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BMG said on Thursday (Oct. 18) that it will use Universal Music Group’s (UMG) commercial services division for the distribution of its physical recorded music, in what BMG CEO Thomas Coesfeld described as the first project of a burgeoning “alliance.” Last month, BMG announced it was winding down its agreement with Warner Music Group’s ADA […]
Hipgnosis Songs Fund’s board said on Thursday it was launching a strategic review of changes to its current management team and other options that could maximize shareholder value, as the company braces for a critical continuation vote next week.
Hipgnosis Songs Fund’s (HSF) stock price hit an all-time low earlier this week after scrapping its upcoming shareholder dividend because of an accounting error that resulted in a nearly $12-million downward revision of certain expected streaming royalties.
Shares in the company, which owns the rights to songs performed by Rihanna, Fleetwood Mac, The Pretenders and more, fell by more than 10% on the news, and investor confidence appeared shaky this week, as the the five-year-old music royalty fund prepares for a do-or-die continuation vote on Oct. 26.
“This decision follows extensive engagement over recent weeks with shareholders in light of the forthcoming continuation resolution,” the board said in a statement announcing the strategic review. “These meetings highlighted a continued belief in the company’s portfolio and growth prospects … as well as the need for changes by the company in order to deliver value for shareholders.”
The board said it explored terminating its contract with the fund’s investment advisor, Hipgnosis Song Management, run by HSF founder Merck Mercuriadis, but said it concluded it is not in shareholders’ interest, “as it would be an event of default under the revolving credit facility” if the fund fired its investment advisor before finding a new one who was approved by the HSF’s banks.
The board reiterated its recommendation that shareholders vote in favor of continuing the fund, saying it believes “it is in shareholders’ interest to have a strategic review with the widest array of options for the company to consider and to identify changes that will focus on recovering and delivering improved shareholder value.” The board went on to say it asked its investment advisor to remove a clause in its contract that gives the group overseen by Mercuriadis the right to acquire HSF’s portfolio if its advisory contract is terminated, but that request was declined.
The company’s stock rose about 2.33% to 74.70 British pence ($0.90) as of 10:22 in London.
Continuation votes are required for all publicly traded trusts listed on the London Stock Exchange to provide investors of closed-end funds with an exit strategy.
In addition to a thumbs up or down on continuation next week, HSF investors will also be asked to vote on the sale of 29 catalogs from HSF’s portfolio–including the works of Shakira, Barry Manilow and other artists–to its privately held sister fund Hipgnosis Songs Capital, which is backed by Blackstone.
The board reiterated on Thursday its support for the proposed sale, saying it would use the $440 million in proceeds to reduce the company’s debt and buy back up to $180 million worth of its own stock.
The fund’s board chairman Andrew Sutch announced plans to step down last month, and the board said it has hired an executive search firm to look for his replacement.
The boad also said it also has secured new terms with lenders that put the company back in compliance with its fixed charge cover ratio covenant. The company risked breaching compliance with its lenders over the past week after it was forced to cut expectations for revenue from the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board’s Phonorecords III (CRB III) to $9.9 million, from $21.7 million.
BMG has acquired the recorded music catalog of French DJ and artist Martin Solveig in what the company calls its biggest such deal in France to date. The sale includes the rights to around 130 tracks, including hits like “Intoxicated” and “+1,” and Solveig’s studio albums from 2002’s Sur la Terre to 2011’s Smash.
Solveig’s work joins a BMG France roster that includes Jean-Michel Jarre (recordings and publishing), Yuksek (recordings and publishing) and Thylacine (publishing). The previous largest recorded music acquisition by BMG in France was more than a decade ago when it purchased Francis Dreyfus Music (Dreyfus), the label which owned Jarre’s first albums.
BMG declined to offer financial details of the Solveig sale, which was brokered by Maximilien Jazani of Catalogue Associates.
Solveig has topped the Dance Club Songs chart twice in his career, first with 2011’s Dragonette-assisted “Hello” and then a year later with “The Night Out.” He’s also placed five tracks on the Hot Dance/Electronic Songs chart, including “All Day and Night,” “Hey Now” and “Juliet & Romeo.” His biggest mainstream hit, “Hello,” topped out at No. 46 on the Hot 100.
