Business
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02/11/2025
Check out all the answers from this year’s honorees, including Usher, WNBA star Angel Reese and football legend Shannon Sharpe.
02/11/2025
South by Southwest has announced new keynotes and its latest round of featured speakers for its 39th edition, taking place March 7-15 across Austin.
Newly announced keynotes include Issa Rae, the creative force behind HBO’s Insecure; Meredith Whittaker, president of Signal; and Ben Lamm, CEO of Colossal Biosciences, who’ll be joined by actor Joe Manganiello to discuss advancements in… cloning. They join previously announced keynotes such as Creedence Clearwater Revival icon John Fogerty, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber, and IBM chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna.
The featured speakers lineup includes the cast and creators of HBO’s The Last of Us, game designer Hideo Kojima, Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe, comedian and podcaster Conan O’Brien, actor and musician Kevin Bacon, and Something Corporate singer-songwriter Andrew McMahon. Additional speakers include comedian Taylor Tomlinson food critic Keith Lee and social health expert Kasley Killam.
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This new slate of speakers complements SXSW’s rounds of announcements, which included Donald Passman, Ghazi, Dr. Peter Attia, Johanna Faries, Douglas Rushkoff, and more.
Highlighted sessions include “Colossal: Technology Company Turning Science Fiction to Science Fact,” where Lamm and Manganiello will explore advancements in gene editing and cloning. “A Conversation with Issa Rae” will cover her career and media company, HOORAE, while “A Conversation About Online Security and Confidentiality” will see Whittaker discussing privacy with Guy Kawasaki. Other panels include “Balloonerism – A Film Based on the Album by Mac Miller,” a discussion on a new film inspired by the late artist’s work, and “Breaking Barriers by Turning Prisoners into Firefighters,” focusing on rehabilitation through firefighting programs.
Entertainment-focused chats will include “Fans Over Fees,” where McMahon will address ticket scalping and fair access to live events; “Claiming the Future of Entertainment,” where O’Brien and gaming exec Johanna Faries will discuss gaming’s influence on media; and “DEATH STRANDING 2: ON THE BEACH,” where Kojima will reveal details about the video game.
Other notable discussions include “Fireside with Arm CEO Rene Haas,” covering AI’s impact on technology, and “Funny AF Comedy Showrunners,” where Universal Television’s top creators will share insights into comedy production. Business-oriented panels include “How America’s 33M Small Businesses Can Grow and Prosper,” featuring Mark Cuban; and “How Technology Is Transforming Urban Spaces,” examining AI’s role in city infrastructure.
Additional sessions will feature discussions on AI in media with Paramount CTO Phil Wiser, immersive storytelling with ILM Immersive, and influencer entrepreneurship with Keith Lee and Jennifer Quigley-Jones.
“Every year, SXSW assembles a group of speakers who are doing extraordinary and often surprising things, such as breaking boundaries in storytelling and representation, advocating for secure communication, and bringing back the woolly mammoth,” said Hugh Forrest, president and chief programming officer of SXSW. “Issa Rae, Meredith Whittaker, Ben Lamm, and Joe Manganiello make up a stellar group of changemakers who are a perfect fit for the SXSW community.”
SXSW will take place from March 7-15 in Austin, Texas, with full details regarding their newly-announced speakers and sessions available via their website.
Ronald Day, president of entertainment and chief content officer at NBCUniversal Telemundo Enterprises, is stepping down from his position, the company announced. His departure, scheduled for this Thursday (Feb. 13), follows a recent contract renewal and comes at a time when Telemundo is experiencing unprecedented success in the ratings.
Day’s resignation coincides with Telemundo’s remarkable achievement of leading the prime time slot among Spanish-language networks in the U.S., sparking industry speculation about the timing and reasons behind this decision. “Today, at the peak of this great success, I am making another equally significant decision,” Day, who has been at the helm of the company for seven years, also announced on social media on Monday (Feb. 10).
In his post on Instagram, Day revealed his future plans, which include writing a book and embarking on a speaking tour across universities in the U.S., Latin America, and Spain. “[It] will bring me closer to my purpose: to inspire and train a new generation of executives and entrepreneurs ready to transform history, just as I can proudly say I did as I close this cycle,” he wrote.
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Day added, “Thanks to a brilliant team of creatives and leaders that I hold close to my heart, and to a Hispanic audience that has been key in my career as an immigrant in the U.S.”
Since joining Telemundo in 2018, Day has been instrumental in defining the network’s content direction. “A media executive with more than three decades of experience in Hispanic entertainment, he led the development and production of multiple seasons of our successful reality shows La Casa de los Famosos, Los 50, Exatlón, and Top Chef VIP, as well as our highly rated live specials including the Billboard Latin Music Awards and Miss Universe,” Luis Fernández, chairman of NBCUniversal Telemundo Enterprises, said in a statement shared with Billboard. “Most recently, he helped me reorganize Telemundo Studios and position them for future growth under Javier Pons leadership.”
Last June, Day was Billboard Español‘s executive of the month. In its second annual edition, Billboard‘s Latin Women in Music 2024 significantly boosted its viewership on Telemundo, shattering previous records. The event witnessed a staggering 541% increase in audience interactions across TV, digital platforms, Peacock, and social media compared to the 2023 show. The gala, which honored stars such as Karol G and Gloria Estefan, not only attracted 109.6 million minutes of video views — a 20% increase from 2023 — but also dominated its prime time slot, outperforming Univision by significant margins in key demographic groups.
Read his full Instagram statement here.
It’s an early evening in late September, and San Francisco is gleaming. The back patio at EMPIRE’s recording studios near the city’s Mission District is all white marble, reflecting the last rays of the setting sun as dozens of YouTube executives mill about, holding mixed drinks and picking at passed trays of beef skewers, falafel, lamb dumplings, and ham and chicken croquettes. At the moment, the companies’ top executives — EMPIRE founder and CEO Ghazi, COO Nima Etminan and president Tina Davis, as well as YouTube global head of music Lyor Cohen, among others — are sequestered in the studio’s live room for a quarterly business review, discussing the platform’s new tools, the label’s upcoming projects and how the two can best work together. A cake is adorned with YouTube’s latest milestone: 100 million members of its music subscription service.
