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With Taylor Swift hiring one of her longtime lawyers as the new general counsel for her 13 Management, Billboard dug into the many cases he’s handled for the superstar – including a bizarre trademark battle with an “Evermore” theme park and Taylor’s high-profile assault accusations against a radio DJ.
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As reported Tuesday by The Wall Street Journal, Swift’s company is set to hire Douglas Baldridge, a veteran litigator at the major Washington, D.C.-based law firm law firm Venable, as the new top attorney for her company in the fall. He’s replacing Jay Schaudies, who the Journal says is retiring.
Though he’s technically a new hire at 13 Management, Baldridge and Swift are hardly strangers. From his position as outside counsel at Venable, Baldridge has repped Swift and her company for years in a number of major lawsuits.
His work for the star first made headlines in 2017, when he represented her in a high-profile battle with a Denver radio DJ named David Mueller, who Swift claimed had groped her at photoshoot. Mueller sued Swift for defamation, claiming her accusations were false and had cost him his job. Taylor quickly countersued, accusing Mueller of civil assault and battery over the incident.
At a jury trial in August 2017, Baldridge was direct with jurors in his closing statement: “The guy did it. Don’t be fooled. Don’t be snookered.” After just four hours of deliberations, the jury agreed – rejecting Mueller’s allegations and holding him liable for assault and battery. After the verdict was read, Taylor blinked back tears and mouthed “thank you” to Baldridge and her other attorneys.
His work for Swift dates back even further, though. In 2014, Baldridge and other Venable lawyers defended the star in a lawsuit filed against her by a small apparel company called Lucky 13, which accused Swift of infringing its trademarks by selling T-shirts featuring that same phrase. After an extended battle over whether the star would be forced to sit for a deposition, the case ended in a settlement the next year.
One of Baldridge’s biggest recent wins for Taylor came in 2021, when a Utah fantasy theme park called Evermore sued her for trademark infringement, claiming her smash-hit acoustic album was threatening to “crowd out” its own brand name.
But Swift’s lawyers quickly flipped the script. They filed a countersuit claiming it was the theme park that was in the wrong, for allegedly neglecting to pay royalties for playing Taylor’s songs for their customers – not just over loud speakers, but with live performances by the theme park’s character performers. They argued the park had even sought out retroactive licenses to cover up its wrongdoing.
“Defendants are making a thinly-veiled attempt to fabricate a record to justify and retroactively authorize their intentional infringement that has gone unabated since Evermore Park opened in 2018,” Baldridge wrote in that complaint. “However, a cover-up attempt now does not and cannot erase years of willful and knowing infringement.”
A month later, the park dropped its case with no money changing hands.
Baldridge also represented Swift in the epic copyright case over the lyrics to “Shake It Off,” but as part of a larger defense that also heavily featured veteran music copyright litigator Peter Anderson of the firm Davis Wright Tremaine. That case ended in a settlement in December.
As he gears up to step into the general counsel role, Baldridge is currently defending the star from another copyright lawsuit, this one filed over a companion book for her album Lover. In that case, a woman named Teresa La Dart claims Taylor stole key elements of the book’s design from her own self-published book of poetry.
In a February response to those allegations, Baldridge didn’t hold back – arguing that the case should be dismissed immediately because it failed in every way possible: “This is a lawsuit that never should have been filed, as it is legally and factually baseless.”
SIZE matters for Astralwerks.
Today (July 20), the venerable dance label has announced a partnership with Steve Angello‘s SIZE Records. Under the terms of this deal, all future SIZE Records releases will be distributed by Astralwerks, with the agreement also encompassing SIZE’s back catalog.
Launched in 2003 by the Swedish House Mafia member, the SIZE catalog encompasses music by Angello, Laidback Luke, Eric Prydz, Afrojack, Don Diablo, AN21, Junior Sanchez and many other electronic stars and underground greats.
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The deal is also being punctuated by new music, with Angello releasing “What You Need” — a collaboration with masked duo Wh0 — tomorrow (July 21) via SIZE Records/Astralwerks and Wh0 Plays. The track marks the 250th release of the SIZE Records catalog.
