Business
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In the desert east of Los Angeles, the new Acrisure Arena has defied critics and proved to be an oasis of entertainment in Coachella Valley.
Since opening in December, Oak View Group’s new 11,000-capacity venue in Palm Springs, Calif., has grossed $17 million in ticket sales from 10 reported shows, according to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore, earning itself the title of North America’s third-highest-grossing arena under 15,000 seats, according to Billboard Boxscore’s 2023 midyear report. The arena actually had 17 shows during this period, and had it reported them all, its ranking on the Boxscore chart would have been even higher.
It’s an impressive launch, especially considering criticism it received that an arena of its size could not survive in the Coachella Valley, the geographic region of 370,000 residents anchored by Palm Springs in the north and Indio to the south. Not only was the valley already teeming with competitive options, from tribal casino showrooms to festivals like Coachella and Stagecoach, but Southern California was already home to three big-name arenas and an ultra-competitive concert market with little incentive for acts or tourists to make the two-hour drive down I-10 from Los Angeles for a show.
Midyear Boxscore charts are based on figures reported to Billboard Boxscore. Eligible shows played between Nov. 1, 2022 and April 30, 2023.
First is Oak View Group’s relationship with OVG partner Irving Azoff, the super-manager whose ability to bring top-tier talent to the facility netted two shows by Harry Styles, a comedy double-header featuring Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock, two shows from the Eagles and concerts by Taylor Dayne, Lizzo, Journey, Shania Twain and Jimmy Buffett. Adding American Hockey League home games from the Coachella Valley Firebirds, the Acrisure Arena has welcomed more than 430,000 people through its doors for 72 ticketed events since opening.
While Acrisure Arena is an open building that can work with any promoter, it enjoys a special relationship with Live Nation, which plans to continue to bring top contemporary tours to the venue, says GM John Bolton, who previously worked at SMG and managed the BOK Center in Tulsa, Okla. In the next six months, Live Nation is bringing some of its strongest tours to Palm Springs, including Peso Pluma (on July 8), Paramore (July 15), Dierks Bentley (Aug. 19), ODEZA (Sept. 20), Sting (Oct. 5), KISS (Nov. 1), Stevie Nicks (Dec. 5) and Madonna (Jan. 11, 2024).
“Part of our success booking artists is that many artists are playing Acrisure Arena on a separate leg of their tour months apart from their L.A. dates,” says Bolton. “There certainly are times when artists will play us after stopping in Orange County or Los Angeles, but in many instances, we’re booking artists as they come across the Southwest and then head into Las Vegas or the Central Valley, making the building very routable.”
Another factor in Acrisure Arena’s success is the building’s innovative, fast-paced, high-touch design. Most seats in the building are in the arena’s lower bowl, which has wide concourses that make moving around the building simple and dramatically decrease time spent waiting in line, thanks to innovative grab-and-go food catering stations. The dozen-plus food concepts inside the arena, as well as those located in an outside common space, feature only a few popular precooked items that reduce prep and wait time.
And while the Coachella Valley population is fairly small, Palm Spring’s year-round marketing efforts attract 14 million visitors to the region each year, including 3 million annually to Palm Springs, according to the city’s conference and visitor’s bureau, accounting for $7.1 billion in spending.
Those visitors include 450,000 Canadians who spend their winters in the area, many of whom support the arena’s Seattle Kraken minor league team, the Coachella Valley Firebirds. In the team’s first season, it reached the league championships and is currently facing the Hershey Bears in the finals. With a strong year-end calendar, Acrisure Arena will almost certainly land on the Boxscore year-end list and continue to chart new routes in and out of region, changing the way artists tour through the Southwest and generate revenue in the Golden State.
UnitedMasters is partnering with Nigerian producer Sarz on his 1789 imprint that aims to discover, develop and empower the next generation of African artists and producers, Billboard can exclusively announce today (June 13).
Sarz (real name Osabuhoien Osaretin) has produced records for some of the biggest African artists, such as Wizkid, Burna Boy and Tiwa Savage, and is responsible for spreading the Afrobeats sound to the U.S. and U.K. charts with hits like Drake, Wizkid and Kyla‘s “One Dance,” which became the most-streamed song on Spotify in 2016, and Lojay and Sarz’s “Monalisa,” which received a Chris Brown remix and has amassed 297.3 million official global on-demand streams through June 8, according to Luminate. He also won the producer of the year award at The Headies last year.
LV N ATTN, the parent project of “Monalisa” that Lojay and Sarz released in 2021, as well as WurlD and Sarz’s I LOVE GIRLS WITH TROUBL from 2019 fall under Sarz’s 1789 imprint, which he established in 2018 to discover and develop African artists and producers. (It symbolizes his birthdate: March 17, 1989.) Now, UnitedMasters is coming in to amplify the work Sarz has already been doing by providing its cutting-edge label services and digital distribution technology.
“Sarz, for the last five years, has been developing some of the biggest producers on the continent that have gone on to produce for the Wizkid’s, the Burna’s, the Tems’, the Lojay’s, etc. We wanted to be able to say, ‘How do we add value to you guys and help give you resources so that way you can ultimately develop the talent on the ground?’” David Melhado, vp of music at UnitedMasters, tells Billboard. “You can see why he’s able to spot talent when you hang out with him. His energy is infectious. He’s just doing what he wishes he had. There’s something so powerful in that where he’s like, ‘I’m paying it forward to these producers.’ He’s really creating a movement.”
“I met with David and Julian McLean [director of producer relations/editorial at UnitedMasters], and it just felt right. I could tell we shared the same vision and we’re very passionate about emerging talent,” Sarz tells Billboard, adding that he hopes his new strategic partnership with UnitedMasters will bring “more opportunities to the continent, bring more opportunities to Afrobeats artists and producers globally. I hope to be the bridge between an emerging artist and everything they desire globally.”
Those signed to 1789 will be able to access “everything that you would get from a major label, from marketing to digital marketing to playlist pitching and, when the time is right, we can scale up and do radio campaigns,” says Melhado. He adds that the partnership will also provide artists and producers “transparency around the money they make” through UnitedMasters’ mobile app, where “they’ll be able to see their streams in real time,” as well as “brand partnerships with some of the world’s biggest brands [NBA, ESPN, WhatsApp], and they all have ambitions to be a part of the global music conversation.”
Adds Steve Stoute, UnitedMasters CEO/founder, in a statement: “We are extremely excited to be in partnership with Sarz and 1789. Sarz, a true hitmaker, has a keen ear for talent and has proven that he cares deeply about the artist development process. Our shared mission in supporting artists from Africa through education and resources will empower them to unlock their true potential.”
United Masters began discussing how to enter the African music conversation two years ago, when Stoute sent Melhado Billboard‘s 2021 feature on Wizkid following the global success of his Tems-assisted smash “Essence.” Melhado told Stoute, “‘When it’s time for us to go expand to Africa, I got a big network there.’ He’s like, ‘Yeah, you should go in December,’” Melhado recalls with a chuckle. Melhado and McLean ended up traveling to Nigeria in December 2021, where the two were hosted by Melhado’s good friend Bizzle Osikoya, a Nigerian A&R expert and music executive who founded the talent management and music services company, The Plug. “We went out to really see what the culture was, the music, the food, the fashion, the art, and really engulf ourselves in the community there but really try to figure out, ‘Where can we add value?’ We didn’t want to just go to Africa and throw money at it. We wanted to not be opportunistic from a perspective of, ‘Let’s just go sign some artists,’ but we wanted to be able to make sure that we were going to be really impactful and additive to the music scene there. We wanted to be able to find the right partner, and that’s ultimately what we did with Sarz.”