Inside, the aesthetic is flipped: Black walls, dark wood floors and a black marble bar set the tone, while a projection screen in the main lounge area shows photos of Nigerian superstar and recent EMPIRE signee Tiwa Savage, who is in town finishing her new album. As Ghazi, Cohen and the others wrap their meeting and begin to filter into the party, everyone is ushered inside to hear her play some of her new music.
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“This is my first project at EMPIRE, and it’s really emotional for me because I’ve never had a label be this invested; most labels are not in the studio with you from morning until night,” Savage says before introducing her first single from the album, “Forgiveness,” which she will release a couple of weeks later. “They made me feel so welcome. I’ve been signed several times, but I’ve never been in a situation where it felt like home.”
The next day, at a barbecue restaurant near the studio, Ghazi is reflecting on the event — and what the connection with YouTube’s Cohen means to him. “I used an analogy with Lyor: ‘This is not a full-circle moment; this is the Olympic rings of full-circle moments,’ ” he says. “This brings so many circles of my life into place. I started as an engineer; I’m in a state-of-the-art studio that I could only dream about that I built with my bare hands. I used to listen to Run-D.M.C. — he found Run-D.M.C. The first tape I ever bought was Raising Hell — now I’m raising hell in the music business.” He laughs. “I prefer to call it ‘raising angels,’ but it’s cool. And then you have a giant like him in the record business that people used to blueprint their careers after, and now he’s telling me that he’s proud of the success I’ve had and that he watched me build a legacy. That’s validation.”
For Ghazi, 48, validation has seemingly been everywhere of late. The company that he founded in 2010 as a digital distributor for his friends in the Bay Area hip-hop scene has grown into one of the most formidable and powerful companies in the global music business. It has a record label, publishing and content divisions, a merchandise operation and 250 employees around the world, with a presence on six continents and deep connections to the local culture, politics and sports, including the Golden State Warriors and the San Francisco 49ers.
And now, as EMPIRE turns 15, it’s coming off its best year yet: For 19 nonconsecutive weeks, spanning from mid-July to the end of November, EMPIRE artist Shaboozey held the top slot on the Billboard Hot 100 with “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” tying the record for the chart’s longest-running No. 1 — an enviable achievement for any label, but particularly for an independent without any outside investment or corporate overlords. Shaboozey landed five nominations at the 2025 Grammy Awards, including best new artist and song of the year, redefining what is possible for an indie act and company in the modern music business.
Even more notably, that success arrived during a year when all three major labels experienced a painful and layoff-heavy molting process, reorganizing themselves to emphasize speed, technology, artist services and distribution — or, to put it another way, to try to look a lot more like EMPIRE. (“I think the battleship has been observing the speedboat for quite some time,” Ghazi says.) Amid those changes in the business, a new school of thought has emerged: that success is often found in cultural niches that gain mainstream acceptance from the bottom up, not the top down. Ghazi embodies that change: He may not have the mainstream name recognition of his peers in New York or L.A., but in his force of personality — humble yet emphatic, as many successful founders are — and his tireless, globe-trotting pace, he fits right in among the elite movers and shakers of the business.
“This industry used to be full of super-colorful entrepreneurs that were focused on their art, and when you talked to them, they had a certain excitement and shine in their eyes. Unfortunately, there’s not that many of them [left],” Cohen says about Ghazi. “I would call him one of the few. A person that is committed to excellence, cares about the details, shows up, has continuity and he’s positive and enthusiastic.”
Hermès coat and shirt
Austin Hargrave
There’s another reason why the YouTube party held such significance for Ghazi: The video streaming service is another company born, bred and based in the Bay Area that grew into a music industry behemoth after being built on tech foundations. Ghazi worked in Silicon Valley, including at an ad-supported video streaming service half a decade before YouTube, prior to dedicating his life to music, first as a recording engineer and then at digital distributor Ingrooves. He then founded EMPIRE — and sees his company as part of that lineage. “I’ve never met a music exec that has such a grip on the three verticals — creative, business and technology — and is fluent in all of it and active in all of it,” says Peter Kadin, a major-label veteran who is now executive vp of marketing at EMPIRE. “Someone who can go from meeting with an engineering team about building out the future of our systems, to sitting with finance and going through our deal structures with all the major DSPs [digital service providers], to going to the studio at night and mixing a Money Man album. There is no other executive doing that.”
Ghazi’s tech background and San Francisco’s reputation as the center of the tech industry are among the many reasons why he has always maintained that EMPIRE will never leave the Bay. The area has been part of him since he grew up in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill neighborhood, during his days at San Francisco State, throughout his time in the trenches of the local hip-hop scene and even now, when he has the ear of the new mayor of San Francisco, Daniel Lurie, whom he’s advising on cultural matters, and is working hand in hand with the NBA and the Golden State Warriors to produce events and release projects surrounding the upcoming NBA All-Star Weekend, which will be held in the Bay Area in February for the first time in 25 years.
But for a city that has had its share of big music moments and in which several major companies got their start, San Francisco’s music, and music tech, scenes have receded over the last two decades, with many companies lured away by the brighter lights and easier connections that exist in New York or Los Angeles. It’s a fate Ghazi is determined to avoid for EMPIRE — and a trend he’s actively working to reverse.
Ghazi likes to tell a story about when he was in his 20s in the early 2000s and mixed The Game’s first mixtape at San Francisco’s Hyde Street Studios. The project, which came out in 2004, ultimately helped Game get signed to Dr. Dre’s Aftermath Records, and when Dre and one of his executives heard the tape, they wondered who had mixed it because it sounded much more professional than the typical lo-fi promotional tapes making the rounds among underground hip-hop heads at the time. The guys invited Ghazi down to L.A. and encouraged him to move to the city and start working with them.
“I was flattered by it, but I was also furious — mad that I had to leave the Bay to build a music career,” he recalls. “I remember driving past the Capitol Tower like, people drive past this building and think, ‘I’m going to work there one day.’ And we don’t have that in the Bay. And I was like, ‘That sucks! I’m going to figure this s–t out!’
“It took me a long time — a really long time — but I figured it out.”
Prada coat, shirt, pants and shoes.
Austin Hargrave
“This might be the most mellow day I’ve had in three months.”