“While I’m excited to honor the legacy of SIZE Records by re-launching the catalog, I’m every bit as thrilled by what the future holds,” Angello tells Billboard. “Teaming with Wh0 to make ‘What You Need’ the inaugural new release on the imprint feels like the perfect way to set the tone for everything we have planned. It’s a new era, new team, new SIZE, new collaborations, new music and lots of it! My gratitude to Astralwerks for taking this journey with us at SIZE!”
The deal marks a return for Angello and Astralwerks, with the label releasing Swedish House Mafia’s compilation albums, 2010’s Until One and 2012’s Until Now, which contained the trio’s all-time hits “One (Your Name)” and “Don’t You Worry Child.”
“SIZE Records is a powerhouse label and home to some of my all-time favorite records,” adds Astralwerks President Toby Andrews. “Being able to work with them as they kick off their 20th anniversary celebrations whilst Astralwerks is celebrating its 30th year feels like the perfect match. In addition to that, the whole team is excited to bring more of Steve’s music to the world and work with him and all his team to elevate the future vision and catalog of the label.”
Steve Angello continues to be managed by Wassim Sal Slaiby and Dina Sahim at SALXCO.
Interscope Geffen A&M has elevated four of its top-level executives into new roles, the company announced Thursday (July 20). The promotions include Michelle An, who has been named president of creative strategy; Gary Kelly, who is now general manager of Interscope and executive vp/chief revenue officer for IGA; and Sam Riback and Nicole Wyskoarko, who […]
Producer duo Play-N-Skillz has inked a label deal with Pitbull‘s Mr. 305 Records, the company tells Billboard. The Dallas-born siblings, Juan “Play” and Oscar “Skillz” Salinas, join a roster that includes Omar Courtz, IAMCHINO and Montana Tucker, among others. “Joining Mr. 305 Records is a perfect match for us,” said Play-N-Skillz in a statement. “We […]
Universal Music Group announced a new partnership with Pocket.watch, a kids-content studio with a roster of 45 creators that boasts over 750 million subscribers, on Thursday (July 20).
As part of the deal, songs on Pocket.watch’s many YouTube videos — plus tracks from the company’s original series on Hulu and Roku — will be brought to streaming platforms. And several creators will release their own original songs in the months to come.
In a statement, Albie Hecht, chief content officer for Pocket.watch, said “music is a huge part of kids’ lives, and this mutually beneficial partnership provides a path for our expansive library of kids and family songs to reach beyond their appearance within YouTube videos. We’re proud to partner with Universal Music Group as they further expand their investment in the kids music space.”
“We continue to see growth in this exciting category and look forward to working with pocket.watch’s team and their family of creators,” added Andrew Kronfeld, Universal’s evp of international and label and artist ventures.
Pocket.watch was started in March 2017 by Chris M. Williams, Hecht (a former president of film and TV entertainment for Nickelodeon), and Jon Moonves. “We set out very intentionally to change the conversations around the creative economy and create a whole new digital-first category of franchises,” Williams told Variety last year.
The company’s hits include Ryan’s World (35.2 million YouTube subscribers) and Love, Diana (8.95 million); in 2021, the roster generated more than 4 billion hours of views. Pocket.watch also has a robust consumer products line — Colgate Ryan’s World Pocket Watch Extra Soft Spin toothbrush, for example, and Love, Diana dolls — linked to its various franchises. Earlier this year, Pocket.watch debuted 12 original series on Hulu.
The first batch of music to hit streaming will encompass songs from Ryan’s Mystery Playdate, Love, Diana, Onyx Monster Mysteries, Toys and Colors: Kaleidoscope City, and more.
Long before Taylor Swift decided to re-record all her original songs, including the “Taylor’s Version” of 2010’s Speak Now which was released last week, Frank Sinatra did the same thing. So did Chuck Berry. And Elmo Shropshire. And many of the classic pop and rock stars who have licensed new versions of their best-known songs to movies, TV shows and commercials to keep all the royalty money over the years.
Artists re-record old hits for several different reasons: Movie and TV productions can pay them rather than their original record labels when licensing songs; they can update the tracks to sound more modern, with newer technology; they can revisit older recordings that were never properly available digitally due to contract disputes, as JoJo did; or, as with Swift, they’re having a dispute with the original label and prefer to put master recordings solely under their own control. “Our thinking was, if we do these now, they’ll be around as long as the originals, and whenever the opportunity arises, we can say, ‘Look, we’ll give you this,’ and we can undercut what whoever owns our masters are asking for,” Squeeze‘s Glenn Tilbrook told Billboard in 2019, nine years after the band put out its re-recorded greatest-hits album Spot the Difference.
