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At least half a dozen independent music distributors are fundraising or exploring selling their businesses as investors and major music companies, including Warner Music Group, vie for a piece of the business sector serving DIY artists.
Stem, the indie distribution darling that started as a fintech platform offering royalty splits, is in the early stages of a fundraising round that will be its largest to date, while Larry Jackson’s gamma. concluded its second round of fundraising. Downtown’s board of directors is exploring a sale and has held talks with Believe after an earlier dialogue with WMG fizzled. (Sources say WMG continues to eye acquisition targets.) ONErpm aims to put together around $40 million next year for its own mergers and acquisitions (M&A) fund, and indie streamer/distributor SoundCloud is expected to move into the final stages of either a sale or fundraising round later in 2024 to replace some of its existing shareholders.
Already this year, Believe founder and CEO Denis Ladegaillerie bought 95% of the outstanding shares of the French music company with roughly $1.7 billion in backing from investors that include TCV and Swedish private equity firm EQT in order to take the company private. And the Chicago-based firm Flexpoint Ford bought a stake in Create Music Group for $165 million. Last year, Exceleration Music bought indie distributor Redeye for an undisclosed sum, and gamma. launched with a $1 billion war chest.
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Indie executives say there are numerous factors pushing them to seek funding; among them are the growing influence of artificial intelligence in music-making and next-gen creators’ evolving feelings about independence. Some would rather take a big check from a major if it comes with guaranteed autonomy — which means indie distributors must achieve scale to survive.
Meanwhile, these indies’ collective share of the market is growing, prompting major music companies to make acquisitions and investments as a defensive play. And backers outside the music industry, such as private equity funds and institutional investors, see opportunity in betting on these companies that purport to have the pole position serving the music-makers of tomorrow. Non-major labels and self-releasing artists’ share of the global recorded-music market was 36.7% in 2023, up from 28.6% in 2015, according to MIDiA Research.
“The amount of money being thrown around right now is more than I’ve ever seen,” Stem co-founder and CEO Milana Rabkin Lewis says. “If you’re not out there fundraising right now, you’re not doing your job.”
Another reason to invest: Indie distribution companies are handling an increasing share of the songs that do best on streaming services. In the first half of 2024 in the United States, such companies were responsible for 13.6% of tracks played between 100 million and 500 million times and 22.1% of those played between 50 million and 100 million, according to Luminate.
That said, the indie digital distribution sector remains highly fragmented, and executives say they expect significant consolidation as the roughly 25-year-old segment of the music industry matures.
“You’ll see a lot of DIY distributors sell over the next six months,” says Greg Hirschhorn, CEO of Too Lost, an indie distributor that Hirschhorn says distributes music for over 300,000 artists and labels. “It’s a good time to run an indie distributor.”
Earlier this year, French securities regulators forced WMG to disclose it was considering making a $1.8 billion bid for Paris-based Believe. Warner CEO Robert Kyncl has said the company backed out before making a formal offer because of the brief amount of time it had to undertake due diligence for the deal, among other reasons.
The consortium of investors led by Ladegaillerie ultimately succeeded in taking Believe effectively private this summer, leaving WMG and others that bid on the company, like BMG, hunting elsewhere for acquisitions. Sources say WMG’s decision not to submit an offer for Believe may lead to more deals in this space.
Downtown has been a beneficiary of that fallout. Its chief investor, the family of late New Zealand beer baron Douglas Myers, has been mulling an exit for months. The company’s board has held exploratory talks with WMG and Believe, among others, according to sources.
Downtown declined to comment about any deal talks, but executive chairman Justin Kalifowitz says the current spate of deals is a natural next step resulting from the significant amount of investment dollars that flowed into music-related businesses between 2018 and 2022.
“A lot of cool ideas were born out of that. Some of them have grown up to be real companies, achieving scale but not profitability,” Kalifowitz says. “There is an efficiency that these businesses in the services sector are providing that is frankly not available at the majors.”
A significant portion of outside investment that flowed into music in recent years went to acquire song catalogs, which indie executives point out provide more stable, though lower, returns than active companies. Private equity funds controlled by banks like Goldman Sachs are warming to music companies, one executive says. “You could buy an asset and forecast it 20 years into the future. But in a music world, that’s really hard,” the executive says. “They realize that music acts like an annuity.”
