State Champ Radio Business
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“REGARDLESS OF WHICH RECORD IS No. 1 next week, in two weeks, it will face off with ‘I Will Always Love You’ by Whitney Houston,” wrote then-Billboard Hot 100 chart manager Michael Ellis in the Nov. 21, 1992, issue, when the track vaulted from its No. 40 debut to No. 12.Ellis’ prediction was off by a week. Houston’s cover of Dolly Parton’s 1974 classic hit No. 1 on the very next chart, Nov. 28, 1992 — the fastest rise to the top by a woman at the time.
From there, more records followed: The song remained at No. 1 for a then-unprecedented 14 weeks and moved 3.1 million copies to become the year’s top-selling single in just nine weeks, according to Luminate.
“Always” was released on the soundtrack for Houston’s 1992 film debut, The Bodyguard, in which she plays a pop diva who falls in love with her hired protector, played by Kevin Costner.
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The soundtrack, which also contains the top five Hot 100 hits “I Have Nothing” and an update of Chaka Khan’s “I’m Every Woman,” locked up 20 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and was the first LP to sell more than 1 million copies stateside in one week since Nielsen began tracking data in 1991.
The album and singles went on to win 11 Billboard Music Awards and eight American Music Awards. At the latter event, Houston’s haul prompted co-host Will Smith to remark out of a commercial break, “Welcome back to the Whitney Houston show!”
Three Grammy Awards followed, including record of the year for “Always,” and 20 years later, it remained Houston’s signature song. After her drug-related drowning death on Feb. 11, 2012, the song returned to No. 3 on the Hot 100, only the second time that a song has reached the top three in two distinct cycles.
At Houston’s funeral, “Always” played as her casket departed the church.
Spotify has been prepping music fans for their personalized Spotify Wrapped playlist for weeks, and the end of year rollout appears to be right around the corner.
The teases started way back in mid-October, when the streaming giant tweeted, “We want to see your Wrapped Top Artist predictions,” garnering responses from fans eager to guess the artist they had streamed the most throughout the bulk of 2022. (One week later, Spotify launched its new ‘Your Wrapped Soundcheck’ feature for artists on the platform.)
In years past, Spotify has collected data regarding each user’s listening habits through Halloween (Oct. 31) with Wrapped dropping either Dec. 1 or 2 — which in 2022, would mean this Thursday or Friday. And while the company has yet to confirm an exact date for the 2022 iteration of the madness, they’ve ramped up anticipation for the big day since that first tweet.
On Nov. 22, just a few days before Thanksgiving, Spotify promised, “All will be revealed soon” when it came to Spotify Wrapped. One day later, they roped Lizzo into the conversation by posting a gif of the singer beneath another tweet which read, “Turn up the music… it’s almost about damn time for #SpotifyWrapped” — a point-blank reference to her Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 hit, and lead single off 2022’s Special.
On Sunday night (Nov. 27), the streamer sent out the latest alert to anxious fans, tweeting, “Want to be the first to know when #SpotifyWrapped is here? [Heart] this tweet and we’ll remind you!” Based on hints and history, it seems the annual drop of Spotify Wrapped is imminent.
Check out everything Spotify has shared about the latest Spotify Wrapped below.
We want to see your Wrapped Top Artist predictions 👇— Spotify (@Spotify) October 12, 2022
Eric Church and his longtime manager John Peets have teamed to launch a new all-inclusive endeavor, Solid Entertainment.
The new company centralizes Church’s various ventures, while also doubling down on the infrastructure behind his span of business endeavors, including his new SiriusXM Channel Outsiders Radio, his upcoming Nashville venue/bar/restaurant Chief’s and his in-house merchandise operation as well as his fan club, the Church Choir.
Marshall Alexander takes on the role of president for Solid Entertainment, and will serve as Church’s representative for Chief’s. Meanwhile, Brandon Schneeberger will oversee day-to-day management for Church. Shane Allen and Kimsey Kerr have been added to launch and run Outsiders Radio, which officially launched on Nov. 4. Bryan Chisholm will lead digital marketing and Hayley Harris has been appointed to manage Church’s fan club. Matt Wheeler continues to oversee Chief merchandise.
