Business
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The largest publicly traded music companies gained this week as investors digested the impacts of another increase in the Federal Reserve’s benchmark interest rate.
Billboard‘s Global Music Index rose 2.1% this week to 1,213.30 despite 11 of its 20 stocks being in negative territory. Shares of Universal Music Group, the most valuable component of the 20-stock Index, rose 6.7% to 22.82 euros ($24.58). K-pop company HYBE rose 4.5% to 187,500 won ($144.70), Warner Music Group improved 4.3% to $31.50, SiriusXM rose 3.6% to $3.77 and Spotify was up 1% to $128.30.
The Index’s greatest gainer was streaming company LiveOne, which climbed 13.1% to $1.12. On Tuesday, LiveOne said it is extending the record date for the previously announced spinoff of its PodcastOne subsidiary to April 7. “We expect the special dividend and trading of PodcastOne to begin in April,” said Robert Ellin, LiveOne CEO and chairman. The company also announced it gained 136,000 paid subscribers since Jan. 1, to more than 2 million monthly paying members, and plans to reach 2.75 million subscribers by the end of the year.
Broadcast radio company Audacy, a relatively small component of the Index, had the week’s biggest decline of 21.4%. On March 16, a B. Riley analyst cut the price target for Audacy shares from 50 cents to 10 cents. The stock closed at 11 cents per share on Friday and is down 52% year to date.
The U.S. Federal Reserve Bank raised its benchmark interest rate a quarter of a percentage point on Wednesday — from 4.75% to 5% — and suggested additional hikes may not be needed “to return inflation to 2% over time,” the Federal Open Market Committee said in a statement. That decision sent markets into negative territory on Wednesday: both the Dow Jones Industrial Average and Nasdaq composite fell 1.6% while the S&P 500 dropped 1.7%. But stocks rallied on Thursday and Friday. The Dow finished the week up 1.2% while the Nasdaq composite and S&P 500 rose 1.7% and 1.4%, respectively.
50 Cent has reached a settlement to end a lawsuit in which he accused a Miami medical spa of falsely suggesting that he’d had penis surgery, according to court documents filed Friday (March 24).
The rapper claims that Angela Kogan and her Perfection Plastic Surgery & MedSpa exploited an innocent photo he’d “graciously agreed” to take with her to imply that he was a client — and, more startlingly, that he had received penile enhancement surgery as part of his work.
But in a joint filing made Friday in Miami federal court, attorneys for both 50 Cent (real name Curtis Jackson) and Kogan said they had “reached an agreement in principle to settle Mr. Jackson’s claims” and were “in the process of preparing an agreement to finalize and memorialize” the deal.
An attorney for 50 Cent did not immediately return a request for comment. A lawyer for Kogan declined to comment.
50 Cent sued Kogan in September, arguing that he took a photo with “someone he thought was a fan” and had “never consented” to the use of the image for commercial purposes in any form. He says Kogan not only posted the image to Instagram herself but also engineered an article on the website The Shade Room that used the post to make the “false insinuation” that she’d provided him with penile enhancement.
The article in question (“Penis Enhancements Are More Popular Than Ever & BBLs Are Dying Out: Cosmetic Surgery CEO Angela Kogan Speaks On It”) did not directly claim that Jackson had the surgery. But it allegedly said he was a “client” of the practice while repeatedly using the image of him with Kogan, leading Jackson’s lawyers to say the “implication was clear.”
“Defendants’ actions have exposed Jackson to ridicule, caused substantial damage to his professional and personal reputation, and violated his right to control his name and image,” the star’s lawyers wrote at the time. They included social media comments in which users mocked the rapper, including one that “crudely” said the rapper should be called “50 inch.”
Kogan strongly denied the allegations and immediately moved to dismiss the case, saying 50 Cent actually was a client and had consented to the use of the image as payment for the work he received. She argued it was just an “innocuous” use of the photo, not a direct suggestion that he’d endorsed the office.
