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Megan Thee Stallion has reached a settlement to end her legal war with her former record label 1501 Certified Entertainment.
After more than three years of litigation over a record deal she calls “unconscionable,” attorneys for 1501 announced Thursday that the two sides had “mutually reached a confidential settlement to resolve their legal differences.” Under the deal, Megan and 1501 will “amicably part ways.”
“Both Megan and 1501 are pleased to put this matter behind them and move forward with the next chapter of their respective businesses,” 1501 said. In the same statement, the label’s president Carl Crawford said that he and his company “wish Megan the very best in her life and career.”
Specific terms of the deal, including whether any money changed hands, were not disclosed.
The star rapper (real name Megan Pete) has been fighting with 1501 for more than three years, claiming the company duped the young artist into signing an unfair record deal in 2018 that was well-below industry standards. She says that when she signed a new management deal with Jay-Z’s Roc Nation in 2019, she got “real lawyers” who helped her see that the deal was “crazy.”
That core dispute has mushroomed into additional litigation. Megan filed the latest case in February 2022, claiming 1501 was refusing to count her 2021 Something for Thee Hotties as an “album” – a key distinction, since she must produce three albums under her record deal. 1501 quickly countersued, arguing that Thee Hotties contained just only 29 minutes of original material.
In August 2022, Megan filed a new complaint seeking more than $1 million in damages. The new filing says 1501 “systematically failed” to pay enough royalties and had “wrongfully allowed for excessive marketing and promotion charges.” Again, 1501 quickly struck back, calling the damages demand “baseless” and arguing that it was actually Megan who owes “millions of dollars.”
A judge ruled last December that the case would need to be decided by a jury trial, but any actual courthouse showdown had been repeatedly pushed back as the parties continued to battle in court over other issues, like whether Roc Nation CEO Desiree Perez would need to sit for a deposition. In April, Megan leveled new allegations that 1501 draining its bank accounts in an effort to avoid paying eventual damages.
Last week, Megan hinted that some kind of settlement could be in the offing, saying during an Instagram live stream that “I have no label right now.”
With climate change having widespread effects across the music industry, a new conference will provide education and create action regarding what the music world can do to address the crisis.
The Music Sustainability Summit launches Feb. 5 in Los Angeles and is being produced by The Music Sustainability Alliance, an organization that provide science-based solutions, business case analyses, best practices, and tools for operational change across the industry.
The Summit is the first of its kind in North America.
Happening the day after the Grammy Awards, the event will be moderated by GreenBiz Group chairman and co-founder Joel Makower and feature members of MIT’s Environmental Solutions Initiative, climate change and food justice focused organization Support+Feed, industry environmental nonprofit REVERB, climate organization Planet Reimagined and global sustainability company ClimeCo. The Summit’s partner is Circular Unity, an organization focused on climate change as it relates to the entertainment industry.
The conference is intended to create alignment within the industry by bringing stakeholders on board to commit to climate action. The Summit will include the establishment of working groups meant to ensure that climate organizations are in the rooms with the key decision makers across the industry. Organizers hope that by the end of the day, those in attendance will have committed to the first steps in the industry’s collective action.
“There’s so much good work people are doing, but nobody knows about it,” says Music Sustainability Alliance co-founder and president Amy Morrison. “A goal of the conference, and what inspired it, is to help people to stop reinventing the wheel, to provide resources and get people talking and collaborating. This is a community. The power of all of this together is so much greater than individual actions.”
Hosted on the USC campus, the day-long conference will be structured into two parts, with morning programming focused on education and getting stakeholders on the same page and afternoon programming geared towards action about what the industry can do to mitigate its carbon footprint.
Along with panel discussions, a team from MIT will present a climate-focused map of the entire music industry, and the conference will provide educational materials so that even people just starting to learn about climate science will be able to follow along.
“We welcome all, the climate curious and the climate experts,” says Morrison. “There will be something for everybody.”
