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AEG has unveiled the company’s plans for realigning its international business divisions, promoting Adam Wilkes to the newly created position of president/CEO of AEG Presents, Europe and Asia-Pacific and elevating Alex Hill to lead AEG’s global real estate and venue operations outside the U.S. in the new position of president/CEO of AEG International.  In his new […]

Wasserman Music has hired five key executives to expand its client service offerings worldwide, the company announced Wednesday (Jan. 29).
“As our clients’ needs continually expand along with our ever-evolving industry, we’ve continued to stay ahead of these changes so that we’re always able to provide best-in-class service to our artists and partners,” said Wasserman Music President Lee Anderson in a statement.

The new hires include Vince Amoroso, who joins Wasserman Music as senior vp of artist services in the company’s New York office. Amoroso will help develop new revenue opportunities for clients across industries, including commercial and digital partnerships, merchandise and e-commerce, original content and IP, gaming, film, TV, and books. He previously served as chief marketing officer for independent music company The Other Songs and as senior vp/head of marketing and business development at management services company mtheory, where he worked with A$AP Rocky, Sabrina Carpenter, J. Cole, Skrillex, Diplo, FKA twigs and Florence + the Machine.

Also in New York, Georgia McGurk joins as vp of event strategy & hospitality, taking a newly created role to enhance the broader market presence of Wasserman Music and its artists through the strategic development and execution of high-touch VIP and white-glove experiences for clients, partners and industry professionals across sectors. McGurk has spent a decade working in the sports and entertainment industries at companies such as IMG/Endeavor and, most recently, BSE Global, the parent company of the Brooklyn Nets and Barclays Center.

Elsewhere, Sharmaine Akhigbe joins as vp of brand partnerships in Wasserman’s London office, where she will develop and manage new partnerships worldwide for clients and brands across the U.K. and Europe, as well as new opportunities for Wasserman Music’s full client roster. She previously served as director of premier artists at Premier Model Management.

Trending on Billboard

Also joining Wasserman Music is Karina Gonzalez as VP of festivals for Wasserman’s L.A. office, where she will focus on client bookings for Latin music festivals in the U.S. and contemporary festivals across Latin America. She previously served as vp of touring & development at Latin concert promoter Zamora Live, where she was instrumental in expanding the company’s reach across Central America and the U.S. Gonzalez also served as an agent at UTA focused on the Latin American market for major music artists including Karol G, Lauryn Hill, Bring Me the Horizon, AURORA and Arlo Parks.

Lastly, Yasi Agahnia joins as director of corporate & special events in Wasserman’s L.A. office, where she will primarily focus on private event bookings for artists across the electronic, hip-hop and R&B genres, though she will also work with artists across Wasserman Music’s full client roster. Agahnia previously worked at CAA, where she rose from working in the company’s mailroom to becoming an agent in its private & corporate events division.

Wednesday’s news follows Wasserman Music’s announcement earlier this month that it had onboardedthree top executives from rival agency WME — Kevin Shivers, James Rubin and Cristina Baxter — to join its executive leadership team.

Wasserman Music

How much are 1,000 streams worth? A new report from catalog investor and lending platform Duetti attempts to answer this question.
According to the report, released Thursday (Jan. 23), independent artists and others who own master recordings received about $3.41 per 1,000 streams globally in 2024.

That global payout rate is down from $4.04 per 1,000 streams in 2021, according to the study, which included data related to Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, Amazon Music, TIDAL, Qobuz, Deezer, SoundCloud and Pandora.

Of those companies, Amazon Music paid the most at $8.80 per 1,000 streams in 2024.

While the rate paid per 1,000 streams has declined each year since 2021, Duetti CEO Lior Tibon says rates appear to be plateauing because the higher price of streaming subscriptions at some companies is raising royalty payouts. Tibon says they also found that the portion of overall payouts coming from YouTube, which Duetti found pays more than Spotify, increased for the artists in its study — while the portion coming from Spotify for those artists decreased 2%.