A few weeks later, Ghazi is driving through the streets of San Francisco, giving the signature tour of the city that he offers to anyone new in town — or anyone who may have only heard of its downtown blight and violence as depicted by the national news. It’s another beautiful fall day in the Bay, the first vintage weather after an extended heat wave, and he has cleared his schedule for the afternoon. For the next four hours, he unspools the history of the city neighborhood by neighborhood, street by street.
From the EMPIRE office in the Financial District, he drives into Chinatown, then to the Marina District and the picturesque Palace of Fine Arts. After that it’s into the Presidio, where Lucasfilm is headquartered, then over the Golden Gate Bridge into Sausalito, stopping at an overlook for a view of the city. Then it’s back across the bridge into San Francisco, along Baker Beach into Sea Cliff and then Richmond District, the neighborhood where Ghazi lived in a 350-square-foot apartment when he was first dreaming up what would become EMPIRE. (“I had like four f–king jobs,” he says. “Some of the happiest times of my life, though. Some of the most stressful, but some of the happiest.”)
Along the way — passing through Lands End lookout point, Golden Gate Park, the Haight-Ashbury district and Billionaires’ Row, down the famously crooked Lombard Street and into the Mission — he calls out the landmarks of his life: the apartment where he was born, his first recording studio, the place he got his first boba milk tea, the theater where he used to watch movies for two dollars, the Haight storefront where he once co-owned a clothing store, the place where he and Etminan built the wiring for the first EMPIRE office through a hole in the wall. After a few hours, he parks near the water and gets out of the car to take it all in.
“They say San Francisco’s a doom loop,” he says, looking across McCovey Cove into Oracle Park, home of the San Francisco Giants, in the late-afternoon sun. “This look like a doom loop to you?”
Louis Vuitton sunglasses and jacket
Austin Hargrave
San Francisco is personal to Ghazi in a way that goes deeper than the typical nostalgia people feel for home. And the recent right-wing news coverage by 24/7 cable networks — which has portrayed the city as crime-ridden and drug-addled, overrun by a persistent homelessness problem that the city has not been able to handle — that has proliferated in recent years has spurred him and other music leaders in the city into action.
“San Francisco had such a heyday up until the pandemic, and it’s been really hard to watch the world s–t on our city,” says Bryan Duquette, founder of Another Planet Management and a member of the core executive team at Another Planet Entertainment, the San Francisco-based independent promoter that puts on the Outside Lands music festival and operates Bay Area venues including Berkeley’s Greek Theatre and San Francisco’s Bill Graham Civic Auditorium. Duquette, who has lived in the Bay for over 20 years, met Ghazi in 2023 and found a kindred spirit determined to rectify the negative perceptions held by outsiders. Last year, Another Planet teamed with Ghazi, EMPIRE and artist management company Brilliant Corners to assemble 100 members of the Bay Area music scene to meet with Lurie, then a mayoral candidate, to discuss his plan to reinvest in the artistic community. “Daniel really was trying to get to the people who were creating culture and helping the city become, again, what it was seen as globally,” Duquette says. “And Ghazi is a really big piece of that.”
Lurie’s outreach ultimately won him much of the creative community’s support, and in turn helped win him the election; he was sworn in as the 46th mayor of San Francisco in January. “The arts and culture have always defined us, and I firmly believe that EMPIRE and Ghazi are going to be part of the revitalization of our city,” Lurie says. “He knows what’s going on in the music world better than just about anybody, and I’ll be listening carefully to his guidance and his counsel.”
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie and Ghazi in 2025.
Courtesy of EMPIRE
EMPIRE’s fierce independence, too, is an expression of the Bay’s ethos. “He’s a representative of the independent grind and the culture here; that’s something that everyone in the Bay can resonate with, just coming from the ground up and being the underdog,” says P-Lo, the Bay Area rapper who has been with EMPIRE since 2017. (P-Lo is spearheading a project with the Golden State Warriors’ content division, Golden State Entertainment, that will be released ahead of NBA All-Star Week and distributed by EMPIRE and will feature more than a dozen Bay Area artists.)
But that independence, and particularly the eye-opening success that EMPIRE has experienced over the past few years, has also brought scrutiny — and tests of Ghazi’s commitment, particularly during a time of intense consolidation in the music business. When a media report circulated in November 2023 positing that LionTree was lining up a $1.5 billion bid to buy EMPIRE — “Most believe Ghazi is not a seller, but big checks have changed other people’s minds,” the report needled — Ghazi was furious and sent a staffwide email emphatically denying it, according to multiple employees. A week after EMPIRE’s YouTube event, he was even more publicly defiant, insisting while onstage in October at the industry conference Trapital Summit in Los Angeles: “I’m not for sale. Period. I am dead serious. I am living my purpose. There’s no price on that.”
It’s a frustrating topic for Ghazi, not least because it implies a fundamental misunderstanding of who he is and why he does what he does. “You don’t understand — I just don’t care about money,” he says. “It’s not my motivation.” Instead he talks about the principles instilled in him by his father, a Palestinian refugee who brought his family to America to put them in a position to control their own paths if they were willing to work for it. “I don’t see myself ever working for somebody else,” Ghazi continues. “I’d rather retire. There’s no price for my autonomy. It’s the greatest gift to a leader.”
Still, his insistence on sole ownership — and the sheer force of personality that he exudes in binding the company together — has left enough of an opening for industry analysts to wonder about succession planning, about what might happen to the company when, or if, Ghazi decides to hang it up. He freely admits he won’t stick around as a hands-on CEO forever, but also that EMPIRE is about legacy for him and that he values legacy and autonomy — the freedom to chart his destiny — more than anything else. In that sense, he’ll never truly leave EMPIRE, even as the rumor mill keeps churning. “I always admired athletes who retired when they were on top. I want to be at the top of my executive game when I quit,” he says. “I don’t want to be the guy who hung on for too long. I’m already the owner, so I could still hang around as a chairman, but I don’t need to hang around as the guy running s–t day to day.”
