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After dipping her toes in the Los Angeles fashion industry as a merchandiser and “not really feeling it,” veteran music publicist Romina Magorno discovered her passion for public relations when she got her first big break at D Baron Media in 2006.
“I took the gig as an assistant at a 30K pay cut, which was insane, but it was in my gut. Something told me I was made to be in public relations,” says Magorno, who credits D Baron Media founder and CEO Diana Baron as the mentor who taught her how to be a true, traditional publicist.
At the agency, Magorno worked on projects like Los Lonely Boys, JoJo, Leann Rimes and All-American Rejects, to name a few. She relocated to Miami in 2010, where she worked at Nevarez Communications and tackled her first Latin projects, including Daddy Yankee, Chyno y Nacho, Elvis Crespo and Amelia Vega. Two years later, in September 2012, she decided to launch her own public relations agency.
“I realized that in order for me to really solidify myself in this space (Latin at that time), I needed to branch out on my own,” she explains. “I was also about to have a baby and wanted more flexibility with my time.”
Magorno now spearheads her own boutique public relations and marketing firm, Imagine It Media, with a foundation in music, entertainment and communications strategy for the U.S. Latin crossover markets, Mexico and Latin America. The Miami-based agency also specializes in talent wrangling, strategic brand partnerships and event media management.
In the past 10 years, Imagine It helmed major projects for Camila Cabello, The Spongebob Movie soundtrack, Justin Quiles and LMFAO’s Sky Blu, among others. Currently, the company’s roster includes Anitta, Tainy, Farruko, Myke Towers, Piso 21, Jorge Drexler, Steve Aoki, C. Tangana, Yahritza y Su Esencia and newcomer Un León Marinero, to name a few, as well as corporate clients NEON16, Sony Music Latin and NTERTAIN.
Below, learn more about Magorno and her agency.
What were some initial challenges when you first opened?
The credibility. I had shifted markets and did not really have super solid relationships and I found bookers, producers and journalists had their favorites and it was a challenge for sure. But I persevered and eventually, the phone calls and emails were answered. I am a people person, it’s hard to say no to this face. Ha! JK.
In your 16-year career, how do you keep motivated with your business?
Breaking new talent. Giving them my platform to really break into the market. Nowadays with streaming, it’s just so amazing to have an endless jukebox of artists and music to discover. For example, the Latin folk music movement is really making noise and having a revival. We most recently signed an indie artist from Mexico, Un León Marinero, who is in this space. He is an incredible songwriter and musician and I am so excited to show the world his talent. You have to check out his music.
What drives you to want to work with an artist?
There are many components to this question. Talent, of course, but also that I really connect with the person behind the music. It is something that is very important to me. Another component when I started my own thing, what drove me then, was to retain one big client so that I would have leverage on my hands. Having big artists means a lot of the opportunities are incoming, and although that is wonderful, what really drives me is moving things and opening doors for the up and comers. I have artists that have been with me for many years and at the beginning, media would shut the doors over and over again. Eventually, the doors opened and the feeling of accomplishment for me is so rewarding.
Who do you turn to for business advice or who has taught you the most about the business?
It’s always good to have a few people you can go to. My fellow PR colleagues Kary An Diaz and Nini Veras have been solid when it comes to advice on work-related things. But there are two people who have helped me see things clearly and supported me on so many facets, Ivelisse Malave and Lex Borrero. These executives have always been my cheerleaders and I am so thankful to have them in my life and to get to work together on projects.
What’s the most crucial advice you can offer to up-and-coming publicists?
Focus. Stay behind the scenes. Work with integrity and really learn to not only offer PR services but also to know and understand strategy. I see so many of the new schools of publicists who have no real understanding of what it is to sit and build a strategy. This is something I wish I would have learned a lot earlier on in my career, but things were a lot different then too.
For months, South Korean politicians have been scrambling to find a solution to the forced breakup of BTS, the biggest cultural export their country has known over the last several decades.
On Monday (Oct. 17), the boy band’s label Big Hit Music, a subsidiary of HYBE, appeared to put an end to the handwringing, saying that each of the BTS members would, in fact, serve their mandatory military service. That means, before long — Jin turns 30 in December — the group will not be able to perform with its full seven-member lineup until 2025.
While the timing will vary for the members — Jin, RM, J-Hope, Suga, Jimin, V and Jungkook — based on their age, the departures will create yet another challenge for Seoul-based HYBE. The company, which went public on the South Korean Stock Exchange in October of 2020, has been working to diversify its roster and silence financial analysts who said the company had the look of a one-hit wonder with BTS, the act that has landed six No. 1 songs on the Billboard Hot 100.
HYBE had already been dealing with the stress put on the company by the act’s joint announcement in June that it was taking an undetermined break from group activities to pursue solo projects. But no amount of lobbying by politicians or HYBE itself has helped BTS avoid the responsibilities that all able-bodied South Korean males from 18 to 28 have to serve at least 18 months in the military, though the length of service may vary. In December of 2020, the South Korean National Assembly passed the so-called “BTS law” to allow K-pop entertainers to postpone required service until the age of 30 with a recommendation from the culture minister.
