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Quasi has exactly two members, and the indie-rock band can afford exactly one hotel room while headlining clubs and theaters through the end of July. “Any increase in that — if we decide we want an additional musician or a sound engineer or someone to help us sell our merch — that pushes us into two rooms,” says Janet Weiss, the duo’s drummer. “And we’re not going to come home with money.
“Costs have increased so much,” continues Weiss, the former Sleater-Kinney drummer. “There isn’t that revenue source — records — to fall back on to get the show funded the way you would like it to be. It’s a combination of the economy and the streaming economy.”
To cope with the astronomical costs of just about everything on the road, club and theater performers cram into as few hotel rooms as possible; swap houses with friends to avoid Airbnbs; spend hours manning merch tables rather than hiring crew for the job; and postpone that long-awaited van-to-bus upgrade. “We went on a full U.S. tour two years ago and found that costs skyrocketed while we were on the road,” says Peter Silberman, singer for indie-rock band The Antlers. “That really ate into our profits in a way that we did not anticipate, even in our worst-case-scenario budgeting. I came back from that tour really wanting to economize.”
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Billboard spoke to nine 2024 touring artists, from singer-songwriter Caroline Rose to rockers English Teacher to doom-metal band REZN, about how they stay afloat amid price spikes for hotels, buses, crew and (depending on what part of the country they’re driving in) fuel.
Janet Weiss, Quasi:
We’re feeling the squeeze, for sure. Hotels are really outrageous — a Holiday Inn Express for $320 plus tax? That’s unheard-of. It’s harder and harder to make a profit if you have any sort of crew at all.
As much as we love touring, it’s not something we can do if you don’t come home with enough money to cover the weeks you’ve been gone. You’re going to have your car, home, health insurance — which costs a fortune — your pet-sitting, you know? So our solution is to scale it way, way back, as far as how many people we tour with.
We’re not spring chickens, but we’re healthy enough to be able to do it. It’s really hard to do everything ourselves — sell the merch, set up the gear, drive, deal with a different sound person every night, explaining our setup and how we want it to sound, and the lights. I would love to bring a few cool lights and have an extra person who would help with gear, but the rooms are so expensive, it’s nearly impossible. After Covid, costs are so high. They never came back down.
Matt Korvette, vocalist, Pissed Jeans:
We definitely feel it. The thing that stands out is the band meal the morning after the show. Usually, that’s the most relaxed and largest meal you’ll have for the day together. You’ll wake up, go to a place to eat and hit the road and finagle some dinner later. That’s an easy $100, where it used to be like $50 for four people.
One thing that’s different than previous years is no one has a van you can borrow. There aren’t the same networks of bands with vans. Everyone outsources it now. There are expensive van-rental companies for Sprinters. That’s been a drag.
We owned one [van], then sold it during Covid. We were just paying insurance for this thing that just sat there. So that was a hindrance. We sold it to a local metal band who we weren’t familiar with. I would see it around town, and apparently it got stolen from them. They added a Motörhead flag to cover up the window and it would be pleasant to see every now and then, like a little reminder. And now it’s gone.
We’re going to play in Baltimore in a couple months, two hours from Philly, and we’ll probably take three separate cars rather than figure out some sort of van. That’s one of the ways we’ve made things work, in a slightly more awkward way. It doesn’t have the same feel of rolling up to a show.
We all have main jobs outside of the band. It makes the band more thrilling and fun and free, a hobby rather than something that we’re staring at show metrics and wondering if we’re going to have to partner with a soft drink on Instagram to be able to pay rent. We miss out on really breaking through to a larger audience, let’s say, but we’ve made peace with that.
Lily Fontaine, singer, English Teacher:
The things we’re having to cut back on are guitar techs and lighting engineers and drum techs. It’d create a smoother show for the audience, and it’d be quite normal at this point in our career to have that. But that’s extra hotels, extra flights, extra food. It’s been an agreement with all of us that as soon as we can have a regular guitar technician, at the very least, that’s something that we want to have. It’s been explicitly talked about.
We have band members share rooms. Last year, all of us were in one room. We’re lucky enough to be able to have twin rooms. Not a lot of bands get to have that. We’ve been on tour for months now, so having space is really good.
Caroline Rose, singer-songwriter:
Prices of buses have just gone up astronomically. It feels like the carrot that’s been dangling in front of my face for years now. It makes it more economical touring in a van, so we all shove in there like sardines.
We extended the tour to two months to make it profitable. The longer we were on the road, the more we could profit. It was a little past break-even point.
