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Billboard is bringing back its peer-voted Power Players’ Choice Award for 2024, asking members of the music industry across all sectors to honor the executive they believe had the most impact across the business in the past year. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news Voting is now […]
Billboard is bringing back its peer-voted Power Players’ Choice Award for 2024, asking members of the music industry across all sectors to honor the executive they believe had the most impact across the business in the past year. Voting is open to all Billboard Pro members, both existing and new, with one vote per member […]
Rapper Polo G is suing a European tour booking firm over canceled plans for a string of concerts, claiming that the company continued to advertise the shows anyway — actions he calls “a shocking and outrageous fraud.”
In a complaint filed Monday (Nov. 27) in New York federal court, attorneys for the rapper (real name Taurus Bartlett) accused Netherlands-based J. Noah B.V. of violating his intellectual property rights, claiming the company “lied to the public” by continuing to promote shows “they knew would not occur.”
“Bartlett’s counsel demanded that defendants immediately remove all uses of Bartlett’s client’s name and image from the website, from Instagram, and from all other social media channels,” Polo G’s lawyers wrote. “Inexcusably, defendants failed to do so, and ignored this demand entirely.”
“Even more egregiously, J Noah’s Instagram account continued to contain advertisements for alleged performances by Bartlett … that defendants are fully aware would not be occurring,” the rapper’s lawyers added.
Those splashy allegations are layered on top of a more run-of-the-mill underlying contract dispute over an agreement for 10 concerts, which Polo G’s lawyers say J. Noah has “wrongly” accused the rapper of breaching.
In the complaint, Polo G seeks a ruling that he had “no obligation to perform” at the shows because he sustained an “injury that prevents him from performing” — a valid reason under the contract, his lawyers say. On the contrary, he claims that it’s actually J. Noah that breached the deal by failing to pay his full $495,000 in fees as required under the contract.
But the lawsuit also goes much further than that — turning a contract dispute into intellectual property litigation by claiming that J. Noah then continued to wrongfully use Polo G’s “name, likeness and trademark” even after the deal had been terminated.
“Through these knowingly false advertisements of fictitious concert performances using the Polo G Mark and Plaintiff’s image, Defendants have engaged in knowingly false advertising—thereby committing a fraud on the public and causing irreparable harm to the Polo G Mark and Plaintiff’s reputation,” Polo G’s lawyers wrote.
A spokesperson for J. Noah did not immediately return a request for comment on Wednesday.
Most conversations around AI in music are focused on music creation, protecting artists and rightsholders, and differentiating human-made music from machine-made works. And there is still discourse to be had as AI has some hidden superpowers waiting to be explored. One use for the technology that has immense potential to positively impact artists is music marketing.
As generative and complementary AI is becoming a larger part of creative works in music, marketing will play a larger role than ever before. Music marketing isn’t just about reaching new and existing fans and promoting upcoming singles. Today, music marketing must establish an artist’s ownership of their work and ensure that the human creatives involved are known, recognized, and appreciated. We’re about to see the golden age of automation for artists who want to make these connections and gain this appreciation.
While marketing is a prerequisite to a creator’s success, it takes a lot of time, energy, and resources. Creating engaging content takes time. According to Linktree’s 2023 Creator Report, 48% of creators who make $100-500k per year spend more than 10 hours on content creation every week. On top of that, three out of four creators want to diversify what they create but feel pressure to keep making what is rewarded by the algorithm. Rather than fighting the impossible battle of constantly evolving and cranking out more content to match what the algorithm is boosting this week, creatives can have a much greater impact by focusing on their brand and making high-quality content for their audience.
For indie artists without support from labels and dedicated promotion teams, the constant pressure to push their new single on TikTok, post on Instagram, and engage with fans while finding the time to make new music is overwhelming. The pressure is only building, thanks to changes in streaming payouts. Indie artists need to reach escape velocity faster.
Megh Vakharia
AI-powered music marketing can lighten that lift–generating campaign templates and delivering to artists the data they need to reach their intended audience. AI can take the data that artists and creators generate and put it to work in a meaningful way, automatically extracting insights from the information and analytics to build marketing campaigns and map out tactics that get results.
