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Nearly two years after Marc Anthony was forced to cancel his highly-anticipated “Una Noche” livestream concert at the last minute, the event’s promoter is now suing the streaming platform for causing the “complete and total failure.”
In a lawsuit filed Friday in Los Angeles court, attorneys for Loud and Live Entertainment claimed that Maestro had assured the promoter that the platform’s technology could “automatically scale to accommodate the number of ticketholders” – more than 100,000 people worldwide.
But when the night of the April 17, 2021, concert came, Loud and Live says those same fans “stared at blank or frozen computer screens” as Maestro experienced what it later described as a “complete collapse of the streaming platform.”
“As a result of Maestro’s complete and total failure, Loud And Live — which paid Anthony a substantial guaranteed artist fee, promoted and backed the concert financially, and contracted with sponsors and vendors around the world — suffered significant economic losses, all of which were foreseeable to Maestro.”
“Una Noche” was supposed to be one of the biggest livestreamed shows of the pandemic era, headlined by Anthony — who fills soccer stadiums in Latin America — and joined by superstar Daddy Yankee as a guest performer. By showtime, more than 100,000 tickets had been sold.
As a streaming partner, Maestro was no novice. Prior to the Anthony concert, the platform had handled major shows like Billie Eilish’s October 2020 livestream and Melissa Etheridge’s successful EtheridgeTV series. But at 8 p.m. EST on April 17, as global fans logged on to watch Anthony perform, Maestro’s system failed. Despite frantic attempts to revive the stream, the concert never happened, and fans were left waiting for hours until learning the show was officially canceled.
“Una Noche” may have been the most high-profile concert livestream to fail, but it’s hardly the only one to experience problems. For instance, Justin Bieber’s 2021 New Year’s Eve livestream with T-Mobile was seriously delayed — almost missing East Coast celebrations — due to unexpected demand from more than 1.2 million T-Mobile customers.
Avoiding such debacles is more complicated than it looks. Unlike physical shows, which have seat selection and could sell out, livestreams offer little incentive to buy a ticket early or arrive ahead of time. This can lead to a surge in activity at the start of the event — the size of which is difficult, if not impossible, to predict and prepare for.
But in its new lawsuit, Loud and Live says those were concerns were well-known to Maestro — and that the company had promised to have the technology and the experience to deal with them.
“Although Maestro had represented to Plaintiff … that it had handled events much larger than Anthony’s, and expressly warrantied that its platform would ‘automatically scale’ to meet Loud And Live’s needs (whether it had 500 viewers or millions), Maestro failed to stream even one minute of the show,” the company’s lawyers wrote. “Maestro’s misrepresentations regarding its technological capabilities induced Loud and Live to engage and rely on Maestro.”
In legal terms, Loud and Live says that Maestro’s failures breached the contract the two companies signed. It also says the streamer violated the promises that the streaming platform had made about the capabilities of its technology — meaning it breached its “express warranty” and made a “negligent misrepresentation” to Loud and Live.
Read the entire complaint here:
Gunna pleaded guilty Wednesday (Dec. 14) in the closely-watched criminal case against Young Thug and other alleged members of an Atlanta gang, ending his involvement in the sprawling case and securing his release from jail — though the rapper stressed that he was not cooperating with prosecutors.
In a statement released by his lawyers, Gunna (real name Sergio Kitchens) said he had taken a so-called Alford plea — a maneuver that allows a defendant to enter a formal admission of guilt while still maintaining their innocence — “to end my personal ordeal.”
In technical terms, the rapper pleaded guilty to a single charge against him and was sentenced Wednesday to a time-served, suspended sentence. His lawyers confirmed that he would be “released from jail in the next few hours.”
Despite the plea deal, Gunna stressed that he had not agreed to work with prosecutors in any way to convict Young Thug or any of the other defendants.
“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,” the rapper wrote.
A spokesman for the Fulton County District Attorney’s office, which is prosecuting the case, did not immediately return a request for comment.
Both Young Thug (Jeffery Williams) and Gunna were indicted in May, along with dozens of others, on accusations that their group YSL was not really a record label called “Young Stoner Life,” but a violent Atlanta street gang called “Young Slime Life.” The charges include allegations of murder, carjacking, armed robbery, drug dealing and illegal firearm possession over the past decade.
Young Thug and many others are set to stand trial on those charges in January.
In Wednesday’s statement, Gunna said he was “acknowledging my association with YSL,” but that he had not seen the group as a criminal enterprise.
“When I became affiliated with YSL in 2016, I did not consider it a “gang”; more like a group of people from metro Atlanta who had common interests and artistic aspirations,” Gunna wrote. My focus of YSL was entertainment – rap artists who wrote and performed music that exaggerated and ‘glorified’ urban life in the Black community.”
“I love and cherish my association with YSL music, and always will,” he wrote. “I look at this as an opportunity to give back to my community and educate young men and women that ‘gangs’ and violence only lead to destruction.”
South Korean investment and management firm Beyond Music made its first acquisition of a North American music catalog by purchasing the rights to the music of Greg Wells, a Grammy-winning Canadian songwriter-producer whose credits includes music recorded by Adele, Taylor Swift, Dua Lipa, Katy Perry and Quincy Jones.
Wells’ career spans genres and decades. As a songwriter, Wells has credits on Aerosmith’s Nine Lives, Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love, Adele’s 21 and John Legend’s Bigger Love. His production credits include The Greatest Showman: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, Twenty One Pilots’ Vessel and the In The Heights soundtrack. The rights vary by title and include publishing rights, producing income rights, and master performance rights, according to a company spokesperson.
With the Wells acquisition, Beyond Music’s assets under management are 300 billion won ($230 million). Before this deal, Beyond Music – which claims to be “largest music IP management company in Asia” – spent more than $200 million on acquisitions in Asia, including the catalogs of FNC Investment, KNC Music and Interpark, to build a catalog of more than 26,000 songs. The company received funding from institutional investors including KB Securities, Base Investment, Maven Growth Partners and Dreamus Company.