The success of “Hello” led to Solveig’s work on Madonna’s MDNA album — he co-wrote and co-produced three songs, including “Give Me All Your Luvin’” and “Turn Up the Radio.”
“Martin Solveig has created some of the most potent and successful electronic music of the past decade with a career which straddles the end of the download era and the emergence of streaming,” said Maximilian Kolb, BMG’s evp of repertoire & marketing across continental Europe. “We see significant potential to bring his music to a wider streaming audience.”
Solveig added, “In the process of selecting a partner to host and preserve my recordings, it was imperative for me to associate myself with a company that understands the intrinsic value of this music and is just as passionate about its future potential as I was in creating it. BMG has demonstrated exceptional motivation, and a genuine desire to perpetuate the exploitation of the tracks that are dear to me.”
News of the deal arrives amid a busy 2023 for BMG. So far this year, the company has struck catalog and/or rights deals with Jet, Paul Simon, The Pointer Sisters and George Harrison. In 2022, BMG acquired rights and royalties for Tina Turner, John Legend, Mötley Crüe, ZZ Top, Peter Frampton, Harry Nilsson, John Lee Hooker, Simple Minds, Primal Scream, and The Hollies, among others.
Much of the electronic music industry is currently en route to Amsterdam, with the genre’s biggest conference, ADE, starting tomorrow (Oct. 18.) Approximately 8,000 professionals are expected to attend.
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The four-day event is, as always, putting on a dizzying number of panels and adjacent events that will take over more than 100 clubs and event spaces throughout the city. ADE 2023 is again divided into Lab and Pro programming, with Lab content tailored for people trying to get into or just starting out in the industry, while Pro programming is designed for established managers, label execs, artists, streamers, marketers, promoters and more.
While the conference is “inspiring and gets everyone together,” says ADE co-organizer Meindert Kennis, “we also focus on hands-on information … In the end, that’s what a lot of professionals are coming for, and they need to take home value for themselves or their organization. We try to implement that in all the different elements of ADE to really help the industry push itself forward.”
There will be a lot of momentum to be gleaned 170 Pro sessions happening from Wednesday to Saturday. Talks on streaming, labels, social engagement, royalties and much more will be given by execs from Spotify, YouTube, Tiktok, Beatport, TuneCore and many other organizations. After dark, the industry will flex what it does best, with musical performances by 2,900 artists both rising and established happening throughout the city.
Here, ADE organizers Kennis and Jan-Willem van de Ven share key 10 things to know about ADE 2023.
1. Over the past 15 years, ADE’s musical offerings have expanded from 33 nightclubs to, in 2023, more than 200 venues. ADE doesn’t produce all of these events themselves, but facilitates promoters from around the world utilizing these spaces while throwing parties under the ADE banner.
“The concept is that we don’t program all these events ourselves,” says van de Ven. “We help facilitate individual promoters to showcase what they know and do best.”
2. As ADE has grown to feature consumer-facing events, it’s become a platform for global festival brands to test run new concepts. This week will see 35 locations around Amsterdam hosting outdoor and big tent festival-style events.
“What you see now is a lot of concepts being tried at ADE,” says van de Ven. “It’s not a DJ showcase festival anymore, but it’s more a concept showcase festival where you’ll see a lot of concepts being tried out for the first second time. But if it works at ADE, it might work for the rest of the world.
Meindert Kennis & Jan Willem van de Ven
Sarah Wijzenbeek
3. As with previous editions, ADE 2023 features hundreds of panels, networking sessions, drink mixers, musical performance and other adjacent programming.
“If you’re at this panel, or at a drinks thing or another event, you’re missing out on 100 other ones,” says Kennis. “That’s difficult, but that’s also the strength of it and the reason why ADE is such a thrilling event…because it’s just too much to handle. That’s why ADE means so so many different things to so many different people, and there’s something for everyone.”
