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Rodrigo Nieto-Galvis, the vice president and team lead in Miami for the Entertainment Banking division of City National Bank, is well aware that the Latin music industry works differently than any other genre, which is why he’s sharing his knowledge and expertise with independent and emerging artists who want to learn how to manage their money properly.
“It’s important to understand that usually an entertainer is self-employed,” he tells Billboard. “They don’t have constant earnings. They are easily exposed to lawsuits. They have international residency with income in multiple jurisdictions. And it’s really difficult to predict the future of their careers and their income.”
In this episode of Billboard‘sLatin Hitmaker podcast, Nieto-Galvis elaborates on five common mistakes artists make with their finances and how they can be fixed or avoided overall.
On building your career as a business: “You know, as an artist, sometimes they want to focus on their craft, on their art, on their music, but they also have to be the CEOs or of their careers. They need to manage their careers as a business […] and there’s something also that you may not be savvy in every area of a business, so you need to surround yourself with the right team. You need a lawyer, you need an accountant, you need a business manager who understands and can help you with your growth.”
On managing expenses: “You need to open an entity and you need to divide your personal income and expenses by your corporate income and expenses. Otherwise, your income is going to become your pocket money, and that’s not something that you want. You shouldn’t be mixing this type of income and expenses and also […] something very important as well is to not leave money on the table. So what that means is when you are negotiating contracts and deals, bring your lawyer, you know, bring somebody to understand these contracts and also sign contracts with every member of your team just to avoid future litigations.”
On creating a budget plan: “So the first thing that you need to do as an artist is creating a plan at a budget for the year. you need to know what will be resources you need to achieve the goals that you are trying to reach. Right. So like have a plan for 12 years. What are the resources that you’re going to need if you buy that car? If you can buy that boat, is that going to affect the plan? Are you still going to have the resources to achieve those goals? Right. So so again, the third issue is the area of problems is managing your expenses, having a budget, having a plan.”
On understanding taxes: “You really need to have an accountant that understands not only your business but the fact that you work in multiple jurisdictions, in multiple countries. So what we’re talking about is getting the right advice, or also there are elements such as the CW, tax exemptions, which are only for international artists.”
On protecting your savings: “Avoid getting into investments that you don’t understand and actually, the final component on that aspect is also to pay attention to estate planning. Like what’s the legacy that you’re going to leave, how you’re going to be providing to your loved ones once you are not here anymore. So you pay attention to those areas.”
Listen to the full episode of Latin Hitmaker here:
City National Bank Member FDIC. City National Bank is a subsidiary of Royal Bank of Canada. ©2023 City National Bank. All Rights Reserved. City National Bank does business in the state of Florida as CN Bank
In the recent article “What Happens To Songwriters When AI Can Generate Music,” Alex Mitchell offers a rosy view of a future of AI-composed music coexisting in perfect barbershop harmony with human creators — but there is a conflict of interest here, as Mitchell is the CEO of an app that does precisely that. It’s almost like cigarette companies in the 1920s saying cigarettes are good for you.
Yes, the honeymoon of new possibilities is sexy, but let’s not pretend this is benefiting the human artist as much as corporate clients who’d rather pull a slot machine lever to generate a jingle than hire a human.
While I agree there are parallels between the invention of the synthesizer and AI, there are stark differences, too. The debut of the theremin — the first electronic instrument — playing the part of a lead violin in an orchestra was scandalous and fear-evoking. Audiences hated its sinusoidal wave lack of nuance, and some claimed it was “the end of music.” That seems ludicrous and pearl-clutching now, and I worship the chapter of electrified instruments afterward (thank you sister Rosetta Tharpe and Chuck Berry), but in a way, they were right. It was the closing of a chapter, and the birth of something new.
Is new always better, though? Or is there a sweet spot ratio of machine to human? I often wonder this sitting in my half analog, half digital studio, as the stakes get ever higher from flirting with the event horizon of technology.
In this same article, Diaa El All (another CEO of an A.I. music generation app), claims that drummers were pointlessly scared of the drum machine and sample banks replacing their jobs because it’s all just another fabulous tool. (Guess he hasn’t been to many shows where singers perform with just a laptop.) Since I have spent an indecent portion of my modeling money collecting vintage drum machines (cuz yes, they’re fabulous), I can attest to the fact I do indeed hire fewer drummers. In fact, since I started using sample libraries, I hire fewer musicians altogether. While this is a great convenience for me, the average upright bassist who used to be able to support his family with his trade now has to remain childless or take two other jobs.
Should we halt progress for maintaining placebo usefulness for obsolete craftsmen? No, change and competition are good, if not inevitable ergonomics. But let’s not be naive about the casualties.
The gun and the samurai come to mind. For centuries, samurai were part of an elite warrior class who rigorously trained in kendo (the way of the sword) and bushido (a moral code of honor and indifference to pain) since childhood. As a result, winning wars was a meritocracy of skill and strategy. Then a Chinese ship with Portuguese sailors showed up with guns.
When feudal lord Nobunaga saw the potential in these contraptions, he ordered hundreds be made for his troops. Suddenly a farmer boy with no skill could take down an archer or swordsman who had trained for years. Once more coordinated marching and reloading formations were developed, it was an entirely new power dynamic.
During the economic crunch of the Napoleonic wars, a similar tidal shift occurred. Automated textile equipment allowed factory owners to replace loyal employees with machines and fewer, cheaper, less skilled workers to oversee them. As a result of jobless destitution, there was a region-wide rebellion of weavers and Luddites burning mills, stocking frames and lace-making machines, until the army executed them and held show trials to deter others from acts of “industrial sabotage.”
The poet Lord Byron opposed this new legislation, which called machine-breaking a capital crime — ironic considering his daughter, Ada Lovelace, would go on to invent computers with Charles Babbage. Oh, the tangled neural networks we weave.
Look what Netflix did to Blockbuster rentals. Or what Napster did to the recording artist. Even what the democratization of homemade porn streaming did to the porn industry. More recently, video games have usurped films. You cannot add something to an ecosystem without subtracting something else. It would be like smartphone companies telling fax machine manufacturers not to worry. Only this time, the fax machines are humans.