Trending on Billboard

Duetti, which provides financing for independent artists in exchange for a stake in their master recordings, says that Spotify’s Discovery Mode and its greater adoption outside the U.S. are the main drivers driving down payout rates, even though Spotify raised subscription prices in most major markets. Artists who sign up their tracks for Spotify’s Discovery Mode program gain more algorithmic exposure on the platform through Spotify Radio and autoplay in exchange for a lower royalty rate. The program, which was expanded in 2023 to be open to anyone with access to Spotify For Artists, has been criticized by music trade organizations and some in Congress who are concerned it puts artists in a position where they feel the need to pay to play.

Spotify did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The growth of Discovery Mode’s contribution to overall streams for independent artists in this study is slowing, which means its impact on payout rates is starting to stabilize, Tibon says.

“We are at the point where it is not going to continue to increase as much as it did over prior years, and the growth of YouTube is counteracting the impact of its growth outside the U.S. and [the growth of] discount plans,” Tibon says.

Certain subgenres, such as hyperpop, saw slightly higher royalty payouts — as much as 30 cents more per 1,000 streams — than mainstream genres, in part because artists who produce this music less often enroll in Discovery Mode, according to the report.

WHO PAYS WHAT

According to the study, Amazon Music pays the highest royalty rate of any streaming service at $8.80 per 1,000 streams. (Amazon Music services are bundled with a Prime membership, which costs $139 per year.)

TIDAL pays the second most at $6.80 per 1,000 streams, while Apple Music pays $6.20 per 1,000 streams “due to their foothold in higher price markets, and the lack of ad-supported tiers,” the report found.

Though YouTube’s payout rates vary significantly among artists, Duetti found that on average across the independent artists in its study, the video streaming platform paid out $4.80 per 1,000 streams in 2024.

Meanwhile, Spotify paid out around $3 per 1,000 streams due to “high usage, geographical mix, reliance on discounted [and] free plans, and their Discovery Mode program,” according to the report.

Counter to conventional wisdom, going viral on TikTok only resulted in higher royalty payouts 15% of the time, the report found.

Amazon, TIDAL and YouTube did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

TikTok has said in the past that it plays a major role in artists getting their songs discovered, claiming that 84% of all songs on the Billboard Global 200 in 2024 started as viral hits on its platform.

DATA FROM CATALOG VALUATIONS

Founded in 2022, Duetti is a catalog investment company that provides independent artists with capital — amounts range from $10,000 to $3 million — in exchange for a stake in the master recordings of certain songs. The data Duetti uses to value artists’ catalogs before buying them — including royalty statements, streaming performance and other analytics — underpin the findings in the report.

Duetti works with more than 500 artists, including Shayne Orok, known for his Japanese versions of pop songs, and Adán Cruz, a Mexican rapper and songwriter, to promote their works digitally, including across Duetti’s network of YouTube channels.

“YouTube has always been the foundation of my career, allowing me to connect directly with fans and build a sustainable livelihood doing what I love,” Orok said in a statement from Duetti. “Partnering with Duetti has taken that connection to the next level by helping my music reach new audiences in ways I couldn’t achieve on my own.”

A new federal report on artificial intelligence says that merely prompting a computer to write a song isn’t enough to secure a copyright on the resulting track — but that using AI as a “brainstorming tool” or to assist in a recording studio would be fair game.
In a long-awaited report issued Wednesday (Jan. 29), the U.S. Copyright Office reiterated the agency’s basic stance on legal protections for AI-generated works: That only human authors are eligible for copyrights, but that material created with the assistance of AI can qualify on a case-by-case basis.

Amid the surging growth of AI technology over the past two years, the question of copyright coverage for outputs has loomed large for the nascent industry, since works that aren’t protected by copyrights would be far harder for their creators to monetize.

