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Amid a production halt during a double strike, major talent agency CAA is undergoing a round of layoffs.
About sixty employees are set to be impacted — including agents, executives and support staff — within the next week, a source tells The Hollywood Reporter. The figure is a relatively small percentage of the thousands of staffers that work at the Century City-based representation giant led by Kevin Huvane, Richard Lovett and Bryan Lourd.
Multiple departments had been evaluating staffing levels even prior to when the Writers Guild of America strike began on May 2. When performer’s union SAG-AFTRA joined the strike on July 13, Hollywood settled in to a long summer as the dealmaking ecosystem ground to a halt.
Several talent agencies have cut staff in the ensuing months as the guilds faced off with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of studios. For instance, Endeavor, the owner of fellow “Big 3” agency WME and fashion-focused IMG, estimated on August 8 that the impact of the actors’ and writers’ strikes would be about $25 million per month in revenue.
Talent and literary agency Verve, which reps many scribes, cut about 60 percent of its assistants and 3 agents in late May. And Big 3 firm UTA had already made a round of cuts, which it described as a single digit percentage of a workforce that totals 2,000 employees, in February.
Hollywood’s agencies went through retrenchment and conducted notable layoffs or furloughs during the COVID-19 shutdowns in the middle of 2020, also at a time of a widespread production halt. At that time, in July 2020, CAA said it cut 90 agents and executives and further furloughed 275 assistants and other staffers.
Since that time, CAA made the most consequential move in the Hollywood talent agency space, acquiring rival firm ICM in a megadeal that closed last June and added 425 of its employees to the payroll, with 105 staffers cut. At the time, the combined company was said to have 3,200 employees in 25 countries.
Deadline earlier reported CAA’s planned cuts on Thursday.
This article was originally published by THR.com.
Amazon Music reached a new merchandise integration with concert-discovery platform Bandsintown that will allow fans across the globe to shop merch items from artists while browsing their artist profile pages on the Bandsintown website and app. Under the integration, more than 590,000 registered artists on Bandsintown for Artists will be able to promote their merch and physical music releases to their Bandsintown followers and the followers of similar artists through in-app notifications, email and social channels. The merch available on Bandsintown will be drawn from the Amazon Music Artist Merch Shop on Amazon.com, developed and curated by the Amazon Music team.
Oliver Chastan‘s artist and brand development company Iconoclast acquired the producer royalties of composer, songwriter and producer Giorgio Moroder. The company will additionally work with Moroder on the development of his name, image and likeness rights. Over the course of his career, Moroder has collaborated with artists including Berlin (“Take My Breath Away”), Donna Summer (“I Feel Love”, and Blondie (“Call Me”). His work as a film composer includes scores and songs for Midnight Express, Top Gun, Scarface and Flashdance.
CTS Eventim increased its stake in France Billet from 48% to 65%, making it the majority owner of the French ticketing company. CTS Eventim acquired the 48% stake in France Billet back in 2019 — a deal that included an option to acquire a majority stake in the company this year.
Reactional Music, the maker of an interactive music engine for video games, reached a global partnership with Southeast Asian games publisher Amanotes, whose games attract more than 100 million monthly active users, according to a press release. The deal will allow Amanotes gamers to personalize their personas and gameplay with their favorite music while also allowing Amanote to tap into a faster and more efficient method to create and prototype music in its games.
Toyota is now the name-in-title sponsor of the Concord Pavilion in Concord, Calif., which will now be known as Toyota Pavilion at Concord. The move is sponsored by the Northern California Toyota Dealers Association, which is composed of 58 local Toyota dealers operating in the region. Upcoming shows at the venue in 2023 include Sting, Snoop Dogg, Jelly Roll, Culture Club and Beck.
PRS for Music and PPL announced a new partnership with music technology company Audoo. Under the deal, Audoo’s Audoo Audio Meters — which aim to ensure “accurate and transparent” royalty distribution to music creators by identifying background music being played in businesses, according to a press release — will be installed in businesses including cafes, bars, hair salons, restaurants and retail establishments across the United Kingdom, with usage data reported back to PRS and PPL.