But in December, Judge Robert N. Scola, Jr. denied Kogan’s request to toss out the case, saying that 50 Cent might eventually be able to prove his allegations at trial.
“As the proverbial saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words,” Scola wrote. “This one in particular depicts a worldwide celebrity next to Kogan with MedSpa’s name repeated all throughout the background. The promotional value is evident.”
As the U.S. government considers banning social media app TikTok, the U.S. music industry faces a few scenarios regarding the platform that’s become a lifeline for discovering and breaking artists — and most aren’t good.
The grilling of TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew by members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Thursday (March 23) had all the political theater expected from a Congressional hearing. It also had one important characteristic unusual for the United States in 2023: bi-partisan agreement. Despite Chew’s insistence that U.S. TikTok users’ data cannot be accessed from China, home of parent company Bytedance, neither Democrats nor Republicans seem intent on allowing TikTok to operate within their borders.
The showdown seemed inevitable given TikTok’s foreign entanglements and the app’s quick ascendence. The app accounted for 17% of total time spent on mobile apps globally in 2022, according to Data.ai — second behind WeChat’s 19.5% and well ahead of No. 3 YouTube’s 12.7%. Chew told lawmakers that TikTok has 150 million users in the U.S. That’s 50% more than the 100 million figure TikTok previously made public (and eMarketer’s latest estimate of 95.8 million at the end of 2022). Among U.S. Gen Z consumers aged 18 to 24, TikTok ranks No. 2 behind Instagram in monthly average users, according to Data.ai.
But the app’s fate in the United States “is on shakier ground than ever,” according to eMarketer principal analyst Jasmine Enberg. “TikTok’s decision to highlight how entrenched the app has become in US society was miscalculated,” Enberg said in a statement. “It actually strengthened U.S. lawmakers’ argument that TikTok poses a threat to both national security and young people.”
Brendan Carr, a commissioner with the Federal Communications Commission, agrees. The vocal TikTok critic told CBS News “the day could not have gone any worse for TikTok” and that Chew “completely failed” to gain “some level” of trust and credibility with members of Congress.
While a TikTok ban appears popular amongst politicians, not everybody is supportive. The Cato Institute’s Paul Matzo called a ban “a hamfisted mistake” born from “neo-Cold War paranoia.” It wouldn’t necessarily make America safer, he argued, and would amount to a bail-out for Meta, whose TikTok competitor, Instagram, has failed to win on a level playing field. The Brookings Institute’s Darrell M. West and Michaela Robison argue that a ban would open up U.S. companies in China — such as automaker Tesla — to similar scrutiny.
If a ban could withstand a legal challenge — former President Donald Trump’s attempt to ban TikTok and Chinese messaging app WeChat both failed — TikTok’s parent company, Bytedance, would be forced to sell the company. President Joe Biden’s administration has encouraged Bytedance to sell TikTok. But it wouldn’t be a straightforward process. China would “strongly oppose” a forced sale, a Ministry of Commerce spokesperson said Thursday, and TikTok is subject to Chinese law on tech exports and would require government approval.
A prompt sale of TikTok, which is reportedly valued at $60 billion, would be the best outcome for the music industry in search of new sources of streaming revenue. TikTok’s revenue rocketed from $4 billion in 2021 to $10 billion in 2022, according to reports. Research firm Omdia projects that TikTok’s ad revenue will climb to $44 billion by 2027 — presumably assuming there are no geopolitical interferences — and surpass the combined video ad revenues of Meta and YouTube. Although TikTok is not a major source of revenue for labels and publishers, rights holders expect to eventually have licensing agreements that give them a share of advertising revenue for user-generated content (like their deal with YouTube).
