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When New Orleans rapper B.G. came home in September after serving an 11-year sentence following his guilty plea on two counts of possession of a firearm and one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice, the rap community rejoiced. He’s the man responsible for entering the phrase “bling-bling” into the pop culture lexicon, after all.
But nearly a year later, the founding member of ’90s rap group Hot Boys is facing an unusual legal challenge: On Friday (June 28), a U.S. District Court judge in Louisiana ruled that the New Orleans rapper must provide the U.S. Probation Office with a copy of the lyrics to his upcoming songs for approval before producing or promoting them.
The decision, handed down by U.S. district court judge Susie Morgan, came several months after B.G. (real name Christopher Dorsey) was arrested in March for performing at a Las Vegas concert alongside rapper Lil Boosie; apparently, B.G. needed prior permission from the court to associate with acts that also have felony convictions on their record, as Lil Boosie does. The probation officer in the case also cited B.G.’s work with Gucci Mane, another rapper/convicted felon with whom B.G. released a collaborative mixtape, Choppers & Bricks, in December.
B.G. was subsequently released on his own recognizance pending the judge’s decision. Shortly after, the rapper expressed his frustration in an Instagram post, saying in part, “It’s crazy how after paying my debt to society with 12 and a half years of my life I come home and still ain’t free…I been doing everything the right way and it seems like that ain’t enough.”
At a court hearing on June 18, B.G. and prosecutors confirmed they had reached a deal to modify the conditions of the rapper’s supervised release following his March arrest but “disagreed” over the prosecutors’ request to prohibit the rapper “from promoting and glorifying future gun violence/murder” in his music and at his concerts, according to the June 28 ruling.
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“The Defendant argues that the additional condition proposed by the Government is an unconstitutional prior restraint of speech that is an overly broad condition of supervised release,” the ruling reads.
The judge ultimately found that the prosecutors’ request was “not sufficiently clear and specific to serve as a guide for the Defendant’s conduct and for those entrusted with his supervision,” instead imposing a special condition that B.G. provide the probation office “with a copy of the lyrics of any song he writes,” according to the ruling. All lyrics B.G. shares with the probation office will be passed to the U.S. government, which can then decide if his “conduct is inconsistent with the goals of rehabilitation,” the ruling continues.
A representative for B.G. did not immediately respond to Billboard‘s request for comment.
The ruling is certain to cause controversy at a time when the practice of lyrics being used against rappers in criminal court has become a hot-button issue. In November, a judge ruled that Young Thug‘s lyrics can be used during his YSL RICO case, saying that “the First Amendment is not on trial.” Bobby Shmurda and the late Drakeo the Ruler have also had their lyrics used against them in criminal cases. There have since have been laws passed and proposed on both the state and federal levels to stop the criminalization of rap lyrics; in September, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law a statute restricting the practice, while similar laws have been proposed in New York and the U.S. House of Representatives.
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: Pharrell Williams and Louis Vuitton face a trademark lawsuit over “Pocket Socks”; Diplo is hit with a lawsuit claiming he distributed “revenge porn”; the Village People move forward with a lawsuit against Disney; a longtime attorney repping Britney Spears moves on; and much more.
Top stories this week…
SOCKED WITH A LAWSUIT – Pharrell Williams and Louis Vuitton were hit with a trademark lawsuit over their launch of a high-end line of “Pocket Socks” a literal sock-with-a-pocket that launched at Paris Fashion Week last year and sells for the whopping price of $530. The case was filed by a California company called Pocket Socks Inc. that says it’s been using that same name for more than a decade on a similar product. AI FIRMS FIRE BACK – Suno and Udio, the two AI music startups sued by the major record label last week over allegations that they had stolen copyrighted works on a mass scale to create their models, fired back with statements in their defense. Suno called its tech “transformative” and promised that it would only generate “completely new outputs”; Udio said it was “completely uninterested in reproducing content in our training set.”REVENGE PORN CLAIMS – Diplo was sued by an unnamed former romantic partner who accused him of violating “revenge porn” laws by sharing sexually-explicit videos and images of her without permission. NYPD confirmed to Billboard that a criminal investigation into the alleged incident was also underway. DISCO v. DISNEY – A California judge refused to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the Village People that claims the Walt Disney Co. has blackballed the legendary disco band from performing at Disney World. Disney had invoked California’s anti-SLAPP law and argued it had a free speech right to book whatever bands it chooses, but a judge ruled that the company had failed to show the issue was linked to the kind of “public conversation” that’s protected under the statute. WRIT ME BABY ONE MORE TIME – More than two years after Mathew Rosengart helped Britney Spears escape the longstanding legal conservatorship imposed by her father, the powerhouse litigator is no longer representing the pop star. In a statement, the Greenberg Traurig attorney said he was shifting to focusing on other clients: “It’s been an honor to serve as Britney’s litigator and primarily to work with her to achieve her goals.” PHONY FEES? – SiriusXM was hit with a class action lawsuit that claims the company has been earning billions in revenue by tacking a shady “U.S. Music Royalty Fee” onto consumers’ bills. The fee — allegedly 21.4% of the actual advertised price — represents a “deceptive pricing scheme whereby SiriusXM falsely advertises its music plans at lower prices than it actually charges,” the suit claims. DIVORCE DRAMA – Amid an increasingly ugly divorce case, Billy Ray Cyrus filed a new response claiming that he had been abused physically, verbally and emotionally by his soon-to-be-ex-wife, Firerose. The filing actually came in response to allegations that it was Cyrus who had subjected Firerose to “psychological abuse” during their short-lived marriage. UK ROYALTIES LAWSUIT – A group of British musicians filed a joint lawsuit against U.K. collecting society PRS, accusing the organization of a “lack of transparency” and “unreasonable” terms in how it licenses and administers live performance rights. The case, filed at London’s High Court, was brought by King Crimson’s Robert Fripp, as well as rock band The Jesus and Mary Chain and numerous other artists.
