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Cardi B stunned fans last weekend when she tomahawked a wireless microphone at an audience member who allegedly splashed a drink at her during a performance at Drai’s in Las Vegas. Now, the Las Vegas Metro Police Department has opened a battery investigation after a fan standing nearby said she was hit, at least partially, by the device.
The incident is just the latest in a recent spate of similar occurrences. Among other episodes, fans have thrown a sex toy at Lil Nas X; a teddy bear at Lady Gaga; and a cell phone at Bebe Rexha — the latter of which caused visible injuries and reportedly led the 27-year-old man who hurled it to be charged with a felony. It’s enough that some event security professionals are worried the trend could tarnish live music’s post-pandemic comeback.
“People have been talking about changes in fan behavior since the return of live events in 2021, and it’s not just in concerts but at sporting events, theater and live comedy as well,” says John Drury, a professor of social psychology at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom. Widely recognized as one of the leading experts on crowd behavior at concerts, Drury says that high-profile examples of rule-breakers experiencing the consequences of their actions can serve as an important deterrence against boundary-crossing that can go “beyond throwing things on stage…includ[ing] rudeness, aggression and dangerous behavior.”
Earlier this year, Drury and his colleagues at Sussex’s department of social psychology received funding from concert promoter Live Nation to study the causes of negative behavior at concerts and develop potential strategies for reducing instances of fans acting out. While the visual of Cardi B hurling a microphone at an unruly fan might serve as an important reminder that actions have consequences, it’s unreasonable to expect artists to physically enforce conduct rules at their shows.
It’s more reasonable to task venue personnel with identifying and deterring bad actors from engaging in bad behavior — but that, says Drury, is only slightly more effective. Most venue staff members are responsible for different elements of show production, while security staff is often tasked with defensive objectives like keeping fans out of dressing rooms, enforcing credentials and controlling access to meet and greets. But fans behaving badly in the audience is largely a blind spot.
“Fans are a venue’s most effective resource for preventing show stoppage and disruptive behavior,” says Drury, who advocates for greater resources to train venue staff. Through training and education, Drury wants to see venues develop fan communities that police themselves and deter bad behavior.
Drury’s theory that fan behavior can be externally formed and channeled in a way that encourages self-policing comes from a career spent studying crowd dynamics. Unlike traditional crowd control, which he says was initially created to understand the “madness” of the crowd, crowd dynamics looks at the beliefs and values of crowds. Even an unruly crowd like the one that took part in the Watts Uprising in 1965, Drury says, can help academics understand the dynamics drawing them together.
“While the dominant representation of [those who took part in the Watts Uprising] wasn’t positive and from the outside looked like chaos, violence and disorder, if you look closely, you can see there are limits,” says Drury. “[They] picked only on certain targets … there are limits that serve as a function of who they are, in line with their social values and identities.”
Once those similarities within the crowd are understood and limits are identified, it becomes easier to create conditions within a crowd that “allow participants to be more than just individuals,” he says.
These individuals are key to creating a self-policing culture at a venue, Drury says, and it can be as simple as identifying fans with leadership qualities, encouraging fans to connect with one another and creating events that reward and celebrate a venue or event’s values.
“Our research shows that there is generally a lower incidence of serious disruptive behavior at events with smaller, more intimate crowds in which everyone was there for the same reason,” says Drury.
That can be difficult to achieve at a large stadium show or mega-festival, but Drury says organizers can create community-driven environments that foster self-policing and social order by tapping into the “transformative power of large groups” and encouraging positive participation. That means communicating with fans in a voice that emphasizes the group experience without delineating between fans and event staff.
“Fans are more likely to act out when they feel the event itself is working against them,” he says, citing the disastrous Woodstock ’99, where fans — many loyal to bands — began acting out against the festival itself.
Drury also recommends using signage, social media and pre-event communications that celebrate the positive benefits and emotional highs of fan culture and coming together in groups.