Later in the article, Mac Boucher (creative technologist and co-creator of non-fungible token project WarNymph along with his sister Grimes) adds another glowing review of bot- and button-based composition: “We will all become creators now.”
If everyone is a creator, is anyone really a creator?
An eerie vision comes to mind of a million TikTokers dressed as opera singers on stage, standing on the blueish corpses of an orchestra pit, singing over each other in a vainglorious cacophony, while not a single person sits in the audience. Just rows of empty seats reverberating the pink noise of digital narcissism back at them. Silent disco meets the Star Gate sequence’s death choir stack.
While this might sound like the bitter gatekeeping of a tape machine purist (only slightly), now might be a good time to admit I was one of the early projects to incorporate AI-generated lyrics and imagery. My band, Uni and The Urchins, has a morbid fascination with futurism and the wild west of Web 3.0. Who doesn’t love robots?
But I do think in order to make art, the “obstacles” actually served as a filtration device. Think Campbell’s hero’s journey. The learning curve of mastering an instrument, the physical adventure of discovering new music at a record shop or befriending the cool older guy to get his Sharpie-graffitied mix CD, saving up to buy your first guitar, enduring ridicule, the irrational desire to pursue music against the odds (James Brown didn’t own a pair of shoes until he 8 years old, and now is canonized as King.)
Meanwhile, in 2022, surveys show that many kids feel valueless unless they’re an influencer or “artist,” so the urge toward content creation over craft has become criminally easy, flooding the markets with more karaoke, pantomime and metric-based mush, rooted in no authentic movement. (I guess Twee capitalist-core is a culture, but not compared to the Vietnam war, slavery, the space race, the invention of LSD, the discovery of the subconscious, Indian gurus, the sexual revolution or the ’90s heroin epidemic all inspiring new genres.)
Not to sound like Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto, but technology is increasingly the hand inside the sock puppet, not the other way around.
Do I think AI will replace a lot of jobs? Yes, though not immediately, it’s still crude. Do I think this upending is a net loss? In the long term, no, it could incentivize us to invent entirely new skills to front-run it. (Remember when “learn to code” was an offensive meme?) In fact, I’m very eager to see how we co-evolve or eventually merge into a transhuman cyber Seraphim, once Artificial General Intelligence goes quantum.
But this will be a Faustian trade, have no illusions.
Charlotte Kemp Muhl is the bassist for NYC art-rock band UNI and the Urchins. She has directed all of UNI and The Urchins’ videos and mini-films and engineered, mixed and mastered their upcoming debut album Simulator (out Jan. 13, 2023, on Chimera Music) herself. UNI and the Urchins’ AI-written song/AI-made video for “Simulator” is out now.
This is The Legal Beat, a weekly newsletter about music law from Billboard Pro, offering you a one-stop cheat sheet of big new cases, important rulings, and all the fun stuff in between. This week: Gunna takes a plea deal to escape the sprawling case against Atlanta rap crew YSL, the Tory Lanez/Megan Thee Stallion trial continues with blockbuster testimony, Metallica loses a battle with its insurance company, and much more.
THE BIG STORY: Gunna Pleads Guilty, But Says He Won’t Flip
With a trial looming in less than a month, the rapper Gunna bowed out this week from the closely-watched criminal case against members of the Atlanta rap crew YSL, reaching a deal with prosecutors that will allow him to end his “personal ordeal” while seemingly still not cooperating against Young Thug or the other defendants.The chart-topping, Grammy-nominated rapper (real name Sergio Kitchens) took a so-called Alford plea — a maneuver that allows a defendant to enter a formal admission of guilt while still maintaining their innocence. After pleading guilty to the single charge he was facing, he was sentenced to five years in prison but immediately released because he was credited with one year of time served, while the rest of the sentence was suspended.Gunna’s plea deal will allow him to exit a sweeping criminal case filed in May by Fulton County prosecutors, who claimed YSL was not really a record label called “Young Stoner Life,” but a violent Atlanta street gang called “Young Slime Life.” Listing dozens of individual allegations (including murder, carjacking, armed robbery, drug dealing and illegal firearm possession), the case accused Young Thug (real name Jeffery Williams) and 27 others of violating Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, a state version of the more famous federal RICO statute that’s been used to target the mafia. Such laws make it easier for prosecutors to sweep up many members of an alleged criminal conspiracy based on smaller “predicate acts” that aren’t directly related.A plea deal for Gunna made sense. The rapper was facing only a single charge and was named in only nine of the 191 predicates that make up the YSL RICO case — and most of those were either problematic references to his music or linked to an earlier case in which he eventually pled guilty to having illegally tinted windows. By way of comparison, Young Thug is facing several other separate criminal charges over guns and drugs and is named in substantially more of the RICO predicates.But such a deal was always going to raise heated debate about the touchy subject of snitching — about whether Gunna had won his freedom by promising to cooperate with prosecutors against Young Thug and the other defendants. In his own statement announcing the deal, the rapper strongly denied any such arrangement.“While I have agreed to always be truthful, I want to make it perfectly clear that I have NOT made any statements, have NOT been interviewed, have NOT cooperated, have NOT agreed to testify or be a witness for or against any party in the case and have absolutely NO intention of being involved in the trial process in any way,” Gunna wrote.The situation is a little more complicated. In footage of the plea hearing, Gunna acknowledged that YSL was both “a music label and a gang,” and that he had “personal knowledge that members or associates of YSL have committed crimes in furtherance of the gang.” He also acknowledged that if called by any party in the case, he would be required to testify “truthfully.” But he also reserved his Fifth Amendment right to avoid incriminating himself and, in texts released on social media this week, Gunna’s lawyer made clear that if subpoenaed, the rapper would indeed “take the 5th and not testify.”The trial against Young Thug and the rest of the defendants is set to kick off Jan. 9, so stay tuned.