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The following is an excerpt from the newly published book Rockin’ the Kremlin: My Incredible True Story of Gangsters, Oligarch, and Pop Stars in Putin’s Russia written by David Junk with Fred Bronson, out now on Rowman & Littlefield. David Junk was the first CEO of Universal Music in Moscow, helping promote artists from Elton John to Mariah Carey in Russia and signing t.A.T.u. and Alsou to Universal. Junk also opened the first Universal Music office in Kyiv, Ukraine, and developed music reality shows for TV in Ukraine. Fred Bronson is a journalist, author and regular contributor to Billboard. He has written three books about the Billboard charts and covered American Idol and Eurovision for Billboard extensively.
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Adapted from the book Rockin’ the Kremlin: My Incredible True Story of Gangsters, Oligarch, and Pop Stars in Putin’s Russia by David Junk with Fred Bronson. Used by permission of the publisher Rowman & Littlefield. All rights reserved.
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The Kiss Heard ‘Round the World
I knew the Moscow-based duo t.A.T.u. was going to be my international breakthrough from the first moment I saw their controversial video.
I loved their music. The dynamic vocals were haunting and the music had an infectious dance beat. The lyrics were provocative. There was no act like them anywhere in the world. But I had to convince my Russian marketing and sales team to support me. An act like t.A.T.u. was going to be a risk for everyone. Russia was still a very intolerant society, despite the Soviet Union being long gone. This band would be pushing boundaries.
I gathered the team in my office, plugged t.A.T.u.’s VHS tape into my TV hanging on the wall, and we watched it together. Everyone’s mouth dropped watching the infamous scene when Julia and Lena kiss. “No! You cannot sign them. Are you crazy, David?” Asya, my very wise marketing director stood up and shouted. “We are going to catch so much hell for this, from everybody!” I argued, “Don’t you love how they’re rebelling against authority? That’s all that kiss is. They’re teenage symbols of a new Russia, leaving the past behind.” That’s when my excellent radio promoter Sasha Rodmanich spoke up. “The song is a hit.” At a record label, that’s all that matters. So with Sasha’s promise the song would be a hit at radio, I was able to rally the team, including Asya, who would have to carry most of the burden. We were going to pursue signing t.A.T.u. But she was right to be cautious, since I was taking Universal into uncharted territory.
Homosexuality was a crime in the old Soviet Union and under Russian law, promotion of LGBTQ issues was considered propaganda, punishable with time in prison. Gay Russians have always been treated as outcasts and subversives by the authorities. So when Julia and Lena openly embraced gay rights and kissed in their first music video, I knew I had to make a quick decision that could change my music career forever: should I sign the most exciting new music act in Russia (and maybe the world) to Universal, even if it meant risking my visa status as an American working in the country or even possible jail time because I angered the two most powerful institutions in the country – the government and the Russian Orthodox Church?
Both frowned on all things LGBTQ. Or should I shy away from the controversy and miss the best opportunity I would ever have to promote a Russian act around the world, perhaps achieving my wildest dream, being the first record executive to promote a Russian band in America? There was no way I was going to pass on this. I kept my fingers crossed that I wouldn’t end up in a Russian prison.
