International
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The pace that global music industry revenues have been growing is expected to slow this year, as the industry is “on the cusp of another major structural change” stemming from the changing price of streaming subscriptions, artificial intelligence and new payment models, according to a closely watched report from Goldman Sachs.
In its latest Music in the Air report, published Wednesday, Goldman’s research analysts say they expect global music industry revenues in 2023 to grow by 7.1%, down from an 8% growth projection last year, as live music and publishing growth rates return to more normal ranges of 6% and 8% growth this year respectively. The compound annual growth rate for revenues from 2023 to 2030 ticked up slightly to 7.3%, from 7.1% last year, and streaming revenue is expected to hold steady at an 11%-growth rate, according to the report.
That indicates steady and even more broadbased growth, researchers say, but the industry is about to face a fresh wave of massive changes.
“We believe the music industry is on the cusp of another major structural change given the persistent under-monetisation of music content, outdated streaming royalty payout structures and the deployment of Generative AI,” Goldman researchers wrote in the new report. “In the wake of these developments, we believe a more coordinated and collaborative response from the main stakeholders will be key to ensure that the industry not only continues on its path of sustainable growth but also captures new business opportunities.”
Echoing a frequent refrain of music industry executives, Goldman’s researchers say monetization of music content is way behind the rate of consumption. They estimate that the revenue earned per audio stream has fallen 20% over the past five years, and that the revenue companies earn per hour of music streamed on Spotify is four times lower than for Netflix.
They estimate that up to $4.2 billion in potential revenue could be gained over time by charging different audience segments, such as super fans, more for subscriptions.
Goldman analysts also wrote that the current method of treating all streams lasting less than 30 seconds the same and paying content owners a pro-rata share of streams “needs to evolve…to cope with dilution of market share.” This weakening, they say, is coming from the fast-growing number of songs uploaded to digital service provider (DSP) platforms, fraudulent and artificial streams and “the propensity of algorithms to push lower royalty content.”
Researchers also sounded a positive note on the potential for generative AI to lower barriers for artists, boost music creation capabilities and improve industry productivity overall, with the major music companies best positioned to benefit.
“We believe the quality of the input to large language models is critical and the largest owners of proprietary (intellectual property) are best positioned to leverage the technology,” researchers wrote, noting the industry will need to be aligned in controlling the deployment of that tech.
The report also notes that, despite fears of market dillution from the rush of new content, Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment both maintained their recorded music market share in 2022, with only Warner Music Group losing market share — about half a percentage point — to independents.
“We continue to expect modest dilution of market share over time, mostly driven by the revenue mix shift towards EM, although we believe that the major record labels will continue to expand their presence in EMs through partnerships, investments and bolt-on M&A,” researchers wrote.
Spotify maintains its clear lead among the DSPs with 34.8% of total global market share in 2022, although it edged 60 basis points lower. YouTube Music was the “major gainer,” gaining about 3 percentage points of market share over the past three years to hold market share in 2022.
Lucy Dickins, the highly respected agent of Adele, Mumford & Sons and Olivia Rodrigo who serves as global head of contemporary music and touring at William Morris Endeavor (WME), has been named this year’s recipient of the U.K.’s Music Industry Trusts Award (MITS).
Dickins — whose clients also include Stormzy, Rex Orange County, SAULT, Little Simz, James Blake, Jamie T, Hot Chip, Bryan Ferry, Mabel and Laura Marling — will receive the award on Nov. 6 at a gala ceremony at London’s Grosvenor House Hotel. The event will benefit U.K. charities the BRIT Trust and Nordoff Robbins.
“I’m truly humbled by this recognition and honoured by the many colleagues and clients I’ve gotten to work with throughout my career and at WME,” Dickins said in a statement.
MITS Award committee co-chair Toby Leighton-Pope said Dickins’ “impact on the industry is undeniable and her contributions continue to shape the industry landscape.”
Dickins regularly appears on Billboard’s Women in Music, International Power Players and Power 100 lists.