Other top stories this week…
TORY LANEZ TRIAL CONTINUES – The criminal trial over whether Tory Lanez shot Megan Thee Stallion in the foot ran all week long, featuring blockbuster testimony in which Megan herself recounted the alleged shooting and said, “I wish he had just shot and killed me.” Later in the week, the rapper’s former friend and assistant Kelsey Harris — expected to be a star witness for the prosecution — largely failed to re-affirm previous statements pinning the blame on Lanez. But then on Friday (Dec. 16), prosecutors played recordings of those earlier statements, in which Harris said Lanez had shot the Grammy-winning rapper and then tried to buy both women’s silence with million-dollar bribes. The trial continues and, though a verdict was expected this week, it’s unclear if the case is moving fast enough to get there.LIVESTREAM FIASCO – Nearly two years after Marc Anthony was forced to cancel his highly-anticipated “Una Noche” livestream concert at the last minute, event promoter Loud and Live Entertainment filed a breach of contract lawsuit against Maestro, the streaming platform that hosted the show. Loud and Live says Maestro assured them its technology could “automatically scale” to accommodate over 100,000 ticketholders, but had suffered a “complete collapse” when users tried to log on, causing “significant economic losses.”METALLICA LOSES INSURANCE BATTLE – A California judge ruled that Metallica’s insurance company (a unit of Lloyd’s of London) doesn’t need to pay for six South American concerts that were canceled when COVID-19 struck, thanks to an exclusion in the policy for “communicable diseases.” The case is one of many that have been filed by music venues, bars and other businesses seeking insurance coverage for harm caused by COVID-19 — and one of many that have been decided in favor of insurance companies.DEVIL IN THE DETAILS FOR MGK – Citing the name of Machine Gun Kelly’s 2019 album Hotel Diablo, lawyers for the superstar last week quietly launched a legal battle to block the television network Fox from securing a trademark registration on the term “Diablo” — the name of an anthropomorphic dog character on Fox’s animated sitcom HouseBroken. Kelly’s attorneys, who are currently seeking to trademark a wide range of terms linked to the star, argued that Fox’s “Diablo” was “confusingly similar in overall commercial impression” to “Hotel Diablo” and must be refused.ULTRA V. ULTRA – Nearly a year after Ultra Records founder Patrick Moxey sold his 50% share of the lauded dance imprint to Sony Music, the major label sued him for trademark infringement over his continued use of the “Ultra” name. When Moxey parted ways with the imprint, which he founded in 1995, he held on to another company called Ultra International Music Publishing, but the new lawsuit from Sony claims he has no legal rights to use the “Ultra” name following the sale: “He has sought to perpetuate the falsehood that he remains involved with Ultra Records by wrongfully continuing to use Ultra Records’ ULTRA trademark.”
This time every year, enduring favorites by Mariah Carey, Brenda Lee and Bobby Helms rise to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 as Americans turn to holiday streaming playlists and Christmas-focused radio stations. However, these evergreens, celebrating the biggest Christian holiday of the year, are more secular than in years past.
It used to be that contemporary takes on traditional songs about the birth of Christ — “Little Drummer Boy,” “Joy to the World,” “Silent Night” and “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” — were among the most popular holiday songs. Listeners enjoyed Nat King Cole’s “O Come All Ye Faithful” as much as his version of “Deck the Halls.” Kenny Rogers had a popular take on “Mary, Did You Know?,” first recorded in 1991 by Michael English of the Christian group the Gaither Vocal Band. Martina McBride’s rendition of “O Holy Night,” a Christmas carol from the 1840s, was among the top 100 holiday songs.
In 2022, as streaming playlists drive listening, the top 100 holiday songs are more likely to conjure images of Santa, sleigh bells and cold weather than a baby Jesus and the Virgin Mary. Through Dec. 8, religious music had only a 4.4% share of the top 100 holiday songs’ total consumption — tied with 2021 for the lowest since 2010, according to a Billboard analysis of Luminate data. The top religious song since the first week of November, “O Come All Ye Faithful” by Nat King Cole, ranks only No. 50, the lowest for a No. 1. religious song since 2010. “Mary, Did You Know?” by Pentatonix ranks a mere No. 68 and Rogers’ version of the song has fallen to No. 255.
In terms of market share, religious holiday songs peaked in 2015 with 18.2% of the top 100 holiday tracks’ total consumption, which measures digital downloads and streaming. Vocal group Pentatonix owned six of the 13 religious songs in the top 100 holiday tracks, including No. 3 (“Mary, Did You Know?”), No. 25 (“Little Drummer Boy”) and No. 30 (“White Winter Hymnal”). The combined consumption of two versions of “Mary, Did You Know?” by Jordan Smith (No. 2) and Pentatonix (No. 3) that year was 17% greater than that of the No. 1 recording, Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You.”
Religious songs captured the most number of spots in the top 100 in 2013, with 14 of the top holiday songs for the final two months of the year being religious in nature. There were two versions of “The Little Drummer Boy,” by Pentatonix (No. 3) and Harry Simeone Chorale (No. 74). Recordings of “Silent Night” by Kelly Clarkson (No. 21) and The Temptations (No. 44) were popular at the time. There were four versions of “O Holy Night” in the top 100: Celine Dion (No. 48), Mariah Carey (No. 77), Martina McBride (No. 96) and Pentatonix (No. 97). And Amy Grant’s original song “Breath of Heaven (Mary’s Song)” ranked No. 82.
To categorize holiday music as secular or religious, Billboard considered each track’s lyrical content. Religious songs contain references to Biblical characters (e.g., Jesus, God or the Virgin Mary) or Christian themes (the nativity scene). Billboard counted Adam Sandler’s “The Chanukuh Song” as religious for its references to Judaism. A song like “Hallelujah,” written by Leonard Cohen and covered countless times by the likes of Pentatonix and Carrie Underwood, has a religious-sounding title but is classified as secular.
How holiday music is consumed — like all music — has changed over the years. From 2015, when religious holiday music reached its peak market share, to 2022, downloads’ contribution to total consumption of the top 100 holiday songs dropped from 49% to just 1.4%. This year, numerous religious songs, including For King & Country’s “Little Drummer Boy” and Lauren Daigle’s “Light of the World,” have relatively strong download sales but too few streams to make the top 100.
