Business
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BMG has acquired a major interest in Paul Simon‘s portion of the Simon & Garfunkel catalog. This sale includes the Grammy winner and two-time Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee’s royalty income for all of Simon & Garfunkel’s recorded music as well as his neighboring rights income to that music as well. Simon & […]
Kobalt has signed Grammy nominated producer and songwriter OZ to a global administrative publishing deal. Ozan Yildirim, a.k.a. OZ, is known for his work on Drake’s “Toosie Slide,” Travis Scott’s “Sicko Mode” and “Highest in the Room,” and Future’s “Life Is Good.”
Electric Feel Entertainment has signed Projexx to a publishing deal. The Jamaica-born, Miami-based singer, songwriter, and producer has already helped write a number of songs for global stars, including Wizkid and Konshens and emerging talents like Jesse Royal, Ruger, Juls, Bakersteez, and more.
Sony Music Publishing Nashville has signed Seth Mosley to a global publishing deal. Most recently, the country and Christian hitmaker co-wrote Gabby Barrett’s “Glory Days.” Other cuts of Mosley’s include Colton Dixon’s “Build a Boat,” King and Country’s “Fix My Eyes” and “Joy.”
Warner Music Spain and Warner Chappell Music Spain have jointly hosted a summer songwriting camp at The Music Station in Madrid, starting June 15. The camp was created to bring together some of Spain and Latin America’s most promising artists and songwriters to write together and perform at The Music Station’s live venue.
Position Music and Poems (a partnership between The Monsters & Strangerz and Mega House Music) have announced their signing of songwriter, producer and artist Jack LaFrantz to a global publishing deal. To date, LaFrantz has written songs like “Hero” by JVKE and Martin Garrix, “Love Like That” by Suriel Hess, “Castle in the Sky” by eaJ and “Sugar Sweet” and “Before You” by Benson Boone.
Superior Music Company has signed New York based songwriter Amy Douglas to a worldwide publishing administration deal. Known best for her work in dance music, Douglas has written songs with artists like Horse Meat Disco, Juan MacLean, Luke Solomon, Soul Clap, Low Steppa, Roison Murphy, and more. Douglas also has her own artist project which boasts the house music hit “Never Saw It Coming.”
Bucks Music Group and Mushroom Music have signed Joshua Epithet to a global publishing deal under their joint venture. A singer/songwriter, Epithet also releases his recorded music under Mushroom Labels worldwide.
MusiCares announced the launch of Humans of Hip Hop on Thursday (June 22). The program is focused on providing resources tailored to the needs of the hip-hop community nationwide with an initial focus on eight key cities – Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles/Compton, New York, Oakland, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C.
“Like so many other communities post-pandemic, the hip hop community is in need of support,” Rico Love, the Miami-based chair of the Recording Academy’s Black Music Collective, said in a statement. “I’ve heard my community voice their needs. With MusiCares and Humans of Hip Hop, I’m excited to work directly with artists and change-makers to get people the services that will really make a difference in their lives.”
A MusiCares spokesperson clarified that while the Black Music Collective played a key role in the creation of this program, the program is open to all members of the hip-hop community. “The Humans of Hip Hop program was created to achieve greater reach within a specific genre of music. Any person who identifies as part of the hip-hop music community can participate, regardless of race, age, gender, location or music profession. MusiCares is trying to reach people making hip-hop music and make sure MusiCares is addressing their needs.”
Humans of Hip Hop will bring programming to key cities over three years. The focus is on fostering long-term relationships to continue building MusiCares programming that is responsive to the needs of the hip-hop community.
Between August 2021 and July 2022, one-fifth of all MusiCares clients identified as Black music professionals. A MusiCares spokesperson says: “This statistic demonstrates that MusiCares serves a significant portion of clients from the Black music community. The program’s goal is to gain even further awareness for MusiCares’ services within a specific genre, open to all races.”
MusiCares will add a full-time project lead for Humans of Hip Hop to serve as the day-to-day focal point for building inroads and maintaining partnership with the hip-hop community.
“MusiCares is grateful to our sponsors and artist advocates for helping us kick off this program,” Laura Segura, executive director of MusiCares, said in a statement. “This work will allow us to zero in on the unique needs of the community and continue our work creating meaningful services driven by leaders and advocates of hip-hop.”
