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The Warner Music Group announced former longtime Google executive Carletta Higginson as its new executive vp/chief digital officer today (Oct. 10). Higginson, who will join the company Oct. 16, replaces outgoing evp of business development/chief digital officer Oana Ruxandra, who announced her departure Oct. 4 after five years with the label group. Higginson is the […]
Shortly after Michael Cherman founded his apparel company, Market, in 2016, he designed and sold a tie-dyed T-shirt with the Grateful Dead’s dancing bears spiraling toward a center point. Spotting the trademarked image online, the Dead’s official merchandise company, Rhino Entertainment, contacted him and asked: “Would you like to do this more legit instead of bootlegging it?”
“Yes,” he responded, and today, the company’s streetwear products include a $200 Grateful Dead screen-printing kit and a $45 trucker hat with the lightning-skull Stealie Rose logo. “This has unlocked the world for me,” says Cherman, whose company sells clothing licensed from the estates of Bob Marley, Jimi Hendrix and others. “People just came to us and said, ‘Hey, how can you do that for us?’”
Since the Dead sold one of its earliest T-shirts in the late ’60s, featuring keyboardist Ron “Pigpen” McKernan and designed by Hell’s Angel Allan “Gut” Terk, its merchandise business has evolved into an international brand licensed to dozens of companies and sold in stores from Walmart to Saks Fifth Avenue. What Cherman calls the “holy trinity” of Dead logos — dancing bears, lightning bolts and skeletons — is on thousands of products. Online, fans can buy a pair of tie-dyed Crocs containing pink-and-yellow dancing-bear charms for $160; a $70 Teton hoodie designed for snowboarding; Grateful Dead leggings marked with “GD” and pink roses, $38; Grateful Dead fluorescent green Nike skateboarding shoes, $110; a psychedelic Air Garcia skateboard, $65; and a pair of Grateful Dead skis topped with the “Steal Your Face” skull logo, $750.
The band’s merch machine has also served as an exemplar of how an act can expand its brand into a multimillion-dollar business, raking in revenue years, and even decades, after the deaths of such core members as McKernan, Jerry Garcia and lyricist Robert Hunter.
Dead products are a sliver of the nearly $4.4 billion music merch licensing industry, as valued by trade organization Licensing International in 2022, an increase from $3.7 billion in 2019. Universal Music Group, which owns merch giant Bravado, earned $618 million from product in 2022, according to financial reports — a 70.2% increase from $363 million the previous year. Much of that revenue comes from traditional sales (T-shirts, hoodies and caps sold at concerts), and contemporary stars like Taylor Swift and BTS dominate the business. But classic-rock merch is booming, too.
“That universe has expanded,” says Rhino president Mark Pinkus, who oversees the Dead account. “The shirts are being worn by people of all ages.” Jeff Jampol, CEO of Jam Inc., which manages licenses for The Doors and the estates of Janis Joplin and others, adds that classic-rock merch has evolved from basic black T-shirts to a diverse fashion industry “largely driven by 10- to 20-year-old females and their moms.”
The rich and famous also boosted demand. In the late ’90s, Brad Beckerman, who worked with his father at the sports-licensing company Starter, noticed that most music merch came in the form of mass-marketed T-shirts and saw an opening. Beckerman’s company, Trunk, secured 76 licenses, including Madonna and The Beatles, and expanded the market to high-end customers and department stores. Trunk sold T-shirts, but also jackets and rhinestone belts, Japanese denim and Italian leather for prices that could approach $1,000. “It was unbelievable, the exposure we got,” he recalls. “We had hundreds of celebrities buying these things.”
Until the early 2000s, the Dead — whose members weren’t getting along at the time, according to their former longtime publicist, Dennis McNally — ran Dead Merchandising. Later, the band licensed its name and various logos to just a few companies, like Ripple Junction and Liquid Blue, and mostly focused on T-shirts. “It was easier to go their own ways and let somebody else deal with the business,” McNally says.
According to a source who works in the business, merch licenses are normally structured as a percentage of the licensee’s gross sales income. Smaller licensees typically pay 12% of gross revenue; national licensees, 4% to 5%; and for internet sales, where there is less overhead, it’s a few points higher.
In 2006, after the Warner Music Group-owned Rhino took over the Dead’s merch, Heather Lewis, vp of merchandising for Warner’s artist-branding division WMX, saw how well the band’s CDs and box sets, such as the dozens of Dick’s Picks live albums, were selling, and steered Rhino’s Dead team toward a similar strategy for merch. “Over the past decade, it has been about growing not just the merch but the creative aspect of the merch and working with Deadhead artists,” she says.
One of Rhino’s challenges is when to turn a blind eye to bootleggers — such as the Shakedown Street vendors who sell unlicensed products at spinoff concerts such as Dead & Company — and when to shut them down or, as with Cherman and Market, license their creations.