Trending on Billboard

“Where that [human] creativity is expressed through the use of AI systems, it continues to enjoy protection,” said Shira Perlmutter, Register of Copyrights, in the report. “Extending protection to material whose expressive elements are determined by a machine, however, would undermine rather than further the constitutional goals of copyright.”

Simply using a written prompt to order an AI model to spit out an entire song or other work would fail that test, the Copyright Office said. The report directly quoted from a comment submitted by Universal Music Group, which likened that scenario to “someone who tells a musician friend to ‘write me a pretty love song in a major key’ and then falsely claims co-ownership.”

“Prompts alone do not provide sufficient human control to make users of an AI system the authors of the output,” the agency wrote. “Prompts essentially function as instructions that convey unprotectible ideas.”

But the agency also made clear that using AI to help create new works would not automatically void copyright protection — and that when AI “functions as an assistive tool” that helps a person express themselves, the final output would “in many circumstances” still be protected.

“There is an important distinction between using AI as a tool to assist in the creation of works and using AI as a stand-in for human creativity,” the Office wrote.

To make that point, the report cited specific examples that would likely be fair game, including Hollywood studios using AI-powered tech to “de-age” actors in movies. The report also said AI could be used as a “brainstorming tool,” quoting from a Recording Academy submission that said artists are currently using AI to “assist them in creating new music.”

“In these cases, the user appears to be prompting a generative AI system and referencing, but not incorporating, the output in the development of her own work of authorship,” the agency wrote. “Using AI in this way should not affect the copyrightability of the resulting human-authored work.”

Wednesday’s report, like previous statements from the Copyright Office on AI, offered broad guidance but avoided hard-and-fast rules. Songs and other works that use AI will require “case-by-case determinations,” the agency said, as to whether they “reflect sufficient human contribution” to merit copyright protection. The exact legal framework for deciding such cases was not laid out in the report.

The new study on copyrightability is the second of three studies the agency is conducting on AI. The first report, issued last year, recommended federal legislation banning the use of AI to create fake replicas of real people; bills that would do so are pending before Congress.

The final report, set for release at some point in the future, deals with the biggest AI legal question of all: whether AI companies break the law when they “train” their models on vast quantities of copyrighted works. That question — which could implicate trillions of dollars in damages and exert a profound effect on future AI development — is already the subject of widespread litigation.

In December, Influence Media Partners, the music investing company backed by BlackRock and the Warner Music Group, joined the growing music industry trend of using asset-backed securitization to finance acquisitions and operations by raising about $360 million through a private placement in a deal lead by Goldman Sachs, sources say.
Besides the Influence Media deal, the waning months of 2024 also saw Concord raising $850 million through its third asset-backed bond offering run by Apollo Global Management in October; while Blackstone led a $1.47 billion securitization for its Hipgnosis Song Asset company. In each deal, the bonds and notes are collateralized by the music assets and income streams of the respective companies. The offerings from Concord and Hipgnosis have public filings with the appropriate regulatory agencies, but the Influence Media offering, as a private placement, does not have to file with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

As interest rates rise, asset-backed securities (ABS) are expected to become increasingly popular funding vehicles for music companies because they have fixed, five-year interest rates. In the past, Concord CEO Bob Valentine has compared these securitizations to fixed, low-interest-rate loans.

Trending on Billboard

Influence Media co-managing partner Lynn Hazan, the former CFO for Epic Records, worked with BlackRock executives on the deal, according to sources.

Influence Media, which was founded in 2019, has since bought stakes in some 30 music catalogs, and in early 2022 received additional funding to the tune of $750 million provided by BlackRock and the Warner Music Group. The acquired catalogs include music by Enrique Iglesias, Future, Logic, Julia Michaels, Ali Tamposi, Tainy and Harry Styles collaborator Tyler Johnson. The new funding is expected to be deployed in buying more music catalog assets.

Initially, it looked like the Influence Media Partners asset-backed securities offering was slow in coming together as bond investors looked at the Concord and Hipgnosis offerings, but in the end, the Influence offering — which also had Truist as the co-structuring and co-placement agent — came together nicely for the New York-based music investment company, attracting funding from about a half-dozen investors, sources say.