Drury’s behavioral research has included extensive work on the causes of stampedes and mass panic, as well as the psychology of religious pilgrimages like the annual Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudia Arabia. In a Feb. 28 study created to understand how crowds respond to public threats, Drury used virtual reality technology to analyze how participants respond to non-verbal cues during mass panic scenarios, like an explosion in a crowded market.
Drury also utilizes historical research, survivor interviews and sends researchers to observe festivals around the world to shape his models on what he calls “the power of the crowd.” That can be critical when dealing with issues like a spike in cell phone throwing that Drury says feels driven by a need for individual attention. After all, fans and bands have famously thrown things at each other for decades. Underwear was tossed at crooner Tom Jones, mixtapes and CDRs were frisbeed at mashup DJs like Girl Talk and millions of bouquets were thrown on stage for legends like the late Selena Quintanilla and Jenni Rivera. Alice Cooper once had a live chicken thrown at him on stage while performing in Toronto, leading the shock rocker to cup the chicken with both hands and throw it back into the crowd, thinking it would fly off. It didn’t.
In the past, fans threw items on stage to get an artist’s attention, Drury said. “Now, many of these fans simply want attention from everyone.” Drury partially blames an exodus of “trained and experienced employees” from the events sector during the pandemic, along with a new generation of music fans attending shows despite being “unfamiliar with the prevailing norms at events” and older fans who may be “’out of practice’ after a period without events.”
In some instances, that could require a back-to-basics approach, posting the venue rules in large letters near the stage, playing public service announcements between acts reminding fans to be courteous to one another and laying out the consequences for extreme behavior, including arrests and show cancellations. Venues should never use heavy-handed tactics or rely solely on the use of force to de-escalate tensions, Drury says.
“The most valuable people at venues right now are the those that can deescalate situations and diplomatically deal with problematic situations,” he says, noting that music fans are starting to attend concerts at a younger age: “More education is needed to bring younger fans up to speed on what it means to be a lifelong music fan.”
Adidas brought in 400 million euros ($437 million) from the first release of Yeezy sneakers left over after breaking ties with Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, as the German sportswear maker tries to offload the unsold shoes and donate part of the proceeds to groups fighting antisemitism and other forms of hate.
The first batch of shoes released in June, which sold out, helped the company reach an operating profit of 176 million euros in the second quarter, better than it originally planned, Adidas said Thursday. A second sale started Wednesday.
After Ye’s antisemitic and other offensive comments led the company to end its partnership with the rapper in October, Adidas said it had sought a way to dispose of 1.2 billion euros worth of the high-end shoes in a responsible way.
“We will continue to carefully sell off more of the existing Yeezy inventory,” said CEO Bjørn Gulden, who took over in January.
“This is much better than destroying and writing off the inventory and allows us to make substantial donations to organizations like the Anti-Defamation League, the Philonise & Keeta Floyd Institute for Social Change and Robert Kraft’s Foundation to Combat Antisemitism,” Gulden said.
Adidas has already handed over 10 million euros to the groups and expected to give an additional 100 million euros, with further donations possible depending on how future sales go, Chief Financial Officer Harm Ohlmeyer said.
Several Jewish civic leaders contacted by The Associated Press said they weren’t planning to buy a pair of Yeezys themselves but generally welcomed the plan to support anti-hate organizations, saying the company is trying to make the best of a bad situation.
The Adidas CEO said the Yeezy sales are “of course also helping both our cash flow and general financial strength.”
The first sale unloaded roughly 20% to 25% of the Yeezy sneakers that were left stacked up in warehouses, contributing 150 million euros of Adidas’ 176 million euros in operating earnings in the April-to-June quarter.
Ohlmeyer, however, cautioned that the Yeezy contribution was smaller than the number made it seem because it did not include many of the company’s costs.
Adidas also warned that the first sale included the highest-priced shoes and sold out completely but that it wasn’t clear whether the remaining releases would see similar price levels and demand.
The blow-up of the Ye partnership put Adidas in a precarious position because of the popularity of the Yeezy line, and it faced growing pressure to end ties last year as other companies cut off the rapper.