To sign t.A.T.u., I had to deal with Ivan Shapovalov, a high IQ provocateur in the mold of Sex Pistols manager Malcom McLaren. He was a manipulative, edgy person, whose eyes would pierce you while you were in conversation. The band was his idea, and he brought in songwriters to craft the anarchistic message. He auditioned many girls and ultimately chose two Moscow teenagers: Lena Katina, a firey redhead with a head of wild curls, considered the reasonable one; and Julia Volkova, the sassy brunette manga comic-looking foul mouthed and funny one. Both had worked in television and music projects as child actors.
I didn’t know what to expect from Ivan because negotiations in Russian show business were never predictable. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia was chaotic, corrupt, and dangerous, like Chicago was in the 1930s when Al Capone was declared the FBI’s public enemy No. 1. Russia was the wild, wild east, and their music industry had no rules or standards.
Common Western business practices like royalty payments and songwriter copyrights were foreign concepts. Payola was rampant. The government didn’t support the music industry or musicians’ rights.
The biggest obstacle was that 90 percent of all music sold in Russia was printed on counterfeit compact discs, while music legally released by record companies accounted for the other 10 percent. Musicians only made money from sales of the official releases, so this situation made it nearly impossible for artists to survive financially. The pirates who made the bootleg CDs sold them in illegal outdoor markets and kiosks throughout the country while local authorities turned a blind eye to all of it. Worse yet, the pirates were controlled by organized crime groups that used the proceeds from counterfeit sales to fund a host of illegal activities, including selling weapons to terrorists and sex trafficking.
Ivan was a tough negotiator, and he knew how badly I wanted to sign the band. My rival Sony Music had caught wind of my efforts and started courting him while I was trying to close the deal. I knew I had to play to his ego, so when he arrived at our Universal office to discuss a record contract I made sure Asya gave him a tour of our marketing and sales department where large cut-out posters of Elton John, U2, and Bon Jovi’s new album releases were hanging on the wall along with dozens of other posters of Universal’s vast roster of superstars, demonstrating that we were an international label, not a small Russian one. That was my best leverage for negotiations. “Why should I give you the rights to t.A.T.u.?” Ivan asked, staring at me with his wild eyes. “I don’t need a record label; the pirates will steal the music from you anyway.” He was right about that. Piracy would limit our sales. I told Ivan, “If you sign with me I guarantee that t.A.T.u’s album would will be promoted by Universal not just in Russia but also internationally.” That persuaded him. Universal was one of the most prestigious American brands in the world and the largest record company, and he wanted t.A.T.u. to be associated with the best Western artists.
Ivan demanded $100,000 for the rights to t.A.T.u., which would have made it the biggest record deal in Russian show business history. He was adamant that he couldn’t accept anything less. I didn’t believe him until I discovered that he had already sold the rights to the first single to a record label controlled by Russian gangsters and they had already manufactured it.
I got angry with Ivan, and he told me that he had made a mistake, that he was new to show business and didn’t know anything about song rights. The gangsters had initially paid him $5,000, but now that he was in talks with Universal, they wanted significantly more to give the rights back. I didn’t have much choice because this wasn’t just any song. This was the hit single with the notorious music video that would launch t.A.T.u. internationally and top music charts worldwide. If I didn’t get the single rights back from the gangsters at that exorbitant price, there would be no t.A.T.u.
I had to keep my bosses at Universal’s headquarters in the dark about some of the unsavory aspects of the deal. Luckily, they thought I had done a good job selling American rap and hip-hop music in Russia, with Eminem being my biggest success.
Still, $100,000 was outrageous for an artist from that part of the world and would be the biggest payout in Russian and Eastern European history. None of my colleagues who ran Universal subsidiaries in Eastern Europe had ever requested that much. Ultimately, my London bosses agreed to the amount, and I used the money to pay Ivan, who paid off the gangsters.
With Universal Russia behind the duo, t.A.T.u.’s debut album, 200 Po Vstrechnoy, got wider distribution and became a phenomenal success in every Russian city and former Soviet republic, including Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Ukraine. Julia and Lena topped the charts everywhere in the region, and t.A.T.u.’s first song and video hit No. 1 simultaneously on pop radio and MTV in 2000.
Their music first appealed to gay and lesbian youth, then spread to a much larger audience of disaffected teens. They took off like a wildfire throughout the former U.S.S.R. Stadiums were sold out and crowds of fans were worked up into a frenzy with Julia and Lena’s provocative performances. It was Russia’s version of Beatlemania. My Eastern European colleagues took notice of that because they all had sizable teenage Russian-speaking populations in their countries and sensed a hit for their markets. On that score, t.A.T.u.’s album delivered, topping the charts in Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Poland.