The current hodgepodge of bans also hurts both TikTok and the music industry. In the United States, TikTok has already been banned by some federal agencies, state and local governments and universities. Elsewhere, TikTok has been banned from the official phones of staff of the European Commission, U.K. parliament, Canadian government, Belgian government, Danish Defense Ministry and Latvian Foreign Ministry, to name a few. Fewer TikTok apps installed on fewer smartphones is twice the punishment for an app that depends on user-generated content. Lower usage means fewer people creating and viewing videos.
Perhaps the biggest question is what would happen to TikTok under new ownership. If, say, Oracle owned a stake in TikTok, as was proposed during the Trump administration, would the app continue to have the same magical recommendation algorithm that has made TikTok so irresistible and its competitors unable to keep up? New ownership would eliminate restraints on TikTok’s revenue and user growth, but if the product suffers, the music industry would be handed a less effective promotional tool and a less valuable source of revenue. The only certainty in this TikTok controversy is that such unintended consequences are guaranteed.
A Manhattan federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit accusing Donald Glover of ripping off his chart-topping Childish Gambino hit “This Is America” from an earlier song, ruling that the two tracks are “entirely different.”
A rapper named Kidd Wes (real name Emelike Nwosuocha) sued in 2021, claiming Glover’s 2018 song was “practically identical” to his own 2016 called “Made In America.” But in a decision issued Friday (March 24), U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero said they were anything but.
“A cursory comparison with the challenged composition reveals that the content of the choruses is entirely different and not substantially similar,” the judge wrote.
In reaching that conclusion, Judge Marrero briefly explained how Nwosuocha’s lyrics were a “short, simple, self-aggrandizing proclamation,” while Glover’s song was about “what America means and how it is perceived.”
“More could be said on the ways these songs differ, but no more airtime is needed to resolve this case,” the judge wrote.
Released in 2018, “This Is America” spent two weeks atop the Hot 100 and eventually won record of the year and song of the year at the 61st Annual Grammy Awards. It was accompanied by a critically acclaimed music video, directed by Hiro Murai, that touched on issues of race, mass shootings and police violence.
Nwosuocha sued in May 2021, claiming there were “unmissable” similarities between the song and his own “Made In America,” including the “flow” — the cadence, rhyming schemes, rhythm and other characteristics of hip hop lyrics.
“The distinctive flow employed in defendant Glover’s recorded performance of the infringing work’s chorus … is unmistakably substantially similar, if not practically identical, to the distinct and unique flow that was employed by Nwosuocha,” his lawyers wrote at the time.
But in Friday’s decision, Judge Marrero said the “flow” and other similar characteristics “lack sufficient originality” to be protected by copyrights. And “no reasonable jury” could find that the lyrics themselves were similar enough to constitute copyright infringement, the judge said.
The judge also ruled that the case failed for an even simpler reason: That Nwosuocha had failed to secure a federal copyright registration for the underlying composition to his song. “Accordingly, dismissal of Nwosuocha’s complaint is warranted.”
In a statement to Billboard, Nwosuocha’s attorneys Imran H. Ansari and La’Shawn N. Thomas said their client was “understandably disappointed” and considering appealing the ruling. “He stands by his music, creativity, and the independence of grassroots artists to create their own music, and receive credit where credit is due, without the fear of it being apportioned by another.”
An attorney for Glover did not immediately return a request for comment on the decision.
The Four Chord Music Festival is back with the announcement of its 2023 lineup, which will bring a stacked roster of punk and indie bands to Western Pennsylvania’s Wild Things Park on August 12 and 13 for a two-day, DIY celebration from across the punk rock spectrum.
This year’s headliners include Yellowcard — performing their 2003 album Ocean Avenue in full — as well as Taking Back Sunday, The Gaslight Anthem, The Interrupters and Alkaline Trio. Also on the bill are Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness, Waterparks, The Maine, Streetlight Manifesto, Face To Face, American Football, Magnolia Park and more.