The torn-up contract was now in arbitration, “a process that is being taken care of by legal people” for both sides and was surrounded “by a lot of uncertainty,” said Gulden, the Adidas CEO.
Asked whether it must pay Ye royalties on the shoes, the company has said only that it will observe all its contractual obligations.
Yeezy revenue from June was “largely in line” with sales seen in the second quarter of last year, Adidas said. The boost has allowed the company to cut its expectations for this year’s operating loss to 450 million euros from 700 million euros predicted previously.
On the amount of money given to anti-hate groups, Adidas said the donations were not a fixed percentage of sales but that it had discussed with the recipients what an appropriate amount would be.
Triller has settled a lawsuit from Sony Music accusing it of showing “brazen contempt for the intellectual property rights” of its artists by ceasing to pay license fees for the use of the company’s songs on the social video app. The deal was reached on July 21 after a federal judge overseeing the case sided […]
Lizzo has issued her first response to a bombshell lawsuit from three tour dancers who claim that they were subjected to sexual harassment and weight-shaming, calling them “false allegations” and “sensationalized stories.”
In a statement posted Thursday morning to her Twitter account, the star said the allegations in the lawsuit – that she and her company created a hostile work environment that also included religious and racial discrimination – were as “unbelievable as they sound and too outrageous to not be addressed.”
“I am not the villain that people and the media have portrayed me to be these last few days,” Lizzo wrote. “I am very open with my sexuality and expressing myself but I cannot accept or allow people to use that openness to make me out to be something I am not.”
The star paid particular attention to a claim in the lawsuit that she had “called attention” to a dancer’s weight gain – an especially loaded allegation against an artist who has made body positivity a central aspect of her personal brand.
“There is nothing I take more seriously than the respect we deserve as women in the world,” Lizzo wrote. “I know what it feels like to be body shamed on a daily basis and would absolutely never criticize or terminate an employee because of their weight.
The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday in Los Angeles by dancers Arianna Davis, Crystal Williams and Noelle Rodriguez, accuses Lizzo (real name Melissa Jefferson) and her Big Grrrl Big Touring Inc. of a wide range of legal wrongdoing and included dozens of pages of detailed factual allegations.
In one particularly vivid allegation, the lawsuit claims that Lizzo pushed the dancers to attend a sex show in Amsterdam’s famed Red Light District and then pressured them to engage with the performers, including “eating bananas protruding from the performers’ vaginas.” After Lizzo herself led a chant “goading” Davis to touch one performer’s breasts, the lawsuit says, Davis eventually did so.
The dancers also detailed alleged outbursts by Lizzo, including an “excruciating re-audition” in April after she accused the dancers of “drinking alcohol before shows”; one dancer claims the ordeal continued for so long that she wet herself because she feared she would be fired if she left the stage. The case also claims Lizzo repeatedly told dancers “none of their jobs were safe” and raised “thinly veiled concerns” about a dancer’s weight gain.
In her statement on Thursday, Lizzo did not address the lawsuit’s individual accusations, but said they were “sensationalized stories are coming from former employees who have already publicly admitted that they were told their behavior on tour was inappropriate and unprofessional.” And she broadly defended herself against what she called an attack on her “ethic, morals and respectfulness.”
“As an artist I have always been very passionate about what I do. I take my music and my performances seriously because at the end of the day I only want to put out the best art that represents me and my fans,” Lizzo said. “With passion comes hard work and high standards. Sometimes I have to make hard decisions but it’s never my intention to make anyone feel uncomfortable or like they aren’t valued as an important part of the team.”
Read Lizzo’s entire statement here.
BRISBANE, Australia — Mike Shinoda, co-founder of Linkin Park, the nu metal favorites fresh from reigning over several Billboard charts, is now part of the lineup for Bigsound 2023.
In March of this year, Linkin Park’s “Lost” saw the band return to No. 1 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Airplay chart for the first time in almost nine years, and hit the summit of the Alternative Airplay chart for the first time in nearly a decade.