Yet no one has earned as much attention — or revenue — for re-recording their songs as Swift. At first, Swift’s announcement that she would put out new versions of all her old hits seemed idiosyncratic, a retaliatory move against Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande manager Scooter Braun, who bought her six-album catalog as part of his 2019 acquisition of indie label Big Machine. But she quickly rolled out new versions of 2008’s Fearless and 2012’s Red with faithful re-recordings, fresh remixes and “from the vault” material and turned the exercise into lucrative hits: Fearless (Taylor’s Version) and Red (Taylor’s Version) have racked up 1.49 billion and 2.83 billion streams, respectively, according to Luminate, and combined sales of nearly 1.7 million units. Swift is now at the forefront of a wave of artists that have or plan to release their own re-recordings, including TLC, Wheatus, Paris Hilton and, possibly soon, Ashanti. “It’s a chance to make money, actually, for the end musicians,” says David Amels, a producer, engineer and session musician who helped Shangri-Las singer Mary Weiss re-record some of the band’s classic hits as a 2007 solo album.
In 2005, TLC negotiated a separation agreement from its longtime label, Sony Music, and re-recorded its ’90s R&B hits “Creep,” “Waterfalls” and “No Scrubs.” They first came out in the 2013 VH1 biopic CrazySexyCool: The TLC Story — without the band’s late third member, Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes. The two-woman band has recently spiked in popularity, according to its longtime manager, Bill Diggins, playing a well-received set last year at the Glastonbury festival, and it plans to “start building distribution infrastructures for the new re-records.” But it wasn’t until January 2023 that singers Tionne “T-Boz” Watkins and Rozonda “Chilli” Thomas released the re-recorded versions on streaming services, without promotion or fanfare.
Although the group followed Swift’s lead in parenthetically subtitling each re-recording “(TLC Version),” Diggins says the move to re-record wasn’t inspired by Swift. “We have the utmost respect for Taylor Swift,” he says. “However, we did the re-records long before Taylor released hers and the ‘TLC Version’ was not referencing a homage to Taylor.” Still, Diggins acknowledges TLC lacks Swift’s music-business clout and massive fan army — after Red (Taylor’s Version) came out in November 2021, iHeartRadio announced its radio stations would switch to playing the new versions of her hits, but the top broadcasting company has made no such promise to TLC. “It’s not as simple as calling Spotify or Apple or iHeart and saying, ‘Play our re-records.’ You have to have enormous power to do that — which Taylor Swift certainly does,” Diggins says. “The minute you do that, the record label that owns the copyright is going to put pressure on the streaming service to play their version, because they want to collect the royalties.”
Sony owns the rights to Lopes’ voice, according to Diggins, so TLC did not have the option of splicing in original recordings of the late star. But he argues the new versions are stronger vocally because Watkins and Thomas have spent the last three decades not smoking, not drinking, leading healthy lifestyles and providing “a little bit more of new authenticity.” Still, while the new versions employed the same engineers and studios as the originals, the three tracks have been streamed a combined 218,000 times, compared to nearly 1.6 billion total for the ’90s classics — including 114 million streams for the original songs since the new versions came out in January. In the last seven months, the original versions of those three TLC hits have generated $675,725, while the re-recordings have added up to just $1,394, according to Billboard estimates.
A year ago, Ashanti told Billboard she obtained the rights to re-record her early albums from Universal Music Group and was working on a new version of her 2002 self-titled debut. (Her reps did not respond to a request for an update.) “Certain people don’t want to see you move forward and progress in life so they try to create roadblocks,” she said at the time. “I love what Taylor Swift did. Anything worth something will be a bit of a battle.”