“I started the festival because I got frustrated with some of the politics behind getting on tours,” says festival founder Rishi Bahl, a touring artist and college professor who first launched Four Chord Music Festival in 2015 as a local punk rock event in a 1,500-capacity club. Since then, the festival has grown into a massive stadium-sized two-day destination event featuring the punk scene’s biggest and brightest — while keeping its independent DIY roots intact.
“We have some of the lowest ticketing fees in any festival of this size in the whole United States,” says Bahl, noting that Four Chord uses the ShowClix ticketing platform. “We control the cost of beverages. We don’t price gouge for alcohol. We don’t price gouge for food. We have 30 and 50 local vendors on site. We have a DIY rate for small, independent companies, and we have a higher rate for more corporatized companies.”
Booking Yellowcard is a return to Four Chord’s roots, adds Bahl, noting that the band headlined the festival in 2015 before breaking up shortly afterward. “When we heard they were getting back together to play a big Ocean Avenue tour, we wanted to be a part of it,” he says. “If you grew up in the early 2000s and were in the punk rock, pop punk, emo scene, that was a seminal record.”
The festival is split into two days — a pop-punk emo day and a punk rock day — and there are no conflicting sets happening that will see one artist playing at the same time as another.
“Everything we do is focused around making it a good experience for the fans and the bands, without making it cost prohibitive,” says Bahl. “I put this festival on each year knowing what it is like to be a kid on a tight budget and we go out of our way to make sure the festival stays affordable and carries on the DIY tradition.”
Single-day general admission tickets for the festival start at $94, while single-day VIP tickets are priced at $196. More information and tickets can be found at www.FourChordMusicFestival.com.
South Korea’s HYBE said Friday (March 24) it will sell its stake in SM Entertainment, officially ending a bidding war between HYBE and the South Korean tech company Kakao for control of the K-pop agency that was key to the genre’s popularity and overseas expansion in recent years.
HYBE, home of superstar boy band BTS, said in a filing it will sell its roughly 15% stake in SM for nearly 564 billion won ($435 million) to Kakao, which earlier this month announced a tender offer aimed at acquiring up to 35% of SM Entertainment’s outstanding shares.
Kakao Entertainment owns Monsta X‘s K-pop record label, Starship Entertainment, as well as the South Korean music streaming app Melon, the North America-based webtoon company Tapas Entertainment and several media production companies. It’s a subsidiary of the tech conglomerate Kakao Corp.
HYBE acquired most of its shares in SM in February from SM founder Lee Soo-man, who was recently ousted from the company after shareholders called for changes in SM’s structure. For over a decade, Lee exercised top-down control of the company he started in 1995, and shareholders had raised questions over millions of dollars he received in producer fees annually.
Lee sold his shares to HYBE in retaliation for a move by SM to issue stock to Kakao, ultimately prompting HYBE’s attempt to secure a majority stake in SM through a tender offer. HYBE relented in mid-March because, it said, outbidding Kakao could have “a negative impact on our shareholders.”
Just days after canceling the company’s bid for control of SM, HYBE founder/chairman Bang Si-hyuk reiterated his desire to expand beyond Korea in an effort to eventually compete with the three major labels – Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group — on a global scale, stating the company must have a “sense of urgency” in doing so.
Bang additionally signaled a desire for outside support for K-pop companies in their attempts to rival the majors, including possibly from the South Korean government, which has helped elevate Korean companies in other industries into global players. HYBE has already made strides on that front with two U.S. acquisitions — Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings and QC Media Holdings, parent company of hip-hop label Quality Control Music, which Bang said are “just the beginning” in its bid for worldwide domination.
SM and HYBE have in recent years dominated South Korean and global pop charts. Together they accounted for nearly half of all albums sold in South Korea in 2022, according to Korean chart company Circle Chart.
HYBE’s planned stock sale could net the company $87 million, the equivalent of a 25% return on its purchases of Lee’s shares one month ago, Reuters reported earlier on Friday.
