State Champ Radio Business
Page: 482
A flurry of senior executives and staff members have left posts at Hipgnosis Song Management in recent months, as the company credited with popularizing songs as an asset class explored selling assets to shore up investor confidence ahead of a key vote this fall.
Since March, employees including Hipgnosis’ chief music officer Ted Cockle, along with the global heads of sync operations and song management and an executive vp of digital and innovation, have announced plans to leave the company, according to posts employees shared on LinkedIn and a statement from Hipgnosis.
The staff turnover comes as sources say the roughly 5-year-old Hipgnosis Songs Fund Ltd. has been shopping a package of assets that it apparently hopes to sell before its first continuation vote, where investors will be asked to decide whether the publicly traded trust should continue to operate under the management of founder Merck Mercuriadis or liquidate all assets.
SONG, the fund’s ticker on the London Stock Exchange, is down about 14% year to date and down 28% since it went public in July 2018. The stock was worth 0.75 British pounds ($0.97) on Wednesday (July 12).
At that price, SONG is worth less than half of its $2.2 billion operative net asset value, a discount that sources say has prompted Mercuriadis to explore selling some of the fund’s non-core assets.
For months, analysts at Jefferies and other investment banks have called on Hipgnosis to sell some of the fund’s non-core songs to raise cash to shore up the share price. The Financial Times reported Wednesday (Juy 12) that some Hipgnosis Songs Fund investors also want the fund to sell non-core assets to generate cash for buying back stock.
In addition to providing the fund’s managers with an arbitrage opportunity to boost the stock price, it could leave the company with enough extra cash to issue shareholders a special dividend — a sweetener issued ahead of the fund’s continuation vote at its next annual meeting in September.
If investors vote not to continue with the fund and to liquidate its assets, Mercuriadis and Hipgnosis Song Management — which is majority owned by private equity firm Blackstone — would likely have the right to bid on the assets in the fund; or if it goes up for auction, Mercuriadis, with Blackstone, likely has matching rights. Sources speculate that Mercuriadis and Blackstone would want to buy back the portfolio’s most iconic music assets, minus the non-core assets — the package of assets that has been selectively shopped around and which sources say includes copyrights from The-Dream and The Outfield — for their private, Blackstone-backed fund, Hipgnosis Songs Capital.
Hipgnosis Songs Fund will report results for the year ending March 31 on Thursday. In December, the company reported a 7.5% rise in revenues amid a “challenging environment” that “fundamentally undervalues the company,” founder Mercuriadis said during a shareholder meeting discussing the results.
On Wednesday, Hipgnosis announced Cockle, its chief music officer will be leaving the company. A former Universal Music Group executive known for nurturing the careers of Scottish superstar Lewis Capaldi, Bastille, Emeli Sandé and others, Cockle joined Hipgnosis Songs in 2020 as president.
“Given our decision to focus our marketing in the US, Ted Cockle, our Chief Music Officer, will not be moving long term with the Company,” Mercuriadis said in a press release. “He’ll work on the transition to America over the coming weeks. I would like to thank Ted for all he has done for Hipgnosis and I hope there will be opportunities for Ted and Hipgnosis to work together again in the future.”
Last week, Tom Stingemore, Hipgnosis Song Management’s global president of sync & creative, wrote on LinkedIn he was leaving the company after joining in 2021 to build its sync and creative operation. Hipgnosis’ synch team has played a key role in getting the songs that it acquires to generate more money than the often-high price Hipgnosis paid for them, and the team has been successful. In December, Hipgnosis Songs Fund reported sync revenues for the first half of the company’s reporting year rose 32% to 9.78 million compared to $7.41 million a year ago.
“As the division is now fully up & running, my mission is complete,” Stingemore wrote, adding that he may “go & do it all over again” as he works to “plot my next adventure.”
Cockle and Stingemore’s departures follows several other senior staff members. In late May, Nick Jarjour announced on LinkedIn he had left his role as global head of song management at Hipgnosis Songs Fund (a source who declined to speak on the record says his departure occurred six months ago); and in March, Tony Barnes’ announced he would be leaving his role as executive vp of digital & innovation at Hipgnosis Songs Fund in the coming months to lead the metaverse gaming company he co-founded, Karta. Barnes is currently still employed by Hipgnosis.
Stingemore, Jarjour and Barnes did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
Hipgnosis continues to hire, announcing two new hires in Hipgnosis Song Management, a separate company from the publicly traded fund, on Wednesday.
