Business
Page: 465
Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler is facing a new lawsuit accusing him of sexually assaulting a minor in the 1970s, filed by a woman who claims she was referenced in the singer’s memoir as almost his “teen bride.”
In a complaint filed Tuesday in Los Angeles court, Julia Holcomb says Tyler used his “power as a well-known musician and rock star” in order to “gain access to, groom, manipulate, exploit” and sexually assault her for three years starting in 1973, when she was just 16 years old.
The lawsuit does not name Tyler, listing only an anonymous John Doe defendant. But Holcomb’s lawyers repeatedly quote from Tyler’s memoir Does the Noise in My Head Bother You? when referring to the alleged perpetrator, who they identify as a “leading member of a world-famous rock band.” Tyler’s book itself, reviewed by Billboard, also lists a “Julia Halcomb” in the acknowledgments.
“She was 16, she knew how to nasty, and there wasn’t a hair on it,” Tyler wrote in the book passage that’s quoted in the lawsuit. “I was so in love I almost took a teen bride.”
The lawsuit alleges that Tyler convinced Holcomb’s parents to grant him guardianship over her — an accusation that also came with quotes from his memoir: “I went and slept at her parents’ house for a couple of nights and her parents fell in love with me, signed paper over for me to have custody, so I wouldn’t get arrested if I took her out of state.”
The lawsuit also claims Tyler impregnated Holcomb but later “pressured and coerced” her into eventually aborting the pregnancy.
Billboard independently obtained a copy of the lawsuit, which was first reported Thursday by Rolling Stone. A representative for Tyler did not immediately return a request for comment.
The allegations against Tyler are not new. Holcomb made similar accusations in a 2011 article published by the anti-abortion website LifesiteNews, and she made the same claims in 2020 during an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s television show on Fox News.
The new lawsuit, which included claims for sexual battery, sexual assault and intentional infliction of emotion distress, was filed just days before the expiration of California’s Child Victims Act, which temporarily suspended the statute of limitations for sexual abuse lawsuits. After a three-year window of availability, the deadline to file such long-delayed lawsuits is Dec. 31.
Read the entire lawsuit here:
Music streaming company LiveOne’s podcasting division, PodcastOne, filed an S-1 with the Securities Exchange Commission on Tuesday as a prelude to becoming a standalone, publicly traded company. LiveOne has set a record date of Jan. 16 for PodcastOne’s special dividend to LiveOne shareholders of record.
The spinoff “will meaningfully enhance our industry market perception,” the company wrote in the filing, “thereby providing greater growth opportunities for us than our consolidated operation as a private subsidiary of LiveOne.”
LiveOne will remain PodcastOne’s majority shareholder and will distribute approximately 6.2% of outstanding shares to LiveOne shareholders. LiveOne will retain 86.3% of outstanding shares. The remaining shares will be held by holders of bridge notes as well as the company’s directors and executives. PodcastOne currently expects its shares to trade on the Nasdaq.
In addition, LiveOne said it intends to explore spinning out SlackerOne into a separate public company during its 2024 fiscal year. LiveOne acquired music streaming service Slacker in 2017 for $50 million. Slacker was ordered by a judge in November to pay SoundExchange $10 million for performance royalties owed since 2018. Slacker asked the judge to overturn the ruling, saying the decision had led debtors to default on two senior secured notes, threatening “economic damage” to the company that would be “unsustainable.” The judge denied LiveOne’s request.
PodcastOne was co-founded in 2012 by current president Kit Gray and Westwood One founder Norman Pattiz and ranks No. 14 on Podtrac’s list of top podcast publishers in the U.S. It has about 2.1 billion downloads annually and produces 350 episodes per week. Among its podcast titles are Court Junkie, Cold Case Files, The Adam Corolla Show and Nappy Boy Radio with rapper T-Pain. PodcastOne also operates LaunchpadOne, a do-it-yourself platform for independent podcasters in the vein of Spotify-owned Anchor and Amazon-owned Art19 that distributes content to Spotify, Apple Podcast, Google Podcasts and other outlets. LiveOne — then named LiveXLive — acquired PodcastOne in 2020.
PodcastOne generated $32.2 million in the fiscal year ended March 31, 2022, a 36% improvement from the prior-year period, and plans to have revenues of $25 million in the nine-month period ending Dec. 31, 2022, according to LiveOne.