The Dead’s first line of merch gatekeeping is archivist David Lemieux and Pinkus, a Deadhead who recently flew to Boulder, Colo., to attend three Dead & Company shows. Their shared philosophy for licensing the band’s nine trademarks: “The Grateful Dead should be everywhere, for everybody, at all price points and in all styles,” Pinkus says. Accordingly, he and Lemieux are “easy to find and open to doing licensing deals.” They recently approved Dead-branded coolers, hammocks, camping equipment and polo shirts with embroidered lightning bolts where you might typically find a horse or alligator. They run every potential licensee proposal by the band members and the estates of those who’ve died, but they usually approve the decisions. (A representative for the band members said they declined to comment.)
“My impression is that Rhino tries to honor the Grateful Dead example, which was choosey, low-key, and generally it wasn’t to make money,” McNally says. “It’s like everything else about the world of the Grateful Dead. It just grew.”
Reservoir Media has signed a publishing deal with Latin songwriter and producer Rudy Perez, the company tells Billboard. According to Reservoir, the deal includes the acquisition of Perez’s catalog as well as a publishing deal for his future works. Throughout his career, Perez has collaborated with artists such as Christina Aguilera, Julio Iglesias, Luis Miguel […]
On Saturday, Bruno Mars was set to become the third American artist ever to perform two sold out concerts at the 70,000-capacity HaYarkon Park in Tel Aviv, Israel — following Madonna in 2009 and Michael Jackson in 1993.
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He played his first show there last Wednesday with two Tel Aviv acts opening, running nearly four hours in total. Both shows were promoted by Bluestone Group, which is owned by Live Nation Israel.
“I say Tel Aviv!” Mars shouted to the audience. “The Hooligans made it to Israel – thank you so guys so much for coming out,” Mars told fans after opening his show with his hit 2016 song “24k Magic.”
Mars’ Saturday show was supposed to be the second-to-last date on a brief world tour that previously stopped in Tbilisi, Georgia, on Oct. 1 and was headed to Doha, Qatar, for an Oct. 8 show to follow the Formula 1 Qatar Grand Prix.
Early Saturday, though, reports began to circulate of a coordinated Hamas-led terrorist attack that would escalate the ongoing Israel-Palestinian conflict. Later that day, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared on television and declared that his country was now “at war” with Hamas. By afternoon, Live Nation Israel issued a statement that the concert was canceled. (The following day, Mars also cancelled his planned Doha concert.)
“All ticket purchases to the show will receive an automatic refund to the credit card through which the purchase was made,” said a statement that Bluestone Group shared online.
Securing the venue, located inside Tel Aviv’s one-and-a-half-square mile Yarkon Park, along the banks of the Yarkon River, during active fighting would present unnecessary risks to concertgoers, a source tells Billboard, noting that the decision to cancel was made a few hours after the attacks began that morning. By 2 p.m., Bruno Mars and his 60-person crew were at Ben Gurion Airport, where they boarded a flight to Athens.
From Athens, Mars was supposed to travel to Doha for his performance, but he was reportedly unable to pack up and transport his production gear out of Israel in time for that performance. On Sunday, hours before he was scheduled to take the stage in Doha, Lusail International Circuit racetrack announced on Instagram that Mars would not perform, and that French producer and artist DJ Snake would take his place.
Mars’ concert cancellation represents a symbolic setback for Israel’s touring business. For more than a decade, artists announcing plans to perform in the country faced harsh public criticism from activists and artists like Roger Waters and Brian Eno, who urged musicians to boycott the country over what they describe as its unjust treatment of the Palestinians.
In 2018, Lana Del Rey was booked to headline the Meteor Music Festival when Waters urged her to reconsider. (Her trip fell apart due to scheduling issues.) Waters, a proponent of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, a Palestinian-led campaign to isolate Israel, has also targeted Radiohead, Bon Jovi and Jennifer Lopez, albeit unsuccessfully.
New generation promoters like Tel Aviv-based Bluestone Group — which Live Nation bought in 2017 as a joint venture of several investors, including Maverick’s Guy Oseary — has worked to increase the potential gross artists can make playing Israel, while also helping them to navigate anti-Israel backlash. In 2023, the country hosted a number of top tier Western acts including Imagine Dragons, Tiesto, Ozuna, Christina Aguilera, the Black Keys and Guns N’ Roses.
Two years after Cardi B won a nearly $4 million defamation verdict against a YouTube host named Tasha K over her salacious lies about drug use, STDs and prostitution, a federal judge has ruled that the gossip blogger cannot avoid paying most of the judgment through Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Tasha, who filed for bankruptcy in a May petition that said she had less than $60,000 in assets, will not be able to “discharge” $3.4 million owed to Cardi via the Chapter 11 process, Judge Scott M. Grossman ruled Thursday (Oct. 5) — meaning she’ll continue to be on the hook even after she exits bankruptcy.