“I’m incredibly proud of the path we’ve taken to get to this point in all our careers and to have experienced so much of it together,” Church said via a statement. “As our business continues to expand in different areas, it was important to me to establish a team of people that is focused on this growth. None of us got into music for the business of it, yet it’s part of how we are our most creative selves: through finding those other avenues for connection. It’s humbling to be in a position where such incredibly talented people want to focus on the future together.” Peets added, “I am very proud to take our professional relationship to the next level. We have been working creatively together since 2004, and Solid Entertainment represents a fresh look and a continued commitment to all that we have built. I look forward to adding to this foundation with an eye towards all that is to come with the ongoing expansion of Eric’s empire.”
They’re the keys to a solid business plan: a sound product, an understanding of the target customer, focused marketing and country music.
That’s right — country music. Nashville songwriters have over the last decade amplified a secondary source of revenue by giving more in-the-round performances beyond Music City’s club circuit, particularly for America’s corporate movers and shakers. Sometimes it’s a hometown gig at Nashville’s Bluebird Cafe or The Listening Room for 50-75 staffers with a company enjoying an entertainment break during a conference. In other instances, the composers may travel out of town to perform for a dozen senior members of different companies that are engaged in a leadership exercise.
Regardless of a company’s purpose, it gives songwriters — who create their material in small rooms — a chance to see their songs at work in front of an audience and to get paid for the privilege.
“A lot of songwriters are doing it because they’re not making money on getting cuts anymore,” says songwriter Hillary Lindsey (“Blue Ain’t Your Color,” “Jesus, Take the Wheel”). “Even if you get the album cut, if you don’t have a single, you’re not making money. So a lot of people are hustling and getting a lot of these gigs. If you do enough, I think you can make some money.”
The development was not born in a songwriting room. Instead, it came indirectly from the Nashville Convention & Visitors Corp., which is tasked with marketing Music City as a destination for both vacation and business travel. Songwriters are “a secret weapon of Nashville,” says NCVC CEO Butch Spyridon. Roughly 20 years ago, he rounded up three writers — Brett James (“I Hold On,” “Blessed”), Rivers Rutherford (“Ain’t Nothing ’Bout You,” “Real Good Man”) and Tim Nichols(“Live Like You Were Dying,” “Heads Carolina, Tails California”) — and hit a handful of other markets, attempting to entice convention bookers to plot their events in Middle Tennessee.
“The irony was it was so good, so cool and so special,” Spyridon says. “The client base responded better than if they were seeing the artists. It resonated out of the gate, and so then we just never stopped.”
Around 10 years ago, some of the executives who experienced those songwriter-in-the-round performances started booking them for their own corporate events. The price was much less than booking, say, Tim McGraw, and the event proved more personal and intimate, as attendees heard familiar songs in the vocal-and-guitar format in which they were originally conceived. While prices vary, the typical writer might get $5,000, so a company could conceivably book a four-person event for $20,000 and minimal production costs, far cheaper than a corporate McGraw gig.
“Not only that, you can get the writers that wrote most of the Tim McGraw hits,” says songwriter Rob Hatch (“I Don’t Dance,” “If Heaven Wasn’t So Far Away”), who co-founded a songwriter booking agency, Entersong, with Jerrod Niemann and Indiana-based entrepreneur Steve Stewart this year. The company has over 50 writers on its roster, and bookings can range from appearances at established venues to informal dates at backyard barbecues or house parties.
“COVID-19 created a situation where people couldn’t go out and go to concerts,” Hatch says. “A lot of the private concerts popped up more because they couldn’t go anywhere else.”
Like any other performer, songwriters determine the workload that suits them. Ashley Gorley (“You Proof,” “You Should Probably Leave”) takes out-of-town dates only if they’re with fellow writers who are already friends and/or it’s in a location where he and his wife would like to vacation. Chris DeStefano (“At the End of a Bar,” “Something in the Water”) is more aggressive.
“I try to do as much of it as possible,” he says. “It’s a great way of reaching fans and [a chance to] do some traveling, too, which I go do a lot of times. I get to bring my wife, and that’s always great. It’s working vacations, but also, it’s a way of really communicating directly with fans. And any opportunity I get to do that is some of the best parts of what I do.”
But a number of writers have also found that the shows can become too much of a good thing, as they start eating into their family time or damaging their creativity in the writing room.
