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Executive Turntable: New Hires at Obama’s Media Company & Warner’s Social Justice Fund
Dan Fierman most recently served as president of Epic Media in Los Angeles, leading the media start-up to acquisition by Vox Media in 2019. Prior to that, he led news coverage at MTV, was the Editorial Director of the pop culture site Grantland and oversaw culture and special packages at GQ. He and Holmes oversaw the launch of The Michelle Obama Podcast and Renegades: Born in the USA, the podcast hosted by President Obama and Bruce Springsteen. Mark R. Wright was an executive at MACRO, where he developed and produced Juel Taylor’s directorial debut, They Cloned Tyrone (Netflix). His slate of projects also includes the Oscar-winning film Judas and the Black Messiah, Alan Yang’s Tigertail and Birth of Cool. He has produced several short films, including an award-winning science fiction film,...
Reservoir Media Stock Stumbles on First Day of Trading
Roth CH Acquisition II shares had a $10 IPO price and briefly exceeded $11 in February. Since then, investors have showed less enthusiasm and with few exceptions have traded below $10 since mid-May. Reservoir, which had revenue estimated at $64 million for its fiscal year ended March 31, is now the fourth publicly traded company that focuses on music rights acquisitions — Hipgnosis Songs Royalty Fund, Round Hill Music Royalty Fund and One Media iP Group are listed on the London Stock Exchange. It is the first to trade in the U.S. and the first led by a female, CEO and founder Golnar Khosrowshahi. “This entry into the public markets is a testament to the growth and bright future that lies ahead within the industry,” Khosrowshahi said in a statement Thursday. “As we focus on our growth...
iHeartMedia Strikes Multiyear Deal With NBA for 20 Podcasts
iHeartMedia has reached a multiyear podcast deal with the NBA that will result in more than 20 podcasts over the next four years, the audio giant said on Wednesday. The podcast deal comes three months after iHeartMedia announced it was creating a podcast network for the NFL as part of a multiyear, exclusive partnership. The NBA’s podcasts, which will be co-produced by iHeartRadio and the NBA, will include a mix of content from the NBA’s archives, player commentary, league news and insider analyses. The first show is expected to premiere this fall, iHeartMedia said. It’s not immediately clear which athletes will participate in the podcasts. You Deserve to Make Money Even When you are looking for Dates Online. So we reimagined what a datin...
Spotify Will Make It Easier to Find ‘What’s New’ by Introducing Personalized New-Release Feed
With over 50,000 hours of content uploaded to Spotify every day, the streaming service is making it easier for users to stay up to date with new releases from their favorite creators. Announced Monday (July 26), What’s New is a new personalized feed that will be added to the platform globally in the coming weeks. It can be found by clicking on a new bell-shaped icon that will be added to the top of the Home tab, which will be updated in real time with new releases from the artists and podcasts users follow on Spotify. When a new track or episode is released, a blue dot will appear on the bell-shaped icon to alert them the next time they sign on. The feed will additionally allow users to conduct more targeted searches by including filters that let them sort for new music releases or ne...
Jason Miller to Lead CTS Eventim’s Expansion Into Asia
Asian touring markets just got more competitive. European promoter and ticketer CTS Eventim is expanding its reach with the new Eventim Live Asia, which will be headquartered out of Singapore with industry veteran Jason Miller as its CEO. Miller previously led all touring activity for Live Nation Entertainment’s Asia and Middle East offices. He will run the division, which is focused on the rapidly growing markets in China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam and Malaysia. “I think CTS is a legitimately visionary company. They are on a roll,” Miller tells Billboard. “They have tripled their revenue in the last 10 y...
Warner Music Gets Upgrade From S&P on Strength of Streaming
Because of these and other factors, S&P lowered its risk assessment for WMG from fair to satisfactory and raised its credit rating from BB to BB+. BB is speculative grade, a notch below investment grade, meaning the company is “less vulnerable in the near-term but faces major ongoing uncertainties to adverse business, financial and economic conditions.” WMG’s share price rose 4.4% to $36.85 on Tuesday, valuing the company at $21.4 billion. Some of Tuesday’s gain can be attributed to the markets’ rebound from Monday’s pessimism about the surge in COVID-19 infections: the Nasdaq and Dow each rose 1.6%. After WMG’s May 2020 IPO, its share price peaked at $39.61 on Feb. 2, 2021. Even as music rights acquisitions remain a hot market with increased competition and companies paying higher mul...