AI-driven campaigns can give creators back the time they need to do what they do best: create. While artificial intelligence saves artists time and generates actionable solutions for music promotion, it is still highly dependent on the artist’s input and human touch. Just as a flight captain has to set route information and parameters before switching on autopilot, an artist enters their content, ideas, intended audience, and hopeful outcome of the marketing campaign. Then, using this information, the AI-powered marketing platform can provide all of the data and suggestions necessary to produce the targeted results.
Rather than taking over the creative process, AI should be used to assist and empower artists to be more creative. It can help put the joy back into what can be a truly fun process — finding, reaching, and engaging with fans.
A large portion of artists who have tapped into AI marketing have never spent money on marketing before, but with the help of these emerging tools, planning and executing effective campaigns is more approachable and intuitive. As the music industry learns more about artificial intelligence and debates its ethical implications in music creation, equal thought must be given to the opportunities that it unlocks for artists to grow their fanbases, fuel more sustainable careers, and promote their human-made work.
Megh Vakharia is the co-founder and CEO of SymphonyOS, the AI-powered marketing platform empowering creatives to build successful marketing campaigns that generate fan growth using its suite of smart, automated marketing tools.
Ahead of the United Nations Climate Change Conference starting tomorrow (Nov. 3) in Dubai, Sony Music, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group have announced the creation of the Music Industry Climate Collective (MICC). This alliance will work to address the challenges and changes in the global climate and how they relate to the music industry.
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The MICC’s first initiative will be offering comprehensive sectoral guidance for measuring scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions, defined as “emissions that are not produced by the company itself and are not the result of activities from assets owned or controlled by them, but by those that it’s indirectly responsible for up and down its value chain.”
For the music sector, the vast majority of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are in scope 3.
MICC’s members have already worked with scientific experts on their first draft of the sectoral guidance, which will be made available to industry participants. MICC’s members have also initiated calls for wider industry input through an advisory council composed of independent record labels, value chain partners, and climate experts. The guidance will be further developed through an inclusive, multi-stakeholder process.
The American Association of Independent Music, a non-profit trade organization representing more than 600 independently owned U.S. record labels, will serve as an advisor to the MICC. A2IM will assist in myriad ways, initially with recommendations on how best to include small-to-medium-sized businesses in this initiative.
“This initiative demonstrates what can be achieved when music leaders come together with a shared vision and commitment to sustainability,” the MICC’s founding members say in a group statement. “We are proud to collaborate to amplify environmental stewardship and offer practical recommendations and strategies tailored to the unique needs of music companies, regardless of their size or scale of operations.
“Together, we must continue to make progress on this vital priority,” the statement continues. “We welcome all to join us in reducing our industry’s carbon footprint by working together to ensure an environmentally responsible future for music and our planet.”
2023 is on track to be the hottest year on record, with many concerts and festivals affected by climate change since the start of the year.
Earlier this month, 760 stations owned by iHeartMedia simultaneously threw their weight behind a new single: The Beatles’ “Now and Then.” This was surprising, because the group broke up in 1970 and two of the members are dead. “Now and Then” began decades ago as a home recording by John Lennon; more recently, AI-powered audio technology allowed for the separation of the demo’s audio components — isolating the voice and the piano — which in turn enabled the living Beatles to construct a whole track around them and roll it out to great fanfare.
“For three days, if you were a follower of popular culture, all you heard about was The Beatles,” says Arron Saxe, who represents several estates, including Otis Redding’s and Bill Withers’s. “And that’s great for the business of the estate of John Lennon and the estate of George Harrison and the current status of the two living legends.”
For many people, 2023 has been the year that artificial intelligence technology left the realm of science fiction and crashed rudely into daily life. And while AI-powered tools have the potential to impact wide swathes of the music industry, they are especially intriguing for those who manage estates or the catalogs of dead artists.
That’s because there are inherent constraints involved with this work: No one is around to make new stuff. But as AI models get better, they have the capacity to knit old materials together into something that can credibly pass as new — a reproduction of a star’s voice, for example. “As AI develops, it may impact the value of an estate, depending on what assets are already in the estate and can be worked with,” says Natalia Nataskin, chief content officer for Primary Wave, who estimates that she and her team probably spend around 25% of their time per week mulling AI (time she says they used to spend contemplating possibilities for NFTs).