The Wells acquisition was made by a newly established U.S.-based subsidiary, Beyond Music US, because domestic transactions are simpler for tax and legal purposes, and the company wants to pursue additional international opportunities in the future, according to the spokesperson. That said, Wells’ catalog covers many Western artists who are also popular in South Korea and throughout Asia. This company believes this acquisition is a “unique opportunity” and “a stepping stone for Beyond to become a global music rights management company,” the spokesperson added.
“Now is the time to become a global music rights management company by securing not only Asian, but also international music rights,” Beyond Music CEO Jangwon Lee said in a statement. Jangwon is also the CEO of Content Technologies and CT Investments, which debuted a K-pop focused exchange-traded fund, using the ticker KPOP, on the NYSE Arca Exchange in September. Beyond Music is a subsidiary of Contents Technology.
In a statement, Wells called it “an honor to be the first major music catalog acquisition for Beyond outside the Korean market. I am impressed with their commitment to creative freedom as well as maximizing the impact of my songs. I feel my work is in good hands with them.”
Wells won a Grammy in 2019 for Best Compilation Soundtrack for Visual Media for his production and engineering work on The Greatest Showman: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (he spoke with Billboard’s Pop Shop podcast about the soundtrack in 2018). He also received Grammy nominations for his work on In the Heights, Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cinderella.
Megan Thee Stallion appeared in Los Angeles court Tuesday (Dec. 13) on the second day of the closely-watched trial over whether Tory Lanez shot her in the foot on July 12, 2020.
The rapper was met with a legion of her supporters at the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center, several of whom held a big, black “WE STAND WITH MEGAN” banner during a rally that was organized by non-profit The Gathering of Justice in conjunction with multiple women’s and violence prevention organizations. The Grammy winner arrived at the courthouse wearing a blunt shoulder bob and bold purple suit — a fitting color choice that symbolizes awareness of domestic violence, especially against women.
Once on the stand, Stallion’s voice cracked after L.A. County Deputy District Attorney Kathy Ta, one of the prosecutors on the case, asked her if she knew the defendant Lanez (real name Daystar Peterson). “Yes…. We used to hang out all the time,” said Stallion (real name Megan Pete), before admitting the two had an “intimate” but not exclusive relationship.
Lanez, wearing a cream patterned suit and white turtleneck, listened intently throughout Stallion’s testimony. He faces three felony charges: assault with a semiautomatic firearm; carrying a loaded, unregistered firearm in a vehicle; and discharging a firearm with gross negligence, the latter of which was added to the list of charges ahead of the trial last week. If convicted on all three counts, Lanez faces 22 years in prison.
Ta went on to ask Stallion about her relationship with Kelsey Harris — whom the rapper identified as her “best friend since freshman year of college” who later became her assistant at the end of 2019 — before asking what transpired the night of July 11, 2020, when the two women, along with Stallion’s stylist EJ King, attended a pool party at Kylie Jenner‘s house. Stallion recalled the evening’s events in front of the packed gallery, where Desiree Perez, CEO of Stallion’s management company Roc Nation, sat next to activist Tamika Mallory. Lanez’s family was also present in the room.
“I just don’t feel good,” said Stallion, 27, when asked by prosecutors if she was “nervous” to testify. “I can’t believe I have to come up here and do this.”
During her time on the stand, the Traumazine MC shared her side of the story as prompted by prosecutors, recalling that she had texted Lanez to come to the “small” gathering at Jenner’s home, where the makeup mogul was joined by friends and her mother Kris Jenner’s boyfriend, Corey Gamble. By the time Lanez arrived at the residence, Stallion said she, Harris, Jenner and Lanez were the only people remaining, and the foursome hung out in the pool together. “My hair [wig] was starting to come off and I wanted to go,” said Stallion, noting that Lanez “had an attitude because he wasn’t ready to leave the party.” Ultimately, Stallion, Harris, Lanez and his security guard Jauquan Smith, who had driven him to Jenner’s house, left the party together.
Stallion said tension initially rose in the car when Lanez, 30, allegedly told her, “You need to stop lying to your friend” regarding their sexual relationship. Stallion, who said she knew Harris had a crush on the R&B singer, “didn’t want her to know I had dealt with him in any kind of way.” While she said Harris was angry after learning about the relationship, Lanez provoked the ire of both women when he called them “bi—es and h–s,” Stallion claimed. Growing frustrated, Stallion says she asked to be let out of the car on Sunset Boulevard but quickly realized she was “literally at the peak” of her career and only wearing a “thong [bikini]” in the middle of the “most famous” street in L.A. To presumably avoid drawing any unwanted attention, Stallion says she got back inside the car, only to ask to be let out again on a side street not too far from the first stop because she was “over it.”
“I started walking away and I hear Tory yell, ‘Dance, bi—!’” she tearfully recounted in front of the jury, adding that she saw Lanez pointing a gun at her. “I froze. I just felt shock. I felt hurt. I looked down at my feet and I see all of this blood,” she said before explaining that she fell to the ground and crawled to a nearby driveway. “Everything feels blurry,” she continued, before recalling that Harris and Lanez bumped into each other on their way over to her. “Tory was basically telling me I wasn’t sh–, and I said, ‘Actually, you ain’t sh–. This is where you at in your career. This is where you at with your music.’ And I feel like that really rubbed him the wrong way,” she claimed.
The magnitude of both rappers’ careers was a point of contention in the hearing. At one point, Ta asked if Stallion’s career at the time was “bigger” than Lanez’s and she answered “yes.” “I had just done a song with Beyoncé,” she told the jury excitedly, referring to the remix of “Savage,” which reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 upon its arrival in April 2020, just two months shy of the shooting. Lanez visibly furrowed his eyebrows when she added, “He was just Tory Lanez,” but that the highly publicized incident “has gained him a lot of popularity.”
Between sobs, Stallion argued that “every man that’s in a position of power that’s in the music industry” didn’t want to believe her side of the story. “I’m a villain and he’s the victim,” she claimed. According to Stallion, that’s one of the reasons why, immediately after the incident, she told police officers that she cut her foot stepping on broken glass. It was only four days after the shooting, during a phone interview with Detective Ryan Stogner, that she alleged she had suffered a gunshot wound, she said. “This was the height of police brutality and George Floyd,” she testified, adding that she feared everyone would wind up dead if she told officers Lanez had shot her. “I didn’t want to see anybody die. I didn’t want to die.”