While 2022 will be remembered as the year that Taylor Swift made history as the first artist to populate the entire top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 with songs from her album Midnights (among other chart records), Billboard’s annual Money Makers ranking of music’s top royalty and box-office earners reveals that she dominated 2021 as well.
Swift, who released two (Taylor’s Version) rerecorded albums, finished the year as the No. 1 earner globally with an estimated $65.8 million in take-home pay. That’s an impressive sum considering she did not tour, which usually constitutes the lion’s share of an act’s annual income, and last year’s runner-up, The Rolling Stones, spent three months on the road last fall concluding their No Filter Tour.
Swift topped the ranking because she owns half of her studio record catalog and because of the strength of her sales and streaming income, $29.8 million and $28.9 million, respectively, in a year that saw her international streams surpass her U.S. streams, 9 billion to 6.8 billion, a 34% increase.
The Stones’ live dates, all of which took place in the United States, resulted in a $44.5 million box-office take. That played the biggest role in boosting the veteran rockers to No. 1 on Billboard’s U.S. Money Makers ranking with a total income of $50.8 million.
But Swift, who finished second in the U.S. ranking — she and the Stones have swapped the top two spots since 2018 — was not far behind with $38.8 million, largely on the strength of her master recording royalties.
Compared side-by-side, the top five earners on the global and U.S. Money Makers rankings are nearly identical, with Harry Styles holding the No. 3 spot on both, $41.3 million and $37 million, respectively; and Drake at No. 5, with $30.7 million and $23.8 million. The big difference can be found at No. 4, where K-pop superstars BTS reside on the global ranking, with a $38.4 million in 2021 take-home pay, and the hard-touring Eagles occupy the U.S. tally, with earnings of $27.3 million.
Methodology
Money Makers was compiled with 2021 Luminate and Billboard Boxscore data, the RIAA’s physical and digital revenue report for 2021, and IFPI global revenue statistics. All revenue figures cited are Billboard estimates and may not equal the sum of the subcategories due to rounding and the omission of revenue categories. Global sales were extrapolated for 21 artists that ranked highest on the 2020 Money Makers list. Global artist royalties were extrapolated using U.S. revenue totals, minus 30% of international royalties in line with major-label contractual clauses for foreign distribution.
U.S. formulas were used to estimate publishing revenue. Calculating royalties from master-recording performance rights was not possible because those rights do not exist for most uses in the United States. Unless otherwise noted, references to streaming totals consist of combined on-demand audio, video and programmed streams. References to recording-career totals are the sum of an act’s sales, streaming and publishing earnings. Revenue from featured-artist appearances, merchandising, synchronization and sponsorship is not included. Touring revenue, after the manager’s cut, equals 34% of an act’s Boxscore. Sales royalties were calculated based on physical and digital albums and track sales. Streaming royalties consist of on-demand audio and video streams, and estimated royalties from webcasting, SiriusXM and Music Choice.
The following royalty rates were used: album and track sales, 22% of retail revenue; 66% of wholesale if the artist owns his or her masters. On-demand streaming royalties were calculated using blended audio and video rates of, respectively, $0.0053 and $0.0038 per stream, applied against a 37% superstar-artist royalty rate; 50% for heritage artists (acts that have released at a minimum of 10 albums or been active for at least 20 years); and 79% for artist-owned masters. Further, a blended statutory subscription per-stream rate of $0.0024 was applied to programmed streams and per-play estimated rates of 74 cents for Music Choice and $46 for SiriusXM. Royalties for programmed streams were calculated on a similar basis using a 50% base royalty rate; 68% for artists that own some of their masters and 100% for artists that own all their masters, minus 5% for side performers.
Publishing royalties were estimated using statutory mechanical rates for album and track sales. The Copyright Royalty Board streaming formula produced an average rate of 13.4% of streaming revenue, an average of $2.50 per play for hit songs; $1 per play for heritage spins and genre songs that didn’t attain hit status; and per-play publishing rates of 40 cents for Music Choice, $8.33 for SiriusXM and $0.0003 for programmed streams. A 10% manager’s fee and 4% producer’s fee were deducted from the appropriate revenue streams.
Over the course of the past year, the music industry has lost some of its brightest behind-the-scenes stars: corporate executives, songwriters, managers, producers, engineers, lawyers, promoters, inventors and more.