As of January, Warner Music Group (WMG) executive vp/general counsel Paul Robinson has worked in the legal department of the company for 30 years. During that time, he has seen “three different owners, seven CEOs and we’ve gone private and public two different times,” he says. “There also have been all of these macro changes in the music business” — which is something of an understatement. What hasn’t changed much, he says, is the culture of the company: “It’s always been an artist- friendly, songwriter-friendly culture, and we’ve always had a great relationship between recorded music and publishing.” 
Robinson was slated to receive the 2025 Entertainment Law Initiative Service Award on Jan. 31 at the organization’s annual Grammy Week luncheon at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. But since the event was canceled in the wake of the Los Angeles wildfires, he will receive the honor at next year’s gathering. 

Trending on Billboard

Robinson started at WMG in 1995 after working at Mayer Katz Baker Leibowitz, which at the time did a significant amount of the label group’s legal work. Robinson got the top job in 2006 and helped steer the company through the worst years of the music business, to its 2013 acquisition of Parlophone Label Group from Universal Music Group, and into the streaming-led recovery and a successful 2020 initial public offering. 

Like the rest of the industry, WMG is now at a point where streaming growth in developed markets is slowing and the challenges of artificial intelligence (AI) loom — and in a way that will especially test it as the smallest of the three majors. Which is why, Robinson says, “From my point of view, it’s important to be perceived as, and to be, the most artist-friendly, songwriter-friendly company” — a message that WMG sent by being the first major to adopt artist-friendly policies on “digital breakage” in 2009 and on sharing gains from equity sales, such as with Spotify in 2016. “Jac Holzman, when he started Elektra, used to have this love-and-affection clause in his contracts that said the label will treat artists with love and affection and the artist will treat the label with a modicum of respect,” Robinson recalls. “And it’s great because it brings to mind the imbalance: Artists will not always love their labels, but we always have to love them and we hope that they at least respect us.” 

Your father is Irwin Robinson, the prominent publishing executive who ran Chappell/Intersong and then EMI Music Publishing. Did you purposefully decide to follow him into the same business?

That was how it ended up, but they say there are no accidents. In some ways, I was afraid to go into the music business. There were huge shoes for me to step into. I thought I wanted to be a doctor, and then I worked at a hospital one summer and I decided, “Maybe I don’t want to be a doctor.” I was a huge music fan as well as a singer, and I thought, “I’ll just go to law school and see what happens.” Maybe I was avoiding it. 

Robinson’s father gave him this 1956 letter from legendary songwriter-composer Cole Porter to his lawyer, John Wharton, at Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison. “I like it because in a single letter, he talks about the relatively important issue of assigning his renewal rights to Chappell and the relatively unimportant issue of a songbook being able to stay on a piano rack,” he says. “God is in the details.”

Krista Schlueter

Billboard can reveal that you were the singer in a new wave band. 

I was one of the singers. We were called The Doctors. The musicians in the band all wore scrubs, and we were the hit of Williams College campus for a year. In fact, they asked The Doctors to play at my college reunion and we’re doing it. 

You’re one of the few people who has been in the same department at the same company since the Napster era. Any lessons from then on how the industry should deal with AI? 

Probably to lean into change. Maybe there were people in 1999 at Warner Music Group who saw peer-to-peer coming, but I feel like we were caught very much off guard, and I don’t think that’s been the case with AI. Also, with peer-to-peer, there wasn’t a great deal around until iTunes in 2003, so we’re also in a better place that way. There are services we can strike deals with now. 

What are the best- and worst-case scenarios for the industry for generative AI?

[That’s] probably less of a general counsel question than [one for] business development, but I think the worst-case scenario is that somehow it’s determined that you don’t need permission to train an AI model and the market is flooded with a huge volume of content that dilutes legitimate music, in the same way services are flooded now with music that very few people listen to — but in turbo. The best case is that AI becomes an incredible tool for artists and songwriters and lets them up their game and release content in languages they don’t speak. 