Tickets for the Summit are available on a sliding scale, between $25 and $200.
The Music Sustainability Alliance has already been busy bringing together stakeholders. A July organizing call had more than 30 representatives from businesses including UTA, CAA and WME, along with Sony Music, Universal Music Group and Warner Music, along with AEG and Live Nation and a number of managers and nonprofit organizations that work in the climate action space.
“It was really the first time ever all of these people had gotten on the phone together and been in a meeting to actually talk about sustainability,” says Morrison, who was the svp of marketing at Concerts West for more than two decades. “One of things that we find is really important to remember is that everybody’s job is a climate job, and there’s something that we can all do in our daily jobs.”
“It really is about working together and not working in these silos,” adds Music Sustainability Alliance director Eleanore Anderson. “It really is amazing working in these neutral parties and seeing everyone come together.”
Founded during the pandemic, the Music Sustainability Alliance is composed of music industry veterans, companies and scientists who are addressing innovation and sustainability converging in the music industry. The Alliance and the Summit both put a strong emphasis on data, research and science.
Jonas Group Entertainment (JGE) and the company’s founder Kevin Jonas Sr. have launched the Nashville-based Red Van Records, under the leadership of CEO Phil Guerini.
The label’s first signing is Nashville singer-songwriter Levi Hummon, who’ll release his first song under the label on Oct. 27, with a new version of his Walker Hayes collaboration “Paying For It.” Dan Pearson‘s Lakeside Entertainment Group will provide label services for Red Van Records.
JGE was founded in 2005 while Jonas was managing his sons, the sibling music group Jonas Brothers. The namesake for Red Van Records is the red van that the Jonas family originally toured the country in. “I can’t begin to guess how many hours and miles we logged driving the guys around the country in that van, but it represents the commitment you make to be in the music industry,” said Jonas Sr. in a statement. “We were always building and in motion and that’s the philosophy of Red Van Records.”
“With the values and ideals that are the foundation of Red Van Records, Levi is the perfect artist to launch our label,” Guerini said in a statement. “He is so well respected in the music community as a complete artist, and he has been tireless in his pursuit of music and taking it to the fans on the road. It’s the unrelenting pace and ‘firsts’ of the early days that may seem small at the time, but like the red van, they are the start of something truly special.”
“So excited to be working with Kevin, Phil, and honored to be Red Van Records first signing,” Hummon added. “I’m so grateful to them for dreaming big with me and I couldn’t imagine my music in better hands. Family is everything to me and they have made feel like part of their family since day one. This next chapter is going to be a wild ride.”
Jonas Group Entertainment’s artist roster includes Bailee Madison, Darby, Franklin Jonas, Harper Grace, Levi Hummon, LIVVIA, Mallary Hope, Mandy Harvey, Tayler Buono and The Band Light. Meanwhile, Jonas Group Publishing’s roster includes Franklin Jones and Terri Jo Box.
Hummon, the son of songwriter Marcus Hummon, previously issued his debut self-titled EP in 2016 through Big Machine Label Group, followed by 2018’s Patient via Iconic Records.
BMG said on Thursday (Oct. 18) that it will use Universal Music Group’s (UMG) commercial services division for the distribution of its physical recorded music, in what BMG CEO Thomas Coesfeld described as the first project of a burgeoning “alliance.” Last month, BMG announced it was winding down its agreement with Warner Music Group’s ADA […]
Hipgnosis Songs Fund’s board said on Thursday it was launching a strategic review of changes to its current management team and other options that could maximize shareholder value, as the company braces for a critical continuation vote next week.
Hipgnosis Songs Fund’s (HSF) stock price hit an all-time low earlier this week after scrapping its upcoming shareholder dividend because of an accounting error that resulted in a nearly $12-million downward revision of certain expected streaming royalties.
