejandro Sanz, Dr. Dre, Camila Cabello, Lady Gaga and more — in a statement. “I want to share the invaluable professional experiences of my closest musical colleagues and myself with outstanding new generations of mixers, producers, and other music and music business professionals. I can’t wait to welcome our first students and witness the beginning of their exciting career journeys.”
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Luca Barassi, CEO of Abbey Road Institute London, added: “We are thrilled to be working with Rafa and his team as we continue expanding our educational footprint in the U.S. Rafa has a strong affinity with how we teach, and an ambition to pass on his expertise to the next generation. Establishing our second U.S. campus in Los Angeles — a creative, dynamic, and globally influential city — will provide students with an immersive experience at the heart of a thriving international music scene.”
The program offers intensive and immersive education in a small, focused-learning environment, emphasizing hands-on, apprenticeship-style training to equip graduates with the skills necessary to thrive in the music industry. Graduates will earn a diploma in music production and sound engineering. Additional diplomas in audio post-production for film and TV & music business will be offered in the future.
“We are incredibly proud of the success of Abbey Road Institute graduates,” Universal Music Group COO and Abbey Road board member David Sharpe added. “Some of them have earned multiple Grammy and Billboard awards, along with numerous Grammy and Latin Grammy nominations. Bringing Abbey Road Institute’s world-class education to Los Angeles will provide aspiring producers and engineers with the training they need to make a strong entrance into the music industry.”
The campus’ exact inauguration date and location will be announced soon.
Warner Chappell continued to dominate the Country Airplay chart for a fifth consecutive quarter in Q4 of 2024 with a strong 33.67% market share and 71 songs on the chart. This includes the quarter’s No. 1 song “I Am Not Okay” by Jelly Roll, which was co-written by WCM Nashville/Tape Room Music’s Casey Brown and Taylor Phillips.
Sony Music Publishing comes in second with 19.57% market share, thanks to its 53 songs on the chart, also including “I Am Not Okay,” which was co-written by SMP talent, Ashley Gorley. Gorley, a longtime hitmaker in Nashville, is this quarter’s top songwriter too.
Universal Music Publishing Group holds the third spot, just as it did in the last quarter, with a 9.81% share of the chart and 26 ranked songs. Among its many Country Airplay hits is “Pour Me A Drink” by genre-bending star Post Malone which ranked as the second biggest song on the chart this quarter.
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Kobalt came in fourth place with a 6.83% market share and 19 songs on the chart. BMG arrives in fifth, up one spot from Q3 thanks to its share of songs like “I Am Not Okay.” In total, the Berlin-based company has shares of 14 songs on the Q4’s Country Airplay chart.
Concord, the fifth largest publisher on the Country Airplay chart, significantly grew its market share this quarter, from 2.51% in Q3 to 4.17% in Q4. Among its 13 songs on the chart is “Lies Lies Lies” by Morgan Wallen, the fourth biggest song of the quarter.
“Lies Lies Lies” was also a major contributor to Big Machine Music’s 3.53% market share this quarter, ranking them at No. 7. Reservoir Media came in eighth for Q4 with “Gonna Love You” by Parmalee bolstering its 1.85% share of the chart.
Pulse is a newcomer to the Country Airplay ranking this quarter at No. 9. Its top song was “High Road” by East Texas favorite Koe Wetzel, marking its official entrance to the upper echelon of Nashville publishers.
Finally, Hipgnosis rounds out the list at No. 10 with a 1.53% market share and 3 songs on the chart, including “4x4xu” by Lainey Wilson.
OpenPlay, the back-office technology company that Universal Music, BMG and others use to manage their catalogs, said on Tuesday it hired former Dubset Media executive Bob Barbiere to lead a new service offering.
Called OpenPlay Reach, the new offering will launch in the second quarter this year and it aims to give its thousands of label and publisher clients more control over the distribution and monetization of their catalogs, and delivery of tracks to the streaming platforms, the company says.
With more than 100,000 new tracks uploaded to music platforms every day, and video assets with music components becoming more powerful generators of streaming revenue than in recent years, managing the thousands and millions of songs major music companies and publishers have in their catalogs has never been more complicated.
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At the same time, record labels and publishers are looking to automate back-office functions to save money and focus staff resources on finding new artists and talent.
“[OpenPlay] Reach is both well-conceived and uniquely timed,” Barbiere said in a statement. “Labels and publishers are not only trying to keep up with the growing use of their catalog and rapidly expanding number of consumer touch points, they are being fiscally challenged to get more accomplished with less. While OpenPlay now powers the back office of thousands of labels and publishers, it’s been one of music’s best kept secrets. With the introduction of Reach, it will not be a secret much longer.”