Live Nation signed a multi-year partnership with Montana-based promoter Logjam Presents. Under the agreement, Live Nation will invest in Logjam, of which the Checota family will retain ownership and continue to manage day-to-day operations for. “Out of state national and regional promoters are already actively promoting in venues around the state. This new partnership will allow Logjam to remain competitive as a Montana-based promoter and will retain our event booking, marketing, management and, most importantly, 100 percent of our staff locally,” said Logjam president Nick Checota in a statement. “Our new partnership will also provide Logjam access to an incredible artist network and will provide additional capital to improve existing venues and explore opportunities in other Montana regions.”
Desertscene and Old Empire, both independent heavy music promoters, announced a partnership “merging our distinct styles and unyielding passion for live music,” according to a statement by Old Empire founder Josh Retallick. Based in the United Kingdom, Old Empire promotes artists including Heilung, Chelsea Wolf, SUNN O))) and Electric Wizard. Desertscene books and promotes Desertfest festivals in London, New York and Berlin as well as in Antwerp, Belgium and Oslo, Norway.
Universal Music Group’s music merchandise and brand management company Bravado partnered with brand licensing and extension agency Redibra as its official licensing agent in Brazil. “We are thrilled to have the opportunity to create incredible products and experiences for the dedicated music fan community in Brazil,” said Redibra CEO David Diesendruck in a statement.
Under a new partnership, Primary Wave Music, Sun Records and TC Restaurant Group will expand Nashville’s music-themed eatery Sun Diner — inspired by Sun Records artists like Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash — to additional locations across the United States; a second location opened Aug. 3 in Gatlinburg, Tenn. Primary Wave acquired the rights to Sun Records in 2021.
Long before signing Nirvana and the Foo Fighters to their respective record labels and, later, becoming AEG Presents’ global touring and talent president, Gary Gersh was a devoted The Band fanatic. While working at Licorice Pizza in California, he saw the influential rock ‘n’ rollers perform numerous times, and as a young Capitol Records employee, he befriended Robbie Robertson, who died Thursday at 80, during The Band’s The Last Waltz farewell concert.
By phone from a Minneapolis airport, Gersh recalls his early encounters with The Band; coaxing Robertson into recording his 1987 self-titled solo debut while working as a Geffen Records A&R man; and long conversations with the guitarist and songwriter in Woodstock, N.Y.
How did you come to be involved with The Last Waltz?
I was a young guy starting out, and The Band were on [Capitol] and doing their thing when they decided The Last Waltz would be the last show. I get up there for rehearsals, and for the show itself, and it was monumental. I watched Robbie in the middle of it all, being different than a musician — he was always talking to cameramen and Mr. [Martin] Scorsese [who directed the 1978 film documenting the event]. It was a beginning of an education. Robbie helped raise me and I was fortunate to have somebody so unbelievably talented and so beautiful as a human being teaching me so much.
What moment do you remember most from that concert?
Robbie was front and center in a way he had never been seen before. Not necessarily the most important member, because the beauty of The Band was the quality of the whole and everybody mattered, but Robbie was the star on screen. Because of the way everything was captured, all of a sudden people were seeing this guy as one of the greatest live guitarists that ever lived.
How did you get to Capitol Records back then?
Gary Gersh photographed on Oct. 21, 2019 at AEG Presents in Los Angeles.
Sally Peterson
I had come from a chain of record stores, Licorice Pizza, and Capitol was my first record-company job. The Band had put out a Christmas song [“Christmas Must Be Tonight,” recorded in 1975 and, released two years later] as a single, and I was crazy for it. I was just this guy at the record label, at the very, very bottom, jumping up and down and screaming about The Band. They weren’t the biggest priority at the time, because they weren’t the biggest band, but, to me, they were the most influential band in American music. I saw them play at the Santa Barbara Bowl when I was in my late teens and it was probably well over 100 degrees. Robbie was dressed up in a suit and they were all just dying from the heat, but there they were, just being The Band, and they crushed every time I saw them.
You helped him make Robbie Robertson — how did that come about?
One of the first things I did as an A&R guy was sign Robbie and talked him into making solo records, which, at the time, he wasn’t thinking of doing. I said, “You can’t stop making music. You can do whatever else you need to do, but you can’t stop making music.” I kind of didn’t know what I was talking about, but I think he got that I could be a partner on the ride.
What was making that album like?