Radio stations favor a different slate of religious holiday songs than streaming platforms, such as versions of the 1962 song “Do You Hear What I Hear?” by Martina McBride, Carrie Underwood and Whitney Houston that fall outside of the top 100 holiday streaming recordings. Traditional songs like “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” recorded by the likes of Barenaked Ladies and Mannheim Steamroller, consistently perform well at U.S. radio. “Songs like ‘O Holy Night,’ ‘Do You Hear What I Hear?’ and ‘The First Noel’ still test equally well for us,” says Tom Poleman, chief programming officer for iHeartMedia, in an email to Billboard.
But the data show U.S. radio airplay of holiday music has also become more secular in recent years. In November and December of 2015, there were 16 religious songs in the top 100 holiday recordings as measured by spins. The top religious recording, “The Little Drummer Boy” by Harry Simeone Chorale, ranked No. 25 and was closely followed by two versions of “Do You Hear What I Hear?” by Houston and Bing Crosby at No. 33 and No. 34, respectively. Rogers’ and Pentatonix’s covers of “Mary, Did You Know?” also ranked in the top 100.
This year, through Dec. 8, there were only 6 religious songs in the top 100, and the top track, “The Little Drummer Boy” by Harry Simeone Chorale, had fallen to No. 72. Christian artist Amy Grant still makes the top 100, but her versions of “Winter Wonderland,” “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” “Sleigh Ride” and “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” have performed better than her top religious song, “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.”
The final rankings could have more religious songs come Christmas, however. Radio stations tend to play religious-themed songs more often as Christmas nears, says Sean Ross, author of the Ross on Radio newsletter. That would mean tracks such as “The First Noel” by Andy Williams and “Joy to the World” by Nat King Cole, both top 100 tracks in 2021, could get more plays and rise through the ranks in the coming week.
Spotify has promoted longtime employee John Stein to head of North America, editorial, the company announced on Tuesday (Dec. 20). He reports directly to Sulinna Ong, global head of editorial at the streaming service.
Stein joined Spotify in 2013 after the streamer acquired his previous company, the playlisting firm Tunigo. Prior to his promotion, he worked as lead of music culture and editorial, overseeing strategy and curation for Spotify’s U.S. editorial playlists and becoming a strong voice on the company’s editorial team and the music team as a whole.
In 2018, Stein co-created Spotify’s successful genre-less playlist Pollen, which today boasts more than 1.3 million likes on the platform. Due to Pollen’s phenomenal success, the streaming service began leaning into the concept of playlist-as-brand and eventually introduced other similar playlists, including the pop-leaning Lorem (more than 969,000 likes) and the Nordic region-focused Oyster (more than 102,000 likes).
With his promotion, Stein has three new direct reports on his team. They include Rachel Whitney, head of Nashville, editorial; Antonio Vasquez, head of U.S. Latin, editorial; and Ronny Ho, head of dance and electronic development, editorial. The trio joins Stein’s existing team, which includes Ehis Osifo, editor, editorial partnerships; Jess Huddleston, editorial lead, Canada with her direct reports Marc Matar, junior editor, Canada and Karla Moy, editor, Canada; Talia Kraines, senior editor, United States with her direct reports Fredrik Fencke, editor and Lulu Largent, junior editor; and Elizabeth Szabo, senior editor, along with her direct report William Nellis, junior editor, North America.
At first, “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” made three people laugh.
One was Randy Brooks, nephew of the late comedian Foster Brooks, who wrote the song but couldn’t convince his own group to play it. The others were Elmo Shropshire, a veterinarian, and his wife, Patsy Trigg, a bluegrass duo that performed at casinos in the Southwest under the name Elmo & Patsy. Brooks met them outside a Lake Tahoe hotel in 1979 and wound up playing them the song. Elmo & Patsy performed it as part of their act, then booked studio time and recorded it as a single.
Then it took off — first on KSFO in San Francisco, which played it as a lark, then at more and more radio stations around the country. Trigg’s parents published “Grandma” through their Tennessee gospel-music company, Kris Publishing, which meant Brooks made money every time it sold. But Shropshire, who owned the master-recording rights, turned out to be an aggressive DIY record man, recording a full-on album containing “Grandma” and lining up distribution through big drug-store chains. In 1983, it hit No. 1 on Billboard‘s Christmas Songs chart, then graduated to toys, films and TV shows. Today, it’s a holiday standard.
“It was an amazing rush,” says Trigg of the early “Grandma” days, before she and Shropshire divorced in 1985. “It was probably one of the most exciting times I’ve ever experienced.”
Billboard estimates the song’s publishing has generated $800,000, but the original Elmo & Patsy master-recording version has brought in $2.5 million through record sales and streaming over the years, all in the U.S. Much of that goes to Sony’s Epic Records, to which Shropshire signed a distribution deal in the early ’80s — meaning the veterinarian lost control of the master recordings and a lot of potential income. So Shropshire pulled a Taylor Swift-before-there-was-a-Taylor Swift and re-recorded the track under the name Dr. Elmo. His version generated an additional $7 million-plus. And that’s not even counting TV, film and toy licensing.
So the track has a happy ending — for everybody but Grandma.
“We did it all ourselves,” says Shropshire, 86, of Novato, Calif., in a phone interview between gigs performing the song at New Jersey soup kitchens and psychiatric hospitals. “We were working constantly. But it was fun. There’s something [that’s] great fun about being an entrepreneur.”
How did you come to be the performer on the song but not the songwriter?
Randy brought the song to me in Lake Tahoe. I thought it was provocative and funny. I thought the joke would be over after one or two times. At that point, I wasn’t professional enough to think about any recording business. I was still working at my veterinary hospital. I made a recording of it to give to some friends for a gag Christmas gift. One took it to a radio station in San Francisco and they started playing it. I had no idea. I was driving to work and [KSFO broadcaster] Gene Nelson said, “Well, we just played this song a little while ago, and a whole bunch of people called in and said they hated it. If we get 50 requests for it, we’ll play it again.”
How did it go from that to holiday hit?