Shares in the company, which owns the rights to songs performed by Rihanna, Fleetwood Mac, The Pretenders and more, fell by more than 10% on the news, and investor confidence appeared shaky this week, as the the five-year-old music royalty fund prepares for a do-or-die continuation vote on Oct. 26.
“This decision follows extensive engagement over recent weeks with shareholders in light of the forthcoming continuation resolution,” the board said in a statement announcing the strategic review. “These meetings highlighted a continued belief in the company’s portfolio and growth prospects … as well as the need for changes by the company in order to deliver value for shareholders.”
The board said it explored terminating its contract with the fund’s investment advisor, Hipgnosis Song Management, run by HSF founder Merck Mercuriadis, but said it concluded it is not in shareholders’ interest, “as it would be an event of default under the revolving credit facility” if the fund fired its investment advisor before finding a new one who was approved by the HSF’s banks.
The board reiterated its recommendation that shareholders vote in favor of continuing the fund, saying it believes “it is in shareholders’ interest to have a strategic review with the widest array of options for the company to consider and to identify changes that will focus on recovering and delivering improved shareholder value.” The board went on to say it asked its investment advisor to remove a clause in its contract that gives the group overseen by Mercuriadis the right to acquire HSF’s portfolio if its advisory contract is terminated, but that request was declined.
The company’s stock rose about 2.33% to 74.70 British pence ($0.90) as of 10:22 in London.
Continuation votes are required for all publicly traded trusts listed on the London Stock Exchange to provide investors of closed-end funds with an exit strategy.
In addition to a thumbs up or down on continuation next week, HSF investors will also be asked to vote on the sale of 29 catalogs from HSF’s portfolio–including the works of Shakira, Barry Manilow and other artists–to its privately held sister fund Hipgnosis Songs Capital, which is backed by Blackstone.
The board reiterated on Thursday its support for the proposed sale, saying it would use the $440 million in proceeds to reduce the company’s debt and buy back up to $180 million worth of its own stock.
The fund’s board chairman Andrew Sutch announced plans to step down last month, and the board said it has hired an executive search firm to look for his replacement.
The boad also said it also has secured new terms with lenders that put the company back in compliance with its fixed charge cover ratio covenant. The company risked breaching compliance with its lenders over the past week after it was forced to cut expectations for revenue from the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board’s Phonorecords III (CRB III) to $9.9 million, from $21.7 million.
TikTok has launched TikTok Music, its new premium-only music streaming service, in Australia, Singapore and Mexico. The news arrives just months after the company announced its closed, beta version of the streamer for those three territories in July.
As part of the launch, TikTok Music is adding in new features like Party It (a personalized collaborative listening feature), FYP Tuning (swipable music discovery tool, letting users choose different musical scenes and moods), and Tonik (a music discovery personal assistant that is powered by Open AI’s ChatGPT).
With Tonik, users can search for an artist, track or playlist, ask about concerts and music news, learn about the stories behind the music and more.
The new streaming service has not yet made it to most of the major music markets around the world, including the U.S., but its interest in combining social media savvy with music listening could make it a strong new competitor to the established services like Spotify, Apple and Amazon as it expands worldwide.
Already, TikTok as a social platform has wielded great influence over the incumbent streamers. For example, Spotify announced earlier this year that they would integrate a new vertical, swipe-able discovery feed into their app, sparking comparisons to the short-form video app. Spotify also recently recruited some of TikTok’s most popular music influencers – like Ari Elkins and Dev Lemons – to help popularize its now-defunct live audio app, Spotify Live.