Stallion also tearfully admitted to initially not being honest about her intimate relationship with Lanez because “it’s disgusting at this point. How could I share my body with somebody who could shoot me?” She added that her current partner, fellow rapper Pardison Fontaine, is “embarrassed” over the continual coverage of Stallion and her previous entanglements. “I can’t even be happy….I wish he had just shot and killed me,” she continued.
The courtroom noticeably stiffened once Lanez’s lead attorney, George Mgdesyan, began interviewing Stallion as part of the cross-examination. After bringing up Stallion’s CBS Mornings interview with Gayle King from April 2022, during which the rapper claimed she did not have an intimate relationship with Lanez, Stallion admitted to the jury that she had lied on national television about the nature of their relationship. The defense also presented her with the police report from her initial interview with Detective Stogner on July 16, 2020, in an effort to refresh her memory that she had told the police “this wasn’t the first time” she had “backdoored” Harris.
“I’ve never been with anyone Kelsey’s been with,” she told Mgdesyan, contradicting the attorney’s opening statement from Monday when he argued Stallion had also been romantically involved with fellow rapper DaBaby and NBA player Ben Simmons right after Harris had dated both men.
While attempting to build a timeline of the July 12, 2020, incident, Stallion and Mgdesyan engaged in a heated exchange about what she remembered, including what time she and her group arrived and left Jenner’s house, the geographical location of where the shooting occurred and Lanez’s whereabouts in relation to the SUV when he shot her. When the defense asked if she didn’t remember what Lanez was wearing that night because she was intoxicated, Stallion shot back by saying she didn’t remember because the incident was now two years old.
Stallion and Mgdesyan talked over each other when the defense showed different photos of the bloody luggage and Louis Vuitton bag from the back seat of the SUV, where Stallion and Harris were allegedly sitting right after the shooting took place. When Mgdesyan asked Stallion if the black Louis Vuitton bag was hers or if she owned one similar to it, she simply replied, “I have a lot of bags,” leading the jury and gallery to chuckle amongst themselves in a brief moment of levity.
The mood quickly tensed again when Mgdesyan again asked Stallion why she didn’t tell the officers at the hospital that she had been shot. “Snitching is frowned upon in the hip-hop community,” Stallion replied. That led the defense to swiftly quote a snippet of her Instagram Live video from Aug. 20, 2020, when the “WAP” rapper named Lanez as her alleged shooter publicly for the first time. The Houston-bred artist looked visibly shocked when Mgdesyan said aloud, “But I’m not finna let y’all keep playing in my face, and I’m not finna let this n—a keep playing in my face, either.” Mgdesyan is not Black and recited the uncensored version of the N-word, leading Stallion to request that he repeat the full line. Upon doing so, Mgdesyan again used the uncensored version of the word.
Lanez straightened his suit jacket and seemed pressed when the majority of Stallion’s seven-minute IG Live was played from this YouTube video, in which Stallion is seen telling nearly 90,000 live viewers, “Yes, this n—a Tory shot me. You shot me! And you got your publicists and your people going to these blogs, lying and sh–. Stop lying! Why lie? I don’t understand. I tried to keep the situation off the internet, but you dragging it! You really f—ing dragging it!”
Stallion grew upset again during the redirect examination, wiping her nose and unable to hold back tears when describing how the alleged shooting has impacted her life and career in the two years since. “People don’t even want to touch me,” she wept, adding that her peers in the music industry viewed Stallion — a moniker suggesting a robust horse — like a “sick bird.” Her desolation grew more apparent while identifying various social media posts that she’s seen in the aftermath of the incident, including one that read, “Megan Needs To Be Shot and Killed.”
Coming forward with who allegedly shot her, Stallion testified, has ultimately caused her to “lose my confidence, lose my friends, lose myself. Damn, maybe I should be dead,” she cried.
The trial will resume Wednesday (Dec. 14).
SoundCloud Holdings GmbH and its subsidiaries reported revenue in 2021 of 230.7 million euros ($273 million at the average exchange rate in 2021 of 1.18308), up 19% from the prior year, according to audited financial statements published by the privately held company in Germany on Tuesday (Dec. 13).
SoundCloud, which originally gained popularity for its embeddable streaming widget, has a unique business model that mixes tools for music creators and listening for fans. Fan revenue — from advertising and subscriptions — improved 16.6% to 143.3 million euros ($170 million), or 62.2% of total revenue, down from 63.5% in 2020. Revenue from subscribers grew 20% year over year and exceeded internal expectations, according to the financial statements. Advertising revenue was in line with expectations, with 12% year-over-year growth.
Revenues from creator tools grew 23.7% to 87.3 million euros ($103 million) and increased to 37.8% of total revenue, up from 36.5% in 2020. The company attributed the improvement to the number of artists that chose to self-release music through the platform to take advantage of organic growth at major DSPs such as Spotify, as well as improving monetization of platforms such as Meta, TikTok and Twitch.
Founded in 2007, SoundCloud originally gained popularity through its ubiquitous, embeddable music player. It eventually launched a subscription streaming service, SoundCloud Go, in 2016, but did not rank in the top eight music subscriptions in the second quarter of 2022, according to figures released on Dec. 7 by MIDiA Research. Deezer was the eighth-largest subscription service with 9.5 million subscribers and a 1.5% global share. Spotify had the largest share with 30.5%, equal to 187.8 million subscribers. SoundCloud’s financial statements did not reveal the number of subscribers to its streaming service.
Unlike its peers, though, SoundCloud has always been a unique destination for artists to connect with listeners. The platform offers SoundCloud Next Pro, a service that allows artists to upload tracks to the platform and distribute them to other streaming services as well as pitch music to SiriusXM, which owns a minority stake in SoundCloud following a $75 million investment in 2020. A 2019 acquisition of Repost Network, an artist rights management and distribution platform, provides SoundCloud with a subscription product that offers creative services such as promotion and marketing.