Between them, these individuals penned hit songs (“Crazy for You,” “Elvira,” “My Whole World Is Falling Down,” “The Way We Were”); helped launch important careers (Metallica, Prince, Little Richard); masterminded iconic cultural events (Woodstock); founded enduring labels (Stax, Impulse!); built empires (Clear Channel); created and/or produced iconic Broadway musicals (Hair, Dear Evan Hansen); helped popularize burgeoning musical genres (hip-hop, alternative rock); and even changed the way people listened to music.
While they may not have enjoyed the high profile or public adoration of their artist counterparts, these individuals played just as important a role in keeping the business humming – or at least dissecting it, in fire-breathing fashion. Some worked in the industry across decades and eras; others passed on far too soon, but left their mark nonetheless. Some created new and important spaces for underrepresented voices; others paved the way for those who came after them. They have been remembered as dreamers, visionaries and jokesters, and described as “magnetic,” “legendary” and possessing “a rock and roll heart” by those who knew and loved them.
To celebrate those who have passed on, Billboard is highlighting these often-unsung movers and shakers, all of whom made a difference in the music industry in ways both large and small, across every aspect of the business.
Here are the behind-the-scenes players we lost in 2022.
TOKYO — For non-Japanese music artists, Japan’s decades-long obsession with physical media has meant they must grapple with legacy strategies for getting attention in the world’s second-largest market — such as landing on a major Japanese TV show or getting CDs into a large brick-and-mortar retailer.
Now, new digital opportunities are emerging that could make it easier. A three-year-old YouTube channel, The First Take, is at the forefront of breaking new artists in Japan and nudging a market long allergic to the internet toward digital music consumption. The channel has featured a handful of big Western artists in 2022, including Harry Styles, who appeared in June to sing “Daughters” from this year’s Harry’s House, and Avril Lavigne, who in September offered up a stripped-down version of “Complicated.”
Launched in late 2019, The First Take now boasts more than 7 million subscribers. It landed its first viral videos with five episodes featuring singer-songwriter LiSA, who performed the opening theme to the anime series Demon Slayer. But it was in the early months of the pandemic when the channel — like other digital entertainment in Japan — surged in popularity.
Digital music sales, which have grown for eight straight years in Japan, jumped 13% to 89.54 billion yen ($660.3 million) in 2021 over 2020, while physical music consumption, which has fallen over the past three years, dipped slightly by 0.4% to 193.64 billion yen ($1.43 billion), according to the Recording Industry Association of Japan. (Physical sales still comprised 68.4% of total sales, easily the highest level of any major music market.)
Fresh-faced artists stepping up to the mic on The First Take to show off their skills — such as Yoasobi, Yuuri and DISH//— have gone on to top the Billboard Japan Hot 100 and produced videos with over 100 million views. They’ve done so primarily through digital and streaming channels, reflecting a shift in how listeners receive J-pop domestically.
When the team started work on the channel in 2019, “what we wanted to create was something you couldn’t see on TV, or more detailed than what you would see on a weekly music show,” says channel producer Makoto Uchida. They drew inspiration from NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts series and Germany’s Colors. “We decided to shoot it from the side, rather than the front, so that it felt like you were in the studio, getting a peek of the artist at work.”
They leaned into this sense of intimacy by positioning The First Take as, well, a first take, capturing whatever the artist sings into the microphone, with errors and emotion on full display. Channel director Naoko Furukawa says that early on, driving this point across to participating artists proved most challenging, as many came in assuming they would have the chance to redo performances.
Soshi Sakayama from The First Take
Kazuki Nagayama
The First Take saw a substantial increase in views, with uploads featuring young creators like DISH// and Yoasobi, who went from fledgling J-pop names to chart toppers, particularly on subscription services such as Spotify.
The First Take is among the first major music efforts in Japan to use streaming data to target the show’s main demographic of 20- and 30-year-olds, and to determine when artists should perform, says team member Kazuto Fushimi.
“The data shows that Japanese people listen to music by seasons,” Fushimi says. “I used that to cast songs that would fit well for this project at certain times of the year.”
Even after Japan loosened COVID-19 restrictions later in 2020, The First Take morphed into an internet-era version of weekly TV shows like Music Station, a music program featuring live performances that started airing in Japan in 1986. It has added a news platform, podcast and live concerts, and has also tried to bring in artists from other markets, initially from China and other Southeast Asian countries.
“We used anime and anime songs to get attention from those markets,” says Fushimi. “They weren’t made explicitly for foreign audiences, but we always made sure to put subtitles and other things so that everyone could follow along too.”