ONErpm CEO Emmanuel Zunz says the indie distribution space is facing an inflection point in its maturation driven by more than investment and deal-making. Moments like this put pressure on companies that may have loads of debt or aren’t profitable to prove their business makes sense. Zunz estimates the company he founded roughly 15 years ago now ranks third, behind Believe and Downtown, among the largest full-service independent music companies. ONErpm, which has no debt and operates off its own earnings, is planning to put together a $40 million M&A fund next year to buy smaller companies around the world.
“It’s going to be interesting to see how it plays out over the next two to three years,” Zunz says. “Some folks are going to crash and burn. There’s going to be consolidation. But the ones that stay are going to have a compelling offer that provides a lot of value for artists.”
Additional reporting by Elias Leight.
On any given day, visitors to the University of California, Santa Cruz’s sprawling campus might stumble upon a grove of towering 150-foot-tall coastland redwood trees, a nesting white-tailed hawk, a handful of trailside yellow banana slugs or a full production concert attended by 2,800 music fans.
The latter would be courtesy of the historic on-campus Quarry Amphitheater, a natural limestone amphitheater that fell into disrepair in the 2000s and reopened in 2017 following a two-phase, $8 million capital improvement plan — before shutting down again due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, the Quarry is officially relaunching as a concert venue on Oct. 12 with Kevin Morby Presents: This Is A Festival featuring Morby (formerly of Babies and Woods); singer-songwriter Jessica Pratt; Trevor Powers’ experimental-pop project Youth Lagoon; prolific Parisian-born drummer, composer and producer 3; beloved indie-rocker Ben Kweller; and rising hip-hop and alt-rock group Blackstarkids. Chris Black and Jason Stewart from the popular culture podcast How Long Gone will serve as emcees for the evening.
“The Quarry is such an incredible space and in looking to the future of the venue, we wanted to create a replica that looks like the original but holds its own with any other modern venue,” said Quarry Amphitheater GM Jose Reyes-Olivas, who works on behalf of UCSC and previously booked and helped produce the Stern Grove music festival in San Francisco.
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Last month, the Quarry hosted a screening of which Reyes-Olivas says was “rebuilt…from the ground up,” has added a new load-bearing roof system, lighting trusses and motorized rigging. The venue doesn’t have a PA system; tours bring their own sound or rely on third-party backline companies for amplification, which Reyes-Olivas points out is also the case at nearby Berkeley, Calif.’s Greek Theater and the Mountain Winery in Saratoga, Calif.
Once viewed as a stopover for touring bands between the Bay Area and L.A., California’s Central Coast has since become an important music market on its own. Oakland company Ineffable manages a number of venues in Santa Cruz and coastal towns like Ventura and Monterey, while nearby Stanford University reopened its 8,000-capacity Frost Amphitheater in 2021.
The Quarry — which technically reopened last month with a special screening of the 1984 Talking Heads concert documentary Stop Making Sense — has agreed to a preferred booking agreement with Bay Area indie concert promoter Noise Pop Industries, though Reyes-Olivas tells Billboard the venue is an open facility available to qualifying concert promoters. Noise Pop, which was founded in 1993 as a $5 club night boasting a five-band bill inside San Francisco’s Kennel Club — now known as The Independent — has since grown into one of the Bay’s premier indie promoters, booking hundreds of bands at dozens of venues each year and serving as one of California’s best-known music showcases.
When it came to booking the Quarry, Morby “was definitely on the shortlist,” says Noise Pop CEO Michelle Swing. “We’re really big fans of Kevin and everything that he does…so we reached out to his team about curating a full day at the Quarry and he loved the idea.”
She added, “I think what’s fantastic is that the university is really investing in finding ways to bring more shows to the Quarry by bringing down costs and invested in the venue even further. We’re partnering with them to find the right shows that make sense for Santa Cruz music fans.”
Tickets for Kevin Morby Presents: This Is A Festival are on sale now via QuarryAmphitheater.com.
BMG CEO Thomas Coesfeld says taking his company’s digital distribution in-house and operational changes — two initiatives launched during his first year at the helm — are paying off.
The Berlin-based music company reported on Wednesday (Aug. 28) that it generated 459 million euros ($491.7 million) in revenue in the first half of 2024, marking an 11.1% increase from the year-ago period thanks to strong growth in digital income streams. Digital revenue, which contributed nearly 70% of BMG’s overall revenue for the period, rose 20.3% in the first half 2024 compared to 2023, as BMG exited a contract with Warner Music Group (WMG) and moved oversight of its digital distribution business in-house.