4. To help guide attendees’ schedules, ADE 2023 Pro programming is organized by three tracks: strategies, opportunities and responsibilities.
“Strategies is all about the business and the value chain,” says Kennis. “Opportunities is really for future startups like A.I. adn responsibilities, is stuff like green initiatives and [industry gender equity associations like] SheSaid.So. This way, we try to at least give people the possibility of making an efficient time schedule.”
5. These Pro and Lab tracks are designed to work in tandem. Lab programming this week includes production demos, mastering social media, music rights education and much more.
“The idea behind it was to create an ecosystem that that feeds itself,” says Kennis, “so that the young people or aspiring producers and professional needs are serviced in that way that they will be a pro visitor maybe in a few years later.”
6. Not everyone who goes to Amsterdam attends the actual conference, with many people traveling to the city simply to be around so much of the industry.
“Not everyone is buying a ticket to go to a panel,” says van de Ven. “That’s our preferred situation obviously, but at the same time, having these all these people over here doing business and creating this momentum together is is really important for us. That’s our greatest value.”
7. ADE recently received official designation as a Dutch nonprofit cultural organization. For the first time ever, the conference will hold an opening night party at the city’s Rijksmuseum, where members of the electronic music community will mingle while surrounded by the works of Rembrandt, Vermeer Van Gogh and other Dutch masters.
“There are these two cultural moguls, and Rijksmuseum are one of them, and we’re on the other one,” says van de Ven. “We can create this jaw dropping momentum, if we can have several audiences together and show the world that day culture and night culture [don’t need to be separate.] It can be one and the same. It’s going to be amazing.”
Amsterdam Dance Event
Tom Doms
8. That cultural organization classification also helps ADE define itself in the eyes of the industry.
“A lot of people think we’re a big commercial company with huge budgets that can fly in any artist in that will fit the narrative,” says Kennis. “Unfortunately, that’s not the case. The stamp of approval of being an official nonprofit cultural organization within the Netherlands kind of helps us fight the stigma that [ADE is] money-hungry, commercial activities, which is nice.”
9. With ADE musical showcases often drawing huge crowds, organizers have developed a new tool that will help attendees figure out what venues are at capacity.
This in-app feature will allow people to “look at every festival location on a map and see if there’s room for entrance,” says van de Ven, “so people aren’t going 50 minutes by Uber” to events they can’t get into. “We’ve wanted this for many years and knew we really needed to solve this issue, so this year is going to be our pilot with 40 or 50 locations.”
10. ADE 2023 is expecting many industry professionals from the U.S., which doesn’t currently have its own dance industry conference.
“There are some parts of the world that are buying more tickets than we expected,” says van de Ven. “For example, Australia’s quite big this year, and there a lot of people coming from the United States.”
Following Hamas’ attacks throughout Israel this past weekend and Israel’s current bombardment of Gaza, the three major labels, along with the Recording Academy, have released statements condemning Hamas. In a statement posted Thursday to X, the platform previously called Twitter, Warner Music Group wrote, “We condemn the terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas and the […]
U.S. labels and musicians have long counted on welcoming international audiences to turn home-grown successes into global stars. Just as people around the world snap up tickets for Hollywood blockbuster movies, consumers abroad have been typically eager for English-language music from the world’s leading entertainment exporter.
In recent years, however, U.S. pop stars have increasingly heavy competition from artists most Americans will never know. In France, the top song of 2022 was “Tout va bien” by Alonzo featuring Nino and Naps, according to French recorded music trade group SNEP. Only one foreign song, “As It Was” by Harry Styles, cracked France’s top 10. The top of the chart’s composition looked drastically different from previous years. In 2017, when Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You” reigned supreme with French music fans, five of the country’s top 10 songs came from foreign artists. In 2012, eight of France’s top 10 songs were from foreign artists.
To Will Page, author and former chief economist at Spotify, the changing fortunes of French artists is evidence streaming and online platforms have changed the balance of power. “When the cost structure changes, local [music] bounces back,” he says. The CD era involved higher costs — mainly manufacturing and marketing — that favored international artists. Despite France’s rule that a quarter of the songs played on radio must be French, the system still tilted toward foreign artists with greater financial backing.
