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A decade ago, sound engineer John McBride and country music vocalist/five-time CMA Award winner Martina McBride launched Blackbird Academy — an educational extension of the couple’s Nashville recording studio, Blackbird Studio, that opened in 2002 and has since hosted artists including Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran, Queen, Kings of Leon and Keith Urban.
Now, the McBrides will further delve into offering accessible musical education via Inside Blackbird, a new subscription-based platform aimed at teaching viewers about the processes of recording, studio producing, songwriting and live sound/production. The series features more than 200 hours of content covering different aspects of the music industry, as well as exclusive interviews and educational videos featuring top-shelf producers, musicians and engineers.
In one video, producer Nathan Chapman (known for his early work with Swift) discusses comping vocals. In another, session player Tom Bukovac discusses building a song from start to finish, while in another, producer Dann Huff (known for his work with Urban, Michael Jackson, Dolly Parton and more) discusses the delicate art of discussing ideas in a recording session. Another video features Young Thug producer Bainz as he discusses navigating a studio session.
New videos will added to the platform each week.
Other contributors to the platform include artists like Billy Corgan, Garth Brooks, Yelawolf, Aly+AJ, Vince Gill and Young the Giant, as well as producer Joe Chiccarelli (The White Stripes, My Morning Jacket), guitar legend Joe Bonamassa, producer/engineer Niko Bolas (Neil Young, KISS), vocal coach RAab Stevenson (Rihanna, SZA, Justin Timberlake), front of house engineer Dave Natale (The Rolling Stones, Tina Turner, Fleetwood Mac). The platform also offers tutorials on live sound, including motors, rigging, power distribution, consoles, monitor engineering and wireless audio.
“Anyone with an interest or curiosity about music will benefit from Inside Blackbird,” John McBride said in a statement. “Learn more about instruments, gear, plugins, the recording process and live touring from the best in the business. Find out how artists start their careers and what it takes to succeed. If we don’t have the answer, we know someone who does, and that is who you will find at Inside Blackbird.”
The Inside Blackbird platform is now available to users for $15.99 per month and to students for $9.99 per month. Further discounts are available through an annual subscription, while the Creator Plan offers users access to not only Inside Blackbird’s content but also KIT Plugins’ complete suite of audio tools released to date. This includes the historic Blackbird Studio emulations for $24.99 per month or an annual subscription of $249.90 (two months free). Any future Blackbird plugins will also be included in the plan as they are released.
Inside Blackbird has additionally partnered with Save the Music by donating an unspecified portion of each subscription to the organization.
See the trailer for Inside Blackbird below:
BIME, the music industry gathering that last year celebrated its 10th anniversary, returns to Bogotá, Colombia this week for its second annual Latin American confab.
The fair, created and hosted by Bilbao-based event production firm Last Tour, will feature over 100 events, including panels, chats, showcases and concerts. Guests include speakers from Colombia, but also from the United States and neighboring countries.
Key topics in this year’s edition are Web 3.0 and AI, as well as sustainability and the rights of those who work in the music industry, an issue that was profoundly highlighted during the pandemic and is now a source of further discussion.
Also in the forefront is the vinyl industry, which still makes up a tiny proportion of music industry revenues but is growing strongly in the Latin music realm and in Latin America.
In a twist, this year’s event is taking place at the campus of Universidad Ean, a fitting locale given BIME’s desire to educate and train a new generation of music industry professionals. An entire track is labeled “Campus,” featuring a series of didactic panels, including “How to develop a successful PR campaign” and “How to become a music supervisor.”
Notable booked speakers from both sides of the Atlantic include singer-songwriters Maria Becerra, Jessie Reyez, Catalina García and Kany Garcia; Baja Beach Festival co-founder Chris Ben Ujil; Daniel Merino, producer of Viña del Mar festival and GM of Bizarro Entertainment; AIE General directo José Luis Sevillanos; YouTube Music head of Label relations Mauricio Ojeda; Paz Aparicio, director of Madrid’s Wiznik Center; and Nelson Albareda, CEO of Loud and Live.
