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Sacré bleu! Ticketmaster France pressed pause on the presales for four Paris dates and both shows in Lyon for Taylor Swift‘s 2024 European Eras Tour.
“Some of you may be having issues with the site this morning,” the company tweeted on Tuesday morning. “We are working on it and will let you know.”
The four Paris dates at La Défense Arena on May 9, 10, 11 and 12, 2024 were set to go on sale today in two stages, with one sale for May 9 and 10 opening at 9 a.m. local time and another, for May 11 and May 12, due to start at 11 a.m. Sales for the two dates at Lyon’s Groupama Stadium, set for June 2 and 3, were due to begin at 1 p.m.
“We will keep you informed of the new on-sale time as soon as possible,” the company said. “All codes will remain valid.”
As in past presales, fans had to sign up in order to be put into a lottery for code to redeem for a shot at tickets. But shortly after the Paris sale had begun, “winning” fans began having problems and Ticketmaster suspended the presale, citing issues with the site.
Leading up to the sale, the company gave fans an idea of what to expect:
Tickets will be available for purchase via the website for access code holders on July 11, 2023. Tickets will be sold on a first come, first served basis while currently available inventory lasts. It’s a simple, standard purchase process and the steps below will help you navigate your search and purchase.
If you are selected to receive an access code, you will receive an email and two SMS messages the afternoon before ticket sales begins on July 11 2023
The messages will include timing details and a link to where the on-sale will occur, and your unique access code.
Prepare for the sale by creating your customer account in advance if you don’t already have one. Sign-in to your Ticketmaster Account in advance. Know your Ticketmaster password, or reset your password in advance. For a faster checkout, make sure you have a valid credit card with updating billing information in your account.
The company did not respond to a request for details on the nature of the site outage.
Though “July 11” won’t carry the same stain as “Nov. 15” — the date Ticketmaster’s site buckled under the weight of millions of Swift fans trying to purchase initial U.S. Eras Tour dates — it remains another botched sale for a Swift sale for the ticketing giant.
Last week, Swift announced an additional 14 dates for her European trip next year, with Paramore opening all dates. Swift’s Eras Tour launched in Glendale, Arizona on March 17. She plays two nights at Denver’s Empower Field this weekend before heading to Seattle and the San Jose area later in July.
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The death of Nahel Merzouk at the hands of a police officer in France has spurred numerous protests and shed light on deep racial divisions in the country.
According to reports, the 17-year-old of Algerian-Moroccan descent was detained at a traffic stop in Nanterre, a suburb of Paris last week. Video footage shows one of two officers firing a shot through the windshield of the yellow Mercedes as Merzouk pulled forward. Forensics reports showed that one shot killed the Nahel Merzouk, as the car then slammed into the barriers at Nelson Mandela Square. The killing compelled observers to draw comparisons to the death of George Floyd in 2020 as it was caught on video, which was shared widely through social media. “He saw a little Arab-looking kid, he wanted to take his life,” the teen’s mother said to France 5 Television.
The death of Merzouk sparked intense outrage as many took to the streets to protest Merzouk’s killing in cities and towns throughout the country over the next six nights, often clashing with police and resulting in 3,400 arrests. Protests were even reported in French Caribbean territories such as Martinique and Guadeloupe, and even the island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean.
The fury behind the protests also points to how French society and its government have adopted an official stance of colorblind universalism. In fact, it is considered illegal to compile racially-based statistics in the country. Observers point to that stance as the reason decades of systemic racism have been prevalent in a country that welcomed Black American expats such as James Baldwin.
In 2017, the Défenseur des Droits civil-liberties watch group noted that “young men perceived to be Black or Arab” were 20 times more likely to be stopped by police for identity checks, and in 2021 six groups including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch launched a class-action suit against the French government over its failure to address racial profiling by police.
“For 40, 45 years there have been warning signs about discrimination,” says Abel Boyi, head of the “All Unique, All United” group. The issue has been pointedly addressed by noted authors such as Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Léopold Senghor who struck at the colonial underpinnings of France that harmed Black and Brown citizens. “He was a nonwhite person in this country,” university student Syrine Djidi said while at a protest for Merzouk, noting that he was the same age as her brother. “Nonwhite people are targeted by the police.”
