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While attending law school at the University of Pittsburgh, Philadelphia native Reynold Jaffe was booking DIY shows at least three nights a week — including Bright Eyes’ first performance in the city in 1999. Through that key booking, he met agent Eric Dimenstein, whom he stayed in touch with over the years as he became more immersed in the music industry. After first working in the business affairs department at Rykodisc, Jaffe later started independently managing Kurt Vile (whom he met at the indie record store his now-wife ran at the time) and Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield.
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By 2017, after years of encouragement from Dimenstein, Jaffe finally turned his passion into co-founding his own company, Another Management Company (AMC). Today, the firm has 10 employees and a roster of just over 20 acts, from Mdou Moctar and Alvvays to 2022 breakouts Blondshell and Horsegirl. “I never thought managing bands would or could be a career,” says Jaffe. “We identified a gap between the big management companies and a bunch of rogue one-man shows … Indie labels used to be thought of as junior varsity. I don’t think that is the case anymore at all. Some of the most artistically and commercially viable records can happen in the independent sphere, more so now than ever.”
Horsegirl
Horsegirl
Cheryl Dunn
During Thanksgiving dinner in 2020, Jaffe excused himself to hide in the bathroom and listen to a Bandcamp link his friend had sent. “I immediately fell in love,” he recalls of hearing Chicago-based teen trio Horsegirl’s first three songs. “I DM’d the band on Instagram from the table and said, ‘Please, can we talk?’ ” He hadn’t felt that surprised since hearing Snail Mail five years prior, subsequently signing the then-teen act to AMC in 2016. After partnering with Horsegirl in 2020, Jaffe helped the group score a record deal with Matador this year. “My experience with Snail Mail is not a small part of what made them comfortable with pursuing this.”
Blondshell
Blondshell
Daniel Topete
Welcoming indie-rock act Blondshell into the AMC family in June was pivotal for Jaffe. “Blondshell marks one of the first instances of a band that I’m not the manager of,” he says, praising AMC’s Holly Cartwright and Shira Knishkowy. “The passion was exuding from them for this demo …They’ve been in the driver’s seat, and that was my goal for AMC.” Jaffe believes the success of Blondshell, the Sabrina Teitelbaum-fronted act recently picked to join Spotify’s Fresh Finds emerging artist program, proves what can happen when the right team comes in at the right moment “with a vision and relationships to put gasoline on the fire.”
Mdou Moctar
Mdou Moctar
Atiba Jefferson
Though AMC started working with Niger-based Mdou Moctar in the summer of 2018, Jaffe had long been a fan of the Taureg songwriter and musician. “I’ve always liked music from that part of the world, but Mdou combined the traditional sounds of that part of the world with raging Western guitars, which I also love,” he says. “I would always go see him and the band as they came to town.” Following encouragement from musician Matt Sweeney, who “was a huge early proponent” of the musician, AMC added Mdou Moctar to its roster with the goal of signing the act to a new label. In 2020, Mdou Moctar signed to Matador and in late 2021 released its sixth album Afrique Victime. “At risk of being hyperbolic, it really is that sort of rarified air of seeing that band play,” continues Jaffe, teasing that after playing an estimated 200 shows this year the band is already back in the studio working on an album he hopes will arrive in 2023.
Poison Ruïn
Poison Ruin
Courtesy of Another Management Company
The Philadelphia punk band Poison Ruïn had been on Jaffe’s radar for some time. “It was one of those things where it’s like, your little brother’s doing something cool and you don’t immediately pay attention because it’s just your little brother’s thing and then you step back and you’re like, ‘Holy cow, this is really special,’ ” says Jaffe. He recalls how the act’s first album, I, uploaded to Bandcamp in 2021, sold 300 vinyl copies in under five minutes, prompting a repressing. He and AMC manager Dan Oestreich agreed the group could transcend the DIY punk scene, and now, much like Horsegirl and Blondshell, anticipate the band’s major breakthrough in 2023. Says Jaffe: “It could definitely be their year.”
This story will appear in the Nov. 5, 2022, issue of Billboard.
LONDON — One of the 22 people killed in a suicide bomb attack outside an Ariana Grande concert at Manchester Arena in 2017 would probably have survived had it not been for “significant failures” by the emergency services responding to the atrocity, a public inquiry has found.
John Atkinson, 28, died on May 22, 2017, when bomber Salman Abedi detonated a home-made explosive device in the foyer of Manchester Arena (now known as the AO Arena) at the end of a Grande’s sold-out show. More than 800 people were injured in the terror attack, many of them children.
An 884-page report detailing the emergency services response to the attack, published on Tuesday (Nov. 3), found that Atkinson, a caregiver for adults with autism, could have survived the attack “if given prompt and expert medical treatment.”
Instead, Atkinson, who was standing only six meters (nearly 20 feet) away from the bomber when he detonated his device at 10:31pm U.K. time, suffered severe injuries to his legs. He had to wait 47 minutes before he was treated by paramedics and then went into cardiac arrest and died on the way to the hospital.
“It is likely that inadequacies in the emergency response prevented his survival,” the report concluded.
The report is the second of three being produced by the public inquiry from the U.K. Home Secretary, which began in 2019.
The chair of the inquiry, John Saunders, said many things went “badly wrong” in how the emergency services responded to the attack, including “significant failings by a number of organizations in preparation and training” for such an emergency. On the night of the bombing, the national terror threat level in the U.K. was severe, meaning an attack was highly likely.
While praising the heroism of the first responders and citizens on the scene, Saunders identified “very significant” failures by Greater Manchester Police and an “unduly risk-averse” approach from the fire service. He also cited substantial problems with how the North West Ambulance Service handled the emergency, as well as serious failings by British Transport Police.
“Some of what went wrong had serious and, in the case of John Atkinson, fatal consequences for those directly affected by the explosion,” said Saunders. He concluded that none of the other 20 victims could have survived their injuries from the explosion and “inadequacies in the [emergency service] response did not fail to prevent their deaths.”
The report is highly critical of Greater Manchester Police for failing to declare a major incident in the immediate aftermath of the explosion. Two of the department’s most senior officers were on duty that night but made “no effective contribution to the emergency response.”
There was “non-existent” communication between emergency service senior offices and “individual failures” that further undermined the joint response, the report stated.
Only three paramedics entered the arena’s foyer to help the injured following the explosion. Fire officers took more than two hours to arrive at the scene after senior officers wrongly believed they were attending a marauding terror attack and it was not safe to send in firefighters – a delay that Saunders said was “serious and unacceptable.” Their presence would have resulted “in the safer and faster extraction of the severely injured” to another location where they could receive proper clinical care, he said.
The inquiry also found that there was a “remote possibility” that eight-year-old Saffie‐Rose Roussos — the youngest victim of the attack — could have been saved “with different treatment and care.” Roussos drifted in and out of consciousness for 26 minutes after the bomb blast and was able to give her name to the first member of the public who helped her, but no tourniquets or leg splints were applied to her injuries.
She was subsequently carried out of the foyer and taken to a hospital, where trauma doctors were unable to save her.
Following the report’s publication, David Russel, chief fire officer for Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service, apologized for what he called a “wholly inadequate and totally ineffective” response that “will forever be a matter of deep regret.”