“This is a 1994 photo from my wedding of
my then-partners from Mayer Katz Baker Leibowitz & Roberts and their wives,” he says. “WMG was Mayer Katz’s biggest client.”

Krista Schlueter

The streaming model seems to be evolving. There’s talk of  “Streaming 2.0.” What kind of terms are you looking for now in streaming deals? 

Trying to lock in per-subscriber minimums and reduce discounts for family plans and so on. That’s where we are focused.

When you started in the music business, there were six major labels. Now there are three. Does that change the nature of competition? 

Even though there are only three majors, it feels like it’s never been more competitive. All you have to do is look at the change in artist deals over time. 

I’m assuming you mean that deals now favor artists? Is it harder to invest in them under these circumstances? 

No. Every year, our A&R spend increases. When I started, we were getting eight-album deals, but we were signing artists where, because there was no internet, their following was probably their hometown and they needed a huge amount of development. Today, we hardly ever sign an artist that doesn’t have a significant social media presence, and those artists don’t need as much development. 

“Believe it or not,” Robinson says, he has had the same office chair for 30 years. “It definitely looks like a chair from 1995, but I just can’t seem to let go of it.”

Krista Schlueter

Now you also compete with distribution deals. 

From an artist’s point of view, there’s a trade-off. In a distribution deal, you’re getting a bigger piece of the pie, but you’re getting less development and it’s a shorter-term relationship, so there’s probably not going to be as much investment. If you sign a frontline label deal, you’re committing to more albums and you’re getting a smaller piece of the pie, but you are getting a whole team of people behind you to develop your career. The great thing is that artists have more choice than ever. 

How do you make sure artist contracts feel like win-win deals?

Deals get renegotiated all the time if they’re out of sync. If there’s an artist with a small record deal that has tremendous success, the economics of their next albums are going to look different. We’re in the personal services business and we’re in the relationship business. We want to maintain the best relationships with artists and songwriters. 

Is there a deal you did that you’re especially proud of? 

When we bought Parlophone Label Group, that was a huge regulatory fight, and I would say it was a win-win. UMG had to sell Parlophone, we were the best buyer, and they were looking for a good price, which today looks like a really low price. We paid about $800 million, probably about a seven-and-a-half times multiple, which at the time was huge. We were much more U.S. weighted in our revenue, and we bought a bunch of European assets. So it rebalanced us in terms of geography, and we acquired great repertoire and some great artists.

What has been some of the most memorable litigation that you have overseen? The case in which Led Zeppelin was sued for copyright infringement by a trustee for the estate of Spirit frontman Randy Wolfe comes to mind.

The exciting thing about the Zeppelin case was not only winning, after having been dealt a bunch of blows — we won in trial court and we were reversed — but changing the trajectory of copyright infringement litigation. It was a beat-back of what was, I think, the bad law of the “Blurred Lines” case.

Robinson never met Prince, but he is such a big fan that two people gave him signed limited-edition lithographs of the New Yorker cover commemorating the artist’s death. “He was an incredibly distinctive artist. For his first album, Warner Records let him do everything. They basically said, ‘Go in the studio and do it.’ That didn’t happen much in 1977.”

Krista Schlueter

This story appears in the Jan. 25, 2025 issue of Billboard.

01/29/2025

With 2025 in full swing, 18 top executives from across the music business share predictions for the year.

01/29/2025

Spotify won a ruling Wednesday dismissing a lawsuit from the Mechanical Licensing Collective that accused the streamer of unfairly slashing royalty rates, with a federal judge ruling that Spotify’s move was supported by “unambiguous” regulations.
The MLC sued last year, claiming Spotify had “unilaterally and unlawfully” chosen to cut its music royalty payments nearly in half through bookmaking trickery – namely, by claiming that the addition of audiobooks to the platform entitled the company to pay a lower “bundled” rate.