“This move is paying off,” Coesfeld tells Billboard of taking control of BMG’s 80-billion stream digital business. BMG now has greater insight into its streaming data, which enables it to provide “better marketing insights, more timely campaigning and iterations of that campaign [and] better tools around fandom” to its artists, who include Jelly Roll, Kylie Minogue and Mustard, Coesfeld says. Also, BMG saves money not paying fees to WMG’s ADA.
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“One or two years ago we had this plan, we said this is what will happen,” Coesfeld adds. “And [these earnings] show it works.”
BMG’s first-half organic revenues grew by 12.5% while operating earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) — a closely watched measure of growth — rose by 35.5% to 122 million euros ($130.7 million). EBITDA margin was 26.5%, up from 21.7% in the first six months of 2023. BMG’s catalogs again underpinned that margin figure, as the company acquired 10 catalogs during the first half of the year. Details of those deals were not disclosed.
The close of the first six months of 2024 coincided with the end of Coesfeld’s first year as CEO. After taking the reins of BMG from longtime CEO Hartwig Masuch on July 1, 2023, Coesfeld has set a tone that communicates BMG is open to change, even if it means taking advantage of artificial intelligence and collaboration with historic rivals.
“We figured only if we anticipate trends a little earlier do we have a chance to win in this very competitive market,” Coesfeld says. “We are looking at a fundamentally attractive market that is growing. It is driven by tech and if we adopt it and don’t fight it there is huge opportunity for BMG and artists.”
One example of this approach is BMG’s partnership with a generative AI lab at Munich’s Technical University, through which they have successfully launched a pilot program that uses gen-AI to market BMG’s deep catalog. Students at the lab generated short videos that have proven to be more cost efficient and effective at getting the audience to engage with the music.
Last fall, BMG also began a structural reorganization that included letting go of around 40 employees. It was a “tough period… but a business necessity” and part of a broader strategy meant to help the company respond quickly to industry trends, Coesfeld says.
“The operational changes, which we enacted — digital distribution, better able to monetize our repertoire and catalogs and our reorg, which is complete, is making us way more agile and faster in delivering our service and making decisions,” he adds. “We are much more agile on a day-to-day.”
Warner Music Japan has appointed Dr. Kenji Kitatani to the resurrected role of chairman of the label division, effective immediately. Dr. Kitatani will work closely with WMJ’s longtime president and CEO, Kazuyuki “Kaz” Kobayashi, to boost the company’s presence in the globe’s No. 2 music market. Dr. Kitatani currently holds the title of chairman of […]
This is The Legal Beat, a weekly newsletter about music law from Billboard Pro, offering you a one-stop cheat sheet of big new cases, important rulings and all the fun stuff in between. This week: Shaboozey gets into a thorny legal battle with his former label; Beyoncé and the Foo Fighters move to stop Donald Trump from using their songs; another lawsuit erupts over the control of the Ramones; and much more.
