Business
Page: 377
Back in 2021, a major label kicked off a radio promotion campaign for a song from an arena-selling act. One of the label’s early moves was to earmark payments to an independent radio promoter tied to a pair of stations in the Northeast, as documented in an invoice reviewed by Billboard. During the chart week before the date of the invoice, the radio-tracking service Mediabase recorded no plays of the single in question on WXRV (Boston) and WNCS (Montpelier, Vermont). The following week — the invoice, which allocated $750 to the first station and $500 to the second, was dated to that Monday — spins increased markedly, rising by at least 15 on both.
This invoice is one of 14 obtained by Billboard from three different executives — one from a major label, one at an independent label and one who works in radio promotion — all of whom requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about radio promotion activities. (To preserve that anonymity, Billboard agreed not to identify the acts on these invoices.) These documents from 2021 and 2022 are detailed, containing the artist name, the single name, the radio station and the “rate” for each.
The invoices show how payments — which range from several hundred dollars to $1,500 — move from labels to one independent promoter, Jeff Deane, who runs the company Jeff Deane and Associates, apparently resulting in spins at specific stations. Analyzing Mediabase data shows that in the week those payments are invoiced, plays for the songs in question increased at the stations specified in 28 out of 30 cases. Deane’s practices have concerned some in the music industry, who appealed for government intervention last year, according to two sources.
All the invoices made out to Deane that were obtained by Billboard include the inscription, “Nothing of value was or will be given to a radio station or radio station employee in exchange for airplay.” Deane and one of his employees did not respond to multiple requests for comment — by email, phone, and two letters in the mail — about how his business works. Representatives for the three major label groups declined to comment.
The Federal Communications Commission allows paying for airplay as long as those payments are “disclose[d]… at the time material is aired and identify who is paying for it.” It’s unclear if any disclosures were made in the 30 cases documented on the invoices. In a statement to Billboard, Ed Flanagan, general manager of WNCS, said that “when WNCS or WXRV broadcasts programming that is sponsored by a third party, it is the practice of the station to ensure that such sponsored programming is broadcast in compliance with the FCC’s rules on sponsorship identification.”
In addition, following a mid-2000s investigation into radio promotion by the New York Attorney General’s office, then overseen by Eliot Spitzer, all the major labels agreed to certain business reforms. Key among them was not to use “commercial transactions,” “advertising,” or “nominal consideration,” among other things, “in an explicit or implicit exchange, agreement, or understanding to obtain airplay or increase airplay.”
Gabriel Rossman, a professor of sociology at UCLA and the author of Climbing the Charts: What Radio Airplay Tells Us About the Diffusion of Innovation, agreed to review redacted versions of the invoices and accompanying Mediabase reports for Billboard. “We see this pattern between the invoices and the Mediabase reports that JDA gets paid to promote a particular song on a particular station, and then in the week that follows the spins go up,” he says.
Rossman says that Deane’s activities could be aboveboard. “Is there a way to do that legally?” he asks. “In theory, you could do that by making a really good press kit or a really good PowerPoint [about how great the song on the invoice is]. If you had to bet, that’s probably not what happened. But in theory, that’s what the job of an independent promoter is: to give a very compelling endorsement. The evidence I saw doesn’t yet exclude the possibility that the promotional efforts they’re doing are legal.”
Independent Promotion
Independent promoters are a longstanding feature of the music industry. At any given time, label promotion departments are working multiple singles across a variety of radio formats — pop, alternative, or adult contemporary, for example — with the goal of pushing those songs up each format’s chart so that more listeners hear them. There are hundreds of stations that need to be called and persuaded to play a track. But there is only so much time in the day, so labels hire middlemen who typically have experience with and relationships in individual local markets to augment their own efforts. These are known as independent promoters.
“Some independent promoters enjoy exclusive arrangements with particular radio stations and are guaranteed regular, direct access to the programmers responsible for the all-important playlists,” the New York Attorney General’s office explained in documents from 2005 related to its radio promotion investigation. “… Other independent promoters, referred to as ‘retainer indies,’ are hired to promote a particular song and are paid a flat fee for the life of the project.”
Deane is one of several current indie promoters who works by establishing these “exclusive agreements” with stations, radio veterans say. In a 2013 lawsuit Deane filed against a radio company, Apex Broadcasting, the promoter’s attorney described the way he relies on “longstanding radio relationships to help artists receive meaningful radio airplay.” The mechanism that allows Deane to deliver that airplay for clients is partially outlined in the lawsuit: He “enters into exclusive agreements — having mostly one-year, but occasionally two-year, terms — with radio stations or entities that own and operate radio stations.” (Deane’s suit alleged that Apex breached its exclusive agreement with him; the dispute was later settled and the case dismissed with prejudice.)
“Deane secures promotional support for the radio stations he represents” in exclusive deals, “helping those stations garner listener loyalty, higher ratings, and increased advertising revenue,” according to documents the promoter’s attorney filed in the Apex Broadcasting suit.