In January 2022, SoundCloud added a third business segment, called roster, to connect fans and artists. Roster provides support services for emerging and developing artists. Its launch coincided with the announcement of a joint venture with artist management firm Solid Foundation Management to “identify, invest in, and foster the careers of artists featured.”
Gross profit margin — defined as gross profit as a percent of revenue — improved 12% to 35.4% on the strength of growth in subscriptions. Content costs — mainly royalties paid to record labels, publishers and independent artists — totaled 120.8 million euros ($143 million), up 14.1% from 105.9 million euros ($125 million) in 2020. As a percent of fan revenue, content costs declined to 84.2% from 86.1% in the prior year.
Despite the improved gross margin, operating loss deepened to 21.1 million euros (-$25 million) from 15.4 million euros (-$18 million) in 2020. SoundCloud increased its marketing spending 69.7% and made “significant investments” in headcount to help “propel the company into its next phase of growth.” Although Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has created uncertainties and disrupted supply chains, it has had a limited impact on SoundCloud’s financials, as direct business with partners in Russia accounted for only 0.5% of its annual revenues.
Since the end of the period covered by these financial statements, SoundCloud announced in August its plans to lay off 20% of its workforce due to “a significant company transformation and the challenging and economic and financial environment,” a spokesperson told Billboard at the time. The company had an average of 451 employees in 2021, up from 392 in 2020, with growth spread across its technology, business and operations segments.
SoundCloud expects slower growth in 2022 due to inflation and other macroeconomic trends that could stifle consumer spending levels. It expects gross profit “to grow slightly” with a similar or higher gross margin as in 2021. Free cash flow from operations is expected to be “slightly negative” in 2022.
It also believes it has opportunities to find acquisition targets. In April, it acquired Musiio, an artificial intelligence and machine learning company, for approximately $7 million cash and an undisclosed amount of equity, according to the financial release. SoundCloud believes Musiio allows it to “further leverage its vast data to identify what’s next in music trends and talent” and create playlisting tools for the music industry.
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: Taylor Swift ends a long-running copyright case over the lyrics to “Shake It Off,” Tory Lanez heads to trial over accusations that he shot Megan Thee Stallion, Backstreet Boys member Nick Carter is accused of sexually assault, and much more.
THE BIG STORY: Taylor Swift’s Accusers Drop “Shake It Off” Case
It was the next big music copyright case – until it wasn’t.After five long years of litigation, and with just a month to go until a scheduled trial, attorneys for Taylor Swift reached an agreement Monday with songwriters Sean Hall and Nathan Butler to end their copyright infringement lawsuit claiming the superstar stole some of the core lyrics to “Shake It Off” from an earlier song.The terms of the agreement were not publicly released. Billboard was first to report the settlement.Hall and Butler sued Swift way back in 2017, claiming she’d lifted the lyrics from “Playas Gon’ Play,” a 2001 song they wrote for the R&B group 3LW. In that song, the line was “playas, they gonna play, and haters, they gonna hate”; in Swift’s track, she sings, “‘Cause the players gonna play, play, play, play, play and the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.” (The music itself was not in play.)The case was a big deal, if for no other reason than that “Shake It Off” was a big deal. Released in September 2014 off of Swift’s 1989, the song debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and ultimately spent 50 weeks on the chart, making it a uniquely major hit even for one of music’s top stars.But it was also a big deal because of the legal issues at play. Like the earlier battles over Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines,” Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” and Katy Perry’s “Dark Horse,” the case posed fundamental questions about the limits of copyright law — about where protection ends and the public domain begins. That question was explored in regard to various musical elements in those earlier cases; the “Shake It Off” case might have offered answers in relation to lyrics.Put simply: The words in both songs were clearly similar — everyone can see that. But were they creative or unique enough in the first place to merit giving particular songwriters a decades-long legal monopoly over them? Experts who chatted with Billboard thought the answer was no.But we’ll never know for sure. Swift’s lawyers spent years trying to make that case, arguing that many earlier songs (1997’s “Playa Hater” by Notorious B.I.G. and 1999’s “Don’t Hate the Player” by Ice-T, among others) had used the same words. A judge initially agreed, ruling that the lyrics were not novel enough for copyright protection. But a federal appeals court later overturned that ruling, and the last substantive decision in the case was a ruling last year that the question was simply too close to call and would need to be decided by a jury.With the “Shake It Off” case now officially in the rearview, what’s the next big music copyright case? Maybe it’s the lawsuits against Ed Sheeran over allegations that his “Thinking Out Loud” infringed Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On.” Or the dueling cases against Dua Lipa over her own mega-smash “Levitating.” Or maybe it’s something that hasn’t even been filed yet…
THE OTHER BIG STORY: Megan Thee Stallion Shooting Trial Begins
Tory Lanez and Los Angeles prosecutors headed to court this week to kick off a closely-watched jury trial over whether he shot Megan Thee Stallion in the foot, with a potential 22-year prison sentence looming for Lanez if convicted.The trial, set to last for at least a week, will center on the early morning of July 12, 2020, when Stallion, Lanez and Stallion’s friend Kelsey Harris were driving in an SUV following a party at Kylie Jenner’s house. According to prosecutors, after an argument broke out, Megan got out of the vehicle and began walking away, when Lanez shouted, “Dance, bitch!” and began shooting at her feet.Lanez (real name Daystar Peterson) has pleaded not guilty to all three charges (assault with a firearm, gun possession and discharging a firearm with gross negligence) and has steadfastly maintained his innocence.The upcoming trial will feature testimony from a number of high-profile witnesses, including Stallion herself and Harris. Also potentially taking the stand are Jenner and Corey Gamble, Kris Jenner’s boyfriend who was allegedly at the party. Lanez might also testify, but putting a defendant on the stand is always a gamble for defense attorneys.Billboard’s Heran Mamo will be in the building covering the trial all week, and she was there Monday (Dec. 13) when the case kicked off with opening statements. Some highlights from Day One:-Prosecutors have assembled a formidable case. They told jurors that Harris plans to testify that “her close friend was shot by the defendant,” and that they have texts from Harris just minutes after the shooting: “Help. Tory shot meg. 911.”-Lanez’s attorneys will present the theory that Harris may have actually been the one who discharged the gun. Lead attorney George Mgdesyan told jurors that “this case is about jealousy,” involving a love triangle between the three celebrities, and that there would be witness testimony about “a fist fight between the girls” leading up to the shooting.Stallion herself is set to testify on Tuesday, so check back in with Billboard for Heran’s dispatch…