Bankruptcy law allows insolvent people to escape certain debts, but it doesn’t shield them from paying money they owe because of “willful and malicious injury” they caused to others. After Tasha filed for bankruptcy, Cardi’s lawyers said that exception clearly applied to the huge judgment — a debt they said Tasha had incurred by “spreading false and defamatory statements” that were intended to cause harm.
After Cardi’s attorneys made those arguments, Tasha’s lawyers didn’t really fight back, essentially agreeing that $3.4 million of the $3.9 million judgment wasn’t going to be erased by the bankruptcy. And on Friday, Judge Grossman made it official: “The award of damages [and] interest thereon pursuant … are excepted from discharge.”
The ruling leaves only $500,000 of Cardi’s judgment in doubt. That money is technically owed solely by Tasha’s company Kebe Studios LLC. Whether or not Tasha herself is required to pay it will be the subject of future proceedings before the bankruptcy court.
Tasha’s bankruptcy attorney did not immediately return a request for comment on Monday.
Cardi (real name Belcalis Marlenis Almanzar) sued Tasha (Latasha Kebe) in 2019 over what the rapper’s lawyers called a “malicious campaign” on social media and YouTube aimed at hurting Cardi’s reputation. The star’s attorneys said they had repeatedly tried — and failed — to get her to pull her videos down.
One Tasha video cited in the lawsuit includes a statement that Cardi had done sex acts “with beer bottles on f—ing stripper stages.” Other videos said the superstar had contracted herpes; that she had been a prostitute; that she had cheated on her husband; and that she had done hard drugs.
Following a trial in January, jurors sided decisively with Cardi B, holding Tasha liable for defamation, invasion of privacy, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. They ordered her and her company to pay more than $2.5 million in damages and another $1.3 million in legal fees incurred by Cardi. Tasha appealed the verdict last summer, but a federal appeals court easily rejected that request in March.
Cardi B has repeatedly vowed to recover the money. Shortly after she won the jury verdict, she tweeted “imma come for everything” along with the acronym BBHMM — “bitch better have my money.” And her lawyers spent months legally pursuing the money, including garnishing her YouTube monetization account.
But in May, Tasha said there was barely any money for Cardi to take. In her bankruptcy petition, she listed just $58,595 in total assets to her name, the vast majority of which came from a truck that’s tied as collateral to an unpaid auto loan. She listed only $11,750 in other properties, including two Louis Vuitton purses and just $95 in actual cash in her bank account. She counted the trademark to her “UnWineWithTashaK” YouTube channel as an asset, but says the value of the brand is “unknown.”
Lawyers for Cardi quickly filed a so-called adversary proceeding — a lawsuit-like process that takes place within a larger bankruptcy case — to ensure that Tasha couldn’t dodge the damages she owes. It was that case that led to Friday’s decision.
Yng Lvcas has signed an alliance with OCESA Seitrack, in partnership with Laele Records, to manage his career worldwide, Billboard can exclusively announce on Monday (Oct. 9). The rising Mexican artist, known for his breakthrough track “La Bebe (Remix)” in collaboration with Peso Pluma, was a six-time finalist at the 2023 Billboard Latin Music Awards. […]
The AI genie is out of the bottle. It’s not going back, so buckle in and get on board.
Artificial intelligence was a hot button topic as music professionals gathered in Singapore last month for the All That Matters conference to learn, meet, greet and get business done.
Music Matters is one of seven streams under the All That Matters banner. Singapore, the dynamic, constantly-evolving city state, once again hosted the event, its music component recognized as the most important of its kind in Asia.
At 18 years of age, ATM is all grown up. This time, almost 2,000 attendees gathered from across the music, sports, gaming, media and entertainment industries, its conclusion the starting point for the Singapore Formula 1 Grand Prix.
Guest speakers at the Sept. 11-13 confab included Jonathan Dworkin, Universal Music Group’s executive VP, digital business development & strategy; Troy Carter, CEO and founder Venice Music; Hazel Savage, VP music intelligence, SoundCloud; Meng Ru Kuok, CEO & co-founder of BandLab; Denis Ladegaillerie, founder & CEO of Believe; Spotify’s Kossy Ng (head of music, Asia) and Joe Hadley (global head of artists and audience partnerships); and Pieter van Rijn, president Downtown Music.