In 2015, the 34-year-old producer founded The Sarz Academy, a non-profit organization dedicated to cultivating African artists and producers and helping them launch successful careers. “I’ve always been passionate about helping people’s journeys, even unofficially I’ve mentored so many producers in the Afrobeats space before I thought about starting an academy,” he says. “It took me at least 10 years just grinding in the industry to find my position. And I thought, if I can mentor these guys, they could probably do it in two years or three years.” The academy’s esteemed alumni includes Kel-P, Legendury Beatz, P.Priime and Tempoe, who have gone on to work with Wizkid, Burna Boy, Rema, Fireboy DML, CKay, Angélique Kidjo and Teni, among many others. “I plan to break out of Africa. I am doing it for global Afro music,” P.Priime, a 2018 graduate of The Sarz Academy, told Billboard in 2020. Two years later, he was a part of the #YouTubeBlack Voices Songwriter & Producer Class of 2022 and earned credits on Wizkid’s Made in Lagos deluxe album that went on to receive a 2022 Grammy nomination for best global music album. Another 2018 graduate, Tempoe, went onto produce CKay’s “Love Nwantiti (Ah Ah Ah)” the following year, which has since garnered 2.46 billion official global on-demand streams and spent two weeks at No. 1 on Rhythmic Airplay.
After meeting Sarz through their mutual friend Osikoya in March 2022, Melhado and McLean traveled back to Nigeria this past October to witness The Sarz Academy firsthand. “He had producers and artists from all over Nigeria. There were artists that flew in from London, from Costa Rica, to Nigerians who came from Canada to be a part of this experience. They all lived in a house. And they just created some of the most amazing music that I’ve heard in a long time. The collaboration, the desire to get on, the hunger — all these kids had that. It was inspiring overall,” says Melhado. “At that moment, I knew that we had the right partnership and the right partner.”
Sarz says the music coming out of last year’s Sarz Academy will be compiled into an album that will be released next month. Three singles — “Jam One Kele” by Sarz, Millymay_pod, Gimba and Fxrtune; “Good to Me” by Sarz, Perfext and Gimba; and “Body Wicked” by Sarz and Millymay_pod — have already been packaged as The Sarz Academy Presents: Memories That Last Forever 2 and released under 1789 and UnitedMasters on DSPs last week. One of the artists, Gimba, was also recently featured on the single “Blessings” with DJ Tunez and Wizkid.
UnitedMasters’ partnership with Sarz includes supporting his endeavors at The Sarz Academy, as education is one of the company’s core missions, according to Melhado. “We didn’t just come into the business trying to tell everybody they needed to be independent. We had to walk them through what it is like to be independent, and for artists on the [African] continent, we want to be able to help artists with those tools and educate them,” he explains. “Our ambition is to be able to support these artists, see them at the beginning of their career and ultimately take them to global superstardom.”
The concert travel business, once a reliably modest slice of the estimated global $25 billion concert industry, is being primed as a potential growth category as promoters of all sizes look for new revenue sources to offset rising costs.
As the pandemic has receded and the demand for live entertainment has blossomed, inflation and scarcity have driven up expenses across the board, and the resulting rise in ticket prices is unlikely to cool soon — a recent report from the American Bus Association cited a driver shortage as part of the reason for higher costs and concluded another 7,300 drivers would need to be added to the 28,000 tour bus drivers now working just to meet current demand.
With already tight margins squeezed further, concert promoters are looking for new revenue streams. “Many are seeing the economic impact their events create within their community and realize they’re not participating in that upside, despite taking on the bulk of the risk with their event,” explains Daren Libonati, co-founder of Las Vegas-based Fuse Technologies, which partners with concert promoters to source and sell accommodations and VIP upgrades for their events.
Libonati, a longtime Vegas event veteran who has served as an executive at both MGM and the University of Nevada Las Vegas, wants to help music event organizers unlock “travel per caps,” a twist on the phrase “per caps,” the concert business measurement of the spending on food and beverage per patron at an event. Tapping into travel spending could unlock major value. A March study commissioned by Live Nation found that its marquee Lollapalooza festival generated $270 million for Chicago last year, with fans spending $48.5 million on hotels and over $80 million on food and beverage.
Libonati is just one of a half dozen entrepreneurs who believe that event producers who draw fans from around the world to festivals and concerts should share in the hotel and hospitality revenue those fans generate. These entrepreneurs include Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino, whose company announced a new travel and hospitality firm, Vibee, in April, which is producing a premium cruise based on Electric Daisy Carnival called EDSea and was behind a Resorts World hotel takeover during the flagship dance festival in May. They’re bringing new ideas to market just as two of the biggest players in concert travel have either gone bankrupt or pulled out of the music travel industry.
Pre-pandemic, three types of businesses were involved in concert travel: destination festivals, mostly in Mexico and the Caribbean; high-end packaging as an add-on for domestic events; and music-driven cruises.
Demand for music-driven cruises has been stronger than prior to the pandemic, but those packages are difficult for promoters to make substantial margins on because of the high fixed costs of chartering vessels and hiring crews, as well as the pressure to keep prices low against competing cruise lines.Hotels have lower fixed costs than cruises and come with different expectations: Customers are used to paying a premium for hotel inventory during periods of high demand. That was what helped drive the success of two of the biggest concert travel companies during much of the last two decades, CID Entertainment and Pollen.
CID focused on creating destination events like Luke Bryan’s long-running Crash My Playa at Riviera Cancun in Mexico, as well as travel packages similar to those it put together for the Grateful Dead’s 2015 Fare Thee Well concerts in San Francisco and Chicago. Pollen helped expand hospitality and VIP offerings for events like Bestival, a four-day event held in the south of England.
Pollen, founded in 2014, raised over $200 million from venture capital investors. But the pandemic stalled business, and a series of last-minute cancellations — including a January 2022 J Balvin event in Cancun — cost the company dearly. By October 2022 Pollen had collapsed, owing nearly $100 million in debt.CID Entertainment, launched by Dan Berkowitz in 2007 and purchased by a private equity group in 2016, was merged with a number of sports travel companies in 2020 and eventually sold to entertainment conglomerate Endeavor, where it operates as OnLocation and focuses mainly on big-ticket sporting events like the Super Bowl.
With CID Entertainment and Pollen out, companies like 100x, which Berkowitz launched earlier this year, and Fuse see a gap in the market they can fill. Fuse has been racing to expand its white-label software systems, which make it easy to tack partner hotels and add-on VIP events to a festival’s website for sale, divide revenue and handle credential management and verification through an integration with the ticketing company. The revenue lift from packaging and bundling these items with ticket purchases would then be split with promoters.