This support is increasingly valuable to stations, especially in small markets, radio sources say, because they have lost a lot of the advertising dollars that traditionally kept them afloat. Over-the-air ad revenue fell by more than 40% between 2005 and 2020, according to a 2021 FCC filing from the National Association of Broadcasters.
In court filings from 2021, another independent promoter allegedly acknowledged that he had been paying “a budget set at $200,000” annually for three radio stations in California and Las Vegas. (That promoter said he “has not, did not, and never will participate in payola, and maintains full compliance with the FCC and regulations of the record industry.”) One radio executive who worked at a station in a deal with Deane said those exclusive agreements land the station “six figures a year.”
Promoters also stand to benefit financially from setting up these exclusive relationships. In the Apex Broadcasting suit, Deane’s attorney said that stations in contract with him turn over “first access to their playlist data, which Deane then analyzes for, and discusses with the record labels, who retain Deane to promote their artists’ music.” In a 2013 email that was part of the Apex suit, he said he worked with 50 stations in this fashion.
Overnight Spins
In some cases documented on the invoices, the label payments occur at the start of a radio campaign. Last year, for example, an invoice indicates that a label made payments to Deane tied to multiple stations, including WRTT (Huntsville, Ala.), KAZR (Des Moines, Iowa) and WFXH (Savannah, Ga.), for a platinum-selling rock band. In the 48 hours following the date on the label’s invoice, each of those stations started to play the band’s single, according to Mediabase data. Another band sent Deane a similar invoice in 2021 for the station KYMK (Lafayette, La.); Mediabase data show that the group earned its first spin on that station two days after the date of the invoice. (Employees of these four stations did not respond to email requests for comment.)
The timing of the plays is notable. The majority of them occurred overnight between midnight and 6 a.m., when few listeners are tuning in, according to information from Mediabase.
This is not a new phenomenon: The New York Attorney General’s office noted in 2005 that the major label groups aim “to generate additional spins detections by the airplay monitoring companies, even if the spins occur in the dead of night when relatively few people are listening to radio. Nighttime spins may still prove effective as a means to improve chart positions” — especially on charts that only rank songs by spins, rather than by audience impressions.
In a 2014 lawsuit Deane filed against another radio company, Advanced Media Partners, that also alleged breach of contract, his attorneys wrote that part of their agreement involved “provid[ing] designated overnight programming hours to JDA, which would then enable JDA to fund the promotional budget Defendants demanded, and realize substantial revenue from its record label clients.” Deane was allotted “the overnight hours of 1:00 a.m. to 5:00 a.m. on Saturday (Friday night) and Sunday (Saturday night) and from 12:00 a.m. (midnight) to 5:00 a.m. on Monday through Friday (Sunday – Thursday nights) to facilitate… interaction with record labels,” according to the lawsuit.
Deane’s interest in the overnight hours is well known enough in radio circles that it was the butt of a joke in the trade publication Hits Daily Double. “I just offered a roll of toilet paper to a PD [program director] for an add,” Hits wrote during the early days of the pandemic. “On Amazon, most paper products, if you can find them, are going for more than a Jeff Deane overnight five-spin special.”
Rossman, the UCLA professor, says that “if you’re trying to get something to rise in the charts, that’s exactly what you would do: Do whatever you could to get a song played in small markets overnight, because that’s the part [of the day] that people care the least about [what’s playing], and so [it] should be the easiest to influence.”
The New York Attorney General
Independent radio promotion has periodically come under scrutiny for its ties to payola, which was regulated by Congress in 1960.
Apex alluded to payola in its 2013 response to Deane’s lawsuit: “In the course of communicating with Deane and the record labels for promotion, Apex Broadcasting also learned that Deane’s practices violated industry standards, and Apex Broadcasting’s instructions, concerning radio promotion.” In emails that were part of the lawsuit, Deane’s attorney hit back, criticizing the company for “coyly suggesting my client engaged in payola — both in the Apex relationship and at some unspecified time in the past” but “refusing to provide any alleged facts.”
While Deane was not mentioned in the 2005 documents summarizing the Attorney General’s investigation, Spitzer’s office zeroed in on the activities of some independent promoters: “In an effort to dodge the payola laws, record labels and radio stations have also enlisted the services of so-called independent promoters… who act as conduits for delivery of the labels’ ‘promotional support’ to the stations and help perpetuate the fiction that this support is not actually being delivered by the labels in exchange for airplay and therefore does not violate the payola statutes.”
Spitzer subsequently imposed strict conditions on independent promoters’ activities when they worked with major labels: Record companies “shall not provide any item of value to an independent radio promoter to be distributed to Radio.” (Again, this language is echoed on Deane’s invoices: “Nothing of value was or will be given to a radio station or radio station employee in exchange for airplay.”)