We were getting ready to release 200 Po Vstrechnoy in Germany, but I knew that t.A.T.u. would never go beyond Russian-speaking audiences in Eastern Europe unless they recorded in English for Western markets.
We needed a partner to help make a t.A.T.u. album in English. We needed to rewrite and re-record the songs, and we needed a bigger, more powerful partner ally inside of our parent company Universal Music Group to shepherd us through the process. I wanted Universal’s full weight behind the release.
I went on a road tour of all of all the company’s offices in search of help. We told everyone that t.A.T.u. was on the way up, selling out concerts everywhere and climbing the charts in Bulgaria, Poland, and Hungary. If they had an English-language release, I said, they could become a global act. Unfortunately, nobody was interested in partnering with us.
Wherever we went – Los Angeles, Nashville, New York, London, anywhere Universal had an office – the answer was always no. When people from the label saw footage of them kissing on stage, it made them uncomfortable, and when Lena and Julia invited boys onstage to do the same, my colleagues were too nervous to support us.
Another issue for the executives was my goal of breaking t.A.T.u. into the American market. They would have to compete with American pop stars like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, boy bands like the Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC and big pop acts from the U.K. My colleagues arrogantly dismissed the potential for a band not from America or the U.K. to have a hit in their markets.
My road tour was a bust, so I went back to Moscow and mailed packages with the Russian album and videos out to all the remaining labels in the Universal Music Group that we hadn’t visited. We kept getting turned down. It felt like we would never find a partner – until suddenly I received a phone call from Interscope Records in Los Angeles, a subsidiary label of Universal and the hottest record company in America.
I was surprised that Interscope was interested. Their roster included No Doubt, Marilyn Manson, the Black Eyed Peas, Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre, 50 Cent, Eminem, Mary J. Blige, Nelly, and Blink-182 – some of the most popular acts in the world. They really didn’t need us. Still, I had done well selling their artists in Russia, so there was already a symbiotic relationship in place.
I had sent our package to the label’s co-founder, Jimmy Iovine. He was the most powerful record executive in the world, and before forming the label, he had produced some of the most prominent artists of all time, including Tom Petty, U2, and Stevie Nicks. He sent t.A.T.u.’s Russian-language CD to British producer Trevor Horn, who had helmed very successful records for artists like Seal and Yes. He had also been in the Buggles, whose “Video Killed The Radio Star” was the first video ever shown on MTV.
He loved the t.A.T.u. CD and was very enthusiastic about working with Julia and Lena. He had been a ground-breaking pioneer in the U.K. music industry, producing the openly gay act Frankie Goes To Hollywood. I suspected that t.A.T.u. breaking through boundaries in Russia and Eastern Europe hit a nerve with him. He just had one question: “Can they sing in English?”
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For the past several years, the organizations that collect public performance royalties have been growing far faster than most of the music business, especially in Europe. Revenue at the French collective management organization SACEM rose 34% in 2022, while its UK counterpart, PRS for Music, doubled its revenue since 2014. The growth is fast enough to make the whole alphabet soup of initials exciting to the point of attracting investment-backed rivals to the traditional nonprofits — think BMI, which just took on outside investment, or Kobalt’s AMRA.
Until about a decade ago, the traditional collective management organizations, known as CMOs, licensed rights within a given territory for compositions played in public — at concerts, in stores and restaurants, on television and radio, and eventually from streaming services. (Some also collect for mechanical rights or neighboring rights and remit that to rightsholders through related organizations.) And while European CMOs still do that, for the last decade they have also competed against one another to represent and license online rights in Europe and some other territories (not including the U.S.). This has made the most complicated part of a complex business even harder to understand, since it allows publishers and songwriters to assign different kinds of rights in different territories to different CMOs. In the U.S., for example, songwriters can join ASCAP or BMI, then assign certain rights in other territories to different organizations, in order to collect that money directly instead of indirectly, although only very successful creators tend to do this.
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As the pandemic subsided in 2021, CMO growth turned to hypergrowth, fueled by increases in online revenue, the reopening of restaurants and stores, and the roaring comeback of the concert business. The annus mirabilis was 2022, especially for the European societies that represent the most U.S. repertoire: SACEM grew 34%, PRS 23%, Sweden’s STIM 20% and Germany’s GEMA 13%. Now growth is coming down to earth, but it’s still healthy — last year, revenue grew 5% at SACEM (where distributions grew 19%), 12% at PRS, 8.4% at GEMA and 14.2% at STIM. So I was eager to write a column about how important this is for songwriters and the music publishing business that supports them, what this means for the future, and how creators can figure out which CMO would be the best for them. Instead, I ended up spending a few days staring into an abyss of uncertainty.