In all, the report makes 149 recommendations, including requiring first aid training for all police officers and firefighters and more regulation and enforcement to improve the standard of healthcare services at public venues.
The public inquiry’s first report into the terror attack, published last June, looked at whether police and security should have done more to prevent the bombing. It found that arena operators SMG, security company Showsec and the British Transport Police, who were responsible for policing the area where the bomb exploded, were “principally responsible” for missed opportunities to prevent or minimize the “devastating impact of the attack.”
The third and final report will focus on the radicalization of Salman Abedi and what intelligence services knew about him and his family. The bomber’s brother Hashem Abedi was sentenced in 2020 to a minimum of 55 years for his part in the bombing.
“Nothing will ease the pain of the families of those killed during the cowardly terrorist attack at Manchester Arena,” U.K. prime minister Rishi Sunak said on Twitter on Tuesday after the report’s release. “It is my solemn commitment to the victims, survivors and their loved ones that we will learn from the lessons of this inquiry.”
High above Broadway near the southern tip of Manhattan, perched atop what’s known as the Standard Oil Building, sits a particularly privileged slice of Old New York history. The top two floors of the 31-story structure once served as sanctuary for the Rockefeller oil tycoons: The lower has 360-degree panoramic views of New York Harbor, the Statue of Liberty and Governors Island and used to house an executive conference room; the upper, known as the Tower Club, was once home to John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s squash courts, with some ball marks still scoring the walls. In the stairwell connecting the two hangs a sign: “IF WE SEE SMOKE AROUND YOU WE’LL ASSUME YOU’RE ON FIRE AND DRENCH YOU WITH WATER.” It appears to have only recently been taped to the wall.
It’s a clear mid-June morning and the place, rather than a shrine to opulence, looks more like a construction zone amid a teardown. Sun streaming in through the bare windows illuminates stripped gray walls and exposed concrete floors, with architectural renderings and white chalk outlines hinting at what’s to come. The space is being transformed into a state-of-the-art recording studio owned by Downtown Music Holdings, the umbrella group that handles distribution, publishing administration, royalty collection, neighboring rights, and label, publishing and artist services; and houses the digital rights management platform Songtrust and recently acquired companies CD Baby, FUGA, AdRev, Soundrop and DashGo. The studio — where the former squash courts will turn into one of the few loud rooms in the city large enough to accommodate a Broadway cast or symphony orchestra — will eventually become Downtown’s latest flag planted in its New York home.
But this is just a preview. About 50 people — Downtown executives, New York municipal employees and a few members of the media — mill around, slugging coffee and taking in the views as Downtown’s chief engineer, Zach Hancock, gives tours and explains the company’s vision. “As prices have skyrocketed in historic neighborhoods where recording and music making has happened, we have lost the vast majority of venues for making music,” says Manhattan borough president Mark Levine in one of the speeches made to those assembled. “To take a space that could have been vacant for years and to turn it into this hub of creativity, it’s going to become iconic in the music industry.”
Downtown outstripped its New York roots long ago to become a global company, and now has 22 offices around the world. But its home ties run deep: Founder and chairman Justin Kalifowitz grew up delivering food from his father’s luncheonette in downtown Manhattan and co-founded advocacy group New York Is Music in 2014 to promote government support of the business and culture of music in the city and state; longtime general counsel, COO and current CEO Andrew Bergman is a product of the New York public school system and has lived in every borough but the Bronx. So, having a studio in the city — and in such an iconic location — means a lot.
“The music industry has been centered in New York for more than a hundred years, and I think a lot of people took for granted, and take for granted, the fact that it is the largest music industry in the world,” says Kalifowitz. “If you’re running a business here and you don’t invest here and you’re seeing people leave for other places, I think it’s just going to be harder — harder to run your business, harder to enjoy what you’re doing here.”
Justin Kalifowitz photographed on October 19, 2022 at Downtown Music in New York City.
Wesley Mann
It’s ironic, in a sense, that Downtown got to this moment by divesting from the business on which it originally staked its name: owning publishing copyrights, which helped it become one of the most successful indie publishing companies of the past 15 years. But as the city, and the music business, have changed, Downtown has, too. And, over the past two years, the company has undergone its biggest transformation yet, morphing from a traditional publisher with 145,000 owned copyrights — including shares in songs such as Maroon 5’s “Moves Like Jagger,” Beyoncé’s “Halo,” Sam Smith’s “Stay With Me” and Lady Gaga’s “Shallow” (from A Star Is Born) — into a full-suite company that owns no rights and aims to help creators at all career levels navigate the music industry’s choppy waters.
But shifting from the traditional business — where ownership was king and hit songs could paper over any cracks — into a new digital world where scale and support are key isn’t easy, and the company’s current status is the culmination of a yearslong transition that’s not yet complete. In the process, Downtown found itself caught in some of the murky corners of the business that the digital revolution created, while trying to remain true to its service-minded core. The path hasn’t been linear, even if the goal is clear — and the transition is a true gamble on the future.
“I’d like Downtown to be this ubiquitous service provider that anyone could tap into, that’s best in class, that’s transparent and that’s easy to port in and out — that’s what we’re trying to build,” says Bergman. “That’s what everything that we’re doing is geared toward. So that all those services are available to you and that anyone, any company or individual, would want to work with us, because we’re filling a need that they have.”
The story of Downtown begins, in a way, with the story of Gnarls Barkley.
In summer 2005, Josh Deutsch and Terence Lam started indie label Downtown Records and quickly signed and starting working the duo’s single “Crazy.” Released in March 2006, “Crazy” reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and was nominated for record of the year at the Grammys, ultimately winning for best urban/alternative performance — and giving Downtown the type of early success indies rarely see.
It also fueled a desire to expand, and in 2007, Kalifowitz joined and founded Downtown Music Publishing. Initially, the company signed a few acts affiliated with the label — Santigold, Cold War Kids, Miike Snow’s Andrew Wyatt — along with the writers behind Miley Cyrus’ Hannah Montana album and the producers of Mims’ No. 1 hit, “This Is Why I’m Hot.” But signing writers wasn’t the company’s main focus.
“The majority of what we were doing at Downtown Music Publishing was building a global, independent music publishing company,” Kalifowitz says. “The premise really was, there needed to be a young, nimble company that thought technology-first, but also had a creative hat in the business, and a more bespoke solution would make sense.”
Over its first few years, Downtown built its publishing business traditionally: writer by writer, catalog by catalog. But several early investments and partnerships also helped it grow its administration business. Downtown was an early investor in indie publisher PULSE Music, which has writers like Starrah, Brent Faiyaz and Kehlani on its roster; it also became the U.S. administrator for Trevor Horn’s Perfect Songs, a U.K.-based publisher with hits by artists like Seal, Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Marsha Ambrosius in its catalog. Rather than rely solely on an owned, or inherited, catalog, Downtown took a partnership and investment approach early on, which gave it both insight into other businesses in its sphere and a diversified income stream.
In 2011, Downtown launched Songtrust, a tech-based global administration platform to help songwriters and producers get paid for the exploitation of their works. The service soon began cutting direct deals with collection societies — today totaling 65 deals across more than 245 countries and territories, with clients in 173 countries — that allowed its clients to receive publishing royalties directly and much quicker than traditional admin deals. “When we started Songtrust it was like, ‘How come those mid-tier artists or earlier aspirational artists can’t have access to the same kinds of service that a more prominent artist would have?’ ” says Bergman, who joined Downtown as general counsel in 2008, rose to COO in 2012 and became CEO in September 2021. “We started to build that technology out as more egalitarian, and today it is essentially the backbone for all of our publishing administration activities.”
