State Champ Radio Business
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CMT/Paramount senior executive Leslie Fram will reunite with Steve Barnes as co-host of the relaunched 99X Atlanta morning show, now known as The Morning X With Barnes and Leslie. The radio broadcast had its original success via Atlanta’s alternative rock station from 1994 until 2003, and will now air from 6-10 a.m. ET each weekday.
Fram will also retain her role at CMT/Paramount.
In 1994, Brian Philips, now chief content officer at parent company Cumulus Media, paired Barnes and Leslie on the original Morning X With Barnes, Leslie and Jimmy (Baron). The show earned acclaim in the Atlanta market and beyond, while the team was named Billboard‘s national major market morning show in 1996, and Radio and Records’ national major market morning show in 1999.
In October 2022, the launch of the 99X “museum” website to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the station’s founding led to an outpouring of fan interest and passion. Cumulus Media acquired the station’s classic call letters and relaunched 99X WNNX in Atlanta in December. The station’s ratings doubled in its first month on the air. Barnes has hosted the revamped program since January.
The popular podcast The Pop Culture Show, which the duo founded at the onset of the pandemic, is now rebranded as The Morning X With Barnes & Leslie and joins the Cumulus Podcast Network. Episodes will release each weekday, featuring both new programming and classic material from the legendary radio show.
“This ‘new original 99X’ was destined to be — it is a passion project, a labor of love. None of us has ever stopped being friends, loving the same music, or laughing at the same jokes,” Philips said via a statement. “The audience demanded the return of the station via a social explosion of affection and nostalgia. Only in Atlanta could the will of the loyal 99X audience make the impossible happen. It’s unprecedented to be able to entirely rebuild a classic station with members of its original cast.”
“99X was my home for 17 years and will forever be in my DNA. Those years prepared me for my current role at CMT – understanding a loyal fanbase of music lovers who truly lead the way,” Fram added via a statement. “You only have to glance at the comments from 99X listeners reminiscing about their favorite music and memories to appreciate the role this radio station played in their lives. The Foo Fighters sang, ‘If everything could ever be this real forever, if anything could ever be this good again’ … and it turns out it can. I am psyched to be working with some of my lifelong friends and colleagues on 99X again and thankful to my Paramount/CMT family for letting me continue to put my rock hat on with Cumulus during my off hours.”
“It’s a thrill to come back ‘home’ to The Morning X and 99X,” added Barnes. “It’s mind blowing that the fans asked for our return to the Atlanta airwaves and Cumulus gave us the chance to put our team back together to rebuild this franchise.”
Canada announced Monday it is banning TikTok from all government-issued mobile devices, reflecting widening worries from Western officials over the Chinese-owned video sharing app.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said it might be a first step to further action.
“I suspect that as government takes the significant step of telling all federal employees that they can no longer use TikTok on their work phones many Canadians from business to private individuals will reflect on the security of their own data and perhaps make choices,” Trudeau said.
The European Union’s executive branch said last week it has temporarily banned TikTok from phones used by employees as a cybersecurity measure.
The EU’s action follows similar moves in the U.S., where more than half of the states and Congress have banned TikTok from official government devices.
Last week, Canada’s federal privacy watchdog and its provincial counterparts in British Columbia, Alberta and Quebec announced an investigation to delve into whether the app complies with Canadian privacy legislation.
TikTok is wildly popular with young people, but its Chinese ownership has raised fears that Beijing could use it to collect data on Western users or push pro-China narratives and misinformation. TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company that moved its headquarters to Singapore in 2020.
TikTok faces intensifying scrutiny from Europe and America over security and data privacy amid worries that the app could be used to promote pro-Beijing views or sweep up users’ information. It comes as China and the West are locked in a wider tug of war over technology ranging from spy balloons to computer chips.
Canadian Treasury Board President Mona Fortier said the federal government will also block the app from being downloaded on official devices in the future.
Fortier said in statement the Chief Information Officer of Canada determined that it “presents an unacceptable level of risk to privacy and security.”
The app will be removed from Canadian government issued phones on Tuesday.
“On a mobile device, TikTok’s data collection methods provide considerable access to the contents of the phone,” Fortier said.
“While the risks of using this application are clear, we have no evidence at this point that government information has been compromised.”
Recent media reports have also raised concerns about potential Chinese interference in recent Canadian elections, prompting opposition parties to call for a public inquiry into alleged foreign election interference.