But in her decision on Wednesday, Judge Analisa Torres said that federal royalty rate rules clearly allowed Spotify to legally claim the lower rate, rejecting MLC’s argument that the company was not actually offering a “bundle” of services.

Trending on Billboard

“Audiobook streaming is a product or service that is distinct from music streaming and has more than token value,” the judge wrote, alluding to the specific wording of the federal rule. “Premium is, therefore, properly categorized as a Bundle.”

A spokeswoman for the MLC did not immediately return a request for comment on the ruling.

The MLC, which collects streaming royalties for songwriters and publishers, filed its lawsuit in late May — a week after Billboard estimated that Spotify’s move would result in the company paying roughly $150 million less over the next year. In its complaint, the MLC claimed Spotify was “erroneously recharacterizing” the nature of its streaming services to secure the lower rate.

“The financial consequences of Spotify’s failure to meet its statutory obligations are enormous for songwriters and music publishers,” the group’s attorneys wrote at the time. “If unchecked, the impact on songwriters and music publishers of Spotify’s unlawful underreporting could run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.”

At issue in the lawsuit is Spotify’s recent addition of audiobooks to its premium subscription service. The streamer believes that because of the new offering, it’s now entitled to pay a discounted “bundled” royalty rate under the federal legal settlement that governs how much streamers pay rightsholders.

In Wednesday’s ruling, Judge Torres agreed. She said the rules required only that Spotify offered a different service and that it provided users with more than “token value” – and that the addition of audiobooks was clearly covered by those terms.

MLC’s attorneys had argued that audiobooks were that kind of “token” non-factor, since Spotify didn’t raises prices when it added them and only a small proportion of subscribers actually listen to them. MLC had claimed Spotify added the books was merely a “pretext” to cut rates for music.

Spotify moved to dismiss the case in August, calling it “nonsensical” and “wasteful.” The company’s attorneys blasted the MLC’s argument that the audiobooks were aimed at a legal loophole, saying it “profoundly devalues the contributions of the tens of thousands of book authors.”

In her decision on Wednesday, Judge Torres sided with Spotify’s argument. Though she said the new offering might strike ordinary consumers as more of a “two-for-one deal” than a traditional bundle, she said Spotify’s addition of the books had clearly brought more than nominal value to its users.

“MLC cannot plausibly claim that having access to audiobooks is not something of intrinsic and monetary value to many, even if only a fraction of Spotify’s millions of Premium subscribers may take advantage of it,” the judge wrote. “The court can draw only one conclusion: that 15 hours of monthly audiobook streaming is a product or service that has more than token value.”

If anything, Judge Torres said, Spotify had “likely paid more in royalties to MLC than it was otherwise required to pay” because it did not immediately claim bundled status after introducing the audiobook feature.

In addition to dismissing the lawsuit, Judge Torres did not give MLC a chance to refile the case, saying the law was clear and that amending the accusations would be futile. The group can still challenge the ruling at a federal appeals court, however.

In a statement to Billboard on Wednesday, a Spotify spokesperson said the company was “pleased” with the court’s decision: “Bundle offerings play a critical role in expanding the interest in paying for music and growing the pie for the music industry. We know the regulations can be complex, but there’s plenty of room for collaboration—and our recent deal with [Universal Music Publishing Group] shows how direct licenses can create flexibility and additional benefits.”

From the late 1990s into the 2000s, “VH1 Save the Music” was a household name known for its annual Divas Live benefit concerts featuring such bold-faced icons as Aretha, Whitney, Mariah and Celine. But by the end of the 2010s, following the television network’s pivot to reality series like Love & Hip-Hop and Basketball Wives, the branding no longer made sense.
“In 2019, it was pretty clear strategically that going forward, the VH1 brand was not going to be part of our future,” says Henry Donahue, executive director at the Save the Music Foundation. As a result, “VH1” was dropped from the organization’s name that same year.