Other new features on the app include:
Sync With TikTok: sync your TikTok and TikTok Music accounts to enjoy songs from the social app
Play TikTok Hits: Stream the full versions of TikTok viral songs
Seamless Music Discovery With TikTok: Record your music discovery journey in TikTok and explore the songs in TikTok Music
Discover More Personalized Music: Swipe up and down to explore songs just for you
Discover New & Emerging Artists: Find your new favourite artist
Find Your Music Community: Express yourself through comments, enjoy behind-the-scenes stories, and connect with like-minded music lovers
Sing Along With Real-Time Lyrics: Sing and rap with built-in lyrics that play automaticallyCo-create collaborative Playlists with Friends: Making music better together
Import your Music Library: With just one click, import external playlists and play them through TikTok Music
Name That Song: identify any song you’re listening to with Song Catch
“We are pleased to publicly launch TikTok Music, a new kind of service that combines the power of music discovery on TikTok with a best-in-class streaming service. TikTok Music will make it easy for people to save, download and share their favourite viral tracks from TikTok,” says Ole Obermann, global head of music business development, TikTok. “We are excited about the opportunities TikTok Music presents for both music fans and artists, and the great potential it has for driving significant value to the music industry.”
YouTube is planning to roll out a new artificial intelligence tool that will allow creators to make videos using the voices of popular recording artists — but inking deals with record companies to launch the beta version is taking longer than expected, sources tell Billboard.
The new AI tool, which YouTube had hoped to debut at its Made On YouTube event in September, will in beta let a select pool of artists to give permission to a select group of creators to use their voices in videos on the platform. From there, the product could be released broadly to all users with the voices of artists who choose to opt in. YouTube is also looking at those artists to contribute input on that will help steer the company’s AI strategy beyond this, sources say.
The major labels, Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group, are still negotiating licensing deals that would cover voice rights for the beta version of the tool, sources say; a wide launch would require separate agreements. As label leaders have made public statements about their commitments to embracing AI in recent months, with UMG CEO Lucian Grainge saying the technology could “amplify human imagination and enrich musical creativity in extraordinary new ways” and WMG CEO Robert Kyncl saying, “You have to embrace the technology, because it’s not like you can put technology in a bottle” — some music executives worry they’ve given up some of their leverage in these initial deals, given that they want to be seen as proponents of progress and not as holding up innovation. Label executives are especially conscious of projecting that image now, having shortsightedly resisted the shift from CDs to downloads two decades ago, which allowed Apple to unbundle the album and sent the music business into years of decline. Some executives say it’s also been challenging to find top artists to participate in the new YouTube tool, with even some of the most forward-thinking acts hesitant to put their voices in the hands of unknown creators who could use them to make statements or sing lyrics they might not like.
The labels, sources say, view the deal as potentially precedent-setting for future AI deals to come — as well as creating a “framework,” as one source put it, for YouTube’s future AI initiatives. The key issues in negotiations are how the AI model is trained and that artists should have the option to opt-in (or out); and how monetization works — are artists paid for the use of their music as an input into the AI model or for the output that’s created using the AI tool? While negotiations are taking time, label sources say YouTube is seen as an important, reliable early partner in this space, based on the platform’s work developing its Content ID system that identifies and monetizes copyrighted materials in user-generated videos.
Publishing, meanwhile, is even more complicated, given that even with a small sampling of artists to launch the tool at beta there could be hundreds of songwriters with credits across their catalogs — which would be sampled by the model. Because of this, a source suggests that YouTube may prefer paying a lump sum licensing fee rather that publishers will need to figure out how to divide among their writers.
As complicated as the deal terms may be, sources say music rights holders are acting in good faith to get a deal done. That’s because there’s a dominant belief this sort of technology is inevitable and if the music business doesn’t come to the table to create licensing deals now, they’ll get left behind. However, one source familiar with the negotiations says this attitude is also putting music companies at a disadvantage because there is less room to drive a hard bargain.
For months, AI-soundalike tools that synthesize vocals to sound like famous artists have been garnering attention and triggering debate. The issue hit the mainstream in April when an anonymous musician calling himself Ghostwriter released a song to streaming services with soundalike versions of Drake and The Weeknd on it that he said were created with artificial intelligence. The song was quickly taken down due to copyright infringement on the recording, not based on the voices’ likenesses, but in the aftermath a month later Billboard reported that the streaming services seemed amenable to requests from the major labels to remove recordings with AI-generated vocals created to sound like popular artists.