Andrew Bergman photographed on October 19, 2022 at Downtown Music in New York City.
Wesley Mann
Songtrust, in its early days, was essentially a Downtown side hustle, co-founded by Kalifowitz and Downtown’s chief strategy officer, Joe Conyers. But it would become important in the company’s evolution as the first true service-first, nonownership-based offering it launched. In 2013, Downtown sold its record label back to founders Deutsch and Lam and, the following year, forged a partnership between Songtrust and CD Baby to provide publishing administration and royalty collection in the same way that the indie distributor collected royalties on master recordings.
That deal was when “we started to deal with creators en masse, thousands of clients as opposed to dozens, and it fundamentally changed how we thought about the service we were offering,” says Kalifowitz, who transitioned from CEO to executive chairman in August 2021. “That was also somewhat of a watershed era for us; we started to really expand to other markets — we opened in the U.K., we opened in Amsterdam, we opened an L.A. office — and we picked up the rights to the John Lennon and Yoko Ono catalogs. It really very much cemented our plans of being a stand-alone business. That partnership taught us a tremendous amount about the growing artist services space.”
It also led the company to expand what it could offer creators, often through acquisitions. In 2015, Downtown introduced Neighboring Rights — public performance rights for sound recordings — through the purchase of London-based Eagle-I Music, and now represents artists like Justin Bieber, Ryan Tedder and Ella Fitzgerald in that area. The company also executed direct licensing deals with YouTube, Apple, Amazon and Pandora, and through Songtrust’s expansion, began aggressive international growth, buying local repertoire in Europe and Japan while inking admin deals for the Wu-Tang Clan, the Miles Davis and George Gershwin estates, Shaggy, Tori Amos and Big Yellow Dog Music, publishing home to Meghan Trainor and Maren Morris. In all, according to Kalifowitz, Downtown worked in some form with over 36 million songs, through distribution, administration, royalty processing or other offerings.
“They made really smart deals; I think Justin Kalifowitz is still regarded as probably the smartest guy in publishing,” says one manager of the company’s success as a publisher. “They were really profitable in that sense. I don’t think they overspent for anything. Just a really smart company.”
By 2019, Downtown began to shuffle the decks. Molly Neuman — the onetime drummer for riot grrrl groups Bratmobile and The Frumpies who went on to various roles in the indie music community — was promoted from head of business development to president of Songtrust. She started turning the “side project” that sat “in the back of our Soho loft space, kind of in the corner, with less than 20 people” into an educational platform for music publishing at a time when the Copyright Royalty Board rate trial and the Music Modernization Act were dominating industry headlines.
“There were all these things about publishing as a required understanding starting to accelerate, while we were marketing Songtrust with education at our core,” Neuman says. “Because it’s fundamentally confusing, people don’t know why they would need it, so we kind of peeled it back as part of our strategy.”
Molly Neuman photographed on October 19, 2022 at Downtown Music in New York City.
Wesley Mann
The same year, Downtown spent around $200 million to purchase AVL Digital Group, the umbrella company that housed CD Baby, AdRev, DashGo and Soundrop, which were collectively responsible for distributing and monetizing over 10 million tracks from nearly 1 million artists. The acquisition dramatically expanded Downtown’s offerings into digital distribution (CD Baby), YouTube monetization (AdRev), social video support (Soundrop) and digital marketing and label services (DashGo) and swelled Downtown’s headcount to north of 300 employees. Less than a year later they brought on FUGA, a business-to-business tech and distribution platform for labels that gave Downtown a twin-engine service offering — one aimed at creators themselves, the other at music business clients — and doubled the size of its staff. Steadily, Downtown had begun to morph from traditional publishing toward a more services-oriented model.
The final piece of the puzzle came in April 2021, when Downtown announced it had sold its 145,000 owned copyrights to Concord in a deal worth $350 million, according to Billboard estimates. (Billboard estimated the owned catalog generated around $30 million per year; Downtown is still in the publishing administration business.) Its remaining businesses, the company said, would pull in $600 million in revenue and collections in 2021 alone. (The company declined to disclose its 2022 revenue projections, but said it is profitable.) Just as money was flooding the catalog acquisition space, Downtown was out. But it had a different vision for its future.
“[The owned catalog] was a small minority of the revenue of the company, it was a very significant cost to run, and it was a business model — the acquisition and ownership of rights — that was incongruous with a fast-growing services business,” Kalifowitz explains. “Our view was, there’s this one aspect of our business that is very crowded, has a tremendous amount of capital and is willing to accept very low returns, and it’s quite distracting to this other thing we’re doing, which is so much bigger and growing so much faster, and that we think, as a business, has a lot more potential, and as a product-market fit, there are so many more people who need what we’re building.”
In a way, Downtown was jumping from one boiling-hot segment of the business — catalog ownership — to another: distribution and services. And it was hardly alone. In the past two years, a slew of record labels — all three major groups, in addition to Republic, 300, Interscope, Capitol, Virgin and others — either started or bolstered their distribution offerings, while companies like SoundCloud, Tencent and TikTok shifted their business models toward services or added distribution capabilities.
It’s a plan with a forward-looking view of how the music business seems to be developing. In February 2021, Spotify’s global head of music, Jeremy Erlich, said that 60,000 tracks per day were uploaded to the platform, or some 1.8 million each month. (Recent reports now put that daily number at 100,000.) Earlier this year, Spotify said that in 2021 it had 72,700 DIY artists, and that 28% of artists who made more than $10,000 per year on the service alone — a total of 15,140, up 171% from 2017 — self-distributed their music to Spotify using CD Baby, TuneCore or Distrokid.
“Catalog decays over time; granted, there’s been exponential sales on a Phil Collins or a Bob Dylan, but it feels like that bubble is beginning to burst,” says one former distribution executive. “So to invest in an infrastructure that supports the emerging, new music industry, which is the DIY music industry, which in aggregate will represent more market share than the three majors combined in the future — that’s a spot I’d want to be in. And if you have a company where you have a flat fee upfront, and you don’t have to worry about if it sells, it becomes a numbers game. Some will pop and take off and you can find different ways to upstream those through administration or label services, and you can create a very robust and lucrative business.”
With more and more companies entering that business, success becomes about differentiation. “Getting your metadata out to the [digital service providers], that’s been commoditized; it’s about everything else that you do,” says Bergman of Downtown’s philosophy. “We probably have the broadest service offering already and we’re really just getting started on that front. Instead of looking to see what’s the next catalog we can buy, it’s about, what’s the next improvement in the service offering, whether that’s international expansion, or localizing the offering, or a service we don’t currently provide or an enhancement of a service we are providing? That’s how we think about the world going forward.”