But with streaming and digital distribution, those costs are all but eliminated. Local artists are free to create and distribute music in far greater numbers, satiating a demand that had been unfulfilled. Consumers who previously listened to American pop stars are all too happy to stream artists singing and rapping in their native tongue. “An unregulated free market has achieved what regulation failed to do,” says Page.
In a paper titled Glocalization of Music Streaming Within and Across Europe, Page and Chris Dalla Riva, a musician who works at music tech startup Audiomack, showed France is hardly alone in this trend toward “glocalization” — local entertainment succeeding in an increasingly globalized digital economy. In other large European markets such as Italy, Poland and Sweden, consumers are also gravitating toward local artists who create music in local languages. These countries — along with Spain, the Netherlands, Germany and the U.K. — matched or reached their peak domestic share of top 10 songs in 2022. In 2012, less than a fifth of the top 10 songs in Poland, France, Netherlands and Germany were local artists. In 2022, local music’s share of the top 10 songs reached 70% in Poland, Italy and Sweden, 60% in France, 30% in the Netherlands and Spain, and 20% in Germany.
Similar results are echoed on TikTok, which has transformed how people discover music around the world. In France, Italy, Poland and Greece, 80% of TikTok’s top 10 songs of 2022 were by home grown acts. Local artists accounted for 60% of the top 10 in Spain and 50% in the U.K. Local hip-hop is especially popular on TikTok in these markets, says Paul Hourican, the platform’s global head of music operations. Drake and Eminem may have a universal appeal but don’t connect with audiences the way local musicians can. “When you think about what hip-hop is, it’s amazing beats and truth telling, and speaking their truth in local language,” says Hourican. “That seems to be really, really connecting, and kind of forwarding the culture of hip-hop into into all these markets.”
The localization shift doesn’t surprise Sylvain Delange, managing director, Asia Pacific at French music company Believe. “We knew that the market would grow domestically, and that the local music would take a bigger share of the music consumption,” he says.
“When streaming came in, there was a very natural effect that skewed consumption towards international music for the simple reason that when streaming music comes, it serves, first and foremost, the higher income, large, tier one cities that are more open to international influence,” says Delange. “So, it’s very logical that in the beginning, international music would over index on streaming platforms. But then it would progressively switch back towards a fairly natural trend — which is domestic music.”
Early on, streaming services’ curation was much more focused on English-language music, adds Dominique Casimir, chief content officer at BMG. “You couldn’t put an Italian song in the middle of that playlist, that just certainly makes no sense.” But as streaming exploded in popularity, the services hired more staff to service the local music market and put a greater emphasis on local music. With boots on the ground, streaming services created channels and playlists that focused on local repertoire, she says. “That did change massively the work we can do together with DSPs.”
Supply alone doesn’t explain the trend toward globalization, though. An additional explanation, “is generally people’s need to identify with their culture,” says Golnar Khosrowshahi, CEO of Reservoir Media. “That is driving listenership and the importance of that identification, whether it’s around the subject matter or the sound or the person. This is not new news. People identify with their culture. Their culture is important to them. Maintaining that culture is important.”
To take advantage of the forces shaping globalization, Khosrowshahi has targeted investments throughout Latin America and the Middle East. Among Reservoir Media’s recent acquisitions are the catalogs of Latin songwriter and producer Rudy Perez and, in conjunction with PopArabia, the catalogs of Egyptian company RE Media and Egyptian rap duo El Sawareekh. Additionally, in June, Reservoir Media and PopArabia formed a joint venture with Saudi Arabian hip-hop label Mashrex and acquired some of its back catalog.
“One of the reasons we’re compelled by the Middle East market and the Arabic-speaking market is because of the size of that diaspora,” says Khosrowshahi. “The geographical reach of that diaspora goes to Malaysia and Indonesia. You have substantive Arabic speaking populations, granted different dialects, but music seems to be able to transcend them a little bit.”