“They are good for a songwriter to get some hard cash because our money is so delayed, the way we get paid,” says Jessi Alexander (“Never Say Never,” “I Drive Your Truck”). “If you’re going to pay me to come sing five songs with my friends, I’m going to do it, but I found that it was really starting to disrupt my writing — go play a gig, get home late at night, start all over again.”
Some of the gigs are ideal — Corey Crowder (“Famous Friends,” “Minimum Wage”) did one for Waldorf Astoria Hotels in Hawaii — and others have ranged from a trucking tire company that employed Track45 to a winery that booked Hunter Phelps (“wait in the truck,” “Thinking ’Bout You”). Another songwriter booking agency, Mike Severson’s Songwriter City, lists a bundle of clients — including Morgan Stanley, AT&T and Amazon — on its website.
In the end, the trend is one that takes advantage of the most unique feature of Music City’s creative class, providing an extra income stream to songwriters and setting the community apart in the business world.
“This kind of shows who we are,” Spyridon says. “You clear away all the clutter, and there’s a heart and soul, and it comes from the songwriter.”
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Jonathan “Hovain” Hylton, who was recently honored as one of Billboard’s 2022 R&B/Hip-Hop Power Players, has died.
“It is with deep regret that we message to all family, friends and colleagues that Jonathan ‘Hovain’ Hylton passed away while at his home on Friday, November 25. He was a beloved and devoted father, husband, son, brother and a proud Brooklyn representative,” read a statement posted Saturday (Nov. 26) on Hylton’s verified social media accounts.
The statement continued, “We’d like to thank all of his close friends for all of the love and support that you have shown during this difficult time. We ask that you all continue to keep his family in your prayers and respect their privacy at this time.”
A cause of death has not been disclosed.
On Friday morning, Hylton had last tweeted, “Good morning and thank GOD for another day,” a message he had been putting out into the world daily.
Hylton, a Brooklyn native who was a vp at Cinematic Music Group, was named alongside founder Jonnyshipes on this year’s R&B/Hip-Hop Power Players list.
“I’ve always prided myself on just being a good person and a hard worker. Never was big on awards. The way I came in this game was the independent route so I always knew caring too much about the politics wasn’t going to help me. But it feels good to be honored as one of Billboard’s Power Players alongside my brother and partner @jonnyshipes,” Hylton wrote on Instagram on Nov. 17. He added, “I think the biggest lesson is this is you don’t have to be a sucka or do corny s— to be recognized. Just be a good person and do your job and God will make the rest happen on his time.”
Throughout his career Hylton helmed projects for prominent New York rappers including Cam’ron, Styles P and Lloyd Banks, and alongside Jonnyshipes at Cinematic Music Group worked with artists including T-Pain and Flipp Dinero.
Hylton was also a professor at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, where he taught “The Business of Music,” an eight-week course offering students in-depth knowledge on publishing deals, business positions needed for an artist’s success and more.
“It’s an amazing opportunity to come from where I come from and to be asked to teach at such a fine institute,” Hylton told Billboard in 2021, when the course launched. “To share my love for music with the young minds who are looking to learn [will be a great experience].”
The music community mourned the death of Hylton on Saturday.
“Maaannnn we lost my brother in drip @hovain love you brother you always showed nothing but love and positivity. My condolences to your family,” Fat Joe wrote on Instagram. “Till we meet again RIP.”
“Damn Hov… Rest Up… Appreciate your knowledge & your positive energy… May God Bless your family with peace. Love & Light from my family to yours. Long Live Hovain,’ T.I. wrote on Twitter.
“Hovain had just hit me up about doing some music with lloyd banks,” Hit-Boy tweeted. “God bless his family.”
Elon Musk said Friday (Nov. 25) that Twitter plans to relaunch its premium service that will offer different colored check marks to accounts next week, in a fresh move to revamp the service after a previous attempt backfired.
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It’s the latest change to the social media platform that the billionaire Tesla CEO bought last month for $44 billion, coming a day after Musk said he would grant “amnesty” for suspended accounts and causing yet more uncertainty for users.