And a crucial part of an estate manager’s job, Saxe notes, is “looking for opportunities to earn revenue.” “Especially with my clients who aren’t here,” he adds, “you’re trying to figure out, how do you keep it going forward?”
The answer, according to half a dozen executives who work with estates or catalogs of dead artists or songwriters, is “very carefully.” “We say no to 99 percent of opportunities,” Saxe says.
“You have this legacy that is very valuable, and once you start screwing with it, you open yourself up to causing some real damage,” adds Jeff Jampol, who handles the estates of The Doors, Janis Joplin and more. “Every time you’re going to do something, you have to be really protective. It’s hard to be on the bleeding edge.”
To work through these complicated issues, WME went so far as to establish an AI Task Force where agents from every division educate themselves on different platforms and tools to “get a sense for what is out there and where there are advantages to bring to our clients,” says Chris Jacquemin, the company’s head of digital strategy. The task force also works with WME’s legal department to gain “some clarity around the types of protections we need to be thinking about,” he continues, as well as with the agency’s legislative division in Washington, D.C.
At the moment, Jampol sees two potentially intriguing uses of AI in his work. “It would be very interesting to have, for instance, Jim Morrison narrate his own documentary,” he explains. He could also imagine using an AI voice model to read Morrison’s unrecorded poetry. (The Doors singer did record some poems during his lifetime, suggesting he was comfortable with this activity.)
On Nov. 15, Warner Music Group announced a potentially similar initiative, partnering with the French great Edith Piaf’s estate to create a voice model — based on the singer’s old interviews — which will narrate the animated film Edith. The executors of Piaf’s estate, Catherine Glavas and Christie Laume, said in a statement that “it’s been a special and touching experience to be able to hear Edith’s voice once again — the technology has made it feel like we were back in the room with her.”
The use of AI tech to recreate a star’s speaking voice is “easier” than attempting to put together an AI model that will replicate a star singing, according to Nataskin. “We can train a model on only the assets that we own — on the speaking voice from film clips, for example,” she explains.
In contrast, to train an AI model to sing like a star of old, the model needs to ingest a number of the artist’s recordings. That requires the consent of other rights holders — the owners of those recordings, which may or may not be the estate, as well as anyone involved in their composition. Many who spoke to Billboard for this story said they were leery of AI making new songs in the name of bygone legends. “To take a new creation and say that it came from someone who isn’t around to approve it, that seems to me like quite a stretch,” says Mary Megan Peer, CEO of the publisher peermusic.
Outside the United States, however, the appetite for this kind of experimentation may differ. Roughly a year ago, the Chinese company Tencent Music Entertainment told analysts that it used AI-powered technology to create new vocal tracks from dead singers, one of which went on to earn more than 100 million streams.
For now, at least, Nataskin characterized Primary Wave as focused on “enhancing” with AI tech, “rather than creating something from scratch.” And after Paul McCartney initially mentioned that artificial intelligence played a role in “Now and Then,” he quickly clarified on X that “nothing has been artificially or synthetically created,” suggesting there is still some stigma around the use of AI to generate new vocals from dead icons. The tech just “cleaned up some existing recordings,” McCartney noted.
This kind of AI use for “enhancing” and “cleaning up,” tweaking and adjusting has already been happening regularly for several years. “For all of the industry freakout about AI, there’s actually all these ways that it’s already operating everyday on behalf of artists or labels that isn’t controversial,” says Jessica Powell, co-founder and CEO of Audioshake, a company that uses AI-powered technology for stem separation. “It can be pretty transformational to be able to open up back catalog for new uses.”
The publishing company peermusic used AI-powered stem separation to create instrumentals for two tracks in its catalog — Gaby Moreno’s “Fronteras” and Rafael Solano’s “Por Amor” — which could then be placed in ads for Oreo and Don Julio, respectively. Much like the Beatles, Łukasz Wojciechowski, co-founder of Astigmatic Records, used stem separation to isolate, and then remove distortion from, the trumpet part in a previously unreleased recording he found of jazz musician Tomasz Stanko. After the clean up, the music could be released for the first time. “I’m seeing a lot of instances with older music where the quality is really poor, and you can restore it,” Wojciechowski says.