Danny Bennett, son of iconic singer Tony Bennett, joined as executive vp leading global marketing and audience development. Bennett joined Hipgnosis from the Verve Label Group, a Universal Music Group company, where he was chief executive officer.
Sara Lord was hired as executive vp content creation from Concord Music, and Patrick Joest, who joined Hipgnosis in 2021, was promoted to the role of head of synchronisation.
In the press release announcing the hires, Mercuriadis said Hipgnosis has continuously invested in new hires and upgrading systems over the past 18 months.
“These appointments demonstrate our commitment to investing in our capabilities and team in order to grow the value of our catalogues, and, most importantly, bring our songs to new audiences around the world,” Mercuriadis said.
Continuation Vote
At Hipgnosis Songs Fund’s annual meeting in September, Mercuriadis’s young company will face one of its biggest tests yet.
In the United Kingdom, publicly traded trusts are required to hold regular continuation votes, where shareholders vote on whether an investment trust should continue in its current form. At this continuation vote, shareholders can choose to stay the course, change managers or liquidate the fund.
Analysts at the investment bank Jefferies issuesd a buy rating on SONG last month, upgrading from their previous “hold” rating, because they said they believe Hipgnosis may sell some non-core assets from its catalog, which would provide a catalyst to narrow its current discount to net asset value ahead of the vote.
However, the continuation vote comes at an inopportune time, only a couple months after Hipgnosis Song Management and Mercuriadis were publicly rebuked by Rod Stewart, who said he called off a deal to sell some his music assets to the company.
In an unusual move, Stewart issued a statement that said, “It’s become abundantly clear after much time and due diligence that this was not the right company to manage my song catalog, career or legacy.”
Additional reporting by Ed Christman
In the first half of 2023, an average of 112,000 new tracks were added daily to digital service providers such as Spotify and Apple Music, Luminate revealed in its 2023 midyear report Wednesday (July 12). That’s an increase of 19.9% from the 93,400 new tracks uploaded daily to digital platforms in the first half of 2022.
At the current rate, digital services will add around 41 million tracks this year, about 7 million more than the 34.1 million tracks added in 2022 and more than double the 16.4 million tracks added in 2018.
The flood of tracks did not bring a commensurate increase in listening, however. While the number of tracks uploaded to digital platforms grew 19.9%, audio on-demand streaming rose only 13.5%. That disconnect between supply and on-demand streams is not unusual. In 2022, on-demand streams increased 12.2% while average daily new tracks grew 12%. But in 2021, on-demand streams grew 9.9% while average daily new tracks grew 18%.
Low barriers to recording and distributing digital music give unknown artists a chance to compete against established, big-budget releases. Major labels — some of whom, like Universal Music Group, have endorsed a system that rewards their music with better royalty payouts — accounted for just 3.3% of new tracks added to digital platforms through June 30. Streaming services are filled with music not just from independent labels — who may be distributed by companies owned by the majors — but also independent musicians, bedroom producers using inexpensive digital audio workstations and a variety of “functional music,” a term used for generic music that often fills streaming playlists aimed at helping people sleep, relax or study.
The possibility that 112,000 new tracks per day will seem low in a few years is causing consternation in some quarters of the music business. A new generation of AI tools will further reduce the barriers to creating music. Just as generative AI programs such as Midjourney and DALL-E-2 create images based on text prompts, AI will instantly create songs without the need for musical expertise or technical ability. “We see a huge market with many billions of original unique songs, similar to photos,” Alex Mitchell, CEO of AI music platform Boomy, told Billboard earlier this year. Such a scenario had previously prompted Universal Music Group CEO Lucian Grainge to warn against “a vast and unnavigable number of tracks” of “lower-quality functional content” created to game algorithms and “divert royalties.”
While independently released music and AI content chips away at major labels’ market shares, the majors continue to produce hits that stand out in an increasingly crowded field. The most popular albums and tracks fared well in the first half of 2023. The top 10 albums took a 2.49% share of equivalent album units (EAUs), up from 2.18% in the first half of 2022. That improvement can be chalked up to Morgan Wallen, whose album One Thing at a Time had 3.31 million EAUs — 67% greater than the No. 2 album, SZA’s SOS. Excluding the No. 1 albums from each half-year period, the remaining top 10 albums’ share of 1.88% in the first half of 2023 was almost equal to the 1.85% in the prior-year period.