Twitter previously suspended the premium service, which under Musk granted blue-check labels to anyone paying $8 a month, because of a wave of imposter accounts. Originally, the blue check was given to government entities, corporations, celebrities and journalists verified by the platform to prevent impersonation.
In the latest version, companies will get a gold check, governments will get a gray check, and individuals who pay for the service, whether or not they’re celebrities, will get a blue check, Musk said Friday.
“All verified accounts will be manually authenticated before check activates,” he said, adding it was “Painful, but necessary” and promising a “longer explanation” next week. He said the service was “tentatively launching” Dec. 2.
Twitter had put the revamped premium service on hold days after its launch earlier this month after accounts impersonated companies including pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly & Co., Nintendo, Lockheed Martin, and even Musk’s own businesses Tesla and SpaceX, along with various professional sports and political figures.
It was just one change in the past two days. On Thursday, Musk said he would grant “amnesty” for suspended accounts, following the results of an online poll he conducted on whether accounts that have not “broken the law or engaged in egregious spam” should be reinstated.
The yes vote was 72%. Such online polls are anything but scientific and can easily be influenced by bots. Musk also used one before restoring former U.S. President Donald Trump’s account.
“The people have spoken. Amnesty begins next week. Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” Musk tweeted Thursday using a Latin phrase meaning “the voice of the people, the voice of God.”
The move is likely to put the company on a crash course with European regulators seeking to clamp down on harmful online content with tough new rules, which helped cement Europe’s reputation as the global leader in efforts to rein in the power of social media companies and other digital platforms.
Zach Meyers, senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform think tank, said giving blanket amnesty based on an online poll is an “arbitrary approach” that’s “hard to reconcile with the Digital Services Act,” a new EU law that will start applying to the biggest online platforms by mid-2023.
The law is aimed at protecting internet users from illegal content and reducing the spread of harmful but legal content. It requires big social media platforms to be “diligent and objective” in enforcing restrictions, which must be spelled out clearly in the fine print for users when signing up, Meyers said.
Britain also is working on its own online safety law.
“Unless Musk quickly moves from a ‘move fast and break things’ approach to a more sober management style, he will be on a collision course with Brussels and London regulators,” Meyers said.
European Union officials took to social media to highlight their worries. The 27-nation bloc’s executive Commission published a report Thursday that found Twitter took longer to review hateful content and removed less of it this year compared with 2021.
The report was based on data collected over the spring — before Musk acquired Twitter — as part of an annual evaluation of online platforms’ compliance with the bloc’s voluntary code of conduct on disinformation. It found that Twitter assessed just over half of the notifications it received about illegal hate speech within 24 hours, down from 82% in 2021.
The numbers may yet worsen. Since taking over, Musk has l aid off half the company’s 7,500-person workforce along with an untold number of contractors responsible for content moderation. Many others have resigned, including the company’s head of trust and safety.
Recent layoffs at Twitter and results of the EU’s review “are a source of concern,” the bloc’s commissioner for justice, Didier Reynders tweeted Thursday evening after meeting with Twitter executives at the company’s European headquarters in Dublin.
In the meeting, Reynders said he “underlined that we expect Twitter to deliver on their voluntary commitments and comply with EU rules,” including the Digital Services Act and the bloc’s strict privacy regulations known as General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR.
Vera Jourova, the European Commission’s vice president for values and transparency, tweeted Thursday evening that she was concerned about news reports that a “vast amount” of Twitter’s European staff were fired.
“If you want to effectively detect and take action against #disinformation & propaganda, this requires resources,” Jourova said. “Especially in the context of Russian disinformation warfare.”
HONG KONG — Chinese-Canadian pop star Kris Wu was sentenced to 13 years in prison for rape and other sexual offenses, a Chinese court said on its official Weibo account on Friday (Nov. 25).
The Chaoyang District People’s Court in Beijing said that from November to December 2020, Wu, also known as Wu Yifan, raped three women at his home when they were under the effect of alcohol.
Wu was sentenced to 11.5 years for rape and 22 months for “assembling a crowd to engage in promiscuous activities” in July 2018, according to the Weibo post. Wu, who is a Canadian citizen, will serve a 13-year term in China before being deported.
“Justice was delayed, but now it’s here,” Du Meizhu, the Chinese influencer who blew the whistle on Wu, wrote on Weibo after the announcement.