For a full schedule and information, visit the official BIME site here.
Duetti, a new music financing startup led by former Tidal COO Lior Tibon and former Apple Music business development executive Christopher Nolte, has closed a $32 million funding round to launch its new service, the company announced Wednesday (May 3). The round includes money from Viola Ventures/Viola Credit, Roc Nation, Untitled and Presight Capital.
The company is aiming to get in on the catalog sales market by providing funding to rising or independent artists in exchange for full catalogs, individual tracks or parts of tracks — then optimizing and growing their returns through marketing and/or social platform promotion. Duetti likens the deals it’s making as akin to the big catalog sales that major artists like Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan and others have executed in recent years, but for smaller artists — or at least those who have had songs on streaming platforms for two years and racked up at least 500,000 streams within the past 12 months.
Lior Tibon
“In recent years, the trend of legacy A-list musicians selling their entire catalogs has left independent artists out of the equation,” said Tibon, who serves as Duetti’s CEO, in a statement. “Now, artists at all stages of their careers can easily capture the potential of their tracks and catalogs to help them reach the next step of their journey. We are arming artists with the information they need to choose when, and how, to leverage their assets from a position of strength.”
Duetti has been in stealth mode, and during that period it says it has partnered with over 60 artists — including Sylvan LaCue, CVBZ and Croosh — across 100 tracks, with acquisitions totaling as much as $400,000; Duetti’s deals take roughly 30 days to complete on average, according to the company. It now sees an opportunity to open up this funding model to more than 70,000 additional independent artists. The company plans to use the seed funding to expand its staff, onboard more artists and boost the value of the tracks already in its catalog. It’s tapping into a market that includes companies like Sound Royalties, which recently sold to GoDigital, that aim to help artists finance their lives and careers by selling royalty streams and other assets and seeing higher returns in the long run.
“Duetti’s cutting edge technology enables efficient analysis of an artist’s potential for successfully monetizing a catalog or track — we are incredibly excited by the potential of their business model and the new, independent investment class it unlocks,” said Avi Zeevi, fintech investor and co-founder of Viola Ventures, in a statement accompanying the announcement. “Independent artist revenue growth is outpacing the entire industry and their highly scalable model returns revenue uncorrelated to broader market and economic conditions. A win-win for investors and musicians.”
Irv Lichtman, for decades one of Billboard’s most respected and beloved editors and columnists and an advocate for songwriters who chiseled out a niche as the go-to expert in music publishing, has died at the age of 87.Lichtman passed peacefully in his sleep on Tuesday (May 2), his son David Lichtman confirms to Billboard.
Born May 21, 1935, Lichtman worked at Cashbox right out of college, from 1956 until 1975.
He went on to work for NY Times Music Publishing for roughly a year, before joining Audio Fidelity Records. From there, Lichtman made the leap to Billboard, joining the music trade in late 1978.
It proved a perfect fit.
Former executive editor Ken Schlager remembers Lichtman as a “genuinely warm and funny man,” whose columns Inside Track and Words & Music were a “must-read.” “When I joined Billboard as managing editor in 1985, Irv as deputy editor unselfishly guided me every step of the way, from putting out the weekly magazine to learning my way around the business,” Schlager says. “I could not have asked for a more generous or knowledgeable mentor. It was, as Bogie would say, the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” An “incredibly sensitive soul,” Lichtman cared deeply about his colleagues and the music industry, notes Schlager, especially the publishing business, and, “through his deep and wide network of sources, served the industry well as a conduit for scoops they couldn’t find anywhere else.”His joyful trait was always close to the surface, recounts Linda Moran, CEO/president of Songwriters Hall of Fame. “Irv was one of the wittiest guys I have ever known with a great sense of humor,” she says. “For many years he was the face of Billboard because he knew everyone and he was respected for his encyclopedic knowledge of music while exuding trustworthiness which is a tremendous asset for any journalist.”As a Songwriters Hall of Fame Board member he represented the SHOF on the Library of Congress’s National Recording Preservation Board due to his extensive knowledge of music, from decades before his birth through to contemporary. Those who knew him well remember Lichtman’s love for show tunes, and “he could always be counted on to be the champion, fighting for the Broadway songwriters on the [SHOF] induction ballot because he felt they were under-appreciated,” recounts Moran.