THE BIG STORY: Shaboozey’s Looming “Bar” Fight
Amid the massive success of Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” an acrimonious legal battle is brewing in Los Angeles Superior Court. On Wednesday (Aug. 21), the breakout country star (born Collins Obinna Chibueze) filed a lawsuit against music publisher Warner Chappell and his former record label, Kreshendo Entertainment, accusing them of breach of contract. Two days later, Kreshendo sued him right back, accusing him of “a strategy of fraud and misrepresentation.” The dispute? The extent to which Shaboozey is still bound by a deal he signed with Kreshendo back in 2016, when he was a relatively unknown artist. Both sides agree that the deal was terminated in 2019, but they are at odds over Shaboozey’s continuing obligations to his old label. And Warner has gotten roped in because it administers his publishing rights, which play a key role in the dispute. The litigation is getting underway just as “A Bar Song” has emerged as one of the biggest hits of 2024. A genre-blending hit that interpolates J-KWON‘s 2004 rap hit “Tipsy” into a bouncy pop country track, the track has spent seven weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, marking the longest chart-topping stint of the year. In its lawsuit, Kreshendo says it was that sudden success that sparked the legal battle: “Shaboozey had no issue with any of these terms for years. It was only after he recently released the ‘Bar Song,’ which has become a huge hit, that he has taken sudden issue with the terms he expressly agreed to.” We’ll keep you posted as the dispute moves ahead in court…
Other top stories this week…
FAMILY FUED – A California appeals court issued a final ruling allowing the Michael Jackson estate to proceed with a $600 million sale of the singer’s catalog to Sony Music, rejecting objections from his mother Katherine Jackson that aimed to block the deal. She’d argued that the deal “violated Michael’s wishes,” but the court ruled that the superstar’s will gives his executors (John Branca and John McClain) “broad powers” to ink such transactions. HOLD UP – Beyoncé‘s record label and music publisher sent a cease-and-desist to Donald Trump‘s presidential campaign over its use of the megastar’s song “Freedom” in a social media video, prompting the campaign to quickly pull down the offending post. The Bey track serves as the official theme song for the campaign of Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris — likely the reason why the Trump campaign used it. ANTI-HERO? – Elsewhere in Trump world, the Foo Fighters publicly claimed that they had not authorized the former president to play their 1997 anthem “My Hero” at a rally with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and would seek to prevent him from doing so in the future. The campaign later claimed that it had, in fact, obtained proper licenses to perform the song. Either way, the band said that any royalties received as a result of this usage would be donated to the Harris/Walz campaign. DAME’S UNPAID TAXES – Just a week before a court-ordered auction of Damon Dash’s one-third stake in Jay-Z’s Roc-A-Fella Records, there was a stunning new wrinkle: He owes more than $8.7 million in unpaid taxes — and New York state says the proceeds from the Roc-A-Fella sale must be used to pay them. The new claim complicated an already complex situation, in which Dash’s stake in the storied record label is being sold off by U.S. Marshals to pay off an $823,000 civil judgment. HEY, HO, LET’S SUE – Opening up a new front in the never-ending legal war over the Ramones, Joey Ramone’s brother (Mitchel Hyman, better known as Mickey Leigh) sued Johnny’s widow (Linda Cummings-Ramone), accusing her of infringing the band’s trademarks by carrying out an “unrelenting quest” to associate herself with the Ramones. DIDDY CASE UPDATE – Sean “Diddy” Combs asked a federal judge to dismiss a case filed in February by Rodney “Lil Rod” Jones, arguing that the “salacious” lawsuit was filled with “blatant falsehoods” designed to pressure him into paying a lucrative settlement: “Running to nearly 100 pages, it includes countless tall tales, shameless celebrity namedrops, and irrelevant images.” SNEAKER SETTLEMENT – The sneaker company Vans and a Brooklyn art collective called MSCHF reached a settlement to end a long-running trademark lawsuit over Tyga‘s “Wavy Baby” sneakers — a parody of the company’s classic Old Skool brand of shoes. The artists said Tyga’s pricy sneakers were akin to an art project, and thus protected by the First Amendment. But Vans called it “blatant” infringement of the company’s IP, and federal courts repeatedly agreed with that assessment. OUTKAST TRADEMARK CASE – The legendary rappers sued an EDM duo called ATLiens, the same name as one of OutKast’s best-known songs. Big Boi and André 3000 claimed that the name (a combo of “aliens” and their hometown of Atlanta) is a novel linguistic term that had been “invented by OutKast” — and that the rival group is confusing music fans by using it. SHKRELI SEIZURE – A federal judge ordered convicted pharma executive Martin Shkreli to hand over his copies of Wu-Tang Clan’s Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, rejecting his claims that he had a right to retain duplicates of the one-of-a-kind album even after he forfeited it to federal prosecutors.
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Surely many Deadheads took in multiple performances of Dead & Company’s 30-date residency at Las Vegas’ Sphere this past spring and summer. It’s unlikely, however, that many of them saw more than Bernie Cahill.
Cahill — who, as a partner at Activist Artists Management, co-manages Dead & Company with Irving Azoff and Steve Moir — caught 20 Dead Forever shows at the fantastical, $2.3 billion venue, with his box suite perch offering impeccable views of the band as it seemed to lift off from the Grateful Dead’s former house in San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury district and hurtle into deep space.