“It’s curious that the Government of Canada has moved to block TikTok on government-issued devices—without citing any specific security concern or contacting us with questions—only after similar bans were introduced in the EU and the US,” a TikTok spokesperson said in a email.
The company is always available to discuss the privacy and security of Canadians, the statement said. “Singling out TikTok in this way does nothing to achieve that shared goal,” the email said. “All it does is prevent officials from reaching the public on a platform loved by millions of Canadians.”
A woman criminally charged over the theft of Lady Gaga’s French bulldogs is now suing the superstar, demanding that Gaga pay her a $500,000 “no questions asked” reward that the singer allegedly offered for the return of the dogs.
The lawsuit was filed by Jennifer McBride, who pleaded no contest in December to receiving stolen property in connection with the violent incident, in which Gaga’s dog walker Ryan Fischer was shot and nearly killed.
In a complaint filed Friday (Feb. 24) in Los Angeles court, McBride’s attorney argued that Gaga made a binding “unilateral” offer to pay the reward in return for the safe return of the dogs — and that McBride had taken her up on the proposal.
“Plaintiff accepted defendants’ unilateral offer by contacting defendants, and delivering Lady Gaga’s bulldogs to defendants at the Los Angeles Police Department,” McBride’s lawyer K.T. Tran wrote in the lawsuit. “Plaintiff has fully performed her obligation under the unilateral contract.”
A rep for Lady Gaga, whose real name is Stefani Germanotta, did not immediately return a request for comment on Monday.
McBride is one of five people charged over the Feb. 24, 2021 gunpoint dognapping of Gaga’s bulldogs, Koji and Gustav. Prosecutors say the singer was not specifically targeted, and that the group was merely trying to steal French bulldogs, which can be worth thousands of dollars.
McBride returned the dogs to police days later, claiming she’d found the animals tied to a pole and asking about the reward. While police initially told the media that McBride appeared to be “uninvolved and unassociated” with the crime, she was later connected to the thieves and charged with one count of receiving stolen property and one count of being an accessory after the fact. In December, she pleaded no contest to the property charge and was sentenced to two years of probation.
James Howard Jackson, the man who shot Fischer during the robbery, took a plea deal in December and was sentenced to 21 years in prison.
In her lawsuit on Friday, McBride accused Gaga not only of breaching an agreement but also of defrauding her with the claim of a “no questions asked” reward.
“The truth was that defendants intended to have its agents and/or law enforcement to ask questions of Plaintiff regarding the circumstances surrounding Plaintiff’s return of Lady Gaga’s French bulldogs,” her lawyer wrote. “The truth was that Defendants never intended to pay the reward money to Plaintiff.
McBride is seeking the $500,000 reward and another $1.5 million in damages.
LONDON — In early February, Universal Music Group chairman/CEO Lucian Grainge drew a line in the sand between the traditional record business and financial companies entering the fray to tap into the global growth of streaming. “Our industry is entering a new chapter where we’re going to have to pick sides,” Grainge said at the Billboard Power 100 launch event in Hollywood. “Are we on the side of fintech [financial technology] and functional music, functional content? Or are we on the side of artistry and artists?”
Though Grainge didn’t name names, he could well have been talking about Utopia Music, a Zug, Switzerland-based tech company that delivers financial services for labels, publishers and distributors. Over the past two years, Utopia, whose motto is “Fair pay for every play,” has embarked on a frenetic buying spree of 15 companies, including music tech company Musimap; Lyric Financial, a Nashville-based provider of royalty-backed cash advances; and Proper Music Group, the United Kingdom’s leading independent physical music distributor, which provides distribution services for 1,000-plus indie labels and service companies.
Industry executives don’t quite know what to make of Utopia’s rapid growth, its direction or where exactly the company fits in today’s multifaceted global music business. It’s one of several fintech companies, many backed by venture capitalists, that have penetrated the music business to varying degrees amid the streaming boom. “At its core, Utopia is a royalty tech company,” co-founder and executive chairman Mattias Hjelmstedt tells Billboard in a rare interview. “It’s about fixing the many data gaps in the industry.”
Hjelmstedt says he understands and even agrees with Grainge’s opposition to “pure fintech” companies that “go in and try to optimize [their] revenue versus the rest of the industry.” But that, he insists, is not what Utopia is about. His company uses technology — leveraging what has been described as “a database of more than 213 billion global data points” — to better capture royalties and process them accurately, faster and with greater transparency. That, in turn, will “help all facets of the industry earn more money,” not just Utopia’s slice of it, he says.
