State Champ Radio Europe
The Red Clay Strays, the quintet behind the recent viral hit “Wondering Why,” are set to launch their inaugural European tour in August.
The group, who just inked a major label deal with RCA Records and are signed with WME for booking, will play five shows, beginning Aug. 18 in Dublin, Ireland, and followed by shows in Glasgow, UK (Aug. 20), Manchester, UK (Aug. 21), London (Aug. 23) and wrapping the trek with a show at The Long Road Festival in Leicestershire, UK, on Aug 24.
The group, hailing from Mobile, Alabama, first released “Wondering Why” in 2022, though the song began surging in late 2023 thanks to social media. The group — which includes lead singer Brandon Coleman, electric guitarist Zach Rishel, guitarist/vocalist Drew Nix, bassist Andrew Bishop and drummer John Hall — has been making music since 2016, blending elements of rockabilly, gospel, soul, blues, rock and country into a sonic mesh Coleman refers to as “non-denominational rock ‘n’ roll.” Coleman, Nix and songwriter Dan Couch wrote “Wondering Why.”
The band is working on a Dave Cobb-produced album. “Since we’ve started, the goal from day one was to work with Dave Cobb,” Coleman previously told Billboard. “The fact that it actually happened is surreal.”
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The Red Clay Strays released their debut album Moment of Truth in 2022, and have since opened shows for artists including Eric Church and Dierks Bentley. In September 2023, they also launched their headlining Way Too Long Tour, and are set to appear on a slate of music festivals this summer, including Moon Crush and Cattle Country Fest.
Tickets for the slate of European shows go on sale April 5 at 10 a.m. local time. Fans can also sign up for a passcode for an artist presale on April 3 beginning at 10 a.m. local time.
Spotify has outlined a number of changes it will soon be introducing for European users, including the ability to make in-app purchases, in response to new EU legislation governing how online companies and platforms operate in the region.
Beginning in March, Spotify’s European users will be able to make “seamless and secure” in-app payments for products such as audiobooks on iPhone and Android devices, the Swedish streaming company announced in a blog post on Wednesday (Jan. 24).
Users of Spotify’s free ad-supported service will additionally be able to upgrade to its premium offering through their phone (without leaving the app), while the company says it will begin directly communicating with customers about subscription offerings, upgrades, deals and promotions.
The changes are being implemented as a result of the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), a sweeping piece of legislation designed to curb the dominance of tech giants like Apple, Amazon, Google and Meta. The DMA forces tech companies trading within the EU region to open up their services and platforms to other businesses and allow them to operate more freely. For companies like Spotify, the law means that Apple is no longer able to charge them a 30% fee on all purchases made through its App Store — a long-running practice that served as a source of contention between the two companies and which is now prohibited in EU member states (smaller developers pay fees of around 15%).
Although the law officially came into force in November 2022, companies have until Mar. 7 to comply with the regulations. Apple didn’t respond to requests for comment when contacted by Billboard.
“For years, even in our own app, Apple had these rules where we couldn’t tell you about offers, how much something costs, or even where or how to buy it,” Spotify said in the blog post, entitled “The DMA Means a Better Spotify for Artists, Creators, and You.”
The company goes on to say that the changes it’s implementing will mean “good things for artists, authors, and creators looking to build their audiences of listeners, concert-goers, and audiobook-loving fans.”
Some of the ways Spotify said it will be looking to do that is by allowing creators to download its “Spotify for Artists” and “Spotify for Podcasters” tools directly from its site and alternative app stores.
“It should be this easy for every single Spotify customer everywhere,” stated the company, referencing its well-publicized battles with Apple in the United States and other international markets over transaction fees the tech company charges app developers.
Last week, Spotify accused Apple of “stopping at nothing” to protect its profits after the firm introduced commission fees of up to 27% in the United States for app developers that choose to sell products in places other than its own App Store.
Apple introduced the fees following a long-running legal battle with Fortnite developer Epic Games in U.S. courts. Although Epic lost the case, a California judge ordered Apple to make changes to how its store operates, including allowing links to outside platforms and third-party services. Last week, The Supreme Court rejected appeals from both Apple and Epic Games.
In Wednesday’s blog post, Spotify said it will “keep fighting” for governments and regulators to pass laws like the DMA “because freedom from gatekeepers means more choice for consumers and positive impact for artists, authors, creators and developers everywhere.”