But his love for music went far beyond show tunes, as he stayed up with contemporary artists. “I recall a moment walking on Broadway when we encountered the rapper M.C. Hammer. Irv bubbled over with enthusiasm, greeting Hammer like an old friend. I don’t believe they had ever met,” Schlager recalls.After retiring from Billboard in February 2001, Lichtman devoted much of his time to the Friedberg Jewish Community Center, where he remained an active participant in the Current Events Club. His favorite charity was Feeding America, the largest hunger-relief organization in the country.
He never lost his love for the Yankees or that famous, “if corny,” sense of humor, remarks Schlager. The pair frequently lunched together. “Invariably, when the waiter or waitress first approached out table, Irv would greet the server with his patented line: ‘We’re in a hurry. Can we please get the check?’ Some got it, some didn’t. We lunched for what I didn’t know would be the final time last fall. On that occasion I noticed he didn’t use his usual line. His explanation: ‘I can’t. They know me here.’ Amazingly, he had come up with a fresh punchline.”Fellow former Billboard Pro Audio editor Paul Verna has similarly fond memories. “It’s telling that on my first day at Billboard, no one thought to tell me where the bathrooms were. Irv literally showed me the way, and then would proceed to show me the ropes of the music industry and our role in covering it,” he comments. “To say he was a mentor is an understatement. I’ll always cherish having had the guiding hand of someone who had seen so much. But as we all know, the best thing about Irv wasn’t his industry experience — it was his humor, his generosity, and his always cheerful spirit.”
Lichtman is survived by his wife Phyllis, sons Steven and David and grandchildren, Kate, Jane, Emma, Jack, Frank and Ben. He was preceded in death by his son, Robbie.
His funeral will take place Friday (May 5) on Long Island. Details are to come.
Sounding alarms about artificial intelligence has become a popular pastime in the ChatGPT era, taken up by high-profile figures as varied as industrialist Elon Musk, leftist intellectual Noam Chomsky and the 99-year-old retired statesman Henry Kissinger.
But it’s the concerns of insiders in the AI research community that are attracting particular attention. A pioneering researcher and the so-called “Godfather of AI” Geoffrey Hinton quit his role at Google so he could more freely speak about the dangers of the technology he helped create.
Over his decades-long career, Hinton’s pioneering work on deep learning and neural networks helped lay the foundation for much of the AI technology we see today.
There has been a spasm of AI introductions in recent months. San Francisco-based startup OpenAI, the Microsoft-backed company behind ChatGPT, rolled out its latest artificial intelligence model, GPT-4, in March. Other tech giants have invested in competing tools — including Google’s “Bard.”
Some of the dangers of AI chatbots are “quite scary,” Hinton told the BBC. “Right now, they’re not more intelligent than us, as far as I can tell. But I think they soon may be.”
In an interview with MIT Technology Review, Hinton also pointed to “bad actors” that may use AI in ways that could have detrimental impacts on society — such as manipulating elections or instigating violence.
Hinton, 75, says he retired from Google so that he could speak openly about the potential risks as someone who no longer works for the tech giant.
“I want to talk about AI safety issues without having to worry about how it interacts with Google’s business,” he told MIT Technology Review. “As long as I’m paid by Google, I can’t do that.”
Since announcing his departure, Hinton has maintained that Google has “acted very responsibly” regarding AI. He told MIT Technology Review that there’s also “a lot of good things about Google” that he would want to talk about — but those comments would be “much more credible if I’m not at Google anymore.”
Google confirmed that Hinton had retired from his role after 10 years overseeing the Google Research team in Toronto.
Hinton declined further comment Tuesday but said he would talk more about it at a conference Wednesday.
At the heart of the debate on the state of AI is whether the primary dangers are in the future or present. On one side are hypothetical scenarios of existential risk caused by computers that supersede human intelligence. On the other are concerns about automated technology that’s already getting widely deployed by businesses and governments and can cause real-world harms.