Austin Hargrave
But that’s not happening anytime soon. In the past six months alone, EMPIRE has expanded into Australia, East Asia and South Africa and completed the acquisition of Top Drawer Merch to bring another monetization vertical into the fold for its artists. Ghazi is engaged in the industrywide debates surrounding superfandom revenue and is constantly seeking new opportunities; the two weeks prior to this driving tour, he had been in Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing, Cambodia, Singapore, Bali, San Francisco, Paris, Marrakesh, Singapore again, Seoul again, Las Vegas, Seattle and back to San Francisco: taking label meetings, shooting music videos, meeting with DSP partners, attending conferences and awards shows and directing work on the EMPIRE studios here, with the goal of expanding the company’s reach step by step — taking the stairs rather than the elevator, as he puts it.
“The goal is to be in all the places that make sense for us culturally,” he says. “Is the music interesting? Is the culture interesting? Holistically, how does it play with our DNA? What’s the cost of acquisition and retention? Do I like the music here? But the initial fuel is the passion; then, from there, start to figure it out.”
Joice Street is mobbed. The Nob Hill alley, around the corner from the Bruce Lee mural that adorns the wall next to the Chinese Historical Society of America Museum, is the location this afternoon for P-Lo’s “Player’s Holiday ’25” video shoot, and dozens of people, including some of the Bay’s biggest rappers — Saweetie, G-Eazy and Larry June among them — are filming on a basketball court on the roof of a building overlooking the city. Ghazi is there, not just because EMPIRE is distributing the song, which will appear on P-Lo’s album with Golden State Entertainment, but because he’s scheduled to make a cameo in the video.
Ghazi spends more than an hour on the rooftop, where he seemingly knows everyone — and everyone wants a minute of his time. But soon he heads back to the studio to return to work. The vibe there is low-key, but a typical cross section of artists and creatives are at work: Nai Barghouti, an Israeli-born Palestinian singer, flautist and composer, is in Studio C, working on songs for her new album before heading back out on tour; two producers from dance label dirtybird, which EMPIRE acquired in 2022, are in the live room, “ideating the next big hit of 2025”; a regional Mexican group sits on the patio outside, figuring out songs on a guitar; YS Baby from EMPIRE-owned viral content aggregator HoodClips (which has over 11 million followers) is talking about the podcasts he has lined up. Later, Japanese rapper-singer Yuki Chiba — whose 2024 collaboration with Megan Thee Stallion, “Mamushi,” reached No. 36 on the Hot 100 — takes over Studio A, where he plays a slew of songs slated for upcoming projects and discusses rollout plans.
EMPIRE may have gotten its start in Bay Area hip-hop and made waves on the front lines of West African Afrobeats, but these days it embodies the global outlook that Ghazi always envisioned; Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” after all, is a country crossover hit out of Nashville that reached No. 1 in 10 countries. EMPIRE partnered with Nashville-based indie promotion company Magnolia Music to handle its country radio campaign, and from there the single branched out to other formats, ultimately becoming the first song in history to go top 10 on four different Billboard airplay charts: country, top 40, adult top 40 and rhythmic. And Ghazi sees himself as a global citizen helping people around the world — “creating microeconomies” within the territories EMPIRE operates, he says — not just within the confines of the Bay Area.
Shaboozey and Ghazi at the 2024 CMA After Party.
Becca Mitchell
He is also the highest-profile Palestinian executive in the music business and has openly condemned the humanitarian crisis that has erupted during Israel’s war in Gaza. His Instagram profile picture is the Palestinian flag; he regularly shares videos and photos decrying the violence against civilians; he helped facilitate the remix to Macklemore’s track dedicated to Palestine, “Hind’s Hall,” and went to Seattle in October to support the rapper at a Palestinian benefit concert, despite Macklemore not being an EMPIRE artist. He stresses that he does this on a personal level, explicitly not to politicize the company. When asked if he feels a responsibility of sorts, given his profile, to help raise awareness about that humanitarian crisis, he simply says, “I feel like I want to be proud of the man in the mirror.” (“He’s Palestinian and I’m Israeli; we shared our great pain and anxiety over what’s happening in the Middle East,” says Cohen, who also calls Ghazi “a genuinely good guy.”)
But despite its global activities, EMPIRE has stayed focused on its local roots — and is continuing to strengthen them, too. In 2020, it started putting on the cultural festival 415 Day (which takes its name from a San Francisco area code) and has gotten further into live events through its deepening relationship with Another Planet. The San Francisco studio has become not just the creative center of EMPIRE’s operations but also an event venue for the city’s music and civic communities. And in a massive move in January, EMPIRE purchased the 100,000-square-foot historic Financial District building One Montgomery, built in 1908, for $24.5 million, according to The San Francisco Business Times; Ghazi plans to move the company headquarters there after renovating it. Eventually, One Montgomery could become the San Francisco version of the Capitol Tower that Ghazi envisioned all those years ago.
“There have been so many times that people have told him he couldn’t do something, and then he was able to do it, that it gave him all the fire and was the catalyst for him to be the person he is today,” says Moody Jones, GM of EMPIRE Dance, who has been with the company since 2018. “They told him he was crazy to have a music company in San Francisco; that he would never compete with a major; that he would never get out of hip-hop; that he would never open up a studio. They told him San Francisco would never be cool again. And every single time he was able to show them that, ‘No, I’m right.’ ”
That all builds into the larger cultural role Ghazi is playing in his city and beyond. Lurie just announced the inaugural San Francisco Music Week, a celebration of the city’s local music industry culminating in an industry summit with a keynote conversation with Ghazi. And while he says he’s not interested in San Francisco politics, he wants to be consulted from an advisory perspective on cultural events in the city and try to bring in more events beyond just music — Art Basel San Francisco is one that he has begun to advise on, though that project is currently on pause. He has worked with the city and the NBA on a slew of events around NBA All-Star Week and discusses the Super Bowl and World Cup in 2026 as further opportunities to showcase all that San Francisco has to offer. “For events like the NBA All-Star Game, Super Bowl LX, the World Cup, we get to show off all the greatness here, and Ghazi and EMPIRE and the artists they represent are part and parcel to what makes San Francisco so great,” Lurie says. “We need more Ghazis.”
Ahead of All-Star Week, he has made a series of moves and partnerships with the NBA and the Golden State Warriors, including with the game NBA 2K25, with which EMPIRE partnered for a first-of-its-kind deal that includes a limited-edition vinyl box set with 13 tracks by EMPIRE artists; EMPIRE artists on the game soundtrack; and Ghazi and some of EMPIRE’s artists scanned into the game itself. At the studio in September, he sat for an interview with NBA 2KTV host Alexis Morgan — who, to Ghazi’s delight, is also from the Bay Area — that will be part of NBA 2K25’s bonus features.