Born in China and raised in Canada, Wu was a former member of the popular K-pop group EXO before returning to China to pursue his solo career in 2014.
Wu was detained in Beijing in July last year and was formally arrested on suspicion of rape in August, after the then-18-year-old Du accused him of luring her and other underaged girls into having sex under the pretense that they would be promised an acting career. The closed-door trial began in Beijing in June.
The sexual assault allegations against Wu prompted widespread criticism and became one of the most high-profile #MeToo cases in China.
Wu was also ordered to pay a 600 million yuan ($83.5 million) fine for hiding personal income through domestic and foreign affiliated enterprises, local taxation authorities said on their website.
Wu’s scandal came at a time when Chinese internet and media regulators have pledged to silence “unhealthy” online fan groups and crack down on “tainted artists” who have used drugs, visited prostitutes or broken the law, from all forms of broadcast.
Artists in China have been under great pressure to refrain from “immoral conduct,” which includes acts as minor as smoking or having tattoos.
Under public pressure from the sex-crimes allegations, some 20 brands — including Lancôme, Louis Vuitton, Bulgari and Porsche — cut ties with Wu last year. Chinese music streaming platforms, including Tencent’s QQ Music and NetEase Cloud Music, pulled his songs, and his Weibo social media account, where he had over 51 million followers, was taken down shortly after his detention.
Wu’s former group, EXO, became one of the most successful boy bands of South Korea, selling over 1.4 million albums in their first year, according to its label, SM Entertainment, and performed sold-out gigs around the world.
He has also starred in films and appeared as a judge on The Rap of China, a popular reality television program. By 2017, Wu was named Forbes’ 10th most influential Chinese celebrity of the year, with an annual income of 150 million yuan ($23 million).
In 2018, Wu signed with Universal Music to distribute his music in global territories besides Japan and South Korea. His debut studio album, Antares (2018), knocked Ariana Grande off the U.S. iTunes music charts and was platinum-certified in China. It peaked at No. 100 on the Billboard 200 albums chart, while the single “Like That” rose to No. 73 on the Billboard Hot 100. (Each lasted one week on the charts.)
Wu’s contract with Universal expired in March 2021 and the label has not renewed it.
For the second consecutive quarter, Sony Music Publishing and Universal Music Publishing Group split the top honors in the publisher’s rankings. Sony topped the Top Radio Airplay category with a more than seven percentage point lead over No. 2 UMPG, while the reverse occurred in the Hot 100 Ranking: UMPG squeaked to a No. 1 finish, surpassing Sony by close to one percentage point.
This is each publisher’s second quarter in a row atop those categories.
Harry Styles‘ “As It Was” was the No. 1 song on the Hot 100 for the second quarter in a row and held steady as the No. 2 song on Top Radio Airplay for the same period. Lizzo‘s “About Damn Time” finished first on Top Radio Airplay and No. 2 on Hot 100 Songs, and was the top song for each of the big three publishers in all but one category. Third-quarter top 10 publishers with a stake in “As It Was” are UMPG and Pulse, while UMPG, Sony and Warner Chappell Music each have a share in “About Damn Time.”
Kate Bush‘s Stranger Things-fueled resurgence continued as her Sony-published “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” finished No. 3 on Hot 100 Songs, No. 7 on Top Radio Airplay, and because she is the track’s sole songwriter, established her as the top Hot 100 songwriter of the quarter.
Styles and his main co-writer Kid Harpoon (born Thomas Edward Percy Hull) took top songwriter honors in the Radio Airplay category for authoring “As It Was” and their credits as two of the three songwriters of another Top 10 Radio Airplay hit, “Late Night Talking.”
In Top Radio Airplay, Sony improved its industry leading market share by more than five percentage points over its 25.62% second-quarter showing, even though its song count fell slightly from 64 to 63 tracks. Lizzo’s “About Damn Time” was Sony’s top song on both the Hot 100 and Radio Airplay charts.
No. 2 UMPG’s Radio Airplay market share also grew more than 1.5 percentage points quarter-to-quarter and raising its song placements from 54 to 56. While “About Damn Time” was also UMPG’s top track on the Top Radio Airplay chart, Styles’ “As It Was” was its No. 1 track in the Hot 100.