Through both catalog acquisitions and frontline label partnerships, companies are finding opportunities in an increasingly online global music market. Investments are now commonplace in developing markets that were previously overlooked by music companies. Believe acquired Indian music company Venus Music, partnered with Indian imprints Think Music and Panorama Music, and partnered with Viva Music and Artists Group in the Philippines. In August, Universal Music Group-owned Virgin Music Group acquired United Arab Emirates-based Chabaka. In 2022, Warner Music Group purchased a majority stake in Africori, the top digital distributor in Africa.
While TikTok and streaming services’ international popularity have leveled the playing field for local music around the world, Delange says YouTube has been the biggest driver of this trend over the last decade. For years, a debate raged throughout Europe and the U.S. about YouTube’s “value gap,” the difference between its ad-supported royalties and per-stream payments from competing subscription services. While the West was hesitant to embrace YouTube, Asian artists and labels embraced the opportunities for promotion, marketing and monetization, says Delange. In the West, YouTube was a problematic free platform. In the East, YouTube was a free platform with a massive audience. “That was revolutionary in a market that had been decimated on the physical side,” says Delange. It’s now proving the driver for a new stage of growth in the global music market.
SESAC Performing Rights has chosen the private company Soundreef to manage its offline performing rights in Italy, withdrawing them from SIAE, the Italian collective management organization. Although the EU rights collections market has been open for a decade – the national societies are no longer national monopolies, especially when it comes to online rights – this is one of the larger moves so far. SIAE was founded in 1882 – Soundreef in 2012.
“It’s very rational,” Alex Wolf, president of international of the SESAC Music Group, tells Billboard. “What made us change is, we were very convinced about their IT, their administration and their management.”
This is the first time one of the ten biggest performing rights organizations (PROs) has withdrawn its repertoire from one of the major European societies in favor of a relatively young, private company. Italy is the sixth largest rights collections market in the world, according to CISAC’s data from 2021, the last year for which information is available.
This shows how competitive the rights market is becoming – especially, but not only, in Europe. SESAC is the third-biggest rights collection entity in the U.S., and it is building an international operation – much of it international. Some of this is through MINT, a joint venture with the Swiss society SUISA that manages Soundreef repertoire online in much of the world. Although that deal is completely separate, Wolf says he respected how Soundreef operated.
“You get a good insight into how a company works,” he says.
Soundreef is a Rome-based private company that initially focused on background music, then raised investment money to expand in 2016. It now has 40,000 affiliates, 26,000 of whom are Italian.
“We thought we could create a different system where technology was at the center of the operation,” said Soundreef CEO Davide d’Atri. “That means three things: analytical distribution, where what is played is paid; transparency, and quick payment.”
Analytical distribution essentially means reducing the amount of royalties that are distributed statistically, as opposed to tracked directly. D’Atri says that Soundreef distributes 85% of its payments this way, while some societies pay out as much as 60% based on statistics – extrapolating which songs are played in bars and restaurants by tracking which are played on radio or television, for example.
“Some of the bigger societies are very efficient,” d’Atri says, “but others sit on a lot of money” that can’t be directly attributed to specific rightsholders. Soundreef, he added, is now trying to attract other Anglo-American companies.
The RIAA has asked to have AI voice cloning added to the government’s piracy watch list, officially known as the Review of Notorious Markets for Counterfeiting and Piracy.
The RIAA typically writes in each year, requesting forms of piracy like torrenting, stream ripping, cyber lockers and free music downloading to be included in the final list. All of these categories of piracy are still present in the RIAA’s letter to the U.S. Trade Representative this year, but this is the first time the trade organization, which represents the interest of record labels, has added a form of generative AI to their recommendations.
The RIAA noted that it believes AI voice cloning, also referred to as ‘AI voice synthesis’ or ‘AI voice filters,’ infringes on their members’ copyrights and the artists’ rights to their voices and calls out one U.S.-based AI voice cloning site, Voicify.AI as one that should specifically face scrutiny.