For now, the market seems to have priced in the reality that either through military service or their own desire to work on their solo careers, this version of BTS would not be able to stay together for much longer.
HYBE’s stock, traded on South Korea’s stock exchange, fell 2.54% to 115,000 won ($80.40) on Monday, with other K-pop companies’ stocks staying within 1% of their Friday closing price.
Mandatory military service issue has been a divisive issue in South Korea in recent years as K-pop’s popularity has grown worldwide. While many, including some lawmakers, say the musicians’ contribution to the country’s global recognition should qualify them for an exemption, others that include the defense ministry have opposed the move.
In a country that has superpower neighbors such as China and Russia, as well as a saber-rattling North Korea, many South Koreans believe that the military requirement serves as a social equalizer. And attempts to avoid mandatory service have suspended or derailed the careers of several entertainers and other public figures. Boy bands such as 2 PM and Bigbang have significantly limited their public appearances or paused group activities after its members entered the military.
Jin, the group’s eldest member, turns 30 in December and is expected to start his military service by the end of the year if no sudden amendments are made to the country’s compulsory draft legislation. Jungkook, the youngest member, is 25 years old.
For HYBE, the big question remains: Has the company done enough to diversify its artist roster to account for a potential drop in revenues from a less-active BTS. Since acquiring Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings in April 2021, the share of HYBE’s revenue BTS accounts for, which was 85% in 2020, has fallen to about 60% in 2021, according to one analyst estimate.
Bernie Cho, owner of Seoul-based DFSB Kollective artists and label services agency, says HYBE “has silenced naysayers by rolling out a deep K-pop artists roster that goes beyond BTS,” including new acts Seventeen, TXT and ENHYPEN. Combined, the three groups, which debuted in 2021, accounted for 7.7 million album unit sales — more than half of HYBE’s 2021 total K-pop album sales worldwide, according to company filings. And this year, two girl bands – Le Sserafim and NewJeans – have joined their male labelmates as “some of the best-selling artists of the year,” Cho says.
Nevertheless, earlier this month, NH Investment & Securities, one of South Korea’s largest securities firms, lowered its target stock price for HYBE by 19% to 250,000 won ($177) citing a “delay in growth even after acquiring Ithaca Holdings.”
BTS fuels tremendous merchandise sales in Korea, along with physical CDs and is essentially the flagship act for a growing global K-pop industry. Attention around BTS helps generate some $3.54 billion in visits from foreigners and exports of consumer goods like clothes, makeup and food, according to the Hyundai Research Institute. One Korean politician, Sung-Il-jong of the ruling People Power Party, has estimated that a No. 1 song on the Billboard charts can create a halo effect that generates an economic boom of $1.38 billion for the South Korean economy.
Twelve full months of revenue from HYBE America — which houses artist management and Big Machine Label Group, which manages top international acts like Justin Bieber — are expected to further strengthen HYBE’s income statement.
The company also will try to cobble together BTS-like sales and streams from BTS solo projects. In July, J-Hope was the first to release solo material with the album Jack in the Box, which featured singles “MORE” and “Arson.”
The members, for their part, seem to want to try to stay together as BTS. At a special free concert on Saturday in Busan, South Korea, where 55,000 fans attended, Jin teased a solo project as the members pledged to carry on group activities well into their careers. “We will continue for 30 years,” Jimin said, “and even perform when we are 70 years old.”
But it was J-Hope, the first to open up about the group’s future, who seemed to signal that military service was looming — and that the group could be entering a challenging period. “I think we’re in a phase where we need your trust,” he said.
Additional reporting by Jeyup S. Kwaaak
Burt Goldstein, a colorful music industry character and executive who headed up two music retailing operations and three independent distribution companies across his more than three-decade career, died peacefully in his sleep at his home in Albuquerque, NM on Oct. 9. on, his birthday. He was 73.
Goldstein’s career spanned from the early 1970s, when he opened his first Musical Maze store in Manhattan, to the 1980s, when he served as the top music retail executive for the Crazy Eddie appliance retail chain. Later that decade, he pivoted to indie distribution — first with his own company Impact Distribution, opened in 1988; then by heading up Profile Records’ Landmark Distributors. He later started his own distribution company Big Daddy in 1996, which he sold in 2007 to Music Video Distributors (MVD). Along the way he mentored a number of executives who went on to music industry careers of their own.
While Goldstein could be a hard-nosed business executive and a tough negotiator — as the major label executives who had to deal with him during the 1980s when he oversaw the Crazy Eddie music department can attest — he was also known for having plenty of fun along the way, often in a tongue-in-cheek manner, former colleagues recall. In fact, when he became a distributor, he would often begin sales calls by performing a magic trick, testifies his Big Daddy partner Doug Bail, who also worked with him at Benel Distributors.