Billboard selected five notable takeaways from this year’s program:
Glocalisation is the way forward
Glocalisation is more than a buzzword. It’s a growing, measurable business as more local language music gains traction on DSPs. Building a business to support that doesn’t happen by accident. “At some point you have a certain ambition,” explained Pieter van Rijn, president Downtown Music, during a day one presentation. “It’s very important for us to be close to our clients,” noted the New York-based Dutchman, whose company has label services staff across the region, including South Korea, Philippines and Japan and elsewhere. Glocalisation is “to think local but act global, the success that we’re seeing there is a trend of local artist having local success and not just English language content driving the charts. You can see that in many countries, it’s another great symptom of how the industry has evolved itself.”
Luminate’s Music 360 research reinforces it, with data showing that 40% of U.S. listeners were found to tune-into music in a non-English language in the second quarter of 2023. At the same time, the share of English-language content is down.
Peter van Rijn photographed on October 19, 2022 at Downtown Music in New York City.
Wesley Mann
Moving forward with AI, and a plan
Believe this year celebrates its 10th anniversary in APAC, a business that started in Indonesia, was built from the ground up, and now represents over 10,000 labels and artist. Some €700 million has been generated in revenue to labels and artists in that decade. Believe is a big believer on Glocalisation, and its future includes the adoption of AI.
“It’s going to come very quickly,” explained Believe CEO Denis Ladegaillerie, during a day-three morning session which also included Sylvain Delange, Believe managing director for APAC. “We expect some products to come into the market very soon, in the next three to six months.” The response needs to be a responsible one. That includes Believe’s own set of principles, drawn up with YouTube, around the four pillars of consent, control, compensation and transparency. A new survey by Believe and TuneCore of 1,558 found that 50% of musicians are willing to make their music available for machine learning while also believing in a responsible approach.
Believe founder and CEO Denis Ladegaillerie
Anis Martin
Streaming fraud is a $500 million problem. At least
For artists, cutting through the noise in the streaming world is a major challenge, and it’s not getting any easier. In the U.S., streams have grown 400% over the last four years, UMG’s Dworkin explained during his keynote presentation, while at the same time, on-platform new music discovery has fallen by 45% (with on-platform music discovery representing just 15% of how fans discover music). If you think that’s bad, streaming fraud takes the cake. Fraud, at the low end of estimations, is a $500 million problem.
“And it could be triple that,” he says. “Security should be a basic matter of hygiene for platforms and for distributors.” Music and artists that connect with consumers should be rewarded in the streaming game. “If a piece of content is riding along on a platform and not connecting with consumers, it will simply be downgraded,” he says, citing Deezer’s novel formulation. “We at Universal are ready for everyone to be held to the same standard. Including us. Let us all compete on the basis of the value created for fans. And not by counting streams as they sleep.“ It’s time to “change the model so the business can be more resilient for the next stage of growth.” He concludes, “there’s a lot more work to do, and the solutions are going to continue to evolve.”
Robbie Williams is coming to entertain you
Thanks to Rocketman and Bohemian Rhapsody, rockumentaries have been a box office boom in recent years. Robbie Williams sings when he’s winning, and he might be singing a lot in the near future with his very own projects.
Before Williams’ headline performance at the F1 Grand Prix, the Brit’s manager Stephen O’Reilly, managing director at ie: ventures and a director of ie: music, sat for a chat about Robbie’s busy schedule.
The former Take That star is the subject of a four-part documentary series, set to air from early November on Netflix. Robbie Williams is a project of Ridley Scott Associates and director Joe Pearlman (Lewis Capaldi: How I’m Feeling Now) and executive produced by Asif Kapadia (Amy). Also, filming is completed on the previously-announced Better Man, which should arrive at cinemas next year.
The context was to “go out of our comfort zones to do things we’ve never done before,” say O’Reilly of Better Man, which has been described as a satirical musical based on the singer’s own life. It’s helmed by Australian filmmaker Michael Gracy whose debut film The Greatest Showman grossed more than $425 million worldwide. New Zealand’s Weta Digital is creating the visual effects for what O’Reilly describes as a “groundbreaking” film, which opens up a new “world of immersive entertainment, with great music and great story.” Robbie’s solo career is now 25 years deep, and has taken him to the very top of the tree in the U.K. (where he has 14 solo No. 1 albums), Europe and Australia. The U.S., however, has stubbornly resisted his cheeky-chappy charms. Will the new projects change that? Wait and see.
Robbie Williams performs at Hits Radio Live 2019 at Manchester Arena on Nov. 17, 2019 in Manchester, England.
Carla Speight/Getty Images for Bauer Media
Russell Simmons talks Hip-Hop, Drugs and Donald Trump
Russell Simmons had the last word at All That Matters, with a free-flowing final session which covered all the topics you’d hoped for, and some you didn’t expect. The Def Jam co-founder regaled with tales on Will Smith, the 50-year history of hip-hop, the epicenter of art that was, and still is, New York City, Run-DMC, drugs and Donald Trump. Simmons and Trump used to hang in the 1990s and they traveled the world together. “I don’t dislike Donald,” he remarked. “We had a lot in common, a lot we didn’t have in common. We laughed about a lot of s—.” Becoming the POTUS, well that’s another thing. “When he became president,” he remarked, “it was obviously not a good thing for America.”