Growth in CMO revenue means that either the publishing business is growing, a given CMO is faring better than its competitors, or some mix of the two. But although the European Union mandates transparency, each CMO accounts for revenue so differently that it’s very hard to compare them. For example, STIM categorizes revenue collected from online licenses in foreign territories as “foreign income”; SACEM considers this “online”; while PRS treats this income as online when it licenses rights directly and foreign when it doesn’t. It gets considerably more complicated from there.
As competition among societies heats up, the most important few are pulling away from the rest. PRS, GEMA and STIM operate ICE as a Berlin-based pan-European licensing hub, and most publishers and other societies license online rights in Europe and other countries either through it or SACEM, which is a hub in its own right. That means at least some of the growth at those societies is coming at the expense of their European competitors, although it’s hard to tell how much.
Even as CMOs compete, they also cooperate in various ways — including remitting money to one another. Some of the success of societies actually depends on their rivals: GEMA members will make more if SACEM maximizes the money it collects on their behalf in France, for example. The closest analog I can think of is world trade, where countries drive prosperity by boosting the success of their counterparts while also trying to outcompete them. Consider that every CMO wants to account to its members faster than its rivals, but final accounting is only possible once numbers come in from other markets. It’s a game that can only be won by both beating and boosting rivals. At this point, the abyss starts to stare back.
Perhaps since the CMOs depend so much on one another, the top executives agreed on a few points — most important that growth will come back to earth and that as it does, cost efficiency will become more important. “I think we will continue to see growth but not at as fast a pace as during the pandemic,” STIM CEO Casper Bjørner told me. As that happens, “I think cost ratio becomes really important,” GEMA CEO Tobias Holzmüller added, referring to the percent of revenue that goes to expenses, which has historically been between about 10% to 15% and is generally declining. And since the CMOs collect relatively similar per-play payouts from streaming services, Holzmüller said, “You compete on cost and services.”
SACEM CEO Cécile Rap-Veber said the same: “What matters to me is value for our members.” PRS CEO Andrea Czapary Martin has also prioritized efficiency, setting a goal of getting the PRS cost ratio below 10%, which it did in 2023 for the second year in a row, in addition to cutting its administration rate for royalties from online services by 20%. “We can do this,” Martin said recently, “because we are surpassing our targets.” The idea is that, amid the accounting chaos, cost ratio might emerge as a comparison that’s easy for songwriters and publishers to measure.
Cost ratio may be an easy way to compare CMOs — but even that gets complicated because different sources of royalties come with very different costs. For example, general licensing revenue for music played in stores or restaurants is relatively expensive, since signing licensing deals with new businesses is relatively labor intensive. Revenue that comes in from online services costs less, while income from foreign counterparts is cheaper still. That gives an advantage to CMOs that depend more on foreign revenue relative to their size — and it helps STIM and PRS reduce their costs. (This isn’t the whole story; these societies are also very well-run.) It also makes SACEM’s 10.76% cost ratio even more impressive.
For all their competition, in fact, the big European CMOs aren’t always even playing the same game. STIM gets 73% of its income from foreign and online royalties, so to some extent its success is tied to that of Swedish songwriters who write for global pop stars, although it has to make sure they can’t get a better deal from another CMO. GEMA is at the opposite end of the spectrum — more than a third of its revenue comes from general and concert licensing, for which it takes in more than its rivals, presumably partly because the German economy is the biggest in Europe. PRS collects more online and foreign income, partly because English-language repertoire travels globally. SACEM, the oldest CMO and the biggest outside the U.S., benefits from operating its own hub. Breaking this down to determine the best deal for a given creator gets even harder, and it may just depend on which of those specialties offers the most appealing advantage.
That doesn’t mean competition isn’t working, though — even if some executives said that they measure themselves against their performance in previous years more than that of rivals. “Competition has forced a lot of us to improve our efficiency,” Rap-Verber told me when SACEM announced its results. And that benefits creators who join any CMO.
Tixr, the fast-growing primary ticketing and live event commerce company, today announced the official opening of its London office and strategic expansion into continental Europe. Industry veteran Stephanie Rosa has been appointed to serve as managing director of the London outpost, leading a new handpicked local team to build upon the company’s already robust roster of partners in the region.
The move marks the California-based company’s latest international launch, following the expansion of its operations into Canada, announced in March. Tixr’s recent client partnerships in Europe include Space Ibiza, Eden Nightclub in Ibiza, British digital radio station Kisstory, F.A.T. International, RuPaul’s Dragcon, Dreamhack, Uptown Festival, Dublin ComicCon, Leicestershire County Cricket Club, Egg London, E1 Series, Brockwell Live, Aramco Team Series, and London’s popular brewery Signature Brew.
