estates
DMX’s estate has a new partner. The late rapper’s family has selected Artist Legacy Group (ALG) as the estate’s exclusive and global representative, according to an announcement today by ALG CEO Ashley Austin.
“A force of nature. That is how I would describe DMX,” Austin said of the artist, born Earl Simmons, who died in 2021 at 50. “Rapper, poet, actor, preacher—the man’s talent was truly limitless. I am honored to work alongside Desiree and Sasha as we maximize the estate’s potential. Together, we will ensure that his message and music lives on.”
The co-administrators of the estate, DMX’s fiancée Desiree Lindstrom and daughter Sasha Simmons, are confident ALG can continue the hard-hitting MC’s legacy.
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“Earl was devoted to his fans. He was grateful that they stayed by his side and walked with him through his ups and downs,” explained Lindstrom. “Sasha and I are confident that ALG is the right team to partner with to honor Earl’s music and legacy. For my son and all of Earl’s children and fans, we will keep Earl’s spirit alive.”
Sasha Simmons added, “My father, Earl, was more than an icon; he was my inspiration and guiding light. His music touched countless lives, and his legacy will forever resonate in our hearts. With ALG by our side, Desiree and I are committed to preserving his spirit, ensuring that his art continues to inspire generations to come.”
With his signature growl and underdog story, DMX made his mark on hip-hop over the years with six top 10s on Rap Airplay, including “What You Want” and “Ruff Ryders’ Anthem,” as well as the six-week No. 1 “Party Up (Up in Here).” He recently made his Mainstream Rock Airplay debut with a featured role on Five Finger Death Punch’s “This Is the Way,” a mash-up between DMX’s “The Way It’s Gonna Be” and FFDP’s “Judgement Day.”
The family and Artist Legacy Group are working on “innovative projects” for fans, industry insiders, and music enthusiasts worldwide, according to a press release. ALG is a renowned entertainment management and legacy preservation firm that provides comprehensive services for estates, including intellectual property management, brand partnerships, media projects and more. Some of the other acts on their roster include Sam Cook, The Blues Brothers, Iggy Pop, Bootsy Collins, John Belushi and Dean Martin.
The estate of late Stone Temple Pilots frontman Scott Weiland has partnered with Primary Wave Music to mine new opportunities for the singer-songwriter’s music and overall legacy, it was announced on Wednesday (Jan. 24).
Under the deal, Primary Wave will partner with the estate to capitalize on Weiland’s publishing copyrights and recording royalties for all songs and recordings by Stone Temple Pilots, his later group, Velvet Revolver, and his solo output.
The agreement also gives Primary Wave a share of Weiland’s name, image and likeness rights, while the estate will be given access to the company’s marketing team and publishing infrastructure. The two entities will work closely on new marketing, branding, digital and synch opportunities along with film and TV projects.
Formed in 1989 by Weiland, Dean DeLeo, Robert DeLeo and Eric Kretz, Stone Temple Pilots released a total of six studio albums with Weiland as frontman, four of which hit the top 10 on the Billboard 200 and one of which (Purple) debuted at No. 1 on the chart. Velvet Revolver also saw success, with the band’s 2004 debut, Contraband, landing at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and its second and final album, Libertad, debuting at No. 5 on the tally. As a solo artist, Weiland released a total of three studio albums and one with his band the Wildabouts in 2015.
Weiland scored six Grammy nominations during his lifetime and won two — one for best hard rock performance with vocal for Stone Temple Pilots’ 1993 single, “Plush,” the other for best hard rock performance for Velvet Revolver’s 2004 single, “Slither.”
“There are few rock artists that had the impact that Scott Weiland did on music,” said Larry Mestel, CEO/founder of Primary Wave Music, in a statement. “We are honored to partner with Scott’s family on such a legendary catalog of music and career. Scott’s influence on music is unparalleled and he remains one of the most influential musicians in rock music. We are extremely grateful the estate has chosen to partner with us to continue to grow his incredible legacy.”
“We believe that Primary Wave are the perfect partners to secure Scott’s legacy as one of the great front men in rock history,” added Brian Harris Frank of Shelter Music Group and Dana Dufine of DBD Squared Entertainment, who manage Weiland’s estate. “We look forward to working with Larry, Natalia, Adam, and their teams and believe that their ability to connect artists with culture will ensure that Scott’s impact will be felt for generations.”