Previous recipients of the annual MITS award include Lucian Grainge, Ahmet Ertegun, Simon Cowell, Michael Eavis, Elton John & Bernie Taupin, Annie Lennox, Roger Daltrey, Rob Stringer, Emma Banks, broadcaster and DJ Pete Tong and Dickins’ uncle, legendary British music executive Rob Dickins. Last year’s MITS award was given to entrepreneur Jamal Edwards, who had died earlier in the year at the age of 31. It was the first posthumous award given in the event’s 32-year history.
Dickins relocated to WME’s Beverly Hills office from London last year after being promoted to global head of contemporary music and touring at the agency, making her the first woman to lead a talent agency’s music division. Her responsibilities include overseeing all aspects of the agency’s contemporary live business.
Last year, Adele played two sold-out shows at London’s BST Hyde Park Festival in front of 130,000 fans. That was followed by her delayed Las Vegas residency, which began in November and has been extended to wrap this fall. In total, WME’s music division says it booked more than 40,000 live dates in 2022.
Prior to joining WME in 2019 — initially as head of its U.K. music division — Dickins spent more than 20 years at International Booking Talent (ITB), the London-based agency that was founded in 1978 by her father Barry Dickins and his business partner Rod MacSween.
Dickins’ lineage in the music business goes back to her grandfather, Percy Dickins, who created the weekly magazine New Music Express (NME). Her uncle Rob Dickins served as chairman of Warner Music UK for 15 years, while her brother, Jonathan Dickins, is chief executive of September Management, which counts Adele, Glass Animals and producer Rick Rubin among its clients.
Chinese pop star G.E.M. is looking to grow her Latin American fan base — and break the mold for Chinese artists — by putting out a full-length Spanish version of her latest album, Revelation. And the idea to do it didn’t come from an executive or carefully plotted strategy by her new label, Warner Music China, which released the original Mandarin version in September.
“It wasn’t necessarily something we sat down with her and sort of guided her towards,” Simon Robson, Warner Music Group’s president, international, for recorded music, tells Billboard. “It was more that she wanted to do this, and we wanted to support her.”
Robson says G.E.M.’s Revelación, which Warner Music plans to release on July 10, will be the first Spanish-language album by a major Chinese music artist at any label (as far as WMG is aware). The experiment, the executive says, is “quite indicative of what’s happening with music at the moment and just how impactful Spanish music is becoming.”
Like her Chinese original, the Spanish album — which G.E.M. says she wrote on her own, after essentially teaching herself the language — will feature 14 songs. After debuting in 2008 with her self-titled EP G.E.M, the Shanghai born, Hong Kong-raised singer, whose real name is Gloria Tang Sze-wing (G.E.M. stands for Get Everybody Moving), became one of the top-selling female artists in Asia. Often dubbed China’s Taylor Swift, she holds the record for most-viewed music video on YouTube among all Chinese artists with “Light Years Away” (267 million views), the Chinese theme song for the sci-fi movie “Passengers.”
“It has been an incredible journey working on this project as I do not speak Spanish, but I was determined to fulfill a prophecy that was made to me 10 years ago that one day I would sing in the language,” G.E.M. says in a press release announcing Revelación. “After receiving support from South America for my Chinese album Revelation, I taught myself Spanish and wrote the entire album by myself.”
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A devout Christian, the singer rose to fame in 2014 after appearing on the TV competition show, “I Am A Singer 2.” Her second-place finish boosted her popularity in mainland China. She also received a nomination for an MTV Europe Music Award for Best Mainland China & Hong Kong Act and in 2016 Forbes named her to its 30 Under 30, the only Asian artist featured on the list. She composes songs in Cantonese and Mandarin, and also speaks English.