“We are thrilled to see this important initiative for our music people in the hip hop community come to life,” Harvey Mason jr, CEO of the Recording Academy and MusiCares, said in a statement. “Providing the resources and services needed will ensure the community knows their voices are being heard.”
Ticket marketplace Vivid Seats is the program’s supporting partner. Vivid Seats has partnered with MusiCares since 2020, sponsoring COVID-19 and natural disaster relief efforts.
To be eligible for MusiCares assistance, applicants must be able to document employment history through a minimum of five years employment in the music industry or six commercially released recordings or videos. MusiCares may grant short-term financial assistance for personal or addiction needs that have arisen due to unforeseen circumstances. Funding may also be awarded to help with needs such as rent, car payments, insurance premiums, utilities, medical/dental expenses, psychotherapy, addiction treatment, sober living, and other personal expenses.
For more information about the Humans of Hip Hop program, visit musicares.org.
Calling the rapid growth of artificial intelligence tools a “moment of revolution,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Wednesday that the government must act quickly to regulate companies that are developing it.
The New York Democrat said he is working on what he calls “exceedingly ambitious” bipartisan legislation to maximize the technology’s benefits and mitigate significant risks.
While Schumer did not lay out details of such legislation, he offered some key goals: protect U.S. elections from AI-generated misinformation or interference, shield U.S. workers and intellectual property, prevent exploitation by AI algorithms and create new guardrails to ward off bad actors.
AI legislation also should promote American innovation, Schumer said in a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.
“If applied correctly, AI promises to transform life on Earth for the better,” Schumer said. “It will reshape how we fight disease, tackle hunger, manage our lives, enrich our minds and ensure peace. But there are real dangers that present themselves as well: job displacement, misinformation, a new age of weaponry and the risk of being unable to manage this new technology altogether.”
Schumer’s declaration of urgency comes weeks after scientists and tech industry leaders, including high-level executives at Microsoft and Google, issued a warning about the perils that artificial intelligence could pose to humankind.
“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” their statement said.
Worries about artificial intelligence systems outsmarting humans and running wild have intensified in recent months with the rise of a new generation of highly capable AI chatbots such as ChatGPT. It has sent countries around the world scrambling to come up with regulations for the developing technology, with the European Union blazing the trail with its AI Act expected to be approved later this year.
On Tuesday, President Joe Biden convened a group of technology leaders in San Francisco to debate what he called the “risks and enormous promises” of artificial intelligence. In May, the administration brought together tech CEOs at the White House to discuss these issues, with the Democratic president telling them, “What you’re doing has enormous potential and enormous danger.”
“We’ll see more technological change in the next 10 years that we saw in the last 50 years,” Biden said.
White House chief of staff Jeff Zients’ office is developing a set of actions the federal government can take over the coming weeks regarding AI, according to the White House.
Schumer’s hands-on involvement in crafting AI legislation is unusual, as Senate leaders usually leave the task to individual senators or committees. But he has taken a personal interest in regulating the development of artificial intelligence, arguing that it is urgent as companies have already introduced human-like chatbots and other products that could alter life as we know it. He is working with another Democrat, Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, and Republican Sens. Mike Rounds of South Dakota and Todd Young of Indiana to speak with experts, educate colleagues and write the legislation.
It’s an unexpected role for Schumer, in particular, who famously carries a low-tech flip phone, and for the Senate as a whole, where the pace of legislation is often glacial.
Senators average around retirement age and aren’t known for their mastery of high-tech. They’ve been mocked in recent years for basic questions at hearings — asking Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg simple questions about how his platform works at a 2018 hearing on Russian interference, for example — and for a bipartisan reluctance to regulate the technology industry at all.
Schumer, along with several Republican colleagues, say the federal government can no longer afford to be laissez-faire with tech companies.
“If the government doesn’t step in, who will fill its place?” Schumer asked. “Individuals and the private sector can’t do the work of protecting our country. Even if many developers have good intentions, there will always be rogue actors, unscrupulous companies, and foreign adversaries that seek to harm us. And companies may not be willing to insert guardrails on their own, certainly if their competitors are not required to insert them as well.”
Attempting to regulate AI, Schumer said, “is unlike anything Congress has dealt with before.”
It is unclear if Schumer will be able to accomplish his goals. The effort is in its earliest stages, with the bipartisan working group just starting a series of briefings for all 100 senators to get them up to speed. In the House, legislation to regulate or oversee artificial intelligence has been more scattershot, and Republican leaders have not laid out any ambitious goals.