He was developing what he wanted his sound to be while we were working on the record. I had always known that [producer] Daniel Lanois was the guy to make the record, and Robbie knew it but had never met him. They hit it off famously. … Daniel pushed Robbie in ways I’m not sure had ever happened before. Robbie had always written multiple verses and had extra lyrics from all the songs. I had never seen that before. There were whole verses being moved in a way that took all of us to see and help develop.
Was there a moment that stands out from that process?
When the first solo album was finished, we mixed the record with [engineer] Bob Clearmountain at Bearsville Studios [in Woodstock, N.Y., site of many Band recordings], which Robbie obviously had a real history at. The day we got to Woodstock, we got a six-pack and he took me over to Big Pink, and we sat on the curb, and I just started asking questions. He was one of the greatest storytellers, whether he was talking about a meal at dinner or a film or music. He talked about how, once they got into the house, they started writing songs from fragments of things. And how Robbie thought each piece was like an actor in a play or a movie, and how they would come and go in a way that made it so cinematic.
When was the last time you saw him?
I talked to him a few weeks ago — he knew my family and knew my wife, and we had young kids and were starting to raise a family, and he had already had one.
Anything else you’d like to add?
He introduced me to so many people — so many musicians — that I had never thought in my life I would know. But he felt it would be part of my education. Van Morrison was just on the music system here [at the airport]. I remember meeting Van because Robbie introduced me to him when they were working on a song [“Wonderful Remark”] for the [1983] King of Comedy soundtrack. I hear things and I’m just reminded everywhere I go. I think that’s the way it is with great teachers. It never leaves you.
Futureverse — a multi-hyphenate AI company — published a new research paper on Thursday (June 9) to introduce its forthcoming text-to-music generator. Called Jen-1, the unreleased model is designed to improve upon issues found in currently available music generators like Google’s MusicLM, providing higher fidelity audio and longer, more complex musical works than what is on the market today.
“Jen is spelled J-E-N because she’s designed to be your friend who goes into the studio with you. She’s a tool,” says Shara Senderoff, co-founder of Futureverse and co-founder of Raised in Space, about the model in an exclusive first-look with Billboard. Predicted to release in early 2024, Jen can form up-to three minute songs as well as help producers with half-written songs through offering ‘continuation’ and ‘in-painting’ as well.
‘Continuation’ allows a music maker to upload an incomplete song to Jen and direct the model to create a plausible idea of how to finish the song, and ‘in-painting’ refers to a process by which the model can fill in spaces of a song that are damaged or incomplete in the middle of the work. To Aaron McDonald, the company’s co-founder, Jen’s role is to “extend creativity” of human artists.
When asked why Jen is a necessary invention during a time in which producers, songwriters and artists are more bountiful than ever, McDonald replied, “I think musicians throughout the ages have always embraced new technology that expands the way they can create music,” pointing to electronic music as one example of how new tools shape musical evolution. “To imply that music doesn’t need [any new] technology to expand and become better now is kind of silly… and arbitrary.”
He also sees this as a way to “democratize” the “high end of music [quality],” which he says is now only accessible to musicians with the means to record at a well-equipped studio and with trained technicians. With Jen, Johnson and Senderoff hope to satisfy the interests of professional musicians and to encourage newcomers to dabble in songwriting, perhaps for the first time. The two co-founders imagine a world in which everyday people can create music, and have nicknamed the products of this type of user as ‘AIGC,’ a twist on the term User Generated Content (or ‘UGC’).
Futureverse was formed piecemeal over the last 18 months, merging eleven different pre-existing AI and metaverse start-ups together into one company to make a number of creative AI models, including those that produce animations, music, sound effects and more. To power their inventions, the company employs the AI protocol from Altered State Machine, a company that was founded by Johnson and included in the merger.
Senderoff says Jen will also be a superior product because Futureverse created it with the input of some of music’s top business executives and creators, unlike its competitors. Though Senderoff does not reveal who the industry partners are or how Jen will be a more ethical and cooperative model for musicians, but she assures an announcement will be released soon providing more information.
Despite its proposed upgrades, Futureverse’s Jen could face significant challenges from other text-to-music generators named in the new research paper, given some were made by the world’s most established tech giants and have already hit the market, but McDonald is unperturbed. “That forces us to think differently. We don’t have the resources that they do, but we started our process with that in mind. I think we can beat them with a different approach: the key insight is working with the music industry as a way to produce a better product.”