Why Are We Still Measuring Artist Success With a Major Label Yardstick? (Guest Column)
Even with the years-long pattern of independent artists increasing their market share — MIDIA estimated that in 2020, artist direct revenues jumped by nearly 35%, made up more than 5% of the global market and broke the billion-dollar mark — the formula for artist success has been the same for practically a century. The top 1% of performers/entertainers are wealthy, powerful and famous stars and the remaining musicians, songwriters, performers and artists are considered failures. If the music of the 99% does not fit the mold of commercial radio or the hot new app, it doesn’t get past the major label or algorithm gatekeepers, so promoters, brands and marketers ignore it. This has an impact on the collective consciousness of what gets heard but also what is considered “good” or successful. Th...
Bill Ackman on Pivoting UMG Bid: ‘There’s No Business I Have More Confidence In’
In an interview with Billboard, Ackman emphasized that Pershing Square — the hedge fund with $13.7 billion under management, not the SPAC it founded — will step in and acquire a stake in UMG. “Our largest investment is going to be Universal Music Group, so that should tell you something,” he says. “There’s no business I have more confidence in the long-term trajectory of than this company — or the music industry in general. Piracy almost killed this business and streaming has made it better than it was with CDs and records in the ’90s.” Ackman likes that companies such as Apple, Google and Amazon shoulder the load of building the streaming services and acquiring customers, leaving record labels to develop, promote and license their music. “You have the most well capitaliz...
Tencent Music Shares Fell 9.2% This Week, Down 63.2% Since March All-Time High
Tencent Music sits in a web of relationships and ownership stakes with the world’s largest music companies. It has a joint venture with Universal Music Group and an agreement to form a joint record label with Warner Music Group. It also has licensing deals with UMG, WMG, Sony Music and independent label rights group Merlin. What’s more, Tencent Holdings, which owns a majority of Tencent Music, is part of a consortium of investors that owns 20% of Universal Music Group and about 2% of WMG. There is no indication Chinese authorities view Tencent Holdings’ ownership stakes as problematic. Tencent Music owns three of China’s top music streaming apps — QQ, Kuguo and Kuwo — and accounted for 7...
Pandora Expands ‘Billionaires’ Artist Milestone Program with 8 New Genre Stations
Artists who reach the nine-figure mark in the coming months will be added to the appropriate genre stations, with their music featured at the beginning of the station to mark the milestone. Pandora’s Billionaires program launched in 2018 when the service presented artists who had reached the marker with a commemorative plaque. Over the past three years, hundreds of artists have been honored for reaching the coveted figure, including Taylor Swift, Lil Wayne, Mariah Carey, Bad Bunny, Ed Sheeran and The Weeknd. Listeners can find the new stations in the “Billionaires” module on the “For You” section of the Pandora app. The full list of stations is below. Country Billionaires: Featuring music from Jason Aldean, Chris Stapleton, Miranda Lambert, Florida Georgia Line and more. Pop Billionaires: ...
UK Parliament Inquiry Recommends ‘Complete Reset’ of Streaming Business
But the committee’s report goes further, concluding in sweeping fashion that the global streaming model pioneered and dominated by Spotify, Apple, YouTube and Amazon Music, is unsustainable in its current form. “Streaming has undoubtedly helped save the music industry following two decades of digital piracy, but it is clear that what has been saved does not work for everyone,” the committee writes in its 200-page report. “The issues ostensibly created by streaming simply reflect more fundamental, structural problems within the recorded music industry. Streaming needs a complete reset.” In 2020, roughly two-thirds of Spotify’s global streams came from music distributed by the major record labels, Spotify said in a March 19 written submission to the DCMS committee, although that total ...
Venues Won’t Have to Reapply for Supplemental Shuttered Venue Grants
The Shuttered Venue Operators Grant was passed in December and supplemental grants were worked into the bill language to provide additional funding for entertainment businesses that continued to suffer closures into 2021. More than six months after the bill was passed, following failed launches and missed deadlines, venues are slowly receiving the much-needed initial round of funding, with just over $3 billion disbursed as of Monday. Information on how the supplemental grants will work continues to be minimal, but the SBA provided stakeholders with additional details this morning. In addition to year-round entities that lost 70% or more of their revenue in 2020, seasonal events such as annual festivals or amphitheaters that lost 70% or more of their revenue in...