Schumer acknowledged that there are more questions than answers about the technology.
“It’s not like labor or healthcare or defense where Congress has a long history we can work off of,” Schumer said. “In fact, experts admit nobody is even sure which questions policymakers should be asking. In many ways, we’re starting from scratch.”
BMI’s recent rate court victory substantially increasing songwriters and publishers’ royalties for live events will be appealed, according to a notice filed by the North American Concert Promoters Association on Wednesday (June 21).
In May, Southern District of New York Judge Louis Stanton awarded the performance rights organization a 138% increase in rate to 0.5% of the event’s “revenue” with an expanded definition of the term to include tickets sold directly onto the secondary market, servicing fees received by the promoters and revenues from box suites and VIP packages. That 0.5% was up from what BMI said was a blended rate of 0.21%, based on 0.3% interim rate for venues that held less than 10,000 seats; and the interim 0.15% for venues that held more than 10,000 during the period of 2018-2022.
At that time, Stanton also set rates for the retroactive period of 2013-2017, with the previously used, less expansive “revenue” definition that only reflected earnings directly from the face value of primary market ticket sales. Those rates ranged from .08% of revenue for venues of up to 2,500 seats to 0.15% for venues with 10,000 or more seats.
On Tuesday, however, lawyers for the concert trade group filed a notice with the Southern District of intent to appeal that decision in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, according to the filing submitted by Weil, Gotshal & Manges, the law firm representing the concert promoters. The notice to appeal could mean that the group will appeal; or it could be a procedural move that keeps open the option to appeal. The concert trade group had 30 days to file the appeal notice from the last day in court— a few weeks back on a BMI motion regarding interest on whatever fees might be owed from the 2018-2022 term covered by the newly set rates for that period.
In a statement BMI said the concert industry has long fought against rate increases for songwriters.
“Given Live Nation, AEG and [the North American Concert Promoters Association’s] bizarre position throughout trial that concertgoers attend concerts for the experience of the staging, videos and light shows, as opposed to the actual songs and music being performed, their appeal was not a surprise to BMI,” BMI president and CEO Mike O’Neill said in a statement. “For decades, the live concert industry has fought to keep rates suppressed. And even now, when they are making more money than ever, in more ways than ever, they are determined to deny songwriters and composers the fair value of their work, despite the fact that without their contributions, a concert wouldn’t even be possible. BMI will continue to fight on behalf of our affiliates, the creators of the music that is the very backbone of the live concert industry, to prevent that outcome.”
The concert promoters did not. respond to a request for comment at time of publishing. In May, an AEG spokesperson said “AEG Presents and NACPA were defending performing artists, who bear the costs of BMI fees, in this litigation.” Concert promoters have long billed the performing artist for performance rights organizations’ royalty fees.
Sphere Entertainment Co., the company behind an expensive, state-of-the-art venue opening this fall in Las Vegas, is selling about a quarter of its stake in MSG Entertainment — 5.25 million shares of Class A common stock — in a secondary offering, the company announced Wednesday. That amount could grow by 787,500 shares if the offering’s […]
Independent Bay Area-based label, publisher and distributor EMPIRE has promoted industry veteran Tina Davis to the role of president, the company announced today (June 21). Davis, who most recently worked as EMPIRE’s senior vp of A&R, will continue to lead the company’s vast and varied A&R efforts while also getting involved in day-to-day operations and […]
Two major forces in talent representation are coming together via the merger of Agency For the Performing Arts (APA) and Artist Group International (AGI).
Announced today (June 21), this partnership launches the newly formed Independent Artist Group (IAG). The company will have offices in Los Angeles, New York, Nashville and Atlanta.
Current APA president Jim Osborne will lead IAG as CEO. Dennis Arfa, founder and CEO of AGI, will serve as chairman of IAG’s music division. AGI president Marsh Vlasic will serve as vice-chair of this music division, with Vlasic, Arfa, AGI COO Jarred Arfa, AGI president of touring Adam Kornfeld and the rest of the company’s senior agents and staff all joining IAG. As reported by Digital Music News, APA recently let go of several of its music agents.
The creation of IAG follows an agreement between APA and Yucaipa Entertainment LLC, a private investment firm owned by Ron Burkle that, as DMN reports, acquired AGI in January 2012 and made a major non-equity investment into APA in September 2012.