Powell acknowledges that these uses are “not a wild proposition like, ‘create a new voice for artist X!’” Those have been few and far between — at least the authorized ones. (Hip-hop fans have been using AI-powered technology to turn snippets of rap leaks from artists like Juice WRLD, who died in 2019, into “finished” songs.) For now, Saxe believes “there hasn’t been that thing where people can look at it and go, ‘They nailed that use of it.’ We haven’t had that breakout commercial popular culture moment.”
It’s still early, though. “Where we go with things like Peter Tosh or Waylon Jennings or Eartha Kitt, we haven’t decided yet,” says Phil Sandhaus, head of WME Legends division. “Do we want to use voice cloning technologies out there to create new works and have Eartha Kitt in her unique voice sing a brand new song she’s never sung before? Who knows? Every family, every estate is different.”
Additional reporting by Melinda Newman
A judge overseeing the estate of Aretha Franklin awarded real estate to the late star’s sons, citing a handwritten will from 2014 that was found between couch cushions.
The decision Monday came four months after a Detroit-area jury said the document was a valid will under Michigan law, despite scribbles and many hard-to-read passages. Franklin had signed it and put a smiley face in the letter “A.”
The papers will override a handwritten will from 2010 that was found at Franklin’s suburban Detroit home around the same time in 2019, the judge said.
One of her sons, Kecalf Franklin, will get that property, which was valued at $1.1 million in 2018, but is now worth more. A lawyer described it as the “crown jewel” before trial last July.
Another son, Ted White II, who had favored the 2010 will, was given a house in Detroit, though it was sold by the estate for $300,000 before the dueling wills had emerged.
“Teddy is requesting the sale proceeds,” Charles McKelvie, an attorney for Kecalf Franklin, said Tuesday.
Judge Jennifer Callaghan awarded a third son, Edward Franklin, another property under the 2014 will.
Aretha Franklin had four homes when she died of pancreatic cancer in 2018. The discovery of the two handwritten wills months after her death led to a dispute between the sons over what their mother wanted to do with her real estate and other assets.
One of the properties, worth more than $1 million, will likely be sold and the proceeds shared by four sons. The judge said the 2014 will didn’t clearly state who should get it.
“This was a significant step forward. We’ve narrowed the remaining issues,” McKelvie said of the estate saga.
There’s still a dispute over how to handle Aretha Franklin’s music assets, though the will appears to indicate that the sons would share any income. A status conference with the judge is set for January.
Franklin was a global star for decades, known especially for hits in the late 1960s like “Think,” “I Say a Little Prayer” and “Respect.”
A coalition of artist and label groups is calling on legislators to urgently address a 2020 court ruling that risks seeing European musicians lose out on millions of euros in royalties each year to U.S. acts.
For decades, American musicians have been denied royalties for the use of their music on broadcast radio or when it’s played in cafes, shops and bars in many overseas countries due to the lack of equivalent terrestrial radio performance and public performance rights in the United States. This practice is based on a principle known as material reciprocity, which means that broadcast and performance revenues are only paid out to countries that apply the same rights.
The longstanding practice of reciprocal treatment was, however, suspended in the European Union (EU) by a 2020 ruling from the European Court of Justice (ECJ). In that decision, the ECJ decreed that all recording artists are entitled to an equal share of the royalties generated when their music is played on radio or in public premises in the EU, regardless of their nationality — or the absence of radio and performance rights in an artist’s home country.
Brussels-based independent labels trade body IMPALA says the ECJ ruling will result in European artists and labels losing out on around 125 million euros ($137 million) in royalty income each year, with the equivalent sum instead going to U.S. musicians. Previously, these broadcast and performance royalties were mostly divided up between local labels according to their market share.
European countries that currently withhold public performance and broadcast royalty payments to U.S. artists and labels include the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Denmark and Ireland. (Outside of Europe, three countries —Japan, Argentina and Australia — also deny royalties to U.S. musicians because of a lack of reciprocal rights).