UMPG held on to its No. 1 Hot 100 Songs ranking for a second quarter, even though its market share was down half a percentage point from its second-quarter 31.25% market, and its song count fell from 67 to 60.
As it did with its Radio Airplay showing, Sony increased its market share by slightly more than five percentage points over its 24.69% second-quarter market share. Its song count also rose from 62 to 64.
Warner Chappell, Kobalt and BMG, respectively ranked No. 3, No. 4 and No. 5 on both the Top Radio Airplay and the Hot 100 publisher rankings — an order that has remained for seven consecutive quarters in the Hot 100 rankings and two in a row for Top Radio Airplay.
In Radio Airplay, Warner Chappell’s market share dropped slightly more than two percentage points from last quarter, and its song count from 54 to 48. But the publisher improved its Hot 100 market share by more than one point over the second quarter’s 14.66%, despite its song count dropping from 53 to 49. Warner Chappell’s top song on both charts was “About Damn Time.” Warner Chappell Nashville also gave up its status as the No. 1 country music publisher for 22 consecutive quarters. It slipped to No. 2 behind Sony.
Kobalt held on to No. 4 in both rankings, despite losing market share. For Top Radio Airplay it fell from 14.945% to 13.21% quarter to quarter. For the Hot 100, it dropped more than three percentage points from 11.97% to 8.60%. Likewise, its song count is down for the Hot 100 chart from 53 to 49 while holding steady at 43 for the Top Radio Airplay chart. Jack Harlow’s “First Class,” which was No. 4, was its top Airplay song while Steve Lacy’s “Bad Habit” at No. 5 is its top Hot 100 song.
BMG also saw market share declines in both rankings, falling to 3.12% from 4.48% in the second quarter for the Top Radio Airplay chart; and to 2.17% from 3.58% for the Hot 100 chart. Its top song on both charts was Harlow’s “First Class,” which was the No. 7 song on the Hot 100.
In the second half of the rankings, Hipgnosis and Pulse Music Group held steady in the No. 6 and No. 7 spots, respectively, for the fourth straight quarter on the Top Radio Airplay rankings, and traded places in the Hot 100 from the second quarter. Both also lost market share from the prior quarter.
While Hipgnosis managed to hold onto its sixth place ranking in the Top Radio Airplay chart, its market share fell to 1.77% from 2.65% in the second quarter. In the Hot 100, it fell to 2.01% from 2.76% in second quarter, which led to the publisher falling from No. 6 to No. 7. Glass Animals’ “Heatwave” was its top song in both charts and finished No. 12 on both.
Pulse Music also dropped market share, falling to a 2.07% share in the Hot 100 from 2.76% in the second quarter but still went up one spot in the rankings to No. 6.; while over in the Top Radio Airplay rankings its tally fell to 1.6% from 2% in the second quarter. Its top song was Styles’ “As It Was.”
On the Radio Airplay chart, three publishers came close to tying: Pulse’s 1.607% was closely followed by No. 8 Concord with 1.597% and No. 9 Downtown at 1.593%. Round Hill Music rounded out the rankings with 1.05%. For the Hot 100, the same three publishers held down the last three spots albeit in different positions with Round Hill at No. 8 Concord at No. 9 and Downtown at No. 10.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) is following up last week’s open letter to Live Nation over “dramatic service failures” during the Taylor Swift presale with a hearing on competition across the ticketing industry. The senator and her across-the-aisle counterpart on the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust and Consumer Rights, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), jointly announced the hearing, with a date and witness list forthcoming.
“Last week, the competition problem in ticketing markets was made painfully obvious when Ticketmaster’s website failed hundreds of thousands of fans hoping to purchase concert tickets,” said Klobuchar, without mentioning Swift. “The high fees, site disruptions and cancellations that customers experienced shows how Ticketmaster’s dominant market position means the company does not face any pressure to continually innovate and improve.”
Klobuchar said the hearing will examine the effects of consolidation across ticketing — namely that a lack of competition suppresses the need to improve services and maintain fair pricing.
Lee added that consumers “deserve the benefit of competition in every market, from grocery chains to concert venues. I look forward to exercising our Subcommittee’s oversight authority to ensure that anticompetitive mergers and exclusionary conduct are not crippling an entertainment industry already struggling to recover from pandemic lockdowns.”