Ghazi (right) with NBA 2KTV’s Alexis Morgan.
Courtesy of 2K
But ultimately, it is all about the music. Shaboozey’s career is now in a superstar arc, and “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” will soon become EMPIRE’s fifth record with more than 10 million equivalent units in the United States according to Luminate, with over 1 billion on-demand streams. A few years ago, EMPIRE was flying largely under the radar, but Ghazi now has it at the top of its game, with a track record that speaks volumes in an industry based just as much on history as on what’s coming next.
“You always learn, all the time; you’re always adapting to what’s going on around you,” he says. “And sometimes you can’t believe how far you’ve come. But that only inspires you to go further.”
This story appears in the Feb. 8, 2025, issue of Billboard.
It’s an early evening in late September, and San Francisco is gleaming. The back patio at EMPIRE’s recording studios near the city’s Mission District is all white marble, reflecting the last rays of the setting sun as dozens of YouTube executives mill about, holding mixed drinks and picking at passed trays of beef skewers, falafel, […]
Live Nation has inked a first of its kind sponsorship with Athletic Brewing Company, America’s largest non-alcoholic brewer, for the concert promoter’s large portfolio of venues and marquee festivals including BottleRock in Napa, California and the famed Bonnaroo festival in Manchester, Tenn.
Under the terms of the three-year agreement, Athletic Brewing will serve as the official non-alcoholic beer for the company’s more than 100 venues, including the Wiltern in Los Angeles, the Paramount in Brooklyn and the Gorge Amphitheater, along with a handful of Live Nation festivals
“It’s a new category for beer — there’s domestic, import, craft and now you’ve got non-alcoholic. Our customers want that option and we know plenty of our fans will be choosing something in the non-alcoholic space, which is why we did this deal,” said Jon Landa, svp of national sales at Live Nation. “We’re seeing it across our markets, with health conscious people trying to enjoy other options. It doesn’t mean that it’s all they’re drinking, but it gives those fans a choice at a show or a festival, depending on how they want to start or finish their day.”
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Alcohol sales have slowed in recent years as Generation Z (those born between 1997 and 2012) turns 21 and begins attending concerts — club owner David Slutes with Congress Club in Tuscon, Arizona, told Billboard in 2023 that concerts catering to a younger Gen Z audience saw a 25% dip in alcohol sales compared to those targeting older demographics. The decline — blamed in part on the growing prevalence of cannabis edible products and healthier attitudes about mental and physical well-being — could have a significant impact on a concert venue’s revenue stream.
Since late 2023, Live Nation has worked to diversify the revenue it generates at its bars and restaurants by introducing non-alcoholic options like mocktails. By partnering with the eight-year-old Athletic Brewing Company, Live Nation is teaming up with the country’s fastest-growing non-alcoholic beer maker. Since opening its first brewery in 2018, Athletic has grown to become the 10th largest U.S. craft brewery and 20th largest overall U.S. brewing company, despite only offering nonalcoholic options, according to rankings by the Brewers Association. Athletic holds over 19% market share within nonalcoholic beer and is driving 32% of total nonalcoholic beer category growth, according to NielsenIQ data.
A recent study by Live Nation found that 70% of live music fans saying they want more beverage options at concerts. As part of the agreement, legal drinking age music fans can purchase one of four of Athletic’s most popular brews — Run Wild IPA, Upside Dawn Golden, Free Wave Hazy IPA, and Athletic Lite, with selections varying by venue. While Athletic does offer draft beer options in 30 states, the Live Nation partnership applies only to canned beer drinks.
“There’s a big time intersection between the fan of live music and the fan of Athletic and NA beer,” said Andrew Katz, chief marketing officer at Athletic Brewing Company. “It’s a shared love of live events, a shared love of well being and a shared love of beer. You put those three things together, and it just made sense for us to work together and try and get something done together.”
Don Henley and his longtime manager Irving Azoff are being sued by one of the men who was criminally charged — and later vindicated — for allegedly attempting to sell handwritten lyrics connected to the Eagles‘ 1976 album Hotel California, claiming they and their attorneys engaged in a “malicious prosecution” that harmed his reputation and caused him financial losses and emotional distress.
The complaint, filed in New York state court on Thursday (Feb. 6), was filed against Henley, Azoff and the firms that represented them in their case: Manatt, Phelps & Phillips and Loeb & Loeb. In it, Horowitz claims the parties falsely alleged that he and his two co-defendants in the criminal case “knew or had reason to believe” that the lyric sheets “had been unlawfully obtained” and nonetheless attempted to profit off of them via an online auction. However, Horowitz claims the men and their attorneys knew all along that the notes had been acquired through legal means in the first place.
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Horowitz, a rare book dealer, and his co-defendants — Rock & Roll Hall of Fame curator Craig Inciardi and memorabilia auctioneer Edward Kosinski — were criminally charged in 2022 over an alleged conspiracy to resell the lyrics that had been handwritten by Henley while working on the Eagles’ iconic Hotel California album. At the time, prosecutors had accused the three men of hiding the fact that the documents had been stolen from Henley’s home by Ed Sanders, a journalist hired by Henley and Azoff to write a never-published book on the Eagles in the late 1970s.
But in a stunning turnaround in March 2024, Manhattan prosecutors dropped the case after Henley produced new evidence previously withheld under attorney-client privilege that cast doubt on his and Azoff’s allegations. The judge in the case subsequently dismissed the charges and chastised Henley, Azoff and their attorneys for “obfuscat[ing] and hid[ing] information that they believed would be damaging to their position that the lyric sheets were stolen.”
According to Horowitz’s attorney Caitlin Robin, the evidence cited by prosecutors and the judge in dropping the charges — a series of emails between Henley, Azoff and their attorneys — proves they were aware that Sanders had legally obtained the lyric sheets in the course of writing the never-published Eagles book. Nonetheless, she alleges they “purposefully withheld any disclosure thereof because they knew it would exculpate Plaintiff GLENN HOROWITZ and essentially destroy the fraudulent allegations they made about him.”