Far from being a disaster, unbundling from VH1 gave Save the Music new life, says Donahue — and in 2025, it’s arguably doing better than ever. According to Donahue, Save the Music’s annual operating budget in 2018 — the year before the VH1 name was dropped — was $4.7 million. Last year, that number had risen to nearly $11 million, including more than $1 million from a new $10 million endowment fund that the foundation formally announced on Wednesday (Jan. 29). (Save the Music notes the 2024 numbers are still unaudited.)

Trending on Billboard

The fund, of which $4 million has already been raised, will “ensure the cultural institution’s sustainability and long-term support for music education,” according to a press release. Notably, the endowment coincides with a formal split from Save the Music and VH1’s longtime corporate parent Paramount Global (formerly Viacom), though the entertainment giant has pledged an initial six-figure donation.

The breakup had been a long time coming. In the five years since it dropped the VH1 branding, Save the Music has substantially reduced its dependence on Paramount after the company opted to move away from social responsibility initiatives, the foundation says. By 2024, 95% of Save the Music’s organizational budget came from non-Paramount sources, with notable backers including tech and music industry behemoths like TikTok, Live Nation, Meta, Amazon and AEG Presents.

The split from Paramount marks the end of a long and productive relationship. Since it was founded by then-VH1 president John Sykes in 1997, Save the Music has donated more than $75 million worth of instruments and technology to over 2,800 school music programs in more than 300 districts across the U.S. and improved the educational fortunes of countless under-resourced students.

Sykes tells Billboard that the foundation came about after he visited Brooklyn elementary school P.S. 58 as part of a “principal for a day” initiative and, while sitting in on the school’s music class, “saw these kids playing their instruments [that] were held together with tape, literally tape, and strings missing on violins, and they didn’t care. They were so, so excited and so connected to the music… they had no idea that the instruments they were playing were falling apart.”

While speaking with the music teacher, Sykes (now president of entertainment enterprises at iHeartMedia and chairman of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame) learned that the music program would likely have to close down for lack of funds. “And I said, ‘Well, how much do you need?’” he remembers. “And she said, ‘Well, a lot — $5,000.’ I said, ‘You got it.’”

Sykes was particularly encouraged by something else the teacher said: That the children who played instruments tended to earn better grades in math and English. Around the same time, he read a magazine article that described how music “helps wire a kid’s brain.”

“I said, ‘Oh, my God. This is bigger than one school. This could impact the country,’” he says. “And VH1 was a national channel. So I went back to our team and I said, ‘We’re going to adopt more schools across the country and partner with our cable systems to raise money and start using the power of VH1’s reach to go and influence local governments not to cut music programs. And we’re going to raise money to fund those programs.’”

Soon enough, Save the Music had equipped roughly a dozen New York schools with musical instruments. When Sykes put in a personal call to President Bill Clinton, who had famously played the saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show during the 1992 election campaign, Clinton agreed to donate one of his saxes to an underprivileged school in Washington, D.C. When the President sent First Lady Hillary Clinton to hand the instrument over, says Sykes, “It became a national story.”

The foundation was formally unveiled in April 1997 during that year’s VH1 Honors awards show, which raised $150,000 for the organization and featured callouts from A-list artists touting the importance of music education. The following year, VH1 Divas Live — a once-annual concert special benefitting the foundation — was launched with Dion, Aretha Franklin, Mariah Carey, Shania Twain and Gloria Estefan and became a phenomenon, grabbing big ratings and even selling albums. (A series of commercially-released VH1 Divas albums sold a combined 1 million copies in the U.S., according to Luminate.)

In its current iteration, Save the Music makes a capital investment in between 100 to 150 school music programs in the U.S. every year, says Donahue. The foundation identifies districts to support via a rubric that looks at two primary factors: economic need, which accounts for everything from median income and racial demographics to free and reduced lunch rates; and readiness and willingness of the district to work with them, including by providing a certified music teacher. They also look at scale, preferring projects that allow them to target “30 or 50 or 100 schools all at once” in a district or a region, says Donahue.