“We’re on the side of anyone who owns the copyright, which is a creator, which is an artist, which is also a Universal [Music Group] or a copyright fund or a publisher,” he says. “I don’t think there is a mismatch there [between fintech and artists]. It is actually fully aligned for me to have a clear path from usage to creator.”
Utopia is hardly alone in pitching ways to use tech to give artists more control over their music royalties than they’ve traditionally had with label deals. Hifi, a fintech with backers that include industry executives like Quincy Jones and Capitol Records chair/CEO Michelle Jubelirer — as well as artists Diplo and G-Eazy — is launching an “enhanced royalties acceleration service” that promises to pay artists advances based on predicted streaming royalties. Los Angeles-based beatBread offers funding for existing music catalogs and employs artificial intelligence to help artists secure advances of up to $1 million for unreleased music. And Brazilian fintech company Hurst Capital says it has set up a “hyper-specialized team” to manage the royalties of catalogs it has acquired from sertanejo (Brazilian pop-country) stars like Gusttavo Lima and the late Marília Mendonça.
Hjelmstedt is a Swedish serial entrepreneur known for founding gaming platform Electronic Sports Network, which Electronic Arts acquired in 2012, and co-founding video-on-demand platform Voddler, which filed for bankruptcy in 2018. He co-founded Utopia in 2016 with Thomas Gullberg, basing it in the town of Zug, where around 60 of the company’s staff of 1,000 are based.
Details about Utopia’s finances and funding remain opaque. The company’s only publicly listed investors are Switzerland-based investment firms CV VC and FiveT Fintech (formerly Avaloq Ventures). Hjelmstedt says the firms “are by far not among the largest investors” but declined to reveal any others. Utopia, which he says generates over 100 million euros ($107 million) in revenue a year, recently completed an investment round, but Hjelmstedt declined to discuss figures or what the capital will be used for.
Lately, the company has been characterized by change. In November, Utopia cut its workforce by around 20%, or about 230 jobs, according to a company representative. Hjelmstedt says the job cuts resulted from the global economic downturn coupled with the company’s goal of achieving sustainable growth. A month later, in December, Utopia restructured its business into two separate divisions: Music Services and Royalty Platform. Then in January, Utopia reshuffled its senior leadership, with former CEO Markku Mäkeläinen exiting the company and Hjelmstedt taking over as interim chief executive. (U.K.-based Roberto Neri is CEO of the Music Services division.)
As part of the reorganization, Utopia announced on Feb. 7 that it had sold U.S.-based music database platform ROSTR — which has a directory of artists, managers, booking agents and record labels — back to ROSTR’s founders for an undisclosed sum. Utopia purchased the company in December 2021 to strengthen its direct ties with the artist community. But Hjelmstedt says Utopia will now primarily focus on delivering financial services. He declined to comment on whether there will be further divestments or acquisitions this year, claiming the company will reveal more about future plans, including new product launches, in the coming months.
Utopia’s music services division is headed by U.K.-based former Downtown executive Roberto Neri and includes the acquired companies Proper, Absolute Label Services, Liverpool-based publisher Sentric Music Group and Cinram Novum, one of the U.K.’s leading physical home entertainment suppliers. (Cinram Novum provides warehouse, fulfillment and distribution services to labels, including UMG, Sony Music Entertainment and [PIAS].)
Utopia’s royalty platform arm, which Hjelmstedt oversees, looks after the company’s financial technology services, data operations, copyright and royalty processing.
Hjelmstedt declines to comment on whether dividing Utopia into two separate divisions signals an intention to make the split between distributor and royalty platform permanent. He rejects speculation that Utopia is a tech scale-up looking to capitalize on the growth of the music industry rather than to build a sustainable business. The company’s myriad acquisitions, he says, were made “to understand different parts of the industry better, so we can serve them better with the data.” Despite acquiring a significant chunk of the U.K. music distribution business, he says, it was “never the idea of Utopia to be a distributor.”
“We will never be a collecting society or a [performing rights organization],” says Hjelmstedt. “We will never sell data and we will not take investments from a large strategic player in the industry, and by doing so, we can safeguard the core of what we stand for.”