In fact, at one NARM convention (now called Music Biz), Goldstein cornered the keynote speaker —Google’s then-head of new business development Chris Sacca — and pointed out that Goldstein’s shoes had a multi-color weave containing all of Google’s corporate colors. He then proceeded to try and talk Sacca into buying thousands of pairs of shoes for all of Google’s employees. At another NARM convention, Goldstein got in trouble with the trade organization by breaking the rules and selling CDs on display at the Big Daddy’s trade booth. But Goldstein was donating all the sales to Bob Benjamin’s Light Of Day charity and wouldn’t be deterred. After they shut him down the first time, he continued to sell the CDs before being stopped once again.
Harry Spero, who nowadays heads up his own ad agency, Spero Media, recalls his days working alongside Goldstein at Crazy Eddie, where he experienced both sides of Goldstein — the hard-nosed businessman and his omnipresent joy-of-life attitude. “One week, he would have a war with CBS until he got what he wanted, then the next week he would have a war with WEA, followed the next week with PolyGram. He was always at war with one of the labels.”
Jay Rosenberg, who also worked at Crazy Eddie, echoes Spero, remembering that during his days at the chain, “We had epic battles with the labels.” Rich Masio, who worked at Big Daddy, quoted two Goldstein sayings that displayed the executive’s take no prisoner’s style — “You eat what you kill” and “Good luck to you, my friend and the horse you rode in on” — the latter of which would be inscribed on the Big Daddy company t-shirt. The first saying was to remind the sales team to keep selling, and the second was for when he was done with you, Masio explains.
Goldstein was born in 1949 and grew up in Brooklyn, graduating from Long Island University in 1971 with a B.S. in Sociology. But while going to school, he began working at the Uni Sonic record store across the street from the LIU Brooklyn campus. After graduating, he stayed on to manage the store, thus launching his music industry career. By 1973, he moved on and opened his first Musical Maze in the Gramercy Park area of Manhattan, around the corner from Baruch College and the School of Visual Arts. In 2006, Goldstein told MusicMorselsonline.com that by age 15 he knew he was going to open a record store.
The Musical Maze enterprise would soon grow to four stores and a pop-up store or two. Along the way, the original Musical Maze, located between 23rd Street and 22nd Street on Third Avenue, seemed to employ a who’s-who from the downtown New York music scene of Max’s Kansas City and CBGB’s. At one time or another, Musical Maze staffers included George Scott from James Chance and the Contortions, Peter Holsapple from The dB’s, Jimi “Quidd” Hatzidimitriou from the Dots, Ed Ryan from The Rudies and, very briefly, Lance Loud from the Mumps as well as Drew Wheeler, a New York Rocker contributor and future Billboard copy editor.
During his Musical Maze days, Goldstein married his girlfriend Jan DeGeer Goldstein, who worked with him at the small indie chain, on March 2, 1984, in Las Vegas, according to an item in Billboard‘s “Lifelines” column. In addition to being his partner in life, DeGeer Goldstein also worked with him during the Crazy Eddie days and later on at Big Daddy.
The local Musical Maze chain would continue on even as Goldstein began his next retailing adventure in 1979, running the music sections for the then-rapidly growing Crazy Eddie electronics chain, whose commercials were infamous for using a fast-talking DJ Jerry Carroll as the chain’s pitchman, touting the stores “insane prices.”
Goldstein actually worked for the Crazy Eddie chain’s sister company Benel Distributors — also known as the Record and Tape Asylum, an operation that supplied and operated the music presence in the chain’s 43 stores — at its peak. At Benel, Goldstein held the title of executive vp, and was the key person negotiating with the major record labels on marketing dollars and promotional campaigns for new releases.
While there, Goldstein hired Rosenberg as a buyer for the chain, and within a couple of years Rosenberg became head buyer. Rosenberg says Goldstein “helped shape my music industry career. I learned a lot from Burt on how to deal with labels and distribution.” In fact, Goldstein, in his own inimitable way, would often remind Rosenberg of that. As Rosenberg recalls — and posted on his Facebook page — “Burt used to tell people, ‘I taught Jay everything he knows, but not everything I know.’”
After Crazy Eddie imploded in the late 1980s due to financial trouble detailed in a recently issued book on the chain and its owner Eddie Antar, Goldstein’s career went in a different direction when he opened up an indie music distribution operation, Impact Distribution, in Chicago in 1988. That would launch the next phase of his career. Soon, he was also working with Landmark, the distribution arm owned by the Profile Records principals, first opening a branch in Los Angeles while maintaining the Impact branch in Chicago. In 1991, Impact was merged under the Landmark banner and, in the process, stood at the forefront of a trend that would sweep the indie music sector: the end of regional distribution networks for indie labels and the move to national distribution.
Still, Orchard senior vp of product development Alan Becker remembers Goldstein more for his retail days. “Burt was a very colorful guy and a throwback to the retail guys of a bygone era,” Becker says.