Most recently, Tixr partnered with Forbidden Forest Festival which took place earlier this month. Nestled in hundreds of acres of lush forest on the grounds of the stunning Belvoir Castle in Leicestershire, Forbidden Forest brings together 20,000 over three nights to celebrate music, nature and dance. Tickets for next year’s fest, the first to be handled under the new Tixr deal, go on sale to the general public later this year.
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“There’s no modern platform more capable of servicing such a wide array of complex events, and the opportunities in the region are immense,” said Rosa. “The fantastic regional team we’ve built is honoured to partner with iconic sell-out festivals like Forbidden Forest that value design, innovation, and share in our mission to deliver the best fan experience possible, starting with the ticket.”
Before relocating to London for her newly created role, Rosa served as Tixr’s director of partnerships and sales operations. She came to Tixr from UK-based Festicket, which was acquired by Lyte in 2022, where she served as vp of sales in North America.
“Each year we set out to deliver extraordinary customer experiences”, said Laura Ball, marketing director at Forbidden Forest Festival. “When we selected Tixr as our trusted ticketing partner for 2025 and beyond, we knew each year we could collaborate to further raise the bar and deliver a best-in-class experience for our Forbidden Forest customers.”
Tixr already services events in 10 European countries and exclusively powers more than 500 of the most respected live entertainment brands in 40 countries. Since its inception, Tixr has processed nearly $2 billion in transactions through its highly visual, modern, unified commerce platform built for sales beyond admission tickets.
Tixr’s new London office is located at London Bridge.
Quality Control has appointed Britney Davis as general manager. Davis will supervise the label’s daily operations alongside CEO Pierre “P” Thomas and COO Kevin “Coach K” Lee. In addition to serving as a liaison between Quality Control’s artist roster and affiliated teams, she will assist the staff, managers and artists in developing strategies and structure across all […]
Hipgnosis Song Management announced on Tuesday that Merck Mercuriadis will be stepping down as chairman of the music investment advisor. In giving his notice, which goes into effect upon closing of the proposed acquisition of Hipgnosis Songs Fund to private equity giant Blackstone, HSM’s founder called it the “right time” and a “timely opportunity for me […]
Mano Sundaresan, founder of the music blog No Bells, will take on the role of Head of Editorial Content for Pitchfork, the publication announced on Tuesday (July 2).
He joins during a fraught time for media — numerous publications have laid off staff in the last 18 months — and for Pitchfork in particular. In January, parent company Condé Nast folded Pitchfork into GQ and cut a number of longtime staffers, including Puja Patel, who had served as editor in chief since 2018. The backlash was swift: The Washington Post declared “the end of Pitchfork,” while The Guardian called the move “a travesty for music media” and many publications ran postmortems eulogizing the venerated site.
“I understand what the concern was — [people thought] this really important media outlet was going away,” Will Welch, global editorial director of GQ and Pitchfork, tells Billboard. “It was a misunderstanding. It’s not going away, and in so many ways, it’s getting all this new energy.”
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That starts with Sundaresan. In 2021, stuck at home during the pandemic, he decided to launch No Bells. “Everybody in quarantine had their little hobby,” he tells Billboard in his first interview since taking the job. Some took up baking bread; he started a site to house some of his stories — “mostly about these undercover online music scenes” — that weren’t being accepted by the remaining publications in a rapidly-thinning music media landscape.
“It was initially me doing everything: writing, editing, designing a bit,” Sundaresan recalls. “But then I brought on some friends and made it more of an actual publication.”
As No Bells grew, it “started to gain a bit of authority,” he continues. “We definitely became a voice for the underground rap scene in New York, and in Milwaukee, and in these various micro-communities that were popping off.”
Sundaresan, who also worked previously at NPR and freelanced for several sites, spoke with Billboard about his plans for Pitchfork‘s future, in an interview alongside Welch. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
What did you learn building No Bells that you’re hoping to implement at Pitchfork?
Sundaresan: What I’m bringing to Pitchfork is essentially the adaptability and experimentation that comes with trying to start a music blog in the 2020s. It’s really hard. It requires not only publishing interesting stuff but also seeing where your audience is and cultivating that. We didn’t have any type of legacy to hinge on.
Pitchfork is interesting because it obviously has this authority [built] over two decades now. It’s also got a bevy of incredibly talented writers, and I think we’re in this age where we turn to individual tastemakers for validation when we’re curious about new music. I think more care needs to be put into building worlds around those tastemakers. That’s kind of what I was doing at No Bells, and that’s what I’m going to try to do at Pitchfork.