An R. Kelly victim who won a $4 million judgment against the singer will get first crack at pulling money from the singer’s royalty account with Sony Music — after the Illinois Supreme Court ruled that her claims should take priority over a Chicago landlord that’s also owed millions.
In a decision on Thursday (March 23), the state high court said Heather Williams was entitled to tap into Kelly’s account with Sony — valued at $1.5 million in 2020 — before Midwest Commercial Funding, a property manager that won its own separate $3.5 million ruling against Kelly over unpaid rent at a Chicago studio, can access it.
Williams filed a civil lawsuit against Kelly in 2019, alleging that when she was 16 years old, the singer lured her into his studio with promises that she could be in a music video and then repeatedly had sex with her as a minor. In 2020, she won a judgment of $4 million against Kelly on those accusations.
Thursday’s decision upheld a lower court’s earlier ruling that Williams — and not Midwest Commercial — should be given priority access to the royalties because she was the first to properly demand the money from Sony. That earlier ruling had ordered Sony to hand over to Williams “any funds currently in Kelly’s royalty account,” and to keep giving her his royalties until the judgment was paid off.
Disbursement of Kelly’s funds held by Sony has been paused while litigation has played out; it’s unclear how much money is now in the account. The company is not named in any lawsuits and is not accused of any wrongdoing. A rep for Sony declined to comment on the ruling or on the status of Kelly’s royalties.
Following Thursday’s ruling, Kelly’s attorney, Jennifer Bonjean, tells Billboard that she’s currently seeking to overturn the underlying $4 million judgment. She says the award to Williams — a so-called default judgment, meaning it was issued after Kelly failed to respond — “never should have been entered.”
“I’ve never in my career seen such a flouting of the rules to deny him even the opportunity to defend these civil cases, even when the courts were fully aware that Kelly was incarcerated, unrepresented at points, and facing multiple criminal indictments,” Bonjean says. “Indeed, much of these civil proceedings occurred without Kelly’s knowledge.”
But the $4 million judgment was already upheld once by an appeals court, and Bonjean said she faces an “uphill battle” to overturn the judgment because of the actions of Kelly’s prior lawyers.
An attorney for Williams declined to comment on the litigation. An attorney for Midwest Commercial Funding did not return a request for comment.
Though Thursday’s decision gave priority to Williams over Midwest Commercial Funding, it’s unclear whether she’ll enjoy similar priority over a slew of additional monetary penalties that Kelly owes to victims as a result of his federal criminal convictions.
After he was sentenced last summer to 30 years in prison for sex trafficking and racketeering in New York, Kelly was ordered to pay more than $480,000 in fines and restitution; after he was sentenced in February on child pornography charges in Illinois, another $42,000 was tacked on. Last fall, prosecutors confiscated nearly $30,000 in Kelly’s prison account in an effort to start paying those penalties.
A representative for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New York declined to comment on the impact of Thursday’s ruling or the status of federal restitution efforts against Kelly. A rep for the Us Attorney’s Office in Illinois did not immediately return a request for comment.
So far this year, much of the discussion around the touring business has been about ticketing, with high-profile tours by the likes of Taylor Swift and Drake putting Live Nation and Ticketmaster in the spotlight. But underlining that throughline is one undeniable fact: three years on from the onset of the pandemic that shut down events across the world, the live music business is fully back, with the biggest stars in the world hitting the road for their first outings in years.
That has meant that all facets of the touring business are once again operating at full speed. Or, as UTA partner and music agent Mike G puts it, “Post-pandemic, the live business has been on fire.”
The longtime agent would know. This year, he’s booked a series of major tours and shows for some of the biggest acts in multiple genres, including Lil Wayne, Romeo Santos, Wizkid and The Kid LAROI, each with some significance: Wayne’s charting an underplay in anticipation of a broader tour around his upcoming album Tha Carter VI; Santos is playing stadium dates in four cities, almost a decade after he became the first solo Latin artist to sell out Yankee Stadium; Wizkid has a headlining arena tour on the way, after he became just the second Nigerian artist to sell out Madison Square Garden in November; and The Kid LAROI kicked off a college tour of secondary and tertiary markets this week. And all that activity has helped earn Mike G the title of Billboard’s Executive of the Week.