On top of that, any indie promoters working with the majors are required to regularly certify in writing that they are complying with the rules laid out by Spitzer’s office. When Spitzer announced the implementation of these business reforms, he called them “a model for breaking the pervasive influence of bribes in the industry.”
But there is some disagreement about their ongoing effectiveness. Last year, frustrated music executives secured another meeting with the New York Attorney General’s office, now led by Letitia James, to complain about the practices of some independent promoters, according to two sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
During a meeting that included Elinor Hoffman, chief of the New York Attorney General’s antitrust bureau, and Jane Azia, chief of the New York Attorney General’s bureau of consumer frauds and protection, music executives mentioned Deane and others by name, according to sources present, alleging that their activities violated the terms of the settlement agreements. (James herself was not in the meeting.) And they asked the New York attorney general to investigate independent promotion’s links to payola, as Spitzer did nearly two decades ago.
The New York Attorney General’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
Ruling on a case that record labels and publishers have called “critical to the American music industry,” the U.S. Supreme Court said Thursday that Andy Warhol violated a photographer’s copyrights when he used her images of Prince to create one of distinctive screen prints.
By a seven to two vote, the high court ruled that Warhol did not make legal “fair use” of photos of Prince snapped by Lynn Goldsmith, a trailblazing rock-and-roll photographer who also captured images of Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen.
Attorneys for the late artist has warned that creators must be able to re-use earlier works and that a loss would “chill” creativity. But Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that Warhol had used the photo for a largely the same commercial purpose as Goldsmith – and had offered little compelling reason for doing so.
“Lynn Goldsmith’s original works, like those of other photographers, are entitled to copyright protection, even against famous artists,” the justice wrote.
The ruling is the first time in more than three decades the justices have ruled on how creative works are covered by fair use. The last time the court did so was a landmark 1991 decision upholding 2 Live Crew‘s bawdy parody of Roy Orbison’s “Oh, Pretty Woman.”
Ahead of the decision, the Recording Industry Association of America and the National Music Publishers’ Association had urged the court to adopt Thursday’s more limited vision of fair use. They said the outcome of the case was “critical to the American music industry,” warning that sampling and interpolation might have been regarded as legal fair use under Warhol’s “wide and manipulable” approach.
Warhol created his images in 1984 as artwork for a Vanity Fair article called “Purple Fame,” a sarcastic ode to the then-rising star. To do so, he used a portrait of the star taken in 1981 by Goldsmith. Vanity Fair licensed her image for use in the magazine, but Warhol also created more than a dozen other versions, which were later sold to collectors, displayed in museums and licensed for use without the her consent.
When Prince died suddenly from a drug overdose in 2016, Condé Nast magazine re-used Warhol’s image on the cover of a tribute issue – a prominent display that caught Goldsmith’s attention. After she threatened to sue the Andy Warhol Foundation for copyright infringement, the group filed a preemptive lawsuit to prove that the works were legal.
In 2019, a federal judge ruled that Warhol’s images had “transformed Prince from a vulnerable, uncomfortable person to an iconic, larger-than-life figure.” Such “transformative use” is often the key question when courts decide if something counts as a legal fair use.
But in 2021, a federal appeals court overturned that decision, sending the case to the Supreme Court. The court said that merely adding Warhol’s “signature style” to Goldsmith’s image had not created something “fundamentally different and new.”
In Thursday’s decision, the Supreme Court affirmed that ruling. In a 38-page opinion, Justice Sotomayor repeatedly stressed that the two images had been used for largely the same purpose – to illustrate a magazine with an image of Prince.
“If an original work and secondary use share the same or highly similar purposes, and the secondary use is commercial, the first fair use factor is likely to weigh against fair use, absent some other justification for copying,” the justice wrote.
With such similar purposes, the justice said that simply wanting to offer a new “meaning or message” wasn’t enough on its own.
“Copying might have been helpful to convey a new meaning or message. It often is,” the justice wrote. “But that does not suffice under [fair use]. Nor does it distinguish [Warhol] from a long list of would-be fair users: a musician who finds it helpful to sample another artist’s song to make his own, a playwright who finds it helpful to adapt a novel, or a filmmaker who would prefer to create a sequel or spinoff, to name just a few.”
Read the Supreme Court’s entire decision here.
A Florida man who testified against three former friends who murdered rising rap star XXXTentacion during a robbery five years ago will spend the next two years in prison, a judge ruled Wednesday (May 17).
Circuit Judge Michael Usan sentenced Robert Allen to seven years in prison, with credit for the five years he has already spent at the Broward County jail. He will then spend 20 years on probation. He could have received a life sentence.
Allen, 27, pleaded guilty last year to second-degree murder and testified earlier this year against Michael Boatwright, 27, Dedrick Williams, 27, and Trayvon Newsome, 25. They were convicted of first-degree murder in March and sentenced to life in prison.