“This definitely was a work in progress,” Cahill tells Billboard. “We were adding new content as late as the final weekend. We feel like we had made a commitment to the fans that we would continue to evolve the show and deliver, and we did.“
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The run made Dead & Company the third group to play Sphere after U2 opened the venue last September and Phish put on a three-night run of shows this past April. Dead Forever grossed $121.5 million and sold 429,000 tickets over 27 shows from May 16-Aug. 3, according to numbers reported to Billboard Boxscore.
Here, Cahill talks about helping break in the cutting-edge venue, bringing Deadheads to Vegas and why, if asked, they’d likely do it all over again.
Was there a sense of learning as the residency went on, and if so, what were those lessons?
Getting in that room and dealing with the audio and some of the basics of not having amplified sound on stage, you learn a lot. Obviously, Irving had just gone through it with U2, so we definitely had a leg up and were lucky that U2 shared so much institutional knowledge with us.
But still, until you get in that room, you just don’t know what you’re in for, so it was a constant evolution. Every single night we were learning things about the room, the audio, the content. Sometimes we would see new content that we would have, and it would just pop and be remarkable, and other times it didn’t always work exactly as it was envisioned. That’s just part of the process of this new medium and new canvas.
I imagine by the end, you have this performance that feels really fully formed, because you’ve developed it over the course of all these shows.
I feel like the guys were inspired as well. They found a new gear at the Sphere. Maybe part of it is the residency, part of it is the challenge of doing something new. I think that was huge for them. You’ve been doing this for particularly as long as Bob [Weir] and Mickey [Hart] have, and I think they were really fired up about the challenge of it. They leaned into all parts of it without ever losing sight of the songs. They were just knocking it out of the park. After the final tour, I didn’t think the band could get much tighter and better, and they pulled it off.
Do you feel they were leveling up because they had to compete with this fantastical thing they were in?
Yes, there’s some of that. But also, they were looking for ways to make this a complimentary integration of their visual storytelling and their music. With this immersive experience happening around you when you’re on that stage, I think they probably felt — and it shows — that they needed to deliver it at another level musically, and they did. I think the room invites that.
Were there unforeseen challenges that came up over the course of the residency?
Lots. [Laughs] I think some of the bigger ones were just things Derek Featherstone, our tour director and front-of-house engineer, had to manage, which was we had less rehearsal than we probably would have liked. When we’re loading in after they show the [Darren] Aronofsky movie [during the daytime], for instance, and we can’t do a full tech run-through of new content, that can be scary and flying without a net a bit. But I think what we see in our granular understanding of the show and then the fan experience, I don’t think they felt any of that stress or worry.
Were you finding that fans were going again and again, or was it more of a one-off experience for people?
Definitely repeat. There were so many repeats, and I think people were really gratified that they were doing more than just a show or more than just one weekend. We had people that saw shows every weekend. Most people saw at least two or three shows. That’s kind of the magic of this band and this community. They know that at a minimum, Bob and John [Mayer] are going tell a story over the weekend and they’re not going to repeat any songs. That story would unfold Thursday, Friday, Saturday, almost like a three-act play. That really appealed to our community.
Having done this, what advice would you give to a manager whose group is about to play the Sphere?
Well, for one thing, learn as much as you can from folks like U2 and Dead & Co. and Phish that have done it. We’re an open book, we’ll share whatever we can. We made mistakes, and we learned a lot, and we’re happy to share that with other artists that are coming after us.
Being a band that has always had visuals as a prominent part of the storytelling helped us a lot. It was very natural for us to explore that and go much deeper at the Sphere. I think bands that come after us who have those visual elements as a part their story and their brand will have an easier time creating their show. I would just advise to get started as soon as you can and don’t stop pushing the margin, either. Keep going with it and keep exploring and experimenting throughout your run.
The venue also really makes sense for a band with such a long a rich history, because the show so effectively leaned into that visually. Obviously, that’s not something a newer act can really do.
True. We have this very rich palette to draw from, and it really clicked in this venue. Yes, there were the crazy moments when it felt very 3D and hurtling through space. Then there were the analog moments and, I think, important emotional moments where the band was just connecting, whether it was Bob playing while standing on the moon and the ballads that just brought everybody to a whisper. I guess the other advice would be to strike that balance of those emotional, analog-feeling moments and then playing with the technology and how big you can go.
It was touching, thinking about the life of Bob Weir and where he and Mickey are coming from and now, they’re effectively playing in a spaceship.