Ivan Cornejo has signed a record deal with Interscope Records, the Universal Music Group-owned label announced today (Aug. 10). The música mexicana singer-songwriter had been signed to indie label Manzana Records since 2021.
The 19-year-old artist went from social media phenomenon to chart-topping artist when he topped Billboard‘s Latin Songwriters chart dated Oct. 30, 2021 thanks to his hit sierreño anthem “Está Dañada,” which then became only the second regional Mexican song to enter the Hot 100 tally. The track later got a remix featuring Jhayco. Last year, he scored his first No. 1 on the Regional Mexican Albums with his sophomore album, Dañado, and he won new artist of the year the 2022 Billboard Latin Music Awards.
“I am really excited to begin this new chapter of my career,” Cornejo said in a statement. “It’s been a long road even though my career is young and we have built a really strong foundation up until now. I am looking forward to working with John and Nir and the entire team at Interscope to continue to build and take my project to the next level.”
Cornejo made his Lollapalooza debut on Aug. 5, where he officially kicked off his Terapia Tour, which will make stops in major cities such as New York, Atlanta, Dallas and Houston before wrapping up with two back-to-back shows in Chicago on Nov. 16-17.
“At Interscope we have always been attracted to artists who move culture, and Ivan has already proven he is on that path,” said John Janick, chairman and chief executive officer of Interscope Geffen A&M Records. “He is absolutely one of the most exciting new artists in music and we are looking forward to working with him and his team on the next chapter of his incredible career.”
“Ivan is truly a special artist, a songwriter of depth and a masterful live performer,” said Nir Seroussi, Interscope executive vice president, who oversees Interscope’s efforts in Latin music. “In a very short time he built a passionate and loyal fanbase which has propelled him up the charts. We’re so proud that he’s chosen Interscope as his new creative home.”
Ivan Cornejo’s move from an indie Latin label to a mainstream label comes just two months after Interscope signed Karol G, joining a roster of Latin acts that include Kali Uchis, Cuco and Bad Gyal, among others.
Apple will get to keep rules barring developers from directing users to avenues that allow them to bypass a commission on sales in the App Store, where the company exacts a toll of up to 30 percent on all transactions, pending an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Justice Elena Kagan on Wednesday denied a bid […]
For roughly half a century, John Fogerty had tried to recover the rights to dozens of hits he wrote for Creedence Clearwater Revival. At the age of 77, he had almost given up hope, when he and his wife, Julie Fogerty, who also works as his manager, realized they were on the cusp of a second chance thanks to the Copyright Act of 1976.
That law–specifically sections 304(c) and 203–are intended to give musicians, songwriters and other creators a second bite at the apple by enabling them to recapture the copyrights to compositions and recordings, in the United States only, that they may have signed away earlier in their careers. Songs dating from before 1978 can revert to their creator or heirs after 56 years, and songs from after 1978 can revert to the creator or heirs after 35 years, provided they file the proper paperwork.
Realizing that many of John’s songs were nearing that 56-year threshold, Julie reached a deal with Concord in January that returned majority control to her husband of worldwide publishing rights to over 65 Creedence classics.
Although clearing the legal and corporate hurdles to recapture rights can be significant and compromises are often negotiated, some industry insiders say that same law could lead to artists putting up for sale their newly recovered catalogs in a way that stokes the already hot market for publishing and recording rights.
“You have this interesting confluence of the big, big moment in classic rock, and you’re also getting to the 35-year window for late-1980s songs,” says Concord CEO Bob Valentine, who mentioned the mutually “happy outcome” with John during a discussion about works from the late ’60s and late ’80s approaching their reversion dates.
“Those are two huge windows for multiple genres,” he adds. “It makes the [catalog investment] market really interesting at this moment in time.”
Clearing the hurdles — both within the law and presented by music companies — to recapture rights is complicated, but there is some precedent to support this optimism. In 2013, when the first wave of post-1978 works approached the 35-year threshold, Billboard reported that nearly 20 of the world’s most famous songwriters had filed termination notices with the U.S. Copyright Office, including Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, Gerry Goffin & Carole King, Willie Nelson, Daryl Hall & John Oates and the estates of Buddy Holly and Bo Diddley.