Downtown has also forged relationships and partnerships across the industry spectrum. Through its various services, the company works with labels like Sub Pop (Songtrust, Neighboring Rights); Beggars, Epitaph and Domino (FUGA); artists like Phish (publishing), Maggie Lindemann (Songtrust), Lindsey Buckingham (Neighboring Rights), Cheat Codes (distribution) and Atticus Ross (publishing); and companies like Secretly Publishing (Songtrust), Symphonic Distribution (publishing for its catalog and its clients), Concord (publishing in Africa) and Hipgnosis (video monetization). What sets it apart from other services-based companies isn’t just the range of what it offers to individual creators, but to the industry at large, allowing them to plug in to its various outlets without having to go the major-label route.
“Organizations like Downtown, through services like CD Baby and FUGA and their admin business, make it possible for independent companies to grow globally without being put into that local bucket that the majors scale, but are unable to deliver the services on, because it’s a 1-inch pipe with 8 inches of water going through it,” says Allen Kovac, CEO of Better Noise Music, label home to artists like Five Finger Death Punch and AWOLnation, and a client of FUGA, Downtown Music Services and Downtown Neighboring Rights. “They offer a workaround — the ability for an indie company that may not have offices to be able to get focus from another independent company.”
Adding these capabilities through acquisitions is one matter; incorporating them into a broader company structure — one that grew fivefold in just a few years — is another. So Downtown underwent a major restructuring in the past few months, aligning itself into two distinct divisions, one business-facing, the other for creators. Neuman was promoted to chief marketing officer, in charge of spreading the gospel of what Downtown offers to the masses; FUGA chief Pieter van Rijn was named president of its new business unit, which includes FUGA, Downtown Neighboring Rights, AdRev and Downtown Music Services’ artist, label services and publishing administration units. Its remaining businesses, including CD Baby, Soundrop and DashGo, fall under its creator unit, overseen by the Downtown Holdings executive leadership team. Currently, Downtown says it works with 1.7 million creators and businesses across 30 million tracks and 14 million YouTube assets and continues to be a strategic investor, most recently in the $34 million funding round for alternative funding platform beatBread, and opened a $200 million fund intended for artist advances for the indie community in partnership with Bank of America in March.
“We have everything already there through various operating companies, and successful businesses, profitable businesses, but because of the acquisition spree that Downtown went on, there is room for opportunity to really create a few very clear business lines that determine how we’re going to go to market,” says van Rijn. “Over time, we want to be the best and most reliable and most forward-thinking service provider for the professional music industry, combining music DNA — which we all have — with technology and services. And understanding that we are a services business means you really have to understand your clients and how to develop with them, how to be innovative, but at the same time be practical about what are today’s needs of our clients.”
Peter van Rijn photographed on October 19, 2022 at Downtown Music in New York City.
Wesley Mann
“Downtown was always seen as a good, have-their-sh-t-together publishing administrator: They seemed very like-minded in caring about the sector that they were in, caring about the artists and putting together an infrastructure that put the artist and the songwriter first, as opposed to an ROI,” says the label-services executive. “And it allowed the company to grow in a very fastidious, credible way.” But growth can also, in turn, reveal unexpected problems. “It’s happened so recently — the catalog sale wasn’t that long ago,” the manager says. “So I think Downtown 2.0 has a lot to prove.”
In just a few short years, Downtown had completely transformed its model and its staff, if not its core philosophy, from the relatively stable publishing world to the constantly evolving services realm. But such rapid growth, as well as the rapid evolution of the digital music business, isn’t always smooth — and Downtown soon ran into a particularly rough speed bump.
In August 2022, Billboard published an investigation into MediaMuv, a company that took advantage of a loophole in YouTube’s royalty collection system to defraud artists and songwriters of $23 million in unclaimed royalties for which it did not own the rights. MediaMuv claimed these royalties between May 2017 and November 2021, when its owners were indicted by the IRS, and used AdRev to claim the money.
Investigators charged the two owners with 30 counts of conspiracy, wire fraud, money laundering and aggravated identity theft, and while neither YouTube nor AdRev were charged with wrongdoing, the story was met with incredulity by some who questioned how AdRev could allow fraud of that scale on its platform. In a plea deal, one of MediaMuv’s founders admitted to falsifying several documents submitted to AdRev “for the purpose of deceiving [them],” and sources tell Billboard that the complexity of the fabrications helped MediaMuv skate through AdRev’s regular monitoring processes.
Much of the fraud — though not all of it — took place prior to Downtown’s acquisition of AdRev, but its scale still put Downtown on the defensive. AdRev’s longtime president, Noah Becker, left the company, though Downtown said the move predated the indictment. In some respects, AdRev’s issues in this particular case reflect the increasingly complicated nature of royalty collections online, particularly on user-generated content platforms like YouTube, and point to real concern the business model presents to services-oriented companies: the sheer number of artists and copyrights companies are dealing with, and the cost-benefit analysis and likelihood of fraud that comes with that much volume.
“It’s an activity that’s growing quickly and the people who are committing the fraud are getting much more sophisticated,” says one distribution executive, who stresses it will take an industrywide campaign to shut down, or just get ahead of, the practice. “It’s not as easy to catch them anymore; their tactics are not as obvious anymore. Unfortunately, we’re playing catch-up with the technology that the people who are committing the fraud have access to, and a lot of what the aggregators do today is reactive.”
Downtown has moved to be proactive in combating this type of fraud: In April 2020, it acquired Simbals, a France-based audio fingerprinting company whose technology Downtown uses to better track its copyrights across the digital spectrum. Downtown has also developed a continuously evolving quality control program over the past several years, which is involved in both onboarding and continual checks for red flags, and in the spring implemented an assurance process to help codify that quality control process across its business units. It has internally developed tools to check for fraud patterns in streaming data prior to distribution, in-house data teams and fraud examiners to monitor for fraud patterns and third-party tools to prevent fraud at scale. (The company also notes that it began working with MediaMuv on a recommendation from YouTube, which referred it to AdRev.)
MediaMuv’s fraud, however, evaded several of those protections, while other safeguards have been strengthened since AdRev was acquired and the fraud was exposed. And it is unlikely to be the only or last issue that Downtown has to deal with in the services space, where fraud can be rampant and rights not always clear. But in a sector of the business where relationships and trust are paramount for adding and retaining clients, it’s been a tough storm to weather.
“We’re a known quantity in the business, so I think that the bulk of the industry will recognize that Downtown and its constituent businesses and people are known as ethical, well-run businesses that are all about trying to connect creators with their rightful share of the pie,” Bergman says. “That is why we exist. So I’m not naive about this sort of stuff, but I expect that our reputation for all the good work that we do — our attention to detail and all the systems and the technology that we provide to do that — will remind people that that’s what Downtown is.”
Moving forward, Downtown plans to continue to build out additional services to help clients navigate the ever-changing digital ecosystem, with social music and Web3 constantly evolving and new platforms continuously reshaping music consumption online. Predicting how the world will look in five years is not always simple, and certainly not static. But creating tools for the future — whether a simplified global publishing admin business, an all-in-one suite of services or even a new, state-of-the-art studio high above Manhattan — has always been in Downtown’s DNA.
“I’ve always believed that we were building a forever company,” says Kalifowitz. “I think the future for us is a continued streamlining of what we do and continued expansion of what we do, primarily geographically. And then continue to build out our platform. That’s critical. One of the things you learn as a service provider is that there’s no ‘build it and you’re done.’ It’s continuous improvement. So I think the future holds continuous improvement.”
This story will appear in the Nov. 5, 2022, issue of Billboard.