While the use of magnetic tape to record and play music dates back to the 1930s, it wasn’t until 1963, at the Berlin Radio Show, that Philips introduced the two-spool cassette. Twenty years later, the finicky format passed vinyl as the most popular music medium in the United States, but it was a short-lived victory: The CD soon spun it into the bargain bin of history. But two decades after most music fans pressed the Eject button, cassettes are following vinyl’s comeback in stores and stereos.Reel Love
Operating under the Norelco brand in the United States, Philips launched an “intensified advertising and promotion drive” to get cassettes into American homes,” according to the Sept. 24, 1966, Billboard. “The Norelco success on TV with shavers will hopefully be duplicated with recorders.” By the Nov. 26 issue, Philips predicted that “the market for equipment that can record and play back cassettes will reach 4 million sets” within a few years, citing one advantage the format had over vinyl: the “capability to play in any position, even upside down.”
Hitting Pause on High-End
Over the next decade, cassette sales were on fast-forward — but the format struggled to attract audiophiles, who stuck with vinyl. “A $19 cassette is a difficult sale to make,” mused an ad executive who worked for a chain store in the May 8, 1982, Billboard, referring to high-end cassettes. But electronics company Maxell tried: In that very issue, a pre-fame Geena Davis, leaning on a shelf full of tapes, appeared in a full-page ad targeting audiophiles.
Tapes and Tapes
Big Brother must have carried a Walkman: In 1984, the March 24 issue reported that “cassettes toppled LPs as the dominant prerecorded audio configuration last year, accounting for almost 53% of all album product shipped to trade.” Cassettes were up 30.1% year over year, while vinyl dropped 14.1%. The “portable lifestyle,” Billboard noted, “continues to propel sales to new peaks.”
Find Cassingles Near You
“Is Cassette-Single Format Winding Down Already?” asked the front page of the Dec. 21, 1991, Billboard. Apparently so: “The dollar value of CD sales surpassed that of cassettes,” according to an article in that issue. “Most distribution executives [agree that] the format has passed its peak,” though one Midwest chain store owner blamed “lousy songs,” insisting that the decline was nothing “a couple of hits couldn’t fix.”
Measuring Tapes
By the end of the ’90s, cassette sales were unspooling. “The decline of today’s cassette mirrors the disappearance of the 8-track tape two decades ago,” Billboard reported in its Dec. 28, 2002, issue. A year later, cassette sales had dropped 40.3% while CD sales had dropped just 3%, due to the rise of online piracy. In a Dec. 19, 2009, year-end “Sales by Album Format” graphic, cassettes had been folded into the “other” category. But reports of the format’s death were greatly exaggerated. From 2015 to 2022, the little tape that could saw a 443% increase in U.S. sales, according to Luminate, as marquee names like Taylor Swift, Megan Thee Stallion and Maren Morris cued up the cassette’s comeback.
This story originally appeared in the Feb. 25, 2023, issue of Billboard.
A Florida judge has issued an arrest warrant for rapper Kodak Black for failing a drug test while on bail for a drug charge, court records show.
The warrant was issued Thursday after Black, whose legal name is Bill Kapri, did not appear for a scheduled drug test in early February and then days later submitted a sample that tested positive for fentanyl, according to records.
Broward County Judge Barbara Duffy issued the warrant and wrote that the rapper had violated the conditions of his pretrial release for an oxycodone trafficking charge from July. At the time, Black was pulled over by the Florida Highway Patrol (FHP) for suspected illegal window tint. After smelling marijuana and searching his SUV, police said they found 31 oxycodone pills and $74,960 in cash, according to an FHP press release. A record check also revealed that Black’s vehicle tag and driver’s license were both expired.
Black had pleaded not guilty to the trafficking charge. At the time, the rapper’s attorney Bradford Cohen told Billboard, “Never judge a case based on an arrest. There are facts and circumstances that give rise to a defense, especially in this case. We negotiated a bond of 75,000 and we will move forward with resolving the matter quickly.”
In January 2020, then-President Donald Trump commuted a three-year federal prison sentence the rapper had for falsifying documents used to buy weapons. Black had served about half his sentence.
Black is nominated for the iHeartRadio Music Awards’ hip-hop artist of the year and has sold more than 30 million singles, with massive hits such as “Super Gremlin,” which reached number three on the Billboard Hot 100 last year.
The process of collecting public performance royalties from DJ sets has long been a tricky one in the United States, with uneven data collection processes often obscuring what songs are played at dance festivals. That makes it difficult for artists with the rights to the music to get paid what they’re due.