As a result of his “unjust prosecution,” Horowitz claims he “was deprived of his liberty and suffered humiliation, defamation, media harassment, diminished reputation, loss of business and/or loss of wages amounting in more than ten million dollars ($10,000,000.00), in addition to mental anguish, indignity, frustration and financial loss.” The complaint further alleges that Horowitz’s wife Tracey (who is listed as a co-plaintiff) also “suffered humiliation, defamation, media harassment, diminished reputation, and mental and emotional anguish” as a result of her husband’s prosecution.
In a statement sent to Billboard, Henley and Azoff’s attorney Dan Petrocelli said, “Don Henley was a witness and a victim in a criminal trial brought by the Manhattan District Attorney after a formal indictment of Glenn Horowitz by a New York grand jury. The indictment highlighted the dark underbelly of the memorabilia business that exploited the brazen, unauthorized taking and selling of Mr. Henley’s handwritten lyrics. The only malicious prosecution involved here is the filing of this case by Mr. Horowitz.”
The Horowitzes are asking for damages “in excess of the jurisdictional limits of all the lower Courts of the State of New York.”
Manatt, Phelps & Phillips and Loeb & Loeb did not immediately respond to Billboard‘s requests for comment.
Horst Weidenmueller, the founder of label and music company !K7, has died at age 60.
A statement from !K7 provided to Billboard says his death followed “a serious illness” but did not elaborate on the specifics.
Born in the Black Forest region of Germany, Weidenmueller moved to Berlin and founded !K7 in 1985, when he was 21 years old. !K7 began as a music-video production company, later launching the DJ-Kicks mix series that would go on to become an influential and globally known platform for a wide range of DJs and producers.
!K7 began releasing artist albums in 1996, putting forth music from across the wide electronic spectrum. The company now has offices in Berlin, London and New York, with its label group including the in-house labels !K7, AUS, 7K!, Soul Bank and Strut Records.
In 2024, Weidenmueller was recognized with the prestigious IMPALA Outstanding Contribution Award for his influential work in the European independent music sector, an award that coincided with the 40th anniversary of !K7 Music.
The award acknowledged Weidenmüller’s advocacy for sustainability and inclusion in the music industry. As a long-time IMPALA board member and the founder of its Sustainability Task Force, he spearheaded the development of a bespoke carbon calculator for labels, in partnership with Julie’s Bicycle, Merlin and Murmur. He also helped establish IMPALA’s Business Case for Sustainability, emphasizing the financial benefits of environmentally conscious practices.
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The statement from !K7 continues that “beyond his role at !K7, Horst was a passionate advocate for the independent music community. As a long-standing board member of Merlin and IMPALA Independent Music Companies Association, he played a vital role in strengthening and championing the independent sector on a global scale. His contributions have left a lasting impact on the industry and will not be forgotten.“Our thoughts are with his family, friends, and everyone whose lives he touched. We will honour his memory by carrying forward the work and values he instilled in us. !K7 remains committed to continuing his vision with the same passion and integrity that he embodied.”
The company’s statement adds, “We kindly ask to respect his family’s privacy at this time.”
Last October, Tyler Brown and Harold Serero launched the independent label Heatwave Records. A few short months later, the company accounted for three of the top five records on Spotify in Nigeria for part of January: Fido’s “Joy Is Coming” and “Awolowo,” along with Kvng Vinci and Zerrdyl’s “Hausapiano” remix.
In the past, ambitious executives might have stayed inside a major label or management company for most of their careers. (Brown used to work as managing director of Syco Music, while Serero was an A&R executive at Ultra Music Publishing.) But more and more, they’re stepping out to start their own operations, pursuing a path that offers not just more freedom, but more potential upside if they catch a hit.
Still, running a record label is not easy, and all these fledgling operations would once have turned to more traditional record companies for the resources, back-end infrastructure, and promotional support that are required for success. These days, however, many of them have decided that partnering with a major is no longer necessary. And recently, a number of them are turning to a relative newcomer, the distribution company Too Lost, for those services.
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“We’ve beaten major labels to deals because of how quickly we move once we’ve discovered something,” Heatwave’s Brown says. “We aim to get that deal done within 24 hours. Too Lost backs us charging after these records and supports us fully — not only from an administrative point of view, but financially and in terms of manpower.”
Co-founded by Greg Hirschhorn, 26, Bjarki Larusson, 29, and Alex Silverstein, 27, Too Lost has grown rapidly since launching publicly at the end of 2020. More than 300,000 labels and artists — including established names like Chief Keef, Lil Tjay, YG and Ye — now distribute music through the platform, and its annualized gross revenue, based on the fourth quarter of 2024, was $56.1 million. The company’s emergence has helped enliven digital distribution, an absolutely necessary but resolutely unglamorous sector of the industry that seemed fairly settled just a few years ago.
At the most basic level, digital distribution companies provide artists with a technology service: the capability to upload their songs to streaming services and other digital stores around the world. Artists already had myriad options before Too Lost made its debut. The DIY side of the market — which is often hobbyists who make music for fun and push it to streamers for a low flat fee — relied on stalwarts like DistroKid and TuneCore. More commercially successful acts often found a home at long-running major-label-owned alternatives like The Orchard or ADA.
The distribution landscape “definitely was saturated,” says Connor Lawrence, COO of indify, a platform which helps pair emerging talent with financial and marketing resources. “But there are so many artists out there, I think if you deliver a good product, people will gravitate towards it.” He likens Too Lost’s appearance and upward trajectory to that of canned water company Liquid Death: There were more than enough water brands around in 2019, but Liquid Death launched and became wildly popular anyway. (Too Lost is an investor in indify.)
Hirschhorn, Too Lost’s CEO, prefers a coffee analogy. “There’s Starbucks, there’s Dunkin’, but you can be Blank Street,” which was established in 2020, he says. “You can still build a great coffee business, even in an ecosystem where there’s already existing competition. You need to execute differently, and you need to really emphasize what makes you stand out.”
Unlike many of its competitors, Too Lost aims to help both the DIY side of the market and successful artists who have achieved name recognition and charting hits. (Most distributors focus on one camp or the other.) Too Lost delivers music to, and provides analytics from, a number of streamers and digital stores that other distributors don’t always reach, including FLO and Melon in South Korea, AWA in Japan, or the exercise company Peloton, providing independent artists with more chances to earn revenue, and more opportunities to learn about their listeners.