Warner Records promoted Ron Stewart to senior vp of urban promotion and hired Cory Sparks as vp of urban promotion. Stewart’s duties will expand, with the executive now leading promotion strategy and campaigns for all urban artists on the label’s roster. Based in New York, he reports to executive vp of promotion & commerce Mike Chester. The Atlanta-based Sparks, who reports to Stewart, joins the label from Epic Records, where he was vp of promotion.
Sherrese Clarke Soares‘ global alternative asset management company HarbourView Equity Partners hired Palisa Kelley as managing director and head of legal and business affairs. Kelley joins HarbourView from Selverne Kelley Bradford, PLLC, a boutique law firm serving the music industry where she served as partner.
David Gorman was hired as creative director at Exceleration Music. In the role, he will oversee the direction of Exceleration’s consumer-facing digital and physical art, as well as packaging and video projects for the company’s label and artist partners. Gorman joins Exceleration — which supports artists, creators and entrepreneurs in the independent music space — from Amazon Music, where he worked as global catalog programming lead.
Howard Price was named head of media at Bucks Music Group. Reporting to managing director Simon Platz, Price will maintain and develop the company’s relationships with composers, broadcasters and production companies and manage publishing interests in music composed for film, TV and media. He most recently served as senior vp of visual & media rights at Sony Music Publishing. Price can be reached at hprice@bucksmusicgroup.co.uk.
Britt Lovejoy and Elana Nightingale Dawson were promoted to partner at the law firm Lathan & Watkins. Both are members of the firm’s connectivity, privacy & information practice and the litigation & trial department, representing clients including digital media companies, music broadcasters and internet platforms in copyright and related matters. Lovejoy can be reached at britt.lovejoy@lw.com and Nightingale Dawson can be reached at elana.nightingale.dawson@lw.com.
Secretly Group hired Laura “Lau” Frías as A&R director on the label side and Tony Messina-Doerning and Trinity Hood as A&R and A&R associate, respectively, at Secretly Publishing. Based in Brooklyn, Frías will serve A&R duties for Secretly labels Dead Oceans, Jagjaguwar, Saddest Factory Records and Secretly Canadian. She joins the company from Kobalt Music Group and reports to Secretly Group vp of A&R Jon Coombs. Messina-Doerning and Hood, both based in Los Angeles and reporting to Secretly Publishing’s senior director of A&R Eddie Sikazwe, join from Nice Life Recording Company and UTA, respectively.
Erin Mackay, who departed his role as executive vp of global digital strategy at Warner Chappell Music at the beginning of the year, has started imbr, a fintech company designed to simplify global rights payments for songwriters. Those interested can join the waitlist and receive updates by visiting imbr.co.
Sophia Margerison was named global business development director at YMU. Based between London and Los Angeles, Margerison joins the artist management company from Pollen, where she served as head of live music partnerships. In her new role, she will recruit new artist managers, look to broaden and diversify YMU’s roster and help oversee the global representation of the company’s clients. Margerison can be reached at Sophia.Margerison@ymugroup.com.
ASM Global named Patrick Lynch senior vp of private events in the U.S; he joins the company from e-commerce and marketing platform Mercato. In the role, Lynch will work with ASM Global’s national sales force to focus on new business opportunities for the company’s private event portfolio. He can be reached at plynch@asmglobal.com.
Perkins Publicity founder Trevor Perkins relaunched management firm Sincerely Music Group and signed artist Nathan Wilson ahead of the release of the singer-songwriter’s next single, “Meant for You,” on Friday (Nov. 4). Perkins can be reached at info@thesincerelymusicgroup.com.
BBR Music Group promoted Caroline Fields to director of publicity and hired Camryn Scharnhorst as manager of publicity. Fields, who was previously manager of publicity, will continue to handle media relations, asset creation and strategy development and implementation while serving as the day-to-day point person for several artists. Scharnhorst, who most recently worked as the account manager for four large-market country radio stations in Kansas City, Missouri, will manage the day-to-day publicity needs of artists on the roster. Both Fields and Scharnhorst will report to senior vp of publicity Jay Jones; they can be reached at caroline@bbrmusicgroup.com and camryn@bbrmusicgroup.com, respectively.
Folk Alliance International hired Neeta Ragoowansi as its new executive director, succeeding Aengus Finnan in the role. Ragoowansi, who most recently served as senior counsel of legal & business affairs at Global Citizen, will look to expand the organization’s global reach and partnerships and further expand its programs for education and access to networks and finances, among other goals. She will continue to serve in a volunteer capacity as president of Music Managers Forum – U.S., global co-chair for Women in Music and co-chair of the diversity, equity & inclusion task force for the American Bar Association’s forum on the entertainment & sports industries.
The Academy of Country Music announced its newly-elected board of directors for the 2022-23 term. They include Scot Calonge, Jackie Campbell, Charlie Cook, Cyndi Forman, Margaret Hart, Deana Ivey, Chandra LaPlume, Chris Lisle, Cindy Mabe, Lee Thomas Miller, Curt Motley, Kristie Sloan, Adam Weiser and Rachel Whitney. In addition, director-at-large positions were appointed by ACM board of directors chair Chuck Aly, vice-chair Ebie McFarland and vp Randy Bernard. Appointees include George Curi, Benson Curb, Beville Dunkerley, Becky Gardenhire, Shannan Hatch, Jeremy Holley, Frank Liddell, Jon Loba, Shawn McSpadden, Austin Neal, Brian O’Connell, Rod Phillips, Kelly Rich, Tim Roberts, Scott Scovill, Sally Seitz, Laura Veitz and Candice Watkins. All directors will serve two-year terms aside from Shannan Hatch and Austin Neal, who have been appointed to one-year terms to fill a previous vacancy.
Fans waiting to buy tickets to Taylor Swift’s Eras tour next week should expect two things: high demand and high prices. After all, it’s been five years and four albums since Swift toured, with her newest album, Midnights, on track to be the best-selling record of the year — earning Swift the title of first artist to ever have 10 songs dominate the top 10 of the Hot 100 chart.
That popularity means that Swift can set high prices for her tickets — most seats will be priced between $200 to $400, with floor tickets going for as much as $800 a piece. Platinum tickets will cost even more with some selling for thousands of dollars per ticket.
If there’s any consolation for the impending sticker shock, though — which has caused outcry over recent Bruce Springsteen and Blink-182 tours as well — it’s that unlike with some of Swift’s past tours, most of that money will be going into her pocket, and not scalpers.
Much like with album marketing and record-breaking sales, as well as revolutionary stances around artists owning their masters and streaming royalties, Swift has had a profound effect on the concert ticket market over the years. Throughout much of her early career, Swift was a master of pricing and marketing and distributing concert tickets to her growing fan base, who eagerly bought up tickets to tours arounds hit albums like Fearless and Red. Unfortunately, scalpers were buying up tickets too. By 2015, with her tour supporting Swift’s crossover pop album 1989, average prices on the secondary market were going for two to three times face value.
In 2016, promoter Louis Messina — who has been working Swift since she was 17 — had been celebrating the mega-successful 1989 tour, which grossed a staggering $250 million worldwide, when a well-known entertainment executive and friend bragged that he had made more on the tour than Swift or Messina. The executive enjoyed a far more profitable haul from the tour thanks to his ownership in a ticket scalping business that was selling 1989 tickets at a four-to-five-times markup. Messina and Swift had priced the tickets so low, and fan demand was so high that anyone flipping tickets for the concert was bound to make a big return.