“For good or for not, what the chatbot moment has done is made AI a national conversation and an international conversation that doesn’t only include AI experts and developers,” said Alondra Nelson, who until February led the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and its push to craft guidelines around the responsible use of AI tools.
“AI is no longer abstract, and we have this kind of opening, I think, to have a new conversation about what we want a democratic future and a non-exploitative future with technology to look like,” Nelson said in an interview last month.
A number of AI researchers have long expressed concerns about racial, gender and other forms of bias in AI systems, including text-based large language models that are trained on huge troves of human writing and can amplify discrimination that exists in society.
“We need to take a step back and really think about whose needs are being put front and center in the discussion about risks,” said Sarah Myers West, managing director of the nonprofit AI Now Institute. “The harms that are being enacted by AI systems today are really not evenly distributed. It’s very much exacerbating existing patterns of inequality.”
Hinton was one of three AI pioneers who in 2019 won the Turing Award, an honor that has become known as tech industry’s version of the Nobel Prize. The other two winners, Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun, have also expressed concerns about the future of AI.
Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal, signed a petition in late March calling for tech companies to agree to a 6-month pause on developing powerful AI systems, while LeCun, a top AI scientist at Facebook parent Meta, has taken a more optimistic approach.
On April 16 at Coachella, finally, after years of postponements, and an hour late that night, Frank Ocean performed his first concert in six years, closing the country’s most-watched music festival with a set that left many fans confused and even disgruntled. Transforming the event’s main stage with a giant screen spanning nearly the full width, Ocean and his band gave the impression they were bringing fans into the recording studio — the kind in which he has presumably been working on his much-anticipated third studio album. Tinkering with remixed versions of his beloved songs, creative camera shots often directed fans’ attention away from the reclusive singer on stage and towards his image on screen.
It was not the kind of fan-friendly hit parade some had surely been hoping for, and after Ocean abruptly ended early (albeit 20 minutes past curfew), the negative reviews started flowing. Days later, he canceled his performance for the festival’s second weekend due to an ankle injury and retreated into the private life he’s built for himself away from the limelight. When he’ll come back — either onstage or with new music — is anyone’s guess.
Since the 2011 release of his debut mixtape, Nostalgia Ultra, Ocean has spent more time out of the industry than in it, releasing only two albums and performing live just 25 to 30 times in the last decade, almost exclusively at festivals. So far, that has worked out pretty well for him, creating pent-up demand that led to his booking atop last month’s Coachella, the world’s largest multi-genre festival. The last time Ocean performed in the United States was in 2017 at the Panorama festival in New York — produced by Goldenvoice, the Los Angeles-based company behind Coachella — about a year after releasing his last album, Blonde. There, Ocean ended on a high note, with New York Times reporter Jon Caramanica calling it a “a grand-scale meditation on feelings and politics” that “proved you can translate intimacy on a giant scale.”
Ahead of Ocean’s Coachella set last month, anticipation was at fever pitch. The singer had originally been booked to headline the 2020 festival before the coronavirus pandemic postponed the event for two years. Then, in 2022, it was announced that Ocean would hold off on his festival performance until 2023. All the while, fans have been waiting for a new album that still has not come, satiated only slightly by occasional features, new songs shared on his Blonded Radio show on Apple Music, miscellaneous creative and fashion projects and appearances at the Met Gala. By withholding from fans in an era where so much revolves around the “attention economy,” Ocean’s passionate fans have only become hungrier for new material from the enigmatic superstar whose long absences are viewed as a product of the singer’s meticulous pursuit of perfection.
“He’d rather do nothing than do something that’s not quite right,” Caramanica wrote in his review of Ocean’s Panorama performance. “And doing nothing has also become, in this era of blithe ubiquity, a daring and quite perversely loud kind of performance.”
If being quiet made Ocean’s stock rise, might his widely panned, self-admittedly “chaotic” comeback performance at Coachella — and his decision to pull out of the second weekend — have pushed his stock back down?