We had a VIP access for most of the shows, in the venues that we had the infrastructure to do so. That allowed people to see our short film that we made. That helped offset a lot of costs. It’s really important to have an enticing production. We have found clever ways to make it look good without costing a fortune. I call it “DIY pro.” All the equipment that we use is pretty ancient and held together with coat hangers and rope and things we end up returning when the tour is done.
All of us wear multiple hats. My guitarist, who also plays keys, does all of our playback, and she’s a genius with tech. My tour manager is basically a production manager. My manager is helping advance all the shows from afar. My sound engineer does almost all of the driving. We change our own tires. I’m very skilled with engines! We have a rotating hotel room. If somebody was having a rough day or needed some time alone, they would get that hotel room to themselves.
Most people still think it’s the ’70s, where we’re partying every night and hanging out with bands and going out and getting wasted. The reality of being an independent musician today is so drastically removed from that. We’re not Taylor Swift. We’re not these huge bands that are selling out arenas. We’re still the working-class musicians that are supporting this industry at the grassroots level.
David Bazan, Pedro the Lion:
We’ve got it whittled down to the livable basics. It’s a three-piece band. You can’t really go fewer than that on stage. Then two crew — one sound person and one manager-person.
At first, in coming back [in 2017, after a lengthy break-up], we came [out] with a lighting designer and a whole lighting rig. When we started touring again after the lockdown, we didn’t have a lighting rig or an LD anymore. I don’t know if we’ll get to the place, income-wise, where we can afford that. But as soon as we can, I would like to reinstate it. It’s such a lovely element to have.
If it got so bad that we weren’t actually breaking even on the tour, I would just tour less and save up and pay for it. It’s something I want to do. The nut we’re rolling with right now is what it costs to do it with care and responsibility.
Rob McWilliams, singer, doom-metal band REZN:
We have five people in our touring party. Four people in the band [and] our merch person. We all just manage our tour stuff ourselves. We all share one hotel room — just a bunch of dudes in one hotel room sharing beds and a pullout couch. That helps save costs, for sure. Luckily, I don’t mind spending time around these guys. It just feels like you’re on vacation with your family. You’ve just got to share a bed with your brother. But you’ve got to stagger those showers.
If we get another hotel room, that’s maybe another $150-$200. Is that worth our comfort, in that we will technically get paid less at the end, because it will eat into the profits at the final day of the tour? It was a brief conversation. We’ve been doing it this way for over a year, and it’s been going well: “We’ll just keep it going.” We’re thinking about bringing a sound person. That’s our next goal. The expenses of another hotel room — that’s a pretty big step.
Peter Silberman, The Antlers:
In planning this tour, we had our sights set on cutting down costs. I don’t think there’s one magic solution for artists. It requires being granular with your budgeting and your accounting.
With this tour, we’ve teamed up with Okkervil River. The idea was to do everything we could to share the burden, and that involves traveling in one vehicle, sharing all the expenses, minimizing the amount of equipment we’re bringing out and the amount of crew — basically, zero crew. We have somebody who is tour-managing remotely, advancing shows and being in touch with promoters. We’re not traveling with a sound engineer, we’re using all the house sound engineers and merch sellers.
All of us are accustomed to a DIY approach to touring and have done that on and off throughout our careers. So the skill set is already there.
Jess Williamson, singer-songwriter:
I’m doing a regional tour around Texas. I live part time in Los Angeles and part time in Marfa, Texas. I made Austin the base for my band for our rehearsals. I could do a house swap for my house in LA for a friend’s house in Austin. That’s one way I kept costs down. We’re here five out of seven nights. We’re sleeping in Austin. We have this kind-of-free, really nice place to stay. It would have been a lot if we had to rent an Airbnb.
Last year, money was a little tighter. This year, things are going really well. I definitely do a lot, though, to make it work.
I hope people realize how important it is, for the artist, to buy something at the merch [booth]. The fees from the shows only go so far, but merch is directly contributing to the artist’s pocket. Going out to the merch every night, it really helps with my sales, and I love to do it. It’s not the easiest thing to do after you’ve played. Sometimes I’m at the merch for an hour and a half, standing and talking to people. It wears on me. I do it because it helps with sales, and I need to move the merch to keep the tour afloat.
Eric Earley, guitarist, Blitzen Trapper:
I’ve got a daughter who’s seven. When they’re that age, I don’t want to miss too much. So two weeks is my limit, at this point, of shows in a row. I’ll do two or three of those a year and we’ll do fly-outs or one-offs, festivals here and there, if it makes sense.
With Covid, a bunch of the guys were tired, and I took over the business side. I started making some decisions, because I have a family: Is it worth it to go on the road? Part of that was, “I think I just want to do a four-piece now.” But I would love to add another member at some point.