The nexus between ticket prices at the box office and what ticket flippers can sell them for on sites like StubHub was also a problem that Live Nation chief executive Michael Rapino wanted to solve. Working with then Ticketmaster president Jared Smith, newly hired head of music David Marcus and company product engineers, the team developed an aggressive pricing strategy to make more money for artists by pricing tickets closer to what they would sell for on the secondary markets.
After piloting the program with Jay-Z in early 2018, Ticketmaster began implementing its new pricing strategy for Swift’s Reputation Tour later that year. Compared to the 1989 tour, the Reputation Tour average ticket price was only about 10% more, but the best seats in the venue were priced significantly higher than in past years, thanks to new Ticketmaster tools that allowed it to optimize a venue’s seat map on a seat-by-seat basis. Ticketmaster also created a fan identification tool for Swift called SwiftTix, which had fans register in advance for an opportunity to buy tickets during the show’s presale, with their place in line partially boosted by purchasing fan merch and posting about the Reputation tour online. Today, the pricing strategy Swift used has become a staple of how most major tours are priced to capture more profit for artists, while advance registration has become a staple of most high-demand shows. For the Eras tour, for example, fans who register in advance get first crack at tickets while those held onto tickets for Swift’s canceled 2020 Lover Fest shows received even higher priority access for the Nov. 16 onsale.
Swift initially faced massive backlash over higher-than-expected ticket prices for the Reputation Tour, as well as criticism that SwiftTix was a money grab at the expense of fans. She was excoriated in the press, bashed on Twitter and targeted by ticket brokers for allegedly ruining her career. Not long after tickets went on sale, Gary Adler, executive director of the North American Ticket Brokers association penned a piece called “Why Taylor Swift’s Reputation Tour Is a Total Disaster” saying Swift’s sales scheme was the “best example of how not to sell tickets to a large tour.”
Adler could not have been more wrong. By avoiding the urge to price tickets so that they would immediately sell out, Swift’s long game, higher priced approach brought in $345.7 million, making it one of the highest grossing tours of all time.
When Swift’s tickets go on sale next week, millions of fans will be waiting for a confirmation email to notify them when it is their turn to buy tickets and fans will collectively spend hundreds of millions of dollars buying up seats. Based on the size of the tour, the popularity of Swift and the five years since Reputation, some fans will not be able to get the seats they want or will not pay the asking price, either because they can’t afford it or because they do not think it’s worth the money.
Again, angry fans will go on Twitter to complain about soaring prices, rage at Ticketmaster and lament about how things used to be, when tickets cost less — and, as they’re likely to forget, when scalpers bought them up in a frenzy. And they can thank their favorite “Anti-Hero,” Swift, for helping to develop a ticketing model that shifted more money into the pockets of artists, instead of scalpers — raising upfront prices for fans in the process. Whether that’s a solution or a new problem altogether, those who do buy tickets are likely to be applauding next year anyway when she sings, “It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.”
For months, industry executives from Warner Music Group to Kobalt have been steadily beating a drum for investing in the Middle East and African markets.
On Thursday (Nov. 3), it it looked like the investor interest swirling around the region may be codified when Frankly magazine reported that Spotify was considering buying Anghami, the Arab-speaking world’s most popular streaming and content service. Billboard could not independently verify the report, however, and a source close to the situation refuted its contents. A Spotify spokesperson says the company has “no news to report regarding any potential acquisition.” Still, investment bankers say we are likely to see increasing investor interest and action around music assets in these markets, as song catalog prices remain elevated and the challenging macroeconomic outlook for North America and Europe slows down the pace of dealmaking there.
Financial players say that the dominant music streaming platforms and labels are looking to extend their global reach through popular streaming companies like Anghami in the Middle East and Boomplay and others in Africa because of those regions’ rapid growth, comparatively positive economic outlooks and the explosive potential for converting free subscribers to paid.
Anghami CEO and co-founder Eddy Maroun declined to comment on the acqusition reports out Thursday, but in a late-September interview Maroun confirmed the company has been approached by interested parties in the past.
“We believe what we are on to as an opportunity is big,” Maroun told Billboard at the time. “Until now we are independent, and we wish to remain independent as long as it’s in line with our company goals.”
The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) was the fastest-growing region globally last year, with revenues up 35% to $89.5 million and a market that nearly doubled between 2019 and 2021, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI). More than 95% of MENA revenues came from streaming, and paid subscribership is expected to double by 2030.
“This sends a very big message to every industry player that this is a hot region and that this is where growth is,” Maroun said in September.
Launched in 2012, Anghami is the first and most popular streaming and content company focused on Arabic-language music, with about 58% of the Middle East’s market share and around 20 million active users, according to company filings.
With investors including the Saudi Arabia-backed firm MBC Group and Middle East Venture Partners and partner Sony Music Entertainment Middle East, with whom Anghami launched a joint venture record label last year, Maroun and co-founder took Anghami public in February.
After listing on the NASDAQ through a reverse merger with a special purpose acquisition company, Anghami stocks have fallen nearly 75% to $2.56 on the NASDAQ as of Thursday. Meanwhile, the company reported first-half 2022 revenues increased by almost 30% and monthly paid subscribers rose by 41% to 1.28 million. Bank sources described that growth as “encouraging,” and say that Anghami’s low stock price could make it an appealing acquisition for companies like Spotify.
For its part, Anghami aims to diversify its business with an entertainment division that houses a content creation studio, runs Anghami’s record label, Vibe Music Arabia, and operates a chain of music venues and lounges, the first of which recently opened in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
In addition to MENA, music and streaming companies in Sub-Saharan Africa, where music revenues grew by 9.6% last year, are steadily gaining big industry investors.
Major labels like Sony Music Group are adding staff to local offices in West Africa — where Sony previously had just two people — and Warner Music Group is leaning further into their strategy to acquire record labels and distribution companies in Africa, one of five priorities it pitched to investors during their 2020 IPO roadshow, say bankers familiar with the matter.
“French copyrights and Latin American copyrights became popular a little earlier,” says Michael Ryan-Southern, Goldman Sachs’ global head of music and live entertainment investment banking. “Now we’re seeing more and more music coming out of these local territories and therefore [companies] need to invest to make sure they are capturing that funnel of new artists locally to exploit globally.”
In its most recent Music In the Air report, Goldman Sachs analysts said Africa presents “a significant opportunity over time” and specifically highlighted Boomplay, one of the leading music streaming services, with 60 million monthly active users and a rapidly expanding song catalog.
Sources say streaming services and other companies that provide infrastructure for music are currently more appealing investment opportunities than catalogs by popular artists in the region because investors fear those are less mature assets with unknown decay rates.
Executives from Warner Music Group, Reservoir Media, Primary Wave, Kobalt and others have called out Africa and the MENA region in their emerging markets growth strategies in recent months.
U.S.-based Reservoir Media is one of the most vocal companies about the opportunity it sees in the Middle East and Africa. With its partner, the United Arab Emirates-based independent music company PopArabia, Reservoir recently bought the Egyptian label 100COPIES, the Lebanese label and music publisher Voice of Beirut, and signed publishing deals with Egyptian rapper and singer Mohamed Ramadan, Lebanese indie singer songwriter Zeid Hamdan and Moroccan hip-hop star 7liwa.