OpenPlay says it not only helps clients house their catalogs, but also distribute their songs. The OpenPlay dashboard shows effectively everything Spotify, Apple Music and other digital service providers require: rights, audio information, secondary contributors, everything associated with an individual ISRC or composition, basic publishing information, lyrics, expanded metadata and more. OpenPlay’s tools also provide distribution services like creating secure, trackable playlists to send promoters, a tool that automatically creates electronic press kits, and a dashboard for label groups to approve or reject releases from across label groups.
Its clients include all the majors — Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group — as well as BMG, Concord, HYBE, Netflix, Disney Music, Big Machine, MNRK and others, according to the company.
A veteran of music technology and digital rights clearances, Barbiere previously co-founded ClearBeats, a startup aimed at solving hassles in licensing derivative works, and was an executive at Pex, which tracks music usage and modified audio. He joins OpenPlay as executive vice president and general manager of OpenPlay Reach.
OpenPlay co-founder and chief client officer Edward Ginis says the expanded new tools further “our vision to give rights owners the independence to take asset management decisions with complete control. Bob Barbiere’s leadership will be key in driving this expansion forward and ensuring that content can be managed, delivered and monetized at scale.”
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: Daddy Yankee sues his ex-wife for $250 million; Jay-Z’s dispute with his former accuser and her lawyer goes on; prosecutors say Taylor Swift tickets were stolen and resold by hackers; and much more.
THE BIG STORY: Daddy Yankee Goes Back To Court
Daddy Yankee’s legal war with ex-wife Mireddys González isn’t over yet.
The pair finalized their divorce last month, but in a lawsuit filed last week in Puerto Rico, the reggaetón superstar (Ramón Luis Ayala Rodríguez) accused her and her sister Ayeicha González Castellanos of mismanaging two of his companies to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
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“Mireddys and Ayeicha … proceeded to concentrate in themselves a greater power than authorized and, together, made negligent and selfish decisions that were detrimental to both the companies and [Daddy Yankee] in his personal capacity and as an artist,” the star’s lawyers wrote.
The lawsuit follows, and often echoes, the allegations Yankee made in December when he sought an injunction against González – namely that the two women had withdrawn $100 million from his companies’ bank accounts without authorization. Now, Yankee claims that after regaining control of the companies, his team discovered many new irregularities, including the “disappearance” of key records.
For all the details, go read the full story from Billboard’s Griselda Flores.
Other top stories this week…
FIGHT GOES ON – Jay-Z’s rape accuser is standing by her story, according to court documents filed last week — directly contradicting a recent lawsuit in which the superstar claimed the woman had admitted to fabricating the allegations. Later in the week, the star’s lawyers filed sworn statements from private investigators to whom the accuser allegedly recanted, and suggested that she and her lawyer should sit for depositions.
HACKED TICKETS – Members of a “cybercrime crew” stole more than 900 tickets to the Taylor Swift Eras Tour and other events and then resold them for more $635,000 in illegal profit, according to charges handed down by New York prosecutors. The tour, which wrapped in December with a record-shattering haul of more than $2 billion in face-value ticket sales over a two-year run, spawned an infamously pricy resale market – something the accused fraudsters were allegedly able to exploit.
“FLOWERS” UPDATE – Miley Cyrus seems unlikely to immediately escape a copyright lawsuit filed over allegations that her Grammy-winning “Flowers” infringed the Bruno Mars song “When I Was Your Man.” At a court hearing, a Los Angeles federal judge indicated that would likely deny a motion to dismiss the case filed last year by attorneys for Cyrus.
SHEERAN CASE AT SCOTUS – The legal battle over whether Ed Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud” infringed Marvin Gaye‘s “Let’s Get It On” has reached the U.S. Supreme Court. In a petition for certiorari filed last week, a company that owns a stake in the rights to Gaye’s 1973 song urged the justices to overturn a November ruling by a lower appeals court that rejected the lawsuit, arguing that “the rights of thousands of legacy musical composers and artists” were at stake in the case.
ANTITRUST SHOWDOWN – A lyrics service called LyricFind filed an antitrust lawsuit against Musixmatch, claiming that the larger rival has reached an exclusive licensing deal with Warner Music Group (WMG) that’s “unprecedented in the music industry” and is aimed at securing an illegal monopoly for providing lyrics to streamers like Spotify.