Live Nation has made the fastest inroads into the space with Vibee. It launched as both a facilitator of high-end destination events, like the Nov. 9-12 Chasing Sunsets festival in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, headlined by Tiësto with prices (tickets and hotel included) ranging from $999 to $3,259, and an entrant into the hospitality business for Live Nation’s traditional headline concerts, offering hotel packages paired with VIP upgrades for U2’s U2:UV Achtung Baby shows at the MSG Sphere in Las Vegas. Those packages have already yielded a $20 million boost to revenue from ticket sales for Live Nation and its partners at the Sphere and the Venetian hotel, Rapino explained during a recent investor earnings call.“Vibee is a product where we looked at OnLocation and CID and others that were doing it,” Rapino said. “The challenge these other companies have is the expensive part: the rights. We don’t have that problem.” He added, “These are our rights. We can do it in-house. We don’t have to outsource it and split any of that upside with anyone else but our own businesses.”
That leaves the rest of the sector competing for non-Live Nation events, which by some estimates equals 40% to 50% of the business and billions of dollars in potential revenue. Berkowitz has not yet revealed his plans or business strategy for 100x, while Libonati says that for now, Fuse plans to focus on creating add-on packages for existing events.
Can either firm make enough money to survive without also operating as an event promoter? It will take the right combination of scale and volume, but given the rebound in travel spending across the board — and engagement of dedicated fans — it seems possible.
Danny Robson, co-founder of management firm Leisurely, believes the answer is yes if the artist controls the event. Robson’s client Rüfüs Du Sol sold an impressive 8,000 tickets for the Australian EDM trio’s Sundream festival — a four-day event in San Jose Del Cabo, Mexico, where prices ranged from $700 to $2,000 per person — without a promoter or any outside help.
“The same changes in the business that make destination events lucrative for promoters,” Robson says, “also make these types of events profitable for artists interested in cutting out the middleman.”
ASCAP has announced a number of new initiatives designed to help its members protect their copyrights and plan for the future of artificial intelligence.
The events start later this month, on June 21, with The ASCAP Experience, the performing rights’ organization’s annual event. As part of its full day of programming, ASCAP will include the panel Intelligently Navigating Artificial Intelligence, created to act as a state of the union for music AI, covering both how the technology could change music creation and consumption and how ASCAP is working to address these changes. Panelists include Lucas Cantor (composer, ASCAP Member), Rachel Lyske (CEO of DAACI) and Nicholas Lehman (Chief strategy and digital officer, ASCAP).
On July 19, ASCAP will host a half-day AI Symposium in New York City to dive even deeper into challenges and opportunities. Details of the event’s speakers will be announced soon.
In addition to the summer’s educational initiatives, the PRO is continuing ASCAP Lab Challenge, a fund started in 2019 to power innovation in music. In the past, ASCAP Lab has run an accelerator program in partnership with the NYC Media Lab, led by the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, exploring new technologies such as the metaverse, augmented reality, spatial audio and computer vision and helping to incubate more than a dozen startups and university research projects.
This year, ASCAP Lab Challenge is focusing on AI, funding five startups that are looking to change the music industry in a positive way. As part of its investment, ASCAP will work alongside these recipients for 12 weeks to guide the development of their products and ensure they can benefit music creators.
Included in the 2023 Lab Challenge class is DAACI, a generative AI model that composes and arranges scores, particularly for video games and virtual reality; Infinite Album, a generative AI company that creates copyright-safe video game music that can react to game play in real time; Overture Games, a company which creates video games designed to encourage musicians to practice and avoid burnout using AI-powered pitch detection and visual feedback, gamifying the music education experience; Samplifi, which isolates auditory information for the benefit of hearing-impaired musicians; and Sounds.Studio, created by Never Before Heard Sounds, a browser-based music production platform that uses AI to help musicians create faster with tools like stem splitting, vocal conversion, timbre transfer and more.
Warner Music Group is getting its game on.
The major music company joins forces with Hello There Games, the Sweden-based game studio for the release of Invector: Rhythm Galaxy, a rhythm game soundtracked by 40 chart hits from the likes of PinkPantheress, Duran Duran, Charli XCX and others.
Slated to drop July 14, initially on PC, Invector: Rhythm Galaxy marks WMG’s first leap into games publishing.
This venture into gaming “showcases our commitment to reimagining the boundaries of music and how it is defined by artists and fans alike within our evolving ecosystem,” comments Oana Ruxandra, WMG’s chief digital officer and executive VP, business development.
Invector: Rhythm Galaxy is said to intertwine “the power of music with the interaction of gaming to build active, immersive experiences for fans and new revenue streams for WMG’s artists.”
Gaming and music are generations-long buddies. During the presentation of the IFPI’s Global Music Report in March of this year, WMG’s Simon Robson, president, international, Recorded Music, noted the industry has “done a great job looking at opportunities in fitness and the games sectors.”
WMG has worked with Peloton and invested in Web3 companies, including Roblox, and sees the alliance with Hello There Games as one that also plays in the music discovery space for gamers.
Hello There Games co-developed the Avicii Invector with the late Swedish EDM star, a game that features the tunes “What Would I Change It To,” “Pure Grinding,” “You Be Love” and more, and was originally built for the PS4.
Adds Oskar Eklund, CEO and founder of Hello There Games, “our unwavering passion for music and gaming fuels our drive. Many of our team members are talented musicians themselves.” Eklund continues, “We are so excited to bring this game to the next level with Warner Music Group and their amazing artists. We can’t wait for everyone to experience the magic of Invector: Rhythm Galaxy firsthand.”
Watch the trailer below.
A man who unsuccessfully sued Cardi B after his giant back tattoo was unwittingly photoshopped into one of her album covers has agreed to repay a whopping $350,000 in legal bills that the superstar spent defeating his lawsuit.
Months after a jury rejected Kevin Brophy’s case against Cardi, his lawyers told a federal judge Monday (June 12) that he would not only reimburse the money that the rapper had dropped on her attorneys but also voluntarily end his efforts to revive the case and waive any chance at a future appeal.
Why would he do all that? Possibly because Cardi’s lawyers were gearing up to formally demand that he repay her attorneys’ fees — a prize to which she was potentially eligible after beating his accusations in court. Under that process, Cardi and her pricey team of lawyers could have won even more than $350,000.
“The parties now have reached an agreement avoiding the necessity of defendants’ motion for attorney’s fees and application to tax costs,” the two sides wrote in Monday’s filing, hinting at the looming threat of such a fee motion from Cardi’s team.
Attorneys for both sides declined to comment on the agreement when reached by Billboard on Monday.
Brophy sued Cardi in 2017 for millions in damages, claiming he was “devastated, humiliated and embarrassed” by the cover of Cardi’s Gangsta Bitch. The image featured the then-rising star taking a swig of a large beer, staring directly into the camera with her legs spread wide and holding a man’s head while he appears to perform oral sex on her.
The actual man in the image was a model who had consented to the shoot, but a giant tattoo on the man’s back belonged to Brophy. Unbeknownst to Cardi, a freelance graphic designer had typed “back tattoos” into Google Image Search, found one that fit (Brophy’s) and superimposed it onto the model’s body.
Brophy’s lawsuit claimed Cardi and others involved in the cover had used his likeness without his consent and also violated his right to privacy by casting him in a “false light” that was “highly offensive.” Cardi’s lawyers called the allegations “sheer fantasy” and “vastly overblown,” arguing that nobody would have recognized a relatively unknown man based merely on his back.
During a four-day trial in October, Cardi took the stand to defend herself. When examined by Brophy’s attorney, A. Barry Cappello, things repeatedly got heated between the two — so much so that at one point the judge cleared the jury, told Cappello he had “totally crossed the line” and threatened to declare a mistrial.
At the end of the trial, the jury agreed with the superstar’s defenses, clearing Cardi of all Brophy’s claims. Brophy later asked the judge to throw out the verdict for a lack of evidence, but the judge denied that motion in December. Brophy then filed a motion in January seeking a new trial, arguing that the star “engaged in theatrics” on the witness stand and deprived him of a fair trial.
Under Monday’s agreement, that motion will be withdrawn, and Brophy will “waive and irrevocably relinquish” any chance to challenge the verdict on appeal. In return, Cardi’s attorneys will similarly waive their right to file a motion formally seeking an award of attorneys’ fees.
In the two years that Cat Kreidich has served as president of Warner Music Group’s distribution company ADA Worldwide, she has focused on one overarching theme: reinvention.
The music industry veteran has spent the majority of her career in the distribution business. She first worked first at Caroline, then ADA, then at Sony’s The Orchard — where she spent eight years — before shifting to Sony’s catalog division for a little over a year in 2019. But when she returned to ADA as executive vp at the end of 2020, “It was invigorating,” she says, sitting in her office at WMG’s Manhattan headquarters. “I hadn’t expected to come back to ADA, but it makes perfect sense because the culture at Warner is very entrepreneurial. So coming back, to me, was an opportunity to make an impact on a company that I truly cared about.”
At the time, the distribution space was exploding. Consolidation, streaming and new players coming into the space were upending the status quo, and the business was moving faster, and with more volume, than ever before. ADA had a few specific challenges facing it in this new environment: a third-party company that handled its tech; a blurred line between ADA and Warner Music Group that made it sometimes unclear how services were handled; and the implosion of Direct Shot Distributing after Warner and ADA had shifted its physical business to the company — leading to supply-chain issues for vinyl and CDs even before the pandemic made that a larger issue.
Kreidich had spent eight years at The Orchard building its commercial insights team, integrating tech into how the company was expanding and parsing data to help optimize commercialization for the company’s label partners. So when it came to the issues that faced ADA upon her return, she had experience in addressing the problems. But just a few months into her tenure came another change: ADA’s then-president, Eliah Seton — whom she calls “a great advocate for me” — announced he was leaving the company. Just five months after coming in as executive vp, Kreidich became president of ADA.
Following that, Kreidich embarked on an overhaul of the company’s executive structure, bringing in a team she calls “the Avengers of Distribution.” That included Samantha Moore, who heads business operations and development; Adriana Sein, who oversees artist and market development globally; Cathy Bauer, who runs physical sales and marketing; Andrea Slobodien, ADA’s first-ever head of product and integration; and MaryLynne Drexler, who oversees business and legal affairs, among several others.
“We were really specific on how we were thinking about the kind of expertise that we wanted to be in the building,” Kreidich says. “And a lot of us are here because we believe that we can do it better [than the competition], and that opportunity to have that voice feels good.”
Now, after two years of reinvention, Kreidich has the team in place to continue to fine-tune ADA as a leader in the global distribution business, which is expanding by the day. The company has launched offices in Canada, Latin America, Japan and across Europe, among others, while WMG has acquired distributors Qanawat in the Middle East and Africori in Africa to further expand their distribution offerings there, too. “At Warner, we want to have an environment where creatives, entrepreneurs and artists at every stage in their career can thrive — where there are as many different avenues as possible into the WMG ecosystem,” says Warner Recorded Music CEO Max Lousada. “What Cat and the team at ADA are doing is an essential part of our ability to partner with the full spectrum of talent. She’s relentless in her passion for the indie community and her mission to empower ADA-supported artists and labels.”
Now, as ADA celebrates its 30th anniversary this month, Kreidich speaks to Billboard about the company’s reinvention over the past two years, what a distributor can offer in the current music business and ADA’s new brand. “I’m really proud of that and the work we’ve done because I think it really nails who we are now,” she says. “I believe in the culture and I have a real soft spot in my heart for it. So I’m happy to celebrate it.”
You’ve worked at Universal, EMI, Warner, Sony and now Warner again. What were some of the things you picked up at each of those places along the way?
I started my career at Universal Motown and then went on to Virgin, and the reason why I ended up at Caroline was because of the passion for the music and the labels. My passion was always to work with the music that I loved and identified with, so I think a big part of being at each of those places was really understanding culture and the culture of representing music from a lot of different backgrounds and styles. And I think the meaning that that has — when people come together to unite for independence and music that they actually care about in a very personal way, not just a professional way — is one of the biggest things I learned and I wanted to be around and create wherever I continued my career.
I certainly thought many times of diversifying, but I always came back to the landscape of independent labels and artists. And I think that landscape has changed dramatically over the years, and the needs have changed. So the other thing I learned was really that value for a client or a label or a partner doesn’t always look the same in distribution, and many times labels are so busy running their businesses that they don’t necessarily have time to stop and ask you what your value is. So it’s being able to creatively come up with different ways to look at the business, or different ways that a label might have not considered.
You came back to ADA at the end of 2020. What were those first couple months back like?
The first thing I did was come in and interview over 40 people in the organization, mostly at ADA, some at Warner, and asked them the same 10 questions. They were generally, “How do you feel about the business? What would labels say about us?” And then I gathered all of those answers and created a presentation for Eliah. Because I knew how I felt about the business, but I also really wanted to understand how people felt about the business, because I didn’t want to make assumptions. And I think that was a really powerful thing to do, and I think it also helped me to come back to ADA authentically and genuinely; I wasn’t just trying to come here and make it The Orchard, I was truly wanting to listen and hear what were the things that we needed to solve for.
What were the conclusions from that?
There was obviously a need for process and empowerment by technology. Our technology was a third-party company that was facilitating the relationship within Warner, so that sometimes [we] just didn’t talk to each other, as third-party companies do. There was also a need for us to differentiate what it is what we do as ADA and what it is Warner does. Having run commercial teams for most of my career, it was always something that people would talk about — “ADA uses Warner to pitch” — and that wasn’t necessarily the truth. But there were things that we needed to do better together and things that we needed to do on our own, and during that time what came out of those talks was, “We need to figure out where the lines were, and then reorient those lines to make the relationships better and more clear.”
You’ve spoken a few times that once you took over as president, you embarked on a “reinvention” of ADA. Why did it need one and how did you implement it?
Warner had not made the same tech investments or acquisitions that the other majors did. They had been growing their [distribution] business as it was in this very shared service mentality that had worked for a while, and I think there was an opportunity clearly to take advantage of more and more music in small corners of the world as more and more DSPs were saturating markets with subscriptions. So it was really about three things for me. It was about being an indie advocate — that education, that understanding and helping to define what it is we do and what it is Warner does with us. It was also bringing in a skill set that was different from what I had seen at other distribution companies.
And one thing I noticed throughout my career was always, labels, managers and artists want to have expertise, and more and more artists want to own their own rights and be in control of their businesses. And that expertise to understand how other people are doing things, especially around audience development, actionable commercial insights, whether it’s growing an artist or helping with travel or breaking an artist in other countries and bringing them back — that skillset of marketing and artist development doesn’t necessarily exist in full force at tech companies, because it’s just the nature of the game.
So we were really specific about the kinds of talent we were bringing in that was going to differentiate us as we built our tech. And that was really the third thing that was most important, not only for just the idea of getting a piece of content from here to the DSP and back but also just tools and tech that would help us communicate over time zones better, help us to ignite priorities without having to email something. So I think that advocacy and audience development and marketing from a global perspective and the tech piece were the three big things we were changing.
You had gone to work at Sony’s catalog division — then a pandemic happened, and you then came back to distribution. A lot of things changed in a very short amount of time. What did you feel like had to change here because of how many things in the industry had shifted?
The great thing is that ADA is a music company. But ADA needs to be empowered by those tools and technologies that allow communication to happen easily. You can do your business with a carrier pigeon, a rotary telephone and a Yahoo email address — you could get it done — but the truth is, if you don’t have to think about those things, there’s so much more you can do. And let’s face it: we are at a point in the evolution of music formats where there’s so much volume, [thousands of] new tracks are being uploaded, social media is ubiquitous. You don’t want to have to worry about whether something got there or came back or how it worked. So I think the tools, like delivery technology that works; a self-serve platform where you can find out the basic information so that when you’re getting on the phone with somebody you’re talking about things that matter; having the strengths and the ability to talk about artist development and commercial insights and data and how things are flowing — if you have those, then you have a really competitive organization.
You also focused a lot on global expansion and having representation in both emerging and new markets, but also places like Latin America. How did you prioritize all these things?
I’ll give credit to Alfonso [Perez-Soto], who is the emerging markets leader and is a tremendous business development person inside of Warner. That track was already full-blown and a part of Warner’s larger strategy. But the truth is that in places like the Middle East and Africa, those established businesses don’t exist from a record label standpoint, so investing in distribution companies that could develop over time was really a part of that strategy. For us, first and foremost, credit to Eliah — he was able to garner a budget way before I got here and really broke the ice and started bringing people in, and Latin America was obviously really relevant in the sector, and that was a territory he really doubled down in. So we have a significant amount of people in Latin America that are ADA and distribution-focused.
But then I would say what was most important with Alfonso was we acquired Qanawat, we acquired Africori, and there’s many more to come that have not been announced yet that we’re currently working on. Once you’re looking at acquiring companies, then you’re looking at prioritizing what’s going to be most important and most impactful when it comes to market share, what are the feature sets we have to build to make sure we’re giving these labels an equal if not better level of service than they’re already receiving, because it’s distribution deals — they can walk away. So for us, the experience we brought in, it was about understanding what we could ingest the quickest, and what was going to make the most impact. But as far as the acquisitions, they were really part of the larger Warner strategy, though they are the ADA teams.
As you guys continue to expand, what are the challenges and potential pitfalls?
I think the biggest challenge is that there is a lot of competition out there, and it’s hard to compete with rates and advances. There’s a lot of money being thrown around in the distribution market, because there’s venture capital companies, there’s a lot of tourists. So I think that the challenge of growing our business, being a successful distribution company globally and also in the U.S., is making sure that we’re doing smart deals and building our business and delivering value.
I also think ADA is back and revitalized and has a new perspective, especially in the U.S. business, and I think that’s new to people. And reintroducing ourselves and letting people know what we’re doing is best done through our successes. In places around the world we’ve hired some really amazing teams, and it feels different and cool and new because ADA didn’t always really exist in all these territories. And in the U.S., it’s more of an education process because there’s so much competition and because, you know, distribution — it’s the hot new thing. For me, I guess, I’m here because I’ve always loved it.
It’s interesting you brought it up in that way, because I feel like you hear that a lot in the catalog acquisition space — there’s outside money coming in, there are companies coming in that don’t have track records in the music business — I hadn’t thought about the parallels here, too.
And all of that is about to become independent. All of these companies buying music catalogs, they have to put them somewhere, and a lot of them are buying rights that haven’t reverted yet. So those catalogs are now moving around. There’s going to be even more infusion, and I think that there’s a real opportunity. I’m very happy for my experience at Sony catalog, because working catalog is not easy, and I’m hoping that there’s an opportunity for us to continue thinking about tools and tech that can optimize catalogs. Because catalog is more important than it ever was before, and you never know when it’s coming; you have to be proactively reactive. And it’s going to be an opportunity.
What do you look for in bringing on new label partners?
I think the most important thing that we look for is the ability to partner both ways. When we first started, it was really the idea of, “How can we use each other as strengths?” Because when it’s a one-way relationship, okay, it’s transactional and we’re a distributor and you’re a label. Value comes differently for every partner. But I think one of the biggest things is a label wants to know that you’re paying attention and are able to think of opportunity either before or maybe in a different place than they would think about opportunity. We try to be very strategic yet tactical when we do business reviews, and we leave it up to three to five key things that we have to do and be able to measure those things. So of course there’s planning and proactiveness that you can do. But there’s nothing better than getting a call from your distributor and them saying, “Oh my god, I just saw a spike, let’s do this.”
You’ve been president for two years now. When you look back, what are you most proud of in that time?
First of all my team. Bringing in the executives I have is probably the biggest highlight, and empowering them. Also launching Co-Op, which is our proprietary product for third-party labels and artists, which we launched in October. No small feat. And overall I would say the successes that we’ve been able to generate with Quevedo and Central Cee. We just had a No. 1 in India with the Sean Paul–Shaggy–Spice track [“Go Down Deh,”] that literally came from us seeing a spark and starting to work it locally. We just had a No. 1 with Ayliva in Germany that beat out Miley Cyrus. So we definitely have these big wins and I hope to have many more to talk about in the future, but it honestly couldn’t happen without the team that I brought in and the relationships that we created with the ADA folks that have been here before and the new folks that have come in. And I’m really looking forward to holding a global conference and getting everybody together. Being able to be together and appreciate that is what I hope to do for the entire organization.
Amid the sports memorabilia in Tim Leiweke’s office, there’s a small framed quote with the word “Motivation” at the top. Leiweke, the chairman/CEO of Oak View Group (OVG), is a 45-year veteran of the estimated global $25 billion concert industry who spent the pandemic building seven new arenas — five of which his company owns and operates — so he’s not one to hang inspirational thoughts from Wikiquotes on his wall. “Motivation” is followed by a question: “How does ASM differentiate itself from its main competitor, Oak View Group?”
The answer comes from Ron Bension, president/CEO of ASM Global, and the most salient part reads: “There are other companies that are noisier, but we’re managing more buildings, with more content from Live Nation and AEG than anywhere else in the world.”
Oak View Group and ASM are indeed competitors in managing facilities around the globe, and it’s important to know that ASM is co-owned by sports/live-entertainment company AEG, where Leiweke was CEO until his “mutually agreed upon departure” in 2013 from the company owned by billionaire Philip Anschutz. Leiweke, 66, says he wishes Anschutz “nothing but luck,” but he also says he carries a copy of Bension’s quote in his backpack and reads it before every presentation he makes. “Never piss off your competitor,” he says with a broad smile. “I thank Ron daily that he has decided it’s me that causes him success. Maybe that motivates me as much as it motivates him.”
In 2015, Leiweke partnered with multisector music magnate Irving Azoff to build a company that now manages approximately 500 facilities. OVG employs 5,000 people full-time (including Leiweke’s daughter, Francesca Bodie, who is president of business development), with another 35,000 part-time staffers.
The arenas OVG has built in the last 18 months include Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle; Acrisure Arena in Palm Springs, Calif.; CFG Bank Arena in Baltimore; and UBS Arena on New York’s Long Island. “We did it in the middle of COVID, inflation, rising interest rates, labor issues, political issues,” he says.
OVG is working on multibillion-dollar projects in Las Vegas; Manchester, England; and, in partnership with Live Nation, São Paulo, and Leiweke says it’s time for the music industry to recognize the crucial role companies like his play in fan satisfaction. “Everyone talks about the promoters, the agents and the managers,” he says. “The brick-and-mortars and the fan experience are equally important. We’re spending tens of millions on acoustics and air-handling systems that deal with things like COVID. And yet people underestimate our passion for how important that is to the live experience.”
“We did a lot of boxing in the AEG days,” Leiweke says. “I’ve got signed globes by Wladimir Klitschko, Lennox Lewis, Oscar De La Hoya. I don’t know how many gloves I have.”
Joel Barhamand
How did you get the Long Island Railroad to open a station at your UBS Arena?
Paid for it. Our landlord and our partner is the state of New York. We went through two governors and a lot of politics to get the deal done. If you look at all the other facilities in the New York area, except for [Madison Square] Garden, Citi Field was built with bonds issued by state and city authorities. The Meadowlands [in New Jersey] was paid for mostly by taxpayers’ dollars. Barclays Center [in Brooklyn] involved bonds. That’s the nature of many of these projects. We were private. Us and [New York] Islanders [co-owner] Scott Malkin put up $1 billion privately to build that arena. Of that billion, roughly $75 million was a cash contribution toward that light rail station. It’s about developing a private-public partnership that works for everybody, which enabled us to get a lot more done there than most anyone else.
The opening of that station has made going to UBS convenient and environmentally friendly. Did sustainability play a part?
We happen to be very sustainable around here. UBS is LEED-certified. Our goal is to make that a carbon-neutral venue within the next couple of years. Obviously, we had the first carbon-neutral arena ever in Seattle. You cannot be carbon-neutral if everyone is driving there for every event. So mass transportation was highly important to us, to get somebody from Penn Station or Grand Central [in Manhattan] in a 30-minute train ride. It was also highly important for the viability of that building in a very competitive marketplace for arenas. You’ve got Prudential Center [in New Jersey], Barclays, the Garden and you’ve got us. We’ve got to find a way to get people in and out without it having to be about the Long Island Expressway.
What is the strategy behind building in secondary and tertiary markets like Palm Springs, Calif.?
There are small markets and big markets, and a combination of those deals is smart. Partially because in North America, the majority of big arenas are owned or controlled by an NBA or NHL tenant. They’re greedy, and they have a strategic value within that market that we don’t have, which is, if you want me to keep this team here, you’ve got to help me build or take over this arena. We’re going to get a few of those — Seattle and New York are examples — but we also have to find either A markets that don’t have an anchor tenant, which are few and far between, or B markets. The business proposition in a B market is just as good as an A market because we can build an arena there for between $200 million and $300 million. I’m not going to get the 86 nights of music that I’m getting in Seattle, but Irving and I can live with 40 nights of music in Palm Springs. And then, we happen to have probably the most financially successful American Hockey League team there this year with the Coachella Valley Firebirds. The mix of those two means we get just as good a rate of return on every dollar I invested at Acrisure as we will in Seattle. We love these B markets because there’s 20 of them out there compared with half a dozen of the A markets.
You’re seeing a lot of growth right now. When does what you do plateau?
It won’t be in my lifetime. There are 50 markets in the world today that need new arenas, but only 20 of them will make sense. I’m very driven by the rate of return that we get on our investment. Irving, the employees and I own the majority of this company. I have an investment partner in Silver Lake, and I’m very driven to get them a healthy valuation on this asset one day because they put a lot of money into it.
Memorabilia from the arenas that OVG has built and the sports teams associated with them. From left: hockey pucks from Climate Pledge Arena and the Seattle Kraken; a plaque from Baltimore’s CVG Bank Arena; a shovel from the groundbreaking for UBS Arena.
Joel Barhamand
You talk a lot about the importance of “alignment” with partners before the work starts. How has that benefited OVG beyond the seven arenas you’ve built?
In Seattle, Climate Pledge Arena was a 50-50 joint venture between us, [Seattle’s NHL team] the Kraken, and [the team’s majority co-owner] David Bonderman. David and I were aligned on that vision for the arena from day one — before he got the team.
That is a city-owned facility, and we continue to be good partners and good neighbors with Mayor Bruce Harrell, Governor Jay Inslee, and county commissioner Dowe Constantine. My brother deals with them every day on our behalf. We’re jumping into Memorial Stadium there because it’s the right thing to do for the city and the county and the school district. And so that alignment with the people I just mentioned has created a hell of an asset. Even though we privatized it, they own it. It has also created all kinds of other opportunities, including our new restaurant, event center and the bid we’re making on Memorial Stadium. And we’re just getting started.
How much of an advantage is it for you that, once you build these venues, you can then bring in Harry Styles or the Eagles because of your partnership with Irving Azoff?
At the end of the day, we’ve got no chips with anybody out there. We’re not promoters, which means we get along with everyone. Louis Messina is one of my best friends. We have known each other most of our adult lives. I have a great relationship with Michael Rapino and everybody else at Live Nation. I like Jay Marciano. I hired Jay. I should be able to get along better with Jay, but there are other relationships at play there. As great as it is to have Irving as my partner, he’s only part of the equation.
Arena builds are not your only business.
We do 16 different services. I probably have 40 people in this company that work with every promoter, including some that route Irving’s tours for him. What makes us dangerous is, we are everybody that wants us to come in and bid because we’ve spent $4 billion building arenas. We’re going to do it better because we’ve got real skin in the game. We raise the debt on each of these buildings through my daughter Francesca and her division. We do the food and beverage, parking. We have a division called GOAL where we learn how to operate buildings more sustainably each year and rate them annually. We have 150 people selling naming rights and sponsorships every day.
How important are VIP packages and services?
We sell premium — suites and club seats. Premium and hospitality are still a huge growth opportunity. We’re just closing a deal on Rhubarb Hospitality Collection, RHC. They’re a high-end catering, food and beverage company based in London, New York and Berlin. They have one of the top restaurants in New York, Peak at Hudson Yards. We’ve also brought on Christian Navarro from Wally’s Wine and Spirits [in Beverly Hills]. When people come into our VIP areas, we want to create a whole different level for them. RHC is my fourth food and beverage company.
You’ve got a massive development in Las Vegas.
The biggest bet we’ve ever made is our project in Las Vegas. You could add New York and L.A. together, and they don’t do as much live entertainment as Vegas. It’s the live-entertainment capital of the world. But let’s look at the venues. There must be 10 nice theaters on the Strip. You need good arenas, too. T-Mobile was my last deal at AEG. It’s a nice arena, but it pales in comparison to what we just built in Seattle, New York and Austin. How do you have the No. 1 live-entertainment marketplace in the world and its arena is not one of the 30 nicest arenas in the country? You’ll hear about this soon, but we have a lot of world-class partners, brands and entrepreneurs who have come together to build out a 100-acre campus that will be the destination for live entertainment, culture, the arts and hospitality.
What does your overseas strategy look like?
The majority of projects we’re working on are overseas, like São Paulo with Live Nation. Thirty million people live in São Paulo. It’s a great music market. Latin music and K-pop are the biggest industry influencers now. We are also highly focused on Singapore and Asia; Lagos, because look at the artists coming from Nigeria. That’s where you’ve got to go for live music and culture and arts. We have a partner from Nigeria to build the single best arena in all of Africa.
You’ve also got Co-op Live opening in Manchester.
That is the capital of the U.K. for live events. That arena is going to be a top five arena in the world. When I opened up Staples Center in 1999, Bruce Springsteen was my opening artist for two nights, and the first night he told everyone, “Why don’t you come out of those corporate boxes and join us.” He didn’t have a great experience. I was like, goddamn it, the Boss just ripped me a new one from the stage. What he told me after the Staples concert is, “Tim, I like hot, sweaty halls.” When he opened up the CFG Bank arena for us in April, I said to him, “You’ve been running around my brain for 25 years because I failed you miserably.” Co-op Live is going to be the first music-only arena that is a hot, sweaty hall, and yet it will have 32 points of destination — restaurants, clubs and VIP spaces. It’s the first time we said, make it about music — make the bowl perfect — and then we’ll shoehorn in whatever else is important outside the bowl. Make all of the people right on the artist so it’s a hot, sweaty hall. I think that arena is going to change our industry. We’re sniffing around in Barcelona and Madrid. We want to go to the great cultural markets of the world where they have arenas that are 30, 40 years old and make those the next flags for the company. We have $2 billion to $3 billion of additional investment coming outside of Vegas and the projects we’re building in the U.S.
What’s your perspective on the Taylor Swift ticketing issue that Live Nation encountered? What could it have done better?
Ticketmaster did nothing wrong on Taylor Swift except for handling the demand, and we all knew that was coming. In a perfect world Taylor, Louis Messina and Ticketmaster would go back, take those dates and spread out the on sales. But at the end of the day it’s the bots and the scalpers that broke that system down. Did Taylor get any money from all of those secondary companies? Not a penny. Did the arenas or stadiums? I’ve spent $4 billion. Why is it that I let a secondary company come into my arena and resell my tickets and keep those fees? It’s a crime.
What are you doing to solve scalping and secondary-market issues?
I’ve got some ideas. In Seattle, we cleansed our season ticket list, our premium list and our club seat list. We got rid of anyone that was a scalper or secondary company so they couldn’t use the right of first refusal on concerts to tie those tickets up. Second is the bots. If an artist wants to be protected, we have to create smart tickets. And one day, your tickets are going to be here. (Holds up his hand.) We use the Amazon “grab and go” using your hand system. It’s not perfected yet, but within two years, it’s going to be phenomenal. Then we’ll be able to put the ticket in there and work a deal between Ticketmaster and Amazon. Just as technology has created the problem, so technology will solve the problem.
There’s also an outcry against fees.
They want to come in and say get rid of fees, but the reality is the fees are split by everybody in the pool. The artist gets some of the fees. Yes, they do. The building gets some of the fees and the promoter gets some of the fees. The fees are shared. There is an economic universe out there of rebates and waiving rent and giving artists free nights in the arena. That’s all part of this ecosystem of sharing fees. Everyone tends to forget about that. Ticketmaster does not even make the majority of fees. It’s not the fees. Should we tell people what the fees are in advance? That’s a good idea. But at the end of the day, if we want to attack what ultimately creates the majority of problems that people like The Cure or Taylor Swift feels strongly about, then attack the secondary companies who have no skin in the game.
“Shaq is our partner,” Leiweke says of NBA star Shaquille O’Neal, whose Big Chicken franchise is among the concessions found at OVG venues.
Joel Barhamand
Do you think Congress is focusing on the right players then?
Congress can’t even get a budget passed. Can they please just go run the country. Do I think they could solve the ticketing problem? No. These are the people saying it’s all Ticketmaster’s fault. No. Come learn the business, and what we’ll tell you is that the very same lobbyists you’re listening to that wrote that bill that you want to pass — they’re the problem.
The lion’s share of an act’s income comes from live shows. How much longer can we look at the live business as this sort of unlimited resource for artists, and whose responsibility is it to foster new arena and stadium acts?
How long can we maintain this ratio? I think forever because as I said music is the essence of our life. The economics have shifted, but the demand for music, recorded music, hasn’t shifted. It’s streaming now, and the economics are different. But we now have more ability to get more music from more artists than ever before. That’s who’s developing the emerging artists, god bless them — those streaming services. Ironically, they took some of the economics out of what an artist makes but they’ve created tens of thousands of more artists now, and who would have ever guessed that today we’d be seeing these K-pop and Latino artists? I’m looking at some of the numbers we did for Grupo Firme and Rauw Alejandro. The amount of tickets that Latino artists sell is unheard of. The same with K-pop. We just did four nights of K-pop including Suga, and UBS sold out everything. We had record merchandise sales. We’re going to continue to see that, and I give a lot of credit to the streaming industry. That’s going to be the live pipeline. So, maybe the economics ultimately got kind of turned a little bit against the artist, but it’s created far more artists that can now go sell out arenas.
Will they come up through the clubs or go straight to arenas?
We have the theater alliance because I think that’s highly important. Clubs are highly important. Both Live Nation and AEG are doing a great job on clubs. I’m a huge fan of Bowery Presents, and we’d like to have a better relationship with them. We will one day when the personalities get shifted. Will we keep going at the rate we’ve been going the last two years? Probably not. We’re seeing record rates, and we see it again next year. Our bookings are very, very strong for next year. But this is going to continue for a while because people have pent-up demand and discretionary income. I also think people went through Covid and said I’m going to go live life. Well, music happens to be something that relates to everybody. So, this isn’t going to stop. We’ll continue to develop smaller venues like Acrisure, which is a huge stepping stone for a lot of Latino bands. Everyone was scared of that marketplace except for Paul Tollett. I’m like, Paul’s pretty smart. I’ll follow his lead.
The same goes for sustainability when it comes to venues and festivals. You seem to be doing a lot on that front, but whose responsibility is it?
Sustainability is the overriding factor of this company. We spent $150 million on sustainability in Seattle saving the roof. I floated that roof in the air for three years. Everyone thought build a new arena, but that is the greatest waste of our planet — new steel, new glass, new everything. I thought, what if we reuse stuff? The arena’s roof is historic. It was originally part of the Washington State Pavilion at the 1962 World’s Fair. We figured out how to float it in the air with temporary steel supports, and I reused the steel. Then we took the front of the building and built an atrium system and a people-moving system to get everyone up and down. Take the existing arena, tear it down, build a hole three times as large, go down, not up because I use less energy below ground level. I don’t have to spend as much money on heating or cooling. Then drop the roof back on. Everyone says, “Oh, the renovation.” I’m like renovation? This is $1.15 billion. Renovate my ass. The only thing that stayed was the roof, and then three of the four sides is the original glass from the 1962 World’s Fair. I preserved it, packed it, stored it for two years and then put it back on. Then I had to retrofit the glass with fiber for earthquakes because the earthquake standard has changed since 1962.
You and Irving Azoff were once rivals and now you’re partners. What does that say about the music industry?
Yo-yos. It’s up and down, up ad down. We were partners, then enemies, then partners. I’m hoping that cycle has played itself out completely. Michael Rapino and I fought aggressively against each other. We’re not best of friends, but I’d say in our business he’s one of the greatest partners I have. The music business is a unique business because everyone thinks they’ve got to be either best of friends or fighting each other. There’s no in-between. The drama in the music business is crazy. We’re drama free around here. Our job is to get along with everybody. That’s the good thing about being private. People say, “Do you get along with Phil?” I wish him nothing but the best of luck. Whatever AEG does, I’m proud that I hired the majority of those people. And guess what, whether they succeed or fail, it will have little impact on my company. The greatest drama I had in my life is when Irving and I were fighting each other because he’s formidable. I’m very happy he’s on my side of the equation.
A Grammy Award-winning composer has dropped her closely-watched lawsuit against YouTube over access to its anti-piracy tools like Content ID, just a day before it had been set to go to trial — and weeks after a federal judge gutted the case by refusing to let it move forward as a class action.
Maria Schneider spent years litigating her lawsuit, which claimed that YouTube had become a “hotbed of piracy” because it provided effective content tools only to “powerful copyright owners” like record labels and not to “ordinary owners” like artists and songwriters.
But on Sunday (June 11), with a jury trial scheduled to kick off on Monday morning), lawyers for both sides told a federal judge that they had agreed to end the case without a decision: “In light of the stipulation of dismissal of all claims with prejudice, the jury trial set for June 12, 2023, is vacated,” Judge James Donato wrote. “The case is closed.”
The sudden end to the case came just weeks after Judge Donato issued a crucial ruling that dramatically reduced the scope of the lawsuit: That Schneider could not team up with tens of thousands of other rightsholders who she claims suffered similar harm from YouTube’s policies.
Schneider quickly moved to appeal that ruling and postpone the trial, arguing that it would “gravely undermine” the goals of her lawsuit. But a federal appeals court denied that motion on Friday.
Faced with a jury trial they had warned would be “enormously wasteful,” Schneider’s lawyers dropped their case. Neither side immediately returned requests for more information about how the resolution of the litigation was reached, including specific details about any kind of settlement agreement.
Filed in 2020, Schneider’s lawsuit claims that YouTube (owned by Google parent Alphabet) forces songwriters and other smaller rights holders to use “vastly inferior and time-consuming manual means” of policing infringement, allowing piracy of their material to flourish on the platform.
For its part, YouTube says it’s done nothing wrong. In court documents, the company has argued that it’s spent “spent over $100 million developing industry-leading tools” to prevent piracy, but that it limits access because “in the hands of the wrong party, these tools can cause serious harm.”
The case was filed as a class action, aiming to let potentially tens of thousands of aggrieved copyright owners team up to fight what Schneider’s lawsuit called “institutionalized misbehavior.” An expert retained by her legal team said the class could include between 10,000 and 20,000 rights holders.
But in a May 22 ruling, Judge Donato refused to “certify” the case as a class action. Under federal law, class-action accusers must share very similar legal concerns — and the judge said Schneider’s fellow rights holders would have widely different cases against YouTube.
Following that ruling, Schneider quickly moved to postpone the trial. But at a hearing days after the decision, Donato said he would stick to the schedule: “I’m not going to do that. You got a trial set on June 12th. This is a 2020 case; OK. It’s showtime.”
In a June 5 emergency petition to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Schneider’s lawyers demanded the appeals court put the case on ice while she filed an appeal on the class certification issue. They argued that a “brief” pause would prevent the judge’s “last-minute, haphazard and erroneous” ruling from derailing a case with important implications.
“The named plaintiffs here joined the case to litigate class claims, and to vindicate their view that YouTube tramples on the rights of independent artists and smaller copyright holders overall, not just those of the individual plaintiffs,” her lawyers told the appeals court.
But in a ruling published on Friday evening, the Ninth Circuit rejected those arguments: “The court, in its discretion, denies the petition for permission to appeal,” the court wrote. “Petitioners’ emergency motion for a stay is denied as moot.”
Schneider and her lawyers still could have proceeded to trial against YouTube, litigating the case simply on behalf of her and another plaintiff. But they had strongly indicated in court filings that they did not want to proceed to the trial without class-action status.
Femme It Forward, a female-led music and entertainment company, has partnered with Google Pixel to establish the Femme It Future Scholarship. Five mentees from Femme It Forward’s mentorship program for young women of color — Next Gem Femme — will be selected as recipients. The scholarship is being announced in conjunction with Femme It Forward opening the application window for the third year of its mentorship program.
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“This scholarship is our commitment to nurturing the next generation of female leaders who will shatter barriers, break stereotypes and create a future filled with equality and empowerment,” said Femme It Forward president/CEO Heather Lowery in a statement.
“Google Pixel is at the forefront of incorporating diversity and inclusivity in its technology and products. We believe that empowering young women with education and opportunities is the key to unlocking their limitless potential. By offering transformative scholarships and coveted mentorship opportunities, our partnership can create change together that empowers the next generation.”
“We’re thrilled to be partnered with Heather and the team at Femme it Forward,” added Ava Donaldson, Google’s senior marketing manager, U.S. Social, Influencer + Inclusion. “Our mutual mission is centered around helpfulness and supporting the advancement of underrepresented communities, especially women.”
Select students will also receive special care packages comprised of Google and other products sourced exclusively from women-owned businesses.
When Next Gem Femme begins its third year in September, it will be pairing mentors with more than 100 females pursuing undergraduate or graduate degrees or presently working in entry-level positions in the music and entertainment industries. As before, the program plans to award at least half of its mentee openings to students from historically Black colleges and universities.
Encompassing career pursuits such as marketing, publicity, live and touring, business development, talent management and artist relations, the program’s mentors come from various companies including Google, Amazon, Apple Music, CAA, Live Nation, NBC Universal, Netflix and YouTube. Among the female music industry executive mentors Republic Records executive vp Danielle Price, Warner Records senior VP of A&R Ericka Coulter, Virgin Music president Jacqueline Saturn and Roc Nation vp, marketing Bianca Edwards.
“Through powerful relationships and practical education, Next Gem Femme opens so many doors for young women of color, a group that has been overlooked for far too long,” noted Lowery. “We’re thrilled to launch our third year of the program and build on its amazing momentum as we continue leading necessary conversations about the need to improve workplace equity. This brilliant group of mentors will give remarkable young women the wisdom and tools to expand their talents, overcome setbacks and reach their potential.”
The application window for Next Gem Femme closes on Friday, June 16, 2023 (9 p.m. PT). For more information and to apply, visit femmeitforward.com.
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