In June, three years after pop star Kim Petras covered Paris Hilton’s 2006 hit “Stars Are Blind” on a livestream, the duo collaborated for a re-recording, with original producer and co-writer Fernando Garibay at Hilton’s studio, calling it “Paris’ Version” a la Swift. They did it for “fun, musically and creatively,” says Alex Frankel, Hilton’s music manager, adding that, from a business point of view, “It kind of aligned with my thinking.” (As with TLC, Hilton’s “Paris’ Version” subtitle was not a homage to Swift, at least overtly: “I don’t think it was a conscious choice, just felt natural, but of course probably an unconscious nod to the always iconic TS,” Frankel says.)
Hilton was “stuck with one of those contracts” with Warner Music, according to Frankel, who wouldn’t say whether Warner imposed a no-re-recording clause in her original contract: “Trying to recoup on that is nearly impossible on those deals, and the term is infinite. No one wronged her, she wasn’t doing it to spite anyone, it was more, ‘Why not revisit the song or create equity on the master side of the recording?’” The new version of “Stars Are Blind” has been streamed 699,000 times, compared to 28.3 million total for the original; since the new version’s release, the original has been streamed 726,000 times, according to Luminate. Billboard estimates the original master recording of Hilton’s track has generated nearly $4,000 for the Hilton Hotels heiress since the new version came out, while the Petras collaboration has landed roughly $5,300.
Outside of Swift, perhaps the most successful contemporary re-recording is Wheatus’ “Teenage Dirtbag,” which began as what singer Brendan Brown calls a “forensic and tedious-as-hell” project to perfectly recreate the band’s 1999 alt-rock debut, Wheatus, after, he alleges, original label Sony Music lost the ADAT masters. (A Sony rep declined to comment.) The band employed old photos to determine what gear it used 20 years earlier and puzzled over a “blip blip blip” sound in two verses that turned out to be a push-button phone tone filtered through a keyboard. “This was a CSI episode recreating some shit that happened 20 years ago that we don’t really remember,” Brown says.
After Wheatus finished the project in April 2020, and reissued the three-song EP as Teenage Dirtbag 2020 / Mope, the COVID-19 pandemic led to a TikTok-Instagram viral resurgence — “Teenage Dirtbag” became the soundtrack for celebrities reminiscing with photos of themselves in the old days. As a result, although the new version didn’t come close to the 236.6 million streams of the 1999 original, it has been streamed a respectable 4.5 million times. Meanwhile, since the new version came out, the master recording has generated a decent amount of revenue for Brown — about $24,400, according to Billboard estimates, though the original — thanks to the TikTok boost — racked up nearly $664,000 during the same period.
“We never said, ‘Listen to this, not to that.’ We just told people what we’d done and why we’d done it,” Brown says. “There was no public relations, there was no publicist. The press came to us and the conversation kind of bloomed.”
Swift is “partly responsible” for that conversation, Brown says. “There are a lot more questions about creative regulation and laws and ownership that used to be very under the hood and are now being discussed out in the open. If you have a talk show, and you’re on YouTube, it’s like, ‘I have to learn about intellectual-property law now?’ This is what we’re doing.”
Additional reporting by Ed Christman.
Universal Music Publishing China has signed Tia Ray to a global publishing deal. Ray is a superstar in her home country and made history in 2018 with her song “Be Apart,” which sold enough worldwide to earn the No. 7 spot of IFPI’s Top 10 Global Singles Chart that year. She was the only Chinese artist to crack the top ten that year.
Reservoir has acquired the rights to rock talent Greg Kilhn. This includes publishing, recording, and distribution rights to Kihn’s Beserkley Records-era catalog. Songs from this time period include “Jeopardy” and “The Breakup Song (They Don’t Write ‘Em),” both of which charted on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart in the early 1980s.
Cutting Edge Media Music has acquired a majority interest in White Stork, a publishing company founded by film/tv composer Tom Howe (Ted Lasso, Daisy Jones and The Six, The Great British Bakeoff). As part of the deal, CEMM has invested in growing the publisher as a joint venture. Tamsin Dove, Chief Commercial Officer, has been selected to expand the business and drive global sync strategy.
Raedio has signed three new acts: Patrick Paige II, Ego Ella May, and Flwr Chyld. Each act will work with Raedio’s record label, music supervision and podcast ecosystem as part of their new agreements with the Issa Rae-founded firm.
Position Music has signed artist and songwriter KANNER to a worldwide publishing deal. Though she has earned credits on songs released by Katy Perry, Royal & the Serpent, Krewella, Siiickbrain, Rebecca Black and more, KANNER is also an artist in her own right. Her next single “MEGAPHONE MOUTH” will be released Friday, July 21.