Natalia Nastaskin, chief content officer at Primary Wave, added, “Scott is the original influencer. The stories behind his undeniably authentic lyrics, effervescent performances, impeccable fashion sense, and meteoric rise to stardom are a filmmaker’s dream. I’m thrilled to work with Scott’s family, as well as Dana and Brian, on expanding and extending Scott’s legacy through new compelling IP projects across film, television, and stage.”
Weiland died of an accidental drug overdose on Dec. 3, 2015. He was 48.
Earlier this month, 760 stations owned by iHeartMedia simultaneously threw their weight behind a new single: The Beatles’ “Now and Then.” This was surprising, because the group broke up in 1970 and two of the members are dead. “Now and Then” began decades ago as a home recording by John Lennon; more recently, AI-powered audio technology allowed for the separation of the demo’s audio components — isolating the voice and the piano — which in turn enabled the living Beatles to construct a whole track around them and roll it out to great fanfare.
“For three days, if you were a follower of popular culture, all you heard about was The Beatles,” says Arron Saxe, who represents several estates, including Otis Redding’s and Bill Withers’s. “And that’s great for the business of the estate of John Lennon and the estate of George Harrison and the current status of the two living legends.”
For many people, 2023 has been the year that artificial intelligence technology left the realm of science fiction and crashed rudely into daily life. And while AI-powered tools have the potential to impact wide swathes of the music industry, they are especially intriguing for those who manage estates or the catalogs of dead artists.
That’s because there are inherent constraints involved with this work: No one is around to make new stuff. But as AI models get better, they have the capacity to knit old materials together into something that can credibly pass as new — a reproduction of a star’s voice, for example. “As AI develops, it may impact the value of an estate, depending on what assets are already in the estate and can be worked with,” says Natalia Nataskin, chief content officer for Primary Wave, who estimates that she and her team probably spend around 25% of their time per week mulling AI (time she says they used to spend contemplating possibilities for NFTs).
And a crucial part of an estate manager’s job, Saxe notes, is “looking for opportunities to earn revenue.” “Especially with my clients who aren’t here,” he adds, “you’re trying to figure out, how do you keep it going forward?”
The answer, according to half a dozen executives who work with estates or catalogs of dead artists or songwriters, is “very carefully.” “We say no to 99 percent of opportunities,” Saxe says.
“You have this legacy that is very valuable, and once you start screwing with it, you open yourself up to causing some real damage,” adds Jeff Jampol, who handles the estates of The Doors, Janis Joplin and more. “Every time you’re going to do something, you have to be really protective. It’s hard to be on the bleeding edge.”
To work through these complicated issues, WME went so far as to establish an AI Task Force where agents from every division educate themselves on different platforms and tools to “get a sense for what is out there and where there are advantages to bring to our clients,” says Chris Jacquemin, the company’s head of digital strategy. The task force also works with WME’s legal department to gain “some clarity around the types of protections we need to be thinking about,” he continues, as well as with the agency’s legislative division in Washington, D.C.
At the moment, Jampol sees two potentially intriguing uses of AI in his work. “It would be very interesting to have, for instance, Jim Morrison narrate his own documentary,” he explains. He could also imagine using an AI voice model to read Morrison’s unrecorded poetry. (The Doors singer did record some poems during his lifetime, suggesting he was comfortable with this activity.)
On Nov. 15, Warner Music Group announced a potentially similar initiative, partnering with the French great Edith Piaf’s estate to create a voice model — based on the singer’s old interviews — which will narrate the animated film Edith. The executors of Piaf’s estate, Catherine Glavas and Christie Laume, said in a statement that “it’s been a special and touching experience to be able to hear Edith’s voice once again — the technology has made it feel like we were back in the room with her.”
The use of AI tech to recreate a star’s speaking voice is “easier” than attempting to put together an AI model that will replicate a star singing, according to Nataskin. “We can train a model on only the assets that we own — on the speaking voice from film clips, for example,” she explains.
In contrast, to train an AI model to sing like a star of old, the model needs to ingest a number of the artist’s recordings. That requires the consent of other rights holders — the owners of those recordings, which may or may not be the estate, as well as anyone involved in their composition. Many who spoke to Billboard for this story said they were leery of AI making new songs in the name of bygone legends. “To take a new creation and say that it came from someone who isn’t around to approve it, that seems to me like quite a stretch,” says Mary Megan Peer, CEO of the publisher peermusic.