“Lost” features vocals from Chester Bennington, who died in 2017, and was featured on the 20th anniversary release of Meteora, which led the Billboard 200 for two weeks following its original release, and is one of the group’s six leaders on the all-genres albums chart.
Away from the studio and stage, Shinoda, a music industry innovator in the NFT space, was tapped last year by Warner Recorded Music (WRM) to help shape the major’s “artist-centric approach” to Web3.
Also part of the third-wave of announcements is Christine Anu, who appears in the capacity as an official Bigsound headline speaker. One of the country’s most recognizable voices, Anu’s performance of Neil Murray’s “My Island Home” is a solid-gold classic, earning entry in APRA’s list of Top 30 Australian songs, published 2001, just one year after she performed it during the closing ceremony of the Sydney Olympic Games.
Organized by trade body QMusic, Bigsound will boast more than 100 speakers, from international and national buyers, agents, music supervisors, bookers and “industry decision makers.”
Speakers at this year’s summit include Simon Napier-Bell, the celebrated author, filmmaker and artist manager, who guided the careers of Rock Hall inductee George Michael and Wham, English composer Simon Franglen, Cockenflap Festival promoter Cora Chan, artists Ziggy Ramo, Kate Miller-Heidke, Georgia Maq, and more.
Also, upwards of 140 emerging acts from around the globe will play the showcase program, which adds Zheani, Full Flower Moon Band, Dean Brady, FELIVAND, Loren Ryan and others.
This year’s edition will be held Sept. 5 – 8 in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley.
Earlier in the year, the Palaszczuk state government announced funding for Bigsound to the tune of nearly A$4 million over four years, a boost that comes as the Queensland capital gears-up for the 2032 Olympic Games.
Bigsound 2023 is presented by Brick Lane Brewing and independent ticketer Oztix, and supported by national youth broadcaster triple j.
Visit bigsound.org.au for more.
Triller, a short-form video app in the style of TikTok, is planning to sell its common stock on the New York Stock Exchange through a direct listing under the ticker “ILLR,” according to the company’s S-1 filing released Wednesday (Aug. 2). The filing did not provide a date of the direct listing.
The direct listing — not an initial public offering, or IPO — will not have an underwriter that assumes the financial risk of selling the listed shares to institutional investors. Popularized by Spotify in 2018, a direct listing avoids the IPO’s road show and book-building process that establishes an initial selling price. Triller will not receive any proceeds from shares offered in the direct listing by its shareholders.
While TikTok had an estimated $9.4 billion in revenue in 2022 and is becoming an important source of royalties for record labels and music publishers, Triller is a far smaller affair. In the first quarter of 2023, the self-described “artificial intelligence powered technology platform” had revenue of $9.1 million and a net loss of $28.8 million. In calendar 2022, Triller had a net loss of $195.6 million on revenue of $47.7 million.
The S-1 paints a picture of a financially troubled company with numerous outstanding issues. Triller had just $2.2 million of cash and cash equivalents as of March 31. The company’s S-1 warns that Triller has incurred losses each year since its inception — not unusual for a high-growth tech startup — and has an accumulated deficit of $1.29 billion. Triller may incur additional costs related to outstanding litigation with Universal Music Publishing Group, as one example, and admits to not being in compliance with the payment obligations of “a significant number” of its music licensing contracts and “overdue on payments” to vendors that provide Triller with engineering, marketing and legal services, among other parties.
The S-1 also reveals that Triller entered into a confidential settlement agreement with Sony Music Entertainment on July 21, 2023, that requires it to make payments to SME for a breach of contract lawsuit brought by SME in 2022. On May 16, Triller was ordered to pay SME nearly $4.6 million. The settlement provided Triller with a payment plan. With 15 days of the direct listing, Triller will be obligated to pay SME under the settlement agreement.