Earlier this year, the Singapore subsidiary of Nodwin acquired a 51% stake in Branded, bringing the confab and showcase event into the Nodwin Gaming family.
Live Nation, Sphere Entertainment Co. and CTS Eventim were the top three music stocks this week amidst news that consumers continue to spend despite nagging inflation and a resumption of U.S. student loan payments for millions of borrowers. Live Nation shares rose 6% to $88.00, narrowly beating Sphere Entertainment’s 5.9% gain to $39.35. German promoter and ticketing company CTS Eventim jumped 4.7% to 56.40 euros ($59.79).
Despite some economic warning signs, consumers continue to spend on experiences such as concerts, travel and luxury goods. Americans spent 5.8% more in August than in the prior-year period, according to the National Retail Federation. Many consumers are now facing the resumption of monthly student loan payments after a long grace period caused by the COVID-19 pandemic — it was one factor in retail giant Target cutting its profit forecasts in August. Gas prices are on the rise in much of the United States. Still, concert ticket sales are booming and airlines reported strong revenue this summer. More encouraging news came from Friday’s U.S. jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics: Non-farm employment rose by 336,000 and the unemployment rate was unchanged at 3.8%.
It was a big week for Sphere Entertainment as its shares climbed 11.1% on Monday following U2’s opening weekend at Sphere in Las Vegas. The rave reviews and mind-blowing videos pushed Sphere Entertainment’s stock price as high as $43.59, up 17.3%, before falling 5% to $39.23 at the end of the trading day. Sphere Entertainment didn’t maintain the momentum, however, and dropped 5% from Tuesday to Friday. Still, Sphere’s opening provided a boost to the company and validated Sphere Entertainment CEO James Dolan’s vision to create a new category of venue built specifically for music. Now, investors will likely consider how many other artists have the necessarily large and fervent fan bases to book Sphere residencies and build productions worthy of Dolan’s $2.3 billion gamble.
The 21-stock Billboard Global Music Index improved 2.1% to 1,373.62 as 12 stocks finished the week in positive territory. The index’s four live music companies had an average gain of 4.3%. Six streaming companies had an average gain of 1.6% while eight companies in recorded music and publishing dropped an average of 0.9% and three radio companies fell an average of 7.6%.
Music outperformed many indexes as stocks had a mixed week. In the United States, the S&P 500 improved 0.8% and the tech-heavy Nasdaq composite improved 1.8%. In the United Kingdom, the FTSE 100 fell 1.5%. South Korea’s KOSPI composite index fell 2.3%.
Another of the index’s more prominent components, Warner Music Group (WMG), rose 4.5% to $32.80, the fourth-largest gain of the week. WMG closed its year-to-date deficit to 6.3% after gaining 2.8% on Friday and pushing its market capitalization to nearly $17 billion. Universal Music Group improved less than 0.1%. Two K-pop companies, HYBE and SM Entertainment, fell 3.8% and 1.9%, respectively.
Spotify, a major player on the index with a $31.3 billion market capitalization, improved 3.5% to $160.07 and took its year-to-date gain to 102.7%. Spotify announced on Wednesday that it’s giving subscribers in the United Kingdom and Australia up to 15 hours of audiobook streaming time per month; the allotment will roll out to U.S. subscribers later this year. Audiobooks are an integral part of Spotify’s plans to become a one-stop audio destination. The news wasn’t cause for concern that Spotify will incur a previously undisclosed expense from this streaming allotment. Guggenheim analysts wrote in a report on Tuesday that they don’t expect audiobook streaming to add to expenses and that Spotify likely built those costs into its latest guidance (which is 26% gross margin and a $45 million operating loss in the third quarter).
Three radio companies were among the four worst-performing music stocks of the week. iHeartMedia shares fell 14.2% to $2.71, bringing the year-to-date loss to 55.8%. Cumulus Media shares dropped 4.5% and SiriusXM shares fell 4.0%. The other notable decline of the week came from Hipgnosis Songs Fund, which fell a further 7.1% to 0.745 GBP ($0.91) in the wake of its Sept. 14 announcement that it will sell $465 million in catalog assets to help lift its struggling share price.
For as much as has been said and written about Taylor Swift in recent years, there’s a chance people have been underestimating the 33-year-old musician’s unique place in the business world.