Landmark eventually blew up due to infighting between the two Profile principals, which indirectly evolved into an unsuccessful involuntary Chapter 11 filing against Landmark by three of its labels. That filing nevertheless spelled the end of Landmark, as it made the other Landmark-distributed labels and its retail account base skittish. In the aftermath, Goldstein started Big Daddy, his most successful distribution company. After merging Big Daddy into MVD in 2007, Goldstein retired from the music industry.
Larry Germack, who worked at Big Daddy, recalls his days on Goldstein’s staff. “He was a great record man; the headmaster of the old school record business, who pressed the flesh to the end, ” Germack says. “I am really saddened by his passing. Burt’s personality and verve were strong. He was an entertainer, had a good vibe about him; and he was one-of-a kind in the true sense of the word.”
On his last day, the Goldstein family and friends went out to dinner at a restaurant to celebrate his birthday. Some of his former staffers recalled that on his birthday, it was Goldstein’s way to encourage a roomful of strangers to sing “Happy Birthday” to him, leading them like a conductor. His friends wondered if that happened on his last night too.
In an e-mail informing friends of Goldstein’s passing, his wife Jan wrote that her husband “was happy…and often said he had such a great life.”
In addition to his wife, Goldstein is survived by his daughters, Ali and Jessie, and his brother Steve.
Inspired by his father-in-law’s example, Goldstein generously donated his body to the University of New Mexico School of Medicine. To make a charitable donation, visit UNMfund.org.
When Cardi B released her debut mixtape Gangsta Bitch Music Vol. 1 back in March 2016, she used an album cover that, ahem, grabbed plenty of attention.
The image featured the then-rising star taking a swig of a large beer, staring directly into the camera with her legs spread wide. Between them, she was holding a man’s head in her hands, while he appeared to perform oral sex on her.
The man in the image was a model who had consented to the photoshoot, but a massive tattoo on his back (a tiger battling a snake) wasn’t actually his. Unbeknownst to Cardi, a freelance graphic designer had typed “back tattoos” into Google Image, found one that fit, and photoshopped it onto the model’s body.
It apparently didn’t occur to him that he would need anyone’s approval to do so.
Six years later, Cardi will head to trial Tuesday in a civil lawsuit filed by Kevin Brophy, the California man whose tattoo was superimposed onto the Gangsta Bitch cover. The trial, expected to run about a week, will feature the star herself taking the witness stand. Fresh off winning a huge verdict against a blogger who told “disgusting lies” about her, Cardi will now find herself on the other side of the courtroom.
Seeking millions in damages, Brophy claims the superstar exploited his identity in a “humiliating and provocatively sexual way to launch her career.” But Cardi’s attorneys say those accusations are “sheer fantasy,” since nobody would have even been able to tell it was him. Brophy, they say, is “trying to cash in the legal equivalent of a lotto ticket.”
“Humiliated and Appalled”
In October 2017, Brophy filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles federal court against Cardi (real name Belcalis Almánzar), claiming that he had been “shocked, outraged, humiliated, and appalled” when friends notified him about the mixtape cover.
“He has had to face uncomfortable comments, questions, and ridicule, from community members and family,” Brophy’s lawyers wrote at the time. “His family dynamic has been adversely affected, and his work and professional life have been unalterably damaged by his having to explain this unconsented-to, offensive, and malicious use of his image.”
In technical terms, Brophy accused Cardi of two specific acts of wrongdoing: misappropriating his likeness for commercial benefit – violating what’s known as his “right of publicity” – and invasion of his privacy by casting him in a “false light” that was “highly offensive” to a reasonable person. The lawsuit asked for $5 million in damages.
In addition to naming Cardi herself as a defendant, the case also named her company, Washpoppin Inc., and KSR Group, the company owned by her former manager firm Klenord “Shaft” Raphael. The case notably did not name Timm Gooden, the designer who actually copy-and-pasted Brophy’s back tattoo onto the cover.
A “Transformative” Use?
Seeking to have the case tossed out without a trial, attorneys for Cardi argued (among other things) that the Gangsta Bitch cover made “transformative fair use” of Brophy’s likeness – a key defense that would have afforded them the protection of the First Amendment.
They claimed the designer used “only a very limited portion” of the original image as part of new, larger creative work, and had clearly not done so in any sort of effort to capitalize on Brophy’s identity.
But in December 2020, Judge Cormac J. Carney ruled that argument would need to be decided by a jury. He said there was no dispute that Gooden had made “some changes,” but also that “significant elements of plaintiff’s tattoo remain untouched in the final album cover.”
“A reasonable jury in this case could conclude that there are insufficient transformative or creative elements on the [album] cover to constitute a transformative use of Plaintiff’s tattoo,” the judge wrote at the time. “Most significantly, defining elements including the tiger and snake remain virtually unchanged.”
“It Is Not Him”
In addition to renewing that fair use argument, Cardi’s lawyers have plenty of other defenses they can try at the upcoming trial. Chief among them is that she and the other defendants simply did not use Brophy’s likeness at all, since nobody would have recognized a relatively unknown person based on a cropped image of his back tattoo.