Yeah, exactly. But by the way, it’s very Bob Weir if you know him. He loves technology. They’re all really technophiles. They love it. I think they love anything that allows them to go deeper with their storytelling and their exploration of this music. That is a gift to these artists, and I think is a big part of why the Sphere worked so well and was such a success.
Would they try it again?
When asked in interviews they’ve done since, I think they’ve all said they would definitely entertain an invite and would love to come back and do some things. Bob wants to really lean into this idea of being able to affect the visuals in real time and synching them more with the music itself.
But there were already some interesting things happening in that room that I don’t know if people even realized. [One night] there was a full moon outside, and we beamed the actual live full moon into the Sphere. That wasn’t video. That was a Weir idea.
If you were to do another residency, is there anything you would change?
Jim Dolan, you have to give him so much credit. He nailed it with this venue, which is impeccable in almost every way, from the backstage where we all spent most of our time, to front of house. Maybe [it would be] having a bit more time to rehearse, more tech rehearsal, just getting comfortable in the Sphere, because it’s one of one. It’s the only one in the world.
NFL star brothers Travis and Jason Kelce are taking their services to the Wondery podcast studio. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the Super Bowl-winning siblings have signed a significant new deal taking their two-year-old New Heights with Jason and Travis Kelce podcast to the Amazon-owned podcast studio, which signed a distribution and exclusive ad-sales representation deal for the family talk show.
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“We couldn’t be more excited to team up with Wondery for the next phase of New Heights,” the Kelce brothers told THR. “We love this show, and the fanbase that has grown with us over the last two seasons. Wondery understands the shared vision and will offer a wealth of experience and resources to take us to New Heights! We are going to create some groundbreaking moments together through this partnership. We are thrilled to start Season 3.”
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While the specific terms of the deal were not announced, THR noted that a person close to the matter described it as being in the “nine figure” range and “very competitive.” The multi-year deal will give Wondery exclusive global distribution rights to all audio and video episode of the pod, as well as its back catalog and the rights to make international audio adaptations of the show.
“We’ve been watching the growth of the podcast, really since it was launched, and I have been building a relationship with Travis and Jason and getting to know them for a while now,” Wondery CEO Jen Sargent told THR. “Sports is a really exciting category for podcast listeners. It’s a strategic priority of Wondery’s and Amazon’s. So there were a lot of reasons to think about joining forces here on the New Heights podcast.”
Sargent added that Wondery is looking into live domestic and international events and potentially creating localized content.
The brothers — older sib Jason retired from the NFL last year after 13 seasons as a center with the Philadelphia Eagles and tight end Travis is a three-time Super Bowl champion with the Kansas City Chiefs — launched the podcast in 2022 with Wave Sports + Entertainment. The new deal will make the show available on all podcast services, as well as YouTube, with Wondery also offering ad-free listening to its Wondery+ subscribers.
Talking about their lives on the gridiron and off the field, the show drew a dedicated sports audience that exploded into a much wider fanbase when Travis started dating Taylor Swift last year. Since then, the Ambies-, Webbys- and Shorty-award-winning football talk on the show that usually ranks as one of the top sports podcasts on Apple and Spotify has been spiced up with some tidbits from Travis and Taylor’s romance.
Among the Traylor highlights over the past year were such scenes as Travis dancing to Swift’s “Shake It Off” during a live taping in April in Cincinnati — where both men attended the University of Cincinnati — and Travis gushing about Swift’s “insane” Eras Tour show at Gillette Stadium in December. Kelce also revealed the the moment the singer officially won over brother Jason during an episode earlier this year, in one of the many mentions of the pop superstar on the pod.
The Kelces have both been expanding their off-field activities lately, with Jason joining ESPN as an analyst and Travis signing on to host Amazon’s Are You Smarter Than a Celebrity? and booking a slot on Ryan Murphy’s upcoming FX horror show Grotesquerie, as well as circling the action comedy Loose Cannons.
Their mega-deal comes amid new of a few other huge signings recently, including Wondery’s similar distribution and ad sales deal with actor Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert pod, which signed an estimated $80 million pact in July, as well as the just-announced $125 million deal Alex Cooper signed wit SiriusXM for her Call Her Daddy show.
While biking across Iowa this summer, Mark Michaels enjoyed a rare moment of reflection. “You’re riding about 80 miles a day among cornfields, and it gives you a lot of time to think,” the United Record Pressing chairman/CEO says. “I spent a lot of time while I was peddling thinking about United,” he adds of the oldest and largest American-owned, U.S.-based vinyl pressing plant in the world, which will celebrate its 75th anniversary this fall.