“He flopped,” said one prominent booking agent who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Is that a career-ender — being a fallible, over-confident 35-year-old young man with one public blemish in an otherwise brilliant career? Of course not…. After more than a decade of brilliant songwriting and performance, he is entitled to make a mistake or two.”
Whether Ocean’s Coachella set was bad or misunderstood is a point of debate, but the widely negative reception was seemingly enough to make him back out of the festival’s second weekend. For many acts, a show like this would be a major reputational hit, causing fans to second-guess attending a future festival he’s booked on — or promoters to think twice about booking him at all.
“When he releases [new] music, am I gonna give it a listen? Yes. [But] if he announces a tour date, am I going to be hesitant to go see him? … It’s a risk,” says Adrian Romo, 29, who traveled from Houston to see Ocean perform at Coachella’s second weekend. “Your fans have been waiting for however many years, you have the biggest stage in the world, and then you do that? It’s like, what can I expect from you in the future? It makes you look at it a little bit differently.”
“I’m not excited [about him] anymore. He lost a fan,” adds Romo’s boyfriend, Oren Rosenbaum, 27.
“If I am a promoter, who is considering him or a comparable artist for my festival, I’m probably going to go with the comparable artist because my trust has been shaken,” says booking agent Malachai Johns with the Allive talent agency.
Ocean’s profile has thrived out of the limelight, however, and it’s not a stretch to imagine his Coachella set driving further fan interest in what he does next, or to even witness another performance of this supposedly bad set — which was not livestreamed on the festival’s YouTube feed, as originally planned — for themselves. Streams for the singer’s music increased 94% in the days following the festival, and much to fans’ excitement he teased a brief mention of a “new album” during his performance.
“[Ocean] wasn’t planning to replicate Coachella at other festivals this summer and cash in — he doesn’t have any other concerts on his calendar for the entire year,” says a source close to the artist. As for the $4 million per set Ocean was to receive, much of that money was spent on the production of an elaborate set that was not used due to Ocean’s ankle injury. While Ocean is interested in making money, the source tells Billboard, he is not interested in going on tour and or being a festival headliner right now, noting that the Coachella performance was an effort to fulfill a commitment he made to Goldenvoice president and CEO Paul Tollett in 2020 and was never meant to serve as a launching point for a tour.
In the United States, Ocean exclusively works with Tollett and Goldenvoice for festival bookings — a relationship he’s developed in part through his friendship with rapper Tyler, the Creator. Sources say that even after all the negative attention Ocean’s Coachella set received, and the hassle of reorganizing the second weekend when he pulled out, there’s no bad blood between Ocean, his agent Brent Smith and Tollett, and they’re all open to working together again in the future.
If or when Ocean decides he wants to tour, however, he’ll assume far more liability for his shows. Unlike festivals, where fans are buying tickets to a larger event and scheduling is subject to change, canceling touring concerts usually requires refunding fans unless the show is rescheduled. The cost of trying to reschedule a tour can eat into profits and make the entire effort unsustainable if not carefully managed.
It’s also hard to determine Ocean’s drawing power, since he’s basically only performed at festivals for the last decade. His career skyrocketed soon after the release of Nostalgia Ultra, just as the U.S. festival business was taking off and many artists at the time opted to forgo the traditional touring model for the less risky festival circuit where artists are guaranteed a performance fee no matter how well tickets sold.
The downside is that artists who spent the early part of their careers performing at festivals have a challenging time building a live fan base as headliners later in their career. Ocean would certainly attract ticket buyers for a traditional venue tour, but it’s totally untested whether he could draw the kind of regular audience that would earn him $4 million a night, like his Coachella billing. Whether he wants it at all is a different question altogether.
A representative for Ocean did not respond to request for comment at time of publishing.
After netting a No. 2 debut on the Billboard 200 with his first album Wasteland, Brent Faiyaz solidified his standing as a critical cog in the R&B circuit, so much so that a year later, he and UnitedMasters agreed on an unprecedented partnership to form a new creative agency as a hub for his upcoming endeavors.
A source close to the situation tells Billboard that the deal is rumored to be valued at close to $50 million.