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Victor Wembanyama will have all eyes on him after it is widely understood that the French basketball phenom will be selected first overall in the 2023 NBA Draft this summer. On Tuesday, the NBA Draft Lottery concluded with the San Antonio Spurs landing the top pick and NBA fans have plenty to say.
Victor Wembanyama, 19, currently plays for the French professional basketball team Metropolitans 92 of the LNB Pro A. Wembanyama, who is listed at 7-foot-4 although online reports list him at ranges of 7-foot-5 and 7-foot-2, is thought to be the greatest basketball prospect to emerge in quite some time. Despite his long frame, Wembanyama has the dribbling and passing skills of a guard which had every team in the NBA hoping to land the big man.
The good fortune experienced by the Spurs couldn’t have been more timely considering that the team, coached by Gregg Popovich, isn’t the elite team it once was during the David Robinson and Tim Duncan era. Under Popovich’s tutelage, the Spurs won five NBA championships, the last coming in 2014. It should also be noted that the last time the Spurs had the top pick of the draft, they selected Duncan.
With Wembanyama all but certain to be selected by the team, the fortune of the Spurs is expected to change almost immediately. It will be interesting to see how Wembanyama plays alongside the young core of Keldon Johnson, Tre Jones, and Devonte’ Graham.
On Twitter, both Victor Wembanyama and the San Antonio Spurs see their names trending with all kinds of reactions. We’ve got the best of them listed below.
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Photo: Christian Liewig – Corbis / Getty
LONDON — Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 led to a rapid exodus of global music companies from Russia. All three major labels say they ceased operations there. So did touring giant Live Nation and streaming platforms Spotify, TikTok, Deezer and Amazon Music. Paris-headquartered Believe, however, publicly pursued a different path, and a year later is still operating in Russia — releasing, distributing and promoting new music by local artists and labels on Russian streaming platforms Yandex. Plus, VK Music and Zvuk.
Executives at rival music companies have privately expressed outrage, accusing Believe of exploiting the sudden breakup of Russia’s music market — the 13th largest in 2021, generating $328 million in revenue that year, according to IFPI — to gain market share in the absence of Western competitors.
Denis Ladegaillerie, Believe’s founder and CEO, denies that charge and says the major labels and platforms are being hypocritical for criticizing how the French company is operating in Russia. Believe’s ongoing presence in the country “is really not an economic decision,” he tells Billboard in a rare interview addressing the issue. “We are not looking at building or growing or extracting value [in Russia].”
Following the start of hostilities, Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group said they stopped distributing and promoting new releases in Russia. If new titles are being made available on local streaming services, the majors say, it’s through piracy.
The Believe CEO is skeptical about those assertions and defends his company’s continued presence in the isolated nation. “What I see is that all global artists are still available on all local platforms [in Russia],” Ladegaillerie says, noting that YouTube and Apple Music are also still active in the market, albeit in a reduced capacity. “So, my question is: ‘You’ve pulled out of Russia? Really?’”
After Billboard discovered in December that Russian streaming service VK was allowing users to upload albums from major label artists like Taylor Swift (UMG’s Republic Records) and Red Hot Chili Peppers (Warner Music), all three major labels declined to comment; labels body IFPI did not condemn the apparent copyright violations, nor confirm if they or its label members had issued takedown orders to VK.
Ladegaillerie says Believe, for its part, has “very strictly” abided by all international sanctions placed against Russia since the start of the war — “both in law and spirit” — and has halted all new investments in the now-isolated country. “Our No. 1 priority, both in Russia and Ukraine, has been to protect our teams locally and support our artists,” he says.
Despite those claims, Believe’s revenue from Russia, where it retains just over 40 employees, has been growing. Combined revenue from Russia and Ukraine rose 9.9% to 57 million euros ($62.5 million) in 2022, according to the company’s year-end financial figures. (That was 7.5% of Believe’s overall revenue.)
While the economic sanctions against Russia were meant to starve the country of funds and further isolate it from the world financial system, they have been limited in scope and hundreds of Western companies continue to operate in the country. Global music companies have not completely extracted themselves from the country, either. Universal Music and Warner Music — which had the largest presence in Russia among the majors, with almost 100 employees — continue to pay their staff and maintain offices there, although they say those offices have been effectively closed since the war started.