Michaels is speaking from his Nashville office, where he’s surrounded by signed records from Buddy Guy, Jack White and more of his icons, all expressing their thanks to him and his manufacturing team. (In 2014, White made history by recording, pressing and releasing a 7-inch of his single “Lazaretto” in under four hours, thanks to URP.) “It’s easy to forget those moments of euphoria and gratitude because you’re so focused on ‘How many records of this did we ship?’ or ‘What’s going on with that press?’ ” Michaels says. “But you don’t want too much life to pass by where you don’t stop and reflect.”
URP was founded as Bullet Plastics in Nashville in 1949, becoming Southern Plastics in the ’50s before landing on United Record Pressing in 1971. By the ’60s, a deal was signed for the plant to handle singles pressings for Motown, and in 1963, the first Beatles 7-inch, “Please Please Me”/“From Me to You,” was pressed, with a typo that spelled the band’s name as The Beattles.
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In 2007, a year before Record Store Day officially launched and just before the format was beginning its first-wave resurgence, Michaels bought the company — and helped sustain it through a particularly rough patch. As he recalls, half of URP’s output at the time was 12-inch singles created as promo records for DJs. “That was a lot of what we did, and shortly after I bought the company, the labels stopped doing that,” he says. “The DJs all got [music production software] Seratos, and the labels figured out that was a better business model. So all of a sudden, the health of the company was in serious jeopardy … We were doing everything to keep the lights on.”
By the summer of 2009, a career-changing order came in: a 50th-anniversary pressing of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue (a favorite of Michaels) — the plant’s biggest order to date. Michaels himself oversaw quality control, checking a record at random every 30 minutes. “I remember one night, it was two in the morning and I’m in my office listening to these records, and I thought, ‘This is crazy, but goddamn, I’m lucky.’ And it just gave me this boost of energy. The next month, we got another order of that size.” Since, URP has manufactured vinyl for every major artist, from Adele to Taylor Swift.
In the early 2020s, URP faced another challenging period: the coronavirus pandemic. “Demand for vinyl exploded” during lockdown, Michaels says, but the orders put an unprecedented pressure on pressing plants to keep up. He says that was the catalyst for URP to expand, resulting in an $11 million project that built new infrastructure and supporting equipment and added 26 new presses. “The challenge is you can’t do that overnight,” he says. And now, not only can URP meet demand, but “the plant runs better than ever.”
He and his team of approximately 130 employees — all of whom have been sporting anniversary T-shirts that detail the plant’s various logos over the years — are now ready to toast such a feat and storied history, with Michaels saying the energy “is palpable” at the plant these days. A forthcoming celebration will bring together partners, customers, vendors and “people who support the format … There’s a renewed sense of pride and interest in what we do.”
Already, Michaels is focused on how to maintain it for the next 75 years, doubling down on the honor he has in keeping the process — and workforce — in Music City. “Seventy-five-plus years of history gives you a lot of gas in your tank in terms of pride,” he says. “You don’t make the first Beatles record in America, you don’t make all these Motown records, you don’t accumulate all this history and know-how and not have something special. And I never want to lose that.”
This story appears in the Aug. 24, 2024 issue of Billboard.
Sean “Diddy” Combs wants a federal judge to end one of the several sexual abuse cases he’s facing, arguing that the “salacious” lawsuit is filled with “blatant falsehoods” designed to force him into a settlement.
In a motion filed Monday in Manhattan federal court, attorneys for the star ask a judge to dismiss a case filed in February by Rodney “Lil Rod” Jones, who claims Combs sexually assaulted, drugged and threatened him while he worked as a producer on the rapper’s 2023 The Love Album.
Though they say the case is really nothing more than a “run of the mill commercial disagreement,” Combs lawyers claim Jones’ lawyer added “meaningless allegations and blatant falsehoods” in order to “generate media hype and exploit it to extract a settlement.”
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“Running to nearly 100 pages, it includes countless tall tales, shameless celebrity namedrops, and irrelevant images,” Combs’ lawyers write. “Yet, despite all its hyperbole and lurid theatrics, the [complaint] fails to state a single viable claim against any of the Combs defendants.”