Triller will have two classes of common stock: a Class A common stock with one vote per share and Class B common stock with ten votes per share. Upon completion of the reorganization, Proxima Media and Bobby Sarnevesht, Triller’s founding partners, will own about 15.4% of Triller’s common stock and have 60.6% of the company’s total voting power. In addition to Proxima Media, the other shareholders with greater than a 5% share of outstanding common stock are Paul Posner, CEO of Carnegie Technologies, and Tsai Ming Hsing. As of March 31, Triller had 282,017,038 shares of Class A common stock and 46,651,382 shares of our Class B common stock outstanding.
Triller claims to have over 550 million user accounts and had over 2.4 million creators as of March 31 — almost 100,000 more than it had two years earlier. It built its user base with acquisitions such as its 2021 purchase of Verzuz, the livestream platform created by of Swizz Beats and Timbaland that shot to fame during the pandemic. Swizz Beatz and Timbaland filed a $28 million lawsuit against Triller in August 2022 over unpaid monies promised in the deal. That lawsuit was settled out of court one month later.
Meta has launched AudioCraft, a new suite of AI models that generate music and audio based on text prompts, the company announced on Wednesday (Aug. 2). The technology consists of three models: MusicGen (music), AudioGen (sound effects) and EnCodec (higher quality music). It acts as new competition for Google’s MusicLM, a text-to-music generator that launched […]
300 Elektra Entertainment has promoted Aimie Vaughan-Früehe to executive vp/head of promotion and streaming, the company announced Wednesday (Aug. 2). In the role, Vaughan-Früehe will oversee all radio promotion and streaming across the label group, which includes 300 Entertainment, Elektra, Fueled by Ramen and Roadrunner Records as well as a roster of artists that includes […]
What does it mean to “break” an artist? It’s a question that has plagued the music industry in recent months. If a singer has billions of streams but walks down the street unrecognized, have they broken? Is a lone billion-stream single enough, or is a second hit required as proof of staying power? And what if an artist racks up multiple hits but can’t pull off a major headlining tour?
The consensus among label executives is that the last pop artist to break big was Olivia Rodrigo, who had four top 10 Billboard Hot 100 hits during 2021 and debuted at No. 1 on the chart with “Vampire” in July 2023. It’s a track record, they say, that today makes her seem like a unicorn.
“Nobody knows how to break music right now,” one senior executive laments. “I think they’re all lost.”
“There is a need and a desire for new artists that have real substance — artists that are more than just a song, that we can really lean into, buy concert tickets, buy [merchandise],” says J. Erving, a manager and founder of the artist services and distribution company Human Re Sources.
“Each person I talk to in the industry is more depressed [about this] than the person I talked to before them,” says another manager.
This melancholy flies in the face of some bright spots. As of July 1, 14 artists had cracked the Hot 100’s top 10 for the first time, a varied group that includes the Nigerian singer Rema, the American rapper Coi Leray, the country powerhouse Bailey Zimmerman, and the regional Mexican star Peso Pluma. That number is already more than double the six newcomers (plus the Encanto cast) who entered the top 10 over the same six-month period last year — seemingly a sign that the industry can still catapult young talent into the popular consciousness.
Genrewise, country is buzzing, and Pluma is at the forefront of a regional Mexican boom. “There are artists breaking. It’s just that they’re in different genres, not typical pop,” one major-label A&R executive says. Pop’s current genre share dropped from 12.87% at the start of the year to 10.69% at the mid-point, according to Luminate.
Still, many music executives remain worried about stagnation beyond a single musical style. They scan the landscape and see “moments,” as one put it, that can fade, rather than genuine breakthroughs that endure. “A lot of people have this bleak mindset,” a second major-label A&R executive says. Even pop radio is seeing “historic lows” in consensus hits, according to radio veteran Guy Zapoleon, which has led to “a bear market for new music.”
Dylan Bourne, who manages rapper JELEEL!, among others, expresses a common industry sentiment: “I see one act that has broken through this year, and that’s Ice Spice.” He adds, “The fears and concerns that people were having last year have only increased.”