According to the letter, Voicify.AI’s service includes voice models that emulate sound recording artists like Michael Jackson, Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, Taylor Swift, Elvis Presley, Bruno Mars, Eminem, Harry Styles, Adele, Ed Sheeran, and others, as well as political figures including Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Barak Obama.
The RIAA claims that this type of service infringes on copyrights because it “stream-rips the YouTube video selected by the user, copies the acapella from the track, modifies the acapella using the AI vocal model, and then provides the user unauthorized copies of the modified acapella stem, the underlying instrumental bed, and the modified remixed recording.” Essentially, some of these AI voice cloning sites train its models on stolen copyrights.
It additionally claims that there is a violation pf the artists’ right of publicity, the right that protects public figures from having their name, likeness, and voice commercially exploited without their permission. This is a more tenuous right, given it is only a state-level protection and its strength varies by state. It also becomes more limited after a public figure’s death. However, this is possibly the most common legal argument against AI voice cloning technology in the music business.
This form of artificial intelligence first became widely recognized last spring, when an anonymous TikTok user named Ghostwriter used AI to mimic the voices of Drake and The Weeknd in his song “Heart On My Sleeve” with shocking precision. The song was briefly available on streaming services, like YouTube, but was taken down after a stern letter from the artists’ label, Universal Music Group. However, the song was ultimately removed from official services due to a copyright infringement in the track, not because of a right of publicity claim.
A few months later, Billboard reported that streamers were in talks with the three major label groups about allowing them to file take down requests for right of publicity violations — something which previously was only allowed in cases of copyright infringement as dictated in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Unlike the DMCA, the newly discussed arrangement regarding right of publicity issues would be a voluntary one. In July, UMG’s general counsel and executive vp of business and legal affairs, Jeffery Harleston, spoke as a witness in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on AI and copyright and asked for a new “federal right of publicity” to be made into law to protect artists’ voices.
An additional challenge in regulating this area is that many AI models available on the internet for global users are not based in the U.S., meaning the U.S. government has little recourse to stop their alleged piracy, even if alerted by trade organizations like the RIAA. Certain countries are known to be more relaxed on AI regulation — like China, Israel, South Korea, Japan, and Singapore — which has created safe havens for AI companies to grow abroad.
The U.S. Trade Representative still must review this letter from the RIAA as well as other recommendations from other industry groups and determine whether or not they believe AI voice cloning should be included on the watchlist. The office will likely issue their final review at the start of next year.
As the Palestinian group Hamas continues to attack Israel and the country retaliates by bombing Gaza, survivors of the terrorist attack at the Paralello Universo Supernova Sukkot Gathering electronic music festival near the Gaza border are continuing what has become a grim search for hundreds of people who are still missing.
So far, the Israeli search and rescue organization Zaka has reported that it found 260 dead bodies at the festival site in Re’im, Israel. An unknown number of attendees have been abducted by Hamas terrorists. At least 150 Israelis were abducted on Saturday (Oct. 7), according to the New York Times, and some of them were taken from the rave.
On Tuesday morning (Oct. 10), President Biden referenced the massacre during remarks on the Israel-Hamas conflict, naming “young people massacred while attending a music festival to celebrate peace” among the violent incidents of the last few days.
As of Sunday evening, 600-700 festival goers were believed to be missing in the immediate aftermath of the attack, according to artist manager Raz Gaster, who was at the event and represents several acts on the lineup. The exact number of the remaining still missing has not been verified, although two sources in Israel put this number at approximately 150, accounting for bodies that have since been recovered and identified as well as survivors who have been identified; though another source on the ground there says it’s still hard to tell how many remain missing.
Gaster, an artist manager who was at the event and represents several acts on the lineup, told Billboard Tuesday (Oct. 10) that he and members of the festival production team are working to locate survivors and gather information about festival attendees who remain missing.
“At the end of the day, it’s our responsibility as human beings to [provide] the families of these missing people whatever information we can get,” Gaster says. “We will keep working until we get information about each and every one of them.”