Aside from a possible grilling by U.S. senators, Live Nation and Ticketmaster are said to be under investigation by the Justice Department as to whether the company maintains an illegal monopoly over the live event ticketing ecosystem. The probe, according to The New York Times, predates this current debacle involving Swift’s tour presale.
Ticketmaster has apologized for the debacle, which started Nov. 15 when millions of Swift fans overwhelmed a presale for her Eras Tour — causing site crashes and hours-long waits, with many fans left empty-handed and — possibly newly engaged in politics. Ticketmaster went on to cancel the general sale as well.
“I apologize to all our fans. We are working hard on this,” Liberty Media CEO and Live Nation chairman Greg Maffei said in an appearance on CNBC last Thursday. “Building capacity for peak demand is something we attempt to do, but this exceeded every expectation.”
Swift’s tour is actually being promoted by Live Nation competitor AEG, which has told Billboard it “didn’t have a choice” in terms of ticketing sales and distribution because of Ticketmaster’s “exclusive deals with the vast majority of venues on the Eras tour.”
Ticketmaster and Live Nation have long been dogged by accusations that they exert an unfair dominance over the market for live concerts, particularly since they merged in 2010 to create their current structure. The combined entity has operated for its entire existence under a so-called consent decree imposed by the DOJ when it approved the merger. Under the decree, Live Nation is prohibited from retaliating against venues that refuse to use Ticketmaster. Those restrictions were set to expire in 2020 but were extended by five years in 2019 after the DOJ accused Live Nation of repeatedly violating the decree.
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: Live Nation faces potential legal fallout from Ticketmaster’s Taylor Swift fiasco, Journey bandmates sue each other over an American Express account, Mariah Carey loses a bid for ‘Queen of Christmas’ trademarks, and much more.
THE BIG STORY: Taylor Swift … Trust Buster?
A week removed from Ticketmaster’s disastrous presale for Taylor Swift’s upcoming Eras Tour, criticism of parent company Live Nation isn’t getting any quieter – and the threat of legal repercussions is growing.Live Nation has apologized to fans and pinned the blame on a “staggering number of bot attacks” and “unprecedented traffic.” And whether or not the star really was forced to use Ticketmaster is a complicated question, as Billboard’s Dave Brooks writes.But the debacle, which saw widespread service delays and website crashes as millions of fans tried (and many failed) to buy tickets for Swift’s 2023 Eras Tour, has nonetheless resurfaced some uncomfortable legal questions for the all-powerful concert giant.Since they merged in 2010, Ticketmaster and Live Nation have been dogged by accusations that they form a near-monopoly in the market for live concerts, potentially violating federal antitrust laws. Federal regulators at the U.S. Department of Justice approved that deal, but only after Live Nation signed a so-called consent decree that aimed to allay fears that they might abuse their dominant position. Among other things, the agreement prohibits the company from retaliating against venues or acts that refuse to use Ticketmaster. Those rules were set to expire in 2020, but were extended by five years in 2019 after the DOJ accused Live Nation of repeatedly violating the decree.In the wake of the Swift fiasco, those same monopoly questions are back in the spotlight – and some lawmakers want more than just another extension of the consent decree.On Tuesday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) blasted Live Nation as a “monopoly” and called for regulators to “break them up.” Two days later, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), the chair of the Senate subcommittee for antitrust issues, warned that the company’s market share “insulates it from the competitive pressures that typically push companies to innovate and improve their services.”Then on Friday, the New York Times reported that DOJ had already been investigating Live Nation for months over potential antitrust violations, reaching out to venues across the country to ask about the company’s conduct. Reacting to that news, Klobuchar and two other Democratic senators on Monday urged the Justice Department to take hard action if they discover more violations, including “unwinding the Ticketmaster-Live Nation merger and breaking up the company.”