In August, YouTube announced a new initiative with UMG artists and producers it called an “AI Music Incubator” that would “explore, experiment and offer feedback on the AI-related musical tools and products,” according to a blog post by Grainge at the time. “Once these tools are launched, the hope is that more artists who want to participate will benefit from and enjoy this creative suite.” That partnership was separate from the licensing negotiations currently taking place and the beta product in development.
On Wednesday, UMG, Concord Music Group, ABKCO and other music publishers filed a lawsuit against AI platform Anthropic PBC for using copyrighted song lyrics to “train” its software. This marked the first major lawsuit in what is expected to be a key legal battle over the future of AI music, and as one source put it a signal that major labels will litigate with AI companies they see as bad players.
Cesar Pina, a celebrity house-flipper with close ties to New York City radio host DJ Envy, was arrested Wednesday (Oct. 18) on federal charges that he perpetrated “a multimillion-dollar Ponzi-like investment fraud scheme.”
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The charges come after months of social media accusations and civil litigation against Pina, who victims say stole their money with promises of big profits. DJ Envy (real name RaaShaun Casey) has been caught up in the scheme because critics say he helped promote Pina, including through appearances on his nationally syndicated hip-hop radio show The Breakfast Club — accusations he denies.
In announcing the charges, federal authorities said Pina had “exploited celebrity status and social media to develop a devoted following of potential victims.”
“Promising returns that were too good to be true, Pina allegedly defrauded dozens of people of millions of dollars,” New Jersey U.S. Attorney Philip R. Sellinger said in a statement. “Our office is committed to protecting the public from these schemes and prosecuting those who lie to investors for their own personal gain.”
DJ Envy is not named in the charges and is not accused of any criminal wrongdoing. But federal prosecutors specifically noted that Pina “partnered with a celebrity disc jockey and radio personality” — listed in the charges as “Individual-1” — to boost his reputation as a real estate guru.
“Together, they used Individual-l’s celebrity to promote various real estate enterprises that Pina controlled,” prosecutors wrote in the criminal complaint. “Pina represented that he was a highly successful real estate investor, owned thousands of properties in multiple states, and had business relationships with numerous celebrities.”
Attorneys for both Pina and Envy did not return requests for comment.
The accusations against Pina first cropped up in May, when an Instagram account accused him of defrauding numerous investors — and accused Envy of playing a key role. That led to a flood of civil lawsuits from dozens of victims who say Pina owed them thousands or millions of dollars. One victim’s attorney estimated that more than 30 investors have already come forward, seeking over $40 million from Pina and his wife, Jennifer.
Many of those lawsuits, including one filed by music industry veteran Anthony Martini, name DJ Envy as a co-defendant, citing their close ties — including Pina’s frequent appearances on The Breakfast Club and a series of real estate seminars that the two men co-hosted. One case says Envy “aided and abetted” the fraudsters by “using his public likeness as a well-known radio disc jockey to promote their real estate scheme.”
Envy says those kinds of allegations are not only false — he says he himself is also a victim of Pina’s alleged scheme — but also defamatory. He’s suing the social media influencer who first publicized the allegations, claiming he “spewed” lies to promote his own real estate business, and he’s demanding to be dismissed from the investor lawsuits.
In an interview with Billboard last week, Envy’s lawyer, Massimo F. D’Angelo, said his client had nothing to do with the specific deals involved in Pina’s alleged scheme and was being targeted by lawyers and critics who were “sensationalizing” the case by involving a celebrity: “Envy had no involvement whatsoever. The only reason he’s being dragged into this is because he’s a public figure.”
Read the full complaint against Pina here.
Universal Music Group (UMG) and other music companies are suing an artificial intelligence platform called Anthropic PBC for using copyrighted song lyrics to “train” its software — marking the first major lawsuit in what is expected to be a key legal battle over the future of AI music.