The Israeli offshoot of the longstanding Brazilian festival brand Paralelllo Universo, Supernova Sukkot Gathering was named in honor of the Jewish Sukkot holiday, and hosted approximately 3,000 attendees on a rural site with two stages.
Those who escaped the festival describe the terror on the ground when at about 6:30 a.m. Saturday rockets began flying from Gaza, with some landing near Re’im. Within 20 minutes, terrorists armed with guns and RPGs arrived in ATVs, pickup trucks and motorcycles, as well as by paraglider, and immediately began shooting attendees.
Shelly Barel, who sells jewelry and clothing at music festivals throughout Israel, had been on the site since Thursday, Oct. 5. At that time, the outdoor space was hosting another psytrance festival, Unity, with Supernova Sukkot Gathering starting on Friday. Supernova Sukkot was only moved to the Re’im site two days prior, after another site in southern Israel fell through.
“The festival was so much fun,” Barel says of Supernova Sukkot through a translator. “Amazing people, it was really full of joy.”
Everything changed when rockets started falling early Saturday morning. Barel and her husband hit the ground and lay there for at least five minutes, until festival security made an announcement telling attendees to run to their cars and leave the site. Barel and her husband spent 10 minutes packing their belongings, then loaded them into their vehicle and drove away, with Barel’s husband behind the wheel. At the time, they assumed they were being asked to evacuate because of a rocket attack, a relatively regular occurrence in Israel.
They soon hit a bottleneck of cars trying to exit the festival. Without realizing that armed attackers had arrived, they took a hard right turn and drove across the dirt field adjacent to the site instead of waiting in the exit line. That decision, made as much out of impatience and an instinct to escape as anything else, might have saved their lives.
“In hindsight,” Barel says, “I understood that the terrorists shot the [people in the] first cars, so those cars couldn’t move, and the rest got stuck behind them. They formed a traffic jam for everyone coming after that. It was a death trap.”
When Barel and her husband drove off the field and back onto the road, they came upon two stopped vehicles, both of which had all their doors open. Then they saw the occupants of those vehicles lying dead on the ground.
Barel’s husband made a U-turn and minutes later received a text from someone in his army reserve group saying there were attackers in the area. “When we realized we had to fear the terrorists,” Barel says, “the missiles seemed like the smallest problem.”
He kept driving, following signs to the nearest city. “We decided to go as fast as we could, full gas, only slowing during turns,” she says. “The rockets were falling around us and at this point I thought it was the moment to say ‘I love you’ to each other and say goodbye.”
They didn’t get hit. Eventually, they made their way back to their home in central Israel. There, they found out that some of their friends from the festival had been killed, while others had been abducted. Many remain missing.
Nitay, a 26-year-old security professional from Tel Aviv who also attended Supernova Sukkot said that he was helping an artist pack up some gear when gunmen appeared and started shooting at the festivalgoers. As shots rang out, “my friend called me when I was running away from the attack and asked me to try and find his sister,” says Nitay, who did not wish to give his last name. “I really wanted to help him, but I had to flee and hide. I felt like I was constantly surrounded by gunfire.”
Nitay ran for several miles and eventually hid for 10 hours in an olive grove. At one point he thought the group he had taken shelter with had been discovered by armed men speaking in Arabic — they were about 20 yards away, close enough that he could see the men’s legs through the olive tree branches.
“I prayed to my father, who passed away several years ago and begged him to help me,” Nitay recalls. As he hid, the men began shouting and Nitay says he braced himself for an attack. The shouting went on for about a half-hour, then the armed men began backing away from the area in which he was hiding with several others, including two tourists from Argentina. They stayed there for several more hours until Israeli finally arrived and led them to a nearby police station. Nitay says he never found his friend’s sister.
In the days since Barel and her husband escaped, they, too, have been searching for information on their missing friends, but they haven’t found much, even as obituaries have started to appear. The trauma is so fresh in her mind that she says she became “hysterical” when the elevator door in her apartment building opened and a man she didn’t know was inside.
For decades, Israel’s dance music scene has been thriving. Psytrance, the electronic subgenre featured on the Supernova Sukkot lineup, became big in Israel in the late ’80s and ’90s, and it has been the country’s biggest electronic sound since, although house and techno have also grown in popularity in recent years.