Because we live in Oregon, if you want to get to the East Coast without flying, and still make money, you have to route a tour that’s at least three weeks. If we’re going to do the East Coast, we’ve got to fly and rent all the gear and the vehicle out there.
I really enjoy shows and touring, so there’s a level of fulfillment that’s not attached to a monetary value. It’d be easier to do a day job. Music business is a rough business, but if you love playing music and make some money off it, it’s worth it.
Primary Wave will acquire the music publishing and select master recording assets of Nuno Bettencourt, the guitar player for Extreme, the company announced Thursday (June 27). The deal — which excludes the band’s aptly titled sixth album, 2023’s Six — includes all of Bettencourt’s publishing, such as administration rights; his share of Extreme’s master recordings in which the […]
More than 50 members of the music industry have joined an advisory committee to help guide an ongoing study by MIT’s Environmental Solutions Initiative.
The report, expected to be released this fall, is designed to provide a comprehensive assessment of the relationship between live music and climate change, to identify areas where the industry and concertgoers can make improvements to reduce emissions and create positive environmental outcomes, and to analyze the latest sustainable technology and systems that can be adopted in the live events space and other areas of the industry.
The ultimate goal of the study is to determine sector-specific and industry-wide decarbonization solutions.
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The new advisory board includes Live Nation president/CEO Michael Rapino along with other Live Nation execs; Warner Music Group CEO Robert Kyncl; and reps from companies including Wasserman Music, WME, Atlantic Records, Upstaging, Inc., Farm Aid, Projects Tait, Global Motion Ltd., Women of Qolor Entertainment and many more.
On the artist side, the committee includes Ellie Goulding, Adam Met of AJR and representatives from the live and touring teams of artists including Billie Eilish, FINNEAS, Harry Styles, Shawn Mendes, Fred again.., Jack Johnson and Coldplay.
Participants also include reps from nonprofits and NGOs like Reverb, Support+Feed, Julie’s Bicycle, Global Citizen and Client Earth. See the complete list of participants here. Anyone can submit data to the report by emailing p1lm@mit.edu.
The MIT study is being executed with the support of Coldplay, Warner Music Group, Live Nation and consulting firm Hope Solutions.
“With the participation of the advisory committee and contributions of data from various sources, we are well on our way to producing a significant contribution to knowledge that can support meaningful actions to address climate change,” said Prof. John E. Fernandez, director of MIT’s environmental solutions initiative, in a statement.
“I would characterize the music industry as risk-averse,” Fernandez told Billboard in March of working within the industry. “It’s a business, and artists are trying to make a living, so we’ve seen an enormous amount of concern over the risk entailed with making a commitment to reduce emissions.”
Singer-songwriter Josiah Queen recently accomplished a relatively rare feat in the CCM space when his first album, The Prodigal, debuted atop Billboard’s Top Christian Albums chart for the week dated June 8: the 21-year-old Florida native reached the chart’s pinnacle without the help of a record label with his self-released album.
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Additionally, the album’s title track is in the top 10 on Billboard’s Hot Christian Songs chart and has earned more than 45.7 million on-demand official U.S. streams, according to Luminate. Queen also has three additional songs on the Hot Christian Songs chart. Meanwhile, Queen has seen his Spotify followers mushroom over the past year or so to over 2 million monthly followers, thanks to his acoustic-based, folk-tinged sound — which also stands out on CCM radio among sleeker, pop-oriented fare.
“I think since [the] COVID [pandemic], people have been drawn to a raw-sounding, folk sound. People just love to feel something,” Queen tells Billboard via Zoom.
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Like many Gen Z singer-songwriters in the pop, hip-hop and country spaces, Queen began releasing his music and initially built his following through social media, but he also spent years performing at worship conferences around the country.
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Queen released his first batch of songs on TikTok and Instagram at age 16, starting with “God of Miracles” in 2020, and has followed with a steady stream of new music ever since — including 2022’s “Use Me” and “Grave Clothes,” and his breakthrough 2023 songs “I Am Barabbas” and “Fishes and Loaves,” which musically recounts the Biblical story of Jesus feeding 5,000 people with fish and bread.
A year ago, a TikTok clip for “I Am Barabbas” went viral, earning nearly two million views. It was around that time Queen began working with co-managers Matt Reed (Hyphen Media Group) and Devin Poindexter (Mad Jack Management). The song also marked Queen’s first entry on Hot Christian Songs in April, peaking at No. 38.