Swift’s prowess as a recording artist and songwriter is well known. As the most popular artist in the United States across several consumption metrics, she has 11.7 million equivalent album units this year through Sept. 21 — about 70% more than the No. 2 artist, Morgan Wallen, according to Luminate. (EAUs convert streams and track sales into album units.) Swift also has the highest album sales, physical album sales, digital album sales, digital track sales, on-demand audio streams and airplay spins so far in 2023.
But in recent weeks, Swift’s status as super-celebrity became more apparent when she single-handedly brought a legion of young females into the professional football fold. Her attendance at two Kansas City Chiefs games, her undefined relationship with Chiefs player Travis Kelce and frequent pictures of her watching and celebrating from a luxury box above the playing field have done for the NFL what no amount of corporate-led marketing has been able to achieve. TV ratings for the Oct. 1 game between the Chiefs and New York Jets averaged 27 million viewers, the second-highest number for Sunday Night Football this season. More impressively, viewing among girls 12 to 17 was 53% higher than the season’s first three Sunday Night Football broadcasts. Women 18 to 24 were up 24%. Women over 35 were up 34%.
The Taylor Swift Effect created large ripples beyond TV ratings. Sales of Kelce’s Kansas City jersey spiked nearly 400% in the days following the Sept. 24 game Swift attended against the Chicago Bears. Secondary market prices for tickets to the Chiefs’ Oct. 1 game in New Jersey against the New York Jets rose 43%. U.S. Google searches for Travis Kelce jumped more than 14 times from Sept. 23 to Sept. 25 and remain more than three times greater than search traffic before the Sept. 24th game, according to Google Trends. Search traffic for the Kansas City Chiefs rose 13-fold over that three-day span.
That ability to cross over to older generations separates Swift from other Gen Z idols. “She’s the equivalent of a four-quadrant movie,” says Brad Gelfond, a former brand partnership executive at Warner Records. That’s a Hollywood term for a movie with broad appeal that attracts four demographic “quadrants” of an audience: females under 25, males under 25, females over 25 and males over 25. Swift’s place in mainstream pop culture reached a new level in 2022 when demand for tickets to The Eras Tour pre-sale effectively broke Ticketmaster’s platform. That led to a Senate hearing on Jan. 24, during which lawmakers such as 63-year-old Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and 77-year-old Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) quoted her song lyrics, as well as a plethora of proposed Swift-themed legislation that followed.
Few artists have a similarly broad-reaching appeal. One current artist with cross-generational pull is Beyoncé, but even that comparison is limited, says Ash Stahl, CEO of Flighthouse Media, a digital media producer targeting Gen Z. While Beyoncé is pop royalty, Swift is more relatable. “I would never expect to see Beyonce on screen at an NFL game chest bumping the guy next to her,” she says. That kind of appeal is rare in Hollywood, too. “She’s up there with The Rock,” says Gelfond. That would be Dwayne Johnson, the professional wrestler-turned-actor who transformed from reliable box office draw to media mini-mogul. Johnson is co-owner of a film and TV company, Seven Bucks Productions (Skyscraper, Jungle Cruise, Fast and Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw), as well as co-owner of the XFL professional football league.
Among Gen Z, Swift has a sway and longevity that surpasses social media stars popular with the demographic. TikTok star Charli D’Amelio comes close, but her popularity was short-lived, says Stahl. Meanwhile, Vine and YouTube star David Dobrik “didn’t keep his hands clean,” his career tarnished following multiple accusations of sexual assault, bullying, professional negligence and cultural insensitivity against him and his collaborators. Being brand-safe is an important factor in keeping and attracting fans.
YouTuber Mr. Beast is popular among young men but lacks a female fan base, adds Stahl. “‘Mr. Beast, hold my beer,’ said Taylor Swift,” jokes Marcie Allen of MAC Consulting, who has decades of experience working with artists and brands. Aside from attracting fans from different generations, what separates Swift from Gen Z’s online stars is her ability to sell out stadiums. While live-streamer Kai Cenat is facing charges of inciting a riot in New York with a PlayStation 5 giveaway gone awry, Swift’s current tour could surpass $1 billion in ticket sales. What’s more, Swift’s tour could generate $4.6 billion in economic impact for local economies, according to research company QuestionPro. Swift versus these other Gen Z celebrities simply isn’t a close comparison.
With unrivaled popularity and cultural cachet, one must wonder what Swift is doing — or could possibly do — between album and tour cycles. “She’s positioned to be the Reese Witherspoon of music,” says Allen. Witherspoon, an actress known for such movies as Legally Blonde and Walk the Line, founded a production company, Hello Sunshine, in 2016, to give females a greater voice in Hollywood. Hello Sunshine’s predecessor, Pacific Standard, produced the film Gone Girl as well as Wild, in which Witherspoon played the starring role. It wasn’t long before the smart money caught on to Witherspoon’s desire to build a female-first media company. Candle Media, backed by investment titan Blackstone and co-founded by two former Disney executives, acquired a stake in Hello Sunshine for $900 million in 2021.