But one music market with a firm grasp on the performance royalties collection and distribution process as it relates to the dance world is The Netherlands, where electronic music is deeply woven into the country’s social fabric.
Buma/Stemra, one of the world’s most progressive collective management organizations (CMOs) for electronic music producers, operates within a live music market that generated 34 million euros ($36 million) in public performance royalties in 2022. Of this revenue, 7.2 million euros ($7.6 million) came from dance festivals, with roughly 1 million euros ($1.1 million) from clubs, making dance music comprises a quarter of the Netherlands’ total performance royalties
Since dance music incorporates so much different music from different artists in a set, that leaves a lot of rights holders to be identified. For this, Buma/Stemra uses audio fingerprinting technology that monitors and identifies songs played during sets.
“In the Netherlands, we have such a wide range of successful DJs with worldwide success,” says Juliette Tetteroo, accounts manager of dance events at Buma/Stemra. “As Buma/Stemra, that’s also why we find it really important to be at the front of developments like fingerprinting technology.”
For its fingerprinting, Buma/Stemra primarily uses Amsterdam-based DJ Monitor, an electronic music monitoring technology. DJ Monitor functions much like Apple-owned audio-recognition mobile app Shazam, identifying tracks within its library — a database of roughly 100 million songs submitted to DJ Monitor by global performance rights organizations (PROs) — and creating set lists for any given set with 93% accuracy, the company reports. (Billboard‘s recently published lists of the top 50 tracks and the top 50 artists played at Dutch dance festivals in 2022 was made with data collected by DJ Monitor.)
DJ Monitor is one of a number of music recognition technologies, including Pioneer’s KUVO, that can make the monitoring and reporting of DJ sets easier and more accurate. Buma/Stemra says that DJ Monitor has the highest identifying rates of all audio fingerprinting technology.
DJ Monitor is currently employed by CMOs in France, Germany, Finland, Belgium, Australia, New Zealand, the U.K. and The Netherlands, where it fingerprints 70% of all festivals. (Another fingerprinting company, Soundware, is also used by some Dutch events.)
Buma/Stemra’s work collecting performance royalties from a given event begins well before any tracks are even played. The CMO begins by determining licensing fees for any given event; for festivals with revenue lower than 110,000 euros ($116,000), the festival organizer pays the standard 7% licensing rate for events. This percentage is based on the assumption that more than two-thirds of songs played during the course of a given event are in Buma/Stemra’s repertoire. (If the event organizer provides a setlist showing that less than two-thirds of the music played was Buma/Stemra repertoire, the licensing fee drops to between 3% and 5%.)
For festivals with revenue higher than 110,000 euros, the event organizer provides Buma/Stemra with audio from the events to be fingerprinted. The festival can submit the audio manually, or upload it to the Buma/Stemra server, where it is then fingerprinted by DJ Monitor. The festival can also let DJ Monitor monitor audio during live performances, in which case DJ Monitor tech is implemented at every stage at the festival.
For bigger events, Buma/Stemra pays for fingerprinting costs, as, they say, it serves their goal of paying royalties on every song played at a given event.
“Our goal is to work towards one-on-one collection and distribution,” says Tetteroo. “It is all about the quality of what we do. [Paying for fingerprinting costs] also helps in encouraging organizers to pay, because they know that the money they pay goes to the composers and their publishers of the songs that have been paid. This is why we happily invest in technology that points in this direction.”
Buma/Stemra receives hundreds of songs from any given festival, given that most events host multiple stages and often run for three days. DJ Monitor typically identifies between 80% to 90% of this music (more than 80% if monitoring electronic music; 90% if monitoring open format/pop music) and sends formatted lists of the data to Buma/Stemra. Buma/Stemra imports this data, 60% to 70% of which is typically imported automatically — given that roughly that amount of music from any given event is recognized as something already in the Buma/Stemra database.
The percentage that’s not automatically recognized goes to an outsourced supplier in India that works to manually identify it. Money collected from a festival is then divided and paid out based on a system that assigns points to songs.
Given that a certain percentage of songs aren’t recognized, hundreds of hours of unclaimed music aggregates over the year because, says Buma/Stemra’s music processing manager Rob van den Reek, “we have a real lot of festivals here in the Netherlands.”
Buma/Stemra publishes this unclaimed music on their website, where artists can find and claim their songs. Artists are able to make a claim for up to three years after the song is posted online. If no one has claimed it after three years, the money owed to all unclaimed music is divided between rightsholders included in what’s called a “reference repertoire” — or a Buma/Stemra-compiled sample of common songs played at festivals. Introduced four years ago, this claiming system adds another layer of transparency — and more opportunity for creators to get the money they’re owed.