Led by Wallen’s “Last Night” and SZA’s “Kill Bill,” the most popular tracks also increased their share of total streams. The top 10 tracks at the midway point of 2023 owned a 0.63% share of on-demand audio streams, well above their 0.5% share in the prior-year period.
Diego Gonzalez started making his own music in 2020, inspired in part by some of the tracks he loved from The Kid LAROI’s first album. “I was using GarageBand on my phone at the time,” he recalls. “I didn’t know what else to use.”
While killing time on TikTok, he came across posts from other artists praising BandLab, another free app that aims to make it easy for aspiring creators to create instrumental tracks and record vocals with a mobile phone. Gonzalez took to it quickly, especially the presets that add clarity and heft to a vocal. “You don’t need 1,000 buttons on there to make something sound good,” he says. With BandLab, he recorded his breakout hit, a mournful 6/8 ballad titled “You & I” that has more than 50 million Spotify streams.
For now, many of BandLab’s most successful users look outside the platform for beats. thekid.ACE, Luh Tyler and Gonzalez say they usually start by finding premade instrumentals on YouTube. “I’ll look up ‘indie-pop type beat’ or ‘R&B Daniel Caesar type beat,’ ” Gonzalez says. Then it’s a matter of seconds to download the right instrumental, open it in BandLab and “start thinking of random melodies,” explains thekid.ACE. He has made a pair of viral songs with BandLab, “Imperfect Girl” (7.3 million Spotify streams) and “Fun and Forget” (8.6 million).
Pop stars pay good money to vocal producers to adjust their pitch and stitch together the best parts of multiple takes. But BandLab lets users replicate a similar process with a few clicks, adding echo, toning down the “s” sounds and upping distortion. Built-in vocal preset options run from very specific — “Punchy Rap,” “Hype Vox” — to “let’s see what this does”: “70s Ballad,” “Sky Sound.” On top of that, “it’s insanely simple to make your own presets and adjust the reverb or the compressor,” thekid.ACE says. “Auto-Tune is super easy to do.”
SSJ Twiin, who has also enjoyed some viral success with BandLab tracks, recently started experimenting with a new panning feature that automatically throws his vocal from left to right. He’s also a fan of the harmony function that “takes your original vocal and layers it with that exact same vocal plus two semitones, another one plus four, another plus six and so on,” he says.
BandLab’s interface looks like a more cheery, streamlined version of a program like Pro Tools — each vocal or instrument track separated into a bright, clickable sound wave. “People will say BandLab is not a real [digital audio workstation],” SSJ Twiin notes. “But it’s getting to the point where there’s pretty much nothing you can’t do.”
Jacob Byrnes, director of creator relations and content strategy for the music strategy and tactics team at Universal Music Group, spends a good chunk of his day scrolling through TikTok. Last fall, he noticed a marked shift in the type of videos appearing on his For You page: “It all turned into screen captures of people playing productions they made on BandLab,” he says.
BandLab provides its 60 million-plus registered users, 40% of whom are women, with music-making software that includes an arsenal of virtual instruments, as well as the ability to automatically generate multipart vocal harmonies, record, sample and manipulate sound in myriad ways. It’s a toolbox that allows them to create professional-sounding recordings on their phones with surprising ease, transforming every civilian into a potential hit-maker. BandLab can also distribute music to streaming services, and it incorporates components of a social network: Musicians can create individual profiles, chat with one another, comment on their peers’ releases, solicit advice or break up a song into its component pieces and share those to crowdsource remixes.
The free app launched in 2016, but it has become almost inescapable over the last 12 months: 200 million videos tagged with #bandlab appeared on TikTok in April. The music industry has taken note of the ease with which users can make songs — “Labels love BandLab because it allows artists to create music for very cheap,” says one music attorney — and the velocity that some songs have picked up on streaming platforms. “There are random kids on there generating streams like crazy,” says Nima Nasseri, vp of A&R strategy at UMG. “Their monthly listeners are going from zero into the millions, and they’re doing it all from the palm of their hand.”
“It’s like other segments of the [music] internet that explode — one artist [broke] and now you’re seeing a ton of them go,” adds Jordan Weller, head of artist and investor relations at indify, a platform that helps independent acts find investors. “That’s what makes it attractive for the community. Now all of these other kids recognize that they can build careers off of BandLab — that it’s a potential pathway.”