Other top stories this week…
NICK CARTER SUED FOR RAPE – Backstreet Boys member Nick Carter was hit with a lawsuit alleging that he raped a 17-year-old fan on his tour bus following a 2001 concert in Washington. Shannon “Shay” Ruth claims that Carter invited her onboard as she sought an autograph, gave her alcohol, and then repeatedly assaulted her — but that she didn’t report it because he told her she would “go to jail if she told anyone what happened between them.” In response to the lawsuit, Carter’s attorney called the allegations “legally meritless” and “entirely untrue,” filed by someone “manipulated into making false allegations about Nick.”50 CENT ‘INSINUATION’ SUIT MOVES AHEAD – A federal judge refused to dismiss a lawsuit filed by 50 Cent that accuses a Miami medical spa of using an innocent photo he snapped to falsely suggest that he’d had penis enhancement surgery. In seeking to boot the case, Angela Kogan and her Perfection Plastic Surgery & MedSpa argued that 50 actually was a client and had consented to the use of the image as payment for the work he received. But the judge said such arguments were premature — and that some of the company’s other defenses were “simply wrong.”OFT-SAMPLED, NOW INFRINGED? Roddy Ricch was sued for copyright infringement by songwriter Greg Perry, who says elements of Ricch’s chart-topping 2019 song “The Box” were lifted from a 1975 soul song called “Come On Down.” Perry says his track has become something of a mainstay sample in the world of hip-hop, featured in both Young Jeezy’s 2008 song “Wordplay” and in Yo Gotti’s 2016 song “I Remember.” But he says those earlier songs were fully licensed, unlike Ricch’s: “Other [artists] in the rap world that have chosen to copy elements of ‘Come On Down’ have done so legally and correctly,” Perry’s lawyers wrote. “Defendants chose not to.”BORED APE LAWSUIT CLUB – Justin Bieber, Snoop Dogg, The Weeknd and dozens of other celebrities were hit with a class action alleging they were secretly paid to “misleadingly” promote NFTs like the Bored Ape Yacht Club, leaving investors with “staggering losses.” The case claims that Bored Ape parent company Yuga Labs Inc. perpetrated a “vast scheme” in which they “discreetly” paid “highly influential celebrities” to pump up the value of the NFTs (non-fungible tokens). In response to the lawsuit, Yuga called the allegations “opportunistic and parasitic” and “without merit.”GENIUS V. GOOGLE AT SCOTUS – The Supreme Court suggested this week that it might be interested in tackling a lawsuit filed by the music database Genius against Google. The case, which claims Google illegally copied the site’s lyrics and posted them in search results, was dismissed in March. But with Genius currently asking the high court to hear the case, the justices asked the U.S. Solicitor General to file briefs “expressing the views of the United States” on whether it should do so. Genius has warned that the ruling in favor of Google threatens “a vast swath of internet businesses”; Google says that’s just “alarmist hyperbole” and the case does not deserve the high court’s time.
As 2022 comes to a close, the music business can look back on another hectic year: turnover at the top levels of several big companies; record-breaking successes in several sectors of the industry; and some major headlines coming from sometimes unexpected places, all of which captured the attention of the music business over the past nearly 12 months. Here are 10 big stories and trends that helped define the year in the industry.
The Executive Turntable
The end of the year is always time for turnover, and the final stretch of 2022 has seen more of that than usual. The biggest story of all, however, is a change atop the Warner Music Group, with Stephen Cooper exiting after a successful 11-year run that saw the major double its revenue and boost its market share while taking the company public once again. He’ll be replaced by YouTube’s Robert Kyncl in February, in a move that has been widely seen as a nod toward the tech-based present and future of the music biz, particularly at WMG. Though changes atop the major groups are relatively rare, that was far from the only transition this year: Def Jam, Island and Capitol all welcomed new chairmen/CEOs, with Tunji Balogun, the duo of Justin Eshak and Imran Majid and Michelle Jubelirer taking over the trio of UMG companies, respectively. John Esposito also is transitioning into a new chairman emeritus role at Warner Music Nashville, handing the day-to-day reins to his longtime heirs apparent Ben Kline and Cris Lacy, who will take over in January. Warner also integrated 300 Entertainment into the 300 Elektra Entertainment Group, with Kevin Liles in charge, then placed it under the umbrella of the newly-formed Atlantic Music Group, with Julie Greenwald at the helm. And just recently, Motown chairman/CEO Ethiopia Habtemariam surprised many in the industry by announcing her intention to step down, at a time when the label is in its best shape in years, with a successor yet to be named. The C-Suites have been spinning much more than usual this year.
The Ticketmaster-Taylor Swift Meltdown
Cross Taylor Swift, and her fans, at your peril. The biggest artist in the world, whose latest album Midnights easily cleared the biggest streaming week globally of 2022, had set a presale for her first tour in five years, with tickets slated to become available on Nov. 15 through Ticketmaster. But the company badly, and somewhat inexplicably, misjudged the level of demand that existed for Swift’s tour. Long wait times, astronomical prices and service outages tanked the pre-sale, with billions of bots, according to the company, flooding the site and resulting in 3.5 billion requests to access it — four times the previous high water mark. That resulted in millions of frustrated, ticket-less fans. Which would have been bad enough, if it didn’t spark a firestorm that has yet to abate and is showing no signs of doing so. (As Billboard’s Glenn Peoples wrote, “Ticketmaster is one of the few non-partisan issues in America in 2022.”) There is now a Justice Department investigation into whether Live Nation has abused its market share in the live business (which was said to pre-date the Taylor tour, though it came to light in the wake of the problem) and a Senate antitrust panel hearing on the docket, as well as several state-level probes, and a lawsuit from more than two dozen fans accusing the company of fraud and “anticompetitive conduct.” It’s unclear if changes are on the horizon, but it has proven a headache of massive proportions.