Could Swift follow Witherspoon and Johnson into building a media fortune? A clue comes from growing demand for the Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour movie. Set to open Oct. 13, it has advance ticket sales of $100 million a week before debuting in more than 8,500 theaters worldwide and is expected to top the U.S. box office. Swift is a producer of the Sam Wrench-directed film and cut a direct deal with AMC to distribute it.
Swift may be outgrowing the typical ways an artist makes money — touring, recording, writing songs, promoting products and the like. And she has proven to have a clear head for business, perhaps most notably by re-recording her Big Machine-era catalog while withholding synch opportunities for the recordings sold to Ithaca Holdings in 2019 and then to Shamrock Holdings in 2020. The move has earned her tens of millions of dollars, if not more, while padding the release schedule between new albums with fresh batches of songs and creating new moments built off the nostalgia and goodwill she’s built up. It’s all evidence that Swift doesn’t mind taking risks if she’ll reap the rewards and that she has enough brand loyalty to pull off something big. “Taylor is so far past doing a brand partnership deal,” says Allen. “She can build her own brand.”
The COVID-19 pandemic hit as “West of Tulsa” singer-songwriter Wyatt Flores was just beginning to launch his career. With opening for bigger artists in large venues not an option because of the shutdown, he began playing a slate of smaller clubs and venues that were allowing performances.
But as the nation has rebounded, nearly a dozen festivals highlighting Americana, Red Dirt, alt-country, and bluegrass artists have sprung up, providing new financial and touring avenues for artists including Flores. In 2023 alone, inaugural festivals include the three-day Redmond, Oregon’s Fairwell Festival (headlined by Zach Bryan, Turnpike Troubadours, and Willie Nelson & Family), Bethel, N.Y.’s two-day Catbird Festival (Tyler Childers and the Lumineers), which brought in 25,000 attendees, Gordy’s Hwy 30 Texas Edition in Fort Worth, Texas (Bryan, Koe Wetzel), Marietta’s Georgia Country Music Fest (Cody Jinks, Wetzel, Turnpike Troubadours), Georgetown, Texas’ Two-Step Inn (Bryan, Childers), Rush South Festival in Columbus, Georgia on Oct. 14-15 (Dawes, The Texas Gentlemen, Paul Cauthen) and Nov. 3-4’s Dreamy Draw Music Festival in Scottsdale, Arizona (Trampled By Turtles, Margo Price, Stephen Wilson, Jr., American Aquarium).
“It’s made things a lot easier on routing, because we’ll just base other shows around festivals,” says Flores, whose team surrounded his appearances at Fairwell Festival and the California music festival Rebels & Renegades with a slate of West Coast club dates. “With Fairwell Fest, I didn’t think that many people listened to my music on the West Coast, [but] we estimated 10,000-12,000 people were watching us on that stage. The new fans we gained being in front of the people there to see Turnpike [Troubadours] or Zach Bryan, it was great.”
Other newly launched festivals over the past few years have included Kentucky’s Railbird Festival, Oklahoma’s Born & Raised Festival and Monterey, California’s Rebels & Renegades festival, as well as Goldenvoice’s Palomino Festival in Pasadena, California (though the Palomino Festival did not return in 2023).
Like many already-existing festivals in the space— such as Bristol (Tenn.) Rhythm & Roots, Nashville’s Americana Music Festival & Conference and Franklin, Tennessee’s Pilgrimage Music & Cultural Festival, Master Musicians Festival and MerleFest — the lineups for these events draw heavily on artists who operate outside of mainstream country, and who traditionally have not received much terrestrial country radio support.
“We’ve definitely seen an uptick in genre-specific festivals,” says Sophie Lobl, a global festival talent buyer for C3 and Live Nation, who curated the inaugural Fairwell Festival, which welcomed 60,000 music fans over three days. “Americana has been pretty popular for a while, but in the past [8-to-12] months has definitely become a really hot topic. For us, especially for Fairwell in that market specifically, it’s definitely the biggest ticket seller so far there.”
Shannon Casey, senior vp, fairs & festivals for booking agency Wasserman Music Nashville, says the pandemic famine helped lead to the current feast. “During the pandemic, there were so many artists who have had to dig into platforms, like Instagram, TikTok and then Spotify playlists, to stay in touch with audiences,” says Casey. “I think that has allowed fanbases to really discover new artists who have an underserved lane of artistry. I think a lot of this was stuff starting to brew right before COVID and now you have all these environments that are supporting it.” Wasserman Music’s Americana and alt-country roster includes Childers, Allison Russell, Brandi Carlile, Kacey Musgraves, Price, Trampled by Turtles and Colter Wall.