“He would tease songs before they would release, sometimes up to four or five weeks before and kind of test the songs to see which ones would get traction,” Reed tells Billboard.
When Queen released “The Prodigal” this year, he instinctively knew the power of continuing to place the song in front of audiences on social media, further building listeners’ familiarity and engagement with the song.
“’The Prodigal’ had nearly 40,000 uses on Instagram by the end of the year, when Josiah had the idea to do a year-end video recap that utilized the song, and it earned another 15,000 uses,” Reed says. “I think [it’s about] just finding new ways to talk about a song and giving people the opportunity to insert themselves into what the song represents.”
According to Luminate data, the Christian/Gospel genre is the fourth-fastest growing music genre in the U.S. in 2024 in overall consumption (following pop, Latin and country), having grown 8.9% in overall consumption so far this year. Luminate research shows that a developing younger audience is one driver of this growth, with research showing that the share of listeners that are millennial and younger has grown from 39% of overall genre listenership in 2022, to 45% in 2024.
“I think God has used these songs to reach my age demographic,” Queen says. “That’s the biggest dream come true, because there are so many people that are my age that are underserved with Christian music. Seeing the people at the live shows and the fan base that was sharing the music with friends through word of mouth — not even just through social media — it wasn’t a planned thing.”
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Recent Luminate data also highlights the word-of-mouth growth in Gen Z (those born between mid-1990s and early 2010s), with Gen Z audiences being 20% more likely to cite friends and family as a music discovery source than the average consumer of Christian/Gospel music.
Reed says approximately 72% of Queen’s fan demographic is within the 13-24 year-olds demographic, below CCM radio’s typical core demographic of 24-54 year olds listeners.
“When you look at CCM music, it typically is ages 30 or 40 and up,” Reed says. “Josiah’s music is on the front line of all these other Gen Z artists making music for their peers. It’s not that CCM hasn’t had young artists, but typically they’ve made music for radio specifically. But I think [for] Josiah’s music and who it’s connecting with, he is on the front lines of creating music for his generation.”
Queen says he initially wrote songs that he hoped would appeal to labels and radio before he realized the need to shift toward music that simply felt personal. “I think so many people write music because they think getting a record deal is what you need to do to make it,” Queen says. “I was doing that for a while, but I realized it wasn’t working — so I just started making music I genuinely believed in.”
His acoustic-based, Americana-leaning sound first gained early support on Spotify’s folk-oriented playlists. Now, his music is found not only on playlists such as Spotify’s Top Christian Contemporary and Christian Road Trip playlists, but remains on the acoustic-oriented Homegrown and Indie Spirit playlists. He’s also been featured on Amazon’s Folk for Summer and Divine Summer playlists.
Once Queen began releasing music, he says Amazon Music’s Lauren Stellato and Apple Music’s Steve Blair reached out to him directly, based on his growth on the platforms and on social media. This year, Queen was the only Christian artist who was part of Amazon’s Artists to Watch program. “It does feel like we’re in that space where the music is going beyond the typical CCM/Christian market, and DSPs have been really helpful in getting us exposure in other avenues,” Reed says.
A team of independent radio promoters signed on to work Queen’s music to radio, including Grant Hubbard, formerly a vp at Capitol Christian Music Group for many years, as well as Jen Mouttet, Rick Steimling and Hyphen Media Group’s Tamara Moore. But even prior to bringing the team on board, Queen says CCM radio giant K-LOVE already had reached out to him directly, saying that they would be adding his song into rotation—a tide change that led him to reconsider his stance on signing with a label.
“Even from my earliest interviews, the question was always ‘Why aren’t you with a label?’ It’s so strong in the industry, the ties to radio and the labels, so taking these songs to radio comes with its challenges,” Queen says. “Around December [2023], we were like, ‘Should we sign?’ and we decided not to at the time. Then, I got a direct message from the people at K-LOVE, and they said they were going to add my song. That was in January, and it changed my whole trajectory.”
Reed notes that though Queen hasn’t yet signed with a label, they are in discussions with multiple labels.
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Queen, who is repped by Jeff Roberts Agency for booking, wrapped his headlining The Prodigal Tour earlier this year. Starting in July, he will open shows for another rising young CCM hitmaker, 29-year-old “Good Day” singer Forrest Frank, alongside plans for Queen to launch another headlining tour in the fall.
“We didn’t know what to expect on the spring tour when we put it on sale, so the capacities and venues were a little scattered,” Poindexter says. “We had some 250-300 [capacity shows] that we had to add shows for, and then we did three or four shows that were over 1,000 capacity. We did about 23 shows total and every single one sold out.”