“Brent Faiyaz is one of the most prolific independent artists today, and we are extremely excited to embark on this new partnership with him,” UnitedMasters founder Steve Stoute tells Billboard. “It’s been inspiring to watch his journey as an artist over the years, and with this partnership we look to further amplify his creative vision and support his entrepreneurial ambitions.”
Along with his new partnership, Brent Faiyaz will embark on a world tour later this summer. Titled F–k the World, It’s a Wasteland, the multi-date trek will arrive in major markets, including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, Paris, and Milan. Presale tickets will be available on Spotify through May 3 and open for the general public on May 5.
Faiyaz keeps momentum from his 2022 effort by releasing his latest visual, “Rolling Stone.” Channeling classic film noir elements, the video is presented as a cinematic thriller with black and white coloring. I still got demons from my younger days. “I wish I could shake ‘em, but they follow me,” he sings in the clip.
Check out video for “Rolling Stone” and the tour dates for F–k The World, It’s a Wasteland below.
TOUR DATES:
7/16 Landover, MD forthcoming
7/25 Denver, CO The Mission Ballroom
7/28 Chicago, IL The Salt Shed
8/1 Toronto, ON History
8/6 New York, NY Central Park Summerstage
8/9 Boston, MA MGM Music Hall at Fenway
8/12 Miami, FL James L. Knight Center
8/16 Orlando, FL Dr. Phillips Center
8/19 Sacramento, CA forthcoming
8/22 New Orleans, LA Orpheum Theater
8/23 Houston, TX 713 Music Hall
8/24 Dallas, TX The Factory Deep Ellum
8/31 San Francisco, CA The Masonic
9/1 Oakland, CA Fox Theater
9/3 Las Vegas, NV The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas – Chelsea Theater
9/15 Los Angeles, CA YouTube Theater
10/16 Leeds, UK O2 Academy Leeds
10/19 Manchester, UK O2 Apollo
10/21 Glasgow, UK O2 Academy Glasgow
10/23 Birmingham, UK O2 Academy
10/25 London, UK Eventim Apollo
11/1 Utrecht, Netherlands TivoliVredenburg
11/3 Stockholm, Sweden Banankompaniet
11/5 Copenhagen, Denmark Vega
11/8 Oslo, Norway Rockefeller Music Hall
11/10 Berlin, Germany Tempodrom
11/12 Milan, Italy Fabrique
11/14 Barcelona, Spain Razzmatazz
11/17 Cologne, Germany Palladium
11/19 Paris, France Elysee Montmartre
11/20 London, UK Eventim Apollo
Live Nation chief executive Michael Rapino was in Washington D.C. over the weekend, hosting his own party around the White Correspondents Dinner on Saturday.
The Axios After Hours Presented by Live Nation party on Saturday was held at the National Building Museum with media partner Axios after the White House Correspondents dinner ended and included a private performance from rising country star Lainey Wilson.
Rapino, who received $139 million in salary and stocks last year, according to a SEC fillings, isn’t a major political donor and hasn’t appeared at a major congressional hearing in a decade. But with the Live Nation-owned Ticketmaster coming under fire from lawmakers in recent years over long-standing concerns about anti-competitor business practices and the Taylor Swift ticketing crash in November, Rapino’s presence capped off a frenzied lobbying effort over the last two years to build a political base for the company.
Financially, Live Nation had its best year ever in 2022, posting a record $16.7 in revenue last year and $732 million in income. But the growing music conglomerate has largely been politically inactive in the years following its 2010 merger with Ticketmaster.
That changed in 2019 when the Department of Justice recommended extending a consent degree governing the 2010 merger. Last election cycle, Live Nation spent $1.4 million lobbying Congress, more than it has ever spent before. That spending is expected to continue unabridged in 2023 as Live Nation continues to lobby for ticketing reform legislation to curb illegal scalping activities, floating its own FAIR ticketing proposal as as a possible model for legislation.
A group of investors has filed a class action lawsuit against Adidas, alleging the sportswear giant knew about Kanye West‘s problematic “personal behavior” years prior to ending its partnership with the rapper but failed to warn them about it.