The gradual de-coupling from Paramount brought opportunities and funding Save the Music otherwise wouldn’t have had. In 2021, the new paradigm “was validated,” Donahue says, when the foundation received a $2 million grant from MacKenzie Scott — the co-founder of Amazon and ex-wife of Jeff Bezos — “which we never would have gotten had we been VH1 Save the Music.”

The shift away from Paramount also allowed Save the Music to become much more responsive to communities’ needs, says Donahue. “[We wanted to] push towards a strategy where our work was much more community based,” he says. “So we were listening to the people in the communities that we served, as opposed to taking direction from the corporate parent or however we fit into the corporate strategy.”

Save the Music’s sought-after post-VH1 program is the J Dilla Music Technology Grant, which invests in music technology curriculums and equipment for elementary, middle and high schools in an effort to help train the next generation of producers, engineers, songwriters, DJs and more. Chiho Feindler, who has served as Save the Music’s chief program officer since 2008, says the grant allows kids to be trained early in the kind of behind-the-scenes jobs that can lead to real careers.

“We often talk about everybody wants to become the Jay Z…but there are a thousand other jobs behind that that can be equally, if not more satisfying,” Feindler adds.

“[It’s] our most-demanded program,” Donahue says of the J Dilla grant, which has gone to more than 100 schools, including “35 or 40” just during the 2024-25 school year. “That’s the thing that schools now ask about most often and it’s the thing that people in the music industry ask about most often.”

A more recent focus has been expanding the foundation’s grants for Latin music programs to encompass additional genres and styles beyond mariachi — another result of the new freedom and depth of engagement with communities made possible by the gradual split with Paramount. “Mariachi is really a small part of the Latin community,” says Feindler, “[but] mariachi is not a solution for all of the Spanish-speaking community.” (Full disclosure: Billboard recently hosted a fundraiser via Instagram for Save the Music’s “Miami Saves Music” project, which is aiming to invest in instrumental and music tech programs for roughly 100 public schools in Miami-Dade County by 2027.)

Feindler adds that Save the Music is also looking to offer more support to preschool and elementary school-aged music programs by providing kid-friendly instruments like xylophones and drums after focusing “for the longest time… on more of the band and stringed [instruments],” she says.

Another new initiative was announced on Wednesday: a giveaway campaign hosted on the charity platform Propellor that will allow fans to bid on more than a dozen auction items from artists including Sabrina Carpenter, The War and Treaty, Blake Shelton and Patti LaBelle to support the foundation.

Though Save the Music is far from its nationally televised Divas Live days, it still attracts A-list talent. In 2023, Ed Sheeran teamed with the foundation to surprise five schools with “pop-up” classroom visits while donating a portion of the proceeds from digital album sales from his Autumn Variations album, along with 100% of the ticket proceeds from an Amazon Live performance, to the organization. Last year, Save the Music also secured the support of Jelly Roll, who visited and performed at his former high school in Antioch, Tenn., and made a substantial donation to the foundation. And in October, Maren Morris, Brittney Spencer and Live Nation Women’s Ali Harnell were honored at Save the Music’s Hometown to Hometown benefit in Nashville, which raised more than $300,000 for music education programs in under-resourced public high schools.

With or without Paramount, Save the Music will continue to endure, says Sykes, because at heart it’s not just about learning to play an instrument but about giving kids a chance at carving out a successful path in life.

“This is not just, ‘Junior is happy because he’s playing the flute or the violin,’” he says. “That kid’s going to go to college, that kid’s going to do better, that kid’s going to stay in school, that kid’s going to feel better about himself or herself. There’s so many different positive outcomes of music education.”

Audacy president/CEO David Field is stepping down, with current Audacy board member Kelli Turner to serve as interim president/CEO, effective immediately. A search is underway for Field’s permanent successor, the company said on Wednesday. Field has served as president of Audacy since 1998, and added CEO duties to his role in 2002. He will continue […]