Here, he talks about the strategy behind several of those outings, as well as the difficulties and opportunities that have arisen as the pandemic increasingly appears to be in the rear view mirror. “[The pandemic] created a demand,” he says, “and the live industry is healthy.”
This week, The Kid LAROI kicked off his college tour in Syracuse, New York, one of a number of big tours you’ve locked in in the last few months. What was the strategy behind this one in particular?
The strategy behind touring these college towns was to touch a significant fan base for LAROI in secondary and tertiary markets. The idea of going on a reputable college tour hasn’t been executed since Jay Z. So, we saw an opportunity to continue to build his live business with this run and market it in a specific way. The pop-up pep rallies on the day of the show have been a special touch by LAROI to connect with his fans on campus.
You also booked the upcoming Lil Wayne tour ahead of his next album, which sold out in presale and moved 70,000 tickets with a mix of theaters and arenas. What goes into the routing of a tour like this for a superstar like Wayne?
The idea behind Lil Wayne was to create an intimate touring experience for his fans by playing at venues like the Wiltern in Los Angeles and the iconic Apollo Theater in New York. The concept of playing these rooms was to leave tickets at the door for his more extensive run in the fall while pre-promoting Tha Carter VI with this tour as a marketing vehicle. It is an understatement to say this has played out the way we wanted it to. This tour will be such a great experience for the fans.
Last November, Wizkid became the second Nigerian artist to sell out Madison Square Garden, and now he’s set for an arena tour later this year. What do you see as the touring market and possibilities for afrobeats artists in the U.S.?
The possibilities will be arena and amphitheater tours with afrobeats artists as well as headlining crossover festivals. The potential is unlimited in the live space and we’ve seen such incredible success with WizKid being on the forefront and one of the very few artists leading the movement in the U.S.
In 2020, you guys signed Romeo Santos, his first time signing with a major agency. How did you convince him to come aboard?
The signing of Romeo Santos in 2020 was one of the most significant signings for our department. We presented the full-service models that we live by at the agency. Touring is an artist’s most important revenue generator, but in conjunction with live, the thought was, “Let’s build out other untapped business areas.” Film, TV, digital and brand opportunities should be part of those daily conversations. That generated Romeo’s interest and, ultimately, led him to signing with us. It’s about everything we can deliver, not just touring. He wanted to build out a 360 business in all areas of entertainment.
This year, he’s doing stadium shows in four U.S. cities, just shy of a decade after he became the first Latin artist to ever sell out Yankee Stadium. What continues to make him such a big draw?
His loyal fan base and consistency in delivering fantastic music and a spectacular live show. Romeo took Bachata music to new heights. He revolutionized and modernized the genre.
What goes into booking artists of all sizes in the right venues — especially those artists who may have emerged during the pandemic, and don’t have much of a touring history, if any?
We study and understand where that artist is in their career. For some acts, we can gauge and see if playing a 500-cap room is the right step to begin their touring career in the major markets. Finding the right support slot on tour for other acts can expose the artist to new fans and build a base. Each artist is different, but you must be strategically aggressive and not afraid to lose to make a live career.
How has the touring business changed as the world emerges from the pandemic? And how has it changed how you do business?
Post-pandemic, the live business has been on fire. It created a demand, and the live industry is healthy. The business will continue to thrive, but being conscious of ticket pricing will be instrumental in our current economy.
Previous Executive of the Week: Jesús López of Universal Music Latin America
Immersive audio has been available in the live sector for about a decade now, but growing interest in spatial audio is fueling increased demand from artists and their creative teams to find money and physical space to deploy the technology at concerts.