Are there other new directions or priorities you’re interested in?
Sundaresan: I’m definitely trying to honor the traditions of Pitchfork as-is. They’ve done so much over the past few years, especially with broadening the accessibility, making it more conversational. I want to continue those efforts. Really, my focus is to try to adapt Pitchfork to the modern age of media, where individual voices are prioritized. We can tap into the incredible writers that are on staff and try to build verticals and columns around what they’re doing — cater to more specialized audiences that way, and younger audiences that way.
What does it mean for Pitchfork to be folded under GQ? What’s different now compared to a year ago?
Welch: Pitchfork is still continuing as Pitchfork and GQ is continuing as GQ. I’m now leading both, and very excited to have Mano working on the Pitchfork project with me. And there are ways that we are sharing efforts on the back end — operational stuff, logistical stuff. We just had a really cool meeting last week, where it was GQ editors sharing what they’re excited about in music looking ahead at the rest of the year, and then the Pitchfork editors doing the same. There are conversations like that happening, but the Pitchfork brand is continuing standalone, and GQ is continuing standalone as well.
This new chapter is taking place after a round of layoffs that got a lot of attention. What led to the layoffs, and what do those mean for the future of the publication?
Welch: I’ve been a reader of Pitchfork for 20-plus years. I started my career at The Fader, another music magazine that was sort of at its peak around the time that Pitchfork was really thriving. There was always a [dynamic of] looking across the road at what the other was doing. It’s an honor to have the opportunity to actually work on Pitchfork and to lead the team. They have done an awesome job in the time since January; we’ve been continuing to publish at a great clip. There’s been a lot happening in music, really exciting, emerging music that the site has covered — as it always has, going all the way back to the beginning — and then a bunch of huge releases as well.
Mano had such a clear vision for really what drives music conversation today, what all of us who are on the internet every day want to see. That just clarified for me what the future should be. Now we get to lead a conversation with a team of staff members and contributors about how we apply what Mano articulated: What should we keep exactly the same, and what can we do in new ways, especially as we think about all the platforms at our disposal.
It’s really hard for musicians right now. The way things are set up can be really beneficial to the huge acts, and it can be really hard for the middle and for the younger acts. And I think a huge part of Pitchfork‘s role is supporting that whole ecosystem, especially new artists and people that are in that difficult middle ground.
Sundaresan: One thing that’s working really well with No Bells is the way we’ve built a community around what we do — writers certainly, but also artists. Pitchfork at one point, before it got bigger, was very community-driven. I want to try and restore some of that feeling, getting back to being literally on the ground reporting about things, creating physical spaces for writers, whether that’s live events, readings, panels. I want to create more of a real community around this really robust online ecosystem that Pitchfork already has.
Even before the layoffs, it felt like Pitchfork started running fewer reviews and moved them down the homepage. The New York Times was historically focused on reviews but it has moved away from them as well. Do you still believe that format has value?
Sundaresan: I feel like every few months the album-review-is-dead conversation pops up. For every discourse around that, you see 18,000 more people posting that Taylor Swift got like a 6.2 or whatever it is. Album reviews, especially for some of these really big releases, are pored over by fans. Some of the highest-performing things on the Pitchfork website are still album reviews.
And I think there’s still such a necessity, from a historical record standpoint, for album reviews. You see with platforms like Tiktok and Instagram Reels — they’re really important, and I think Pitchfork really needs to tap into them more and create more interesting content around them — but there’s only so much you can do. You need comprehensive writing of some sort about these really important releases, just so that in five or 10 years, somebody can come back and see this is what happened at this time.
Welch: I would also add that if other outlets have moved on from reviews, and Pitchfork is still known as the place that’s really committed to that form, then that’s a position of strength for us. The foundation of the site is news and reviews, and that can and should continue. And then we’re going to do a bunch of other cool stuff too.
Is there a tension between trying to document some of these smaller scenes and the need to generate traffic? It seems like people have moved away from covering some of the niches because they’re all fighting for the same mainstream clicks.
Welch: We live in a world where audience matters, traffic matters. At Conde Nast, we have KPIs for audience just like any other media brand on Earth. But I think there’s a huge opportunity to evolve the Pitchfork ecosystem. When that’s done effectively, and I think GQ is a good example of this, your business does not live and die based on pure raw traffic.