Meanwhile, Queen and his team aim to keep expanding upon the success of The Prodigal with his folk-tinged sound.
“The name of the game is building onto each song. One song has its moment and, hopefully, people love it, then you build onto that with the next song.”
Over the past decade, as U.S. recorded music revenue grew from $7 billion in 2014 to $17 billion in 2023, the combined market share of music sales and streaming controlled by the three major labels went from 64.9% in 2014 to 64.3% in 2023, Billboard estimates. That modest decline, which counts only music that the majors control rather than just distribute, came even as the companies bought market share with acquisitions of independent labels like 300 Entertainment, 12Tone and Alamo, plus buyouts of joint ventures. And it came about partly because about 5% of the global recorded music market — about $1.5 billion annually, according to a Billboard estimate — is now controlled by digital distribution services that mostly serve DIY and independent artists such as CD Baby, DistroKid and TuneCore, which I founded and ran until 2012. And this part of the market is projected to continue to grow.
This comes as consumers have access to more independent music than ever on the same online services, and even the same playlists, as major label releases. But one of the responses from the major music companies seems to be, if you can’t beat them, push to change the rules to take a portion of their royalties.
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Last year, the three major labels made separate deals with Spotify, as well as with Deezer, on new licensing terms for recordings, to which all other rightsholders on those platforms have to agree. The new agreements changed the policy on when a stream of a recording can generate a royalty, and in some cases the amount earned. In addition, this year, under the rules laid out by the Music Modernization Act (MMA), some portion of the “accrued but unpaid” mechanical “black box” royalties currently held by the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) become eligible to be paid out to member publishers, some of which have executives on the MLC board, based on their market share on the platform and at the time the royalties were earned. Although both policies apply to the entire market, they will redistribute revenue disproportionately to large labels and publishers, especially the majors, at the expense of smaller companies and DIY and independent creators.
Deezer now applies a royalty multiplier to tracks by artists that have at least 1,000 streams per month from 500 unique listeners, a policy that generally benefits major label artists, who tend to be more popular. Under Spotify’s new deal terms, royalties that previously would have been paid out on recordings with fewer than 1,000 streams over the course of the prior 12 months are now essentially reallocated to recordings that streamed more than 1,000 times over that same time period. And since the majors control fewer recordings that stream less than 1,000 times compared to the vast number controlled by DIY creators and independent labels, those royalties will overall go disproportionately to them.
In 2023, there were 106 million recordings that received between one and 1,000 streams (others generated no streams at all), which together accounted for a total of 13.68 billion streams globally, according to Luminate. Since each Spotify stream is worth a global average of between $0.0038 and $0.0042, that suggests that, although it’s hard to measure the impact of individual services, about $33 million a year could flow from smaller artists to more popular ones that are disproportionately signed to major labels.
To understand what these new policies mean in practice, consider the indie band Head of Femur. Over the last two decades, the band released several albums that include a total of 58 tracks. Under Spotify’s new model, the service will only pay out royalties for the band’s recordings that streamed more than 1,000 times in the prior 12 months, no matter how much the recordings streamed in total. In other words, a band with 58 tracks that stream 999 times each, for a total of 57,942 streams, will make nothing — while a band with a single song that streams 1,000 times will get paid. The royalties that would have gone to those 57,942 streams will go to bigger acts — many of them on bigger labels.
The model for streaming mechanical royalties changed in a way that will benefit the same players. Before the October 2018 passage of the Music Modernization Act and the January 2021 creation of the Mechanical Licensing Collective, Spotify and other streaming services didn’t get the mechanical licenses they needed, and as a result faced multiple copyright infringement lawsuits, with potentially ruinous statutory damages. In addition, services weren’t paying out all, or in some cases any, royalties for some of the songs they had licensed — to the point that the MLC reported that it received $397.7 million in adjusted unpaid “historical” mechanical royalties that had been earned but not paid out. The Music Modernization Act was supposed to address these issues by making it easier to license mechanical rights and accurately pay publishers and songwriters.
In order to do this, the Music Modernization Act made three significant changes to the relevant parts of U.S. copyright law. First, it created a “blanket” compulsory license for digital services for every song ever written, to protect the services from liability for copyright infringement. Second, it shielded the services from liability for infringement before the law took effect. Third, it mandated the creation of a database to be administered by a designated “mechanical licensing collective,” with the goal of accounting to and paying publishers and songwriters billions of dollars in mechanical royalties generated by trillions of streams — promptly, accurately and transparently. The collective was also charged with paying out the $397.7 million in “historical” mechanical royalties earned but not paid out before 2021.