In 2019, prior to the court ruling, SoundExchange, which issues licenses to online and satellite radio services, estimated that recording artists and rights holders in the United States lost out on an estimated $350 million in royalty payments due to what it called the “unfair treatment of music creators.”
So far, the Netherlands is the only EU country to change its legislation in line with the ECJ ruling, which has become widely known as the “RAAP” case in reference to Irish collection society Recorded Artists Actors Performers (RAAP), which initiated the reforms by taking legal action against Phonographic Performance Ireland (PPI) in 2020. In that case, RAAP challenged PPI in the Irish High Court after it reduced royalty payments to performers from a 50-50 split with labels to around 20%. The case was then referred up to the ECJ, which made the now-controversial ruling in September of that year.
U.S. repertoire represents around 40% of all public performance and broadcast income collected annually in the Netherlands, according to Dutch collecting society SENA. Until recently, this income was neither collected nor distributed. Since the change in practice, SENA has increased its tariffs on public performance royalties from 12.5% to 26%.
Will Maas, chair of the Netherlands’ musicians’ union, said in a statement that the rise in rates is not enough to make up for the additional U.S. repertoire now being collected, resulting in a “clear and substantial drop” in revenue going to Dutch and European performers. “This is what awaits other countries if nothing is done to address this,” he added.
In response, IMPALA executive chair Helen Smith wants the European courts to reverse its 2020 ruling and restore the principle of material reciprocity.
“It is the EU’s responsibility to prevent European artists and producers losing millions every year to the USA, which has chosen not to protect these rights,” said Smith in a statement. She added that the lack of terrestrial radio performance rights and public performance rights in the United States costs the world music economy “hundreds of millions, if not billions a year.”
IMPALA also supports a flexible solution that would enable EU countries to pay U.S. artists if they already did so before the ECJ judgment.
Other music groups and CMOs backing IMPALA’s call for action include Adami in France, the Swedish Musicians’ Union, Belgium’s PlayRight and the German Federation of Musicians. They argue that reciprocal treatment forces countries to raise their own levels of protection for musicians by not allowing nations to benefit from other countries’ rules unless they follow the same standards.
Not everyone in the music business is against the ECJ ruling and the push for so-called national treatment — whereby foreign recording artists and labels receive the same types of royalties as the nationals of a given country — to be standardized across the global music business. Executives who back national treatment say that any fall in label income would likely be offset by the increased set of rights and royalty collections elsewhere in Europe resulting from the ECJ decision.
That, however, is not a view shared by IMPALA or its members.
“Hundreds of thousands of artists count on the EU to do the right thing,” said Dutch musician Matthijs van Duijvenbode in a statement, “and to do it fast.”
As Sean “Diddy” Combs continues to do damage control amid his ongoing legal troubles, 50 Cent is offering a his fellow rapper a lifeline — but not without taking a few shots at him in the process. After the Diddy-founded TV network REVOLT announced that the 54-year-old mogul would be stepping down from his role […]
Young Thug’s attorney told jurors Tuesday (Nov. 28) that his client was “born into a society filled with despair” and merely rapped about violent crime because “these are the stories he knew” — and that prosecutors had cherry-picked lyrics that matched the crimes they hoped to pin against him.
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A day after Atlanta prosecutors kicked off the artist’s racketeering trial by accusing Thug (Jeffery Williams) of running a criminal street gang that operated like a “pack” of wolves, his attorney, Brian Steel, responded by telling the jury that the rapper “doesn’t even know most of the people in this indictment” and had no reason to run a criminal organization.
“He’s not sitting there telling people to kill people,” Steel said. “He doesn’t need their money. Jeffery is worth tens of millions of dollars.”
In addition to refuting each of the alleged “overt acts” that form the basis for the RICO case against Thug, Steel defended his client’s First Amendment right to rap about the dangerous conditions he faced growing up in Atlanta’s Cleveland Avenue neighborhood.
“Yes, he speaks about ‘killing 12’ and people being shot and drugs and drive-by shootings,” Steel said, referring to a phrase that allegedly refers to murdering police. “This is the environment he grew up in. These are the people he knew, these are the stories he knew. These are the words he rhymed.”
“This is art,” Steel added. “This is freedom of speech.”