The complaint — representing people who acquired Adidas securities between May 3, 2018, and February 21, 2023 — also names Adidas’ former CEO, Kasper Rorsted, and CFO, Harm Ohlmeyer, as defendants, alleging the executives “employed devices, schemes and artifices to defraud” investors and that the company “failed to take meaningful precautionary measures to limit negative financial exposure” in the event the partnership was terminated as a result of West’s behavior.
West is not named as a defendant in the suit.
Filed Friday (April 28) in U.S. District Court in Oregon, the lawsuit’s “substantive allegations” cite comments made by West (now known as Ye) dating back to 2018, including a notorious TMZ interview in which the rapper called slavery “a choice.” The complaint goes on to point out that Adidas “stuck by” West following his comments and includes excerpts from Rorsted’s 2018 interview with Bloomberg in which he said, “We neither comment nor speculate on every single comment that our external creators are making.” It also includes various offensive comments West directed at the Jewish community as well as his quote, “I can say anti-Semitic things and Adidas can’t drop me,” made during the rapper’s October 2022 appearance on the podcast Drink Champs.
On October 25, 2022, just days after the Drink Champs episode aired, Adidas ended the partnership.
The suit also alleges that Adidas failed to make investors aware that the rapper made “offensive remarks at Company premises” and that the company’s publicly released reports between 2018 and 2021 did not acknowledge “serious issues affecting the partnership” in their “Business Partner Risk” sections. The sections did, however, acknowledge that “improper behavior” from entertainers and athletes representing the brand could have a “negative spill-over effect on the company’s reputation.”
Pushing back on the allegations, Adidas said in a statement to The Associated Press on Monday: “We outright reject these unfounded claims and will take all necessary measures to vigorously defend ourselves against them.”
The suit makes mention of the initial “positive impact” of West’s partnership with Adidas, and the $1 billion worth of sales Yeezy shoes hit by 2019. The Yeezy brand — owned by West and licensed to Adidas — became a streetwear pillar and ushered in a new era of popular style. However, West’s insensitive comments and actions eventually overshadowed his artistic talent.
After the partnership ended, Adidas reported a $540 million loss in the fourth quarter of 2022, partially due to unsold Yeezy clothing and shoes. The company has also projected a total loss of $1.3 billion in “full-year revenue” for 2023 resulting from the unsold products.
HeadCount founder/executive director Andy Bernstein announced he will step down from his role in an open letter released Monday (May 1), kicking off a search for a new executive director to fill his seat beginning next year.
In the letter, Bernstein wrote that he intends to leave “to make room for new leadership, fresh vision and the type of innovation that only change can bring,” though he will continue on with the organization — a national nonprofit that works on voter engagement — in an advisory role. He continued that “constant reinvention has sustained HeadCount for all these years,” and that with the 2024 presidential election looming, “I believe it’s the right time for someone new to take HeadCount into the next era.”
Bernstein founded HeadCount with Marc Brownstein in 2004.
According to Bernstein’s letter, HeadCount has registered over 1.2 million voters over the past 20 years by engaging with music fans at concerts, festivals and more. The organization began working with politically minded acts like Dave Matthews, Phish and founding board member Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead and has since grown to work with more than 200 artists, including Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Dead & Company, Harry Styles, Lizzo, Ariana Grande and Billie Eilish. It has also integrated with Spotify and established a multi-year partnership with Global Citizen.
“What’s always meant more to me than any number, though, is the human connection driving it all,” Bernstein wrote. “Collaborating with our board of directors and its brilliant chairs Peter Shapiro and Jessy Tolkan; seeing our volunteers form a community and hone their skills; working with a staff that feels more like a family — that’s what fueled me over the years. We built this thing together, one idea at a time.”
HeadCount has posted the executive director job description online. It calls for “a natural leader with a keen cultural radar, a track record of success in the nonprofit or private sector and a strong connection to the audiences we engage.” The job will entail leading a team of 22 staff members with an organizational budget between $4-5 million. Check out the full job description here.