K-pop group Stray Kids was the first non-Japanese artist to appear on The First Take, in the spring of 2020. Fushimi says many new viewers came to the clip via Twitter, where fan communities were sharing it and explaining what The First Take was. The Korean act has appeared on the channel two more times since, which has further boosted their video views on YouTube. “The more that they’ve appeared, the more likely they are to appear on the ‘related’ videos list, which leads to more fan engagement,” Fushimi says.
Other K-pop acts have appeared on the channel since — most recently, burgeoning girl group Kep1er — as have acts from other parts of the continent, including a recent turn by Taiwanese artist WeiBird.
The team’s focus didn’t move beyond the region until this past summer when they landed Styles in June and started looking outside Asia to the West. The team put together English-language promotional materials for Twitter, knowing that it would get them new looks from abroad. Fushimi says Styles’ appearance generated the most tweets about any artist on The First Take to date. (The First Take’s producers declined to share how the Styles collaboration specifically came together.)
“Compared with Japanese artists, foreign artists really are quick about recording – they don’t take much time for rehearsals, they just jump right in,” Furukawa says. “Harry Styles only took 10 minutes after he showed up to the studio to do the actual recording.”
Lavigne’s video followed several months later, attracting over 7 million viewers (boosted by a domestic love for her music that has endured for decades), and offering The First Take another opportunity to tip-toe toward Western attention.
“It’s hard to export J-pop to the world,” Fushimi says, “but we want to use The First Take as a bridge to introduce great Japanese artists to the world.”
ReoNa from The First Take
Kazuki Nagayama
Rapper Tory Lanez has been found guilty on all three counts in the closely-watched trial over whether he shot Megan Thee Stallion in the foot, ending a nearly two-week trial over the July 2020 incident and setting the stage for a potentially lengthy prison sentence.The verdict was handed down by a jury in Los Angeles court on Friday (Dec. 23). Lanez was convicted on all counts: assault with a semiautomatic firearm; carrying a loaded, unregistered firearm in a vehicle; and discharging a firearm with gross negligence. He faces up to 22 years in prison.
Upon the reading of the verdict, Lanez’s father, who was present in the gallery, began screaming. “This wicked system. Shame of all of you!” he cried out.
In the course of the trial, Lanez’s defense team made their best effort to sow doubt over pulled the trigger, painting a scenario in which Megan’s ex-friend and assistant Harris was the shooter. To make their case, they leaned on inconsistent statements made by Megan in the more than two years since the incident as well as an account from alleged eyewitness Sean Kelly. However, Kelly undercut the defense team’s theory by offering confusing and contradictory testimony from the stand on Tuesday — stating he saw a muzzle flash near where Megan and Harris were scuffling in the street near his home but also that he saw a man matching Lanez’s description holding a gun and, at another point, that he never saw a gun at all.
On the other side, prosecutors have continuously highlighted Megan’s emotional testimony last week, when the Grammy winner held back sobs as she recounted the ordeal and said that she’s received severe public blowback in the wake of the incident, at one point stating, “I wish he had just shot and killed me if I would have known I was going to go through this torture.” In addition to Megan’s direct claims that Lanez was the one who pulled the trigger, prosecutors also poked holes in the defense team’s theory that Harris was the one responsible. In closing arguments, Deputy District Attorney Alexander Bott strongly suggested that Harris — who in a prior interview with prosecutors said that Lanez shot Megan and also assaulted her when she tried to intervene — contradicted her prior statements only after being threatened or paid off.
The blockbuster trial arrived nearly two and a half years after Megan was shot at least once in the foot in the early morning hours of July 12, 2020, while on the way home from a small party thrown by Kylie Jenner. According to Megan, after a fight erupted between Lanez, Harris and herself in an SUV driven by Lanez’s security guard Jaquan Smith, she exited the car only to be shot at multiple times by Lanez, who she claimed at one point shouted, “Dance, b—-” while firing out the window. That is clearly the version of the story that jurors, who took less than two days to reach their unanimous verdict, chose to believe.
The trial could well have dragged on beyond Christmas had either Lanez or Smith taken the stand, but on Wednesday, the rapper said he would not be testifying and defense lawyers opted against placing Smith on the stand, citing procedural wrangling and the possibility of a delay that could have forced jurors to return after the holiday.
Megan was not present for the reading of the verdict on Thursday.
Less than three weeks after two dozen Taylor Swift fans sued Live Nation over Ticketmaster’s disastrous presale of tickets to her Eras Tour in November, another similar lawsuit has been filed against the concert giant in California federal court.