In September, Sony Music announced it had decided “to exit the Russian marketplace completely” and was transferring its Sony Music entity there to a fully independent local company that would only represent locally signed artists. “As the war continues to have a devastating humanitarian impact in Ukraine, and sanctions on Russia continue to increase, we can no longer maintain a presence in Russia, effective immediately,” Sony Music said in a statement at the time.
YouTube continues to operate in Russia in compliance with U.S. sanctions but has suspended ads and monetization features (Russian creators can still make money from ads and other monetization products shown to users outside of the country). The Russian subsidiary of YouTube parent company Google filed for bankruptcy last year after authorities seized its bank account, making it impossible to pay employees, suppliers and vendors, a YouTube spokesperson tells Billboard.
Apple Music is still available in Russia, although there are fewer subscription payment options, as MasterCard and Visa cards issued by Russian banks can no longer be used to pay for subscriptions. Music from the major labels that left Russia is not available. (An Apple Music spokesperson did not reply to a request for comment.)
The French government of President Emmanuel Macron, for its part, has supported Believe’s decision to “maintain links” with Russia, Ladegaillerie says. That rings true for other French companies, which established deep ties with Russia in the wake of the Cold War. In March, French retailer Auchan said it planned to open a new store in Russia, doubling down on its brick-and-mortar presence in the market. And auto maker Renault, which is 15%-owned by the French state, has been scrambling to restart its assembly lines in Russia, where it owns the country’s biggest car maker, The Wall Street Journal reported.
In fact, French companies are among Russia’s biggest foreign employers, providing more than 150,000 jobs across a range of sectors that include energy, food products and wholesaling, according to figures from the French Economy Ministry.
The situation “is not black and white, it’s grey,” Ladegaillerie says. He identifies Believe’s humanitarian support for Ukraine — which includes donations and regularly publishing a playlist of Ukrainian artists — as part of the “difficult” balance his company is trying to maintain in Eastern Europe. “We realized that different countries have different perspectives on the situation but that’s really the line that we are trying to navigate.”
Additional Reporting By Vladimir Kozlov
LONDON — French music company Believe’s recent investments in Europe, Asia Pacific and Africa helped boost digital sales across its key markets and drive overall revenues up 22% from January through March, despite a slowdown in ad-funded streaming revenue.
The company reported Thursday (April 27) that revenues grew 22.2% to 198.6 million euros ($218.9 million) compared to the prior year’s quarter. The Paris-headquartered company’s premium solutions business — which includes label services, marketing, distribution, promotions and sync — rose 23% year-on-year to 186 million euros ($205 million), while its automated solutions, which includes the TuneCore distribution platform, increased 11.2% to 12.7 million euros ($14 million).
Digital revenue also grew by 22.2% during the quarter, with non-digital sales up 21.8%. Believe didn’t provide financial figures for either market segment, nor an indication of overall net profit or loss for the quarter. The company’s shares, traded on France’s Euronext, fell 2.41% on Thursday to close at 9.70 euros ($10.70).
The company said ad-funded streaming revenue slowed to single digit growth at the start of the year — in line with the challenging global advertising market — but didn’t report financial values or the percentage increase.
Non-digital revenue benefitted from merchandising, branding and live activities in France and India, as well as a film project in Turkey, which Believe said collectively offset the fall in physical sales, most notably in Germany.
Growth of Believe’s core digital business, which focuses on markets and music genres where artist promotion and marketing are predominantly online, was driven by the global rise in paid music steaming and the company’s expanding international portfolio of artists and labels, CEO and founder Denis Ladegaillerie said during Thursday’s earnings call.
Recent investments include partnerships with Filipino label Viva Music and Artists Group (VMAG), India-based imprints Think Music and Panorama Music, French pop label Structure and Germany-based Madizin Music. Last month, Believe acquired U.K.-based publisher Sentric from Switzerland-based Utopia Music in a €47 million ($51 million) deal that marks the French company’s first major entry into the publishing industry. (Sentric is expected to add about 3% to annual revenue growth, the company said Thursday.)
Notable Believe artist signings cited include Thai acts TimeThai and Reinizra, Belgian rapper Hamza and a new multi-album deal with French hip-hop star Jul.