By enacting the MMA, Congress made mechanical licensing easier and protected digital services from liability for infringement. Although the law calls for penalties if digital services do not pay the MLC, it includes no specific regulations about the MLC paying rightsholders or offering rightsholders any remedies if it fails to do so. (The U.S. Copyright Office oversees the MLC and every five years reviews whether it should continue administering the compulsory license.) In fact, the Music Modernization Act states that its regulation of the mechanical licensing collective “shall supersede and preempt any State law (including common law) concerning escheatment or abandoned property, or any analogous provision, that might otherwise apply.”
That means that any unpaid mechanical royalties are subject solely to the Music Modernization Act, which says that after a certain amount of time they become eligible to be distributed according to “relative market share” of copyright owners “as reflected in reports of usage.” Essentially, the money is divided by market share on a given platform during a given time, which means that it will disproportionately go to larger publishers. So far, the MLC has yet to distribute any money based on market share. But as of June 2024, the MLC is sitting on $634 million in “black box” royalties that it has taken in but not distributed, according to the organization; it also received $397.7 million in undistributed historical royalties, of which it is sitting on $285.9 million. Eventually, all of that money — $919.9 million — will be eligible to be distributed by market share on a given platform and time period.
Over the next decade, predictions suggest that consumers will continue to turn their attention to a wider selection of DIY and independent artists. Under these policies, however, some of the revenue generated by their work will be disproportionately paid to the major labels and publishers instead of to the artists and songwriters who earned them.
Jeff Price is the founder and CEO of Word Collections. He previously co-founded and was GM of spinART Records and founded and was CEO of TuneCore and Audiam.
SiriusXM is facing a class action lawsuit that claims the company has been earning billions in revenue by tacking a deceptive “royalty fee” onto consumers’ bills.
In a complaint filed last week in federal court, attorneys for four aggrieved subscribers claim that SiriusXM adds a “U.S. Music Royalty Fee” – allegedly 21.4 percent of the actual advertised price – onto the normal price that users pay for satellite radio plans.
“This action challenges a deceptive pricing scheme whereby SiriusXM falsely advertises its music plans at lower prices than it actually charges,” attorneys for the users write. “SiriusXM intentionally does not disclose the Fee to its subscribers. SiriusXM even goes so far as to not mention the words ‘U.S. Music Royalty Fee’ in any of its advertising, including in the fine print.”
The lawsuit claims the royalty fee is an “invented” charge that SiriusXM has “deceptively” labeled to falsely suggest that it’s mandated by the government to pay for music rights. In reality, the lawsuit says, it’s a really just a “disguised double-charge for the music plan itself” that no other competing music services imposes on their users.
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“Reasonable consumers would expect that the advertised price for SiriusXM’s music plans would include the fundamental costs of obtaining the permissions necessary to provide the music content that SiriusXM has promised is included in those plans,” lawyers for the subscribers say.
According to the lawsuit, SiriusXM has reaped huge benefits from the “unlawful advertising scheme” since it was implemented in 2009, allegedly collecting $1.36 billion in such royalty fees in 2023 alone. In just in the states of Washington and Florida — the locations where the plaintiffs live — the lawsuit claims Sirius has collected $932 million in royalty fees since the charge was created.
And, according to the complaint, SiriusXM allegedly tries its best to ensure that consumers never find out: “SiriusXM’s sign-up process, automatic renewal process, and policy of not sending monthly or ongoing billing notices or invoices are deliberately designed to prevent subscribers from learning of the U.S. Music Royalty Fee.”
Those allegations echo claims made by New York’s attorney general, who sued SiriusXM in December over claims that the company made it “extremely difficult” for listeners to cancel their subscriptions. In a statement at the time, SiriusXM called those claims “baseless allegations” that “grossly mischaracterize” its customer service practices.
The new lawsuit was filed in the form of a proposed class action, aimed at eventually representing “millions of individuals” who have allegedly paid the royalty fee after seeing a lower price advertised.
“To be clear, plaintiffs are not seeking to regulate the existence or amount of the U.S. Music Royalty Fee,” lawyers for the subscribers wrote. “Rather, plaintiffs want SiriusXM to include the [fee] in the music plan prices it advertises to the general public.”
A representative for SiriusXM did not immediately return a request for comment on Thursday.
Read the entire lawsuit here:
Downtown Music launched Curve Royalty Services on Thursday for labels, publishers, and distributors that are hoping to find a third party to handle the laborious work of accounting on their behalf. Downtown had previously acquired the company Curve Royalty Systems in 2023.