Lisa Alter, a founding partner at Alter Kendrick & Baron in New York and an expert in rights reversion negotiations, says a new surge has already begun. “Commerce has definitely increased in this area,” she says. “It will continue to increase, and at some point, maybe 10-plus years down the line, things will start to level off.”
Sources cautioned, however, that rights reversions — particularly for master recordings — rarely work out so cleanly as the law implies, and that likely only a fraction of the hit song catalogs reaching the 35-year or 56-year milestones will revert to their owners.
While John was able to regain a majority share of his worldwide publishing rights, Concord retains the Creedence master recordings in its catalog and, as of January, was still administering the rocker’s share of the publishing catalog. (Concord obtained Creedence’s recordings through the 2004 acquisition of Fantasy Records.) While John regained only publishing rights this year, Concord reinstated and improved his artist royalties shortly after the acquisition.
A key argument used by industry observers who predict the spate of copyright reversions will superheat the catalog investment market in the coming years is that superstar artists and songwriters who were behind hit records in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s are aging and may be considering selling their rights to pass down a simpler inheritance to their heirs.
Before that can happen, however, artists and songwriters — or their heirs, if they are deceased — are required to serve the U.S. Copyright Office and their current music publisher or record company a termination notice at least two years before the songs turn 35 or 56, and they cannot enter any agreement with a third party before their current contract is terminated. Whoever has been holding those rights has the right of first refusal to acquire them.
While that option often leads the incumbent rights holder to negotiate new deals with the artists seeking to recover their rights, Alter says that since 1978, publishers have usually acquiesced when artists seek to reclaim their publishing rights, and labels have largely sought to block attempts to reclaim sound recording rights.
“There has been almost universal opposition on the part of the labels to the [termination] notices,” she says, with labels often arguing the notice was not validly served or the artist or songwriter produced the song as a work for hire. “While some artists have successfully gotten their rights back, in the majority of cases, the record label has renegotiated the leases.”
Many artists have attempted to sue major labels for their responses to termination notices — so far almost always unsuccessfully. One closely watched case was brought by “Missing You” singer John Waite, who sought class action status for hundreds of artists to sue Universal Music Group to regain control of their masters. The class action request was denied in January after a judge said there were complex and unique issues raised by each artist’s relationship with UMG that could not be resolved on an “aggregate basis.”
Round Hill Music co-founder Josh Gruss, who was an early investor in songs as an asset class, says he questions whether the rights reversion trend will result in more copyrights coming to the investment market.
“It’s really hard for significant recordings to fall out of the major-label system,” he says.
That said, Gruss acknowledges that attractive copyrights that have reverted to an artist or songwriter frequently come up for outside investment. For example, songwriter Eddie Schwartz, who wrote 100% of Pat Benatar’s 1980 top 10 Billboard Hot 100 hit “Hit Me With Your Best Shot,” reclaimed his publishing rights to the song in 2015 and sold them to Round Hill. Gruss says they’ve both been happy with the result.
When it comes to master recordings, however, Gruss agrees with Alter’s assessment.
“The labels have always done a masterful job of not letting the recordings revert,” he says.
With the launch of a music publishing venture, Simon Cowell returns to the business where he honed his own talents in pop.
Unveiled this week, SYCO Publishing, a collaboration between Syco Entertainment and Universal Music Publishing Group, will sign and develop songwriters and catalogs that will be administered and supported exclusively through UMPG globally, reps say.
At launch, SYCO Publishing is home to Lucy Spraggan and John Samuel Gerhart, as well as song catalog from Camila Cabello, James Arthur, Grace VanderWaal, Fifth Harmony and others.
The record executive, TV personality and current judge on America’s Got Talent got his break in publishing.
“There is nothing more important than a great song. I started my career in music publishing,” comments Cowell on the unveiling of his new venture. Paying tribute to Mike McCormack, managing director of UMPG U.K., and the music publishing giant, Cowell says he’s been given “the chance to build a music publishing company. They are a brilliant company and share my wish to work with amazing songwriters.”
SYCO Publishing will also create new opportunities for its writers to work across Cowell’s network of media formats and projects, reads a statement.