Globally, revenue from Asia Pacific and Africa, which Believe groups together in its earnings report, grew 40% year-on-year to 56.1 million euros ($61.8 million), representing 28.2% of the company’s earnings, compared to 24.7% in the first quarter of 2022.
Within the Asia Pacific and Africa region, Believe said it recorded strong growth in India, Greater China and Southeast Asia, driven by its growing roster of local artists and labels, sustained investment in on-the-ground teams and the rollout of its full label and artist solutions offer in most markets.
Europe, excluding France and Germany, recorded a revenue increase of 21.1% to 54.4 million euros ($60 million), representing around 27% of total revenue.
Believe’s operations in the Americas rose 25.2% to 29.4 million euros ($32.4 million), representing 14.8% of all income, with the company saying that it had a particularly strong sales quarter in Latin America, most notably in Brazil.
The company’s two strongest individual markets, France and Germany, also grew by 13.2% to 32.1 million euros ($35.4 million) and 3.7% to 26.6 million euros ($29.3 million), respectively. France generates 16.2% of the company’s total revenue, while Believe said its performance in Germany was impacted by a “strong decline in physical sales linked to the lowered exposure to physical sales-heavy contracts.”
Over the past 12 months, Believe has made significant moves into the dance music sector with the launch of global label solutions brand b:electronic, which has signed deals with electronic music imprints Hospital Records and Rinse in the U.K.; Big Top Amsterdam, Blackout Music and Mixmash in the Netherlands; and Cercle and Roche Musique in France.
On Wednesday, the company announced that its TuneCore distribution platform had teamed up with Beatport, enabling TuneCore artists to distribute their songs on the world’s largest electronic music platform for working DJs.
“This great start to the year, marked by strong operational milestones and solid organic performance, shows that we are well on track to deliver another year of profitable growth,” Ladegaillerie says in a statement. Believe’s increasing global reach combined with a “successful investment strategy” was enabling “artists and labels to thrive in the digital ecosystem,” he says.
Ladegaillerie says the company is looking to make further acquisitions in the year ahead. Believe, which operates in more than 50 countries and has over 1,600 employees worldwide, says it expects to generate positive free cash flow for the full year and expects to record organic revenue growth of around 18% in 2023. The company says it will “monitor its investment pace and focus on improving efficiency” to reach an adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest and taxes, depreciation and amortization) margin of 5% for fiscal year 2023.
LONDON — French music company Believe is making inroads into the publishing business by acquiring U.K.-based publisher Sentric, which represents more than four million songs and over 400,000 songwriters in more than 200 territories.
Under terms of the deal announced on Thursday (March 30), Believe is acquiring full ownership of Sentric Music Group from Utopia Music, with the transaction valuing Sentric at €47 million ($51 million), Believe says in a press release.
(Utopia Music declined to comment).
Believe founder and CEO Denis Ladegaillerie says in a statement that the takeover of Sentric is the company’s “first step” in the “roll-out of a global and comprehensive publishing offer.”
It is the second time in just over a year that ownership of Liverpool-based Sentric Music Group — which also has offices in London, Hamburg, New York and Los Angeles — has changed hands.
In February of 2022, Utopia, a Zug, Switzerland-headquartered fintech company, acquired Sentric amid a frenetic buying spree that saw Utopia acquire 15 companies over a two-year period.
Sentric’s existing leadership team, led by CEO Chris Meehan, will continue to lead the business, says Believe. Paris-based Believe, which has 1,650 employees in more than 50 countries, says the combination of its digital music expertise and global network with Sentric’s industry-leading technology will develop “a comprehensive solution for songwriters and publishers at all levels.”
Believe’s move into publishing follows recent investments the company has made in Europe, India and Asia to further expand its global footprint. They include partnerships with French pop label Structure, Indian label Panorama Music and Germany-based Madizin Music.
Last year also saw Believe make strong gains in some key European countries and eat into the major record labels’ share of the recorded music market. In France, Believe says it was the second-largest music company in digital local repertoire in 2022. In Germany, it claims to have been the third-largest recorded music company for local repertoire in the streaming market, and the market’s second-largest company in hip-hop.