Concord Music Publishing signs country artist and songwriter Tyler Halverson to his first-ever publishing deal. The worldwide agreement includes all of his future works.
Daytripper Music Publishing, the creative division of CCS Rights Management, has signed Ron Gallo to a worldwide co-publishing deal. On the label side, the Philadelphia-based singer songwriter is signed to Kill Rock Stars.
MNRK Music Group has partnered with Steel Sessions and its producers Francis “Buda Da Future” Ubiera, Dan “Grandz Muzik” Garcia, and Michael “Mike Kuz” Kuzoian. As part of the new partnership, the producers — along with the rising talent from Steel Sessions — will develop artists in the studio, sign them to MNRK, and provide production services for MNRK Urban’s releases.
Global recording industry trade body IFPI announced on Thursday that Frances Moore will step down as CEO at the end of the year, ending a consequential tenure that began in 2010. Moore has agreed to assist in the search for her successor at the organization, which represents more than 8,000 record company members worldwide, including all three major labels.
Moore joined IFPI in 1994 as regional director for Europe; her 13-year tenure as chief executive makes her its longest-serving leader ever and, according to IFPI, the longest-serving leader of a recorded music trade body.
Under Moore’s leadership, IFPI has guided the global industry through a throng of seismic changes, namely its transition to digital streaming, along with major initiatives to strengthen copyright protections and intellectual property rights and the ongoing fight against music piracy. Those initiatives helped lay the groundwork for the recorded music industry’s year-on-year recovery from the lows of just over a decade ago when piracy was rampant.
When Moore started at CEO in 2010, global music sales had fallen to $13.8 billion from a high of over $22 billion in 1999. Last year, recorded music sales had rebounded to $26.2 billion, a rise of 9% on the previous year and the eighth consecutive year of growth, according to the organization’s most recent “Global Music Report.”
Noteworthy achievements during her 13-year tenure include the hard-fought enactment of the EU Copyright Directive – a landmark piece of legislation, which made online platforms like YouTube liable for unlicensed content, effectively closing safe harbor protections in Europe, and which was passed in 2019 after extensive lobbying from IFPI.
Moore’s reign has also seen IFPI take a leading role in combating stream manipulation and copyright infringing websites around the world. Legal action taken or coordinated by IFPI in the digital era has led to around 5,200 infringing sites being blocked or shut down, says the London-based organization.
As the music industry has become more global, IFPI also created the IFPI Global Charts and in 2015, IFPI struck a blow to piracy by aligning the global release of new music to Fridays.
“After three decades with IFPI, thirteen of which as its Global CEO, it is time for me to hang up my spurs!” Moore,who trained as a barrister, said in a statement. “I have loved working for IFPI and the recording industry and feel so fortunate to have had the opportunity to serve in this role. I am very proud and appreciative of the IFPI team, both now and over the years. Every achievement has been the result of a team effort. ”
She continued, “I have had the good fortune of living through so much of the industry’s transformation from analogue to digital. On my first day at IFPI thirty years ago, I was dealing with legislation on blank tape levies and here we are today dealing with legislation on AI!”
Along with advocating and taking actions on behalf of it members, IFPI of course endures as the recorded music industry’s main resource for documenting the industry’s progress. It’s annual “Global Music Report” continues to be the standard, and under Moore IFPI launched the IFPI Global Charts, the industry’s official annual ranking for the best-selling artists.
In a written statement, the IFPI Main Board said, thanked Moore for “navigating IFPI through arguably the most demanding and complex period of modern music’s history. At once, she has led us through music’s digital transition and the industry’s expansion worldwide, enabling a return to growth that mutually benefits artists, labels and the broader music ecosystem. Not only has she herself been an excellent and effective advocate for labels and creators, but Frances has built an incredible team of professionals to assure that her legacy will carry on.”
BALI — When Denis Ladegaillerie takes his place on stage for the Music Matters conference in Singapore later this year, the Believe chief executive officer should have some tales to share. Success stories.
Ten years ago, Believe (then Believe Digital) embarked on an Asia Pacific odyssey. The risk is paying off, thanks in no small part to the expanding reach and adoption of streaming services, and the waves of regional acts passing through the pipeline, crossing borders like never before.