“This may be the only way to truly protect consumers, artists, and venue operators and to restore competition in the ticketing market,” the senators wrote.Such action might have been unthinkable just a few years ago, amid a decades-long period of relatively lax antitrust enforcement that saw airlines and mobile providers (and yes, music companies) merging into ever-larger conglomerations. But the Biden-era Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission have embarked on an aggressive new effort to crack down on such mega-mergers, including successfully blocking book publisher Penguin Random House from buying up rival Simon & Schuster.Beyond the Justice Department probe, other legal threats also potentially loom for Live Nation. The attorneys general of Tennessee, North Carolina, Nevada and Pennsylvania have all launched investigations into whether state consumer protection and antitrust laws were violated, including a Tennessee state law that aims to fight the use of automated “bots” on ticketing websites.And don’t forget about class actions. Live Nation is already facing an existing case that accuses the company of “blatant, anti-consumer behavior,” and the rest of the plaintiffs bar could be eager to try similar cases in the wake of such a high-profile snafu. At least one group of Swift-loving lawyers is already brainstorming how to bring cases.Faced with all that, can Live Nation shake it off? Stay tuned…
Other top stories this week…
JOURNEY’S CREDIT CARD CLASH – Journey guitarist Neal Schon filed a lawsuit against bandmate Jonathan Cain over allegations that he’s blocking access to “critical” financial records for the band’s American Express account, through which “millions” in Journey money has allegedly flowed: “This action is brought to turn the lights on, so to speak, and obtain critical financial information Schon has been trying to obtain but has been denied.” The case is the third legal battle among Journey members in the past two years, but the first to divide Schon and Cain — the only core members remaining in the band from Journey’s heyday.I FEEL SUED – Primary Wave and the estate of James Brown were hit with a lawsuit claiming their $90 million catalog sale last year violated an agreement that the iconic singer had struck decades earlier with another company. The case was filed by David Pullman’s Pullman Group (best known for creating so-called Bowie Bonds in the 1990s) over allegations that the blockbuster sale breached a contract that Pullman company struck with Brown way back in 1999, which allegedly guaranteed the company the right to broker any such deal in the future.YOUNG THUG GANG TRIAL SET FOR JANUARY – A Georgia judge refused to delay the closely-watched criminal case against Young Thug, Gunna and others accused of participating in an Atlanta gang, meaning their trial is now locked in to start on January 9. Prosecutors wanted to move the trial back by nearly three months because a few defendants had not yet been appointed a lawyer. But with Young Thug, Gunna and many others stuck in jail until trial, defense lawyers strongly opposed the delay: “It is unjust that [Young Thug] rots in the county jail and … is being required to wait on the appointment of counsel for co-indictees.”DUA LIPA RIPS COPYRIGHT SUIT – Attorneys for Dua Lipa asked a federal judge to quickly toss out a lawsuit claiming she stole her smash hit song “Levitating” from a little-known reggae track called “Live Your Life.” Florida band Artikal Sound System sued the star for copyright infringement last year, arguing the songs were so similar it was “highly unlikely that ‘Levitating’ was created independently.” But in their response last week, Lipa’s attorneys said those allegations were full of “vague, boilerplate labels and conclusions” and “devoid of a shred of factual detail.”MARIAH CANT GET ‘CHRISTMAS’ TRADEMARKS – The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office rejected Mariah Carey’s application to register “Queen of Christmas” as a federal trademark, siding instead with Elizabeth Chan, another singer who says she’s used the same name for years. Repped pro bono by BigLaw attorneys, Chan had argued that no single singer or company should be able to lock up the title. “It is wrong for an individual to attempt to own and monopolize a nickname like ‘Queen of Christmas’ for the purposes of abject materialism,” Chan said in a statement after the ruling.R. KELLY MANAGER SENTENCED – Donnell Russell, R. Kelly’s friend and former manager, was sentenced to 20 months in prison after pleading guilty to charges that he stalked one of Kelly’s sexual abuse victims in an effort to keep her silent. Prosecutors said Russell used “reprehensible” tactics against the unnamed victim after she filed a civil lawsuit against the disgraced singer in 2018, including threatening messages to her mother and leaking explicit photos online.SLACKER ON HOOK FOR HUGE ROYALTY JUDGMENT – A federal judge refused to undo his own earlier ruling that Slacker owes nearly $10 million in unpaid music royalties to SoundExchange, despite the steamer’s warnings that the huge judgment could trigger financial ruin for the company. SoundExchange urged the judge to ignore those pleas and last week he obliged – ruling that the seven-figure judgment was simply the result of an agreement that Slacker itself had signed.