Arfa founded touring agency AGI 35 years ago. The company delivers IAG a client roster that includes Billy Joel, Metallica, Def Leppard, Rod Stewart, Motley Crue, Linkin Park, Jane’s Addiction, Darryl Hall & John Oates, Norah Jones, Neil Young, The Strokes, Smashing Pumpkins, Ghost, Elvis Costello, Cage The Elephant and Five Finger Death Punch.
APA touring music clients coming to IAG include 50 Cent, Mary J. Blige, Ms. Lauryn Hill, 2 Chainz, NE-YO, Key Glock, $not, Kamasi Washington, D’Angelo, blackbear, JAX, Cypress Hill, Bryce Vine, Jon Bellion and Robert Glasper.
The merger follows recent AGI and APA collaborations involving AGI clients Billy Joel, Daryl Hall, Perry Farrell, GHOST and Billy Corgan.
“Dennis Arfa and his exceptional colleagues at AGI are revered in the industry, having built a spectacular artist roster and a sterling reputation,” Osborne says in a statement. “The great news is we have already established a tremendous working relationship with them through shared representation on some of their most valued artists. This new partnership with AGI and our rebrand to Independent Artist Group (IAG)is another major step that elevates us within the agency landscape…and we are not done yet!”
“This was the natural next step in our evolution and made in the best interests of our valued artists,” adds Arfa. “We have admired how Jim Osborne and their colleagues have been market leaders in creating brand expanding, non-touring revenue opportunities for their clients and we are excited to build on that success with them and look forward to integrating under the Independent Artist Group (IAG) banner.”
The first time Ashley Elzinga, a 33-year-old DJ from Traverse City, Mich., heard her doppelgänger’s voice, she was not happy. Not because the sound of an artificial-intelligence imposter was so eerie. Not because AI technology portends robots might someday replace her. She didn’t like the way AI Ashley pronounced “news.” “I was like, ‘Why are they saying nooooose?’” recalls Elzinga in her flat Midwestern accent. “I was so embarrassed.”
It took a few tries for the engineers at Futuri Media, a Cleveland-based AI specialist, to find the right vocal balance between flat and sharp, deadpan and excited. “Now she’s ironing out…,” says Elzinga, a midday host for Portland Top 40 station Live 95.5, then corrects herself: “Now it’s ironing out…. She, or it, is starting to have more emotion and be a bit more accurate resemblance.”
AI Ashley, as Live 95.5 refers to the cloned voice on the air, made “her” debut on the air last Friday, delivering news, introducing songs and hyping station promotions in alternating speaking segments with the real Ashley Z, as Elzinga is known. Live 95.5 hasn’t received any listener complaints, says Dylan Salisbury, the station’s content director: “I don’t even know if they realize it yet.”
Alpha Media, owner of Live 95.5, started experimenting with AI voice technology last fall, according to Phil Becker, the company’s executive vp of content. When company execs learned Elzinga was about to take the full-time job in Traverse City, potentially reducing her hours on Live 95.5, they saw her as a “perfect storm” case study for an on-air test, he says: “The line in Moneyball is ‘the first guy through the wall always gets bloodied.’ That’s where we are right now. We’re OK playing some Moneyball-style radio, because it wins championships.”
Elzinga and Salisbury see AI as an efficiency tool, a way of stretching DJs’ hours so listeners can hear their voices even when they’re not physically present. For Elzinga, who multi-tasks her way through a full-time morning-show gig at her hometown Top 40 station WKHQ, then “tracks” her voice remotely for Live 95.5 and another station in Seattle every day, AI Ashley allows her to work even more. She owns the rights to her voice, approves every on-air AI usage and, Salisbury says, “We have increased her fee.”
“If she says stop, we have to stop,” Salisbury adds. “We’re trying to be respectful during the wild West of AI and go where we think the law is going to go.”
We made history as the world’s first radio station with an AI DJ! Our midday host Ashley has become AI Ashley! We can’t wait for you to meet Ashley, the world’s first artificially intelligent DJ. As to the intelligence of our other DJ’s…we’ll save that for another post 😉 pic.twitter.com/CtlMhYU0IO
— Live 95.5 (@live955) June 13, 2023
Of course, what is a neat, little, high-tech, mostly risk-free magic trick for Elzinga, Salisbury and Alpha Media, the Portland broadcast company that owns Live 95.5 and 205 other stations, is a terrifying prospect for much of the radio industry. When the station posted excitedly about AI Ashley last week, Twitter erupted: An NPR host tweeted an “everyone disliked that” meme, a freelance writer wanted to know, “Why would you participate in the very public elimination of your job?” and even J. Smith-Cameron, who plays Gerri on HBO’s Succession, wondered if Elzinga was “worried you’ll have ALL the days off now that they cloned you?”