G.E.M. signed with Warner Music China last July, after a sticky separation from her Hong Kong-based label, Hummingbird Music, which sued her in 2019 to enforce their 2014 contract, which the label said was valid until 2022. Hummingbird was seeking HK $120 million ($15.3 million) in damages, according to Chinese media reports. G.E.M. filed a countersuit for unspecified damages, claiming Hummingbird had failed to fulfill its contractual duties. Both parties were seeking exclusive rights to her copyrighted works, including her stage name. (It is unclear if the suits have been resolved. A WMG spokesperson says he does not have any information about the situation.)
Revelation, G.E.M.’s seventh studio album, is named after the New Testaments’s Book of Revelation. In the wake of the pandemic last summer, the artist found herself prone to melancholy and other negative emotions, and developed the habit of praying, she told Billboard China. Her album was a “direct dialogue between me and heaven,” she said. “I write letters to heaven, and they write back. This is what gradually gave shape to the concept behind Revelation.”
Warner Music released two songs from the album every week — accompanied by videos — for seven weeks leading up to Sept. 22. G.E.M. began noticing that user-generated content and remakes of the song in local languages by Spanish-speaking content creators were appearing on social media platforms, particularly in South America. “Whether it was due to the album’s themes or its vibes, it was evident that it was connecting strongly with Spanish speakers globally,” a WMG spokesperson says. So, she decided to learn Spanish and convert the songs into Spanish “to better share her message and music with this fanbase.”
While the plan is still in its preliminary stages, G.E.M. is planning to perform the Spanish version of the song throughout the next year, with live performances in Latin America, the spokesperson tells Billboard.
Robson says WMG currently has no plans to release any other Chinese artists’ albums in Spanish. “But I think that obviously there is an element of seeing how successful this album is,” he says. “It’s something I wouldn’t be surprised if we see more of just because Spanish music, in the broadest terms, is becoming increasingly influential around the world.”
The Warner Music executive acknowledged that there is an element of risk for G.E.M. and the label with the Spanish project but declined to define what success would look like for the artist. “It’s more about building her fan base in Latin America,” he says. “It’s step by step, really.”
WMG continues to lean into Latin music, at a time when the genre is exploding globally. Between 2020 and 2022, Latin music grew 55.29% in album consumption in the U.S., according to Luminate, more than double the overall industry’s 21.61%.
Robson points to recent tracks like Peso Pluma’s remix of Yng Lvcas’ “La Bebe,” which is holding at No. 16 on the Billboard Hot 100 this week, and the upcoming album or EP from Mexican rapper Natanael Cano, which is scheduled to drop at the end of June, as signs of Warner Music’s efforts on the Latin front. (Yng Lvcas performed last week at a songwriting camp in Madrid organized by Warner Music Spain and Warner Chappell Music Spain, part of an effort by the company, Robson says, to host more joint writing camps for both publishing and recorded music.)
Two years ago, the label named former Universal Music Group executive Alejandro Duque as president of Warner Music Latin America. Duque helped oversee the release of Anitta’s Versions of Me, whose signature single, “Envolver,” reached No. 2 on the Billboard Global 200. But now the Brazilian pop star is gone, after separating with the label in April and signing with UMG’s Republic Records, a definite blow to WMG.
“We’re already starting to build up our roster [in Brazil],” Robson says, noting the recent signing of Brazilian urban funk artist Kayblack.
More broadly, “when you look back two years prior, although we were sort of active, [it is] nothing like to the degree we are now, and are not having the success we have,” Robson says. “Alejandro is an incredibly strong executive and we’re trying to support him as much as possible.”
Two years after the pandemic and its temporary shutdown of concerts and many stores and restaurants devastated the collective management organizations that license public performance royalties for songwriters and publishers, some of those CMOs are reporting record-setting financial results. In April, German society GEMA and the United Kingdom’s PRS both collected and distributed their highest amounts ever. And on June 21, French collective management society SACEM announced that it had collected €1.41 billion ($1.54 billion) in 2022, 34% more than in 2021, and distributed €1.06 billion ($1.15 billion) — a 19% increase over the previous year. Both numbers represent new highs — both for SACEM and at least for European societies.