In a complaint filed Wednesday morning (Oct. 18) in Nashville federal court, lawyers for UMG, Concord Music Group, ABKCO and other music publishers accused Anthropic of violating the companies’ copyrights en masse by using vast numbers of songs to help its AI models learn how to spit out new lyrics.
“In the process of building and operating AI models, Anthropic unlawfully copies and disseminates vast amounts of copyrighted works,” lawyers for the music companies wrote. “Publishers embrace innovation and recognize the great promise of AI when used ethically and responsibly. But Anthropic violates these principles on a systematic and widespread basis.”
A spokesperson for Anthropic did not immediately return a request for comment.
The new lawsuit is similar to cases filed by visual artists over the unauthorized use of their works to train AI image generators, as well as cases filed by authors like Game of Thrones writer George R.R. Martin and novelist John Grisham over the use of their books. But it’s the first to squarely target music.
AI models like the popular ChatGPT are “trained” to produce new content by feeding them vast quantities of existing works known as “inputs.” In the case of AI music, that process involves huge numbers of songs. Whether doing so infringes the copyrights to that underlying material is something of an existential question for the booming sector, since depriving AI models of new inputs could limit their abilities.
Major music companies and other industry players have already argued that such training is illegal. Last year, the RIAA said that any use of copyrighted songs to build AI platforms “infringes our members’ rights.” In April, when UMG asked Spotify and other streamers in April to stop allowing AI companies to use their platforms to ingest music, it said it “will not hesitate to take steps to protect our rights.”
On Wednesday, the company took those steps. In the lawsuit, it said Anthropic “profits richly” from the “vast troves of copyrighted material that Anthropic scrapes from the internet.”
“Unlike songwriters, who are creative by nature, Anthropic’s AI models are not creative — they depend entirely on the creativity of others,” lawyers for the publishers wrote. “Yet, Anthropic pays nothing to publishers, their songwriters, or the countless other copyright owners whose copyrighted works Anthropic uses to train its AI models. Anthropic has never even attempted to license the use of Publishers’ lyrics.”
In the case ahead, the key battle line will be over whether the unauthorized use of proprietary music to train an AI platform is nonetheless legal under copyright’s fair use doctrine — an important rule that allows people to reuse protected works without breaking the law.
Historically, fair use enabled critics to quote from the works they were dissecting, or parodists to use existing materials to mock them. But more recently, it’s also empowered new technologies: In 1984, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the VCR was protected by fair use; in 2007, a federal appeals court ruled that Google Image search was fair use.
In Wednesday’s complaint, UMG and the other publishers seemed intent on heading off any kind of fair use defense. They argued that Anthropic’s behavior would harm the market for licensing lyrics to AI services that actually pay for licenses — a key consideration in any fair use analysis.
“Anthropic is depriving Publishers and their songwriters of control over their copyrighted works and the hard-earned benefits of their creative endeavors, it is competing unfairly against those website developers that respect the copyright law and pay for licenses, and it is undermining existing and future licensing markets in untold ways,” the publishers wrote.
In addition to targeting Anthropic’s use of songs as inputs, the publishers claim that the material produced by the company’s AI model also infringes their lyrics: “Anthropic’s AI models generate identical or nearly identical copies of those lyrics, in clear violation of publishers’ copyrights.”
Such litigation might only be the first step in setting national policy on how AI platforms can use copyrighted music, with legislative efforts close behind. At a hearing in May, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) repeatedly grilled the CEO of the company behind ChatGPT about how he and others planned to “compensate the artist.”
“If I can go in and say ‘write me a song that sounds like Garth Brooks,’ and it takes part of an existing song, there has to be compensation to that artist for that utilization and that use,” Blackburn said. “If it was radio play, it would be there. If it was streaming, it would be there.”
In the wake of the deadliest terrorist attack in Israel’s history, as well as the prospect of a deadly, drawn-out war against Hamas in Gaza, the country’s fast-growing concert business has hardly been at the top of anyone’s mind.