For the past three decades, the broadcast industry has faced consolidation and extreme cost-cutting that has oftentimes meant layoffs of on-air talent. Over the past few years, DJs for local radio shows have been outsourced from other markets — much like Elzinga does in Portland and Seattle from her home in Michigan.
“They are eagerly stripping away, as fast as they can, the thing that makes radio unique,” says former radio host and station manager Michele Coppola, who’s now a Portland copywriter.
“My fear is there will be some owners that will [say], ‘This is an efficiency, this is a way for us to save money — that will further deplete the body of truly talented radio people,” adds Steve Reynolds, a Raleigh, N.C., talent coach for radio personalities.
“Futuri claims it’s going to be a tool, just like any other tool, to make a job easier,” says Lance Venta, owner and publisher of Radio Insight. “Voice-tracking, when used properly, is a tool. When it’s used to have a talent voice 35 stations to save money, it’s no longer a tool — it’s a weapon.”
Radio Waits
So far, the rest of the U.S. broadcast industry has yet to plunge into on-air AI voices as aggressively as Live 95.5. But radio stations around the world, and their digital competitors, have tinkered with the technology – and have suggested they may expand. In April, a Swiss station used AI to clone five human presenters on the air; comedian Drew Carey used an AI-generated approximation of his voice on his SiriusXM show in March; and in February, Spotify launched a (voiceless) AI-curated, personalized broadcast called “DJ.” During an April conference call about a soft advertising market, Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of top broadcaster iHeartMedia, told investors after a 3.8% drop in revenue, “We and every other company are looking at how to use AI. I think AI can fundamentally change the cost structure of the company.”
At Audacy, the second-biggest broadcaster, execs have done a “fair bit of experimentation” with AI tools, from voice applications to ChatGPT-style generative text that helps produce drafts of advertising scripts, according to Jeff Sottolano, executive vp and head of programming. But he’s not convinced an AI Ashley-style experiment has “value it creates for the consumer,” because Alpha Media had to expend “up-front investment” on training, reviewing, post-production and editing — all of which, at least for now, contradict the company’s efforts for greater efficiency and cost-cutting.
“All that said, I expect it will continue to get better and easier and faster,” he says. “We don’t look at this as something that’s finished, but something that’s going to continue to evolve. Just because we haven’t done it today doesn’t mean we might not do it tomorrow.”
The human Ashley is happy with the AI arrangement as long as she and her robot counterpart are clearly identified as “Ashley Z” or “AI Ashley” every time she — or it — appears on the air. “You just need to make sure integrity comes first,” she says.
Chinese pop star G.E.M. is looking to grow her Latin American fan base — and break the mold for Chinese artists — by putting out a full-length Spanish version of her latest album, Revelation. And the idea to do it didn’t come from an executive or carefully plotted strategy by her new label, Warner Music China, which released the original Mandarin version in September.
“It wasn’t necessarily something we sat down with her and sort of guided her towards,” Simon Robson, Warner Music Group’s president, international, for recorded music, tells Billboard. “It was more that she wanted to do this, and we wanted to support her.”
Robson says G.E.M.’s Revelación, which Warner Music plans to release on July 10, will be the first Spanish-language album by a major Chinese music artist at any label (as far as WMG is aware). The experiment, the executive says, is “quite indicative of what’s happening with music at the moment and just how impactful Spanish music is becoming.”
Like her Chinese original, the Spanish album — which G.E.M. says she wrote on her own, after essentially teaching herself the language — will feature 14 songs. After debuting in 2008 with her self-titled EP G.E.M, the Shanghai born, Hong Kong-raised singer, whose real name is Gloria Tang Sze-wing (G.E.M. stands for Get Everybody Moving), became one of the top-selling female artists in Asia. Often dubbed China’s Taylor Swift, she holds the record for most-viewed music video on YouTube among all Chinese artists with “Light Years Away” (267 million views), the Chinese theme song for the sci-fi movie “Passengers.”
