International
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TOKYO — A court ruling in South Korea on Friday added further confusion to K-pop’s biggest corporate shakeup in years: the rollercoaster battle for control over SM Entertainment, the once-industry leader bedeviled by corporate governance concerns, which rival HYBE is eager to take control of.
The Seoul Eastern District Court granted a provisionary injunction to block SM from issuing new shares, which Kakao, a Korean tech giant, had agreed to buy as part of a partnership deal between the two companies. The court ruled that SM’s decision was taken without shareholders’ consent, accepting the argument from SM founder Lee Soo Man, who has been battling SM’s management over the future of the company he created in 1995.
The ruling marks a win for HYBE, K-pop’s largest agency and home to boy band BTS, which in recent weeks acquired a 14.8% stake of SM shares from Lee – and announced plans to take control and overhaul SM’s management and board of directors. HYBE was offering shareholders a premium to boost its stake up to 40%, but the market price has since exceeded the offer price. SM’s management has slammed HYBE’s acquisition as a “hostile takeover.”
Following the ruling, HYBE, in a statement, thanked the court for the “appropriate” ruling. “With this result, everything should now fall back into place,” the company said.
In a statement from his lawyers, Lee said the decision “clearly confirmed that the resolution by SM’s current management to issue new shares and convertible bonds was made in an unlawful attempt to influence the company’s control and governance.” The attorneys added that “if SM’s current management further attempts to commit unlawful acts in the future, we will respond firmly by taking appropriate legal actions.”
A Kakao spokesperson said late Friday that the company didn’t immediately have a comment but “plans to issue a response after internal discussions.” A SM spokesperson couldn’t immediately be reached.
Lee and the company he founded are widely considered trailblazers, developing K-pop’s signature formula of visually driven performances and dance pop, and tirelessly knocking on overseas markets’ doors. But in recent years SM’s output has slowed, which its management has blamed on the founder-led single-pipeline structure.
SM’s co-CEO Lee Sung-su, a nephew of the founder’s late wife, has lashed out at the uncle with a litany of accusations, from using artists’ music for personal gains to tax evasion through a Hong Kong-based paper company. Shareholders in recent years have also objected to the founder’s ballooning producer fees, which he was receiving via a separate entity he owned.
Kakao in February agreed with SM’s management to buy 9.05% of SM shares, as part of a wider partnership agreement. The messenger-app-and-search-engine company, which has successfully expanded into e-finance and music, was going to distribute SM’s music and related content on its platforms. Kakao has also acquired several entertainment agencies in recent years, leading some, including HYBE, to argue Kakao was trying to gain managerial control over SM. Both SM executives and Kakao have rejected the claim.
With an annual shareholders meeting scheduled for March 31, SM and HYBE are expected to spend the coming weeks courting SM investors, which includes South Korea’s National Pension Service.
BRISBANE, Australia — A brouhaha between Bluesfest and a touring party that includes the Soul Rebels and Big Freedia is entering legal territory after the groups — which also includes Talib Kweli and GZA — has jointly claimed they were canceled by the Australian event “in bad faith and in breach of contract.”
All of those acts were initially slated to perform at the festival this Easter in Byron Bay, in addition to several theater shows on Australia’s east coast promoted by Bluesfest Touring.
And then, they weren’t.
When the second artist announcement for Bluesfest dropped in October 2022, the growing lineup included The Soul Rebels & Friends with special guests Talib Kweli, GZA and Big Freedia.
The bill as it stands for Bluesfest 2023 no longer features the four acts.
A strongly worded statement from the tour’s reps, seen by Billboard, lays all the blame at Bluesfest and its director Peter Noble.
“The artists had fully executed signed contracts with Peter Noble and had already booked travel to Australia and were looking forward to returning to the country to perform for their fans,” the statement reads.
“Peter Noble removed the artists and the tour without further communication or reason from Bluesfest other than him stating his decision to not want to pay the artists.”
Furthermore, it continues, “these are all black artists, and Big Freedia is an LGBTQ icon.”
Bluesfest
Courtesy Bluesfest
The statement then points to the controversial Australian rock group Sticky Fingers, which, after a weeks-long backlash, has been removed from the lineup.