In total, Believe, which acquired the TuneCore distribution platform in 2015, worked with 1.3 million artists last year, either directly or through record labels, with annual revenues rising 31.8% year-on-year to 760.8 million euros ($723.5 million), according to the company’s year-end financial results, published earlier this month.
The company says its acquisition of Sentric will help drive future growth by enabling it to capture a slice of the growing music publishing market. In 2021, global publishing royalties to songwriters and composers grew by 7.2% to €8.5 billion ($9.2 billion), according to the International Confederation of Authors and Composers Societies’ (CISAC).
The Sentric deal also strengthens Believe’s TuneCore business offering, which provides worldwide digital distribution to independent and self-releasing artists. Believe says 23% of TuneCore’s subscribers already use Sentric’s publishing service. Moving forward, says Believe, Sentric will offer publishing services to all clients within the Believe Group.
“The growth and digital transformation of the songwriters’ market is opening-up many opportunities,” says Ladegaillerie.
For Utopia Music, the future appears cloudier with its sale of Sentric following a period of intense change at the fintech company.
In November, Utopia cut its workforce by about 20%, or about 230 jobs, followed two months later by CEO Markku Mäkeläinen exiting the company and founder and executive chairman Mattias Hjelmstedt taking over as interim chief executive. In February, Utopia said it had sold U.S.-based music database platform ROSTR — which has a directory of artists, managers, booking agents and record labels — back to ROSTR’s founders for an undisclosed sum.
At the time, Hjelmstedt told Billboard that the sale of ROSTR was part of a company-wide refocus on its core financial services business and that the company had recently completed a fresh investment round. (He declined to discuss the size of investment or investors).
However, on Wednesday, Scandinavian news outlet Breakit reported that some Utopia employees have recently gone unpaid and the company’s Swedish arm, Utopia R&D Tech, owes 8 million SEK ($770,000) to the Swedish tax authorities. (Music Business Worldwide was the first to report Breakit‘s story).
In response, a spokesperson for Utopia told Billboard that the company’s “strategic transition” was in response to “current changes in the market landscape,” adding that it is focusing on profitability and growth.
“It has not been an easy journey, but we are very positive about Utopia’s future and look forward to continuing what we are here to do — support the music industry with digital solutions for managing, monitoring, and processing royalties, and distributing the music we all love to listen to,” the Utopia rep said.
Annual revenues for French music company Believe grew 31.8% to 760.8 million euros ($723.5 million) in 2022 as the company capitalized on investments and expansion in Europe, India and China. Digital sales accounted for 92% of Believe’s revenue while non-digital sources represented just 8%.
The company’s premium solutions segment grew 31.6% to 712.6 million euros ($677.7 million). Automated solutions, which includes the TuneCore distribution platform, improved 34.5% to 48.2 million euros ($45.8 million). TuneCore’s launch of an “unlimited pricing” plan in 2022, which allows artists to distribute an unlimited amount of music for a fixed annual fee, was “extremely successful and translated into an acceleration of growth,” CEO Denis Ladegaillerie said during Wednesday’s earnings call.
“We ended 2022 strongly delivering above our IPO commitments both operationally and financially for the second year in a row,” Ladegaillerie said in a statement. “In 2022, as we have done each year since 2005, we did what we said we would do … or better. We grew our market share; we improved profitability; we generated significant cash flow from our operations.” Free cash flow was 52 million euros ($49.5 million), an improvement from negative 30.7 million euros in 2021.
Believe also revealed that it invested in French pop label Structure, which it called “a new French pop label partnering with two successful producers, behind the recent success of several multi-platinum French pop artists.” It additionally noted an investment in Madizin Music, “a German well-known brand managed by two renowned producers, composers, and entrepreneurs,” as well as an exclusive partnership with Panorama Music, a new Indian label founded by a Bollywood film producer.
Digital revenues improved 34.7% organically as Believe served an additional 200,000 artists, to 1.3 million, either directly or through record labels. In France, Believe was the second-largest music company in digital local repertoire in 2022. Believe was the third-largest recorded music company in Germany “on local repertoire in the streaming market,” and the market’s second-largest company in hip-hop. The company pointed to the chart success of TuneCore artist Theo Junior and Milky Chance, who amassed 1.2 billion streams in 2022 on the strength of the track “Stolen Dance.”