Outside the United States, however, the appetite for this kind of experimentation may differ. Roughly a year ago, the Chinese company Tencent Music Entertainment told analysts that it used AI-powered technology to create new vocal tracks from dead singers, one of which went on to earn more than 100 million streams.
For now, at least, Nataskin characterized Primary Wave as focused on “enhancing” with AI tech, “rather than creating something from scratch.” And after Paul McCartney initially mentioned that artificial intelligence played a role in “Now and Then,” he quickly clarified on X that “nothing has been artificially or synthetically created,” suggesting there is still some stigma around the use of AI to generate new vocals from dead icons. The tech just “cleaned up some existing recordings,” McCartney noted.
This kind of AI use for “enhancing” and “cleaning up,” tweaking and adjusting has already been happening regularly for several years. “For all of the industry freakout about AI, there’s actually all these ways that it’s already operating everyday on behalf of artists or labels that isn’t controversial,” says Jessica Powell, co-founder and CEO of Audioshake, a company that uses AI-powered technology for stem separation. “It can be pretty transformational to be able to open up back catalog for new uses.”
The publishing company peermusic used AI-powered stem separation to create instrumentals for two tracks in its catalog — Gaby Moreno’s “Fronteras” and Rafael Solano’s “Por Amor” — which could then be placed in ads for Oreo and Don Julio, respectively. Much like the Beatles, Łukasz Wojciechowski, co-founder of Astigmatic Records, used stem separation to isolate, and then remove distortion from, the trumpet part in a previously unreleased recording he found of jazz musician Tomasz Stanko. After the clean up, the music could be released for the first time. “I’m seeing a lot of instances with older music where the quality is really poor, and you can restore it,” Wojciechowski says.
Powell acknowledges that these uses are “not a wild proposition like, ‘create a new voice for artist X!’” Those have been few and far between — at least the authorized ones. (Hip-hop fans have been using AI-powered technology to turn snippets of rap leaks from artists like Juice WRLD, who died in 2019, into “finished” songs.) For now, Saxe believes “there hasn’t been that thing where people can look at it and go, ‘They nailed that use of it.’ We haven’t had that breakout commercial popular culture moment.”
It’s still early, though. “Where we go with things like Peter Tosh or Waylon Jennings or Eartha Kitt, we haven’t decided yet,” says Phil Sandhaus, head of WME Legends division. “Do we want to use voice cloning technologies out there to create new works and have Eartha Kitt in her unique voice sing a brand new song she’s never sung before? Who knows? Every family, every estate is different.”
Additional reporting by Melinda Newman
The yearslong legal battle over Ed Sheeran‘s “Thinking Out Loud” has officially drawn to a close. The heirs of Ed Townsend, co-writer on Marvin Gaye‘s “Let’s Get It On”, who sued Sheeran in 2016 for allegedly infringing the classic song in his smash 2014 single, have officially dropped their appeal in the long-running case, according […]
Sandbox Entertainment Group’s estate management division, Sandbox Succession, is now representing the Loretta Lynn estate, it was announced Thursday (Aug. 24).
The division will manage the Country Music Hall of Famer’s estate, in partnership with the Lynn family, in areas including film, TV, theater, music recordings, licensing and more.
Led by Jason Owen, Sandbox Entertainment oversees the careers of artists including Kelsea Ballerini, Faith Hill and Little Big Town. Sandbox Succession, which launched in 2021, manages the estates of Johnny Cash, June Carter Cash, the Carter Family and NASCAR Hall of Famer Richard Petty.
“Loretta Lynn is the original Queen of Country music, and it is a true privilege that her family has entrusted Sandbox Succession to preserve her precious legacy,” Sandbox Entertainment CEO Owen said of Lynn, who died on Oct. 4, 2022, at age 90.
“We are happy to partner with Sandbox Succession to not only represent but also perpetuate the amazing legacy of our mother’s career,” added the Lynn family.
“With Sandbox Succession, we strive to place our clients at the intersection of historical importance and cultural relevance,” added Sandbox Succession president Josh Matas. “We are thrilled to apply our proven strategies to bring Loretta Lynn to new audiences and celebrate her further with existing fans.”