“It appears the tour may have been replaced by other artists including Sticky Fingers,” reads the statement, which was originally distributed to a handful of media outlets in late February, including the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Double J network. “We are uncertain about who else on Bluesfest may have also been cancelled.”
Noble’s “cancellation of the tour of the aforementioned artists and on Bluesfest has resulted in significant financial loss to the artist,” the statement continues. “Peter’s egregious treatment and disregard of his contractual and moral obligations and disrespect can be completely supported by his actions and written communications.”
Speaking with Billboard on Friday (March 3), Noble read from a prepared statement from Bluesfest’s lawyers.
“The termination of the Soul Rebels contract by Bluesfest has nothing to do with the announcement of Sticky Fingers playing at Bluesfest 2023,” the statement reads. “The Soul Rebels contract was terminated because they did not comply with the contractual terms. By that, we mean, Soul Rebels, Big Freedia, GZA and Talib Kweli.”
Noble declined to go off script.
The impresario and his long-running festival have rolled with many punches these past few years, from the pandemic to floods, to the border closures and public health orders which saw the 2021 edition nixed just hours before showtime.
In the new year, a new problem.
King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard and Sampa The Great recently bailed from the bill, a boycott to the booking of Sticky Fingers, whose frontman has a well-publicized and controversial past.
On Thursday of this week, after a weeks-long backlash on social media, Noble and Bluesfest announced that Sticky Fingers “is to step off the Bluesfest 2023 line-up.”
The 2023 edition of Bluesfest is set for April 6-10 at Byron Events Farm, with headliners including Gang of Youths, Paolo Nutini, Tash Sultana, Bonnie Raitt, the Doobie Brothers and more. Last year’s event reported more than 100,000 attendees.
LONDON — Security services could have prevented a suicide bomber from killing 22 people in a terror attack outside an Ariana Grande concert at Manchester Arena in 2017 if they had acted swiftly on key intelligence, a public inquiry has found.
The chair of the inquiry, John Saunders, says there was a “realistic possibility” that the bomber could have been stopped from carrying out the atrocity if British security service MI5 had acted decisively upon on two pieces of intelligence that they received in the months leading up to the attack. The significance of that intelligence, Saunders notes, “was not fully appreciated at the time.”
A 207-page report, published Thursday (March 2), details the radicalization of bomber Salman Abedi but does not disclose details of either piece of intelligence, citing national security reasons. It does, however, state that neither piece of intelligence was shared by MI5 with counter-terror police — a failing that Saunders calls “a further example of a communication breakdown” between security agencies.
The inquiry found that an MI5 officer, identified as Witness C, failed to write a report on the second piece of intelligence on the same day MI5 assessed it and did not discuss it with colleagues. That delay “led to the missing of an opportunity to take a potentially important investigative action.”
Abedi flew from Libya to Manchester on May 18 — four days before he detonated a homemade explosive device in the foyer of Manchester Arena (now known as the AO Arena) at the end of Grande’s sold-out show. Twenty-two people died in the terror attack, the youngest aged 8 years old. Hundreds of people were injured, many of them children.
The report contends that had MI5 taken the intelligence more seriously Abedi could have been stopped at Manchester Airport upon his return from Libya and followed to his car where he had stored his explosives.
In a press conference in Manchester on Thursday, Saunders said the “failure by the security service to act swiftly enough” had contributed to a “significant missed opportunity to take action that might have prevented the attack.”
The inquiry chair went on to say that while “it is not possible to reach any conclusion on the balance of probability” as to whether the bombing would have been prevented, he believed “there was a realistic possibility that actionable intelligence could have been obtained which might have led to actions preventing the attack.”
The report also found that Abedi’s family held “significant responsibility” for the radicalization of both him and his brother, Hashem Abedi, who was sentenced in the U.K. in 2020 to a minimum of 55 years for his role in the murders.
Thursday’s report is the third and final set of findings to come out of the public inquiry into the terror attack. The U.K. Home Secretary launched the inquiry in October 2019 with its first hearings taking place in Manchester in September 2020. In total, more than 250 witnesses gave 194 days of oral evidence, although much of the evidence from MI5 and counter-terror police officers was heard in secret.
The inquiry’s two previous reports have focused on how emergency services responded to the attack and whether police and concert security should have done more to prevent the bombing.
Families of the victims called the failures exposed in Thursday’s report “unacceptable” and a “devastating conclusion” to the inquiry. “Those killed and injured in this murderous attack had every right to feel safe and protected, but as this inquiry has demonstrated, they were failed at every level — before, during and after this horrific attack,” said Richard Scorer, principal lawyer at Slater and Gordon, reading out a statement on behalf of 11 of the victims’ families.
Andrew Roussos, the father of 8-year-old Saffie-Rose Roussos, who was one of the 22 victims, said the security services’ actions amounted to a “cataclysmic failure.”
“The fact that MI5 failed to stop [Salman Abedi] despite all of the red flags available demonstrates they are not fit to keep us safe and therefore not fit for purpose,” said Roussos.
Following the report’s publication, MI5’s director general, Ken McCallum, said he was “profoundly sorry” that the security service did not prevent the attack. “Gathering covert intelligence is difficult,” McCallum said in a statement, “but had we managed to seize the slim chance we had, those impacted might not have experienced such appalling loss and trauma.”
Max Lousada, CEO of recorded music for Warner Music Group, will sit down for a keynote interview at this year’s electronic music conference IMS Ibiza. The keynote will mark Lousada’s first appearance at the annual event, which is slated for April 26-28 at Destino Pacha Ibiza Resort.
For the summit’s 14th edition, co-hosted by BBC Radio 1 broadcasters Pete Tong MBE and Jaguar, the theme will be Face the Future. Topics will range from the complexities of AI and Web3, diversity and inclusion and ageism in electronic music. Further, conversations are scheduled to explore music rights management, understanding neurodiversity, the ever-changing dynamic between agents and promoters, an analysis of music journalism and the unveiling of the IMS Business Report.
Lousada is one of the first 10 speakers announced for the 2023 conference. IMS Ibiza will also welcome TaP Music co-founder Ben Mawson, who will discuss spearheading the lawsuit that led to house legends Larry Heard and Robert Owens winning a major court battle to reclaim the rights to their back catalogs after decades of struggle.
Across the three days, there will also be a live podcast recording of Takin’ Care of Lady Busine$$ with Justice Department founder/CEO Jennifer Justice and TOKiMONSTA, who will discuss SONA, a new Web3-based music protocol she co-founded that aims to put artists in control of the culture they create.
BBC Radio 1 resident and Hooversound label boss Sherelle will be joined in conversation with Fabio & Grooverider, while DJ Fat Tony will share the journey of his rise to become a kingpin of the ’80s and ’90s club scene in London.
“IMS returns to open the Ibiza season with a powerful and diverse mix of carefully considered content focused on the key issues facing our industry today. In 2023, we no longer have the luxury of speculating about the future: AI has fully arrived, and things will move fast from this point forward,” said IMS co-founder Ben Turner in a release. “As a tidal wave of AI-generated content sweeps in, some welcome a new era of creative possibilities, while others lament the loss of another aspect of humanity in music, all while a cornucopia of unanswered questions are created concerning the control of rights. It’s time for us to collectively ‘Face the Future.’”
Additional speakers include Femme House founder and music director for W Hotels LP Giobbi, manager Cristiana Simon of Alegria Agency, Wasserman music partner Tom Schroeder, iii Points founder David Sinopoli and artist Yellow Squares.
Check out a full list of events and speakers here.
Women in Music honoree Doreen Schimk has one of the more interesting backstories in the music business: She escaped from the former East Germany as a teenager.
In the late 1980s, she and her sister Susann, both promising athletes, went to an East German training camp where she met a teenage boy she liked. Schimk took a bigger step than most girls her age, though, sneaking across the border in his car and moving to Hamburg in what was then West Germany. In 2011, this journey became the subject of the fictionalized German film Westwind.
In 1990, not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Schimk moved to London, and later New York, where she says she “picked up English on the street.” “But I was obsessed with music – I was a DJ for a few years – and I thought this was the place I could get into the business, but I didn’t know the difference between an agent and a manager and a label.”
Then a friend from back home called about an opening for an internship at the German indie label Edel Records. Schimk moved back within 48 hours and then spent six years learning about promotions before taking a job at Sony Music Germany – and then, eventually, at Warner Music.
In August 2021, she and Fabian Drebes were named co-presidents of Warner Music Central Europe, which oversees operations in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. One priority is “cultural change,” she says. “There’s a huge opportunity to create a new way of working in terms of changing the mindset and breaking these barriers in terms of hierarchies.” Another is focusing more on dance music and German language hip-hop.
“With dance and EDM we have a huge opportunity to grow globally,” she says. For hip-hop, she and Drebes founded Atlantic Records Germany “to be a new door for German rap artists,” she says. “It’s based in Berlin” – Warner Music’s German headquarters is in Hamburg – “and it’s growing out of the culture there.” Change takes time, she says, but Warner Germany has shown strength this year on the singles chart.
As for the movie, she recalls, “I was in my 30s, sitting with my twin sister Susann on a balcony in Berlin, having a drink, and one of the guys we were with said, ‘Why don’t you make a movie about it?’ — [Her sister is a movie producer] — “From such a young age when I made that decision,” she says, “being fearless has always been a driver for me.”
The 2023 Billboard Women in Music Awards take place tonight (March 1) at the YouTube Theater at Hollywood Park in Los Angeles. The event will livestream here on Billboard.com and via Billboard’s YouTube account.
French music streaming company Deezer reported on Tuesday that its 2022 revenues rose 13% to 451 million euros ($478 million), as the company reduced its losses by 18 million euros ($19.1 million) through a combination of growth through partnerships and eliminating marketing spend.
The company reported its adjusted gross profit rose 16% to 98 million ($104 million) euros in 2022 versus 2021 on greater margin improvement. The 18 million euros ($19.1 million) the company reported in savings came partly from growth — Deezer grew its top line by 51 million euros ($54 million) and improved gross margins by 30 million euros ($32 million) — and partly from reducing its marketing spends in certain emerging markets.
For years since its 2007 launch, the Paris-based company angled to gain customers by partnering with telecommunications companies. But under new chief executive Jeronimo Folgueira, Deezer has focused on a business-to-business (B2B) approach, aiming to gain more streaming users in major markets through partnerships with companies that already have established customer bases.
That piggy back approach — which is already in place with Sonos in the United States, RTL in Germany and DAZN in Italy — allows Deezer to reach prospective customers in major markets without investing to build a brand first. Folgueira, who joined Deezer in June 2021, says 2022’s earnings show the strategy has legs, and he expects his company to generate revenue growth of more than 10% in 2023 as they work toward achieving profitability by 2025.
“All of the ground work on B2B that we’ve been doing is starting to pay off,” Folgueira tells Billboard. “Those deals are just the beginning. We want to enter markets through partners, and we are targeting the United Kingdom and other major European markets like Spain.”
Last year, Deezer partnered with German broadcast giant RTL Deutschland to deliver music and video content over the app RTL+ Musik, putting Deezer in a position to compete in the crowded streaming space in the world’s fourth-biggest recorded-music market, and it teamed up with the Italian sport subscription streaming platform DZAN.
This year, Deezer struck a long-term agreement with the U.S. speaker and hardware company Sonos to power its Sonos Radio and subscription service Sonos Radio HD, a deal that will extend Deezer’s reach to 16 countries, including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France and Germany.
Deezer remains strongest in France, where it is bundled with telecom company Orange and has 4.4 million subscribers, and in Brazil, where it partnered with TIM Celular in 2016 and has 2.7 million subscribers, according to company filings. Worldwide, Deezer has 9.4 million subscribers compared with Spotify’s 195 million subscribers and 273 million free (ad-supported) users, while TME has 82.7 million paying subscribers, according to the companies’ latest earnings reports.
The company was among the first DSPs to raise prices last year when it upped the price for an individual plan to 10.99 euros ($11.66) per month from 9.99 euros ($10.60) and family plans to 17.99 euros ($19.09) per month from 14.99 ($15.91).
Those hikes helped deliver a 14.3% increase in the company’s average revenue per user (ARPU) in 2022. Deezer had 9.4 million subscribers as of Dec. 31, 2022, down 2.2% from a year earlier.
“On the year as a whole, there was basically no impact on churn despite a roughly 10% price increase,” Folgueira says. “People are willing to pay more for proper quality music.”
U.K. labels trade body BPI has appointed Jo Twist as its new chief executive, replacing Geoff Taylor who exited the London-based organization in December after more than 15 years at the helm.
Twist has been CEO of Ukie, the U.K. trade body for the games and interactive entertainment industry, since 2012 and was awarded an OBE (Order of the British Empire) for services to the creative industries in 2016. BPI’s chief strategy officer, Sophie Jones, will continue as interim chief executive until Twist takes up her role in July.
The labels trade body celebrates its 50th anniversary this year and represents the U.K. arms of all three major labels, as well as more than 500 British independents. BPI says its total membership accounts for approximately 85% of legal music sales in the United Kingdom and around one in 10 streams globally.
Last year, a record 159 billion music tracks were streamed in the U.K., up 8.2% on 2021, and the equivalent of 166 million albums were streamed or purchased across digital and physical formats, up 4.3% on the previous 12 months, according to BPI figures.
The U.K. is the world’s third biggest recorded music market behind the U.S. and Japan with sales of just over $1.8 billion in trade value, according to IFPI’s 2022 Global Music Report.
In a statement announcing her appointment, Twist said she was looking forward to supporting BPI label members and the wider music community “in fully realizing the value of music – growing the market, boosting exports and ensuring the recognition and backing the industry deserves.”
“The industry’s talent, so passionately nurtured by innovative major and independent record labels, is world leading, and the BPI plays an important role in creating an environment where labels and their artists can thrive,” said Twist, who sits on a number of industry and charity boards, including the Creative Industries Council.
Prior to joining Ukie, Twist held senior roles at the BBC and commercial U.K. television station Channel 4 and was awarded a doctorate by Newcastle University in 2001. BPI chair Yolanda Brown said the incoming chief executive’s “fresh perspective” and “rich breadth of experience” across the creative industries will prove invaluable to the organization’s members “as we navigate great changes in our industry.”
Among Twist’s duties as head of BPI is overseeing the BRIT Awards, the U.K.’s biggest annual music awards show, and the Mercury Prize, its independent-leaning sister event, recognizing what judges determine to be the 12 best albums of the year by U.K. and Irish artists.
BPI also runs a number of international trade functions, including its annual LA Sync Mission event, and administers the Music Export Growth Scheme (MEGS), which awards U.K.-based indie artists and labels grants of between 5,000 pounds ($6,000) and 50,000 pounds ($60,000) to help them break international markets.
In 2021, more than 60 U.K. artists whose music was streamed at least 20 million times worldwide received funding from the scheme, including Bicep, Beabadoobee, Wolf Alice and Rina Sawayama.
U.S. government bans on Chinese-owned video sharing app TikTok reveal Washington’s own insecurities and are an abuse of state power, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson said Tuesday.
The U.S. government “has been overstretching the concept of national security and abusing state power to suppress other countries’ companies,” Mao Ning said at a daily briefing.“How unsure of itself can the U.S., the world’s top superpower, be to fear a young person’s favorite app to such a degree?”
The White House is giving all federal agencies, in guidance issued Monday, 30 days to wipe TikTok off all government devices. The White House already did not allow TikTok on its devices.
TikTok is used by two-thirds of American teens, but there’s concern in Washington that China could use its legal and regulatory powers to obtain private user data or to try to push misinformation or narratives favoring China.
Congress and more than half of U.S. states have so-far banned TikTok from government-issued mobile devices.
Some have also moved to apply the ban to any app or website owned by ByteDance Ltd., the private Chinese company that owns TikTok and moved its headquarters to Singapore in 2020.
China has long blocked a long list of foreign social media platforms and messaging apps, including YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
Washington and Beijing are at odds over myriad issues including trade, computer chips and other technology, national security and Taiwan, along with the discovery of a suspected Chinese spy balloon over the U.S. and its shooting down earlier this month.
On Monday, Canada announced it was joining the U.S. in banning TikTok from all government-issued mobile devices.
“I suspect that as government takes the significant step of telling all federal employees that they can no longer use TikTok on their work phones many Canadians from business to private individuals will reflect on the security of their own data and perhaps make choices,” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told reporters after the announcement.
Canadian Treasury Board President Mona Fortier said the Chief Information Officer of Canada had determined that TikTok “presents an unacceptable level of risk to privacy and security.”
“On a mobile device, TikTok’s data collection methods provide considerable access to the contents of the phone,” Fortier said.
The app will be removed from Canadian government issued phones on Tuesday.
The European Union’s executive branch said last week it has temporarily banned TikTok from phones used by employees as a cybersecurity measure.
TikTok has questioned the bans, saying it has not been given an opportunity to answer questions and governments were cutting themselves off from a platform beloved by millions.
LONDON — In early February, Universal Music Group chairman/CEO Lucian Grainge drew a line in the sand between the traditional record business and financial companies entering the fray to tap into the global growth of streaming. “Our industry is entering a new chapter where we’re going to have to pick sides,” Grainge said at the Billboard Power 100 launch event in Hollywood. “Are we on the side of fintech [financial technology] and functional music, functional content? Or are we on the side of artistry and artists?”
Though Grainge didn’t name names, he could well have been talking about Utopia Music, a Zug, Switzerland-based tech company that delivers financial services for labels, publishers and distributors. Over the past two years, Utopia, whose motto is “Fair pay for every play,” has embarked on a frenetic buying spree of 15 companies, including music tech company Musimap; Lyric Financial, a Nashville-based provider of royalty-backed cash advances; and Proper Music Group, the United Kingdom’s leading independent physical music distributor, which provides distribution services for 1,000-plus indie labels and service companies.
Industry executives don’t quite know what to make of Utopia’s rapid growth, its direction or where exactly the company fits in today’s multifaceted global music business. It’s one of several fintech companies, many backed by venture capitalists, that have penetrated the music business to varying degrees amid the streaming boom. “At its core, Utopia is a royalty tech company,” co-founder and executive chairman Mattias Hjelmstedt tells Billboard in a rare interview. “It’s about fixing the many data gaps in the industry.”
Hjelmstedt says he understands and even agrees with Grainge’s opposition to “pure fintech” companies that “go in and try to optimize [their] revenue versus the rest of the industry.” But that, he insists, is not what Utopia is about. His company uses technology — leveraging what has been described as “a database of more than 213 billion global data points” — to better capture royalties and process them accurately, faster and with greater transparency. That, in turn, will “help all facets of the industry earn more money,” not just Utopia’s slice of it, he says.
“We’re on the side of anyone who owns the copyright, which is a creator, which is an artist, which is also a Universal [Music Group] or a copyright fund or a publisher,” he says. “I don’t think there is a mismatch there [between fintech and artists]. It is actually fully aligned for me to have a clear path from usage to creator.”
Utopia is hardly alone in pitching ways to use tech to give artists more control over their music royalties than they’ve traditionally had with label deals. Hifi, a fintech with backers that include industry executives like Quincy Jones and Capitol Records chair/CEO Michelle Jubelirer — as well as artists Diplo and G-Eazy — is launching an “enhanced royalties acceleration service” that promises to pay artists advances based on predicted streaming royalties. Los Angeles-based beatBread offers funding for existing music catalogs and employs artificial intelligence to help artists secure advances of up to $1 million for unreleased music. And Brazilian fintech company Hurst Capital says it has set up a “hyper-specialized team” to manage the royalties of catalogs it has acquired from sertanejo (Brazilian pop-country) stars like Gusttavo Lima and the late Marília Mendonça.
Hjelmstedt is a Swedish serial entrepreneur known for founding gaming platform Electronic Sports Network, which Electronic Arts acquired in 2012, and co-founding video-on-demand platform Voddler, which filed for bankruptcy in 2018. He co-founded Utopia in 2016 with Thomas Gullberg, basing it in the town of Zug, where around 60 of the company’s staff of 1,000 are based.