On a recent call with investors to discuss Reservoir’s earnings, the company’s founder and chief executive Golnar Khosrowshahi said emerging markets investments are a key part of the company’s diversification strategy.
“The thing about the emerging markets is that we could do high-volume deals, but at significantly lower price tags than what we do in Europe … North America, etcetera.,” Khosrowshahi said.
Outgoing Warner Music Group CEO Stephen Cooper said in September that Warner’s share in the Africa and MENA markets has grown from 10% to 30% in recent years through partnerships with record labels and distribution companies, and it aims to continuing investing in the region.
“Great content, great entertainers, great storytelling is starting to transcend language, and there’s a recognition that the next global chart-topping songwriter can come from anywhere in the world,” says Aaron Siegel, Goldman Sachs global head of entertainment investment banking. “That is a theme that major labels and publishing companies are willing to bet on.”
Live Nation set records for concert revenue and ticket sales in the third quarter of 2022 as the touring industry continued its recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. Third-quarter revenues were $6.2 billion, 66.8% greater than the same period in 2019, while adjusted operating income increased 45% to $621 million, the company announced Thursday (Nov. 3).
“Fans around the world continue prioritizing their spend on live events, particularly concerts,” said president and CEO Michael Rapino in a statement. “Despite varying economic headwinds including inflation, we have not seen any pullback in demand, as on-sales, on-site spending, advertising and all other operating metrics continue showing strong year-on-year growth.”
The concerts division tallied its highest-ever quarterly attendance with 44 million fans at 11,000 events that generated $5 billion of revenue and $281 million of adjusted operating income (AOI), up 67% and 44%, respectively, from the same period in 2019. Demand was strong across all types of venues and markets. Stadium attendance tripled to almost 9 million as many top artists, including Bad Bunny (the highest grossing Latin tour in Boxscore history), Red Hot Chili Peppers and The Weeknd, took advantage of strong fan demand by performing the larger venues.
Ticketmaster also had a record-breaking quarter by delivering its highest fee-bearing gross transacted value of $7.3 Billion, a 62% increase from the same period in 2019. Ticketing revenue was $343 million, up 96.7% year-over-year and 36.8% greater than the same period in 2019. Ticketing’s AOI of $163.2 million was 5% lower year-over-year but 28.2% above the third quarter of 2019.
Ticketmaster has made headlines because some artists — namely Bruce Springsteen and Blink-182 — opted for dynamic pricing that charged more for the best seats. The practice may frustrate some fans, but Live Nation expects to transfer over $550 million to artists through higher primary ticket prices — value that might otherwise have been captured on the secondary ticketing market.
Sponsorship and advertising revenue was up 59.4% to $343 million on the strength of Live Nation’s festivals and Ticketmaster platform integration. The high-margin segment’s AOI of $226.2 million was 103.4% better year-over-year and 69.8% higher than the same period in 2019. Confirmed sponsorship revenue for 2023 is up 30% over the same period a year ago.
Through September, ancillary fan spending at U.S. amphitheaters was up 30%. “The consistent theme is that fans are eager to enhance their experience, as we continue elevating our hospitality operations and provide more premium options,” said Rapino.
Looking ahead, the busy touring season will continue into 2023 and consumer demand appears to be holding strong despite widespread fears of an upcoming recession and tightening budgets due to persistent inflation. “Ticket sales for shows in 2023 are pacing even stronger than they were heading into 2022, up double-digits year-over-year, excluding sales from rescheduled shows,” said Rapino. Through the third quarter, Ticketmaster sold over 115 million, up 37% from the same period in 2019.
Live Nation’s share price rose 4.6% to $79.90 in after-hours trading on Thursday following the earnings release.
Financial metrics
Total revenue: $6.2 billion, up 63.TK% from 2019
Adjusted operating income: $621 million, up 45% from 2019
Concert revenue: $5.29 billion, up 66.8% from 2019
Ticketing revenue: $531.6 million, up 36.8% from 2019
Sponsorship and advertising: $343 million, up 59.4% from 2019
Fan metrics
North America concerts; 8,261, up 14% from 2019
International concerts: 2,958, up 57.4% from 2019
North American fans: 29.1 million, up 27.7% from 2019
International fans: 15.2 million, up 71.9% from 2019
Fee-bearing tickets: 73.4 million, up 32.7% from 2019
For evidence that California’s Prop 28 — which seeks to provide nearly $1 billion in new funding annually for arts and music education in all K-12 public schools — has become a pet cause among music luminaries, one need look no further than the industry’s most famous structure. The Capitol Tower in Hollywood, whose cylindrical shape has long drawn comparisons to a stack of records, currently has a “Yes on 28” flag flying prominently from its roof.
Universal Music Group, which owns the famed building and has given $25,000 to support the measure, isn’t the only high-profile supporter of Prop 28, which voters will weigh in on Nov. 8. Authored by former Los Angeles Unified School District superintendent Austin Beutner, the proposition has been endorsed by more than 350 individuals and organizations, including companies like Fender Music and CAA; legendary executives such as Quincy Jones and Irving Azoff; and A-list artists like Dr. Dre, will.i.am, Lil Baby and Katy Perry. In mid-October, Christina Aguilera and her fiancé Matthew Rutler (investor and founding executive of MasterClass) hosted an event at their home in support of the proposition that featured performances by musicians Lady Bri, One Republic’s Tim Myers and Aloe Blacc.
So why has the music industry, which Prop 28 does not directly support, come out to endorse it so heavily? As advocates put it, the money invested in students now will benefit the music business down the road.
“The most important beneficiaries are the kids themselves,” says Andy Mooney, CEO of Fender Music, which provided $100,000 in seed money for the proposition and donated another $1 million to collect signatures and market the proposition. But, he adds, “the benefit for companies like ourselves, or anybody who’s in the music and arts business in California, is the long-term investment that may yield dividends beyond my tenure.”
Currently, according to proposition authors, “barely one in five public schools has a full time arts or music teacher” and “arts and music programs have often been the first to get cut” at California public schools – a problem Prop 28 is designed to fix. The money allocated by the measure – which must be spent on arts and music education such as teachers, supplies, arts partnerships, training and materials – would include accountability and require schools to publish annual reports on how they spend funds, including specific programs and how students benefited.
Important in garnering support from voters is the fact that Prop 28 “is not taking any money away from existing school funding,” says Beutner, who retired as superintendent last year and has spent his newfound free time focusing on the measure. The money provided by Prop 28 would be 1% of the California school funding budget, which is currently 40% of the state’s general fund. But instead of siphoning that 1% from other school needs, it increases the school budget from 40% to 40.4% of the state’s general fund. Based on the current year, that would amount to $950 million – 1% of the state’s $95 billion school budget.
Also important to many supporters is the fact that Prop 28 offers a route to diversify the creative sector. While all 6 million public school students in California would have access to the new funding proposed by the measure – which will come from the state’s general fund without raising taxes – 30% would go to schools based on their share of low-income students enrolled statewide (with the remaining 70% going to schools based on their share of statewide enrollment).