Following Lynn’s passing in 2022, Sandbox Productions and CMT gathered artists to celebrate Lynn’s life and career with a public memorial service, titled Coal Miner’s Daughter: A Celebration of the Life and Music of Loretta Lynn. The service aired on CMT from Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry House.
Sandbox Succession also recently revealed Johnny Cash: The Official Concert Experience, a tour that features video footage of Cash from episodes of The Johnny Cash TV Show with the accompaniment of a live band and vocalists. Also in the works are a documentary on the life of June Carter Cash and a television series honoring Petty’s racing legacy.
Dennis Murcia was excited to get an email from Disney, but the thrill was short-lived. As an A&R and global development executive for the label Codiscos — founded in 1950, Murcia likens it to “Motown of Latin America” — part of his job revolves around finding new listeners for a catalog of older songs. Disney reached out in 2020 hoping to use Juan Carlos Coronel’s zippy recording of “Colombia Tierra Querida,” written by Lucho Bermudez, in the trailer for an upcoming film titled Encanto. The problem was: The movie company wanted the instrumental version of the track, and Codiscos didn’t have one.
“I had to scramble,” Murcia recalls. A friend recommended that he try AudioShake, a company that uses artificial intelligence-powered technology to dissect songs into their component parts, known as stems. Murcia was hesitant — “removing vocals is not new, but it was never ideal; they always came out with a little air.” He needed to try something, though, and it turned out that AudioShake was able to create an instrumental version of “Colombia Tierra Querida” that met Disney’s standards, allowing the track to appear in the trailer.
“It was a really important synch placement” for us, Murcia says. He calls quality stem-separation technology “one of the best uses of AI I’ve seen,” capable of opening “a whole new profit center” for Codiscos.
Catalog owners and estate administrators are increasingly interested in tapping into this technology, which allows them to cut and slice music in new ways for remixing, sampling or placements in commercials and advertisements. Often “you can’t rely on your original listeners to carry you into the future,” says Jessica Powell, co-founder and CEO of Audioshake. “You have to think creatively about how to reintroduce that music.”
Outside of the more specialized world of estates and catalogs, stem-separation is also being used widely by workaday musicians. Moises is another company that offers the technology; on some days, the platform’s users stem-separate 1 million different songs. “We have musicians all across the globe using it for practice purposes” — isolating guitar parts in songs to learn them better, or removing drums from a track to play along — says Geraldo Ramos, Moises’ co-founder and CEO.
While the ability to create missing stems has been around for at least a decade, the tech has been advancing especially rapidly since 2019 — when Deezer released Spleeter, which offered up “already trained state of the art models for performing various flavors of separation” — and 2020, when Meta released its own model called Demucs. Those “really opened the field and inspired a lot of people to build experiences based on stem separation, or even to work on it themselves,” Powell says. (She notes that AudioShake’s research was under way well before those releases.)
As a result, stem separation has “become super accessible,” according to Matt Henninger, Moises’ vp of sales and business development. “It might have been buried in Pro Tools five years ago, but now everyone can get their hands on it.”
Where does artificial intelligence come in? Generative AI refers to programs that ingest reams of data and find patterns they can use to generate new datasets of a similar type. (Popular examples include DALL-E, which does this with images, and ChatGPT, which does it with text.) Stem separation tech finds the patterns corresponding to the different instruments in songs so that they can be isolated and removed from the whole.
“We basically train a model to recognize the frequencies and everything that’s related to a drum, to a bass, to vocals, both individually and how they relate to each other in a mix,” Ramos explains. Done at scale, with many thousands of tracks licensed from independent artists, the model eventually gets good enough to pull apart the constituent parts of a song it’s never seen before.
A lot of recordings are missing those building blocks. They could be older tracks that were cut in mono, meaning that individual parts were never tracked separately when the song was recorded. Or the original multi-track recordings could have been lost or damaged in storage.
Even in the modern world, it’s possible for stems to disappear in hard-drive crashes or other technical mishaps. The opportunity to create high-quality stems for recordings “where multi-track recordings aren’t available effectively unlocks content that is frozen in time,” says Steven Ames Brown, who administers Nina Simone‘s estate, among others.
Arron Saxe of Kinfolk Management, which includes the Otis Redding Estate, believes stem-separation can enhance the appeal of the soul great’s catalog for sample-based producers. “We have 280 songs, give or take, that Otis Redding wrote that sit in a pot,” he says. “How do you increase the value of each one of those? If doing that is pulling out a 1-second snare drum from one of those songs to sample, that’s great.” And it’s an appealing alternative to well-worn legacy marketing techniques, which Saxe jokes are “just box sets and new track listings of old songs.”