“Thanks to the resumption of concerts, the explosion of digital, the new agreements signed with the many users of SACEM’s repertoire, and the strategic shift undertaken in its transformation plan, SACEM had a record year in terms of both collections and royalties distributed,” said CEO Céclile Rap-Veber in the organization’s announcement. “These results demonstrate, once again, our ability to adapt and strengthen our expertise in a highly competitive and rapidly changing sector.”
For SACEM, as for all CMOs, some of the increase in revenue and distributions comes from the return of live concerts, which are a significant source of royalty revenue. But the success also reflects the growth of streaming, as well as the ability of CMOs to negotiate better prices for the compositions they license. It’s also important to note that SACEM’s results will not just affect French composers and publishers: CMOs now compete to represent the rightsholders for online use in most countries, excluding the U.S., and SACEM licenses the work of composers around the world, as well as the repertoire of Universal Music Publishing Group
SACEM, the oldest music collecting society, is setting the pace for its rivals. Its collections of €1.41 billion ($1.54 billion) are higher than those of GEMA, which in 2022 took in 1.18 billion euros ($1.25 billion), and PRS, which had revenue of 836.2 million pounds ($1.04 billion).
Direct comparisons are inexact, however, since all of the CMOs use different accounting procedures. (The two biggest U.S. CMOs, ASCAP and BMI, are also constrained in their negotiations by antitrust consent decrees.) SACEM, for example, counts money it collected and distributed in 2022, but since it takes some time to distribute funds, the money it pays out trails slightly. This implies that distributions will rise in the first part of next year. “In 2023, taking into account collections in the second half of 2022 and the first half of 2023, we expect to reach a new distribution record,” SACEM said in its announcement.
SACEM also lowered its expenses. Its ratio of operating expenses to collections was a low of 11.65%, down 3.15 points from 2021. As competition among CMOs heats up — especially between SACEM and the ICE hub run by GEMA, PRS and the Swedish society STIM — all of the societies are trying to cut costs.
In 2022, for the second year in a row, online was the biggest source of royalties — up 38% to €493 million ($538.27 million). The second largest category of revenue was television and radio, which accounted for €353.1 million ($385.56 million), up 19%. General royalties contributed €327 million ($357.06) — up 93% partly due to the return of the live music business.
The financial results only include SACEM’s core operations of collecting public performance and mechanical royalties for composers and music publishers, both in France and for online uses in most countries around the world. They do not include SACEM’s neighboring rights revenue from television and radio play of sound recordings, or the subsidiaries like the one it operates to license the neighboring rights of newspapers and periodicals when their works are used by online companies like Google and Facebook.
Street Mob Records has signed a worldwide deal with Cinq Music to distribute the label and expand its opportunities in branding, sponsorships, merchandising and synchronization. The deal will also include new talent discovery for Street Mob Records.
Founded by Fuerza Regida’s frontman Jesús Ortiz Paz (a.k.a. JOP), Street Mob Records’ artists include Chino Pacas, Calle 24, Ángel Ureta, Chuy Montana, Linea Personal and more rising regional Mexican music — or música mexicana as it is also called — acts.
“We have worked with Cinq for years and know that they’re committed to the genre,” said Paz in a statement to Billboard Español. “It’s only natural that we should partner with them to grow and expand Street Mob – combining their infrastructure, experience, and reach with our talent.”
“We bet on people, not just music, and it’s obvious that Jesus Ortiz Paz is going to carry his success as an artist into his label,” added Cinq Music president Barry Daffurn. “We are excited to team up with Street Mob Records to accelerate their growth. Cinq already brings billions of streams a month to the music world – now, we’re going to add incredible fuel to that fire with these important artists.”
Since 2018, Cinq Music has also been working with Rancho Humilde — Fuerza Regida’s label — another independent label at the forefront of música mexicana’s recent growth.