During the monthlong trial, prosecutors linked Allen, Boatwright, Williams and Newsome to the June 18, 2018, shooting outside Riva Motorsports in suburban Fort Lauderdale through extensive surveillance video taken inside and outside the store. They stole $50,000 and made cellphone videos hours after the shooting showing them flashing fistfuls of $100 bills.
XXXTentacion, whose legal name was Jahseh Onfroy, had just left Riva Motorsports with a friend when an SUV swerved in front of him and blocked his BMW.
Surveillance video showed two masked gunmen emerging and confronting the 20-year-old singer at the driver’s window, and one shot him repeatedly. They then grabbed a Louis Vuitton bag containing cash XXXTentacion had just withdrawn from the bank, got back into the SUV and sped away. The friend was not harmed.
Boatwright was identified as the primary shooter with Newsome being identified as the other gunman. Williams was the group’s leader and the driver of the SUV.
Allen testified that the men set out that day to commit robberies and went to the motorcycle shop to buy Williams a mask. There they spotted the rapper and decided to make him their target. Allen and Williams went inside the shop to confirm it was him. They then went back to the SUV they had rented, waited for XXXTentacion to emerge and ambushed him.
Last year, Pandora started to get suspicious about the streaming activity of a prominent act. “This is a top artist by every measure,” George White, senior vp of music licensing at SiriusXM and Pandora, said during a panel at the Music Biz conference in Nashville on Wednesday (May 17). Some of the interest from Pandora users was clearly genuine. But at the same time, the platform picked up “abnormalities” — “lots of quick skips,” White noted, and “very unusual ratios of radio listening to premium listening” — along with “social media sites actively posting tutorials for how to game the Pandora system and teaching potential users how to drive those streams even higher.”
“This is challenging and more difficult to detect because it’s under a background of legitimate activity,” White continued. And he said that Pandora is seeing more of this type of behavior around “established artists.”
White was one of 11 different speakers across a two-hour, three-panel fraud extravaganza — which covered a lot of ground, jumping from bot farms all the way to thieves falsely claiming publishing ownership on songs to collect money that belongs to someone else — at Music Biz. The tone stayed upbeat, though the message was glum and occasionally paranoia-inducing, with lots of talk about cybercriminals hacking into the accounts of innocent unsuspecting users for nefarious purposes.
“We’ve been seeing lately that as technology advances, the fraud is supercharged,” said Mona Simonian, a partner at the entertainment law firm Pryor Cashman. It’s important that “people start really recognizing how much money is at stake here,” she added. And as Shuman Ghosemajumder, Google’s former “click fraud czar” (real title: head of global product for trust and safety), put it: “It’s always a little bit scary before you get your arms around the problem.”
While some panels stay general, these three sessions (an interview with Ghosemajumder about the ubiquity of fraud, “52 Flavors of Fraud,” and “Fraud Use Cases: What Can We Do?”) brought some hard numbers to a fraud conversation that often remains frustratingly diffuse, because the behavior is difficult to quantify. White had his Pandora case study. And Andrew Batey, co-founder and co-CEO of the fraud detection company Beatdapp, came armed with numerous examples and a boatload of graphs.
There was the account that recorded 33,500 plays in one week. (“The average user has a few hundred to a thousand plays a week,” Batey said.) There was the user with 96 devices “playing from 47 cities in 17 countries in the same week,” a geographical impossibility for even the most devoted jet-setter. There was the group of thousands of accounts all targeting the same songs with 155-ish plays a week, and the batch of 53,000 accounts playing around a dozen acts to camouflage the one artist whose numbers they’re actually trying to inflate.
If this behavior continues undetected, it represents “billions [of dollars] that are being sucked out of this industry,” Batey said. This sentiment was echoed by Christine Barnum, chief revenue officer of CD Baby: Fraudsters are “diluting the pool for everyone.” (She spoke about ways for companies to improve their fraud detection capabilities on a budget, including using ChatGPT to help write programs that can detect anomalous activity.)
Why the upbeat mood, despite the grim news? For years, many music executives, especially in the United States, were unwilling to publicly acknowledge that fraud was a problem. The fact that there was a 120-minute block — enough time to watch two episodes of Succession, quipped Beatdapp co-founder and co-CEO Morgan Hayduk — devoted to the topic at a major music business conference is indicative of an attitude shift. “I’m so happy there’s a room full of people talking about fraud,” Barnum said.
White was similarly optimistic. While recent studies have concluded that around 80% of fraud is financially motivated — grifters running bot networks to white noise recordings, for example, rather than the work of actual artists — White said, “We’ve seen enormous strides in identifying that [activity] really early.”
“I won’t say that’s in control; it’s an issue that requires ongoing investment,” he added. “But it’s at least something we feel like we have a handle on.”
In a presentation at the Music Biz conference in Nashville on Wednesday (May 17), MIDiA Research’s Tatiana Cirisano revealed the company’s predictions about the future of music streaming. Namely, the firm suspects that music streaming revenue growth, which has been in the double digits for years, will slow to the single digits, eventually cooling off from about 10% growth in 2024 to 3% growth in 2029.