In 1979, maybe 1980, when we first came out with the record, it was played a couple times. Right after Christmas, the bottom would drop out. At that time, there were probably 80 [record] companies. I’d send them a copy. I just had a little vinyl 45. They were interested in selling albums. I’d send a letter saying, “This is played on the radio, and I think it’s going to be good.” Almost every one would take the letter I wrote, and they had big Magic Marker on it, saying, “Stop sending me this shit!” In 1983, everybody started taping it from KSFO in San Francisco.
How did you capitalize on the radio exposure?
There were a lot of independent record distributors, but they’d [buy] 100 CDs — and at the end of a season, they’d send back, like, 98. Then we’d have to pay them back, or no money would exchange hands. My wife Pam Wendell — she was a salesperson — had the idea of making CDs and little displays and packaging them in a box and selling them to drugstore chains. We went to Longs Drugs in California. They had about 250 stores. It was different from getting them into record stores, when you usually didn’t get paid — then you’re competing with Elton John and the Eagles and your stuff goes down into the basement. Longs Drugs didn’t sell music, but at Christmas, they would put our displays out. Thirty days later, they would send us a check.
Then what happened?
We went from Longs to Eckerds, in the East. They had 3,000 stores. And we went to Costco and Sav-on — they had about 3,000 stores. Ultimately, we got into Dollar General, and they had 8,000 stores. I would try to do radio interviews. And they liked it. There was always a good angle: “Why did you sing a song where Grandma gets killed at Christmas?” I wasn’t that great of an interview, but it was fun for them and provocative. I would do interviews starting at 3 in the morning so I could be on the 6 a.m. morning shows in the East. I did probably 175 interviews every December. We lined them up every 15 minutes. That was from about 1994 until 2014.
At some point, Sony comes into the story, right? What was the story there?
In 1983, I spent a lot of money making a video. There was a man and wife in Nashville who had a little record company called Nationwide Sound Distributors. They got wind of it and said, “If you’ll sign a deal with us for a year, we’ll press 250,000.” Well, they sold all 250,000 copies, because people were hearing it for about three years, and there was no place to buy it. So the market was there. Billboard had it No. 1, in front of [Bing Crosby‘s] “White Christmas.” That’s when Epic [Records, part of CBS, later purchased by Sony] got involved and said they wanted to distribute it. It was a pretty onerous contract. I made an album of Christmas songs, so they could have an album. It probably cost $10,000 to $15,000. They gave me a $20,000 advance, but they owned everything. They sold a lot of records, and they just did nothing for promotion.
If Epic owned those recordings, you couldn’t sell the album yourself at drugstores, right? Is that why you recorded a different version?
That’s right. I re-recorded my own version of “Grandma.” We used all the same personnel. Even I can’t tell the difference.
You must be aware that’s exactly what Taylor Swift is doing. Have you followed that story?
No, I have not. No kidding! I’m so excited to hear about it.
Her record label was sold, including her original catalog. She didn’t like the people who bought the label and wanted to buy back the catalog but couldn’t. So she re-recorded all the songs and told everybody to buy and stream the new ones instead of the old ones.
I’ll tell you another thing about re-recording. Let’s say somebody wants to use the song in a movie. It’s a one-time payoff. They usually pay, I’m thinking, $25,000 for the publishing part of it to use the composition and another $25,000 for the master sound recording. So anytime somebody wants to put it on TV or a movie, [or] toys, more money comes from that than from record sales. If they use the Sony version, Sony just gives me a pittance. But if they use my version, I get the whole $25,000. This is the same with Taylor Swift.
Ah! I wasn’t even thinking about synchs.
Oh, you would not believe the times somebody would call up and say, “We want to pay X amount of dollars” — usually many thousands — “to use the composition in Jarhead.” And they’d say, “We’ve already contacted Sony and they say we can use their recording.” And I’d immediately call up the person and say, “Don’t use the Sony recording! Use ours!” That’s $25,000 out the window!
So you have to be proactive and make sure music supervisors know to use your version.
We have been on so high alert with that. Sometimes we’d have to talk ’em out of it. They’d say, “Who’s Dr. Elmo?” We’d get them to listen to it and they couldn’t tell the difference and we’d say, “We can give you a better deal.”
Did you ever recoup the $30,000 you spent on the video, and the $10,000 or $15,000 you spent in the studio for that Epic version?
Yeah, we made it up that year. That and more!
Well, I assume you have another 150 interviews to do today, so I should let you go.
No! We’re not afraid all those CDs will come back to us after the first of the year anymore. Those streams won’t come back to us. We’re not worried about that.
The Recording Academy Entertainment Law Initiative (ELI) will honor Peter T. Paterno, partner at King, Holmes, Paterno & Soriano, LLP, with the 2023 Entertainment Law Initiative Service Award. The award will be presented at the ELI’s 25th-anniversary event at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills, Calif. on Friday, Feb. 3, 2023 — two nights before the 65th Annual Grammy Awards are presented at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles.
“We’re thrilled to return to the Beverly Wilshire Hotel for the 25th anniversary ELI Grammy Week Event to salute the impact of entertainment law on the music industry,” Harvey Mason jr., CEO of the Recording Academy, said in a statement. “The creative community is grateful for Peter’s advocacy on behalf of music makers, and I look forward to celebrating ELI’s mission to inspire dialogue between industry professionals and to cultivate an inclusive future generation of entertainment law practitioners.”
Over the course of his career, Paterno has nurtured the careers of dozens of recording artists. He has extensive experience in all aspects of copyright and trademark law, tax planning relating to the entertainment industry, litigation management and live theater production.
Paterno’s clients include Dr. Dre, Metallica, Van Morrison, Blink-182, Twenty One Pilots, Skrillex, Tyler the Creator, Q Tip, Goo Goo Dolls, Rage Against the Machine, Rancid, Alice In Chains, Offspring, Linda Ronstadt, Jared Leto/Thirty Seconds to Mars, Roddy Ricch, Richard Sherman, Sia, Shirley Manson, Alanis Morissette and Tori Amos — as well as the estates of Tupac Shakur and Henry Mancini.