“Regional Mexican [music] is one of the hottest and fastest genres in the world right now, so to have that relationship with someone like Jesús means a lot to us,” continued Daffurn. “From the time we first started working in regional Mexican music, and the first time I sat down with Jimmy [Humilde] of Rancho Humilde, our goal was to bring this music global. The vision at that point was not to make it regional Mexican music, but more música mexicana, expanding it outside that network, to all the countries outside of [Latin America.] Corridos are leading that global expansion.”
Earlier this month, Street Mob Records and Cinq Music teamed up to release Chino Pacas’ “Yo Preferí Chambear,” which was the premiere of their new partnership. The video already racked up 2.1 million views on YouTube since it dropped 11 days ago.
In March, Chino Pacas entered the Billboard Hot 100 with “El Gordo Trae El Mando,” the artist’s first entry in the historic, all-genres chart.
“We’re operating as a distributor, from a technical standpoint, but as a company, we don’t work with everyone. The artists and labels that we do work with are very high touch,” said Daffurn. “We’re helping them with administrative support, full service marketing, and there’s money involved to make investments so they can build their own infrastructure and grow that way.”
Fuerza Regida earned its first entry on Billboard Hot 100 in January with “Bebe Dame” alongside Grupo Frontera, a romantic cumbia jam with a grupera swing that peaked at No. 25. Since then, they’ve placed three other tracks on the all-genres chart, “Ch y La Pizza” with Natanael Cano, “Igualito a Mi Apá” with Peso Pluma, and their latest “TQM” on their own.
LONDON — Amid increasing concern among artists, songwriters, record labels and publishers over the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the music industry, European regulators are finalizing sweeping new laws that will help determine what AI companies can and cannot do with copyrighted music works.
On Wednesday (June 14), Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) voted overwhelmingly in favor of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act with 499 votes for, 28 against and 93 abstentions. The draft legislation, which was first proposed in April 2021 and covers a wide range of AI applications, including its use in the music industry, will now go before the European Parliament, European Commission and the European Council for review and possible amendments ahead of its planned adoption by the end of the year.
For music rightsholders, the European Union’s (EU) AI Act is the world’s first legal framework for regulating AI technology in the record business and comes as other countries, including the United States, China and the United Kingdom, explore their own paths to policing the rapidly evolving AI sector.
The EU proposals state that generative AI systems will be forced to disclose any content that they produce which is AI-generated — helping distinguish deep-fake content from the real thing — and provide detailed publicly available summaries of any copyright-protected music or data that they have used for training purposes.
“The AI Act will set the tone worldwide in the development and governance of artificial intelligence,” MEP and co-rapporteur Dragos Tudorache said following Wednesday’s vote. The EU legislation would ensure that AI technology “evolves and is used in accordance with the European values of democracy, fundamental rights, and the rule of law,” he added.
The EU’s AI Act arrives as the music business is urgently trying to respond to recent advances in the technology. The issue came to a head in April with the release of “Heart on My Sleeve,” the now-infamous song uploaded to TikTok that is said to have been created using AI to imitate vocals from Drake and The Weeknd. The song was quickly pulled from streaming services following a request from Universal Music Group, which represents both artists, but not before it had racked up hundreds of thousands of streams.
A few days before “Heart on My Sleeve” become a short-lived viral hit, UMG wrote to streaming services, including Spotify and Apple Music, asking them to stop AI companies from accessing the label’s copyrighted songs “without obtaining the required consents” to “train” their machines. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has also warned against AI companies violating copyrights by using existing music to generate new tunes.
If the EU’s AI Act passes in its present draft form, it will strengthen supplementary protections against the unlawful use of music in training AI systems. Existing European laws dealing with text and data-mining copyright exceptions mean that rightsholders will still technically need to opt out of those exceptions if they want to ensure their music is not used by AI companies that are either operating or accessible in the European Union.
The AI Act would not undo or change any of the copyright protections currently provided under EU law, including the Copyright Directive, which came into force in 2019 and effectively ended safe harbor provisions for digital platforms in Europe.