Harnessing the tech is only “half the battle,” though. “The second part is a harder job,” Saxe says. “Do you know how to get the music to a big-name producer?” Murcia has been actively pitching electronic artists, hoping to pique their interest in sampling stems from Codiscos.
It can be similarly challenging to get the attention of a brand or music supervisor working in film and TV. But again, stem separation “allows editors to interact with or customize the music a lot more for a trailer in a way that is not usually possible with this kind of catalog material,” says Garret Morris, owner of Blackwatch Dominion, a full-service music publishing, licensing and rights management company that oversees a catalog extending from blues to boogie to Miami bass.
Simpler than finding ways to open catalogs up to samplers is retooling old audio for the latest listening formats. Simone’s estate used stem-separation technology to create a spatial audio mix of her album Little Girl Blue as this style of listening continues to grow in popularity. (The number of Amazon Music tracks mixed in immersive-audio has jumped over 400% since 2019, for example.)
Powell expects that the need for this adaptation will continue to grow. “If you buy into the vision presented by Apple, Facebook, and others, we will be interacting in increasingly immersive environments in the future,” she adds. “And audio that is surrounding us, just like it does in the real world, is a core component to have a realistic immersive experience.”
Brown says the spatial audio re-do of Simone’s album resulted in “an incremental increase in quality, and that can be enough to entice a brand new group of listeners.” “Most recording artists are not wealthy,” he continues. “Things that you can do to their catalogs so that the music can be fresh again, used in commercials and used in soundtracks of movies or TV shows, gives them something that makes a difference in their lives.”
Irving Azoff‘s latest signing to his Iconic Artists Group is “The King of Cool,” Dean Martin.
On Wednesday (Dec. 7) Iconic Artists Group announced a new agreement with The Dean Martin Family Trust to “manage, develop and expand” the legendary singer and actor’s legacy to new generations. The deal encompasses Dean Martin‘s name, image and likeness along with a range of rights from his career, including the trust’s interest in his self-titled variety shows and specials, the Dean Martin Celebrity Roast series, feature films and sound recordings from his time with Capitol and Reprise Records.
Over the course of his career, Martin, who died in 1995, sold over 50 million albums worldwide and appeared in 85 films and numerous TV shows, according to Iconic Artists Group’s press release. His hit songs include “That’s Amore,” “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head,” “Volare,” “You’re Nobody till Somebody Loves You” and “Everybody Loves Somebody.”
Martin rose to fame alongside Jerry Lewis, with whom he had a massively popular show at the 500 Club in Atlantic City, New Jersey beginning in 1946. The live show launched them as an in-demand duo, and they went on to team up for a total of 16 feature films and a string of appearances on The Colgate Comedy Hour.
After splitting professionally with Lewis, Martin went on to host the hugely successful Dean Martin Show from 1965-74, for which he received two Emmy nominations for outstanding variety series. That was followed by The Dean Martin Celebrity Roast, a series of 54 specials that aired from 1974 to 1984.
Martin was posthumously honored with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009.
“Dean Martin was America in film, recordings, nightclubs, comedy & TV,” said Azoff in a statement. “He was the epitome of coolness. It is both an honor and privilege to welcome this cherished American talent to our Iconic family.”
Martin’s long-time business manager and trustee of The Dean Martin Family Trust, Laura Lizer, added, “Dean Martin’s work and cultural influence across so many media platforms, including music, television, movies, radio, and live performances, makes his diverse catalog and legacy one of the most unique assets in entertainment history. Aligning the Dean Martin Family Trust with Irving Azoff’s Iconic Artists Group secures Dean’s legacy for generations to come.”
Founded in January 2020, Iconic Artists Group has made several attention-getting deals over the last couple of years. In January 2020, the company purchased a controlling interest in The Beach Boys‘ music catalog, including sound recordings, select musical compositions, brand and memorabilia. The company also signed a partnership with the family of Nat King Cole to sell asset rights from his estate, acquired Linda Ronstadt‘s recorded music assets and purchased the catalogs of former Crosby, Stills & Nash bandmates David Crosby and Stephen Stills in separate deals.
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