Peter T. Paterno
Ron Lyon
In 1990, Paterno started and became the first president of Hollywood Records, the Walt Disney Company’s popular music record label.
The Service Award winner is determined by ELI’s executive committee, which is currently chaired by Laurie Soriano. Members include Kris Ahrend, Sandy Crawshaw-Sparks, Susan Genco, Renee Karalian, Michael Kushner, Dina LaPolt, Wade Leak, Angie Martinez, Tanya Perara, Julian Petty, Leron Rogers, Henry Root, Bobby Rosenbloum, Julie Swidler, Jeff Walker, Robert Windom and Stephanie Yu.
The ELI Grammy Week event will also celebrate the winner and two runners-up of the Entertainment Law Initiative writing contest, co-sponsored by the American Bar Association. The contest challenges students in Juris Doctorate and Master of Laws programs at U.S. law schools to research a pressing legal issue facing the modern music industry and outline a proposed solution in a 3,000-word essay. Students have until Jan. 3, 2023, to enter the contest.
A $10,000 scholarship is awarded to the author of the winning paper, and $2,500 scholarships are awarded to two runners-up. The winning paper will be published in the ABA’s journal Entertainment & Sports Lawyer. The winner will also receive travel and tickets to Los Angeles to attend the 65th Grammy Awards, MusiCares Person of the Year and the ELI Grammy Week Event. See official rules, detailed prize packages and deadlines at recordingacademy.com/eli.
Individual tickets and a limited number of discounted student tickets to the ELI Grammy Week event are on sale now.
Harvey Weinstein on Monday (Dec. 19) was found guilty of rape in a Los Angeles trial. The conviction further cements his plunge from one of the most influential producers in Hollywood to the face of the #MeToo movement.
But the jury acquitted Weinstein of sexual battery by restraint against one of his Jane Doe accusers.
Jurors also couldn’t reach a decision on three sexual assault charges, including rape.
This trial centered on testimony from four women, all known as Jane Does in court, who accused Weinstein of raping or sexually assaulting them from 2004 to 2013. Four others also testified that they were assaulted, though their claims didn’t lead to charges. In total, prosecutors called 44 witnesses to the stand to make their case against the former movie mogul.
Weinstein faced two counts of rape and five counts of sexual assault. He pleaded not guilty to all charges against him. Weinstein is currently serving a 23-year sentence following his conviction by a New York jury in Feb. 2020 of committing a criminal sexual act in the first degree and third-degree rape. He appealed the sentence, but it was affirmed by an appeals court in June.
Jurors started deliberating on Dec. 2. It reached a verdict on the 10th day of deliberations, after roughly 41 hours considering the case.
Weinstein sat at end of the defense table with his attorneys Mark Werksman and Alan Jackson after the jury walked into the ninth floor courtroom of the Clara Shortridge Foltz courthouse in downtown Los Angeles to announce that it had reached a verdict.
The verdict comes on the heels of a host of other decisions in cases with #MeToo implications. Across the hall of the downtown Los Angeles courtroom in which Weinstein’s trial unfolded, a judge declared a mistrial on Nov. 30 in actor Danny Masterson’s rape case after the jury said it was “hopelessly deadlocked.” In New York, Academy Award-winning filmmaker Paul Haggis was ordered to pay $10 million to a woman who accused him of rape, while actor Kevin Spacey beat a sexual misconduct suit brought by Anthony Rapp, who alleged sexual abuse when he was 14.
Weinstein, who reigned as one of Hollywood’s most influential producers, didn’t testify. The defense primarily focused on poking holes in the testimony of the eight accusers — four Jane Does and four named witnesses whose accusations didn’t lead to charges.
Werksman said Jane Does No. 1 and 2 lied about their accusations, while Jane Does No. 3 and 4 had “transactional sex” with Weinstein to advance their careers.
“Take my word for it — five words that sum up the entirety of the prosecution’s case,” said Alan Jackson, also representing Weinstein, in closing arguments on Dec. 1.
Jane Doe No. 1 — a model and actress — testified that she was raped in a hotel room in February 2013. After demanding to be let in, she alleges that Weinstein started to masturbate before forcing her to perform oral sex and raping her. She reported the incident to law enforcement in 2017.
The Hollywood Reporter doesn’t typically name people who say they were sexually assaulted unless they voluntarily come forward. Several of the women who testified against Weinstein have disclosed that they were assaulted.
Among them is Jennifer Siebel Newsom, who was a relatively unknown actress when she met Weinstein at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2005 before marrying Gov. Gavin Newsom. She testified that she was raped in a meeting Weinstein set up to discuss her career, bursting into tears when asked to identify the disgraced movie mogul. “He’s wearing a suit and a blue tie, and he’s staring at me,” she said from the witness stand.
Prosecutors detailed a “recorded pattern” among the assaults of Weinstein luring his accusers into an isolated hotel room under the guise of professional meetings.
During opening statements, Werksman said Siebel Newsom would be “just another bimbo who slept with Harvey Weinstein to get ahead in Hollywood” if she wasn’t married to the governor.
The accusations against Weinstein date to a time when he was at the apex of his powers in Hollywood. Over 40 years in the industry, he played a part in launching the careers of countless A-listers and award winners.
More to come.
This article originally appeared on The Hollywood Reporter.
Most people probably didn’t even realize that Billy McFarland, founder of the failed Fyre Festival was out of prison until he popped up on TikTok Oct. 24, with a video showing an old pirate-style map taped to a whiteboard. He was hyping a new project that he claimed would be “a little crazier and a whole lot bigger than anything I’ve ever tried before.” Full details would follow in November, he said, as he pulled off the map to reveal a phone number, “but this time, everyone’s invited.”
It’s been over four years since McFarland’s planned Fyre Festival on Great Exuma in the Bahamas imploded, leaving concertgoers with soggy sandwiches and emergency tents instead of Blink-182 and luxury accommodations. A year later, he was perp-walked into Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center after being arrested for selling tickets he didn’t have to events like the Grammy Awards and the Met Gala, while out on bail awaiting sentencing for fraud charges after stealing $26 million from investors in Fyre Fest.