In Asia, Believe has invested in India and Southeast Asia and now has about 80 people spread throughout five offices in China. “The level of activity remained sustained throughout the year as the digital monetization increased in Greater China, which led to the signings in Premium Solutions of more than 300 labels and above 250 artists directly,” the company said.
Looking forward to 2023, Believe expects to post organic revenue growth of 18%, improve its adjusted EBITDA margin to between 5% and 7% and again be cash flow positive. “In 2023, we will continue our profitable growth strategy: invest in our teams to grow market share, innovate in audience development products for our artists and labels, and further drive operational efficiencies through technology and scale to increase profitability,” said Ladegaillerie.
BMG signed a Senegalese rapper from Paris that Universal Music Group had dropped because of Holocaust-denying and antisemitic lyrics — but executives in Berlin ultimately pulled the plug on releasing his music at the last minute, according to a report in The New York Times published Friday (Feb. 3).
In internal documents obtained by The Times, in 2021 BMG’s French division weighed the financial benefits of signing the rapper, Freeze Corleone, against his history of hate speech, and decided to sign him so long as his connection to the German label would remain secret. In previous songs, the rapper had questioned the Holocaust and compared himself to Adolf Hitler. In one 2018 song featuring Corleone, “KKK,” he raps about “Nazi vehicles” and says he’s “determined with lotta ambitions nigga, like the young Adolf.”
In 2020, Universal Music France released Corleone’s La Menace Fantôme (The Phantom Menace), which went double platinum in France and included lyrics in songs like “Tarkov” that mention a “fraternity like Aryans” (though with no explicit mention of Jews). Despite the album’s success, a week after it began distributing LMF, in September 2020 the label said it was cutting all ties with him because the album had “revealed and amplified unacceptable racist statements.”
After UMG dropped him, the 30-year-old rapper, whose real name is Issa Lorenzo Diakhate, Tweeted “finally free.”
Then in 2021, BMG’s French team proposed signing Freeze Corleone, who was becoming increasingly popular in the Parisian hip-hop scene. In internal emails and memos reviewed by The Times, French label executives at BMG noted the artist was “France’s fastest growing artist in the last 2 years” and would thus “really help us meet our revenue target.” But the executives, Sylvain Gazaignes, the French operation’s managing director, and Ronan Fiacre, the head of A&R, also noted the controversy around the 2020 UMG release.
“In order to mitigate the risk of possible controversy,” BMG executives wrote in an internal memo reviewed by The Times, their contract would ensure the label had the right to approve his lyrics. The memo also said the contract should keep BMG’s involvement with the rapper’s career hidden. There should be “no BMG logo anywhere on the release,” Dominique Casimir, BMG’s chief content officer, said in an email she sent to a BMG lawyer and other executives, according to The Times.
BMG signed a one-album deal with Freeze Corleone worth about $1 million in October 2021, according to The Times. About three weeks after signing the deal, Casimir decided to cancel the contract the day before the release of “Scellé part. 4,” Corleone’s first single from the album, titled Riyad Sadio. The decision came after Casimir’s German team had completed a review of Freeze Corleone’s past lyrics and told the French team they needed to end the relationship with the artist, a person familiar with the matter confirms to Billboard. (An undisclosed settlement was paid to Freeze, the source says.)
Freeze Corleone has two entries on the Billboard Global Excl. U.S. chart — “Freeze Rael,” which spent one week on the chart in September of 2020 at No. 176, and “Mannschaft,” billed as SCH featuring Freeze Corleone, which landed at No. 167 in April of 2021.
In a statement sent to Billboard, BMG says “today’s New York Times story confirms that as soon as senior BMG executives became aware of the historic allegations against the artist, it ended their relationship. No record was released. BMG stands firm against anti-Semitism and hate.”
For Berlin-based BMG, the incident is the second such situation in the past five years involving an artist known to have music containing antisemitic lyrics. In 2018, a controversy exploded over an album BMG released by two German rappers, Kollegah and Farid Bang. The album, Jung Brutal Gutaussehend 3 (Young Brutal Good-Looking 3), contained lyrics like “make another Holocaust, show up with a Molotov,” but nevertheless became a hit.