The artists wielding BandLab are not stuck in one mode — Diego Gonzalez and d4vd enjoyed success with lovelorn ballads; Luh Tyler makes slippery, bass-heavy hip-hop; thekid.ACE favors breezy guitars; ThxSoMch trafficks in shades of post-punk. Several have landed record deals — Gonzalez with Island, d4vd with Darkroom/Interscope, Tyler with Motion Music/Atlantic, ThxSoMch with Elektra and thekid.ACE with APG — while d4vd and ThxSoMch have also landed on Billboard’s charts. (All are teenagers except ThxSoMch, an elder statesman of sorts at 21.) Other acts like SSJ Twiin and kurffew have picked up more than 15 million Spotify plays apiece while remaining independent.
Even BandLab’s CEO is surprised by this wave of breakthroughs. Meng Ru Kuok says he always hoped to have an artist chart with a song made on his platform, but “the fact that it already happened last year with d4vd” — whose “Romantic Homicide” peaked at No. 33 on the Billboard Hot 100 — “was ahead of schedule.”
When Meng co-founded BandLab, he wanted to capitalize on the technological shift “from a desktop ecosystem to a mobile one”; phones represented “a musical instrument in everybody’s pocket.” He also aimed to open up audio tools to the large swath of the global population that couldn’t afford iPhones, which came with another digital audio workstation, GarageBand. BandLab makes money by taking a cut for artist services like distribution and promotion.
Artists who favor BandLab say it is remarkably frictionless to cut a vocal and smear it with effects or whip up a loop. It also has an artificial intelligence-powered SongStarter function that can automatically generate musical ideas based on a few inputs, though none of the artists who spoke for this story use it. BandLab “is easier than GarageBand; everything is in front of your face,” says keltiey, whose racing, helium-addled “Need” has over 14 million streams on Spotify.
“The more convenient you make something, the more it is going to be adapted,” says Mike Caren, founder of the publisher and independent label APG and a producer. “I used to buy full recording studios for people — Pro Tools, interfaces, [$20,000] packages of equipment.” In contrast, BandLab is free and portable. “I encourage my artists to use the platform as a way to get down spontaneous vocal ideas,” Caren says. He thinks most artists still don’t fully understand how many different tools are available within BandLab’s suite of tech; Meng says that over 40% of users work with more than two “core creation features,” but he hopes to boost that number to 99%.
When he’s not playing Fortnite with more than a dozen fellow BandLab users, thekid.ACE generally records on his bed. The same goes for Tyler, who says the ability to cut vocals in solitude was part of BandLab’s initial attraction: “I used to be nervous to rap in front of people; I just wanted to be by myself.” ThxSoMch recorded the vocals for “Spit in My Face!” in his bathroom, according to a video he posted on TikTok, while keltiey prefers to use the closet. “Her clothes would be all around,” says Velencia Wallace, keltiey’s mother and manager. “She almost had a fort.”
Young artists who get used to working quickly on BandLab in the comfort of their homes may find it hard to kick the habit, even once they have access to professional recording studios. “As the artists become more prominent, the labels want to wean them off BandLab — they want them to actually go into the studio and work with legitimate producers,” the music attorney says. “But the kids don’t want to; they want to stick to BandLab. I’ve seen situations where kids turn down big session opportunities with prominent writers and producers in favor of just doing their thing on BandLab.”
Tyler uses a studio, but says that “if I haven’t been there in a minute, I’ll just record a song on BandLab. I don’t like writing, so I’ll just do it on there and rerecord it.”
Not everyone in the music industry is sold on BandLab. One senior executive, who requested anonymity to speak frankly, was impressed with the tech. “Kids have never sounded this good at home,” he says. But so far, he continues, artists using BandLab haven’t become recognizable stars. While some of the songs stream, he notes, the acts behind them remain “faceless.” (This criticism is common in the streaming era.) In addition, the executive points out that posting BandLab sessions on TikTok has become so common that it might reach a point of oversaturation and lose steam, like previous trends before it.
Meng acknowledges there are doubters who think “this a fad.” But he’s quick to offer a rebuttal. “There are billions of people around the world who don’t have access to music-making on their mobile devices,” he says, warming to his theme. “We’re just starting to scratch the surface. There’s a lot more to come.”