That means that if an AI company were to use copyright-protected songs for training purposes — and publicly declare the material it had used as required by the AI Act — it would still be subject to infringement claims for any AI-generated content it then tried to commercially release, including infringement of the copyright, legal, personality and data rights of artists and rightsholders.
“What cannot, is not, and will not be tolerated anywhere is infringement of songwriters’ and composers’ rights,” said John Phelan, director general of international music publishing trade association ICMP, in a statement. The AI Act, he says, will ensure “special attention for intellectual property rights” but further improvements to the legislation “are there to be won.”
An American musician with the Russian rock group LoviNoch (Catch the Night) has been arrested in Moscow on suspicion of drug trafficking, according to media reports.
Michael Travis Leake, whose Instagram account identifies him as the band’s singer (his last post was on Feb. 3), is suspected of selling mephedrone, a drug with similar effects to cocaine and MDMA, CNN and the Associated Press reported, citing Russian media reports and a statement on Telegram from a Moscow.
Leake faces charges for the distribution or production of drugs, which carry a sentence of up to 20 years in prison. A Moscow court has ordered him to be held for two months in pre-trial detention, the reports say.
CNN reported that Russian media outlets, including Ren TV, a tabloid outlet, published a video of Leake’s arrest at his home and a mug shot from a Russian police station on Thursday (June 8). “I don’t understand why I’m here. I don’t admit guilt, I don’t believe I could have done what I’m accused of because I don’t know what I’m accused of,” Leake reportedly said.
A former paratrooper with the U.S. military who has lived in Moscow since 2010, Leake appeared on a 2014 episode of Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown in Moscow and St. Petersburg after being handpicked by Bourdain to appear on the show. In the episode, he half-joked that the KGB was listening in on their conversation and tailing Bourdain.
The episode’s producer, Darya Tarasova, told CNN that Leake and his friends were vocal critics of Russian state censorship and advocates for free speech in the country.
The U.S. State Department confirmed Leake’s detention in a statement sent to Billboard, with a spokesperson writing, “The Department of State takes seriously its commitment to assist U.S. citizens abroad. It is our standard practice to reach out to the families of U.S. citizens detained overseas as soon as we are provided permission by the individual. We have attempted to reach out to Mr. Leake’s family. We stand ready to provide all appropriate consular assistance to Mr. Leake and his family.”
On Sunday, the State Department told CNN that U.S. embassy officials had attended Leake’s arraignment the day prior. “We will continue to monitor the case closely,” a State Department spokesperson told the outlet.
Leake is the latest American to be detained by Russian officials since the country’s military forces invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Punitive economic sanctions by the United States and its Western allies have further strained tensions with Russia.
In another drug-related case, WNBA star Brittney Griner was arrested the month of the invasion after vape canisters containing cannabis oil were found in her luggage at a Moscow airport. A Russian court sentenced her to nine years in prison, but she was released in December in exchange for U.S.-imprisoned Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout.
And in March, Russian officials detained Wall Street Journal correspondent Evan Gershkovich, accusing him of espionage, which he denies. On May 23, a Russian court extended his arrest by three months.
Plans are afoot for a “modern reimagining” of the 1985 classic “We Are the World” — dubbed “We Are the World NOW” — as a multi-country, live recording and televised music event. In the words of the project’s producer, Jeffrey Weber: “We are taking “We Are the World NOW” to the world.”
Separate recordings of the song will be produced in Korea, China, Japan, Australia, England, Italy, France, Germany, Brazil, Mexico, Spain and one or more African countries. Additional countries may be announced later.
The original 1985 recording of the humanitarian anthem “We Are the World,” by USA for Africa, was designed to alleviate starvation on the African continent. With “We Are the World NOW,” “a percentage of the revenue from the sale of the recordings and associated products will be split between a noted charity in each country devoted to ending world hunger and a third-party charity devoted to the same goals on a global basis,” according to a statement.