On any given weekend, especially between March and October, there are several big parties like Supernova Sukkot throughout Israel, with crowd sizes ranging between 50 and 10,000, according to Amotz Tokatly, who’s been involved in the country’s electronic scene for more than 20 years as a promoter, manager, consultant and writer. “If you go to a psytrance party or a house or techno club, you see people from the age of 18 to 60 or even 70,” says Tokatly. “It’s a basic activity in Israel. We love to dance. We love to go out.”
It’s hard to tell what will happen to this scene in the aftermath of the attack, not to mention the war that is expected to follow.
“What happened here is a disaster. It’s unbearable,” says Tokatly. “The most important thing for us is to [show] the world that this is a crime against innocent people. They don’t belong to any political side. These were just kids going to a party.”
Additional reporting by Tal Rimon.
On Saturday, Bruno Mars was set to become the third American artist ever to perform two sold out concerts at the 70,000-capacity HaYarkon Park in Tel Aviv, Israel — following Madonna in 2009 and Michael Jackson in 1993.
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He played his first show there last Wednesday with two Tel Aviv acts opening, running nearly four hours in total. Both shows were promoted by Bluestone Group, which is owned by Live Nation Israel.
“I say Tel Aviv!” Mars shouted to the audience. “The Hooligans made it to Israel – thank you so guys so much for coming out,” Mars told fans after opening his show with his hit 2016 song “24k Magic.”
Mars’ Saturday show was supposed to be the second-to-last date on a brief world tour that previously stopped in Tbilisi, Georgia, on Oct. 1 and was headed to Doha, Qatar, for an Oct. 8 show to follow the Formula 1 Qatar Grand Prix.
Early Saturday, though, reports began to circulate of a coordinated Hamas-led terrorist attack that would escalate the ongoing Israel-Palestinian conflict. Later that day, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared on television and declared that his country was now “at war” with Hamas. By afternoon, Live Nation Israel issued a statement that the concert was canceled. (The following day, Mars also cancelled his planned Doha concert.)
“All ticket purchases to the show will receive an automatic refund to the credit card through which the purchase was made,” said a statement that Bluestone Group shared online.
Securing the venue, located inside Tel Aviv’s one-and-a-half-square mile Yarkon Park, along the banks of the Yarkon River, during active fighting would present unnecessary risks to concertgoers, a source tells Billboard, noting that the decision to cancel was made a few hours after the attacks began that morning. By 2 p.m., Bruno Mars and his 60-person crew were at Ben Gurion Airport, where they boarded a flight to Athens.
From Athens, Mars was supposed to travel to Doha for his performance, but he was reportedly unable to pack up and transport his production gear out of Israel in time for that performance. On Sunday, hours before he was scheduled to take the stage in Doha, Lusail International Circuit racetrack announced on Instagram that Mars would not perform, and that French producer and artist DJ Snake would take his place.
Mars’ concert cancellation represents a symbolic setback for Israel’s touring business. For more than a decade, artists announcing plans to perform in the country faced harsh public criticism from activists and artists like Roger Waters and Brian Eno, who urged musicians to boycott the country over what they describe as its unjust treatment of the Palestinians.
In 2018, Lana Del Rey was booked to headline the Meteor Music Festival when Waters urged her to reconsider. (Her trip fell apart due to scheduling issues.) Waters, a proponent of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, a Palestinian-led campaign to isolate Israel, has also targeted Radiohead, Bon Jovi and Jennifer Lopez, albeit unsuccessfully.
New generation promoters like Tel Aviv-based Bluestone Group — which Live Nation bought in 2017 as a joint venture of several investors, including Maverick’s Guy Oseary — has worked to increase the potential gross artists can make playing Israel, while also helping them to navigate anti-Israel backlash. In 2023, the country hosted a number of top tier Western acts including Imagine Dragons, Tiesto, Ozuna, Christina Aguilera, the Black Keys and Guns N’ Roses.