“The tattoo design itself, as ‘priceless’ as it may be to plaintiff, subjectively speaking, was only used in an anonymous manner, as a single building block, one small peripheral element, in a complex picture and scenario in which Cardi B is the focus and central figure,” Cardi’s lawyers wrote in a brief earlier this year.
“No matter how much plaintiff may be obsessed with the notion, the fact remains that it is not ‘him,’ or a ‘likeness of him,’ or ‘his identity’ in the cover image,” they wrote. “It is simply a use of a small portion of a tattoo design, applied to the body of someone (young, Black, with hair) obviously not plaintiff (a middle-aged Caucasian with a shaved head).”
Lawyers for Brophy will try to counter that narrative. They plan to call witnesses, including both Brophy’s wife and the tattoo artist who inked him, to argue that the man was “immediately recognizable by the tattoo and that others recognized plaintiff’s likeness.” Brophy himself will take the witness stand to testify about discovering the image and the impact it had on him.
In addition to those witnesses and Cardi herself, other people taking the stand this week will likely include Gooden, the designer who created the image; Cardi’s former manager Klenord “Shaft” Raphael; and legal and business experts who can weigh in on the various issues in the case.
How Much Harm? The Money At Stake
If the jury holds Cardi and the other defendants liable on any of the claims they’re facing, jurors will then have choose how much to award Brophy in damages. His initial complaint asked for $5 million, but jurors will not simply award that; instead, they’ll wrangle with tough questions about how much he’s owed.
For starters, they’ll weigh how much emotional and reputational harm he’s suffered as a result of the wrongful use of his image. There’s no objective standard for such questions, and jurors can award what they believe is reasonable, leading to a wide range of potential outcomes based on how this week’s trial plays out.
On that front, Brophy says his “family life was negatively affected by stress and worry,” and that he was “devastated, humiliated and embarrassed” by his appearance on the cover. Cardi’s lawyers fire back such claims are “vastly overblown” and unsupported by any evidence, like proof that he or his family sought therapy or other treatment for their supposed mental injuries.
Jurors will also be tasked with trying to figure out how much profit from Gangsta Bitch Music Vol. 1 was directly linked to Brophy’s image, another source of potential damages. Earlier in the case, an expert witness provided by Brophy’s lawyers argued that all digital profits from Cardi’s mixtape (a total of $1.6 million) were fair game. But Judge Carney rejected that approach as “pure fantasy,” saying it did not appear that the image was the primary factor driving the mixtape’s revenue.
Separately, the jurors could also choose to award so-called punitive damages if they find the wrongdoing against Brophy to be particularly egregious, but that figure would be calculated in a future proceeding.
The Courtroom Fight Ahead
The trial, taking place at the U.S. federal courthouse in Santa Ana, will kick off with jury selection on Tuesday morning and is expected to run for four to five days. A verdict could be reached as early as Friday, but deliberations could stretch into next week.
Cardi and the other defendants will be represented by Jonathan Segal and other lawyers from the white-shoe firm Davis Wright Tremaine LLP, as well as by Lisa F. Moore of Moore Pequignot LLC, who represented Card in the defamation case in which she won the $4 million verdict earlier this year. For most of the case, Cardi was represented by attorney Alan G. Dowling, but Segal and Moore stepped in at the last minute when Dowling backed out of the case in August due to serious health problems.
Brophy will be represented by attorney A. Barry Cappello, Lawrence J. Conlan and Wendy Welkom from the law firm Cappello & Noel LLP.
Round Hill Music has signed a worldwide publishing administration agreement with Coheed and Cambria, the progressive rock band that has recorded 10 studio albums and generated 3.4 million album consumption units in the U.S., according to Luminate. The band, fronted by Claudio Sanchez, is signed to Round Hill Music via its Fund 3 Plus vehicle.
“We are pleased to welcome Claudio and the band to the Round Hill family,” the company’s head of creative services John Baldi said in a statement. “Our team is excited to explore creative outlets and opportunities for their music and provide support wherever we can on their current release, “Vaxis Act II.”
The latter album has generated 55,000 album consumption units worth of activity since its release in February this year.
“Our music is dramatic and cinematic,” Sanchez said in a statement. “We’ve been looking for a home that will facilitate getting Coheed and Cambria front and center in the sync world. The folks and Round Hill have a firm grasp of our vision and an added creativity that will help achieve or goals, and we couldn’t be more excited about taking this journey together.”
As real-life touring continues to be plagued by cancellations, Soulja Boy, Dillon Francis and Ozzy Osbourne are turning to virtual worlds. The Metaverse Music Festival returns on Nov. 10-13 for its second year in Decentraland — an immersive digital world built using blockchain technology and owned by its users — with more than 100 artists across 15 stages. The event will be free to attend and no crypto wallet is required to participate.