“It’s not like we haven’t had Outlaw country before, and it’s not like Americana is something new,” Casey continues. “I think it’s a time and place where there is so much music discovery. We are seeing that separation from the mainstream, which has always been there. There is just an explosion of all of these genres — Red Dirt, Americana, alt-country, folk, bluegrass — in a time and place that people are absorbing it.”
The Zach Bryan Effect
Dan and Amy Sheehan worked to launch the Rebels & Renegades festival in 2022, which featured Trampled By Turtles, Godwin, Kat Hasty, and Nikki Lane and drew 5,000 attendees each day. This year’s Oct. 6-8 lineup expands the fest from two days to three days, and features Flores, The War and Treaty, Old Crow Medicine Show, Whiskey Myers, Shane Smith and the Saints, Morgan Wade, Jaime Wyatt and Flatland Cavalry.
“There’s been this blossoming, obviously, with Tyler [Childers], but I do think Zach Bryan has definitely pushed this space even higher,” Dan Sheehan says. “I think he’s one of the bigger factors in all of this. A rising tide lifts all boats, and I think that’s what’s happening right now. But we’re also seeing artists like Charley Crockett become more and more of a staple and [acts like] Paul Cauthen and Sierra Ferrell and Morgan Wade — they are all selling tickets at a rapid pace.”
Simultaneously with the surge in these festivals, more acoustic and/or roots-oriented artists are ascending to new career heights on Billboard’s charts, thanks to streaming gains. Bryan’s Aug. 25 self-titled album release (on Belting Bronco/Warner Records) spent two weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, while his collaboration with Musgraves, “I Remember Everything,” debuted atop the Billboard Hot 100. Meanwhile, Childers notched his first Hot 100 entry with “In Your Love,” which debuted at No. 43. Roots-oriented artists including Dylan Gossett, Charles Wesley Godwin and Sam Barber have also made inroads on the charts, while Turnpike Troubadours’ current album, A Cat in the Rain, debuted in the top 10 on Billboard’s Top Country Albums — the album marked the first from the group since 2017’s A Long Way From Your Heart.
“I think we got lucky with a lot of serendipitous timing,” Lobl says of the Fairwell Festival. “Obviously Turnpike and Willie [Nelson] for example, have crushed it for a very long time, and I think it was just perfect timing that Willie’s kind of doing this huge run. Turnpike had not had an album out in a while. I think that Zach is doing phenomenal things in that space and now crossing over into other spaces. It’s exciting to see that a lot of these artists are garnering a lot of new fans.”
Sheehan notes that many of these festivals offer tickets at more reasonable prices than events featuring bigger mainstream names and fill a gap in the mid-sized festivals space.
“If you have a 25,000-capacity venue, you can do a Morgan Wallen or a Zach Bryan,” he explains. “If you have a 10,000 cap as we do, there’s a certain level of artists you pursue. Developing some of these artists into the next headliners is also crucial.” Expenses, including insurance and van rental costs, have soared since Covid, but Sheehan stresses there is a price point they can’t go beyond: While the festivals want to break even, “You have to set your ticket price, but you can’t make it too expensive. It’s a delicate balance.”
Casey also credits Stagecoach, particularly its Palomino Stage, as helping seed the ground by highlighting a wide swath of musical styles since the California music festival debuted in 2007. While the Mane Stage is generally reserved for mainstream country superstars, among the artists who have played on the secondary stage are Bryan, Wall, Cauthen, Crockett, Price, and Rhiannon Giddens.
“If you look at the Palomino Stage at Stagecoach, you can see that [Goldenvoice vp of festival talent] Stacy Vee and her team had their fingerprints on the pulse of all of this,” Casey says. “I think that’s what has sort of slowly been translating and going into other markets, including markets where there traditionally hasn’t really even been a country festival.”
Looking Ahead
Sheehan, who is both a festival promoter and a venue owner, notes that as with live performances in general, oversaturation can be a concern.
“I think it comes back to what can the consumer actually afford. There are only so many events that one person can physically, let alone financially, go to,” Sheehan says. “On the West Coast, I don’t think we are oversaturated yet, but right now, touring lanes [overall] are very oversaturated, and venues and festivals alike feel it.”
For Flores, the surge in popularity of roots-oriented artists, marks a change in musical tastes since the pandemic.
“I definitely believe a lot of people went through some difficult times — emotionally, financially — and the stuff they were listening to wasn’t adding up to how they were actually feeling inside. I think their music tastes maybe changed, because they were trying to find something they could relate to… So many songs were about happiness and positivity, and I don’t think a lot of people were happy when COVID hit — a lot of people’s lives changed completely,” Flores says.
And as people re-emerged, they wanted to hear the artists who they discovered during their hard times. “It’s really good music,” Sheehan says, “which is why [people] are building festivals around them.”