“We Are the World” — co-written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie and produced by Quincy Jones — was a global smash in 1985. It topped the Billboard Hot 100 for four weeks and went on to win Grammys for record and song of the year. “We Are the World 25″ — a cover version by another all-star grouping, Artists for Haiti — reached No. 2 on the Hot 100 in 2010, though it didn’t have anywhere near the same cultural impact as its predecessor. That one was produced by Jones, Richie, RedOne, Mervyn Warren, Patti Austin, Humberto Gatica, Wyclef Jean and Rickey Minor.
Weber says that he has not yet connected with Richie, the Jackson estate or Jones about the project. He wouldn’t need permission, beyond a compulsory license, to cover the song, but adds, “Once there is a broadcaster in place, we would have to strike a deal for publishing rights to the original song with Lionel as well as the Jackson estate if the project were to be shown on any device that has a visual image, such as a DVD, television, computer screen, movie theater, etc.”
The project’s creator and executive producer is Sunny Ogbamichael, a Korean entrepreneur. “Never before in our history are we, as a people, more divided on so many levels,” she said in a statement. “We are divided socially, economically, racially, religiously and politically. In what I hope will be a unifying effort, we are producing reimagined and modernized versions of the song, ‘We Are the World,’ in over a dozen countries, while aligning with indigenous charity partners dedicated to ending world hunger.”
Pre-production is set to begin on July 1, at which time Weber will start to gather musicians and singers from each country. The first recording session is expected to be in Seoul, South Korea in the first quarter of 2024.
Each country’s session will be recorded live, but not on the same day.
Weber says the “We Are the World NOW” live event series will be recorded in over a dozen countries: “We are assembling the finest local arrangers, musicians and vocalists in each country to record contemporary versions of the song in the language of each country and incorporating the indigenous instruments of each country. The project will be recorded live, in world-class studios in each country.”
To assist the various arrangers in each country, Weber will initially record a modern take on the original song that can be augmented by the arrangers in each country or used as an example for each country’s selected arranger to create their own arrangement. Weber’s recording will feature a band that Weber has assembled, including Gregg Bissonette (Ringo Starr), Matt Bissonette (Elton John), Tariqh Akoni (Josh Groban), Dapo Torimiro (John Legend) and Troy Laureta (Ariana Grande). The song will also feature rappers, including Prodigal Sunn (Wu-Tang Clan, Sunz of Man) and Anacron.
“I expect that each country’s arranger will have a different approach to what a modern version of the song will be,” says Weber. “I am going to leave the arrangement up to each arranger, but when you add the indigenous instruments to the mix, it promises to be interesting, at least. I do expect rap to be a part of some of the versions. We will be doing a symphonic version of [the arrangement] in China which will be arranged and conducted by Christina Liang.”
Weber has worked as a concert, event and music festival producer and has also produced hundreds of albums. He teamed with Morgan Ames to produce the album Diane Schuur and the Count Basie Orchestra, which was a double Grammy winner in 1988 for best jazz vocal performance, female (for Diane Schuur) and best instrumental arrangement accompanying vocals (for arranger Frank Foster).
Grammy and Emmy-winning engineer, Clark Germain, will record and mix the entire project. Germain won a Grammy in 2004 for best jazz instrumental album, individual or group for his work on Wayne Shorter’s Alegría. He won an Emmy in 2017 as a scoring mixer on Amazon’s Mozart in the Jungle, which was awarded outstanding sound mixing for a comedy or drama series (half-hour) and animation.
Broadcast and distribution partners for “We Are the World NOW” have yet to be finalized.
HYBE is reportedly in talks with investors to raise around $380 million (500 billion won) to fund acquisitions outside of the South Korean entertainment market, according to a report by Bloomberg. The agency and entertainment company is exploring taking on strategic and financial investments in exchange for equity, the outlet reported Thursday, citing sources who […]
Three HYBE employees could be prosecuted for insider trading in South Korea for allegedly using non-public information about K-pop group BTS’ planned hiatus before the news was given to investors, according to multiple reports out of South Korea. South Korea’s Financial Supervisory Service (FSS), the equivalent of the Securities Exchange Commission in the U.S., […]