McFarland tells Billboard in an exclusive interview that his new idea will help him pay back the $26 million the judge in the Fyre Festival case ordered him to reimburse those investors. He says he came up with the idea during a tough stretch in solitary confinement, where he was sent after the prison warden realized that he had recorded a podcast while locked up.
“Ninety percent of the ideas that I had in there were for pure survival,” says McFarland. “If I wasn’t brainstorming this project, I would have gone crazy — it’s hell.”
His idea, which he first shared with his longtime girlfriend Anastasia Eremenko, a Russian-born model featured in the documentary Fyre Fraud, was to start smaller, by talking small groups of people into traveling to Great Exuma — then get bigger. So, he started posting videos and appeared on Good Morning America and the Full Send podcast talking up “PYRT” — pronounced “pirate” — which he described as a luxury Bahamas resort property, clothing line and digital metaverse that would kick off with a global treasure hunt. The prize, he said, was a private island in the Bahamas.
In October, before he posted the first TikTok video, he had even invited potential investors to sit in on a call with a regional Bahamian official, who assured McFarland he was welcome back on the island, according to Peter Vincer, the producer of the Dumpster Fyre podcast, which told McFarland’s story.
But, it won’t be that easy. On Nov. 14, Bahamas Acting Prime Minister Chester Cooper released a statement that the government would not approve any event affiliated with him. “He is considered to be a fugitive,” the statement read. “Anyone knowing of his whereabouts should report same to the RBPF” — the Royal Bahamas Police Force.
Until then, McFarland assumed the bigger problem would be getting permission from his probation officer to leave the Southern District of New York. “That was personally super tough,” McFarland says about his Bahamas ban. “The reality is that I owe a lot of workers money for their work on the festival, and they need to get paid back. And I just don’t have the money right now.”
That wasn’t his only problem. By the time he posted his first TikTok video, McFarland had fallen into a financial dispute with the lead investor in PYRT, who he met in Elkton Federal Correction Institute in Ohio, and the investor’s young business partner, Eric Bratcher, an alienated McFarland fan, now says his main goal in life is to “be known as the person who brought down Billy McFarland.”
Bratcher’s beef with McFarland is personal. He says he put his life on hold to help McFarland publish his memoir and launch PYRT, a project that Bratcher believes could have been successful had it not been for repeated misrepresentations by McFarland about its finances. (McFarland said he was always forthright about the PYRT’s money situation.)
Bratcher had invested with a businessman — identified by The Daily Beast as John Taylor — who put $640,000 into PYRT, mostly with wire transfers and checks made out to McFarland’s longtime friend and partner in PYRT, Michael Falb. Taylor, a private investor who served four years in prison for sex trafficking a 15-year-old prostitute, helped capitalize McFarland’s business without a contract or formal agreement.
Months after Taylor made that investment, McFarland kicked Taylor out of PYRT, which Taylor had been managing as one of three partners. Taylor says he was fired after he started to raise questions about how money was being spent, but McFarland tells Billboard that he fired Taylor because he had lied to him about the details of his conviction.
Bratcher was also let go because of his connection to Taylor. And since Bratcher had been hired to transcribe some of McFarland’s notes from prison to turn into a memoir that McFarland said he had a publishing deal for, he threatened to auction off the notes if McFarland didn’t pay him $75,000 to $150,000 for the work he had done. McFarland says he never told Bratcher he had a publishing deal in place.
A little more than a week before McFarland appeared on TikTok, he offered to buy out Taylor from the company in a deal that would have repaid his $640,000 investment, plus an additional $360,000 over the next six months. (Taylor says that he considered his investment in PYRT to be a loan collateralized against the $2 million book deal that McFarland allegedly told him he had made.)
Taylor didn’t believe that McFarland would be able to pay him back, so he countered that he wanted his money back in a week, plus an additional $5 million over the next two years, according to emails provided to Billboard. McFarland’s attorneys rejected this offer on Oct. 31, despite threats from Taylor and Bratcher to tell the FBI and the U.S. Probation and Parole Office that McFarland had misappropriated Taylor’s investment. After McFarland’s attorneys rejected Taylor and Bratcher’s offer, Bratcher tells Billboard that he and Taylor did go to the FBI.
Amid all of this, McFarland is still planning PYRT. “One of the things I should have done early on is cut out all of the jail people from my life,” McFarland says. He’s still pushing forward, despite this fight, his ban from the Bahamas, or the issues involved in raising investment after a fraud conviction. After all, he owes his $26 million under the terms of his sentence, and how else could he possibly raise it?
McFarland was able to garner more than $26 million for Fyre Festival because he offered potential partners more than just a return on investment. Most ventures show plenty of potential on paper. McFarland’s also offered something that potential investors couldn’t buy: status.
“People will give you money if you can give them access to something they don’t have,” McFarland wrote in a draft of his memoir, which Bratcher showed to Billboard. (He does not have a book deal.) So, to raise money for the Fyre Festival, he created a sizzle reel with video of Ja Rule and IMG models in swimwear on jet skis, and showed potential investors pictures of the island where Fyre would take place. When that wasn’t enough, according to an SEC complaint, McFarland resorted to forgery.
Among the documents McFarland created for investors was a false revenue report which showed that Fyre Media, the festival’s parent company, had generated $34 million (actual revenue: $1.5 million); a fake brokerage statement showing McFarland owned $2.56 million worth of Facebook shares (real holdings: $1,599 in shares) and a fabricated email from a private bank saying McFarland had been approved for a $3 million personal loan. McFarland created enough fake documents to be convicted of criminal fraud, defined under U.S. law as “intentional deception to benefit yourself or someone else.” He was ultimately sentenced to six years in prison and served four and a half years in five different facilities.
McFarland started serving his time in Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center, a squalid prison where billionaire sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was found hanging from his lower bunk in 2019. After his sentencing, McFarland was moved to Otisville Federal Correctional Institute in New York, a minimum-security camp for white collar criminals that operates on the honor system and has also housed Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino and Donald Trump confidants Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen. There, McFarland was caught with a digital recording device, thrown in solitary confinement for three months and shipped off to Elkton Federal Correction Institute in Lisbon, Ohio.