Ladegaillerie, the Paris-based music company’s founder, returns to the annual summit this September brimming with confidence for his business’s regional operations, which are now active in 15 APAC territories. Royalties to labels and artists have ballooned to €700 million ($784), Billboard can confirm. The magical €1 billion ($1.12 billion) milestone is on the horizon.
Believe established its APAC presence back in 2013, initially in Indonesia. Playing to the beat of its mantra, “local approach, global vision,” the brand set about building from scratch a network tuned to each local music scene, cognizant of the language, culture and genre specificities that make each market unique.
Believe paid tribute to its APAC origins in May by returning to Bali for a gathering of 130-plus staff, or “Believers” as they’re known within the company, from 11 countries.
Participants included Antoine El Iman; managing director of Southeast Asia and Australia/New Zealand; Dahlia Wijaya, country director, Indonesia; Georgette Tengco, country director, Philippines; Somwalee Limrachtamorn, country director, Thailand; and Mick Tarbuk, country manager, Australia & New Zealand, whose affiliate landed two ARIA No. 1 albums in 12 months, with Cub Sport’s Jesus At The Gay Bar (April 2023) and Northlane’s Obsidian (April 2022).
Cub Sport
Bryant
Also among guests, Believe’s streaming partners, including Paul Smith, managing director of YouTube Music APAC, one of the most powerful brands in the region (and also a guest speaker at ATM 2023), and several key artists, including Indonesia pop star Yura Yunita, a native of Bandung, West Java, who boasts more than 1.2 million followers on Instagram and upwards of 1 million subscribers to her YouTube channel.
The region “was untapped territory,” recounts Sylvain Delange, managing director Asia Pacific. “The business opportunity was tiny at the time because digital was not existent. Well, it existed, but it was ringback tones.”
The Frenchman is a big believer — in the traditional sense — that the pan-Asian music market could achieve lift-off; he was tapped to build the regional business from the ground up.
Previously, he served for five years in Tokyo, promoting French music abroad for the French Music Office. That organization no longer exists, though the relationships he built in Asia still do, and Delange got a head start.
Delange “is an instrumental part of the transformation of the market that we’ve been a part of,” notes Ladegaillerie.
Timing is everything. Launch before the streaming platforms mature and make inroads, and the ship has sunk before it sailed.
Start too late, you miss out.
“When you have international players, and especially big players, like Apple, Spotify or YouTube entering the market, that levels the playing field for everyone,” reckons Delange.
Those big players, when they arrived, brought with them certain standards. “Standards of business practices, content management, monetization, good practices, in terms of marketing releases, and so on,” he continued, creating “a much healthier environment for the music ecosystem.”
The Asian market is as exciting as it is diverse, and the recorded music business is spiking.
The numbers back it up.
Luminate’s 2023 “Midyear Music Report” found that, overall, on-demand audio and video streaming in the first half lifted by 107% year-on-year – a world-leading rate of growth.
And earlier, the IFPI reported that Asia notched double-digit growth for the third consecutive year, up by 15.4%, “outpacing the overall global growth rate.”
China, meanwhile, has joined the recording music industry’s elite. According to the IFPI’s Global Music Report, the world’s most populous market is now the No. 5 ranked country for the first time, bumping France into No. 6. APAC accounts for four of the top 10 markets (Japan at No. 2, South Korea at No. 7, Australia at No. 10), and four of the top 10 acts globally are from APAC – BTS, SEVENTEEN, Stray Kids, and Jay Chou.
Believe itself has evolved from pure distribution-driven business into one focused on “local content, globally,” explains Delange, who confirms the Asia Pacific activities has generated north of €700 million in distributions.
That pile includes its businesses in India, Southeast Asia, China, Australia, New Zealand and Japan, where Believe is ranked No. 3 in terms of digital market share, according to Oricon market research, behind Universal and Sony Music, and ahead of Warner Music.
Acquisitions, investments and partnerships will continue to play a part. Notable deals struck in recent years include the acquisition of a stake in Philippines-based Viva Music and Artists Group (VMAG); the acquisition of India’s Venus Music, and subsequent rebranded to Ishtar; and the purchase of a 76% interest in South Indian soundtrack specialist Think Music, all in 2021.