So far, the only big show to be cancelled was the sold-out Bruno Mars concert scheduled for Oct. 7 in Tel Aviv. But concerts and festivals now face a pause as Israel mourns its dead, including the more than 250 people who died at the Supernova Sukkot festival in the Oct. 7 attack. For however long the war in Gaza takes, it is unlikely that many major international acts will play Tel Aviv out of security concerns, worries about the optics of taking a side on a controversial issue, and the fact that so many potential concertgoers will be fighting or working in the military. However, the country’s entertainment market is expected to make a quick recovery once hostilities end thanks to companies like Bluestone Entertainment, which has made considerable progress modernizing Israel’s concert industry over the past six years.
Up until the Oct. 7 attack, security issues didn’t even make the top five challenges facing the Israeli concert business, sources tell Billboard. Bigger issues include a lack of touring infrastructure, geographic isolation, routing difficulties, limits on potential artist earnings and the Boycott Divest, Sanction (BDS) movement that pushes artists not to play in the Jewish state.
Until 2017, the only modern ticketing platform in Israel was the German company CTS Eventim, which dominates Europe but isn’t as well known to U.S. touring artists and managers. Israel also lacks a major venue for large acts, meaning most touring artists have to rely on 5,000-7,000 capacity amphitheaters — which can make it difficult to make money due to the high travel costs required to visit the country. Travel also complicates logistics, since it’s easy to fly into Israel but, until 2020, it was hard to fly on from there. Since then, flights have been added to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the next major concert market, as well as an international flight hub.
The 2014 formation of Bluestone Entertainment, as well as its 2017 purchase by Live Nation, modernized the country’s touring infrastructure and earned it a stamp of approval from the concert giant as one of 29 markets where Live Nation maintains offices and on-the-ground staff. Leading the company today is CEO Guy Besar, a 46-year-old native of Israel’s Rishon Lezion who got his start working at student events for the city’s College of Management Academic Studies, along with co-founders Shay Mor Yosef and Gadi Veinrib. Music manager Guy Oseary, whose clients include Madonna and, until recently, U2, is the fourth co-founder of Bluestone.
Bluestone has been successful in pushing back against BDS activist groups like the Palestinian Campaign for Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) and artists like Roger Waters, who convinced Elvis Costello, Devendra Banhart and Gorillaz to cancel planned visits to the country in 2010. Oseary has worked with artist managers to develop a communications and messaging strategy before announcing shows in the country.
Bluestone also played a key role in bringing Ticketmaster to Israel as part of its 2017 joint venture with Live Nation and has focused its efforts on modernizing and bringing shows to HaYarkon Park in Tel Aviv, an urban park and summer concert destination that can host concerts for up to 70,000 attendees per night. That led to a $6.7 million gross for Guns N’ Roses‘ June 5 concert at HaYarkon, $6.6 million for Imagine Dragons on Aug. 29 and a whopping $11.7 million for two Maroon 5 concerts in May 2022.
Those seven-and-eight-figure grosses have helped offset the expenses associated with performing in Israel, while a 2020 agreement with the UAE and Bahrain known as the Abraham Accords has led to the normalization of relations between the three countries. The treaty, negotiated by the Trump administration, also allows air travel between the three countries via Saudi Arabian airspace. That means that once in the UAE, touring shows can easily fly to markets like Malaysia, Singapore and much of Southeast Asia.
Bluestone was reportedly on track to generate $75 million in 2023, a number that will likely drop following the cancellation of Mars’ Oct. 7 concert. But it will likely still be up nearly 50% percent from 2022 when the company brought in $46 million. As for the security threat that caused the cancellation, sources say that despite the surprising nature of the Oct. 7 attacks, Israel deploys significant resources to securing events and large crowds and note that concert promoters in the country feel extremely confident in their ability to secure A-list artists and visitors for concerts.