Set in a cyberpunk city of the future, Dillon Francis will open the festival with a “mega club” experience projected on several screens, while Soulja Boy will perform through a virtual avatar. The digital setting also allows for elaborate stage design. “The final [headline set] should look like a city from the future, abandoned for 100 years,” says Sam Hamilton, creative director at Decentraland Foundation.
Despite the metaverse backdrop, the team hopes to recreate a real-life festival experience, complete with atmospheric rain (every festival needs mud), custom dance moves called ‘emotes,’ pop-up nightclubs and even a virtual porta-potty experience.
“[We’re] trying to capture that chaos that happens at a real festival inside a digital world,” explains Hamilton.
The festival features a diverse lineup thanks to Decentraland’s global community picking many of the performers. “We’re curating the main stage,” says Iara Dias, head of the Metaverse Music Festival, “but we gave the rest of the stages to the community for curation.” As a result, the lineup also features Chinese idol group SNH48 and Japan’s J-pop group Atarashii Gakko!
“Rather than trying to be American-centric,” adds Hamilton, “We’re trying to give a cultural experience to everybody that they wouldn’t normally be able to have.”
More than 50,000 attendees logged into Decentraland to experience 2021’s inaugural event with performances from crypto-native artists including Deadmau5, 3LAU, RAC and Alison Wonderland. This year will also feature crypto favorites like CryptoPunk rapper Spottie Wifi and British DJ Akira the Don, but the foundation hopes that a roster of bigger names will expand the festival’s reach.
Virtual music performances have grown in popularity in recent years, partly due to COVID-19 lockdowns putting IRL concerts on hold. Travis Scott and Ariana Grande both played virtual concerts in Fortnite’s virtual gaming world, while MTV launched a Best Metaverse Performance category.
Decentraland, however, is different from corporate metaverses like Fortnite as it is owned and operated by its users through crypto technology. The land inside the world can be bought and traded by the community who then choose what to build. Wearables and digital items can be traded on the platform’s native marketplace.
“The big difference is philosophy,” says Hamilton. “We believe that the user should not be the product, but should own and direct the product.”
Decentraland’s community also helps make decisions through a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).
Despite last year’s metaverse hype, however, these virtual crypto worlds are not as popular as Fortnite, Roblox and others. As the tide goes out on the metaverse mania, Decentraland has approximately 60,000 monthly active users according to data provided by the foundation; a small number compared to the tens of millions of daily users on gaming worlds like Roblox.
“We’re working hard to catch up with the hype,” admits Hamilton. “We needed longer to build out a better platform with more features but the hype [of 2021] came too quickly.”
Last year’s festival brought in Decentraland’s biggest numbers of the year, and Hamilton believes this year’s event will bring another wave of new users to the platform. “The metaverse is inevitable,” he concludes. Zooming out, he envisions a network of virtual worlds, some centralized and some decentralized, but not necessarily dominated by one company or platform. “This is definitely happening.”
HarbourView Equity Partners has acquired the music publishing catalog of Incubus, the genre-bending rock band that has generated 12.4 million U.S. album consumption units since forming in 1991, according to Luminate. When non-U.S. sales are added in, the group has sold more than 23 million records, according to the announcement.
Terms of the deal, which also encompasses the individual works of group member Mike Einzigerl, were not disclosed but it includes such songs from the band as “Drive,” “Love Hurts,” and “Megalomaniac,” as well as Einzinger’s share of the Avicii hit, “Wake Me Up,” which he co-wrote. Besides Avicii, Einiger has collaborated with Pharrell Williams, Skrillex, and Tyler the Creator, among others, either as a songwriter and or producer.
Other deals HarbourView have done since launching a year ago include Sum 41, Brad Paisley, Lady A, Hollywood Undead, Florida Georgia Line, Luis Fonsi and R&B songwriting and production duo Dre & Vidal.
During the course of their career, Incubus has released eight studio albums and recorded over 100 songs.
Fox Rothschild served as legal counsel to HarbourView in the transaction. Incubus and Mike Einziger were represented by Todd Cooper and Monica Zhang of Greenberg Traurig, LLP. Incubus management is Johnny Wright and Joe Lilak for Wright Entertainment Group. Incubus business management is Bill Vuylsteke, CPA and David Boyson of Provident Financial Management. Mike Einziger is managed by Martin Kierszenbaum for Cherrytree Management.
Kanye West is offering to buy right-wing friendly social network Parler shortly after being booted off Twitter and Instagram for antisemitic posts.
Parlement Technologies, which owns the platform, and West, legally known as Ye, said the acquisition should be completed in the fourth quarter, but details like price were not revealed. Parlement Technologies said the agreement includes the use of private cloud services via Parlement’s private cloud and data center infrastructure.
Ye, was locked out of Twitter and Instagram a week ago over antisemitic posts that the social networks said violated their policies. In one post on Twitter, Ye said he would soon go “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE,” according to internet archive records, making an apparent reference to the U.S. defense readiness condition scale known as DEFCON.