Thug (Jeffery Williams) was indicted last year on accusations that his “YSL” was not really a record label/music collective called “Young Stoner Life,” but a violent Atlanta gang called “Young Slime Life” that committed murders, carjackings, drug dealing and other crimes over the course of a decade.
Along with other charges, Thug stands accused of violating Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, a law based on the more famous federal RICO statute that’s been used to target the mafia, drug cartels and other forms of organized crime. If convicted on all eight of his counts, Thug faces decades in prison.
Go read an explainer of the YSL case here, including a full breakdown of the charges and a deep-dive into the background of the accusations.
Throughout his opening statements Tuesday, Steel told a story of a young, impoverished kid whose disdain for police and the justice system stemmed from real-life instances of neglect and mistreatment. Steel said Thug had watched presumably innocent people face serious consequences after “snitches” told lies to them, and had witnessed his mother be handcuffed after his brother had been shot. During that incident, Steel said Thug had watched police place a sheet over his brother’s face despite the fact that he was still breathing.
Describing his client as a malnourished child with rotted teeth, Steel said Thug had turned to rap as a way out of poverty. He “idolized” rappers Lil Wayne and 2Pac, the attorney told jurors, and even took his stage name from the latter’s 1995 song with Smooth titled “P.Y.T (Playa Young Thugs).” Steel said the stage name wasn’t intended to be menacing but is, instead, an acronym for ‘truly humbled under God.’
Steel spent a majority of his more than two hours of opening statements going through each of the individual charges and “overt acts” — the small actions that make up a RICO charge.
One of those alleged acts is that Young Thug rented a 2014 Silver Infiniti Q50 sedan that was allegedly used during the murder of a rival gang leader, Donovan Thomas, in 2015. But Steel denied that Thug had any involvement in the killing, saying he had regularly rented cars for friends and had been “sad” to learn of Thomas’ death.
Steel frequently criticized the use of rap lyrics as evidence — a controversial prosecutorial tactic that has drawn criticism in recent years. During Monday’s opening statements, for instance, prosecutors told jurors that a particular Thug lyric — “hundred rounds in a Tahoe” from the song “Slime Shit” — referred to Donovan’s killing in a Chevy Tahoe. But Steel disputed that argument, saying Thug rapped about various cars often and there was “no evidence of when that lyric was even created.”
At other points Tuesday, Steel repeatedly questioned the trustworthiness of Kenneth Copeland, a former YSL member who made headlines earlier this year when a video leaked showing him talking with police investigators. The attorney described Copeland as a “leech” and “snitch” who had lied to investigators to avoid facing his own criminal charges.
Copeland is listed as a prosecution witness in the case, and Steel’s statements — which suggested that Copeland could have actually committed some of the crimes in the indictment — indicate he believes Copeland could be a key witness for the other side.
Several of the alleged acts refuted by Steel involved riffs or interactions with other rappers, including the allegation that YSL affiliates had once fired gunshots at rapper Lil Wayne’s tour bus in service of Young Thug.
During his statements, Steel acknowledged that Thug had recorded a video about Wayne’s Atlanta appearance that showed him surrounded by people with guns. But he said Thug had been told to create the video by his management for entertainment reasons because such a beef “creates interest in fans.”
Steel also noted Thug’s publicized disputes with YFN Lucci. The attorney described Lucci as a less successful rapper who used Thug’s name for clout, including claiming to have sex with Thug’s fiancé. Steel asked the jury if the leader of a criminal street gang would’ve let that go unscathed for so long.
Thug’s attorney also alluded to Lil Uzi Vert, accusing prosecutors of misrepresenting text messages to make it appear that Thug was threatening the fellow rapper’s life when he wrote “YSL Rule the world kid. 24m on a nigga head…” Steel said the text was not a bounty but rather an innocuous reference to Vert’s highly-publicized decision to have a $24 million diamond implanted in his forehead.
The YSL trial will continue Wednesday with more opening statements from attorneys for the other five defendants (Marquavius Huey, Deamonte “Yak Gotti” Kendrick, Quamarvious Nichols, Rodalius Ryan and Shannon Stillwell). Once openers conclude, the district attorney’s office will begin presenting its case and calling witnesses – a process that could last months.