Filed Tuesday (Dec. 20), the class-action lawsuit, brought by Swift fan Michelle Sterioff, accuses Live Nation and subsidiary Ticketmaster of violating federal antitrust and unfair competition laws and “intentionally and purposefully” misleading “millions of fans into believing” Ticketmaster would prevent bots and scalpers from participating in presales for the tour.
Similar to the lawsuit filed earlier this month, Tuesday’s lawsuit alleges that Live Nation and Ticketmaster, which merged in 2010, represent a monopoly in both the primary and secondary ticketing markets and have used that alleged monopoly power “in a predatory, exclusionary, and anticompetitive manner.” According to the complaint, this monopoly is used to charge “supracompetitive” ticketing fees that can increase the price of tickets “by 20-80%” over their face value.
“Ticketmaster…has violated the policy, spirit, and letter of [antitrust] laws by imposing agreements and policies at the retail and wholesale level that have prevented effective price competition across a wide swath of online ticket sales,” the complaint reads, adding that the company “is only interested in taking every dollar it can from a captive public.”
Sterioff claims that she registered for the Eras Tour presale on Nov. 1, 2022, and “relied” on Ticketmaster’s claim that its Verified Fan program “would ‘level the playing field’” so that more tickets would go to real fans over bots. However, she claims she was unable to secure a ticket during the presale on Nov. 15 or Nov. 16, forcing her to purchase tickets “through an alternate secondary ticketing service provider” after Ticketmaster canceled the general public sale, citing widespread service delays and website crashes as millions of fans tried -– and many failed –- to buy tickets.
Additionally, Sterioff says the amount she paid for her ticket on the secondary market was subject to Ticketmaster’s “monopolistic prices” due to the company’s dominance in the secondary ticketing market as well. She cites a Ticketmaster technology that limits ticket purchasers from transferring tickets unless they’re resold through the company’s secondary ticketing platform — essentially making it all but impossible to purchase a Swift ticket outside the Ticketmaster ecosystem. That allows the company “to charge monopolistic ticketing fees every time a single ticket is resold,” the complaint adds.
There are a total of eight counts listed in Sterioff’s complaint, including violation of California’s Consumers Legal Remedies Act; intentional misrepresentation; common law fraud; fraudulent inducement; antitrust violations; violation of California’s Unfair Competition Law; violation of California’s False Advertising Law, and quasi-contract/restitution/unjust enrichment.
Sterioff is asking the court for injunctive relief, statutory damages, punitive or exemplary damages, costs of bringing the lawsuit and more.
Reps for Live Nation and Ticketmaster did not immediately return a request for comment.
In the wake of the Swift ticketing controversy, Ticketmaster apologized to fans and pinned the blame on a “staggering number of bot attacks” and “unprecedented traffic.” But that explanation has seemingly not been enough for many of the company’s critics, who have resurfaced longstanding complaints about the outsized power Ticketmaster and Live Nation have wielded in the market for live music since they merged.
In November, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and her counterpart on the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), jointly announced they would be holding a hearing to examine the effects of consolidation on the ticketing industry. Live Nation and Ticketmaster are also reportedly under investigation by the Justice Department over whether the companies represent an illegal monopoly, though that probe is said to have predated the Swift incident.
Whether it was Taylor Swift or Prince or Cardi B, 2022 saw major legal battles involving some of the music industry’s biggest stars, ranging from never-ending copyright fights to sprawling criminal cases centered on rap lyrics. Some stars, like Katy Perry, won big; others, like Young Thug and Gunna, faced repeated setbacks; still others, like Megan Thee Stallion and Ed Sheeran, just got exhausted. To catch up, here are 10 big music law stories that you need to remember from 2022.
Taylor Swift Finally Shakes It Off
There was no bigger music copyright lawsuit than the long-running case accusing Taylor Swift of stealing the lyrics to “Shake It Off.” Since 2017, songwriters Sean Hall and Nathan Butler had argued that Swift’s song (an all-time smash hit that spent 50 weeks on Hot 100) stole some of its core lyrics from “Playas Gon’ Play,” a 2001 song they wrote for the R&B group 3LW. And despite arguments from Swift’s white-shoe lawyers that lyrics about “playas” and “haters” were too commonplace to be monopolized under copyright law, federal courts repeatedly refused to dismiss the case. Following in the wake of earlier battles over Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” and Katy Perry’s “Dark Horse,” the lawsuit raised big questions about the where copyright protection ends and the public domain begins. Those questions were set to be answered at a blockbuster trial in January – until Swift and her accusers reached a sudden settlement earlier this month.