Ye is no stranger to controversy, once suggesting slavery was a choice and calling the COVID-19 vaccine “the mark of the beast.” Earlier this month, he was criticized for wearing a “White Lives Matter” T-shirt to his collection at Paris Fashion Week.
The potential purchase of Parler would give Ye control of a social media platform and a new outlet for his opinions with no gatekeeper.
“In a world where conservative opinions are considered to be controversial we have to make sure we have the right to freely express ourselves,” Ye said in a prepared statement.
The acquisition could also breathe new life into Parler, which has struggled amid competition from other conservative-friendly platforms like Truth Social. Parler, which launched in August 2018, didn’t start picking up steam until 2020. But it was kicked offline following the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. A month after the attack, Parler announced a relaunch. It returned to Google Play last month.
“This deal will change the world, and change the way the world thinks about free speech,” Parlement Technologies CEO George Farmer said in a prepared statement.
Veteran Los Angeles concert promoters and talent buyers Brian Tarney and Liz Garo have joined forces to form Restless Presents, an indie promotion company that’s producing the upcoming Substance 2022 festival.
Previously produced by Tarney’s ticketing and marketing company Restless Nights and Live Nation, the annual celebration of dark rock, industrial, electronic post-punk will feature one of its strongest lineups to date, with performers including Jesus And Mary Chain, The Chameleons, Clock DVA, Cabaret Voltaire co-founder Steven Mallinder, electro-royalty ensemble Miss Kittin And The Hacker, Boy Harsher, Light Asylum, Youth Code, SEXTILE and Kontravoid. The festival is slated for Oct. 21 and 22 at the Los Angeles Theater.
Tarney and Garo have also launched a New York event called Flesh & Steel — a multi-venue, multi-date celebration taking place Dec. 1-3 and featuring Boy Harsher, A Split-Second, Psyche, Phase Fatale and more. Restless enlisted NYC artists David Castillo of Brooklyn venue Saint Vitus and DJ, promoter and journalist Andi Harriman of Synthicide to serve as creative directors for the New York event.
Tarney and Garo launched Restless Presents during the pandemic and have since booked shows for ADULT, Lingua Ignota, SEXTILE and Thee Sacred Souls. Substance is the company’s first festival, but both have produced the festival brand from its inception, going back to the launch of the Cloak and Dagger series for She Wants Revenge.
“I think one of the best things about these events is the broad, eclectic audience,” says Garo, who served as the lead talent buyer for Spaceland Presents for more than 20 years, booking the Echo and Regent Theater and concert series at the Getty Center, LA’s Natural History Museum and the Santa Monica Pier. (Spaceland was bought by Live Nation in 2019). Garo also co-founded and managed the long running Echo Park Rising series.
“There is such a broad age range at Substance. You’re definitely getting an older crowd that knows the classics but a young, healthy scene too that that’s pretty vibrant,” Garo adds. “People can come in and be who they want to be. It’s a very tight scene.”
The Los Angeles Theater in downtown LA’s Theater District was chosen as host venue because of its flexibility and eclectic layout, says Tarney, who hosted Substance at the venue in 2019 with headliner Gary Numan.
“It’s a blank slate and we built the whole thing from scratch. It’s got so many little weird rooms and nooks and crannies. We’re working really hard to activate all of them with buildouts including a marketplace and a record store,” says Tarney, a former booker at Spaceland and the creator of Restless Nites, an L.A. marketing agency and ticketing platform for independent promoters and venues. Tarney adds that Restless Presents was born from a need for more independent promoters in the live music industry and says his hope is to work closely with established and emerging acts to create unusual and forward-thinking live events.
“I think a lot of people are fed up with going to a small theater or small show and paying Ticketmaster fees or getting priced gouged on drinks when they’re there,” Tarney says. “People are looking for more than just big festivals, and many have trickled their way into some of the smaller venues. “That’s why we’re always looking for unique spaces. This is something that Liz is awesome at. She’s always finding cool, unique venues and places where we can come in and have more input.”
Tarney notes that Restless Presents has several new festival genre concepts in the works for 2023, including a roots roadhouse event and neo soul festival.
“Substance is the focal point this year, but there’s gonna be a lot more events and much more diverse sounds in the future,” he says.
The Ledger is a weekly newsletter about the economics of the music business sent to Billboard Pro subscribers. An abbreviated version of the newsletter is published online.
The 2004 documentary Super Size Me took a humorous look at the health consequences of fast-food restaurants’ practice of up-selling customers to higher-priced, larger-portioned items – a super-sized cup of Coca-Cola rather than a large, for example. To the customer, up-selling looked like a good deal: the additional soda or food cost only a few cents more. For restaurants, the tactic padded margins because the difference in price dwarfed the cost of goods.