Industry veterans Chuck Rhodes and Dr. Glenn Toby have co-founded a new business venture, christened The Entertainment Alliance (TEA). Rhodes will serve as CEO and Toby as president of the full-service, multi-genre entertainment company whose main office will be headquartered in Nashville.
In addition to operating an in-house record label with global distribution by Bob Frank Entertainment, exclusively through The Orchard, TEA will house a management company, a publishing company and booking agency along with offering label services that include social media marketing and PR. TEA will also broker select movies, television series, documentaries and subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) products. The new venture’s A&R services are based in New York and there’s a satellite office in Atlanta. Initial artist signings will be announced soon with an inaugural project release slated by the end of this year.
“Our tagline at The Entertainment Alliance is ‘We are equal opportunity dream makers,’” Rhodes tells Billboard. “After 38 years of working in the industry, this is a great opportunity now to step up and be a founder/owner with a partner. I’ve found my soulmate in Dr. Toby when it comes to the business world and music world. We’re chomping at the bit to present something to the business that I don’t think they’ve ever seen before.”
Adds Toby, “Rhodes is the Clive Davis of the South whether it’s country, southern blues or soul and I’ve been involved in pop, R&B and dance. We don’t care about age, race or genre; we’re bringing everybody in. The fuel for this new venture is two music industry veterans that have written, arranged, produced, performed, advised and discovered talent in our more 40 years’ of combined experience. We’ve been behind the curtains for so long that it’s time to come to the forefront.”
Rhodes has spent the last 15 years in partnership with Bob Frank Entertainment where he served as general manager for Bob Frank Distribution and the Audium Nashville label. Getting his start in the music industry as a keyboard player for Ray Charles and Cher, Rhodes later served as program director of adult contemporary KVIL- AM/FM in Dallas-Ft. Worth. A move to Nashville found him segueing into promotion and management at MCA Records and later Giant Records. Rhodes also operates his own production company, On the Rhodes Entertainment. During his career, he has collaborated with a diverse slate of artists including Daryle Singletary, Loretta Lynn, Clay Walker, Kenny Rogers, Charlie Daniels, MC Hammer and the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson.
Dr. Toby is the founder/CEO of Glenn Toby Enterprises (GTE), an international holding corporation that controls companies in the entertainment, sports, technology and real estate arenas. Total Entertainment Artist Management, Total Entertainment Athlete Management, and Infinite Sports Concepts are companies under the GTE umbrella with offices in New York, Atlanta, Los Angeles and Las Vegas. The roster of artists, actors and athletes that Toby has worked with includes LL Cool J, Swizz Beatz, Damion Hall of Guy, David Banner. Saigon, songwriter Positive K, “Queen of House Music” Barbara Tucker, actor Lance Reddick and Green Bay Packers legend Antonio Freeman. Dr. Toby is also a noted philanthropist who founded The Book Bank Foundation, which promotes literacy.
In 2023 so far, what’s happened in the last three months of the year largely mirrors the first when it comes to U.S. record label market share: the top two albums of the year — Morgan Wallen’s One Thing At a Time (Big Loud/Mercury/Republic) and SZA’s S.O.S. (TDE/RCA) — are still dominating the top two slots among consumption albums through June 29, according to Luminate. But while that may come as little surprise to industry chart-watchers, the rest of the top five points to a relatively surprising level of domination by one record label in particular: Republic Records.
In the first quarter of the year, Republic — which encompasses Island, Big Loud, Mercury, Cash Money and indie distributor Imperial — put up a current market share (defined as albums released within the past 18 months) of 12.45%, nearly five percentage points higher than second-placed Interscope Geffen A&M’s 7.75% (Interscope also encompasses Verve Label Group). At the end of the first half of the year, Republic’s current share stands at 12.46% — a remarkable level of consistency that shows the staying power of Republic’s current big releases, even as IGA has tightened the gap a bit, posting an 8.08% mark of its own to remain in second place.
Republic’s 12.46% current share at the midway point is also a significant leap from where it stood at the halfway mark in 2022, when it posted a current share of 8.92%, good for third place behind leaders Atlantic Records (9.92%) and second-placed Interscope (9.36%). Republic releases — chiefly Wallen’s album, but also Taylor Swift’s Midnights (one week) and Stray Kids’ 5 Star (one week) — spent all 13 weeks of the second quarter at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, part of a run of 17 straight weeks that only ended with Lil Uzi Vert’s new album Pink Tape.