Too Lost also has a publishing administration option, so artists don’t have to go to another platform to earn songwriting income; a block list function, which will automatically strike an artist’s track if it’s uploaded to Twitch or SoundCloud by a third party; and a breezy catalog ingestion tool, which lessens the technical headaches caused by moving music from one distributor to another. Artist collaborators can easily create free accounts just to receive royalties from projects they worked on — a featured artist might use this if their duet partner is on Too Lost, for example — even if they distribute elsewhere.
“My idea was always to capture market share by just building a very frictionless product,” Hirschhorn says. “People then build loyalty to something that fundamentally just works.”
Too Lost has started to take deals away from established competitors, and that fact, combined with Hirschhorn’s boyish demeanor — his old Instagram picture was Matthew Broderick in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off — has sparked skepticism in the music industry. “Other distributors aren’t the biggest fans” of Too Lost, Lawrence acknowledges. “That means that they must be doing something right.”
***
On a Tuesday in December, Laurent Hubert, CEO of the publishing company Kobalt, stopped by the Too Lost offices in Manhattan to meet Hirschhorn in person for the first time. Too Lost added its publishing administration option at the end of 2022 to provide distribution clients with a way to take home songwriting income. Over the last two quarters, that part of the business has grown from generating $200,000 in net revenue to $1 million.
Too Lost currently partners with BMG to collect publishing. (Coincidentally, while Hubert was visiting the office, BMG sent over cupcakes to celebrate the Too Lost founders’ appearance on Forbes‘ latest 30 Under 30 list.) Still, Hubert was interested in learning more about the new company on the block. The result was a genial CEO sparring session, heavy on economic jargon, that ranged from the cost of office leases in Manhattan to the bloated executive salaries at the major labels to the increasing importance of catalog.
The first time Lawrence got on a Zoom with Hirschhorn, he remembers the Too Lost co-founder “speaking a million miles an hour.” (“I ramble,” Hirschhorn says at one point, chalking up some of his conversational velocity to the military-grade cold brew in the Too Lost office.) While chatting with Hubert in December, Hirschhorn sometimes fired off a new idea before the Kobalt boss finished a thought.
But Hubert held his own. He has a gift for distilling economic wisdom into pithy manifestos — “We must crush the majors on cost of capital!” — and slick catchphrases: “We build businesses on trend lines, not headlines.” “I might have to steal that one,” Hirschhorn says later.In a way, he already has. Because Too Lost was a late entrant in the distribution landscape — TuneCore and DistroKid, for example, are both well over a decade old — Hirschhorn says he was able to survey the available options and see what was working, and what wasn’t. His goal was to build “a DIY distribution service that could also service the upper middle class of artists.”
Historically, that has been tough to achieve. Several distributors abandoned the DIY side of the market — a low-margin volume game that comes with common headaches like streaming fraud and copyright infringement — to focus strictly on higher-performing clients, where they can take a cut of royalty income. And the distributors that do offer DIY services often lose clients once their songs start performing well: Wealthier competitors or major labels lure them away by offering a large advance or more personalized help with their careers.
Part of the reason it’s tough to cater to the DIY artist market and the “upper middle class” simultaneously is that their needs are fundamentally different. Hobbyists just need basic functionality, the ability to get their songs on a streaming service and ensure that royalties from any subsequent streams flow back to their bank account. But the upper middle class might want advance funding for their next album, help protecting a viral song from bad-faith takedowns, access to Spotify’s Discovery Mode program, or marketing money to fan the flames of a TikTok trend emerging in Indonesia, for example.
Nevertheless, Hirschhorn set out to satisfy both constituencies. He started working on Too Lost in earnest during the first months of the pandemic, putting $25,000 of his own money into the company. (Hirschhorn started a record label and sold it to Sony as a teen, leaving him some funds to play with.) “It was the first year I could grow a beard, and I grew a full beard,” he recalls. Subsisting largely on Chinese takeout, he gained weight.
Hirschhorn met Silverstein, who was working at +1 Records, through a mutual friend and convinced him to join up as a co-founder, offering a chance to be his own boss. (For a while, Silverstein slept on the couch in Hirschhorn’s midtown one-bedroom apartment.) Larusson was working as a freelance data scientist before he came aboard as chief technical officer.
While many companies call themselves distributors, they often rely on a third party like FUGA and AudioSalad to provide the digital “pipes” that beam music to streaming services. Choosing to provide services and outsource the distribution work means these outfits have to give FUGA or AudioSalad a cut of their earnings, reducing already thin margins. But this way, anyone can launch a distribution offering quickly and then focus on building a profile in a crowded marketplace — often by signing prominent artists.
For many distributors, “It’s less about, ‘Let’s build this out,’ and more about, ‘Let’s raise a lot of money and go do a lot of deals,’” Hirschhorn says. “I’m a true believer that distribution is a technology business, not a music business.”
As a result, Too Lost “built without dependency on any partners,” guided in part by Larusson, who had a computer science background and worked as an engineer on projects for banks, among other endeavors. The founders even built their own payment processing engine, so they didn’t have to pay fees to third parties for financial transactions.
“Greg was late to the game,” notes Josh Feshbach, who manages the singer Pink Sweat$ and works frequently with Too Lost. “What he did better than anyone was understand how today’s DIY artist operates and how they need to run their business. Then he basically tried to put every piece of functionality they would possibly rely on into one platform” — analytics for more than 15 streaming services, funding for advances, copyright registration, publishing administration, cover song licensing, Spotify Discovery Mode access, royalty splitting, reports on songs’ usage on social media, and more.
And it all comes on the cheap: The basic Too Lost account costs $19.99 a year. (For comparison’s sake, it’s $22.99 on DistroKid and TuneCore, though those companies are still much bigger than Too Lost). A label can sign up for an account for just $35.99 a year.
“You can run your entire business from Too Lost’s dashboard,” Feshbach says.
***
Two days after the Kobalt meeting, Hirschhorn rolled into the office fashionably late, a little rough around the edges. While it was an especially festive week for him — an event celebrating Forbes‘ 30 Under 30 inductees, Too Lost’s holiday party — he says he’s usually a homebody: “I put sweatpants on after work. I watch Netflix or answer emails from my couch with a blanket over me.”