Broadly right now in internet media, relative to other phases that I’ve been in, this is not a time of traffic as the be-all, end-all. Without taking it to a naive extreme, Mano’s directive is not to chase traffic. It’s to build a really high quality website. And then we’re going to be collaborating with the rest of the team on building out the Pitchfork ecosystem. Mano referenced events — I think that’s incredibly important. Thinking in new ways about the social platforms, there’s just so much you can do, so many different ways to not just mean something to your audience, but also to bring revenue into the brand that isn’t about raw traffic.
Sundaresan: You nailed it. Tent-pole reviews are always going to matter. But No Bells to some extent was about, “Let’s create this ecosystem around online music scenes.” We didn’t always have the highest readership. That wasn’t our goal. But we were able to sustain ourselves just by having very loyal readers because they cared about the things that we cared about.
I think Pitchfork has a potential to essentially do that tenfold, and have different pockets that cater to specific audiences, almost like subcultures, that are spearheaded by genre specialists — which, by the way, Pitchfork already has. The resources just haven’t been put in those directions yet.
After the layoffs, I’m sure you saw there was just a wave of pieces basically saying that Pitchfork was dead. Do you have any response to those?
Welch: Just that Pitchfork is still continuing as Pitchfork. I feel confident in my ability to lead the title, and I think we have an incredibly exciting new voice, new thinker — it wasn’t until I talked to Mano that it really crystallized what I thought the future of Pitchfork should be. He’s bringing this very of-the-moment perspective: This is how people want to talk about music. All the tools are there, we just need to adjust the dials a little bit, do some new things. And I think there’s an opportunity for Pitchfork to really grow and feel fresher than ever.
The judge overseeing the racketeering and gang prosecution against Young Thug and others on Monday put the long-running trial on hold until another judge rules on requests by several defendants that he step aside from the case.
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Lawyers for the rapper and several other defendants had filed motions seeking the recusal of Fulton County Superior Court Chief Judge Ural Glanville after he held a meeting with prosecutors and a prosecution witness at which defendants and defense attorneys were not present. They said the meeting was “improper” and said the judge and prosecutors tried to pressure the witness, who had been granted immunity, into giving testimony.
Jurors, who were already on a break until July 8, would be notified that they will not be needed until the matter is resolved, Glanville said.
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This is the latest delay in the trial that has dragged on for over a year, in part because of numerous problems. Jury selection in the case began in January 2023 and took nearly 10 months. Opening statements were in November and the prosecution has been presenting its case since then, calling dozens of witnesses.
Young Thug, a Grammy winner whose given name is Jeffery Williams, was charged two years ago in a sprawling indictment accusing him and more than two dozen other people of conspiring to violate Georgia’s anti-racketeering law. He also is charged with gang, drug and gun crimes and is standing trial with five of the others indicted with him.
Glanville last month held Young Thug’s attorney Brian Steel in contempt for refusing to tell the judge how he found out about the out-of-court meeting. Steel was ordered to serve 10 consecutive weekends in jail, but the Georgia Supreme Court put that penalty on hold pending an appeal.
During a hearing Monday without jurors present, Glanville said he would release the transcript of the meeting that he had with prosecutors and state witness Kenneth Copeland and Copeland’s lawyer. He said he would also allow another judge to decide whether he should be removed from the case.
Glanville told the lawyers he would enter the order sending the recusal matter to another judge, adding, “We’ll see you in a little bit, depending upon how it’s ruled upon, alright?”
“Your honor, do we have a timeline of when the motion to recuse may be heard?” prosecutor Simone Hylton asked.
“Don’t know,” Glanville responded, saying the court clerk has to assign it to another judge. “I don’t have anything to do with that.”
Hylton asked if the matter could be expedited, citing concerns about holding jurors “indefinitely.”
Glanville said he understood that concern and that he hoped it would be acted upon quickly.
Glanville has maintained there was nothing improper about the meeting. He said prosecutors requested it to talk about Copeland’s immunity agreement.
Young Thug has been wildly successful since he began rapping as a teenager and he serves as CEO of his own record label, Young Stoner Life, or YSL. Artists on his record label are considered part of the “Slime Family,” and a compilation album, “Slime Language 2,” rose to No. 1 on the charts in April 2021.
But prosecutors say YSL also stands for Young Slime Life, which they allege is an Atlanta-based violent street gang affiliated with the national Bloods gang and founded by Young Thug and two others in 2012. Prosecutors say people named in the indictment are responsible for violent crimes — including killings, shootings and carjackings — to collect money for the gang, burnish its reputation and expand its power and territory.
Spotify has removed the music and profiles of several Russian artists who support the Ukraine invasion and have been sanctioned by the European Union and elsewhere in the West, Billboard has confirmed. The removals were first reported by The Moscow Times. “Platform Rules clearly state that we take action when we identify content which explicitly […]