UMG’s chief people and inclusion officer and co-chair of the Taskforce for Meaningful Change Eric Hutcherson, who says this is the first proposition UMG has officially gotten behind as a company, notes that by exposing more kids to music education, the new funding will inevitably inspire future leaders in a variety of music industry roles that go beyond just being an artist or producer. “What you find is that these industries have all of those opportunities available,” he says.
Entertainment veteran Tim Sexton, who executive produced the Emmy-winning Live 8 benefit concert and has been working with Beutner to drum up artist support, adds that for media companies “worried about diversity, equity and inclusion, you don’t need to look further than our public schools to see that’s the population looks like that’s what the workforce ought to look like.”
The proposition would ideally be investing nearly $1 billion into California’s creative economy as well. According to Bloomberg, the state of California is on the verge of becoming the fourth largest economy in the world by overtaking Germany and, according to a study conducted by Otis College of Art and Design, nearly a quarter of the state’s economy comes from the entertainment sector.
“Companies like ours, that moved to California to be at the nexus of entertainment and technology, rely on a skilled workforce to fill the high-quality jobs we create here,” said Universal Music Group chairman and CEO Sir Lucian Grainge in release in April. “If enacted, this initiative will ensure a future job-ready workforce and secure California’s position as the global epicenter of music and the arts.”
Informal opposition to the measure argues that the increased usage of general funds should be used to address other issues like homelessness or paying down state debt, but the Official Voter Information Guide for California residents – which provides arguments in favor and against each proposition – states that “no argument against Proposition 28 was submitted.”
“I’m not a ballot initiative expert, but I have asked some and no one can recall the last time [an argument against wasn’t submitted,” says Beutner. “It’s truly a unicorn.”
The impact of Prop 28 could be felt far wider than California. If the initiative is successful this election cycle, supporters say they would be interested in taking tailored versions of Prop 28 to other states.
“The money that we spent in support of this initiative is one of the best investments the company has ever made for the future,” says Mooney. “We can replicate that investment in other states where music and art is also really important. Think of Tennessee or Florida with Miami, which is the heart of Latin music in the U.S. these days. There’s a lot of opportunities.”
Just minutes after nominations to the 2022 Latin Grammy Awards were announced in September, Manuel Abud called all of the nominees in the best new artist category.
“One of our nominees was at school,” the Latin Recording Academy CEO says, referring to 15-year-old Yahritza Martinez, frontwoman of sierreño trio Yahritza y Su Esencia. “She stepped out to take my call and then went back to class.”
Artists don’t usually learn about their nominations in a personal call from the academy’s CEO. But Abud — who stepped into the new role in 2021, succeeding longtime president/CEO Gabriel Abaroa Jr. after 18 years — says a top priority is making the academy more accessible to the Latin music community. The goal is more participation and greater representation across what Abud calls the “four Gs”: geography, genre, gender and generation.
“Those four Gs need to be adequately represented in my membership, in my staff, in everything that we do,” he says.
Abud’s background is in TV, not music. He came to the academy as COO in 2019 after five years as president/CEO of Azteca America and was elevated to CEO at a time when the academy was under scrutiny, criticized by the reggaetón and regional Mexican artistic communities for lack of inclusion in the main categories. In response to that criticism — which included a Latin Grammys boycott by artists such as J Balvin in 2019 — the best reggaetón performance and best rap/hip-hop song categories were created for the 2020 edition. But to date, regional Mexican music has remained largely left out.
“It’s not something you can change in a day,” says Abud. “There’s only so much we can do as the academy to expose the different genres to the membership,” he says. “[But] I’ve been meeting with the regional Mexican community. I’ve invited them to be more active in the meetings, making surethey understand how to get involved. We need to evolve the artists to be more participant and the membership to be more receptive.”
While change doesn’t happen overnight, Abud is launching new initiatives. The Latin Grammy Acoustic Sessions is a globally minded series of concerts that have included performances by artists such as El Fantasma, Becky G and Giulia Be and taken place in Mexico, Brazil and Spain ahead of the Latin Grammy ceremony on Nov. 17. Notably, the Mexican show featured exclusively regional Mexican acts. “These Acoustic Sessions, which represent the four Gs, are a first step to make sure we’re getting closer to every community.”
As one of the four Gs is “generation,” Abud has beefed up the digital side of the academy to reach Facebook and TikTok users. “My responsibility is to get our celebration to as many people as possible. Of course, we love our partnership with Univision, but it is a bigger picture now and we want to be everywhere.”
Also, Abud and his team are spotlighting the best new artist nominees with a first-ever showcase event during Latin Grammys week. “This year, there’s importance of nurturing future talent. You’ll see some of that in the actual ceremony, but I’m also very excited that we’ll be able to provide a platform to all nominees for best new artists.
This story will appear in the Nov. 5, 2022, issue of Billboard.
When Alessandra Alarcón was named president of SBS’ entertainment division in 2019, she became, at 31 years old, the first woman to ever lead the Latin media company’s very lucrative live events division.
“We have a sweet little nickname at corporate for my division,” she says with a laugh. “They call us the ‘profit center.’”
“The profit center,” as Alarcón calls it, puts together SBS Entertainment’s many highly regarded and successful music events, including Los Angeles’ Calibash, the urban fest that takes place every January. In the three years since Alarcón took over, Calibash has gradually pared down the number of acts and emerged with a more star-studded lineup. “I thought the audience would be okay, because I would be okay with there being less acts but more quality sets. And I’m happy to report that I was right,” she says.
Garnering success was especially important for Alarcón given that she’s the granddaughter of SBS founder Pablo Raúl Alarcón and one of the daughters of SBS Chairman Raúl Alarcón.
In this episode of the Billboard podcast “Latin Hitmaker,” Alarcón, in her first in-depth interview since being appointed to her post, spoke about the importance of legacy, the new U.S. Latin market and balancing work and motherhood. Below you can find some highlights from the conversation.
On bringing a bilingual, bicultural perspective to a Spanish-language media company: “It gives me a very unique perspective on business and how business is done. There are a lot of deep relationships [in Latin] and there’s a certain way of thinking of how things have to get done, because that’s the way it was always done. And I think that being born in L.A., and then [living] in New York and raised in Miami […] and having that more bicultural view of business and how things get done has certainly helped me accomplish a lot of things and not getting lost in the noise, which sometimes happens.”
On her negotiating style: “I’m definitely more of a velvet hammer. This is a very male-dominated industry. Women are making strides, but it is a very male-dominated industry. There’s a time and a place to be tough, but I always like to come in, hearing someone out, making them feel heard and respected. But certainly there’s a hammer that has to come down every once in a while.”
On work advice from her dad: Raúl Alarcón always imparted on his daughter the importance of being respectful to others. “He said, ‘There’s nothing worse than having an enemy that works for you. The solution is going to come to you, but you’re not going to get it by berating someone or making them feel bad about themselves.’”
On balancing work with her six and four-year-old children: “This [is a] piece of advice I got from my aunt. She worked and she had two children and she said: ‘You can have it all, just not at the same time.’”
On her advice to those new in the business: “The obstacle is the way. There is a way through anything. There’s a solution to every problem. It might not be the exact thing that you want, and that’s where the humbling and the flexibility comes in. You know, you have to be limber and ready to adapt because if you don’t adapt, you die. You have to pivot.”
Listen to the full episode of Latin Hitmaker here: