International
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The annual IMS Ibiza dance music industry conference launches today (April 26), marking the opening weekend on the famed Spanish clubbing mecca.
IMS Ibiza 2023, the dance second largest conference after Amsterdam’s ADE, is expecting roughly 1,300 delegates from around the world at the luxe Destino Pacha Ibiza resort, which IMS is once again taking over for the three-day event. Co-hosted by dance world legend Pete Tong and BBC Radio 1 DJ and dance producer Jaguar, IMS 2023 is happening April 26-28 with a cavalcade of artists, agents, managers, journalists, managers, label owners and more, altogether representing a flurry of companies including YouTube, Tunecore, Deezer, BBC Radio 1, WME, Wasserman, Beatport, Ultra Music Publishing, the Association For Electronic Music and more.
The intensely robust IMS 2023 schedule — “An absolute monster in terms of curation and the level of speakers coming,” says IMS co-founder Ben Turner — features more than 130 keynotes, discussions, parties, workshops and networking events happening at Destino and satellite locations. Naturally, these include the island’s prestige clubs including Amnesia and Hï, along with the historic Dalt Villa, a UNESCO world heritage site that will once again become a rave during the IMS closing party.
But while the conference will span many topics, Turner anticipates the practicalities and legalities of artificial intelligence to be a major topic of conversation as the music industry at large grapples with how to not just profit from AI, but to understand its potential and sustainably contain its capabilities.
“Electronic music culture has been driven by independence from its roots,” Turner says, “and I think that’s still is a core component of why we’re different… I think our industry is in the best position to embrace AI, because of that independent spirit and that understanding of ownership of IP, and how ownership of masters and publishing gives you more freedom to experiment with this stuff — whereas the majors are just going to do what they always do, which is freak out and shut all the doors.”
IMS will also once again feature the presentation of its annual business report, which surveys the health of the dance music industry across sectors including streaming and live events, and which serves as an industry tool to determine growth sectors. For the first time this year, the report has been prepared by MIDiA Research, and will find new focuses in music publishing and the creator economy, “which around electronic music is obviously huge,” says Turner. This year’s report also reflects “a huge bounce back” of the industry following the pandemic, with this year’s report reflecting 2022 metrics.
IMS Ibiza 2022
Courtesy of IMS Ibiza
Also new this year is IMS’ partnership with Beatport, the digital download platform that acquired a 51% majority stake in IMS this past January. With conferences typically presenting slim margins and IMS’ 2022 partnership with Pollen falling through in the wake of that company’s collapse, the Beatport sale has allowed IMS to create a new level of financial solvency.
“Being really honest about it,” says Turner, “we nearly didn’t survive the pandemic. We had to do refunds, we didn’t have a show for three years, we had zero income coming in, we had to cut overhead, we had to cut our small but core team. There was a big question of, ‘Can we still do this? Can we afford to still do this? And can we afford to risk doing this?’”
Turner emphasizes that he and the other IMS founders are maintaining organizational and curatorial control the conference, that Beatport can help IMS grow and that the IMS team has “been really encouraged and feel extremely supported by them.”
But while the Beatport acquisition is presenting new opportunities, it also came with baggage due to a 2022 VICE article alleging sexism, racism and a toxic work culture within Beatport. Following Beatport’s acquisition of IMS, longstanding music industry diversity and inclusion advocacy group shesaid.so announced — after a seven year partnership with IMS — that it would be putting a “temporary pause” on its participation in IMS this year. (Read shesaid.so’s complete statement on the topic.)
So too did U.K. advocacy group Black Artist Database, which suspended its partnership with Beatport last August. The organization also recently released a statement that it would not be sending any members to IMS 2023. In an April 13 statement, IMS noted that the conference “understands and respects the need to make such decisions and will continue to remain strong supporters of both organizations and the values that they stand for. Our continued, long-term, widely-acknowledged commitment to diversity, inclusion and equality in all its intersections is demonstrated in our 2023 programming and it remains a core tenet of our ethos.”
“We understand why they needed to make their statements, Turner says. “Our door is always open, and we hope that we can work with both organizations in the future. I don’t see why that can’t happen. I think there needs to be dialogue between all of the parties, I don’t think this gets resolved any other way than people communicating and trying to understand each others perspective.”
“I’m on a mission is to help make dance music a more equal place that is representative of minorities, while supporting emerging artists,” IMS co-host Jaguar adds. “I’m really proud of the work we are doing alongside Ben and the IMS team to achieve this at the summit.” She adds that “It wouldn’t feel right to go into this week without extending my love, support and solidarity to Black Artist Database and shesaid.so, who will sadly not be present at IMS this year. What [they] both stand for is incredibly close to my heart and so important.”
While IMS delegates largely arrive from throughout Europe, Turner reports “a growing number of hardcore American attendees,” a demographic he attributes to the fact that “there isn’t a conference with a narrative left around the business of electronic music in America.” (IMS did host a one-day event in Los Angeles for five years, during the apex of the EDM boom.) He says if IMS is to add another event to its schedule, it will be in the U.S.
“I think we’re globally-minded in our output, but I do think America has its own set of issues, its own dialogue, its own need for its own Summit, no question. Because America is so big, and there’s an inward looking industry, quite a lot of people don’t think much beyond America in terms of their travel or their even in some cases, their ambitions. There’s a very strong home grown scene that deserves to have its own moment.”
For this week, though, the moment will once again be in Ibiza. Billboard will be reporting from the conference this week.
On April 3, Billboard broke the news that Jimin’s track “Like Crazy” reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 — a first for a solo Korean artist — while his album, FACE, debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200. Released by Big Hit Music, one of the labels under Korean entertainment company HYBE, “Like Crazy” currently marks the best performance by a member of K-pop supergroup BTS, whose hiatus announcement last year presented a significant challenge to HYBE’s ability to forge another chart success in the United States. “Like Crazy” reached only No. 11 in South Korea, although FACE topped album charts in South Korea and Japan.
Investors took note of Jimin’s U.S. accomplishments. The following day, HYBE’s share price on Korea Exchange rose as much as 11.4% to 212,500 won ($161) before ending the day at 205,000 won ($155), up 7.5% from the previous day (as of April 17, it had risen 40%). That was the highest closing price since June 10 of last year — three trading days before BTS confirmed it would take a hiatus, worrying investors and sending HYBE’s share price down 28% in a single day. For a company with grand ambitions to build off of the success of BTS, “Like Crazy” was an important validation.
The music industry should take note, too. HYBE did with Jimin what all South Korean music companies are attempting with increasing urgency: ride the wave of K-pop’s global success by expanding outside of Korea and build up operations in the United States, the world’s largest music market. “All the shareholders want to see the ability for them to diversify [their] portfolios,” says Sung Cho, CEO of Chartmetric and newly appointed board member of the pioneering K-pop agency SM Entertainment.
Exporting is what South Korea does best. “After the Korean War, the only way to survive was to export things,” says Cho. Over the last three decades, the success of companies such as Samsung, LG and Hyundai has turned the country of 52 million into a top 10 exporter, according to the World Bank. But in recent years, South Korea has become known not just for its exports of high-tech products and manufactured goods, but as a global entertainment dynamo as well. South Korea’s music business built its economic success into a trade surplus of about $3.1 billion for intellectual property of music and images in 2021, up from $800 million in 2020, according to the country’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism. The South Korean film Parasite won a 2020 Academy Award for best picture. A year later, Squid Game became the most watched series in Netflix history, a worldwide phenomenon that racked up 1.7 billion viewing hours in its first month.
South Korean music companies have become international powerhouses by drawing on hip-hop, R&B and pop music and selling the K-pop blend of these genres back to fervent fans in the United States, Japan and Europe. But to compete globally with larger companies, the South Korea approach to the music business, and not necessarily the music itself, could be the deciding factor. “We’re seeing not only the export of K-pop bands — the boy bands, the girl bands — we’re starting to see the export of the K-pop business model,” says Bernie Cho, president of DFSB Kollective, a Seoul-based artist and label services agency. SM Entertainment founder Lee Soo-man coined the term “cultural technology” in the ’90s for his system of producing K-pop and promoting it worldwide. Other K-pop companies have adopted a similarly disciplined, systematic approach to finding, developing and promoting musicians.
The widespread music-business anxiety about the death of artist development doesn’t apply to South Korea. Western labels fight bidding wars over viral artists with instantaneous popularity or favor proven artists and catalogs, leaving the task of building an audience to artists themselves or independent labels. In contrast, K-pop companies spend years recruiting and rehearsing talent, as well as giving artists instruction in a specific approach to the music business. “Combing through social media platforms like TikTok may give us a chance to sign artists who are technically proficient as music producers or performers, but we demand more from our artists,” says HYBE CEO Jiwon Park in an email to Billboard. That means trainees work with HYBE’s training and development department to “internalize the values of autonomy and responsibility” so they can navigate the expectations put on them.
To learn the U.S. market, South Korean companies have partnered with U.S. labels to distribute, market and promote their music. HYBE has a joint venture with Universal Music Group’s Geffen Records to create a U.S.-based girl pop group. JYP Entertainment has teamed with UMG’s Republic Records to form the global girl group America2Korea, or A2K. Additionally, Kakao Entertainment’s Starship Entertainment subsidiary has partnered with Sony Music Group’s Columbia Records to co-manage marketing and promotion of the six-member female group IVE in North America.
These U.S.-Korean partnerships have also given domestic labels a chance to learn the K-pop method of A&R. To Glenn Mendlinger, president of Imperial Music, a new division of Republic Records, the JYP partnership has provided insight into “what it is to build a fandom and foster it through immersive packaging and increasing the collectability of the products.” Mendlinger is impressed with JYP’s attention to detail and ability to build storylines for their artists. “That’s why they’re so successful,” he says in an email to Billboard. “The level of care is unparalleled and unrivaled in terms of its intimacy and diligence.”
But more and more, South Korean companies have boots on the ground and control of their destinies in the United States. HYBE is the furthest along in building out its stateside operations. In 2021, it acquired Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings for $1.05 billion and named Braun the CEO of HYBE America, a genre-spanning collection of artist management and record labels that includes SB Projects, Nashville-based Big Machine Label Group and Atlanta hip-hop company Quality Control, which was acquired in February for $300 million. Those deals are “just the beginning,” HYBE chairman Bang Si-hyuk said in a speech in March. He believes building in the United States will give HYBE the “strong network and infrastructure” it needs to “minimize the cost of trial and error” and attain stronger bargaining power and distribution rates relative to local companies.
SM Entertainment, the company behind such groups as NCT 127 and aespa, and Kakao Entertainment have created a U.S. joint venture and plan to acquire a U.S.-based company to expand into hip-hop or R&B, according to SM’s road map made available to investors. Kakao now owns a 40% stake in SM Entertainment, having quelled HYBE’s attempt to buy a commanding stake and control its board of directors following a break with SM founder Lee.
South Korean music companies’ do-it-yourself nature extends to tech platforms, too. While most labels depend on the likes of Meta, Twitter and Fortnite to reach fans, HYBE owns its own social network, Weverse, and JYP and SM have a joint venture with tech company Naver called Beyond LIVE that streams live online concerts. SM also owns a social networking app, Bubble, and its artists will begin building fan communities at HYBE’s Weverse in September. It makes sense in one of the world’s most wired and wireless countries, says Cho of DFSB Kollective. In Korea, “youth culture, pop culture and digital culture are one and the same in many ways.”
For HYBE, Weverse not only diversifies its business but allows it to control how its artists communicate with their fans. With the addition of artists from North America and Japan, Weverse “will serve as a gateway to the fandom market in Asia, North America and the world,” says Park. With enhancements and new services, “Weverse will seek boundless expansion beyond K-pop.”
This story originally appeared in the April 22, 2023, issue of Billboard.
For Rimas Entertainment CEO Noah Assad, it was a night to celebrate. On Feb. 1, seven years after signing Bad Bunny, Assad, 32, took the stage to accept the Executive of the Year award at the annual Grammy-week Billboard Power 100 event to honor the most important executives in the business. In front of an audience that included Universal Music Group CEO Lucian Grainge, HYBE Chairman Bang Si-hyuk and music mogul Clive Davis, Assad, sporting white sneakers and a ponytail, accepted the award from fellow Puerto Rican Bad Bunny. Minutes later, manager and executive Scooter Braun told Assad from the stage: “You’re the best of us now.”
Bad Bunny’s fifth studio album, Un Verano Sin Ti, ended the year at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 — the first non-English album to do so — and his 81 concerts in 2022 grossed a record $434.9 million. Assad was the force behind a lot of this success, as the artist himself noted onstage. “There is no Bad Bunny superstar without Noah,” he said in halting English, then handed Assad the obelisk-shaped plaque. “Without [Bad Bunny],” Assad said as he accepted the award, “a lot of my dreams would have never become true.”
The same could be said of another figure, Rafael Ricardo Jiménez Dan, who founded Rimas nine years ago but has had no interaction with Bad Bunny or the company’s other stars. He went unmentioned in Assad’s acceptance speech, andfew of the executives in that room even knew that he existed. Jiménez says he was the sole owner of Rimas — which manages, records and publishes Bad Bunny — until 2018, when he says he made Assad a 40% owner, though a source close to Assad disputes that description of their initial deal. Before that, Jiménez had been a vice minister in authoritarian leader Hugo Chávez’s Venezuelan government; while in the regime he worked to modernize the country’s information systems and was charged with helping oversee the development of a national ID that Chávez wanted to deepen his control over the populace.
Also unknown to most of the Power 100 attendees, Assad had spent the last few months embroiled in negotiations, which were so intense they continued through the year-end holidays, that would buy Jiménez out of Rimas. After working to build Rimas together for nearly a decade, the relationship between the two men broke down, and for the past five years, multiple sources say, Assad has been pushing to get him out, for “business reasons,” says the source close to him. When Rimas was initially formed in March 2014, Assad believed Jiménez was simply an investor who owned restaurants and packaging companies.
After they started working together, Assad began to hear talk about Jiménez’s connections to the Chávez regime, but when Assad inquired on one occasion, Jiménez told him he had “nothing to hide,” according to the source close to Assad. Now, though, Jimenez may finally be on his way out.
Under the terms of Sony Music Group’s potential deal with Rimas, which is still under discussion, Sony would put up capital toward buying out the 60% stake owned by Jiménez and, through an ownership restructuring, assign a significant minority stake to its independent distribution subsidiary, The Orchard. Bad Bunny, who does not currently have a stake in Rimas, could get some equity and Assad could get a bigger stake in the company, which Billboard estimates could be valued at more than $300 million overall, not including publishing. Together, sources say, Assad and Bad Bunny would likely emerge from the deal controlling Rimas, although the agreement is still being discussed. A separate Rimas publishing arm, also believed to be 60% owned by Jiménez and 40% by Assad, which Billboard estimates is worth about $70 million, will likely be sold in a separate deal, sources say.
Jiménez, Assad and a spokesperson for Sony Music Entertainment declined to comment about any deal in the works.
The size of the potential deal speaks to the growing sway of Latin music and especially of Bad Bunny, who has helped grow the San Juan-based Rimas into a 100-person company that essentially functions as a label, publisher, manager and booking agency and also works with other Latin artists like Arcángel and Karol G.
In a series of email exchanges through his lawyer, Jiménez gave Billboard an unprecedented look at his unlikely journey from an army captain raised in Portuguesa, a rural part of Venezuela, to one of music’s most successful behind-the-scenes investors. The image that emerges is that of a savvy operator who positioned his business enterprises in ways that benefitted from his government connections in Venezuela — and who in both his five-year government career and his second life in the U.S. music business has remained out of public view while playing a role in the lives of prominent people, like an unseen gravitational force.
Jiménez, 56, who played violin in Venezuela’s youth orchestra system and got his first taste in the music industry managing a Venezuelan urban duo, formed at least a dozen companies from 2005 to 2013, in Venezuela and the Caribbean, and he also served as CEO of a cardboard and paper packaging firm that Chávez nationalized. He tells Billboard that the funding to start Rimas and his life in the United States came from a Miami restaurant and from a company that imported food products from Brazil and other countries.
Assad was always thought to be the co-founder of Rimas. Although he privately acknowledged the company had a silent partner, he previously told Billboard on the record that he co-founded the company with José “Junior” Carabaño, a 20-year-old Venezuelan graffiti artist. But Jiménez tells Billboard that after meeting a 22-year-old Assad in 2012, he formed Rimas in Puerto Rico in March 2014 and hired Assad as an employee — an arrangement that continued until 2018, when Assad became part-owner after he “agreed to assume more responsibilities.” A source close to Assad disputes that claim but wouldn’t provide more detail. Billboard was unable to obtain documentation of the initial deal terms.
Assad “demonstrated a great talent in the artist development side of the business and worked hard to scale up the growth of the company,” Jiménez says, adding that he brought Assad aboard as part of “a strong team of talented people were brought aboard to take over the day-to-day operations.”
Jiménez would not tell Billboard how much he initially invested in Rimas. A 2017 corporate filing for Risamar Business Group, the entity Jiménez used to hold his share of Rimas, shows $1.34 million in assets and $648,098 in liabilities. Property records show that, in 2014, while still living in Caracas, Venezuela, Jiménez also purchased a foreclosed property in an exclusive beachfront neighborhood in San Juan for $390,000 in cash to turn into Rimas’ first offices and recording studios.
Rimas Entertainment’s first office in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Juan R. Costa
Assad served as the face of Rimas in the music business, but Jiménez says he led the company for four years before effectively handing the reins to Assad. Until then, Jiménez had to approve — and often vetoed — artist signings that would exceed the company’s budget, and he was also kept apprised of the label’s other big decisions, including the very important one to sign Bad Bunny. Jiménez was copied on the April 11, 2016, email from Rimas attorney Jessie Abad to Assad about the “360 deal and songwriter agreement” for Benito Martínez Ocasio (Bad Bunny), according to a copy of a partially redacted email in a civil case in San Juan and one person familiar with the matter.
From Army Captain to Vice Minister
Like many leaders in Venezuela, Jiménez’s career started at a military academy. He graduated in 1987, No. 3 in his class. He finished the same year as Diosdado Cabello and Jesse Chacón, he noted, both of whom participated in Chávez-directed coup attempts in 1992; Rodolfo Marco Torres was a class below them. All three went on to become high-level officials in the Chávez regime.
Venezuela’s legacy as one of the wealthiest and most-stable democracies in the region began to change on Feb. 4, 1992, when Chávez, then a disaffected army officer, led a failed coup attempt. Once out of prison, he rose to fame and was elected president in 1998 on an anti-establishment platform. A disciple of Cuban leader Fidel Castro, he later veered toward autocratic socialism by silencing opposition parties, packing the courts, harassing the media and nationalizing more than 1,000 businesses.
While Chávez’s “missions to save the people” initially helped stem poverty, his policies laid the foundation for the oil-rich country’s descent into full-blown dictatorship after his death in 2013. His legacy also included “an institutionalized kleptocracy the likes of which the world has never seen before,” Marshall Billingslea, former assistant secretary for the Office of Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes in the U.S. Treasury Department, wrote in 2021. Over the past two decades, Chávez and Maduro, his successor, “and their cronies,” Billingslea wrote, “plundered at least $300 billion from state assets.”
President of Venezuela Hugo Chavez gives a speech during the closing session of the 4th PetroCaribe Summit in the Camilo Cienfuegos refinery Dec. 21, 2007 in Cienfuegos, Cuba.
Sven Creutzmann/Mambo photo/GI
Jiménez, who was commissioned as an army captain, retired from the military in 1999, by which time he had earned degrees in both law and systems engineering. Once Chávez took power in 1999, the new president initiated a sweeping modernization program, and Jiménez’s knowledge of telematics, which involves the long-distance transmission of computerized information, proved valuable. He joined the government in late 2002, serving initially in a management and technical unit that oversaw the operational side of the Judiciary, helping to digitize the country’s law enforcement and criminal and civil administration.
After he was briefly ousted from office in 2002, Chávez launched Misión Identidad (Mission Identity), a program that became a cornerstone of his “Bolivarian Missions,” or social programs, and a way for him to tighten his hold on power after the failed coup —at the expense of civil liberties. Its focus became developing a national ID card with biometric data embedded in a chip that would be modeled after China’s smart card, which Beijing uses to track social, economic and political behavior. Chávez launched his ID program in 2003, employing a Cuban company to help implement it, according to the Center for a Secure Free Society (SFS), a conservative national security think tank in Washington, D.C., that has testified in Congress about the dangers of the Venezuelan regime.
Mission Identity involved transitioning Venezuela’s passport and naturalization system from what was called ONIDEX to the higher capacity SAIME system. Beginning around 2003, Jiménez worked with a hand-picked team on the automation of the project, according to two people familiar with the matter. SAIME went online in 2009. President Nicolás Maduro, Chávez’s successor, finally rolled out the national ID, later called the carnet de la patria, or “fatherland ID,” in 2018. (Jiménez would not comment on whether he worked on the transition to SAIME.)
Jiménez’s government career peaked in March 2006 when Chacón appointed him vice minister of legal security in the Interior Ministry. That led to a seemingly plum assignment the following January when he became one of five directors of Mission Identity, according to a government document.
Chávez officials in 2007 allegedly used Mission Identity to provide false identities to Cuban agents to enter Venezuela, and to facilitate the travel of suspected Islamist terrorists, Colombian guerillas and drug traffickers, says the SFS.
Despite his official designation as a director, Jiménez says he “personally never worked with Mission Identity” and that the directorate had “no decision-making authority.” He resigned from the Interior Ministry after about a year and a half, “due to frustration with the government’s unwillingness to fairly and justly apply the rule of law.” (Jiménez provided a copy of his resignation letter signed on Oct. 11, 2007, by Pedro Carreño, the Interior Minister at the time.) He adds that he “sought to implement several projects aimed [at] improving legal certainty, to guarantee a better participation of the civil society and to increase the standards of transparency but these were obstructed and stopped by the minister (Carreño) above him.”
Jiménez overlapped in the Interior Ministry by about five months with Tareck El Aissami, a powerful member of the regime who served as a vice minister through September 2008, and then as Interior Minister from 2008 to 2012. The Trump administration sanctioned El Aissami in 2017 and the Justice Department indicted him in 2019 for alleged international narcotics trafficking and money laundering; U.S. Treasury officials have also been investigating his ties to the terrorist group Hezbollah. (El Aissami responded to the accusations in 2017 on Twitter, calling them “infamy and aggression; Maduro said he had “delivered the strongest blows against the heads of drug trafficking” in Venezuela.)
Venezuela’s Vice President Tareck El Aissami delivers a speech during a rally against the secretary general of the Organization of American States (OAS), Luis Almagro, in Caracas on March 28, 2017.
FEDERICO PARRA/AFP via GI
El Aissami was the chief architect of the national ID program, according to Joseph Humire, who heads the SFS, and who testified to Congress about the program in 2015. El Aissami also allegedly oversaw a multiyear program to sell hundreds, if not thousands, of legitimate Venezuelan passports for as much as $50,000 apiece to people from Middle Eastern countries, says Mauricio Claver-Carone, former senior director for Western Hemisphere Affairs at the National Security Council. (Delcy Rodríguez, then Venezuela’s foreign minister, told CNN in 2017 that allegations of selling passports and visas were “totally” false.)
Through his lawyer, Jiménez says he has “no knowledge” of the passport-selling program and “has never had any personal, business or political relationship with Mr. El Aissami.” Jiménez’ lawyer adds that “the presence of individuals like Mr. El Aissami was one of the factors that led Mr. Jiménez to resign.”
On the Money
Jiménez was initially reluctant to discuss his investment in Rimas, which he first told Billboard derived from “private business activity,” without offering more details. He later clarified that the funding came from a food import company and a restaurant in Miami, as well as a line of credit he said was from a bank in Florida, “which was secured by his assets in Florida.”
Risamar Business Group also controls a Florida-based food company of the same name. The company’s website says it specializes in “high-quality, ethically produced snack foods, canned fruits and vegetables, cleaning supplies and animal care products.”
In October 2006, at the peak of his career in the Chávez regime, Jiménez also started an import-export food company in Venezuela, Agropecuario Ravigg C.A. It imported food to Venezuela from Brazil, Argentina and other countries, generating a net profit of 8,897,246 bolívares ($1.4 million) in 2013, according to the Registry of National Contractors (RNC). Ravigg shipments from January to May of 2014 alone totaled $7.9 million in value, according to Venezuela’s National Center for Foreign Commerce (CENCOEX). The firm, which is 85% owned by Jiménez and still operates, did business as food shortages were beginning to mount in the country after the price of oil plummeted. Food imports became controversial in 2019 when the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned a Colombian national and others for allegedly orchestrating a scheme that enabled Maduro and his regime to “significantly profit from food imports and distribution in Venezuela” as far back as 2016. (Ravigg was not named in the sanctions.)
When asked to clarify if Ravigg was the company he was talking about that helped him fund Rimas, Jiménez said it was not and that he had been referring to a third “international food-trading entity,” founded in 2008, which he declined to name.
Jiménez also handled a variety of Venezuelan government contracts through Rialfi Consulting C.A., a company he set up in August 2005, seven months before joining the Interior Ministry. By the following August, when he was a vice minister, Rialfi landed a contract with the Venezuelan Institute of Social Services (IVSS), which manages employee pension funds.
Between 2006 and 2018, Rialfi completed 17 contracts, 15 of which were with government-controlled companies or institutions, including the national oil company Petróleos de Venezuela, the Bank of the Treasury and Banco de Venezuela. (Jiménez was still listed as CEO in 2019; Rialfi is 100% owned by Consorcio Riso C.A., which Jiménez also controls.)
In an email, Jiménez says no funds from Rialfi were invested in Rimas and notes that with the “year-to-year devaluation of the bolívar, those proceeds would have had very little value if they were ever converted to dollars.” (A government document from 2019 shows Rialfi had total assets of 2.84 billion bolívares, worth $6,100 in December of that year, when the currency was cratering from hyperinflation of 9,586%.)
After Jiménez resigned from the Interior Ministry in October 2007, he didn’t stop doing business with the government. Since Jiménez left his post, Rialfi has executed at least 14 contracts with Chávez-controlled companies or institutions, according to the 2019 document. Jiménez says the contracts were granted “via a public bidding process.”
Jiménez, downplays his government service, describing himself as “an entrepreneur for over 20 years in different industries, including food and beverage, technology, packaging, hospitality and entertainment.” In April 2010, the board of Envases Internacionales S.A., a cardboard and paper packaging firm, named him CEO (and majority shareholder, he says); two months later, Chávez nationalized the company, in what became a common practice of appointing current or former military officers to lead companies the government had taken over.
Jiménez eventually controlled or ran at least 15 companies in Venezuela and Panama, and later in Barbados, Florida and Puerto Rico, according to corporate records.
He made his first foray into the music industry in Caracas in 2011, when he started managing and funding Kent & Tony, a newly formed urban act. The duo wanted to work with Puerto Rican producers Los de la Nazza, and in October 2012, Assad, their manager, flew with the producers to Caracas to work with the Venezuelans in the studio. Jiménez asked Assad to also manage Kent & Tony, and in January 2014, they signed a license agreement with Siente Music.
After that, Jiménez moved quickly, founding Rimas two months later in Puerto Rico, when he saw an opportunity “for a well-run full-service independent label focused on a genre that was growing exponentially.”
Helpful to the early interactions between Assad and Jiménez, say two people familiar with the matter, was Carabaño, the son of a Venezuelan folk singer from Barquisimeto popular with military veterans. Later, working with Assad at Rimas, Carabaño signed Venezuelan artists like rapper Big Soto. (Carabaño did not respond to requests for an interview.)
After Chávez died in 2013, Jiménez left Venezuela in November 2014, he says, and moved to the Miami area, where he had already bought a house in 2008 for $925,000 with his now wife Dayva Soto Vallenilla, a former Venezuelan judge, in Weston, a suburb known as Westonzuela for its popularity with Venezuelans. They purchased the home about six months after Jiménez left the Chávez government. They emigrated at a time when U.S. officials were allowing in few Venezuelans with high-level government backgrounds. Jiménez maintained his connection to his native country, traveling from Miami to Caracas 10 times between December 2014 and July 2018, according to Venezuelan passport records.
Rimas to Riches
“I’m from a place called Carolina, Puerto Rico,” Assad said to the audience of about 400 at the Billboard Power 100 event. Assad’s hometown, just outside of San Juan, is known as “Tierra de Gigantes” (Land of Giants), for 7-foot-11-inch resident Don Felipe Birriel González and for baseball star Roberto Clemente, the first Latin player named to the Hall of Fame.
By 2013, Assad was living in a small apartment in Carolina while organizing parties and booking performers in Colombia and other Latin American countries. By that time, he had already been managing future reggaetoón star Ozuna. Soon after, Assad created a YouTube business, striking the first direct partnership in Puerto Rico with the platform to more easily monetize content, says Mauricio Ojeda, YouTube’s manager of label partnerships, U.S. Latin. He says he first met Assad in San Juan in early 2014 — before Rimas existed — and decided to partner with him because of his connections to the underground Latin urban scene on the island. At the time, major labels and important markets like Mexico were not optimistic about the future of reggaetón and Latin trap music, and Ojeda says he was looking to recruit a partner in Puerto Rico, where the scene was heating up.
Jo-Ann Toro
“We spoke for hours, we hung out in Puerto Rico, he introduced me around,” says Ojeda, who says he also met Jiménez during that period. “[Assad] said he was going to come out with a ‘road map and a plan’ for becoming a YouTube partner,” says the YouTube executive.
YouTube signed a deal with Rimas in February 2015, Ojeda says, for a partnership that involved sharing revenue from video ads and other monetization features like channel memberships and merch sales. “This was providing the artists the opportunity to export their content and reach their audiences, during a time when nobody was really paying attention to them,” Ojeda says.
In 2016, with the YouTube partnership and Jiménez’s financing in place at Rimas, Puerto Rican rapper Eladio Carrión, an early Rimas signing, introduced Assad to Martínez, a then college student calling himself Bad Bunny, who was appearing at a Ponce show with Carrión. At the time, Bad Bunny was earning money for school by working as a bagger at the Econo supermarket near his home in Vega Baja. Martínez dropped out of the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo, where he was studying audiovisual communication, and switched to a sound engineering program at the College of Cinematography, Arts and Television. (He chose his stage name after posting a picture of himself as a child wearing a bunny suit and a dour expression, then created a Twitter handle.)
After Bad Bunny uploaded some of his early music on SoundCloud, Assad in April 2016 signed him to the 360 deal with Rimas, collaborating on some early tracks with DJ Luian’s label Hear This Music.
Eventually, as Assad’s differences with Jiménez became increasingly apparent, Assad began seeking better opportunities for himself and his team, says a source close to Rimas. Days before Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in September 2017, Assad met with manager Scooter Braun, whom he’d long admired, about a potential deal in which Braun would provide investment, making Jiménez aware of their discussions, according to multiple sources. The deal got close to the finish line but didn’t come to fruition.
Econo market in Vega Baja where Bad Bunny worked before Rimas signed him.
Alexei Barrionuevo
By mid-2020, with Bad Bunny’s success accelerating, Rimas had moved into newer offices in San Juan’s Miramar neighborhood on the top floor of a small office building. That November, Assad branched out, forming his own management agency, Habibi, which signed Karol G. The industry took notice: Even before Sony Music started negotiating a deal to help Assad buy out his majority partner, other companies were sniffing around Rimas, including HYBE, which has prioritized adding Latin companies to its portfolio.
This month, Bad Bunny and Rimas made history yet again when the Puerto Rican star performed at Coachella as the first Spanish-language headliner. The next night, Karol G, whose fourth studio album, Mañana Será Bonito (Tomorrow Will Be Beautiful) debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 in March, performed on Saturday Night Live.
Behind the scenes, Sony and Rimas continue to work on the deal that could give both Assad and Jiménez — two driven hustlers from different generations and different worlds — keys to their futures. Assad would get the freedom to pursue his mogul dreams without an investor pulling at the purse strings, while Jiménez is expected to pocket what Billboard estimates could be more than $200 million for his stakes in the recording and publishing businesses he formed less than a decade ago.
Additional Reporting By Marcos David Valverde and Ed Christman
When Universal Music Group emailed Spotify, Apple Music and other streaming services in March asking them to stop artificial-intelligence companies from using its labels’ recordings to train their machine-learning software, it fired the first Howitzer shell of what’s shaping up as the next conflict between creators and computers. As Warner Music Group, HYBE, ByteDance, Spotify and other industry giants invest in AI development, along with a plethora of small startups, artists and songwriters are clamoring for protection against developers that use music created by professionals to train AI algorithms. Developers, meanwhile, are looking for safe havens where they can continue their work unfettered by government interference.
To someday generate music that rivals the work of human creators, AI models use a process of machine-learning to identify patterns in and mimic the characteristics that make a song irresistible, like that sticky verse-chorus structure of pop, the 808 drums that define the rhythm of hip-hop or that meteoric drop that defines electronic dance. These are distinctions human musicians have to learn during their lives either through osmosis or music education.
Machine-learning is exponentially faster, though; it’s usually achieved by feeding millions, even billions of so-called “inputs” into an AI model to build its musical vocabulary. Due to the sheer scale of data needed to train current systems that almost always includes the work of professionals, and to many copyright owners’ dismay, almost no one asks their permission to use it.
Countries around the world have various ways of regulating what’s allowed when it comes to what’s called the text and data mining of copyrighted material for AI training. And some territories are concluding that fewer rules will lead to more business.
China, Israel, Japan, South Korea and Singapore are among the countries that have largely positioned themselves as safe havens for AI companies in terms of industry-friendly regulation. In January, Israel’s Ministry of Justice defined its stance on the issue, saying that “lifting the copyright uncertainties that surround this issue [of training AI generators] can spur innovation and maximize the competitiveness of Israeli-based enterprises in both [machine-learning] and content creation.”
Singapore also “certainly strives to be a hub for AI,” says Bryan Tan, attorney and partner at Reed Smith, which has an office there. “It’s one of the most permissive places. But having said that, I think the world changes very quickly,” Tan says. He adds that even in countries where exceptions in copyright for text and data mining are established, there is a chance that developments in the fast-evolving AI sector could lead to change.
In the United States, Amir Ghavi, a partner at Fried Frank who is representing open-source text-to-image developer Stability AI in a number of upcoming landmark cases, says that though the United States has a “strong tradition of fair use … this is all playing out in real time” with decisions in upcoming cases like his setting significant precedents for AI and copyright law.
Many rights owners, including musicians like Helienne Lindevall, president of the European Composers and Songwriters Alliance, are hoping to establish consent as a basic practice. But, she asks, “How do you know when AI has used your work?”
AI companies tend to keep their training process secret, but Mat Dryhurst, a musician, podcast host and co-founder of music technology company Spawning, says many rely on just a few data sets, such as Laion 5B (as in 5 billion data points) and Common Crawl, a web-scraping tool used by Google. To help establish a compromise between copyright owners and AI developers, Spawning has created a website called HaveIBeenTrained.com, which helps creators determine whether their work is found in these common data sets and, free of charge, opt out of being used as fodder for training.
These requests are not backed by law, although Dryhurst says, “We think it’s in every AI organization’s best interest to respect our active opt-outs. One, because this is the right thing to do, and two, because the legality of this varies territory to territory. This is safer legally for AI companies, and we don’t charge them to partner with us. We do the work for them.”
The concept of opting out was first popularized by the European Union’s Copyright Directive, passed in 2019. Though Sophie Goossens, a partner at Reed Smith who works in Paris and London on entertainment, media and technology law, says the definition of “opt out” was initially vague, its inclusion makes the EU one of the most strict in terms of AI training.
There is a fear, however, that passing strict AI copyright regulations could result in a country missing the opportunity to establish itself as a next-generation Silicon Valley and reap the economic benefits that would follow. Russian President Vladimir Putin believes the stakes are even higher. In 2017, he stated that the nation that leads in AI “will be the ruler of the world.” The United Kingdom’s Intellectual Property Office seemed to be moving in that direction when it published a statement last summer recommending that text and data mining be exempt from opt-outs in hopes of becoming Europe’s haven for AI. In February, however, the British government put the brakes on the IPO’s proposal, leaving its future uncertain.
Lindevall and others in the music industry say they are fighting for even better standards. “We don’t want to opt out, we want to opt in,” she says. “Then we want a clear structure for remuneration.”
The lion’s share of U.S.-based music and entertainment organizations — more than 40, including ASCAP, BMI, RIAA, SESAC and the National Music Publisher’s Association — are in agreement and recently launched the Human Artistry Campaign, which established seven principles advocating AI’s best practices intended to protect creators’ copyrights. No. 4: “Governments should not create new copyright or other IP exemptions that allow AI developers to exploit creators without permission or compensation.”
Today, the idea that rights holders could one day license works for machine-learning still seems far off. Among the potential solutions for remuneration are blanket licenses something like the blank-tape levies used in parts of Europe. But given the patchwork of international law on this subject, and the complexities of tracking down and paying rights holders, some feel these fixes are not viable.
Dryhurst says he and the Spawning team are working on a concrete solution: an “opt in” tool. Stability AI has signed on as its first partner for this innovation, and Dryhurst says the newest version of its text-to-image AI software, Stable Diffusion 3, will not include any of the 78 million artworks that opted out prior to this advancement. “This is a win,” he says. “I am really hopeful others will follow suit.”
Harry Styles and Kid Harpoon are each nominated for three 2023 Ivors, as are Cleopatra Nikolic and Dean “Inflo” Josiah Cover, making them this year’s most honored songwriters.
The Ivors Academy announced the nominations for The Ivors 2023 with Amazon Music on Tuesday (April 18). The awards recognize outstanding British and Irish songwriters and composers across nine categories.
Styles and Harpoon are nominated for songwriter of the year with Amazon Music. They are also nominated in two categories for co-writing Styles’ global smash “As It Was” with Tyler Johnson – best song musically and lyrically and PRS for music most performed work.
Styles indirectly factors into a fourth nomination this year. He starred in the film Don’t Worry Darling, which netted a nomination for best original film score for composer John Powell.
“Inflo” and Nikolic are competing with “As It Was” for best song musically and lyrically as the co-writers of SAULT’s hit “Stronger.” They are also nominated twice for best album, for their work on Little Simz’s No Thank You alongside Little Simz and SAULT’s 11 alongside Jamar McNaughton and Jack Peñate.
In the PRS for music most performed work category, Ed Sheeran makes history as “Bad Habits” is nominated again after winning the award last year. He is the first artist to achieve this feat in this category. Sheeran’s follow-up hit “Shivers” is also nominated in the category this year.
Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” is nominated in that same category 37 years after the track was nominated for best contemporary song. The song experienced a global resurgence after being featured in the hit TV series Stranger Things.
A total of 72 individual songwriters and composers received Ivor Novello nominations this year, with 54% of those being nominated for the first time.
The songwriter of the year with Amazon Music category recognizes British or Irish songwriters or songwriting teams for outstanding bodies of commercially successful songs released in 2022. This year’s nominees are Florence Welch (Florence + the Machine), the only individual songwriter nominated in the category this year; Styles & Harpoon; Rhian Teasdale & Hester Chambers (Wet Leg); George Daniel & Matty Healy (The 1975); and Central Cee & Young Chencs.
Knucks receives two nominations for best contemporary song, for his track “Leon the Professional” with co-writers Venna and Toshifumi Hinata and for his feature on Kojey Radical’s “Payback,” which also credits Swindle.
British duo The Flight (consisting of Joe Henson and Alexis Smith) received two nominations for best original video game score. They are nominated for composing the Batman-inspired Gotham Knights and for co-composing the critically acclaimed Horizon Forbidden West, alongside Joris de Man and Oleksa Lozowchuk.
Since its inception in 2020, the rising star award with Amazon Music has championed Britain and Ireland’s most promising songwriting talents. This year’s nominees are Cat Burns, Ines Dunn, tendai, venbee and Victoria Canal. Previous winners are Mysie, Willow Kayne and Naomi Kimpenu.
Tom Gray, chair of The Ivors Academy, said in a statement, “The music nominated for an Ivor Novello this year is testament to the power and range of British and Irish songwriting and screen composing. It’s a superlative list and on behalf of The Ivors Academy, I’m delighted to congratulate every writer nominated for their craft and achievements.”
Winners will be revealed at The Ivors with Amazon Music at Grosvenor House in London on Thursday May 18.
As previously announced, Sting will become a Fellow of the Ivors Academy, the highest honor the Academy bestows. Ivor Novello Awards will also be presented for the outstanding song collection, special international award, visionary award with Amazon Music and PRS for music icon award.
Here’s a complete list of The Ivors 2023 nominations:
Songwriter of the year with Amazon Music
Central Cee and Young Chencs
Florence Welch
Harry Styles and Kid Harpoon
Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers
George Daniel and Matty Healy
Best contemporary song
“Cold Summer”; written by Wesley Joseph and Leon Vynehall; performed by Wesley Joseph
“Escapism”; written by 070 Shake, RAYE and Mike Sabath; performed by RAYE & 070 Shake
“Hide & Seek”; written by Owen Cutts, P2J, PRGRSHN and Stormzy; performed by Stormzy
“Leon the Professional”; written by Knucks, Venna and Toshifumi Hinata; performed by Knucks
“Payback”; written by Knucks, Kojey Radical and Swindle; performed by Kojey Radical feat. Knucks
Best song musically and lyrically
“As It Was”; written by Kid Harpoon, Tyler Johnson and Harry Styles; performed by Harry Styles
“Best Day of My Life”; written by Laurie Blundell and Tom Odell; performed by Tom Odell
“Complex”; written by Katie Gregson-Macleod; performed by Katie Gregson-Macleod
“King”; written by Jack Antonoff and Florence Welch; performed by Florence + The Machine
“Stronger”; written by Dean “Inflo” Josiah Cover and Cleopatra Nikolic; performed by SAULT
PRS for music most performed work
“As It Was”; written by Kid Harpoon, Tyler Johnson and Harry Styles; performed by Harry Styles
“Bad Habits”; written by FRED, Johnny McDaid and Ed Sheeran; performed by Ed Sheeran
“Heat Waves”; written by Dave Bayley; performed by Glass Animals
“Running Up That Hill”; written by Kate Bush; performed by Kate Bush
“Shivers”; written by Johnny McDaid, Kal Lavelle, Steve Mac and Ed Sheeran; performed by Ed Sheeran
Best album
11; written by Dean “Inflo” Josiah Cover, Jamar McNaughton, Cleopatra Nikolic and Jack Peñate; performed by SAULT
No Thank You; written by Dean “Inflo” Josiah Cover, Little Simz and Cleopatra Nikolic; performed by Little Simz
Skinty Fia; written by Grian Chatten, Thomas Coll, Conor Curley, Conor Deegan and Carlos O’Connell; performed by Fontaines D.C.
Some Nights I Dream of Doors; written by Barney Lister and Obongjayar; performed by Obongjayar
The Car; written by Alex Turner; performed by Arctic Monkeys
Best original film score
Avatar: The Way of Water; composed by Simon Franglen
Death on the Nile; composed by Patrick Doyle
Don’t Worry Darling; composed by John Powell
Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris; composed by Rael Jones
The Electrical Life of Louis Wain; composed by Arthur Sharpe
Best television soundtrack
Bad Sisters; composed by PJ Harvey and Tim Phillips
Elizabeth: The Unseen Queen; composed by David Schweitzer
The Midwich Cuckoos; composed by Hannah Peel
The Responder; composed by Matthew Herbert
The Thief, His Wife and the Canoe; composed by Harry Escott and Ben Pearson
Best original video game score
Gotham Knights; composed by The Flight
Horizon Forbidden West; composed by Joris de Man, Oleksa Lozowchuk and The Flight
Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope; composed by Gareth Coker, Grant Kirkhope and Yoko Shimomura
Rising star award with Amazon Music
Cat Burns
Ines Dunn
tendai
venbee
Victoria Canal
HYBE announced Monday (Sept. 17) that a dozen solo artists and music groups on the SM Entertainment roster will join its global fan community platform, Weverse, in September. Those artists, who have not yet been named, will move to Weverse from SM’s own fan community platform, Kwangya Club.
In addition to connecting with fans via services including Weverse Live, the 12 SM artists will also be featured on the e-commerce platform Weverse Shop, where fans can buy albums and official merchandise.
The Weverse deal derives from a platform partnership struck between HYBE, SM and Kakao Entertainment in March after HYBE fell short of its mission to purchase a controlling stake in SM. HYBE, home to K-pop superstars BTS, was blocked in its efforts by rival bidder Kakao, a South Korean tech company that owns Monsta X‘s label Starship Entertainment and Korean music streaming platform Melon. The battle ended when HYBE agreed to sell its entire SM stake to Kakao; days later, it sold 1.66 million SM shares to Kakao for 248.8 billion won ($191.8 million), amounting to 44% of its total shares in the company and increasing the stake of Kakao Corp. and its subsidiary, Kakao Entertainment, to nearly 40%. HYBE retains an 8.8% stake in SM.
Later in March, SM appointed Jang Cheol-hyuk as the company’s new CEO, succeeding outgoing CEO Lee Sung-soo, and named a new board as the company vowed to improve corporate governance and its production system, which had fallen behind rivals like HYBE in recent years and led to investor scrutiny.
Weverse claims approximately 65 million subscribers across 245 countries and regions globally.
Warner Music México has announced the launch of Gorgona, a label which will be “completely” run and managed by women, and will also be focused on promoting women talent.
According to a statement issued by the company Wednesday (April 12), the “historically low” presence of women in key senior industry roles initially led to the formation of Warner Music México’s Gender Equality Committee, comprised exclusively of women across the organization. Then came the idea of creating a label in which all roles — from songwriting to digital music services — would be executed by women.
The creation of Gorgona — a creature who is a protective deity of women according to Greek mythology is — led to their first songwriter’s camp attended by Ali Stone, Erika Vidrio, Escarlata, Ingratax, Marian Ruzzi, and other artists, producers and songwriters.
“The atmosphere in our first camp was very friendly because everyone felt that their opinions and voices were validated in the studio,” says Andrea Fernández, A&R manager at Warner Music Mexico and the label’s creative leader. “They had practically never attended a camp where the participation of women was greater than that of men. We came out with a network of creative women who were able to get to know themselves and their work and produced spectacular songs.”
“Cypher 1: Ella”, which dropped on International Women’s Day, was the first release under Gorgona. A collaboration between singers and emcees Mabiland, Emjay, Mare Advertencia and Delfina Dib, the alternative, urban-leaning song was produced by Maria Vertiz, mixed by Marcella Araica and mastered by Natalia Schlesinger.
The underrepresentation of women in the industry in Mexico reflects the reality of music in general. A report on inclusion issued by The University of California Annenberg Inclusion Initiative earlier this year found that women have been woefully underrepresented across the recorded music industry.
The number of women with producer credits continues to be low. In 2022, only 3.4% of producers were women across all songs included on the year-end Hot 100 chart, according to the report, which examines the gender of artists, songwriters and producers across all 1,100 songs included on Billboard’s Hot 100 year-end charts spanning from 2012 to 2022. Moreover, women represented only 30% of the 160 artists on the Hot 100 year-end chart, while men made up 69.4% and artists who identified as non-binary made up less than 1%.
While Miley Cyrus’ “Flowers” continues its rule atop the Billboard Global 200 and Billboard Global Excl. U.S. charts – it’s now up to 10 weeks at No. 1 on each tally – activity throughout the surveys shows a variety of artists making impacts. One of those is Peso Pluma, who blasts into the top 10 of both April 8-dated rankings for the first time.
“La Bebe,” by Yng Lvcas and Peso Pluma, climbs to No. 6 on Global Excl. U.S. and No. 7 on the Global 200. In the week ending March 30, the reggaetón track drew 61 million streams, up 90%, according to Luminate. It’s the first global chart entry for YNG Lvcas. For the latter, it builds upon many months of momentum.
Peso Pluma first reached the global charts with “Siempre Pendientes,” a collaboration with Luis R Conriquez. That song spent three weeks on both lists last September, peaking at No. 155 on Global Excl. U.S. and No. 174 on the Global 200.
The track dropped off both charts seven months ago, but Peso Pluma now counts six songs on each April 8-dated global ranking, none lower than No. 60. And while that haul started just two-and-a-half months ago with the debut of “AMG” with Gabito Ballesteros and Natanel Cano, the best could be yet to come.
Just last week, “Ella Baila Sola” with Eslabon Armando debuted in the top 20 of both charts; it jumps to No. 11 on this week’s Global 200 and No. 12 on Global Excl. U.S. One spot away from becoming his second top 10 in two weeks, rising into either charts’ upper echelon would mark the first time a Mexican act would double-up in the same week.
Further, “El Azul,” Peso Pluma’s collaboration with American producer Junior H, zooms to No. 53 on Global Excl. U.S. and No. 59 on the Global 200. Rising 39 positions on the former chart and 42 on the latter, the song nears each list’s top 40, on track to become Peso Pluma’s sixth title to reach the region.
Peso Pluma has buffed up his global portfolio in 2023 with a wide range of collaborations, but his solo prowess shouldn’t be underestimated. “Por Las Noches” is his first solo chart hit, holding in the top 40 of the Global 200. And even his top 10 duet with Yng Lvcas shows evidence of his contribution to the song’s high rank: “La Bebe” originated as a solo Yng Lvcas track, released in 2021. Picking up momentum at the top of the year, the song hit both global charts, climbing among the lower half of each list last month. The remix featuring Peso Pluma arrived March 17, propelling the song from No. 103 to No. 21, and now to No. 7 on the Global 200, and similarly from No. 74 to No. 6 across two weeks on Global Excl. U.S.
Peso Pluma’s wide-ranging global success can, in part, be attributed to his musical flexibility. Most of his globally charting hits fit the mold of regional Mexican tradition, while “La Bebe,” his first top 10, aligns with reggaetón. Both have become increasingly popular, both globally and in the U.S., where he counts five songs on this week’s domestic-based Billboard Hot 100.
And while reggaetón might first appear to be the more U.S.-friendly genre with its production sharing elements with American pop and hip-hop, it’s one of Peso Pluma’s regional Mexican tracks that leads the way on the Hot 100. “Ella Baila Sola” hangs at No. 31, over “La Bebe” at No. 34. This week, All of his regional Mexican songs skew 27-28% of their worldwide streams from the U.S. and 72-73% international, while “La Bebe” splits 22% U.S. and 78% beyond.
As for Peso Pluma’s global standings, all five of his charting regional Mexican songs rank among the top 10 of Billboard’s Mexico Songs chart, logically enough, but don’t appear on any other Hits of the World tallies. “La Bebe,” however, with its top 10 placement on both global charts, finds itself on rankings for Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, in addition to its No. 1 status on Mexico Songs.
Despite a challenging economy and the lingering effect of the pandemic on the concert business, the German collecting society GEMA took in 1.178 billion euros ($1.25 billion) in revenue in 2022, a 13% increase over 2021. This year, for the first time, the organization’s distributions will exceed a billion euros.
“This is a record result,” said GEMA CEO Harald Heker in a statement. “The resurgence of events and music performances means a relief for our members after three hard years.”
Some of this increase reflects the continued growth of streaming, but some of it is due to the recovery from the pandemic.
GEMA collections from public music performances, its biggest category of revenue, grew to 357.5 million euros ($381.6 million), up 43.7% over 2021 (but still below the 407.4 million euro high of 2019). Online, the organization’s third biggest category, grew to 301.3 million euros ($321.6 million), up 26.5% over 2021. (Radio and television collections, the second biggest category of revenue, dropped 3.9% to 325.1 million euros [$347 million].) The amounts of money GEMA collects from levies on computers and items with blank memory, as well as from physical goods, both declined – by 27.7% and 9.2%, respectively.
GEMA is one of the first international collecting societies to announce its 2022 results, but its counterparts are expected to report good years as well, for some of the same reasons. Last month, ASCAP reported a 14% increase in collections over 2021, to $1.52 billion. (Collecting societies report their results differently, so exact comparisons can be difficult.) While organizations struggled to maintain revenue during the pandemic, the comeback of the concert business – and public life in general – should now boost all of them.
GEMA’s good news comes at an interesting time for the organization. As the 2014 EU directive on collecting societies continues to push them into competition with one another online, GEMA has emerged as one of the bigger and more successful organizations. In addition to its own operations, GEMA operates the online licensing and collecting hub ICE with STIM (Sweden) and PRS for Music (UK). Heker has led GEMA since 2007 and is expected to retire by the end of the year, and there is talk that GEMA will name its next CEO by summer.
Like many collecting societies and organizations of publishers and songwriters, GEMA believes that music-streaming is unfair to their side of the business, and rewards labels and artists disproportionately.
“The trend towards streaming must not lead to authors’ rights being undermined,” Heker said in the same statement. “GEMA’s most important task is and remains to stand up for fair remuneration in all areas and thus at the same time to secure conditions for a lively and diverse musical and cultural landscape.”
MUMBAI — India is driving Spotify’s international expansion, vaulting into the top five territories in total users for the platform after just four years of operation in the country.
“India is the single market that has contributed the most to our global growth over the last year,” says Gustav Gyllenhammar, Spotify’s vp of markets and subscriber growth. The company’s user count in India has tripled over the last two years, according to Gyllenhammar.
Spotify did not provide numbers, but Comscore estimates the platform has about 55 million monthly active users (MAUs) in India, and Spotify is the country’s top audio-streaming service in terms of engagement, with nearly 10 billion tracks streamed in India in January alone, sources close to the company say. Last year, Spotify says, Bollywood playback singer Arijit Singh tallied more streams on the app than Beyonce. Then in January, Singh broke into the top 10 of Spotify’s Global Top Artists chart, even though most of his plays were in India.
Despite this, India is not a top five revenue market for the service, Gyllenhammar says, demonstrating the limits of the country — which has 1.4 billion people and is expected to soon pass China as the most populous nation — as a music market. Multiple factors are at play, including India’s significantly lower per-stream payouts, a resistance to paying for music subscriptions and the challenges of a market with two official languages and another 22 regional ones.
India was the 17th-largest recorded-music market in 2021 with $219 million in revenue, up 20% from 2020 and driven largely by streaming, according to IFPI’s Global Music Report. But at just $0.16, its per-capita music revenue is among the lowest in the world.
India’s economy is one of the world’s largest, but a 2022 report by the International Monetary Fund ranks its per-capita income at 140 out of 190 countries, which contributes to the problems streaming services have in getting more consumers to pay for subscriptions. A monthly Spotify subscription costs 119 rupees ($1.45) compared with $9.99 in the United States. Gyllenhammar says the service doesn’t plan to increase prices in India in the near future.
India’s streaming market is estimated to have over 300 million MAUs. (For comparison, there are 219 million in the United States.) When Spotify launched there in 2019, it was the eighth major audio-streaming service to enter a market ruled by local streaming services Gaana, JioSaavn and Wynk. Since then, it has overtaken Gaana, which has turned into a subscription-only service after talks for an acquisition by Wynk’s parent, the telco Bharti Airtel, fell through. JioSaavn, which saw an overhaul of its top management last year, has witnessed a fall in engagement.
Though JioSaavn and Wynk still have more MAUs than Spotify, 20.1% of respondents picked Spotify as their favorite music streaming service, compared with 4.9% who chose either JioSaavn or Wynk, in a study conducted last year by IFPI and the Indian Music Industry, the country’s recorded-music trade group. (YouTube topped the list with 46%.)
Spotify’s closest competition for engagement, according to industry insiders, is ByteDance-owned Resso, which officially launched in India in March 2020 as one of three test markets for the app outside of China. (Indonesia and Brazil are the others.) Resso, they say, has a stronger presence in smaller cities and tallies a similar number of streams. But it’s been growing at a slower rate than Spotify and has been affected by the loss of Sony Music’s catalog — which includes several hit Indian film soundtracks — after Sony removed its titles from the service in September.
Indian music executives say Spotify has better technology for generating algorithmic recommendations and playlist personalization — and that gives it an edge over domestic rivals. It also emulated its local competition by emphasizing the importance of regional-language music and by creating a generous ad-based tier.
In India, Spotify offers a mobile-only “mini” subscription where users pay 7 rupees ($0.09) per day. It offers ad-free music on phones, group listening sessions and downloads of 30 songs per device. There aren’t any restrictions on the number of songs free users can stream in the ad-based tier.
A Focus On Servicing Local Languages
Today, in addition to English, Spotify offers its service in 12 Indian languages, including Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi and Urdu. To focus on local languages, Spotify has had to customize its operations. “Until we came to India, most [of our] markets [were dominated by] one or two languages,” says Amarjit Singh Batra, GM/managing director for India. “The whole structure, from the teams to the way we work to how we look at recommendations, curation — every piece had to be re-looked at.”
Local content accounts for about 85% of listening on domestic platforms like JioSaavn and Wynk, for example, but initially only made up 20% to 30% of Spotify streams in the market. “When we launched, consumption looked very similar to many other countries globally, [which is] predominantly international English-language music,” Gyllenhammar says. Then Spotify pushed to expand its audience beyond India’s big cities, and today, out of Spotify’s 184 markets, India has the highest share of local consumption, at 70%.
During the pandemic, as competitors tightened their budgets, the Swedish company says it spent heavily on nationwide and region-specific advertising and marketing — including ads on broadcast and streaming TV. “We have never paid so much attention to marketing in any single market,” says Gyllenhammar. The platform has run marketing campaigns in Hindi and English, as well as the four main languages spoken in south India: Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam.
Spotify has also resisted pressure from labels to ensure their songs feature at the top of playlists, which music companies had come to expect from Indian platforms. “They keep looking at Spotify to be something like that,” says Padmanabhan “Paddy” NS, Spotify’s head of artist and label partnerships. Instead, Spotify realized early on the potential of independent and non-film music and showcased them through playlists and programs such as Radar. The strategy paid dividends during the pandemic when the closure of cinemas led to a paucity of new soundtrack releases, which local platforms had relied on.
Since it launched in the country, Spotify has more than doubled its number of India-based employees, Gyllenhammar and Singh say, and they’re planning to expand their India ad sales teams five-fold by the end of the year. (They decline to share how many people the company currently employs in India.)
While India is primarily a low-price, high-volume play for Spotify, the country offers tremendous growth potential. It has the second-largest share of internet and smartphone users in the world (after China), at about 658 million, though that’s just under half of its total population. (The United States and the United Kingdom both have 90% internet penetration.) “If you look at other sectors online, whether it’s in search or social media or e-commerce, [India is] a billion-dollar market for the global players,” Gyllenhammar says.
Singh Batra says Spotify’s focus over the next four years will be on reaching “a level where the audience for each and every core [Indian] language is able to say, ‘Spotify is for me, for my region.’” By focusing on regional-language listeners, Spotify aims to gain new consumers in smaller cities and rural areas, as well as by pulling customers from JioSaavn and Resso, which dominate those regions.
The company says it’s gaining subscribers in India at a faster rate than total users. In 2022, premium subscriptions grew by 85% and MAUs by 80% year on year. Spotify executives say they see India following the same growth path as Latin America, where the level of paid users is now about the same as the global average of 40%.
It took eight years after Spotify launched in Brazil in 2014 for the region to reach that 40% level, Gyllenhammar says. “It didn’t happen in the first four years,” he observes. “It happened during the second phase of those eight years. So similarly, for India, the next four years is a period where we will see improvement on this side.”