“We’re in a crazy time for competing for consumer attention,” said Cirisano during the presentation, titled Where Does Streaming Go From Here? She noted that after the pandemic subsided, content providers of all kinds — from music to gaming to video — have had to accept that more traditional, in-person activities are absorbing large amounts of time for consumers once again. “The era of build it and they will come is starting to come to a close,” she continued. “You need to give people reasons to spend time on your platform.”
As part of the return to in-person experiences, MIDiA Research has found that background consumption of entertainment is on the rise, with 18.1 hours of background consumption in the first quarter of 2021 having escalated to 20.6 hours in the second quarter of 2022.
Traditional streaming services — Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and other competitors — also face competition for users’ attention from “non-[digital service provider] streaming,” or platforms where music is part of the experience but not its sole focus, such as Peloton and TikTok. “We are starting to learn that non-DSP streaming is not just additive, it might actually also diminish the cultural capital of [traditional] streaming,” said Cirisano.
While the cultural capital of streaming reached a fever pitch as Spotify editorial playlists, like Rap Caviar and New Music Friday, became many listener’s go-to source for music suggestions, MIDiA’s data suggests that that “soft power” is starting to wane, giving way to sites like TikTok which promote what Cirisano called “lean-through” music consumption.
This can be a positive thing, she explained. While “lean back,” or background, consumption — such as pre-programmed playlists and radio play — is on the rise, young people are also more likely than ever to not just “lean forward” (meaning they program what music they listen to themselves) but to “lean through,” which Cirisano defined as creating social content, curating content and re-creating content with music. MIDiA has found that the average 16 to 19-year-old spends 3.7 hours per week creating content as of the fourth quarter of 2022. More than ever, young people want to be actively playful and interactive with their music, not just listen to static playlists on streaming — though that form of listening will still surely persist.
To Mark Mulligan, MIDiA’s founder, this is a repeat of history, said Cirisano. Prior to recorded music, live bands’ music would be impacted by the audience in front of them. Now, this has taken on a new form in the age of social media, AI and at-home recording technology, signaling a return to interactivity present throughout the long history of music — and marking a change in appetite from the “isolating” and “hyper-personalized” nature of today’s popular music streaming services. “This new generation wants to be more actively involved in music… I think you’re going to have an advantage if you’re an artist that is comfortable engaging with your fans,” said Cirisano.
MIDiA Research has also found that with the emergence of hyper-personalized algorithms on streaming and social platforms, listenership fragments significantly. This leads to superstars having less of an impact, making it harder for that class of artists to earn a fruitful living from just streaming alone. In tandem with creating content and forging brand partnerships, however, these bigger names can capitalize on their fandom. This atomization of the mainstream is also pushing DSPs to differentiate themselves by, for example, focusing on genre, like Apple Music Classical, or targeting audiophile listeners, like Tidal.
In the future, MIDiA’s data suggests that next-generation platforms will create three-sided marketplaces that operate as self-contained virtuous circles. Audiences will consume music, some fans in the audience will also create using the music, and that consumption and participation will signal the algorithm and distribute the music to new fans.
UPDATE: This story was updated May 17 at 7:59 p.m. ET to note that music streaming revenue growth — not music streaming subscription growth, as incorrectly stated in a previous version of the story — is expected to fall to 3% by 2029. It was also updated to note that background consumption of all entertainment, not just music, is on the rise.
Montana became the first state in the U.S. to enact a complete ban on TikTok on Wednesday when Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte signed a measure that’s more sweeping than any other state’s attempts to curtail the social media app, which is owned by a Chinese tech company.
The measure, which is scheduled to take effect on Jan. 1, 2024, is expected to be challenged legally and will serve as a testing ground for the TikTok-free America that many national lawmakers have envisioned.
“Today, Montana takes the most decisive action of any state to protect Montanans’ private data and sensitive personal information from being harvested by the Chinese Communist Party,” Gianforte said in a statement.
TikTok spokesperson Brooke Oberwetter argued that the law infringes on people’s First Amendment rights and is unlawful. She declined to say whether the company will file a lawsuit.
“We want to reassure Montanans that they can continue using TikTok to express themselves, earn a living, and find community as we continue working to defend the rights of our users inside and outside of Montana,” Oberwetter said in a statement.
Keegan Medrano, policy director for the ACLU of Montana, said the Legislature “trampled on the free speech of hundreds of thousands of Montanans who use the app to express themselves, gather information and run their small business in the name of anti-Chinese sentiment.”
Some lawmakers, the FBI and officials at other agencies are concerned the video-sharing app, owned by ByteDance, could be used to allow the Chinese government to access information on American citizens or push pro-Beijing misinformation that could influence the public. TikTok says none of this has ever happened.
When Montana banned the app on government-owned devices in late December, Gianforte said TikTok posed a “significant risk” to sensitive state data. More than half of U.S. states and the federal government have a similar ban.