That includes global superstar Adele, who wraps up her “Weekends with Adele” residency at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace this Saturday. After a brief demonstration in London, Adele and her creative team decided to use L-Acoustics’ L-ISA system for the high-profile residency, creating an ideal showcase for journalists, creative teams and other music executives to hear the system’s “hyper real sound,” as L-Acoustics sometimes calls it, and how it compares to traditional stereo sound.
“In a traditional stereo show, the sweet spot for sound as a mixer is probably pretty small,” explains Jordan Tani, project and technology marketing engineer for L-Acoustics, during a pre-show front of house tour of the Colosseum. In many venues, “the sweet spot” where the audience can fully capture the audio mix is as little as 5% of the venue. But immersive audio systems significantly expand the coverage area of a venue to more than 90% of the audience, thanks to innovations in loudspeaker configuration, algorithmic sound mapping technology and the processing power of the human brain to quickly calculate differences in time and amplitude to determine a sound’s location.
When delivered correctly through high-end lateral and overhead speakers, L-ISA creates a 3D soundscape that more evenly distributes audio to the audience and gives certain sound objects a distinct spatial position.
“And by having this type of coverage and this resolution, we can now pan things around, give spatialization, and give the instruments and the sounds, their appropriate space,” Tani says. “Immersive sound ensures all sounds are heard the way the artist wants them to be heard, not matter where the audience member is sitting.”
For Adele, that means the sound of her voice naturally moves with her as she walks around the stage and the venue, while greeting fans. It also gives her front-of-house engineers a chance to build impressive crescendo moments into her songs. As more instruments and audio elements are added, the soundscape is widened and given more depth, slowly immersing the audience for each track’s big musical moments.
For L-Acoustics, the pioneering sound company launched in France in 1984 and now headquartered in LA’s Westlake Village, The Coliseum is the most high-profile use yet for L-ISA. L-Acoustics is one of the largest premium loudspeaker and pro audio companies in the touring industry and one of only a few manufacturing complete audio systems for immersive sound at live entertainment venues.
The company’s founder Christian Heil is credited with inventing the modern line array, a system for stacking speakers familiar to live music fans used to seeing large, curved vertical arrays of loudspeakers hanging from the stage grid. Heil — a partial physicist and fan of Pink Floyd in the 1970s and 80s who wanted to improve the sound quality of the gigs he was attending in Europe at the time — noticed that many venues and sound techs tried to make up for sound coverage issues at concerts by increasing overall power, making it much louder in the front section than the rear. In 1992, he discovered that stacking speakers of the same frequency at a slight angle greatly expanded sound coverage, without additional power requirements, and gave way for a much more even listening experience from front to back.
Today, most loudspeaker companies have adopted the line array model into their touring systems, while the team at L-Acoustics have continued to innovate and develop new methods for how sound is delivered to an audience. Beginning in the early 2010s, the company began experimenting with immersive audio and object-based sound mixing, paving the way for the launch of L-ISA in 2016.
In order to expand adoption of the technology, L-Acoustics CEO Laurent Vaissié says the company has shifted its marketing and educational efforts away from production managers and front-of-house engineers toward artists, musical directors and sound designers that have creative input for a show.
“L-ISA opens up the creative process and you can see that with Adele show,” says Vaissié. “There are creative decisions that need to be made in terms of how the music should be heard. Is her voice front and center? Who wide do her backup vocals need to be? These are decisions increasingly being made by the creative director, the musical director, and sometimes even the artist themselves.”
By engaging directly with the creative teams, L-Acoustics has expanded the number of contemporary artists using its immersive technology, signing up Bon Iver, Odesza, Katy Perry, Lorde and more.
“It’s a slow burn,” says Vaissié who estimates that about 10% of the tours that work with L-Acoustics are now using L-ISA. In five years, he believes that immersive audio will account for 20-30% of his company’s business.