Rap On Trial: A Year of Highs and Lows
Despite widespread criticism of the practice, prosecutors continued to cite rap lyrics as evidence in criminal cases in 2022, most prominently when Young Thug and Gunna were indicted in May as part of a sweeping gang case against dozens of members of the Atlanta rap crew YSL. The charges included numerous references to Young Thug and Gunna’s music, claiming lyrics were the kind of “predicate acts” that contributed to the overall criminal enterprise. And Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who bought the case, offered no apologies for doing so: “If you decide to admit your crimes over a beat, I’m gonna use it,” Willis said. “I’m going to continue to do that, people can continue to be angry about it.” And yet, 2022 also saw the enactment of landmark legislation in California that would sharply restrict the practice, and efforts to pass similar laws in New York state and at the federal level – hopeful signs for critics who say it unfairly targets black men and violates their First Amendment rights.
Prince Estate Case Closed – Finally
The long legal battle over Prince’s $156 million estate was finally resolved in 2022, more than six years after the iconic rocker died suddenly from a fentanyl overdose without a will. The estate had been stuck in probate court for years, under the control of a court-appointed bank as rival groups of legal heirs wrangled over the rocker’s legacy. Over time, those proceedings came to be dominated in part by Primary Wave, the music industry giant that slowly bought out various Prince heirs to amass a 50 percent stake in the estate. The biggest hurdle was cleared in January, when the heirs reached a deal with the Internal Revenue Service to set a final tax valuation of $156 million, followed by a ruling February on the basic structure for how the assets would be split into two groups, and then a final judicial approval in August. Prince’s legacy is now a music story and a business story, not a legal story.
Ed Sheeran’s Copyright Nightmare
Ed Sheeran says he’s tired of all the copyright lawsuits, but 2022 was something of an up-and-down year on that front. In April, he won a dramatic victory in UK court over his chart-topping 2017 hit “Shape of You,” when a judge ruled that he didn’t copy the song from a little-known track called “Oh Why.” Following an 11-day London trial – in which an opposing attorney called Sheeran a “magpie,” the singer repeatedly took the stand to defend himself, and he once even sang in open court – the judge ruled there was no evidence Sheeran had intentionally or even “subconsciously” copied any of the earlier material. But the respite was short-lived: In October, a federal judge in New York ruled that Sheeran must face a jury trial in a separate case claiming he borrowed key elements of his “Thinking Out Loud” from Marvin Gaye‘s iconic “Let’s Get It On. Barring a reversal (and Sheeran’s lawyers are asking for one) the decision set the stage for a blockbuster trial at some point in 2023, but a date has not yet been set.
Cardi B v. The World
Cardi B started the year with a bang, winning a $4 million defamation verdict in January against Tasha K, a gossip blogger who made salacious false claims on YouTube about drug use, STDs and prostitution. (Cardi’s lawyers are still trying to collect that money, btw.) And in October, she won at trial again, avoiding millions in damages by beating back a bizarre lawsuit filed by a California man whose back tattoos were unwittingly photoshopped onto the “raunchy” cover of Cardi’s 2016 mixtape Gangsta Bitch Music Vol. 1. The star herself took the witness stand in both trials, testifying about the pain of being defamed and sparring with an opposing lawyer over whether he had “receipts.” Oh, and Cardi also resolved a long-standing criminal case by pleading guilty in September to misdemeanor charges stemming from a 2018 bottle-throwing incident at a Queens strip club. All in all, a quiet year.
Dua Lipa’s Double-Whammy
One could argue you’re not truly a pop star until you’ve been sued for copyright infringement a few times; just ask Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran. That means Dua Lipa must have truly arrived this year, when she was hit with not one but two separate lawsuits claiming she copied earlier songs when she wrote “Levitating”– the longest-running top 10 song ever by a female artist on the Hot 100. One case was filed by a Florida reggae band named Artikal Sound System, which claimed Lipa lifted the core hook for her song from their 2015 “Live Your Life.” The other case, filed a few days later in March, accused her of copying both a 1979 song called “Wiggle and Giggle All Night” and a 1980 song called “Don Diablo.” Armed with a top-flight legal team, Lipa has already struck back in both cases – but both remain pending.
Taylor Swift … Trust Buster?