Details about Utopia’s finances and funding remain opaque. The company’s only publicly listed investors are Switzerland-based investment firms CV VC and FiveT Fintech (formerly Avaloq Ventures). Hjelmstedt says the firms “are by far not among the largest investors” but declined to reveal any others. Utopia, which he says generates over 100 million euros ($107 million) in revenue a year, recently completed an investment round, but Hjelmstedt declined to discuss figures or what the capital will be used for.
Lately, the company has been characterized by change. In November, Utopia cut its workforce by around 20%, or about 230 jobs, according to a company representative. Hjelmstedt says the job cuts resulted from the global economic downturn coupled with the company’s goal of achieving sustainable growth. A month later, in December, Utopia restructured its business into two separate divisions: Music Services and Royalty Platform. Then in January, Utopia reshuffled its senior leadership, with former CEO Markku Mäkeläinen exiting the company and Hjelmstedt taking over as interim chief executive. (U.K.-based Roberto Neri is CEO of the Music Services division.)
As part of the reorganization, Utopia announced on Feb. 7 that it had sold U.S.-based music database platform ROSTR — which has a directory of artists, managers, booking agents and record labels — back to ROSTR’s founders for an undisclosed sum. Utopia purchased the company in December 2021 to strengthen its direct ties with the artist community. But Hjelmstedt says Utopia will now primarily focus on delivering financial services. He declined to comment on whether there will be further divestments or acquisitions this year, claiming the company will reveal more about future plans, including new product launches, in the coming months.
Utopia’s music services division is headed by U.K.-based former Downtown executive Roberto Neri and includes the acquired companies Proper, Absolute Label Services, Liverpool-based publisher Sentric Music Group and Cinram Novum, one of the U.K.’s leading physical home entertainment suppliers. (Cinram Novum provides warehouse, fulfillment and distribution services to labels, including UMG, Sony Music Entertainment and [PIAS].)
Utopia’s royalty platform arm, which Hjelmstedt oversees, looks after the company’s financial technology services, data operations, copyright and royalty processing.
Hjelmstedt declines to comment on whether dividing Utopia into two separate divisions signals an intention to make the split between distributor and royalty platform permanent. He rejects speculation that Utopia is a tech scale-up looking to capitalize on the growth of the music industry rather than to build a sustainable business. The company’s myriad acquisitions, he says, were made “to understand different parts of the industry better, so we can serve them better with the data.” Despite acquiring a significant chunk of the U.K. music distribution business, he says, it was “never the idea of Utopia to be a distributor.”
“We will never be a collecting society or a [performing rights organization],” says Hjelmstedt. “We will never sell data and we will not take investments from a large strategic player in the industry, and by doing so, we can safeguard the core of what we stand for.”
J-Hope is ready to enter the South Korean military for his mandatory service stint, BigHit Music announced on Sunday (Feb. 26). On the same day, it was also announced that the BTS member will soon release a new single, “On the Street.”
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“We would like to inform our fans that j-hope has initiated the military enlistment process by applying for the termination of his enlistment postponement,” BigHit said in a statement released to the BTS ARMY on Weverse. “We will inform you of further updates in due course. We ask you for your continued love and support for j-hope until he completes his military service and safely returns. Our company will spare no effort in providing support for our artist.”
J-Hope will be the second BTS member, following Jin, to enlist for the nation’s mandatory 18-month military service.
In another post on the same day, BigHit shared an update about J-Hope’s new music release: “We are happy to inform you that BTS member j-hope will be releasing a solo single ‘on the street,’” they wrote.
“On the Street” will be released on March 3 at 2PM KST.
“j-hope wrote the track to share his candid feelings toward his fans,” the message said. “The title ‘on the street’ refers to j-hope’s roots — street dance — from which his dream to become an artist began, and the path the artist and fans will continue to walk together. We hope that j-hope’s ‘on the street’ serves as a meaningful gift to everyone who supports the artist. Please look forward to j-hope’s new song!”
J-Hope’s Disney+ documentary, J-Hope in the Box, is now streaming, and it was just announced that he is the luxury brand Louis Vuitton’s newest ambassador.
See the updates from BigHit Music below.