Super Size Me comes to mind when looking at music subscription services and their quest to improve their margins. Those services have the equivalent of a super-sized option: the family plan, which generally costs 50% more than an individual subscription and includes up to six subscribers on a single plan. But unlike up-selling in the fast-food business, super-sizing a music subscription service doesn’t pay off in the short term. The family plan may help retention, which can improve subscribers’ lifetime value – that, not average revenue per user, is the key metric in the subscription business – but it does nothing to boost margins.
For years, high-fidelity audio was presumed to be music’s version of super-sized food portions: an up-sell product that carried a higher price without a commensurate increase in costs to the platform. But high-fidelity audio now appears to be a standard option for most streaming platforms, another carrot to entice people to sign up rather than a means to segment consumers based on willingness to pay. That means music licensed from record labels and distributors doesn’t provide a path to better margins. In fact, there’s only a small amount of upside left to wring out of licensors: Spotify expects it can get its music margins to 30% and eventually to 35%, up from the 28.1% margin it reported for 2021.
The future of the music streaming business looks more like gas stations than fast food. Gas stations have turned into convenience stores that sell junk food, beverages and household staples. Gas itself is almost a loss leader. Stations make their margins on everything else – a $3 bottle of Coca-Cola, a $2 candy bar or a $6 package of Ibuprofen pills. According to an examination of the economics of gas stations at The Hustle, stations earn a 1.4% profit margin on fuel compared to 200% on soda machines and 100% on lottery tickets.
We’re seeing more examples of streaming services looking for margin relief outside of their core products. On Sept. 20, Spotify, which acquired audiobook distributor Findaway in June, launched a la carte audiobook sales, putting it directly in competition with Amazon-owned Audible. Audiobook downloads provide better margins than Spotify can get from music. As the retailer, Spotify keeps 50% of the audiobook purchase sale proceeds. Findaway’s distributor fee is 20% of the author’s royalties – which works out to 10% of sale proceeds after Spotify takes its 50% cut. In aggregate, Spotify gets a 60% margin in audiobook sales on its platform – double the typical margin in both music streaming and music downloads and more than double Spotify’s gross margin on music last year.
One notable hiccup to Spotify’s foray into audiobooks is the buying process. Spotify sells audiobooks only at its website, not within the Spotify app. That allows it to keep its cushy margins without giving a significant portion to either Apple or Google for in-app purchase fees. Not offering audiobook sales within the app creates an extra step in the buying process, and even a small amount of friction can become a drag on purchase activity. But Spotify could also be a boost to the format, says Tony van Veen, CEO of DIY Media Group, which owns BookBaby, a distributor for independent book authors. “If Spotify offers it and lowers the barrier, will there be more adoption? Yeah, I think so,” he says. Spotify CEO Daniel Ek believes audibooks could eventually achieve 50% of book sales in mature markets compared to their current 6-7% share.
Spotify has already made a big push into podcasts in a search for better margins. Podcasts have been a money-loser with a –57% gross margin but have potential at scale. At a June 8 investor presentation, Spotify CFO Paul Vogel said podcast margins could reach 40% to 50% in the future. Tightening the belt could help get there: news broke on Oct. 7 that Spotify laid off “at least” 38 employees and will shutter 11 podcasts created by Gimlet and Parcast, two content studios Spotify acquired in 2019 for a combined $286 million.
Also searching for better margins, French music streamer Deezer is planning a new product called Zen by Deezer. Expected to debut in France in the first quarter of 2023, the product offers “exclusive music relaxation, sounds, expert tips and guided exercises,” according to the company’s Oct. 4 investor presentation. It’s a sensible product extension given the explosion of apps for meditation, yoga, sleeping and mental health. In the wake of COVID-19, McKinsey put the size of the global wellness industry at a staggering $1.5 trillion.
When Zen by Deezer is running at scale, Deezer believes, its content costs will run about 10% of revenue. That’s compared to roughly 70% for a standard on-demand streaming service that licenses music from record labels, music publishers and performance rights organizations. The difference, the presentation explains, is “one-off content production,” rather than music licensed at standard rates. Whether created in-house or acquired on a one-time, royalty-free basis, Zen by Deezer won’t pay most of its subscription fees to license music.
Elsewhere, music is increasingly a means to hook customers before giving them another product. Abu Dhabi-based Anghami is looking to diversify through podcasts, branded content and live concerts. In June, it purchased Spotlight Events, a concerts company based in the Middle East-North Africa region. Tencent Music Entertainment, China’s largest music streamer, also made a concerted push into spoken-word audio when it acquired audiobook distributor Lazy Audio in 2021. TME also has a growing podcast business.
Using a gas station metaphor for Spotify only goes so far – or does it? Consumers’ reliance on their automobiles makes them dependent on gas stations for transportation. Until electric cars see widespread adoption, most people will be regular customers at gas stations’ convenience stores. Music isn’t quite as entrenched as the automobile, but there’s a growing belief that a music subscription is a basic utility – like internet, gas or water – that most people will carry continuously. That gives streaming services on ongoing billing relationship with hundreds of millions of customers and an opportunity to make better margins on something other than music.