On Wednesday, Gianforte also announced he was prohibiting the use of all social media applications tied to foreign adversaries on state equipment and for state businesses in Montana effective on June 1. Among the apps he listed are WeChat, whose parent company is headquartered in China; and Telegram Messenger, which was founded in Russia.
The legislation, drafted by the attorney general’s office, easily passed through Montana’s GOP-controlled Legislature.
Gianforte had wanted to expand the TikTok bill to include apps tied to foreign adversaries, but the legislature did not send the bill to him until after the session ended, preventing him from offering any amendments.
Montana’s new law prohibits downloads of TikTok in the state and would fine any “entity” — an app store or TikTok — $10,000 per day for each time someone “is offered the ability” to access the social media platform or download the app. The penalties would not apply to users.
Opponents consider the measure to be government overreach and say Montana residents could easily circumvent the ban by using a virtual private network, a service that shields internet users by encrypting their data traffic, preventing others from observing their web browsing. Montana state officials say geofencing technology is used with online sports gambling apps, which are deactivated in states where online gambling is illegal.
TikTok, which has said it has a plan to protect U.S. users, has vowed to fight back against the ban, along with small business owners who said they use the app for advertising to help grow their businesses and reach more customers.
The app’s fun, goofy videos and ease of use has made it immensely popular, and U.S. tech giants like Snapchat and Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, see it as a competitive threat.
Though many lawmakers in Montana have been enthusiastic about a ban, experts who followed the bill closely said the state will likely have to defend the legislation in court.
NetChoice, a trade group that counts Google and TikTok as its members, called the bill unconstitutional.
“This is a clear violation of the Constitution, which prohibits the government from blocking Americans from accessing constitutionally-protected speech online via websites or apps,” Carl Szabo, who serves as the group’s vice president and general counsel, said in a statement.
Officials are also bound to receive criticism from advocacy groups and TikTok users who don’t want their favorite app to be taken away. TikTok has been recruiting so-called influencers and small businesses who use the platform to push back on a ban. But others who haven’t been part of an official campaign coordinated by the company are also worried about what lawmakers are doing.
Adam Botkin, a former football player and recent graduate at the University of Montana, said it was a scary time for him as a content creator in Montana. The 22-year-old has nearly 170,000 followers on TikTok, where he mostly posts short videos of himself performing football kicks.
He says he sometimes makes “tens of thousands” of dollars per month from brands looking to market their products on his social media accounts, including Instagram, where he has roughly 44,000 followers.
Botkin says most of his income comes from Instagram, which is believed to be more lucrative for content creators. But he has to grow his following on that platform — and others — to have the same level of popularity that he does on TikTok. He says he’s trying to do that, and won’t try to circumvent the TikTok ban by using a VPN.
“You got to adapt and evolve with how things move,” Botkin said. “So, if I have to adapt and move, I’ll adapt.”
Chatter about a TikTok ban has been around since 2020, when then-President Donald Trump attempted to bar the company from operating in the U.S. through an executive order that was halted in federal courts. President Joe Biden’s administration initially shelved those plans, but more recently threatened to ban the app if the company’s Chinese owners don’t sell their stakes.
TikTok doesn’t want either option and has been clamoring to prove it’s free of any Chinese government interference. It’s also touting a data safety plan it calls “Project Texas” to assuage bipartisan concerns in Washington.
At the same time, some lawmakers have emerged as allies, arguing efforts to restrict data harvesting practices need to include all social media companies, not just one. Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky blocked a bill in March that would ban TikTok nationally, saying such a move would violate the Constitution and anger the millions of voters who use the app.
Montana’s TikTok ban also comes amid a growing movement to limit social media use among kids and teens and, in some cases, impose bans. Several bills circulating in Congress aim to get at the issue, including one that would prohibit all children under the age of 13 from using social media and require permission from a guardian for users under 18 to create an account.
Some states, like Utah and Arkansas, have already enacted laws that would hinge social media use on parental consent and similar bills are in the works in other states. Last year, California enacted a law that would require companies to beef up data protection practices for children and offer them the highest privacy settings.
Public relations company Full Coverage Communications is no longer working with singer-songwriter Jimmie Allen, sources tell Billboard. The news is the latest fallout after allegations of sexual abuse were lodged against Allen by a former day-to-day manager via a civil lawsuit filed last week.
Following the allegations, Allen was suspended by his label, BBR Music Group, which included halting radio promotion for his current single, “Be Alright.” Additionally, he was suspended by his booking agency, UTA, as well as his current management home, The Familie, which Allen joined in late 2022. CMA Fest also dropped him from the lineup.
Alleng’s accuser claims that his alleged abuse took place over 18 months from 2020 to 2022, and claims that she was fired after she complained about his behavior.
“Plaintiff expressed in words and actions that Jimmie Allen’s conduct was unwelcome, including pushing him away, sitting where he could not reach her, telling him she was uncomfortable and no, and crying uncontrollably,” her attorneys stated in the complaint filed Thursday (May 11). “However, Allen made clear that plaintiff’s job was dependent on her staying silent about his conduct.”
The artist denied all allegations of wrongdoing in a statement shared with Billboard at the time but admitted to a sexual relationship with his accuser. “I’ve worked incredibly hard to build my career, and I intend to mount a vigorous defense to her claims and take all other legal action necessary to protect my reputation,” he said.
Also on Wednesday, Allen broke his silence with a series of posts via Instagram Stories that seemingly pointed to the allegations against him. In one of those posts, Allen stated, “We Gonna Be Alright … This Too Shall Pass,” along with prayer hands and fist emojis. Notably, the post incorporated the title of “Be Alright,” which currently sits at No. 60 on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart, a three-position drop from the previous week.
In a separate Instagram Stories post, Allen shared a promotional photo of the song “God Only Knows,” recorded by the CCM sibling duo For King & Country. Allen tagged the duo in the photo and commented, “He knows!,” accompanied by the same emojis as the previous post.
Full Coverage Communications clients include Anderson .Paak, 5 Seconds of Summer, Earth Wind & Fire and Saweetie.
Stories about sexual assault allegations can be traumatizing for survivors of sexual assault. If you or anyone you know needs support, you can reach out to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN). The organization provides free, confidential support to sexual assault victims. Call RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Hotline (800.656.HOPE) or visit the anti-sexual violence organization’s website for more information.
Each year, the music industry inevitably loses some of its most influential behind-the-scenes players — corporate executives, agents, managers, songwriters, producers, engineers, lawyers, promoters, visionaries and more who shaped the business in a multitude of ways. So far in 2023, the industry has lost people like Alba “Albita” Eagan, the public and talent relations executive […]
Ineffable Records, the label division of Ineffable Music Group, has announced the appointment of Diego Herrera as director of Business Development. Herrera joins the leading independent reggae label after close to a decade at Pandora, where he played a pivotal role in music curation, specializing in pushing forward reggae, dancehall, soca, and other Caribbean genres. […]
Beatdapp co-founders and co-CEOs Morgan Hayduk and Andrew Batey were not initially focused on fighting streaming manipulation. Batey spent years in digital marketing, while Hayduk formerly worked as a lobbyist for the Canadian music industry in the area of copyright protection. At first, they teamed to build an auditing tool that would enable labels to evaluate inconsistencies between their sales reports and streaming services’ server logs. Conversations with label executives indicated that “there were pretty often material discrepancies,” Hayduk says.
As he and Batey tried to understand those inconsistencies, it became clear that streaming manipulation was causing some of them, and Beatdapp embarked on developing a tool to detect fraudulent streams — which Hayduk defines as the leveraging of “bots, stolen accounts or manipulated platform features” to steal streaming income — and prevent them from impacting payouts.
According to a recent report from the Centre National de la Musique (CNM), a government-backed organization that supports France’s music industry, in 2021, over 1 billion music streams — between 1% and 3% of all streams generated in the country that year — were fraudulent. “The methods used by fraudsters are constantly evolving and improving,” the report noted, “and fraud seems to be getting easier and easier to commit.” If that percentage was applied to IFPI’s estimate that global streaming revenue totaled $17.5 billion in 2022, fraudulent streams would amount to $350 million in potential lost income for legitimate rights holders.
Beatdapp’s software sifts through massive amounts of data from partners — including labels, distributors and streaming services — to identify and investigate suspicious patterns. In one case, it identified 10,000 accounts all playing the same 63 tracks. The pair say the company now analyzes hundreds of billions of streams, and while they declined to identify partners, they recently started working with SoundCloud and Napster, according to two sources.
“If we can make this industry less attractive for financial fraudsters, that will make a positive difference for everybody who’s working on music,” Hayduk says. “That’s what animates us.”
Why is streaming fraud an important issue?
MORGAN HAYDUK: It hurts everyone who makes a living in the music industry and, left unchecked, creates this promotional race to the bottom where everyone believes they have to cheat to succeed. In cybersecurity terms, it’s important to shrink the attack surface of the industry.
ANDREW BATEY: In an industry where it’s already hard to make something and then promote something and then get paid, you should at least get paid correctly.
How much data is Beatdapp analyzing at this point?
HAYDUK: We’re looking at about 320 billion streams now. That’s about 13 trillion individualized streaming data points when you account for all of the metadata associated with each of those streams. We expect to add data in the neighborhood of another 50 billion streams in [the second quarter] and about another 2 trillion data points on that.
BATEY: It’s not just the individual stream. You might make 12 decisions in an app, such as how you search — if you clicked on the artist first and then you looked at their song list. We’re capturing all of that, anonymized across users. All of that context helps us because if somebody consistently hits, let’s say, the exact 11 things for every song they play, that’s a pretty obvious case of fraud if they’ve done that 3,000 times in a week.
How has the industry’s perception of streaming fraud changed since you started Beatdapp?
HAYDUK: Just hearing people acknowledge the issue is probably the biggest shift. It used to be verboten to speak publicly about streaming fraud. It was all behind closed doors. But I don’t think you can fix a problem until you accept its existence. We’re starting to get there now and [are] seeing a more widespread willingness to put in place solutions.
How has your perception of the problem changed as your data set has expanded?
HAYDUK: The biggest revelation to us has to be that this is way closer to death by a thousand paper cuts than it is a top-of-the-market problem. If you asked us where most of the fraud came from 18 months ago, we probably would have pointed the finger at bigger artists because we would have thought they had the most to gain. But we were missing the point of most of this activity. It’s not about changing perception; it’s about making money. This isn’t a phenomenon that’s driven by major labels and major independent label artists or their top artists. The overwhelming majority, like upwards of 80% of what we see is fraud, is coming from — call it non-music content. It’s not being released for popular consumption or because these are artists who are trying to get noticed. These are releases that have no commercial purpose except as [instruments of] fraud.
BATEY: When we first started, we genuinely thought fraud would be 1% to 3%. Now we think it’s closer to 10% [though some of this is caught]. Also we would have guessed that most of the fraud would occur on the platforms where people were — Spotify, Apple, YouTube. But because it’s a lot of financially motivated fraud, what we actually see is that it’s easier for the fraudsters to attack all the mid- and long-tail [digital service providers] as well, where they’re less likely to get caught and they’ll get a similar or better per-stream payout. Why not target all of these smaller DSPs with zero protections in place and get paid across all of them?
France’s CNM recently came to the conclusion that fraud is getting easier to commit.
BATEY: I 100% agree with that. There are so many ways to exploit platforms. If your job is to deliver the best user experience possible, it often means making it easy for them to access that content and creating really cool ways for them to experience or engage with that content. [When that happens,] there are more ways to manipulate that content for the purpose of exploiting it for a payout.
HAYDUK: And the tools that you need to commit fraud effectively and at scale are easier to access now than ever before. The tools that facilitate fraud in e-commerce or ticketing or financial services are also repackaged and repurposed to commit streaming fraud. You can generate fully automated online bot farms using cloud computing in a way you couldn’t 10 years ago.
How do you avoid generating false positives when you’re hunting for fraud?
HAYDUK: We know that a false positive is worth considerably more in the loss column than a false negative, so we adjust our models to account for the fact that they need to be conservative in the right ways.
BATEY: You can’t get it wrong. If you miss a fraudster, it’s OK. We hope we catch them later. If we call something fraud that’s not, that’s way worse.
Some have suggested that a user-centric payout system might mitigate fraud.
HAYDUK: Our view is that it’s not going to make that big a difference. It’ll change the tactics, but it won’t change the motivation. It’s a big pot of money on the internet, and generally speaking, the DSPs are still fairly soft targets. A different payout structure will just change the tactics that fraudsters use to aggregate money and divert it their way. Obviously, there’s a whole different case for the merits of payout systems if you’re an artist or you’re a label.
There’s a lot of industry concern about artificial intelligence right now. To what extent does AI make it even easier to commit these types of fraudulent activities?
HAYDUK: It’s a tool. We work for some good AI companies that care about not being a tool for fraudsters. That said, the new models are incredibly powerful, and you can create content at scale. There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle when some of these tools emerge. The tougher we make it to get away with fraud, the less valuable the tool becomes in the hands of someone who’s wielding it for a bad purpose.
How incentivized are DSPs to care about fraud?
HAYDUK: Their biggest partners care, especially in light of what we said earlier: Market share shifts matter to the partners and, therefore, it matters to the DSPs. I think consumers also care because bad recommendations on the DSP side make for bad user experience. And given that every platform is offering roughly the same catalog to the consumer, if your recommendations are substandard, that makes consumers more inclined to choose your competitor.
Some music industry executives worry that public discussions of fraud undermine user confidence.
HAYDUK: How many times a week does your bank email you about the extra efforts they’re taking to protect you from fraud in the financial sector? It doesn’t make me want to boycott my bank when they tell me that. Fans probably want to hear that, as an industry, we’re taking steps so that the artists they care about are paid correctly.
BATEY: If you’re the consumer, your account was hijacked, and now you’re getting a bunch of recommended songs that don’t make any sense, you’re not blaming the fraudster — you’re blaming the platform.
What is your dream scenario for fraud mitigation in the industry?
HAYDUK: Our view is there are some things you can’t do in a vacuum. DSP A can’t look at the data from DSP B to help inform its own detection models. It’s way too competitive between the platforms to give up the level of data required to do fraud detection at the highest levels. Having a platform in the middle acting as Switzerland, working for the collective benefit of everyone without minimizing the level of competitiveness between the platforms, is the right approach. And it’s also an approach that we’ve seen play out in other verticals with similar dynamics.