Some blame the meager number of big breakthroughs on label decisions. According to the first A&R executive, “Labels signed more and signed worse than ever before in the decade-plus I’ve been at a major.”
Some cite the precipitous decline of mass media like radio and the maddening unpredictability of TikTok. And some attribute the feeling of industry inertia to the exhausting intensity of competing for attention in a world where gamers and influencers wield as much clout as music artists, if not more.
“Every issue that we’re facing right now comes down to oversaturation,” Bourne says. “People are just buried in content.”
“You know when you go camping and someone pulls out a guitar, and you’re like, ‘Oh, my God. Can you please stop?’ ” grouses a third A&R. “That guy is on [digital service providers] now.”
In addition to those factors, executives say, a hit doesn’t mean what it used to. It’s common to hear grumbles about young acts who have hundreds of millions of plays of a single but can’t fill a small room for a live performance. “It’s easier [today] for folks to be passive fans,” Erving says. “For you to consider yourself really broken, people need to care about you beyond the song. Where is the connectivity? Are people really dialed in in a deeper way?”
As a result of these shifts, some executives argue that the industry needs to change the way it thinks about breaking artists. As one A&R executive puts it: “Maybe there aren’t as many players slugging home runs, but there are more producing a steady stream of singles and doubles.”
Talya Elitzer, co-founder of label and management company Godmode, works with rapper JPEGMafia, who she says “hasn’t had a traditional hit in a commercial sense.” Even so, “his business is enormous,” she adds. “We sold 15,000 vinyl records from his web store in 24 hours. He sells seven figures in merch.”
Another act climbing into this camp is Laufey, a Berklee-trained jazz singer and multi-instrumentalist who has amassed fans with swooning bossa nova and a lively TikTok presence. 18-ish months after Laufey released her debut EP, she was the number-one selling artist in terms of merch in small-cap rooms in 2022, according to Atvenu, the payment processing system which handles transactions at 125,000 shows a year. She sold out a fall tour where the average room fit 1,500 fans. “Some fans show up dressed like her,” says her manager, Max Gredinger.
Bourne believes that “if you’re an artist earning well into seven figures a year repeatedly on an annual basis, you’ve broken to a certain degree.” But he acknowledges “that is a different recognition of what breaking means” relative to the one that much of the industry still relies on.
That’s partially because ticket and merch numbers don’t matter as much to most labels. Unless an artist signs a 360 deal — which are increasingly out of favor with managers and lawyers — record companies are not getting a cut of those revenue streams. Labels tend to earn the bulk of their money from streams, downloads and old-fashioned sales.
The industry is “slowly moving” toward a different concept of breaking, one entertainment attorney says. “People are celebrating the mid-level breaks as if it’s the biggest thing in the world, because that’s what you get these days.”
Steve Cooper, former CEO of Warner Music Group, said last year that the company had taken steps to lessen its “dependency on superstars.” One way the major labels have done that is step up signings, with the goal of spreading growth across a larger number of artists rather than relying on a few tent-pole acts. In 2022, Hartwig Masuch, CEO of BMG, noted that his company’s business model “is designed to be robust enough not to need hits in order to survive.”
In addition, both major labels and streaming services are increasingly focused on identifying “superfans” and finding new ways to extract money from them. If these efforts are effective, the industry will be unable to avoid the reality that artists with small but passionate followings may generate more business than those with wide, shallow fan bases.
A study released by Spotify in July concluded that artists’ most dedicated followers — presumably the ones that might come to a show dressed like the performer — make up just 2% of their monthly listeners but generate 18% of their streams. Even more important: Those devotees account for 52% of merch sales.
For now, the uneasiness felt around the music industry is likely to persist. “The doomsday thing is comforting for people that don’t know what’s going to happen next,” says Kayode Badmus-Wellington, an A&R consultant for Def Jam. But he prefers to “revel in” the uncertainty. “I don’t know what’s going to happen next,” he adds. “But I want to be a part of it.”