“Transparency is one of the benefits that stands out the most from the way we work,” says Buma/Stemra marketing manager Annabel Heijen. “That’s where we’ve made the most progress.”
There is one fault with the Buma/Stemra system that’s in the process of being addressed. Currently Buma/Stemra pays out based on the length of a full song that’s registered — not how much of it was actually played in a DJ set. If a song was registered at a length of three minutes, but only played for two minutes, Buma/Stemra pays based on that full, original timestamp. Buma/Stemra is currently building a new system that will pay out against the real timestamp identified during DJ sets that the organization expects to release by the end of 2023 or early 2024.
In the latest episode of the battle of K-pop giants, HYBE, the home of BTS, took some swings at SM Entertainment’s business partnership with tech company Kakao, owner of a popular messaging app, Kakao M, and music streaming service Melon.
On Feb. 6, Kakao announced it would purchase a 9.05% stake in SM Entertainment, whose roster includes NCT 127 and Red Velvet. Three days later, HYBE announced it would acquire a 14.8% stake in SM Entertainment by purchasing the majority of shares of the company’s founder and legendary K-pop producer, Lee Soo Man. Following a campaign by an activist investor for SM Entertainment to reduce Lee’s role, the company canceled his producer contract on Dec. 31, 2022.
SM Entertainment called HYBE’s investment “hostile M&A” and said its partnership with Kakao is “the first step” in its long-term transformation plan. HYBE sees SM Entertainment’s relationship with Kakao as one-sided and bad for shareholders.
“The contract between SM and Kakao, which grants acquisition of convertible bonds, undermines shareholder interest,” HYBE said in a statement Friday (Feb. 24). A clause grants Kakao or Kakao Entertainment the ability to “continuously increase its stake in SM” by allocating stocks issued through a paid-in capital increase to a third party, HYBE stated. “This will dilute the value of stocks owned by all shareholders other than Kakao or Kakao Entertainment.”
HYBE further argued the contract would hurt SM Entertainment’s chance of attracting “new strategic investors” and make it easier for Kakao “to seize control of SM’s management rights.”
HYBE also took issue with the Kakao’s role in managing SM Entertainment artists and distributing their music, arguing the contract gives Kakao an “unexpiring, exclusive” right to distribute SM Entertainment’s recorded music and allow Kakao Entertainment to manage SM Entertainment artists in North and South America.
In turn, SM Entertainment subsidiary SM Life Design will produce the recordings of Kakao Entertainment artists and provide a music video shooting set. “Compared with the important business rights that SM is handing over,” HYBE stated, “the return seems unreasonably small.”
After reviewing the contract’s legal issues, HYBE “will take all necessary legal measures, both civil and criminal,” it stated.
Thomas H. Lee, a billionaire private equity investor and part of the group that acquired Warner Music from Time Warner in 2004, died Thursday (Feb. 24) in New York at age 78, his family said in a statement.
A pioneer in the private equity world, Lee was the chairman of Lee Equity and formerly the chief executive of Thomas H. Lee Partners, the namesake firm he founded in 1974. Over nearly five decades in finance, Lee invested $15 billion in hundreds of companies and transactions, including the acquisition and sale of household brands like Snapple.
The Wall Street Journal, citing a New York Police Department source, said Lee was found dead in a bathroom at his Fifth Avenue office from what first responders believe to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. They were responding to an emergency call placed Thursday morning by Lee’s office assistant, the WSJ reported.
“The family is extremely saddened by Tom’s death,” Lee’s family said. “Our hearts are broken. We ask that our privacy be respected and that we be allowed to grieve.”
Lee’s Thomas H. Lee Partners, Bain Capital, Providence Equity Partners and Edgar Bronfman Jr. bought Warner Music from Time Warner Inc. for $2.6 billion in 2004. The group took the company public the following year, and Lee’s firm, Bain Capital Partners and Bronfman controlled 56% of Warner’s outstanding shares when it was sold to Len Blavatnik‘s Access Industries in 2011 in a deal valued at $3.3 billion.
Lee sat on WMG’s board as a director from 2004 to 2021, when he became a director emeritus.