“It has always been our goal to make royalties better and easier,” Richard Leach, managing director at Curve, said in a statement. “Now our royalty services team can take on those parts of the process [that] clients would like to outsource.”
Curve was launched in 2019. “We ingest data from the likes of Spotify, Apple Music, any physical distributors, 1,000+ different sources,” co-founder Tom Allen explained in 2022. “We then allow labels and publishers to input the contract details, and we output the artist statements.”
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“In its simplest form,” he added, “it is just a bit of math.”
But it can be a lot of math in the streaming era. Back in 2012, when streaming services began acquiring more users, “statements that we were used to seeing, maybe we would hit hundreds of thousands of lines on a statement, and you could still manage that on Excel,” Leach added in the same interview. “Suddenly we were getting millions and millions of lines of data every month. Anyone who’s familiar with Excel knows it collapses at a million lines.”
In this new landscape, some labels and distributors were “really struggling,” Leach continued. “And that was really the genesis for Curve. We struggled to find the software to deal with the scale. Suddenly processes were taking days instead of hours. We couldn’t find a solution” — until “Tom thought he’d have a crack at building it.”
Curve expanded into the U.S. in 2021. The following year, the company said it processed close to $1 billion in revenue. It currently serves around 1,500 clients, including notable independent labels like Domino, Epitaph, and Armada.
Downtown acquired Curve in January 2023. “We have been admirers of the technology and service quality that Tom and Richard have been building,” Downtown CEO Andrew Bergman said at the time.
Country star Randy Travis had members of Congress gushing and brought star power to an otherwise businesslike hearing titled “Radio, Music, and Copyrights: 100 Years of Inequity for Recording Artists,” held Wednesday (June 26) by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet.
“This is a great honor,” said Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chair of the subcommittee, adding that the other three witnesses “will have to live in his shadow.”
Travis, who has had difficulty speaking since suffering a stroke in 2013, was represented at the hearing by his wife, Mary Travis. His circumstances made him a fitting witness and supporter of the American Music Fairness Act (AMFA), a bill that would create a performance right for sound recordings at terrestrial radio. Unable to sing, Travis has given up touring and relies on royalties for his long-term health care. A country artist who performed others’ compositions would benefit from royalties from continued airplay on terrestrial radio.
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“This piece of legislation is essential to correct 100 year old issue regarding artists and non payment for their work performed on the most prominent music platform in America — one which they helped to build and sustain,” said Mary Travis.
AMFA would establish fair market value for radio performance royalties similarly to how rates are set for streaming platforms. It also compels foreign radio stations to pay U.S.-based artists for the performance of their songs. Outside of the U.S., radio stations commonly avoid paying performance royalties to American artists and record labels despite the existence of a similar performance right in those countries.
The bill would task the Copyright Royalty Board, the three-judge body that determines streaming, satellite radio and mechanical royalties rates, with setting the royalty rates for the new license. Under AMFA, stations that earn less than $1.5 million in annual revenue (and whose parent companies make less than $10 million in annual revenue) to pay $500 annually. Small, non-commercial stations with annual revenue less than $100,000 would pay as little as $10 per year.
“I think you’ve gotten the balance exactly right,” Mike Huppe, president and CEO of SoundExchange, told members of the committee. While small broadcasters would pay modest fees under AMFA, the large national corporations that dominate the broadcasting industry would pay more. Huppe argued they could easily afford it. “This is a $15 billion business in the US,” he said. “Eighty-eight percent of all Americans listen to radio. The biggest broadcast groups are becoming bigger and more powerful.”
Radio broadcasters don’t see it that way, though. Curtis LeGeyt, president and CEO of the National Association of Broadcasters, warned the committee that any additional royalties would be too much. “AMFA would impose a new royalty on local radio that is financially untenable for broadcasters of all sizes,” he said. Eddie Harrell Jr, regional vp and general manager of Radio One, agreed. “Make no mistake that a new performance royalty imposed on local stations would create harm for local stations, listeners and the recording industry itself,” said Harrell. Local broadcasters, he said, “are operating on extremely tight margins right now.”
The most dire warnings from LeGeyt and Harrell often centered around AMFA’s threat to radio stations’ ability to serve their communities. Because stations’ revenue are not growing, Harrell explained, any additional expense threatens services stations provide to their communities — he cited a program that collects donated items for needy families — and undermine their ability to broadcast during natural disasters. “Those are the things that are lost in what we do as opposed to just playing the music and so our ability to lead community efforts like that would be impacted by any new expense that we’d have to endure.”