“Simon has been a good friend for decades and I’m thrilled he has finally decided to launch a publishing business with UMPG,” adds McCormack. “His track record is incredible – he’s always had great instincts and passion for outstanding songs, and brings incredible value to every songwriter, producer and catalog he works with.”
It’s the second songwriting-focused project in the past year that has brought together Cowell’s entertainment venture and Universal Music Group. In 2022, both companies got behind StemDrop, a creative platform for musical collaboration, curation and artist discovery, which launched exclusively with TikTok and Samsung, by providing users with access to music “stems,” the isolated components of a song, from an exclusive track, which creators could then use to record and share their own versions.
Syco Entertainment is the independent company which created and owns TV formats such as “Got Talent” and “The X Factor”.
The Zombies, the British invasion rock band behind classics like “Time of the Season” and “She’s Not There,” announced this week they’ve obtained their master recordings after decades of outside control.
“It’s another stage of us not worrying about what’s going to happen in the future,” says keyboardist Rod Argent, one of the band’s founders and songwriters. “We’ve got more overseeing of everything that’s going on.”
The baroque pop originators signed with Marquis Enterprises in 1964 when they were still teenagers and almost immediately scored a No. 2 hit on the Hot 100 with their Argent-penned debut single, “She’s Not There,” which Marquis had licensed to Decca. They followed that up with another Argent original, “Tell Her No,” which peaked at No. 6. Their signature and most enduring hit — Argent’s “Time of the Season” — didn’t gain traction until after they’d broken up prior to the 1968 release of their sophomore album Odessey and Oracle on CBS. The era-defining song, with its breathy call-and-response vocals from Colin Blunstone and psychedelic keyboard runs by Argent, eventually reached No. 3 on the Hot 100.
Carole Broughton, a Marquis employee at the time, wound up controlling the band’s masters and publishing over several decades, recently placing synchs including Odessey and Oracle album cut “This Will Be Our Year” in the Schitt’s Creek finale and “She’s Not There” in a Chanel ad campaign starring Keira Knightley.
“I’d always promised [the masters] to them,” says Broughton, owner of Marquis and Bocu Group, a publisher that oversees 700 song copyrights. “We’re all in our 70s now and it just felt right. I certainly didn’t want the masters to go back to anybody else other than The Zombies.”
Rod Argent, Hugh Grundy, Chris White and Colin Blunstone of The Zombies attend An Evening With The Zombies at The GRAMMY Museum on April 27, 2017 in Los Angeles.
Rebecca Sapp/WireImage for The Recording Academy
Deal terms were undisclosed, but discussions were “three years in the making,” according to Chris Tuthill, the band’s co-manager. “My partner Cindy [da Silva] and I have been working long and hard to have it controlled and under one roof,” he says. “Although Marquis always kept a sympathetic and active role in the catalog, they didn’t necessarily do things to actively promote the catalog, particularly on DSPs.” When Marquis placed The Zombies’ “A Rose for Emily” in the hit 2017 podcast S-Town, he adds, “It would have been brilliant, had we known this was coming out, having people pitch this for playlisting and promoting the story of this song.”
Still, Broughton and Marquis were unusually fair to The Zombies during a long period when classic-rock stars lost control of their publishing and master recordings to music executives they considered unscrupulous.
“When it was fairly unfashionable, she did the most wonderful job, because she was so dedicated to us,” Argent recalls. “She continually worked it in the early days. She never let it die. That did us a huge favor.” Tuthill adds: “The guys have told me it was always very straightforward, unlike the highway-robbery stories I’ve heard from people who came up in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. Everything got paid through that was supposed to be paid through.”
After the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, Broughton sold The Zombies’ publishing, which includes tracks by songwriters Argent, Blunstone and Chris White, to Robert Wise‘s Wise Music Group. “I’d known Bobby since I was young — he used to put out our sheet music,” says Broughton, who began her music-business career in 1961, at 14, with U.K. publisher Mills Music. “It made sense at the time. I knew they were going to be very proactive with it.”
The Zombies, who are on tour this fall and recently released a new album, Different Game, are directing their managers to dig through boxes of files and scouring original four-track tapes for potential catalog reissues. “The gem in all of this is The Zombies don’t have to ask anyone for permission to do anything with respect to their masters,” says Monika Tashman, the band’s attorney. “This is about them claiming something that seemed impossible at the early stage of their career.”