“We are deeply saddened by the passing of our friend and colleague Tom Lee,” Warner Music Group CEO Robert Kyncl said in an emailed statement. “Tom made valuable contributions to WMG’s trajectory for almost two decades. Tom’s experience, wisdom, and enthusiastic support helped guide WMG through periods of major transformation, both within our company and in the music industry at large. Our condolences go out to his family and many friends.”
When Lee announced he would retire from the role of WMG board director in 2021, he described the company as having “undergone an extraordinary evolution,” and said he was gratified to have helped it transform and grow.
Lee was worth an estimated $2 billion, according to Forbes, and he was an active philanthropist involved in several New York City cultural institutions, including Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and the Museum of Modern Art.
The Ledger is a weekly newsletter that covers the financial and economic side of the music business. An abridged version appears at Billboard Pro. Sign up here to receive the newsletter.
Ticket fees have been called everything from “exorbitant” (Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Amy Klobuchar) to “completely bats—” (Last Week Tonight with John Oliver). And they can increase the price of a concert ticket by an average of 27-31%, according to a 2017 study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
Unfortunately for ticket buyers, those fees aren’t going anywhere quickly. They may change or disappear completely, but consumers won’t reap any savings in the end, Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino explained during Live Nation’s fourth quarter 2022 earnings call on Thursday.
Say, for example, a venue is prohibited from charging fees on top of a ticket’s face value. “Well, then the venue would say, ‘Okay, artists, the rent isn’t $50,000 anymore. It’s $100,000,’” Rapino said.
The ticket fee is a surcharge that helps cover a venue’s costs. Rapino’s point is that the venue needs to cover its costs, so it’s going to collect money to cover them, no matter what. In a normal scenario, the consumer helps cover those costs by paying a surcharge directly to the venue.
If fees were eliminated, artists — who are the final authority on primary ticket prices — would be forced to raise them to cover the additional cost. The surcharge may have disappeared, but that cost would still exist in the form of a higher face value. Regardless of the approach, the consumer’s expense and the venue’s revenues would be unchanged.
“The true cost of going to a show and making the show happen is the full price all-in,” said Rapino. The concept is apparent to anybody who has pondered how airlines set prices. If airlines charged an all-in fee that encompassed all its costs, ticket prices would be dramatically higher. Legislation that banned fees for checked baggage could result in higher prices for everything from flight themselves to in-flight beverages. Airlines that previously allowed free carry-on bags might start imposing fees on those. They could also charge more to change your travel plans (which used to cost the consumer nothing).
Rapino acknowledged that Live Nation, which owns and operates venues, would do the same. “If tomorrow someone said, ‘You know, you can’t charge 20% service fees on your amphitheater, you have to [charge] 10%.’ Well, then the $75,000 house rent that we charge artists would be $100,000,” he said as an example. Live Nation couldn’t simply absorb the cost, he explained. Since the company requires money to pay staff and operate the venue, it would find a way to recoup the lost fees.
While what consumers pay won’t change, they may get more transparency. In the wake of Ticketmaster’s disastrous Taylor Swift Eras Tour pre-sale, President Joe Biden unveiled an initiative to limit, among other types of fees, mandatory, back-end fees that “often hide the full price” of a good or service. The White House pointed to research that found hiding the full price encourages consumers to spend more than they would have otherwise.
Live Nation has also come out publicly — and forcefully — against hidden fees. On Thursday, Rapino called numerous times for the industry to adopt all-in pricing that show the ticket buyer a single price at the beginning of the transaction. Also on Thursday, Live Nation issued a press release that encouraged lawmakers to introduce legislation that includes, among other things, mandatory all-in pricing.
The uproar against Live Nation and Ticketmaster over ticket fees is just one of many criticisms to gain momentum in recent months. Some members of Congress have called Live Nation a monopoly that limits competition in the touring business and harms consumers by charging high prices and leaving some unable to purchase tickets for in-demand concerts like Swift’s Eras tour. Many inside and outside of Washington have called for the Department of Justice to break up the company’s concert promotion and ticketing operations. On Thursday, Sens. Klobuchar and Mike Lee sent evidence of the Jan. 24 Senate hearing on the ticketing market to the Department of Justice and encouraged its antitrust division “to take action if it finds that Ticketmaster has walled itself off from competitive pressure at the expense of the industry and fans.” Others have suggested Ticketmaster improve its security practices to deal with the bot attacks that derailed Swift’s pre-sale.
Ticketmaster may be most reviled for its fees, though. And as Rapino pointed out, those aren’t going away anytime soon.