Ticketmaster’s disastrous November presale for Taylor Swift’s upcoming Eras Tour – which saw widespread service delays and website crashes as millions of fans tried (and many failed) to buy tickets – resurfaced some uncomfortable legal questions for the all-powerful concert giant and its parent company Live Nation. Those questions have never fully gone away since the two companies merged in 2010, but in the days after the fiasco, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle called for new antitrust investigations – and that was before news broke that the U.S. Department of Justice had already launched such a probe. If violations are found, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), the chair of the Senate subcommittee for antitrust issues, urged regulators to consider “breaking up the company.” Meanwhile, state attorneys general across the country are also probing the debacle, and at least one class action lawsuit has already been filed accusing the company of fraud and “anticompetitive conduct.” Hell hath no fury like Swifties scorned…
Megan Thee Stallion’s Exhausting Year
Following an October appearance on Saturday Night Live promoting the release of her album Traumazine, Megan Thee Stallion said she needed to take a break because she was “so tired, physically and emotionally.” After her 2022 legal battles, it’s hard to blame her. In February, Megan’s long fight with her former record label, 1501 Certified Entertainment, escalated significantly when she accused the company of purposefully mislabeling an album to keep her locked into the deal. 1501 quickly countersued, then Megan upped the stakes again in August with new allegations and demands for damages. And all of that had nothing to do with the even bigger Megan story: A criminal case against Tory Lanez over charges that he shot her in the foot during a July 2020 altercation in Los Angeles. When a trial in that case kicked off earlier this month, Megan took the witness stand to recount the shooting and the toll it had taken on her. “I wish he had just shot and killed me,” she tearfully recounted.
R. Kelly Gets 30 Years – And Gets Convicted Again
Things went from bad to worse for R. Kelly in 2022. After being convicted last year in New York on racketeering and sex trafficking charges, the disgraced R&B singer was sentenced to 30 years in prison on those charges in June. Then in August, he was convicted in Chicago on separate child pornography charges stemming from an infamous video tape involving him and minor, meaning he faces decades more in prison time. His attorneys plan to appeal both convictions.
Katy Perry Wins Case and Makes Law
When Katy Perry won a copyright ruling at a federal appeals court in March, declaring that her 2013 chart-topper “Dark Horse” hadn’t infringed an earlier song, it was a bigger deal than just one case. Sure, it was important to Perry herself, who avoided $2.8 million verdict by defeating the accusations. And the star was obviously pleased, telling a Las Vegas concert crowd in a viral clip: “So just be sure…before you take me to court, ‘cause I’m a Scorpio, bitch!” But the ruling was also a clear rejection of similar infringement cases over songs, stressing that simple musical “building blocks,” like the short “ostinato” in Perry’s song, cannot be locked up by any particular songwriter because it would chill future songwriting creativity. Much like a 2020 ruling on “Stairway To Heaven,” the decision for Perry could be seen as part of a pendulum swing away from earlier decisions over Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines,” which were criticized by some for expanding music copyrights to more basic elements.
The Cramps‘ 1981 recording of “Goo Goo Muck” became an out-of-left field success story in November after its use in a dance scene in the hit Netflix series Wednesday helped a new generation discover the song, first released in 1962 by Ronnie Cook and the Gaylads.
Music trends, created by viral hits on TikTok and YouTube, are unpredictable, though. As soon as “Goo Goo Muck” was enjoying its newfound fame, along came “Bloody Mary,” a deep cut from Lady Gaga‘s 2011 album Born This Way. Fans inspired by the Wednesday scene uploaded videos of themselves performing the dance to TikTok and other platforms, but many swapped out the audio of “Goo Goo Muck” with a sped-up version of “Bloody Mary” — including Gaga herself after the singer caught onto the trend.
Lady Gaga may have stolen some of The Cramps’ thunder. As weekly growth of on-demand streams of “Goo Goo Muck” slowed — from 177% to 7% in the last two weeks — on-demand streams of “Bloody Mary” increased 88% to 43.1 million in the week of Dec. 9. About 89% of the streams came from video platforms, namely YouTube, where the sped-up version of the recording is used in videos of people recreating the Wednesday dance scene.
Still, “Goo Goo Muck” is having a fairy tale of a fourth quarter. Between Nov. 18 to Dec. 16, its weekly U.S. on-demand streams increased about 200 times, from 31,000 to 6.1 million. Download sales were strong enough to put “Goo Goo Muck” at No. 25 on Billboard’s Digital Song Sales chart for the week of Dec. 10. “It’s a really amazing, fun little bonanza,” Jim Shaw, owner of the song’s publishing rights, previously told Billboard.