But the previous night, Leon Morabia, an attorney at Mark Music & Media Law, had invited Hirschhorn to the firm’s East Coast holiday party, which didn’t start until 10:30 pm. Ron Perry, chairman/CEO of Columbia Records, and Tyler Arnold, president of Mercury Records, had both made appearances. “It was a very impressive group of folks,” Hirschhorn says. “I was like, ‘Well done. I can barely get these guys in a room one on one.’”
Early in 2024, Morabia had reached out to Corey Goldglit, Too Lost’s manager of A&R, to discuss one of his clients, the rapper Ayesha Erotica. “She had a lot of infringement” around her catalog, according to Goldglit — imposters were ripping her songs, uploading them and pocketing royalties from the plays they earned.
Too Lost worked to take down the pirated versions of Erotica’s songs and ensure her royalty income flowed properly to her artist account without even asking for up-front payment. “I’ve never seen it in the music business — someone said, ‘Let me just do this thing for you, and then we’ll take it from there,’” Morabia says. “Usually it’s, ‘Sign your life away here, and then we’ll underdeliver on our promise.’”
Erotica is now earning more than 9 million streams a week on Spotify alone. “She’d never seen a check off her music,” Goldglit says. “Now she’s seeing a lot of money.” She has since signed an official deal with Too Lost, and her team liked the company enough that they recommended it to another act who is now close to signing a deal.
As artists like Ayesha Erotica get bigger, Too Lost’s ability to hold on to them will be a test. But Hirschhorn is confident that, as long as his platform remains versatile, current and easy to use, even artists that choose to go elsewhere will eventually return to the fold.
“You might not always bank with Chase, but you’re not going to get rid of your Chase account,” he reasons. “They might leave to do a project with a major, but they’re going to come back, or they’ll keep their back catalog with us.”
***
Too Lost has been able to win some deals by undercutting competitors, not only on pricing, but on distribution rates — offering to take a 5% cut, for example, when competitors are asking for twice as much. Several executives at rival companies, speaking on the condition of anonymity, believe that this strategy is not sustainable in the long run. And these executives did not understand how Too Lost could be making money.
Feshbach offers a blunt rebuttal. “The people that say there’s no way Too Lost is making any money are just stupid,” he says. “Does [Too Lost] do some deals that I wouldn’t do in order to get people on platform? Sure. But in the long run, they’re weighing these decisions against all of their different revenue streams.”
Too Lost makes money from subscriptions, royalties from distribution deals with bigger clients, and data deals with consumer research companies, according to Hirschhorn. The average customer spends $8 a month between a subscription and other add-on services like cover song licensing, copyright registration and usage discovery, which shows where tracks are being played on various social media services. The company’s adjusted EBITDA for 2024 was $6.5 million.
beatBread, an artist funding platform, has pumped “tens of millions” into Too Lost artists. “I’d like to think that that has at least something to do with their growth,” says Peter Sinclair, the company’s founder, who spent five years at Universal Music Group before founding beatBread. “A lot of guys win deals by promising dream fulfillment,” he continues. “That is expensive. You need fancy offices, a big A&R force. To really focus on the digital nuts and bolts of something [like Too Lost does] can be cheaper. And I think that word is what drives some resentment.”
Too Lost is now in the process of raising $20 million to $40 million, capitalizing on a moment when both investors and major music companies are looking to snap up pieces of the independent distribution market. “I have been working off our balance sheet historically [to do deals], which has a ceiling,” Hirschhorn says. “I’ve had to turn down a lot of amazing opportunities just due to a lack of available capital.” He hopes that raising money will provide extra ammunition to win competitive deals.
Separately, Too Lost might also indirectly benefit from Virgin Music Group’s recent acquisition of Downtown Music Holdings, FUGA’s parent company. Some artists and labels still want to build their businesses outside of the major label systems. If they no longer see FUGA as an option because Virgin is part of Universal Music Group, they will search for other independent distribution companies to partner with, including Too Lost.
The majors “convince artists they’re going to become stars,” Hirschhorn says. But “when they don’t become stars, they still have a catalog making a lot of money every year.”
At that point, he’s making a bet: “Artists are gonna think, I’d rather manage my catalog with those guys over at Too Lost than with the guy who said he’s going to put me on Jimmy Kimmel.”
The U.S. Copyright Office posted a notice of inquiry on Monday (Feb. 10) in the Federal Registrar, requesting more information about issues related to American-based performance rights organizations (PROs).
More specifically, the Copyright Office is requesting public comment on “factors that may be contributing to the formation of new PROs”; whether there have been “increased financial and administrative costs imposed on licensees associated with paying royalties to additional PROs”; and “how to improve clarity and certainty for entities seeking to obtain licenses from PROs.”
The inquiry is a response to the House Judiciary Committee’s letter to the Register of Copyrights, Shira Perlmutter, six months ago, which requested an examination of “concerns” and “emerging” issues in the PRO sector. The letter was signed by the committee’s chairmen, Rep. Jim Jordan and Rep. Darrell Issa, and member Rep. Scott Fitzgerald.
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“It is difficult to assess how efficiently PROs are distributing general licensing revenue based on publicly available data,” the letter read. “For example, it is difficult to determine how accurately lesser known and independent artists as well as smaller publishers are being compensated compared to widely popular artists and major publishers.”
The letter added: “Licensees [like bars, venues, restaurants and small businesses] have reported receiving demands for royalties from new entities claiming to represent songwriters… Licensees are concerned that the proliferation of PROs represents an ever-present danger of infringement allegations and potential litigation risk from new and unknown sources.”
The Copyright Office’s notice of inquiry addressed this so-called “proliferation” of PROs as well, noting that for decades, ASCAP, BMI and the smaller SESAC were the only PROs in the U.S. However, in the last dozen years, this market has doubled in size with the introduction of Global Music Rights (or “GMR”) in 2013, PRO Music Rights in 2018 and AllTrack in 2019.
Around the world, most other countries only have one PRO representing all local rights holders’ interests — many also handle mechanical (or reproduction) rights as well — making the U.S. an especially unique and complex market for licensees.
Written comments concerning these matters must be turned in to the Copyright Office by April 11. After that, there will be a “reply comment” period that has a submission deadline of May 7.