Both Republic’s consistency and Interscope’s growth helped propel parent company Universal Music Group to a 34.48% current market share at the midyear mark, an improvement over both its first quarter current share (33.59%) and its current share at the midyear mark of 2022 (33.18%). Sony Music, in second place at 27.54%, dipped slightly from its huge Q1 current share of 28.46%, though it is still up significantly from the midyear mark in 2022, when it posted a 26.01% current share. And the Warner Music Group, in third among the major corporations, grew to 17.26% at the halfway mark of the year in current share, up from Q1’s 16.81% and 2022’s 15.33%. The collection of indie labels came in at 20.72% in current share at midyear, down from 21.15% in Q1.
Atlantic, in third among current share, grew to 7.34% at the midyear mark from 7.22% in Q1, though still down from the leading 9.92% it had midway through 2022. (Atlantic includes the combined 300 Elektra Entertainment Group.) But Capitol Music Group — which includes Motown/Quality Control, Blue Note, Astralwerks, Capitol Christian and indie distributor Virgin Music — surged from sixth place in Q1 2023 (5.56%) to fourth at the midyear market (6.00%), up significantly from the 4.31% it posted at the midway mark of 2022. Fifth-placed Warner Records (encompassing catalog label Rhino, Warner Latin and the bulk of Warner Nashville) also jumped two slots, from seventh in Q1 to fifth at midyear, to put up a 5.62% current share, up from 5.23% in Q1 and a 4.63% mark halfway through 2022.
Those two jumps from Capitol and Warner mean that Columbia (which includes some labels from indie distributor RED) and RCA Records slide down to sixth and seventh among current share, respectively. Columbia dipped from 5.85% in Q1 to 5.16% at the midyear mark in 2023 — though down significantly from the 6.65% it had at midyear 2022 — while RCA dropped from 5.76% in Q1 to 4.98% at the halfway point this year, a mark which is improved from the 4.31% it posted midway through 2022.
Rounding out the top 10 among current share is a trio of Sony labels, including two that made large strides: Sony Nashville, in eighth, at 2.55%, which grew from 2.30% in the first quarter and 1.72% midway through 2022; and Sony Latin in ninth, at 1.95%, up from 1.92% in Q1 and 1.22% halfway through 2022. Epic Records, at 1.82%, came in 10th in current share, dropping from 2.06% in Q1 and 2.24% at this time last year.
But current market share — while a strong indicator of recent performance for any label — does not tell the whole story, particularly at a time when Luminate reports that catalog (albums older than 18 months old, or the bulk of many major labels’ repertoire) share has increased again in 2023 so far, to 72.8% of all consumption from 72.4% in 2022, with a corresponding drop for current from 27.6% to 27.2%. And when taking into account all consumption, Interscope actually leads the U.S. industry in overall market share, posting a 9.48% mark at the midway point of 2023, up from 9.44% in Q1 and slightly down from its leading 9.80% mark halfway through 2022. That nudges Republic into second, ever so slightly, at 9.34% in overall share, a number that is also up from its Q1 mark (9.16%) and a significant increase from midyear 2022, when it posted a 7.96% share and came in third.
Outside those top two labels, the next handful of slots in the top 10 remain in the same order as their current share rankings, with Atlantic (8.31%) equalling its Q1 mark despite falling from the 9.30% it had in 2022; and Capitol also remaining static over Q1, posting a 6.70% (from 6.68% in Q1 and 6.06% in 2022). Warner (6.55%), in fifth, swapped positions with Columbia (6.23%) from their respective Q1 showings, while RCA (5.27%), in seventh, dropped from its 5.50% in Q1 but improved on its 4.92% mark from midway last year. Epic (2.54%), Sony Nashville (2.13%) and Def Jam (1.88%) rounded out the top 10 in overall market share.
Among the major label groups, UMG grew from 37.25% in overall share at the midpoint of last year to 37.98% this year, while Sony grew a full percentage point, jumping to 27.34% from last year’s mark of 26.34%. Warner Music Group, meanwhile, jumped significantly from 16.26% midway through 2022 to 18.75% halfway through this year, largely at the expense of the Indies, which fell from 20.15% to 15.93% in overall share this year.