Both tracks also got a boost from being featured on some major playlists. On Nov. 30, Spotify added “Goo Goo Muck” to its Big on the Internet playlist, which has nearly 3 million followers, and on Dec. 6 it added the track to its Teen Beats playlist, which boasts over 1.8 million followers, according to Chartmetric. “Bloody Mary” is also featured on both playlists and is currently the leadoff track on Teen Beats.
Earlier this month, breakthrough country superstar Kane Brown became the first touring artist to play all 29 National Basketball Association (NBA) arenas during a single tour, fulfilling a lifelong dream around his passion for pro hoops.
“Kane’s a huge basketball fan,” says his manager Martha Earls with Neon Coast. “He’s athletic, loves sports and first got the idea back in 2019 when he was invited to headline a 20th-anniversary show for what was then the Staples Center in LA (and now is known as Crypto.com Arena).”
The January 2020 show — postponed from October 18, 2019, due to the tragic death of Kane’s longtime friend and drummer Kenny Dixon days earlier — and a Lakers game attended the night before by Kane, Earls and promoter Rich Schaefer with AEG Global Touring became the genesis for Brown’s first arena tour.
Originally scheduled to be announced in March 2020, publicity for Brown’s tour was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, with a plan to “be ready the minute we can get back on the road,” Schaefer recalls. “That opening came in April of 2021 and we ended up being one of the first sales in the year following COVID-19.”
Schaefer said he wanted Brown to get back on the road after releasing his EP Mixtape, Vol 1 in Aug. 2020 on RCA Records Nashville, which hit No. 2 on Billboard‘s Country Albums chart and No. 15 on the Billboard 200 albums chart. Mixtape, Vol. 1 included the crossover track “Be Like That” featuring Swae Lee and Khalid, as well as “Cool Again” featuring Nelly and “Last Time I Say Sorry” featuring John Legend.
“Sales for the tour were massive and the tour kicked off six months later,” Schaefer said of the Blessed & Free Tour, which officially launched on Oct. 1, 2021, at the Golden 1 Center in Sacramento and hit 28 of 29 NBA arenas and college facilities in Nampa, Idaho and College Station, Pennsylvania. The tour also made three stops at hockey arenas in Pittsburgh, Seattle and Las Vegas, wrapping its first leg at Sin City’s T-Mobile Arena on Feb. 4.
The final show took place 10 months later on Dec. 4 at the final NBA arena on the tour, ScotiaBank Arena in Toronto — marking the 29th of 29 NBA arena concerts. “We couldn’t get into Canada during the initial run of the tour because of the restrictions and the lockdown in the country,” Schaefer says.
In Jan. 2022, the Blessed & Free Tour was the most well-attended concert tour of the month, averaging 11,000 fans per show. “When we did announce the tour in April, I got some calls from people thinking we were maybe being a little bit bullish,” Earls recalls, “but we just felt there was such a desire from the fan base and an excitement from fans for live music coming back that we knew we were ready.”
Helping boost sales was the chart success of Chris Young’s track “Famous Friends” featuring Brown, which hit No. 1 on the Billboard Country Airplay in July, two months after the Blessed & Free Tour went on sale.
“At almost every show, we had NBA players come out on stage for ‘Famous Friends,’ often with the mascots from each team,” Schaefer said. In Milwaukee, player Khris Middleton appeared on stage for the song months after leading the Bucks to their first NBA Finals victory.
During the downtime between the February date in Vegas and the Canada show, Brown performed the first concert ever held at Finley Stadium in his hometown of Chattanooga, Tennessee, on May 7.
“It was a heavy lift and we all learned a lot together including the stadium staff,” Schaefer recalls. “We don’t really say no to a lot of things. If it’s Kane’s dream to do it, we’re gonna help make that happen. That’s what we do for a living here.”
A month later, Brown reached another milestone, headlining a stadium show at Fenway Park in Boston on June 23. The venue became available to Brown thanks to a quick sellout at the city’s TD Garden arena five months earlier on the Blessed & Free Tour.
“That was the great thing about this tour — each success lead to a new opportunity and a chance for Kane to hit a bunch of venues he has always wanted to play,” Earls said. “We learned more than we ever thought possible and watched Kane continue to grow and strengthen his relationship with fans who have grown with him. We are all so proud of what he has achieved.”