While Huppe acknowledged the value radio stations provide to their communities, he wondered why musicians shouldn’t be paid when stations pay to syndicate talk radio shows and license sporting events. “Why should Randy Travis have to be the one to bear the load of this community effort and all the charitable work?,” Huppe asked.
Artificial intelligence’s threat to the music business was interspersed into the conversation about performance rights and royalties. Travis proved an exceptional witness on this topic, too, having recently released his first new track since his stroke in 2013, “Where That Came From,” with the help of generative AI software to recreate his voice. (Issa paused the hearing for a minute to play the song over the loudspeakers by pressing his smartphone next to his microphone.) “His piece of AI work was humanistic and artistic,” said Mary Travis. “And that’s the difference [between] the good and the bad AI.”
When asked by Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY) if users of generative AI software should be able to create unauthorized copies of a singer’s voice, Mary Travis was succinct: “Absolutely not,” she said flatly. Later, she compared unauthorized use of an artist’s voice to identity theft. “There needs to be laws that are in place to keep that from happening,” she said, “which means consent and compensation and attribution and provenance.”
But the hearing mostly focused on the economics of the radio business and the two sides’ inability to come to agreement. Huppe said the NAB’s strategy “is to run out the clock” and wait for another bill to be introduced in the next Congressional term. LeGeyt took “significant issue” with Huppe’s characterization and blamed the recording industry’s representatives for not supporting the conversations. “NAB stands willing to be in a conference room,” he said.
Rep. Issa, however, doubted LeGeyt’s willingness to make a deal with record labels. Noting that the NAB has been negotiating on Radio One’s behalf, Rep. Issa asked Harrell if his stations “would be willing to pay something to get this problem to go away?” “Mr. Chairman, I would not say that,” Harrell replied.
Minutes later, Issa took an admonishing tone with LeGeyt. The NAB did not offer “one penny” in higher royalties in their negotiations, Issa claimed, and if artists started to encourage people to listen only to radio station’s streaming offering, the cost to stations would be “far more than a modest concession,” said Issa.
Grammy winner Brandon Lake, known for his Billboard Hot Christian Songs chart-topping hits including “Gratitude” and “Praise You Anywhere,” has signed with UTA for booking representation. Lake recently wrapped a sold-out, 20-city tour crisscrossing the United States and was both a co-host and a winner at the annual K-LOVE Fan Awards in Nashville. “I am […]
Following the unexpected shuttering of the MTV News website earlier this week, Paramount has now largely cleaned house on the sites for several more of its cable channels, in a potential cost-cutting move.
As of Wednesday afternoon, the sites for Comedy Central, CMT, Yellowstone airer Paramount Network and TV Land were instead directing users to the media conglomerate’s streaming platform Paramount+. On Monday, MTVnews.com was taken down, purging some 20 years of stories from the web.
A pop-up window on the Comedy Central site reads, “While episodes of most Comedy Central series are no longer available on this website, you can watch Comedy Central through your TV provider. You can also sign up for Paramount+ to watch many seasons of Comedy Central shows.” Similar language shows up on the CMT, Paramount Network and TV Land sites, as well as that of MTV (which was separate from MTVnews.com).
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aramount said in a statement, “As part of broader website changes across Paramount, we have introduced more streamlined versions of our sites, driving fans to Paramount+ to watch their favorite shows.”
As noted by LateNighter, the cleaning out of the Comedy Central site in particular wipes out a huge trove of archival material from The Daily Show and other late night series, along with clips from South Park, Key & Peele and Workaholics, among many others. Some of that material is available on YouTube, but it’s not as easily searchable or accessible as it was on the network page. (The oldest video on the Daily Show YouTube channel, for instance, is from 2016, while the show’s history stretches back 20 years before then.)
On Paramount+, only the two most recent seasons of The Daily Show are available. The platform has several South Park specials and the 1999 feature film Bigger, Longer and Uncut, but the show’s primary streaming home is on Max. Paramount+ does have the full runs of Key & Peele and Workaholics.
As of publication time, sites for Paramount’s BET, Nickelodeon and VH1 were still active, while MTV.com offered some episodes and clips.
The website changes come on the heels of Paramount’s co-CEOs — George Cheeks, Chris McCarthy and Brian Robbins — telling employees at a town hall meeting Tuesday that they were embarking on a cost-cutting mission as profits have dropped for the company. Paramount is looking for $500 million in reduced costs, which will mean layoffs for some employees. Cheeks also said at the town hall that “We’re looking at selling certain Paramount-owned assets — in fact, we’ve already hired bankers to assist us in this process — and we’ll use the proceeds to help pay down debt and strengthen our balance sheet.”
This article was originally published by The Hollywood Reporter.