Top-Level Touring Success
The headlines have never been rosier: Live Nation and Ticketmaster reported record-breaking quarters. Bad Bunny’s World’s Hottest Tour became the first ever to average a $10 million gross per show. Elton John’s Farewell Yellow Brick Road Tour closed in on the record for highest-grossing tour of all time. In short, it was a great year to be in the live music business — if you’re one of the biggest artists or promoters in the world. For a lot of others, the outlook was much less rosy: a “nightmare” of supply chain issues, COVID-related cancellations and postponements, rising costs and routing difficulties all combined to make it much more difficult for a lot of artists to get back out on the road this year. It is, and will continue to be, a process to get back to normal.
Synchs On Fire
A well-placed synch has always been a big revenue driver, particularly for legacy acts, but this past year the combination of prestige television and the TikTok algorithm combined to super-charge some of the biggest synchs to not just big bucks, but new chart highs, too. This past year, the biggest story on this front was Kate Bush’s 1985 track “Running Up That Hill,” which received a high-profile synch in Stranger Things and simply took off, surging into the top five of the Hot 100, becoming the oldest song to reach No. 1 on the Streaming Songs chart and returning to the top 10 of the Alternative Airplay chart after a record 28-year absence, while doubling its label revenue in the first two weeks after the series aired. And that wasn’t even the only Stranger Things-related synch to blow up: Metallica’s “Master of Puppets” ballooned 400% in streams in the days after its synch in the season finale. Songs featured in Euphoria, The Batman and Thor exploded in value, while the RIAA’s midyear report saw synch revenue growing faster than ever. Most recently, The Cramps’ “Goo Goo Muck,” with a placement in Netflix’s Wednesday, saw its revenue grow more than 8,000% in a single week.
Ebbs and Flows of Catalog Market
The red-hot catalog market has been the talk of the business for almost half a decade at this point, but over the past year things started to change in some unexpected ways due to rising interest rates, the dwindling number of truly elite catalogs available and the faltering of some of the sector’s most prominent players. And still there were big wins, including Sting’s deal with UMPG that Billboard estimated could be worth well north of $300 million, Stephen Stills’ sale of a controlling interest in over 1,000 songs to Irving Azoff’s Iconic Artists Group and UMG’s purchase of Frank Zappa’s catalog in the region of $30 million. Meanwhile, Brookfield dropped $2 billion into Primary Wave, which promptly acquired the catalogs of Joey Ramone ($10 million) and Huey Lewis & the News ($20 million). Concord swung a package deal for the Genesis catalog as well as those of its individual members for somewhere around $350 million, and new players like Litmus Music came into the market with $500 million to spread around (some of which just went towards Keith Urban’s master recordings). So despite a “challenging environment” and an end to the catalog “feeding frenzy,” there’s still a lot of juice left in those old songs (and a big Pink Floyd-sized catalog potentially in the offing).
The Rush Toward Services
While one sector of the business is running with arms wide open toward catalog ownership, another sector is running just as firmly in the opposite direction: toward services, or partnering with artists and labels to provide a backbone of support to help them achieve their goals without giving up ownership through distribution, marketing, publicity, promotions, royalty claiming and other services. The independent distribution space has generally been a viable business model for decades, but the rush into services ramped up in the past year. Companies like SoundCloud, TikTok, Tencent and Downtown embraced the shift with realigned business models, joining relatively new entrants to the space like UnitedMasters, Stem and Utopia. Many of the major labels (Interscope, Republic, 300) also launched their own distro subsidiaries in an attempt to grow their market share in an increasingly indie world. For some, however, the shift was less of a slam dunk than they may have envisioned, with a tough business model that relies on scale colliding with the increasingly-murky corners of the digital music industry –resulting in fraud, financial challenges and lukewarm responses from the market.
The Onset of Crypto Winter
Early in the year, Web3 projects exploded in what seemed like every sector of the music business, including all three major labels along with companies like Spotify, Coachella, Ticketmaster, Gibson, the Grammys and Death Row Records — not to mention artists like Snoop Dogg, Steve Aoki, Pharrell and Keith Richards. Universal launched an NFT band, Warner partnered with a slew of web3 companies, Snoop promised to buy Death Row and make it into an NFT record label; the possibilities seemed endless. But the seas proved to be much choppier than many had expected, and a series of selloffs and financial failures (as well as recession and inflation fears) brought in what many called the Crypto Winter, with sales and enthusiasm beginning to ebb as the year went on. By the time the second-biggest crypto exchange, FTX, spectacularly failed in November, there had been a 70%-80% cool-off in the market, to the point where the once-ubiquitous format seemed ready for another hibernation while the industry tries to figure out how best to take advantage of the new-ish technology. Expect the ebbs and flows to continue until we’re all in an acronym haze.
BTS Break Rattles Biz — And HYBE Stock
By just about any metric, BTS has been one of the biggest and most formidable acts of any genre in the past several years, racking up No. 1 hits, big-name collaborations, massive box office grosses and accounting for nearly one-third of the entire K-pop market in the U.S. since 2021, according to Luminate. So the group’s decision to take some time off for solo projects was a blow to the group’s management company, label and agency HYBE, which saw its stock, already down 45% for the year at that point, sink 27% in the week after the announcement. (Shares recovered a bit after closing at 145,000 won following the announcement, hitting a low of 107,000 on Oct. 13 and rebounding to 157,000 as of Dec. 12.) With the group members facing the prospect of mandatory service in the South Korean military, HYBE is facing an uncertain outlook for 2023, despite third-quarter growth and the possibility of positive returns from BTS members’ solo projects. For K-pop fans, however, there is room for other companies to step in: JYP Entertainment has had chart success with TWICE and Stray Kids multiple times this year, SM Entertainment’s BLACKPINK scored a No. 1 album in October and Big Hit Entertainment has generated success with Tomorrow X Together. While there’s plenty of opportunity in the K-pop market, the road ahead is uncertain for HYBE, a company that not too long again was a slam dunk.