Antisemitism is a particularly sensitive issue for the label’s parent company, media giant Bertelsmann, which in 2002 apologized for its past ties to the Nazi regime after an independent commission of academics the company hired found it had thrived during World War II by producing antisemitic material and Nazi propaganda. Bertelsmann previously had claimed to have played an active role in the Nazi resistance.
Casimir, who was promoted in May to the CCO post and given a seat on BMG’s board (and was recently named to Billboard’s 2023 Power 100 list), also oversaw the signing of the controversial German rappers as managing director for Germany at that time.
After BMG decided to drop him, Freeze Corleone released his album independently. Two employees in France involved in the Freeze Corleone signing — who “believed in the artist” – have since left the company but were not fired, the source familiar tells Billboard. Gazaignes remains a top executive in the French division.
More than 1 billion music streams in France — or between 1% and 3% of all streams in the country — were detected to be fraudulent in 2021, according to a report released this week by a French government organization that analyzed data from Spotify, Deezer and Qobuz.
If the report’s number were to hold true for the worldwide music market — which the IFPI valued at $16.9 billion in 2021 — that would mean approximately $170 million to $510 million of streaming royalties are being misallocated globally. This is roughly in line with a 2019 estimate of $300 million lost to streaming fraud cited during Indie Week.
The Centre national de la musique (CNM), an organization created by the French government in 2020 that operates under the Ministry of Culture, found that fraud is widespread in France, the fifth-largest music market, to a sobering degree: “Irregularities are spotted” on both major-label and independent releases, national and international albums, old catalog and fresh new singles alike, the CMN says in its 56-page study. “The methods used by fraudsters are constantly evolving and improving,” it notes, “and fraud seems to be getting easier and easier to commit.”
The genres which had the highest percentage of fraudulent streams detected in the CNM’s report were background music (4.8% on Deezer) and non-musical titles (3.5%). While the raw number of fraudulent streams detected was highest in rap — the most popular genre in France — that represented just 0.4% of overall plays in the genre on Spotify and 0.7% on Deezer.
CNM’s report appears to be the first country-wide investigation of streaming fraud. “We’re happy with the effort by the CNM and the French government as a whole to look into this and take it seriously,” says Morgan Hayduk, founder and co-CEO of Beatdapp, a Canadian company that provides fraud detection software to streaming services, labels, and distributors. “This issue deserves the weight and attention that they gave to it.”
CNM’s report comes with several caveats, however. The organization’s data does not include information from Apple Music, YouTube and Amazon, who declined to share information about fraud on their platforms. According to a recent estimate from MIDiA Research, those three services account for slightly more than 35% of global streaming subscriptions. (MIDiA did not share country-level figures.)
In addition, Hayduk says, the report only looks at country-level data. This means it does not account for VPN usage that allows fraudsters to mask their country of origin.
Bad actors committing streaming fraud often “rotate through multiple countries redirecting traffic constantly,” says Andrew Batey, Beatdapp’s other co-CEO. “It’s not uncommon when we find fraud cases to see 15 devices spreading plays across 30 countries.” To catch that, he says, “you need a global view.”
Fraudulent streams, once defined by former Napster executive Angel Gambino as “anything which isn’t fans listening to music they love,” have become a major topic of music industry concern in Germany, France and Brazil. That’s because undetected fraudulent streams can impact market share calculations and divert money from honest artists.
The countries have taken different approaches to combat this fraud. The IFPI led a legal effort to shut down German websites that offered streams for cash starting in 2020. The organization made the case that manipulating play counts allows artists to create a false impression of popularity, ultimately misleading consumers and violating Germany’s Unfair Competition act.
In Brazil, law enforcement worked in conjunction with Pro-Música, IFPI’s Brazilian affiliate, to shut down 84 stream-boosting sites in the country in 2021. Prosecutors there argued that sites that offered fraudulent streams were violating Brazil’s Consumer Defense Code and treated the activity as a criminal act.
Brazil’s coordinated effort — dubbed Operation Anti-Doping — determined that the fraudulent streams were actually being generated outside of Brazil, illustrating the limitations of a single-country approach to fraud reduction. “No company in Brazil has the technology to make these fake streams,” Paulo Rosa, Pro-Música’s president, told Billboard in 2021. “This technology comes from websites hosted in Russia.”