The challenges of building the system, which costs about 20% more than non-immersive products, are expected to improve as L-Acoustics shifts to a lower cost licensing model charging users based on how they use the system, lowering costs for smaller productions. He also added that the necessary gear is getting smaller and lighter, taking up less real estate on stage.
“And most importantly, fans are demanding it,” Vaissié says. “Once a fan hears it at one show, they come to expect it at other concerts they attend. Fans pay a lot of money for concert tickets, and they want to have the best experience possible.”
Maureen Loughran was named director/curator of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings — the nonprofit record label of the Smithsonian — effective Monday (March 27). Loughran, who is currently senior producer of the nationally distributed public radio series American Routes, will also oversee the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections. She succeeds Daniel Sheehy, the former director of Smithsonian Folkways, who had come out of retirement to serve as interim director for the past two years. Loughran can be reached at LoughranME@si.edu.
Better Noise Music promoted senior label manager Trish Sterling to vp of marketing; UK & Europe promotions manager Claudia Mancino to international director of press & promotion; senior vp of finance Harris Masood to CFO; and director of financial operations Chekesha McCalla to vp of finance. Also promoted was Dan Sears to director of production and Michael Filippone to finance manager. Additionally, the company hired Michael Lombardi as head of production and development; Paolo Bettaglio as senior director of digital marketing & audience growth; Elisa Nye — hired by Bettaglio — as senior manager of digital marketing & audience growth; Chandler Booth as marketing manager; and Liam Kay as production coordinator. Mancino can be reached at claudia@betternoise.com.
Kobalt named Lindsey Lanier as vp of creative and Desi O’Meara as director of creative. The Los Angeles-based Lanier most recently served as vp of A&R at Motown Records and the New York-based O’Meara was most recently director of A&R at Columbia Records.
Various Artists Management appointed Joe Etchells as head of A&R and artist development, effective April 2. Etchells will be based between the company’s London and Los Angeles offices, reporting to CEO David Bianchi and U.K. managing director John Dawkins. He will work across the company’s artist management, music publishing and label operations. Etchells joins from EMI, where he served as A&R director. He can be reached at joe@variousartistsmanagement.com.
Jon “Ando” Andolina launched The Francis June Group for management, bringing with him flagship client, Big Loud Records artist Larry Fleet (“Where I Find God”). Andolina was previously co-founder/partner at Good Company Entertainment alongside Jake Owen and Keith Gale. Andolina can be reached at ando@thefrancisjunegroup.com.
Jammcard — styled as a LinkedIn for the music industry — announced the launch of Jammcard Films. Filmmaker Jack Piatt, who was originally director of operations for Jammcard, will serve as president of the new division, while Caroline Hoste — a partner at Piatt’s Highway West Entertainment as well as a Jammcard advisor — will serve as vp. Meanwhile, Jammcard founder Elmo Lovano will fill the role of executive producer. Forthcoming Jammcard Film releases include the feature-length documentaries Immediate Family directed by Denny Tedesco and Trap Jazz directed by Sadé Clacken Joseph. Piatt can be reached at Jack@highwaywestent.com, Hoste can be reached at Caroline@highwaywestent.com and Lovano can be reached at elmo@jammcard.com.
On-air personality/podcaster/producer Ashley Eicher launched her own media company, AE Entertainment, which will provide story consulting, media coaching and content creation for clients. She can be reached at ashley@aeentertainment.co.
Nashville Notes:
International Bluegrass Music Association executive director Pat Morris resigned from his post effective March 24, allowing him to move out of state to address family medical issues. Former executive director Paul Schiminger will handle the role on an interim basis … T.J. Dula joined iHeartMedia/Raleigh-Durham, N.C., as senior vp of sales. She was previously Disney ABC Television Group digital sales director. The five-station Raleigh cluster includes country WNCB … Pandora senior director of country programming Johnny Chiang added SiriusXM country programming to his job description … Subscribe to our weekly Country Update newsletter for more Music City news.