Despite Complications, the Business is Thriving
It’s been a complicated year for the business overall, as the return from COVID has been trickier than expected, breaking new artists has become harder than ever and overarching financial issues like inflation and the possibility of a recession have cooled what had been a white-hot market. But despite those challenges, the music business has been growing on almost all fronts for another year. The touring business has already been covered here, but the U.S. recorded music business also saw on-demand audio streams surpass 1 trillion for the first time ever — representing a 611% increase from 2015, according to Luminate. Despite supply chain issues that continue to bedevil labels and manufacturers, vinyl sales passed $1 billion in revenue for the first time since the mid-1980s. At the midyear mark, they were up more than 22% — well before Taylor Swift’s Midnights set the record for largest vinyl sales week since Luminate began tracking data in 1991. Overall consumption is up another 9.2% year over year so far in 2022, with no signs of slowing down and with record companies increasing their guidance for investors in 2023. Amid cutbacks and hiring freezes in tech and media, the music business stil appears to be on strong footing.
It’s Still a TikTok World
Love it, hate it, rue its influence or spend hours scrolling it, the industry was as obsessed with TikTok in 2022 as it’s ever been, and the ByteDance-owned social streaming behemoth has leaned further than ever into its connections to the music biz — for better or worse, depending on whom you ask. The service has been behind the massive success of hits both old (Kate Bush’s “Running Up that Hill,” Frank Ocean’s “Lost”) and new (Lizzo’s “About Damn Time,” Bebe Rexha and David Guetta’s “I’m Good”) while helping break new artists like Em Beihold and Cafuné. But the labels’ love affair with TikTok has, over the past year, cooled down, as breaking a hit has become more complicated and the marketing pluses that it offered have fizzled. A distribution play from the platform called SoundOn was met with a lukewarm response, while a ByteDance streaming service, Resso, has rolled out in select markets, with rumors that it could come to the U.S. soon — if TikTok can ease the concerns of U.S. officials. And that comes as the frustration over low payouts and song leaks have some executives warning of a repeat of the early days of MTV and YouTube, when music content was regularly used to promote a fledgling service without commensurate compensation. Still, the biggest song on the platform in 2022 — a nine-year-old track from Swedish sad boy Yung Lean — grew its stream count by over 1,000%, and TikTok is still the single biggest proving ground for singles in the current digital climate. What to make of TikTok in 2022? How about…everything?
The U.S. Supreme Court looks like it might be about to jump into a lawsuit filed by the music database Genius that accuses Google of illegally copying the site’s lyrics and posting them in search results.
After a lower court dismissed the case in March, Genius – a platform that lets users add and annotate lyrics – asked the high court to hear the case and overturn the ruling. Though it called the ruling “unjust” and “absurd,” such petitions are always a long shot; the Supreme Court takes less than 2% of the 7000 cases it receives each year.
But the odds for Genius just got better. In an order Monday, the justices asked the U.S. Solicitor General to file briefs in the case “expressing the views of the United States” on whether or not the court should hear the case against Google.
That kind of request (a “call for the view of the Solicitor General,” or CVSG, in SCOTUS parlance) indicates that the justices think the issues in the case might be significant enough for the court to tackle. Genius has warned that the ruling for Google threatens “a vast swath of internet businesses”; Google says that’s “alarmist hyperbole” and the case does not deserve the high court’s time.
Neither Genius nor Google immediately returned requests for comment on Tuesday.
Genius sued the tech giant in 2019, claiming Google had stolen the site’s carefully-transcribed content for its own “information boxes” in search results, essentially free-riding on the “time, labor, systems and resources” that goes into creating such a service. In a splashy twist, Genius said it had used a secret code buried within lyrics that spelled out REDHANDED to prove Google’s wrongdoing.
Though it sounds like a copyright case, Genius didn’t actually accuse Google of stealing any intellectual property. That’s because it doesn’t own any; songwriters and publishers own the rights to lyrics, and both Google and Genius pay for the same licenses to display them. Instead, Genius argued it had spent time and money transcribing and compiling “authoritative” versions of lyrics, and that Google had breached the site’s terms of service by “exploiting” them without permission.
But in March, that distinction proved fatal for Genius. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit dismissed the case, ruling that only the actual copyright owners – songwriters or publishers – could have filed such a case, not a site that merely transcribed the lyrics. In technical terms, the court said the case was “preempted” by federal copyright law, meaning that the accusations from Genius were so similar to a copyright claim that they could only have been filed that way.
In taking the case to the Supreme Court in August, Genius argued the ruling would be a disaster for websites that spend time and money to aggregate user-generated content online. Such companies should be allowed to protect that effort against clear copycats, the company said, even if they don’t hold copyrights.
“It serves no public purpose … to bar these companies from enforcing their contracts so that behemoths like Google can vacuum up content and increase their internet dominance,” Genius wrote. “Big-tech companies like Google don’t need any assists from an overly broad view of copyright preemption; they already control vast swaths of the internet, to the public’s detriment.”
Google obviously disagrees. In a response to the Supreme Court, the company urged the justices to avoid the case and reject Genius’s “alarmist hyperbole,” arguing that the lower ruling was “plainly correct.” Google said Genius was trying to use an agreement “inconspicuously tucked behind a tiny link” to create “pseudo-copyright” control over songs written by other people.
“Genius does not own the copyrights to any of the lyrics. Genius nevertheless wants to prevent any website visitor from reproducing or publicly displaying the lyrics,” Google’s lawyers wrote. “Its solution? Ignore the true copyright owners and invent new rights through a purported contract.”
DENVER — Tennyson’s Tap was the kind of music club where, on packed nights, the lone frazzled employee serving drinks, running sound and manning the door might ask one of the bands to help out and collect the $5 cover charge. I know because I sang in one of those bands, Smaldone Faces, and our bassist Luke and I pretty much let everyone in for free.