Lizzo could be facing further legal action on the heels of a lawsuit filed by three tour dancers who claimed in a complaint filed last week in Los Angeles that the “Juice” singer subjected them to sexual harassment and a hostile work environment that included allegations that they were pressured to touch nude dancers during a live sex show.
According to a statement from attorney Ron Zambrano — who is representing dancers Arianna Davis, Crystal Williams and Noelle Rodriguez — “we have received at least six inquiries from other people with similar stories since we filed the complaint.”
Zambrano added that, “Noelle, Crystal and Arianna have bravely spoken out and shared their experiences, opening the door for others to feel empowered to do the same. Some of the claims we are reviewing involve allegations of a sexually charged environment and failure to pay employees and may be actionable, but it is too soon to say.”
At press time a spokesperson for Lizzo had not returned a request for comment on Zambrano’s statement.
The complaint filed last week on behalf of Davis, Williams and Rodriguez accused Lizzo (born Melissa Jefferson) and her Big Grrrl Big Touring Inc. of a wide range of legal wrongdoing, including racial and religious discrimination. Among the allegations in the suit were claims that Lizzo pushed the dancers to attend a sex show in Amsterdam’s famed Red Light District and pressured them to engage with the performers.
The lawsuit also claimed that the captain of Lizzo’s dance team, Shirlene Quigley, forced her religious beliefs on the plaintiffs and took repeated actions that made them uncomfortable, including commenting about their virginity and simulating oral sex on a banana in front of them.
In one of the most notable allegations, the suit claims that Lizzo, who has made body positivity a key aspect of her brand, “called attention” to a dancer’s weight gain after a performance at the South by Southwest festival.
Last Thursday, Lizzo issued her only response to date to the suit, calling the allegations “false” and “sensationalized stories” in a statement on Twitter. “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.”
She said that the allegations that she and her company created a hostile work environment that included allegations of religious and racial discrimination were “unbelievable as they sound and too outrageous to not be addressed.”
Lizzo specifically addressed the allegation that she had “called attention” to a dancer’s weight gain, saying, “There is nothing I take more seriously than the respect we deserve as women in the world. 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.”
Though Lizzo did not specifically address the individual accusations in the suit in her statement, she called them “sensationalized stories [that] are coming from former employees who have already publicly admitted that they were told their behavior on tour was inappropriate and unprofessional.”
In a response, Zambrano said Lizzo’s statement “only adds to our clients’ emotional distress”; at press time the names of the alleged six other people reportedly contacted Zambrano after the suit was filed had not been released. Billboard has reached out to one of Lizzo’s lawyers, Marty Singer, for comment on Zambrano’s statement but had not heard back at press time; according to NBC News, Singer had recently called the lawsuit “specious.”
Following the suit and Lizzo’s statement, filmmaker Sophia Nahli Allison — who at one point had been attached to direct the singer’s Love, Lizzo documentary — explained on her socials why she left the project. “In 2019, I traveled a bit with Lizzo to be the director of her documentary. I walked away after about 2 weeks. I was treated with such disrespect by her,” Allison wrote.
“I witnessed how arrogant, self-centered, and unkind she is. I was not protected and was thrown into a sh-tty situation with little support,” she added. Allison also said her gut told her to leave the project, and that she is “grateful” that she did, adding that she “felt gaslit and was deeply hurt.” At the time Lizzo’s reps had not returned Billboard‘s requests for comment on Allison’s claims.
Earlier this year, Amazon Studios announced that auditions had begun for the second season of Watch Out for the Big Grrls, a series that chronicled the singer/rapper’s search for her next crew of “BIG GRRRL” dancers to accompany on her 2022 tour; according to NBC, among the six unnamed people Zambrano has talked to, some said they worked on the Amazon series.
In addition, on Tuesday, the Jay-Z-founded Made In America festival, which was to feature headline sets from Lizzo and SZA, announced that it was pulling the plug on this year’s edition due to “severe circumstances outside of production control.” A statement from organizers did not give specific reasons for the cancellation and a spokesperson for promoter Live Nation referred Billboard to the statement without offering additional comment. NBC reported that before the suit against Lizzo was filed, an unnamed source close to the production said that ticket sales for this year’s Made in America fest in Philadelphia were “not good.”