“The objective for us is to is to strengthen our position on market segment by bringing in people that have a very specific expertise,” explains Delange. “Our positioning is to basically build on our past 10-year success, continue to educate. There’s still a lot of education to be done on many topics. We will continue to build on our teams, we’re going to continue to invest in local players, we’re going to continue to build the partnerships closely with the DSPS.”
Soon, the “emerging markets” tag will be gone from the vernacular.
A decade from now, “Asia would have been very-well emerged,” says Delange. “We do anticipate that Asia Pacific is going to become the largest music market in the world in the next 10 years.”
Independent venue executive Andre Perry will serve as the new board president of the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA). Announced at the second annual NIVA conference held in Washington, D.C., from July 9-12, Perry was elected after serving as vp of the board since 2021.
“Our NIVA family, our members, represent so many threads of the independent performance world, and it is an honor to be named NIVA’s next Board President,” said Perry in a statement. “We are small club owners, we produce festivals, we run performing arts centers, we are promoters, we are comedy people, we are music heads, we are multidisciplinary performing arts workers, we run for-profits — big, medium, and small 00 and we run nonprofits at a range of sizes, we are government affiliated or part of universities and colleges, or we are part of nothing — committed, brilliant loners who just do what we do for the good of the cause.”
Perry, who also works as the executive director of the Hancher Auditorium and the Office of Performing Arts and Engagement at the University of Iowa, will take over the president role from NIVA co-founder and founding president of the board Dayna Frank, who held the position for the maximum term of three years. Frank will continue her advocacy leadership as chair of NIVA’s advocacy and policy committee and continue to serve on the board of directors.
Frank led the association through the passage of the Save Our Stages Act, which resulted in $16.25 billion dollars in emergency relief for the live entertainment sector during the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, as a driving force behind the Fix The Tix campaign, Frank will continue her critical efforts to protect consumers, artists, venues and festivals against harmful and deceptive ticketing practices.
“NIVA has made history in our three years of existence, and there are many challenges ahead for our industry. However, I know that our Association, chapter leaders, and members are capable of tackling these challenges because we have done it before,” said Frank in a statement. “One of those challenges is predatory ticket resellers. Together, independent venues, festivals and promoters will work with Congress to pass Fix the Tix and continue laying the groundwork to create the industry our fans deserve.”
NIVA’s membership also elected two new independent live entertainment industry leaders to its board of directors: Shahida Mausi and Jamie Loeb.
Mausi is president and CEO of the Right Productions, vp and chief strategic officer of the Black Promoters Collective (BPC) and operator of The Aretha Franklin Amphitheatre in Detroit.
Loeb is the senior vp of marketing at Nederlander Concerts. With more than 30 years of local, regional and national experience, she was instrumental in creating the vision for NIVA’s first two conferences and in planning NIVA’s Save Our Stages Fest in 2020.
“As NIVA embarks on this new chapter, the Association remains resolute in its mission to support, promote, and advocate for independent venues across the country,” said NIVA executive director Stephen Parker in a statement. “The appointment of Andre Perry as Board President, Dayna Frank’s continued leadership on federal advocacy, NIVA’s new slate of Board officers and the addition of Shahida Mausi and Jamie Loeb to the Board, signals a renewed commitment to advancing the interests of independent venues and festivals and ensuring their continued viability in an ever-evolving live entertainment ecosystem.”
Full 2023-2024 slate of NIVA Board Officers:
President: Andre Perry, executive director of the Hancher Auditorium and the Office of Performing Arts and Engagement, University of Iowa
Vp: Audrey Fix Schaefer, head of Communications at I.M.P.
Vp: Jim Brunberg, founder of Revolution Hall, Mississippi Studios; Composer/Performer
Treasurer: Brad Grossman, COO of Helium Comedy
Secretary: Jesica Gerbautz, CEO of Pnk Moon Productions
Continuing their service as board members:
Dayna Frank, co-founder of NIVA, founding president of the NIVA Board and CEO at First Avenue & 7th St Entry
Grace Blake, programming director at City Winery NYC
Kira Karbocus, president/COO at Newport Festivals Foundation
Hal Real, founder/CEO at World Cafe Live