“It has been an incredible journey working on this project as I do not speak Spanish, but I was determined to fulfill a prophecy that was made to me 10 years ago that one day I would sing in the language,” G.E.M. says in a press release announcing Revelación. “After receiving support from South America for my Chinese album Revelation, I taught myself Spanish and wrote the entire album by myself.”
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A devout Christian, the singer rose to fame in 2014 after appearing on the TV competition show, “I Am A Singer 2.” Her second-place finish boosted her popularity in mainland China. She also received a nomination for an MTV Europe Music Award for Best Mainland China & Hong Kong Act and in 2016 Forbes named her to its 30 Under 30, the only Asian artist featured on the list. She composes songs in Cantonese and Mandarin, and also speaks English.
G.E.M. signed with Warner Music China last July, after a sticky separation from her Hong Kong-based label, Hummingbird Music, which sued her in 2019 to enforce their 2014 contract, which the label said was valid until 2022. Hummingbird was seeking HK $120 million ($15.3 million) in damages, according to Chinese media reports. G.E.M. filed a countersuit for unspecified damages, claiming Hummingbird had failed to fulfill its contractual duties. Both parties were seeking exclusive rights to her copyrighted works, including her stage name. (It is unclear if the suits have been resolved. A WMG spokesperson says he does not have any information about the situation.)
Revelation, G.E.M.’s seventh studio album, is named after the New Testaments’s Book of Revelation. In the wake of the pandemic last summer, the artist found herself prone to melancholy and other negative emotions, and developed the habit of praying, she told Billboard China. Her album was a “direct dialogue between me and heaven,” she said. “I write letters to heaven, and they write back. This is what gradually gave shape to the concept behind Revelation.”
Warner Music released two songs from the album every week — accompanied by videos — for seven weeks leading up to Sept. 22. G.E.M. began noticing that user-generated content and remakes of the song in local languages by Spanish-speaking content creators were appearing on social media platforms, particularly in South America. “Whether it was due to the album’s themes or its vibes, it was evident that it was connecting strongly with Spanish speakers globally,” a WMG spokesperson says. So, she decided to learn Spanish and convert the songs into Spanish “to better share her message and music with this fanbase.”
While the plan is still in its preliminary stages, G.E.M. is planning to perform the Spanish version of the song throughout the next year, with live performances in Latin America, the spokesperson tells Billboard.
Robson says WMG currently has no plans to release any other Chinese artists’ albums in Spanish. “But I think that obviously there is an element of seeing how successful this album is,” he says. “It’s something I wouldn’t be surprised if we see more of just because Spanish music, in the broadest terms, is becoming increasingly influential around the world.”
The Warner Music executive acknowledged that there is an element of risk for G.E.M. and the label with the Spanish project but declined to define what success would look like for the artist. “It’s more about building her fan base in Latin America,” he says. “It’s step by step, really.”
WMG continues to lean into Latin music, at a time when the genre is exploding globally. Between 2020 and 2022, Latin music grew 55.29% in album consumption in the U.S., according to Luminate, more than double the overall industry’s 21.61%.
Robson points to recent tracks like Peso Pluma’s remix of Yng Lvcas’ “La Bebe,” which is holding at No. 16 on the Billboard Hot 100 this week, and the upcoming album or EP from Mexican rapper Natanael Cano, which is scheduled to drop at the end of June, as signs of Warner Music’s efforts on the Latin front. (Yng Lvcas performed last week at a songwriting camp in Madrid organized by Warner Music Spain and Warner Chappell Music Spain, part of an effort by the company, Robson says, to host more joint writing camps for both publishing and recorded music.)
Two years ago, the label named former Universal Music Group executive Alejandro Duque as president of Warner Music Latin America. Duque helped oversee the release of Anitta’s Versions of Me, whose signature single, “Envolver,” reached No. 2 on the Billboard Global 200. But now the Brazilian pop star is gone, after separating with the label in April and signing with UMG’s Republic Records, a definite blow to WMG.
“We’re already starting to build up our roster [in Brazil],” Robson says, noting the recent signing of Brazilian urban funk artist Kayblack.
More broadly, “when you look back two years prior, although we were sort of active, [it is] nothing like to the degree we are now, and are not having the success we have,” Robson says. “Alejandro is an incredibly strong executive and we’re trying to support him as much as possible.”