Jonathan Shank‘s Terrapin Station Entertainment has announced a majority investment in Los Angeles-based production services company, Black Ink Presents. The agreement connects the Sony Music Masterworks-owned Terrapin with Blank Ink CEO John Kinsner‘s production management and design firm known for its work in concerts, immersive events and “live-to-film” shows in which a full orchestra performs […]
LONDON — “I still feel like that little girl who started out in music publishing,” said Universal Music Publishing Group chairman and CEO Jody Gerson as she accepted the Ralph Peer II Award for Outstanding Contribution to Global Music Publishing. It was presented by the award’s namesake at the July 10 annual meeting of the International Confederation of Music Publishers, or ICMP, held at Abbey Road Studios in London.
Gerson was, of course, being modest: She’s one of the most accomplished publishing executives in the world. But in front of dozens of European publishing and collective management executives, she shared the story of how she got started in the business.
The Pennsylvania native grew up in a music family that owned nightclubs in Philadelphia, and she had always been interested in getting into the music business. But when she first applied for label jobs, she didn’t have much luck. Eventually, she scored an interview with Chappell Music (later Warner Chappell) and her first job there was as the archivist, where she ran the tape library and became interested in the demos submitted by songwriters.
“I started thinking about marching songs with artists,” she remembered.
At the time, she pointed out, the music publishing business was much smaller, both in absolute terms and in comparison with recorded music, which dwarfed it in terms of both revenue and, it seemed to many at the time, wow factor. Now publishing is thriving, and a series of big song catalog purchases are generating plenty of excitement and attention.
The award was presented by Ralph Peer II, executive chair of peermusic and the initial recipient of the ICMP award that’s now named after him. “This wasn’t my idea,” he joked about the name of the prize. “It was foisted on me.” But he praised Gerson’s dedication to the publishing business. “On an everyday level she helps make the industry better,” he said. “She has acumen in business and music that’s very deep.”
Gerson was introduced by Mumford & Sons singer-songwriter Marcus Mumford, who praised her as well as the publishing business at large. “I don’t think artists are the best at protecting their songs, and managers aren’t always much better,” he joked. “We need publishers!”
The ICMP meeting itself, held at Abbey Road before the awards dinner, was more about business — royalties, metadata and the other details that make sure publishers and songwriters get paid as fast and accurately as possible. Trombonist Eric Crees, who plays at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden spoke about making film soundtracks, as did composer Stephen Warbeck.
SYDNEY, Australia — Indie rockers the Rions have struck a global publishing deal with Sony Music Publishing Australia, Billboard can exclusively reveal.
It’s full steam ahead for the Sydney band, whose debut EP Minivan is due out Aug. 11. Featuring fan fave “Scary Movies” and the title track, Minivan was recorded with producer Chris Collins (Matt Corby, Skeggs, Middle Kids) in the Byron Bay hinterlands.
[embedded content]
“They’re a brilliant young band with a lot of heart and soul, writing great songs and we have no doubt they will be captivating audiences for a long time,” comments Sony Music Publishing managing director Damian Trotter, the publishing veteran who signed Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker.
Hailing from the Northern Beaches, the Rions was formed in 2016 by schoolmates Noah Blockley (lead vocals, bass guitar), Harley Wilson (guitar), Asher McLean (guitar) and Tom Partington (drums).
The lads got their break with first prize in Triple J’s 2021 Unearthed High competition, for their song “Night Light”. The track would land at No. 51 on triple j’s Hottest 100 countdown for 2021, and they’d follow it up with “Anakin,” which appeared at No. 64 in the national youth network’s annual countdown for 2022.
Support slots came with Lime Cordiale and Boy & Bear, then festival spots at Grapevine Gathering, Party In the Paddock and Festival of the Sun, and, more recently, a sold-out 10-date national tour in support of “Scary Movies.”
[embedded content]
Coming up, a spot on the bill for the two-day Yours & Owls Festival 2023 this October, headlined by Bakar, Broods and Chet Faker.
The Rions are managed by Steve de Wilde at UNIFIED Artist Management. “We’re really excited to partner with Sony Publishing in the next phase of this incredible band’s career,” he enthuses. “Damian and the team have such an impressive track record, and I can’t wait to see what this pairing of creative minds can unlock on a global scale.”
Selena Quintanilla‘s father, Abraham Quintanilla Jr., is suing Los Angeles-based Catalina Classic Cruises over an “unauthorized” live tribute in honor of the late Tejano star. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news According to the lawsuit, filed Monday (July 10) in the Central District of California, Selena’s father […]