The filing took personal aim at Jones’ attorney Tyrone Blackburn, citing a recent ruling in a separate case in which a federal judge sharply criticized the lawyer for filing suits designed to “garner media attention” and “embarrass defendants.”
Once one of the most powerful men in the music industry, Diddy has been hit with at least seven civil lawsuits alleging sexual abuse over the past year, including claims by ex-girlfriend Cassie Ventura that were followed by a video showing him assaulting her. The hip-hop mogul is also facing an apparent federal criminal investigation after authorities raided his homes in March.
Though the rapper has denied the legal allegations against him, he issued an apology in May over his conduct captured on the video of the Ventura attack: “My behavior on that video is inexcusable. I take full responsibility for my actions in that video.”
Jones sued in February, accusing Diddy not just of sexual assault but also of operating a sweeping conspiracy that violated the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act — the federal RICO statute that’s more often used in criminal cases against mobsters and drug cartels. He also accused Combs and others of violating federal sex trafficking laws.
In Monday’s motion to dismiss the case, attorneys for the rapper argued that Jones had fallen well short of showing that he could sue under RICO.
“Because litigants frequently attempt to transform garden-variety fraud or breach of contract cases into RICO claims, the civil provisions of RICO are the most misused statutes in the federal corpus of law,” Combs’ lawyers write, quoting from earlier rulings. “Thus, courts strive to flush out frivolous RICO allegations at an early stage of the litigation.”
Combs lawyers also asked the judge to dismiss the other claims in the case. They argued that the claim of sexual assault is spelled out in “two vague paragraphs” in which Jones “fails to allege essential facts, such as the where, when, and how of the purported misconduct, or even any conversation about, report of, or witness to any particular occurrence.”
Jones’ attorney, Blackburn, did not immediately return a request for comment from Billboard. But in a statement to Deadline, Blackburn called the motion to dismiss “nothing more than a billing exercise by Sean Combs’ latest set of lawyers.”
“It is a weak attempt to fill their pockets before he is indicted, and they decide to haul ass, just like his five previous lawyers did,” Blackburn told the outlet.
Jones’ case initially named Universal Music Group (UMG) and CEO Lucian Grainge as defendants, claiming they “aided and abetted” Combs in his alleged misconduct and were members of the RICO conspiracy. But Jones later dropped them from the case, with Blackburn admitting there had been “no legal basis for the claims and allegations that were made against the UMG defendants.”
Read the entire motion filed by Combs’ lawyers here:
The merger between entertainment giant Paramount and media company Skydance is set to go ahead after Edgar Bronfman Jr. withdrew a competing offer.
Bronfman, executive chairman of streaming service Fubo, told Paramount’s special committee of directors Monday night that he would not proceed with his bid.
“While there may have been differences, we believe that everyone involved in the sale process is united in the belief that Paramount’s best days are ahead,” he said.
Bronfman, the former chairman and CEO of Warner Music, had intitially offered $4.3 billion for Shari Redstone’s National Amusements, the controlling shareholder of Paramount, according to multiple media reports. He then upped that bid to $6 billion.
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Paramount agreed last month to a merger deal with Skydance that will inject desperately needed cash into a legacy studio that has struggled to adapt to a shifting entertainment landscape.
Since then, during what’s known as a “go shop” period, a special committee of Paramount’s board had reached out to more than 50 third parties to determine whether they were interested in making offers. The go shop period was extended for Bronfman, but has now closed.
Shari Redstone’s National Amusements has owned more than three-quarters of Paramount’s Class A voting shares through the estate of her late father, Sumner Redstone. She had battled to maintain control of the company that owns CBS, which is behind blockbuster films such as “Top Gun” and “The Godfather.”
The deal signals the rise of a new power player, Skydance founder David Ellison, the son of billionaire Larry Ellison, who founded the software company Oracle.
Skydance, based in Santa Monica, California, has helped produce some major Paramount hits in recent years, including Tom Cruise films like “Top Gun: Maverick” and installments of the “Mission Impossible” series.
The proposed combined company of Paramount and Skydance is valued at around $28 billion. The deal is expected to close in September 2025, pending regulatory approval.
Paramount, founded in 1914 as a distributor, is one of Hollywood’s oldest studios and has had a hand in releasing numerous films — from “Sunset Boulevard” and “The Godfather,” to “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “Titanic.”