In Elkton, McFarland met Taylor, now 49, who loved scuba diving and had battled cocaine and alcohol addictions for most of his life. Despite being two decades apart in age, Taylor and McFarland became close behind bars, where they would talk business and discuss their mutual interest in startups. After Taylor was granted early release in April 2020, the men promised to stay in touch.
Six months later, Taylor was ready to be part of McFarland’s first redemption project — the Dumpster Fyre podcast, produced by publicist and media executive Peter Vincer with Notorious LLC. The concept for the show was to document McFarland’s life in the general population of Elkton as prison officials dealt with a brutal COVID-19 outbreak that killed nine inmates. Prison officials had no idea McFarland was recording episodes of Dumpster Fyre from the prison phone until a trailer for the show aired. Hours after airing, McFarland was again hauled off to solitary confinement for a six-month bid, the hardest time he says he served behind bars.
“It’s fucking awful,” says McFarland, adding that he lost track of time, as hours, days and later weeks ran into one another. “As soon as you lose hope, you go crazy.”
It was in solitary confinement that McFarland first came up with the idea for PYRT, a fantastical island getaway in the Bahamas that would be part hotel and part digital universe, linked together through VID/R technology that would allow digital visitors and real-life resort guests to interact.
To generate awareness, PYRT would begin with a major stunt — the crash of a twin engine prop plane on the pristine beaches of Norman’s Cay (“…Aviation experts will be engaged to adhere to environmental and local regulations,” McFarland wrote in the draft of his memoir.) The crash would then kick off a global treasure hunt that would end where it began, in the Bahamas where the crashed plane would be converted into a diver’s reef, not far from a luxury hotel that would serve as PYRT headquarters.
McFarland continued to work on PYRT once he was released from solitary confinement in April 2021, then came up with an investor deck, which he sent to Taylor. When McFarland was released, Taylor was one of the first people to show up at the halfway house McFarland moved to, and he eventually gave McFarland and his business partner, Falb, a total of $640,000 — about $590,000 in wire transfers to Falb, about $40,000 through a debit card, and about $10,000 in cash. Bank records show that Taylor transferred $8,000 to $10,000 a month into a bank account and that McFarland was withdrawing money from the account at an ATM near his apartment.
McFarland says Taylor knew how he was spending the money and only shut down the account after the two had a falling out. It’s unclear why Taylor — who has a background in lending and originated and financed more than $100 million in international loans, according to his company’s website — would hand over so much money without any paperwork.
Whatever arrangements McFarland makes to pay back Taylor, he already owes $26 million to his former investors, and he says he has already found some ways to make money — recording videos for the app Cameo, signing a trading card deal and working on a TV project. But he still believes that PYRT represents his best bet for paying back his victims and moving forward with his life.
Eventually, that is. “I’d be stupid to say I could pay the money back in seven years or some set amount of time,” McFarland says. “Unless I win the business lottery, that’s just not realistic.”
A social impact tech platform long aligned with the music industry has found success at the iconic Red Rocks amphitheater near Denver, raising money and awareness for more than a half-dozen non-profits working with nearly 30 artists and comedians in 2022.
Founded by CEO Brandon Deroche in 2015, Propeller was originally created for the band Incubus to help raise money for their foundation and educate donors about the various nonprofit groups the foundation was supporting, Deroche explains. It was designed to promote “a deeper level of involvement from the fans,” beyond charitable giving, he continues, educating fans on how to support causes by volunteering, advocacy work and contacting their local legislators.
“Fans might have known that a dollar per ticket from the show they attended went to a good cause, but they don’t always know who the organization is and what that organization does,” Deroche says. “It’s a missed opportunity to turn those fans into supporters of that cause. And that’s a big aspect of what Propeller tries to do – provide education and understanding of the different ways fans can take action.”
The goal for many non-profits, Deroche says, is to expand their marketing efforts to a younger audience, which is more difficult to reach in the current media landscape. By working with Propeller, non-profits are able to tap into the active fan bases of many artists, he explains.
The decision to partner with a venue was part of a larger effort to expand Propeller’s footprint and meet different types of audiences and artists. While Deroche was looking for the right venue partner, the city-owned management team behind Denver’s Red Rocks amphitheater was also looking for new charity-based partners to expand the venue’s own impact. After averaging about 80 shows a year for the past decade, Red Rocks had won approval to host 200 concerts in 2022 and was looking for ways to create a more meaningful experience for its growing audience.
“We recognize that artists want to have an impact, and venues do too,” says Brian Kitts, director of marketing & communications at Red Rocks. “When Propeller came along and said they could match the venue with the artist and the organization, we felt like it was the complete package.”
Propeller connected with every performer from the more than 200 concerts at Red Rocks in 2022, offering each the opportunity to support a cause of their choice with special activations including exclusive post-show meet and greets, memorabilia and side stage viewing access. That included an after-party with The Black Keys and Molson Coors for fans who took action to support Save The Music, with 100 winners selected from the audience at Red Rocks and chartered via private shuttle buses to a secret dive bar location.
“They make it really easy for me to show up, participate and raise awareness and a little bit of money for a good cause,” says comedian Bert Kreischer, who gave away free tickets and airfare to see his show at Red Rocks in September in an effort to raise money for Climate Action Now.
Before each show, a short video is shown encouraging fans to take action for the chance to win a ticket upgrade. Propeller also operates an interactive booth with a prize wheel on Red Rock’s upper deck section to engage fans.
In total, Propeller interacted with more than 95,000 music fans and raised $165,784 in its first year, “a very impressive first year here at Red Rocks,” says Kitts.
Propeller covers the costs of the activations and getaways included in the promotions it runs and collects a fee from each charity and non-profit it represents. Deroche says Propeller will be back in 2023 and is looking to expand even further.
“We learned a lot,” Deroche says. “We feel like we barely scratched the surface on what’s possible there. Next year we are looking to go a lot bigger with our efforts and really dive in and apply everything we’ve learned.”