Ask a lawyer: “Do you have too many clients?” The answer will only ever be, “I’d like more.” But not all lawyer-client relationships are created equal. Entertainment lawyers are not like lawyers who handle class action lawsuits and represent thousands of clients with little contact, or personal injury lawyers where you hope that you never have to help the particular client again. We are in a high touch, fast-paced, relationship-based, paper-intensive business.
Billboard raised some great questions and points last month in its widely-discussed report, “Music Lawyers Have a Problem: Too Many Clients, Too Many Deals & Too Much Paperwork.” It’s true: the digital era has removed substantial barriers of entry to recording and distribution of music. Now combine that with the ease and speed of music to market, songs written and recorded, sometimes by as many as ten or more credited writers and producers, and deals that are as varied and creative as the music they’re meant to protect. You’re left with ever-growing piles of music business paperwork.
This “Lawyer Problem” can and will be fixed by a combination of music industry education and training and the deployment of deal-making platforms and tools, aided by AI, that modernize and improve the whole dealmaking process. These are the fundamental beliefs that led me — and co-founder Steven Ship — to build Creative Intell, an education and deal-drafting platform now in private beta.
This doesn’t mean that every artist and their team members need to go to law school. But let’s face it: if you bring your car to a mechanic and can’t describe the problem, you aren’t setting yourself – or the mechanic – up for success. Attorneys spend an enormous amount of time on education, walking clients through basic deal points and nuances. In an age when deals are getting more and more bespoke, it behooves artists and their camps to master the broad dynamics and key terms of basic dealmaking. A striking number of industry professionals in positions where they should know better still don’t understand basic royalty accountings or recoupment; each one of these cases costs the client billable hours and/or a law firm a lot of time.
Administrative process may not sound like the sexiest topic. But given the high volume of deals being done, an enormous amount of time is wasted on tasks as simple as downloading documents, saving the file to the correct folder and naming the document, redlining, checking precedent from prior deals, and looking for variations to include in a revised draft. If you’re a lawyer or a manager, how many emails do you send or receive asking “Where are we with this?” Talk to any working attorney in the music business, and they will acknowledge that these are substantial, contributing factors to the drag on deals.
And you’d be amazed what happens once a deal is signed. How much time is spent on taking contracting metadata and having it entered into royalty systems? Why are producer agreements sent to record labels as PDFs that need to be manually entered into royalty systems? The same goes for song split data for publishers and PROs. Minutes that add up to hours and days can be saved throughout the entire contracting process. Notably, none of the tools utilized by music industry attorneys are actually built for making contracts or their other needs. As platforms where all of the above can be executed, organized and archived in one place emerge and become industry standard, transformative speed and efficiency will result.
And of course, it wouldn’t be a “future of work” piece if we didn’t touch on the potential of AI. Generative tech offers enormous promise in the dealmaking and contracting spaces. Google “legal tech” and “AI” and you’ll see waves of funding and new, still-experimental utility–and yes, plenty of missteps in these early days. But given the right focus and experienced oversight, well-trained engines are capable of generating bespoke language for some of the most common deals in the music business where clients can ask questions, and be provided with immediate, accurate contextual education. These sorts of next-generation platforms should lower the barrier to entry for all music industry stakeholders including artists, songwriters, producers, managers, etc. in a whole different way: creating much greater access to credible, needed legal direction and knowledge to handle the world of music industry deals.
None of this will put lawyers out of business. Rather, as the various elements laid out in this piece begin to come to market, attorneys will be freed to fix higher level issues such as song splits disputes that hold up income for years which require relationships to fix and stamina to resolve. They’ll have more time to develop relationships with more “buyers” and “sellers” to provide added value. And they’ll finally get ahead of paperwork to plan for their clients’ futures. In this world, lawyers may still be unable to help themselves from always wanting more clients. But those clients will receive better, faster service.
David Fritz is partner, Boyarski Fritz LLP, and co-founder, along with Steven Ship, of Creative Intell, a deal-making platform currently in private beta.