The Tap, at 4335 W. 38th St. in Denver, specialized in whiskey and scruffy musicians of every conceivable genre — my two bands that played there did country, punk and metal covers, and we opened for screamo indie-rockers, jazzy improvisationalists and dreadlocked funk-and-reggae combos. The bar smelled like cigarettes and beer, and had a capacity of about 90, but when we drew our crowds of 20 or 30 people, it roared like Springsteen at the Roxy.
“It’s one of those places where everybody’s right in your face. You don’t just hear the music, you feel it,” says singer and guitarist Aaron Garcia, whose Denver band 78 Bombs played its first gig there. “It’s so comfortable, it’s like an old shoe — an old Chuck Taylor.”
A few weeks ago, I drove by the Tap and the beige-colored, shack-like building was now a pile of collapsed lumber and cinder blocks as tall as the nearby telephone poles. The band I’m currently in, Sid Delicious, played its last gig at the Tap on March 6, 2020, and we soothed our small crowd that was feeling nervous about COVID-19 through the healing power of the MC5’s “Kick Out the Jams.” Cody, the big-bearded sound guy, had assured us that, just as 9/11 had brought people together, live music would never die, and offered plenty of hand san.
The bar closed a week or so later, and remained that way. “LOVE,” read the marquee. Eventually, somebody painted “Thank you!” on the wall outside.
Through quarantine, Fauci, Trump, vaccines, anti-vaxxers and the triumphant return of live music, I drove by, waiting for the band names to reappear on the marquee. But the Tap, like B.L.U.E.S. On Halsted in Chicago, the Satellite in Los Angeles and, this year, Exit/In in Nashville, couldn’t make it — despite the Small Business Administration’s multimillion-dollar grants to thousands of music venues forced to temporarily shut down during the pandemic.
According to the National Independent Venue Association, more than 25 U.S. clubs have permanently closed in 2022.
“For a whole year, I kept that place open and legal and ready to open the doors,” says Dave Fox, one of the club’s co-owners, who also ran a recording studio as part of the same corner complex. “But it was really the landlord’s decision to not proceed with the corner.”
The neighborhood surrounding Tennyson’s Tap is a long-since-gentrified portion of Northwest Denver known as Berkeley, and over the past 20 years, condos and coffee shops have replaced the old hardware store, the family-owned window-repair business and the music shop that used to repair my keyboard after I banged the “E” key too heavily during the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog.” The previous, longtime property owner suggested to Fox he could keep paying the Tap’s lease, but, according to Fox, new owners went in another direction last year.
(Representatives for the property, listed with the Colorado Secretary of State, did not respond to calls and e-mails about what they might do with the site of the former Tennyson’s Tap.)
In January 2011, Fox and a partner opened the Tap and began booking music. The odd national touring name played there, like metal-and-bodybuilding star Thor, but the club showcased mostly local artists, as many as five per night. A bartender, Cat Ackermann, was also a musician, and inaugurated a karaoke night; Leonard Apodaca, one of the club’s managers, had the idea to merge Taco Tuesdays and dance music, and it became a high-grossing, heavy-drinking success; the bar’s lack of genre discernment drew metal, ska, funk, jazz, reggae and, yes, punk-and-metal cover bands.
“We found the underlying grit in the DJ scene,” says Apodaca, who indulged me when I showed up at the bar on Tuesday afternoons to beg for new gigs, sometimes after we managed only 15 or 20 people at the previous ones. “All those people are used to going to clubs and paying a big cover. One night a week, they didn’t have to get all dressed up, they didn’t have to worry about going downtown. They can just be themselves. The girls would come out in sweatpants and backwards baseball caps.”
Sid Delicious hasn’t played a gig since that March 2020 night at Tennyson’s. A couple of our members were dedicated quarantiners and were reluctant to expose their young kids until they were eligible for vaccines. Then, last summer, we booked a date, but it was on a difficult night, in an inconvenient part of town, and, unlike band-friendly Tennyson’s, required us to rent our own PA, haul it in, figure out how to set it up and sound-check it ourselves.
We eventually canceled the gig. We’re figuring out how to move forward, but the band is adrift without the perfect venue, one like Tennyson’s Tap, where you could rock an hour long set on a tiny stage, closing with Motörhead’s “Ace of Spades,” after which Cody would hand you an envelope containing one or two crisp $100 bills. Of all the things we lost during the pandemic, a dingy old club with a back room for darts was not the most consequential.
Or, maybe, it was.
“It was just a community,” Apodaca says. “It’s all basically dirt now.”
What remains of the site of Tennyson’s Tap in Denver.
Steve Knopper
BERLIN — Austrian collecting society AKM, which manages and licenses rights for songwriters and publishers, has joined ICE Core for online licensing. That means ICE, the online licensing hub created by collecting societies in Germany (GEMA), the U.K. (PRS for Music) and Sweden (STIM), will now represent and collect for AKM compositions for online services in much of the world, excluding the U.S. and some Asian markets. The deal includes AKM mechanical rights subsidiary, Austro Mechana.
“The ICE Core reflects the best licensing solution for online music services, with the best value, for our members,” said AKM CEO Gernot Graninger in a statement. “In these times more than ever, societies need to find the right services at the right value.”
ICE was created in response to a change in European Union regulation that allows the societies that take in money for public performing rights in their local territories to compete in the online world. Inevitably, the larger societies, including France’s SACEM and the partnership behind ICE have emerged to dominate that business, since they can make the investments needed to manage the vast amounts of data generated by streaming services. Gradually, this model is spreading to other territories.
AKM had been managing its rights under a partnership with GEMA.
ICE provides several services, including licensing and online processing, and it operates a copyright database. But the core of its operation is licensing – which is why it goes by the name ICE Core. In addition to its founding partner societies, ICE also represents IMRO, the Irish collecting society; SABAM, the Belgian society, and BMI. Concord Music Publishing, Songtrust and peermusic, all based in the U.S., are also direct members.
In November, ICE Core distributed €102 million, breaking its own record for monthly distribution.
“We’re very happy to welcome AKM into the Core,” said ICE chief commercial officer Ben McEwen in a statement. “The collaboration to make this happen reflects all parties working together in the interests of rightsholders, the very DNA of everyone who is part of the ICE hub.”