The U.S. industry has historically appeared less bothered by streaming fraud — or at least less willing to acknowledge its existence publicly, with executives and streaming services reluctant to discuss the subject. This may be starting to shift, however. At a Music Biz panel in May, SoundCloud vp of strategy Michael Pelczynski noted that the current streaming ecosystem is rife with “very prevalent fraud and abuse,” and that this activity has “cultural ramifications.” When undetected fraudulent streams “start influencing the way we measure the success of music, we are literally supporting inauthenticity,” Pelczynski said.
The CNM appeared heartened by the fact that, since the summer of 2021, it has seen “the growing mobilization of platforms, distributors and producers” worried about fraud, resulting in the creation of “dedicated teams” and the outlay of increased resources to battle “manipulation.”
But there remain several key challenges when attempting to tackle fraud. The lack of transparency from some streaming platforms, and the inability to push toward assembling a comprehensive global data set, means that the scale of the problem is still unknown.
What’s more, as the CNM points out, it’s nearly impossible to punish those engaged in fraud because they are rarely identified. The penultimate section of the report lays out potential legal remedies that could be used to fight fake streams in France — if authorities were able to prove that bad actors violated laws related to illegal hacking or unfair business practices. They include fines of up to 300,000 euros ($324,000) and prison sentences of up to five years for perpetrators.
The CNM pledged to release a follow-up report in 2024.
The mayor of the northern French town of Amiens is appealing to pop star Madonna to loan them what they believe is a missing 200-year-old Neoclassical painting that disappeared from their museum during World War I.
But is Madonna’s version the genuine article, or a copy?
Brigitte Fouré, the mayor, says in a video that the oil painting the singer reportedly owns, called Diana and Endymion, was “probably a work that was lent to the Amiens museum by the Louvre before the first world war after which we lost trace of it,” according to a report in The Guardian.
Now Fouré wants the “Material Girl” singer to provide the artwork as a loaner to help Amiens’ bid to become the European capital of culture in 2028.
The painting, which depicts the Roman goddess Diana falling in love with Endymion, is thought to have been painted by Jérôme-Martin Langlois, and dates to 1822. After being commissioned by Louis XVIII to hang in the Palace of Versailles, it was acquired by the French republic in 1873, and was exhibited in Amiens at the Musée des Beaux-Arts – now the Musée de Picardie – beginning in 1878.
The Langlois went missing after the Germans pounded Amiens with bombs and artillery fire for 28 days in March 1917, destroying much of the city including part of the museum. The paintings were taken to safety, but after the war the Langlois was listed as “untraceable” and later deemed to have been “destroyed by the falling of a bomb on the museum,” the Guardian reports.
The painting — or one nearly identical to it — reappeared in 1989 at a New York auction where Madonna paid $1.3 million for it, more than three times its estimated price, says French newspaper Le Figaro.
Madonna is an avid art collector known to have a collection worth an estimated $100 million, People magazine has reported. It includes Frida Kahlo’s My Birth (1932), one of only five painting she created while in Detroit; an extensive collection by Polish Art Deco painter Tamar de Lempicka; and Pablo Picasso’s Buste de Femme à la Frange (1938), which she paid almost $5 million for at Christie’s in 2000.
In 2015, a sharp-eyed curator from Amiens spotted the Langlois painting in the background of a photograph of Madonna at her home that was published in Paris Match magazine.
The painting Madonna bought is reportedly one inch (three centimeters) smaller than the artwork that disappeared from Amiens and was unsigned and undated, leading experts to wonder if it is the original — or a copy.
The museum has lodged legal action against “persons unknown” for the theft of the painting, the Guardian reports. But Fouré, the mayor, says the town doesn’t dispute that Madonna acquired the work in a “perfectly legal auction.”
The singer “bought it and she owns it,” the mayor says. “I’m not asking her to give it to us but to allow us to borrow it for just a few weeks so people here can see it.”
Fouré would welcome a visit by Madonna to Amiens, a town best known for textiles and its gothic cathedral, and as the birthplace of French President Emmanuel Macron.
“It would be amazing to have her come here but I can’t imagine it happening,” she says. “Still, now everyone is talking about Amiens!”
Billboard reached out to Madonna’s team, which had no comment.