One front in that fight is taking place in the United States, where Spotify founder/CEO Daniel Ek has actively lobbied Congress and the Biden administration to pass the Open App Markets Act, which would disallow Apple, Google and other app stores with more than 50 million users from forcing app developers to use their payment systems as a condition of distribution. Though the bill never made it to the floor of either chamber, advocates reportedly expect its reintroduction soon.
LONDON — Representatives of the creative industries are urging legislators not to water down forthcoming regulations governing the use of artificial intelligence, including laws around the use of copyrighted music, amid fierce lobbying from big tech companies.
On Wednesday (Dec. 6), policy makers from the European Union Parliament, Council and European Commission will meet in Brussels to negotiate the final text of the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act – the world’s first comprehensive set of laws regulating the use of AI.
The current version of the AI Act, which was provisionally approved by Members of European Parliament (MEPs) in a vote in June, contains several measures that will help determine what tech companies can and cannot do with copyright protected music works. Among them is the legal requirement that companies using generative AI models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude 2 (classified by the EU as “general purpose AI systems”) provide summaries of any copyrighted works, including music, that they use to train their systems.
The draft legislation will also force developers to clearly identify content that is created by AI, as opposed to human works. In addition, tech companies will have to ensure that their systems are designed in such a way that prevents them from generating illegal content.
While these transparency provisions have been openly welcomed by music executives, behind the scenes technology companies have been actively lobbying policymakers to try and weaken the regulations, arguing that such obligations could put European AI developers at a competitive advantage.
“We believe this additional legal complexity is out of place in the AI Act, which is primarily focused on health, safety, and fundamental rights,” said a coalition of tech organizations and trade groups, including the Computer and Communications Industry Association, which counts Alphabet, Apple, Amazon and Meta among its members, in a joint statement dated Nov. 27.
In the statement, the tech representatives said they were concerned “about the direction of the current proposals to regulate” generative AI systems and said the EU’s proposals “do not take into account the complexity of the AI value chain.”
European lawmakers are also in disagreement over how to govern the nascent technology with EU member states France, Germany and Italy understood to be in favor of light touch regulation for developers of generative AI, according to sources close to the negotiations.
In response, music executives are making a final pitch to legislators to ensure that AI companies respect copyright laws and strengthen existing protections against the unlawful use of music in training AI systems.
Helen Smith, the executive chair of IMPALA. /
Lea Fery
Helen Smith, executive chair of European independent labels group IMPALA, tells Billboard that the inclusion of “meaningful transparency and record keeping obligations” in the final legislation is a “must for creators and rightsholders” if they are to be able to effectively engage in licensing negotiations.
In a letter sent to EU ambassadors last week, Björn Ulvaeus, founder member of ABBA and president of CISAC, the international trade organization for copyright collecting societies, warned policymakers that “without the right provisions requiring transparency, the rights of the creator to authorise and get paid for use of their works will be undermined and impossible to implement.”
The European Composer and Songwriter Alliance (ECSA), International Federation of Musicians (FIM) and International Artist Organisation (IAO) are also calling for guarantees that the rights of their members are respected.
If legislators fail to reach a compromise agreement at Wednesday’s fifth and planned-to-be-final negotiating session on the AI Act, there are a number of possible outcomes, including further ‘trologue’ talks the following week. If a deal doesn’t happen this month, however, there is the very real risk that the AI Act won’t be passed before the European parliamentary elections take place in June.
If that happens, a new parliament could theoretically scrap the bill altogether, although executives closely monitoring events in Brussels, the de facto capital of the European Union, say that is unlikely to happen and that there is strong political will from all sides to find a resolution before the end of the year when the current Spain-led presidency of the EU Council ends.
Because the AI Act is a regulation and not a directive — such as the equally divisive and just-as-fiercely-lobbied 2019 EU Copyright Directive — it would pass directly into law in all 27 EU member states, although only once it has been fully approved by the different branches of the European government via a final vote and officially entered into force (the exact timeframe of which could be determined in negotiations, but could take up to three years).
In that instance, the act’s regulations will apply to any company that operates in the European Union, regardless of where they are based. Just as significant, if passed, the act will provide a world-first legislative model to other governments and international jurisdictions looking to draft their own laws on the use of artificial intelligence.
“It is important to get this right,” says IMPALA’s Smith, “and seize the opportunity to set a proper framework around these [generative AI] models.”
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