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Red Rocks Amphitheatre Resumes Concerts With High Hopes, Smaller Crowds
The last major concert in the Denver area before the pandemic shut down the live industry was Post Malone at the Pepsi Center on March 12, 2020. Red Rocks was no different — although it reopened briefly in September for shows by Denver heroes Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats and a capacity crowd of just 175 — but now that vaccinations against COVID-19 are widely available and an increasing amount of research indicates that outdoor gatherings are relatively low risk when masking and social distancing are employed, local public-health officials signed off on reduced-capacity Red Rocks shows. “All of those things taken into account, we feel comfortable letting this move forward,” says Bob McDonald, director of the Denver Department of Public Health and Environ...
Not So Fast: Shuttered Venue Grant Application Relaunch Moves Dates Again
They followed up with additional tweets stating, “It is our top priority to deliver on the promise and commitment to provide economic lifelines to these hardest-hit venues ASAP,” and, “Yet, we understand the challenges a weekend opening would bring and to ensure the greatest number of businesses can apply for these funds, we decided to reschedule. We remain committed to delivering economic aid to this hard-hit sector quickly and efficiently.” The account applicants to visit this link to review a checklist of items they might need for the loans, which can be found here. The relaunch is a result of the SBA’s website crashing on April 8 as venues operators, talent agencies, cinema owners and managers of museums, cultural arts groups and zoos applied for $15 billi...
Spotify Stock Soars 8% Ahead of First-Quarter Earnings
This vote of confidence helps buttress Spotify’s share price, which has lost 26.7% since hitting $387.44 on Feb. 22, valuing the company at $73 billion. That fall was perhaps a sign that investors were too enthusiastic about exclusive podcast deals and that spoken word will help improve Spotify’s margins. Analysts tend to agree that Spotify is the leader in the streaming market, a sentiment CEO Daniel Ek communicated during Spotify’s Feb. 3rd earnings call, calling the shift from linear (one-way) to on-demand (interactive) music a “massive multi-billion user opportunity” accelerated by COVID-19 and that was reachable by “only a handful of companies” in audio. Spotify’s first-quarter numbers probably won’t disappoint, although they might not impress, either. Universal Music Group’s first-qu...
SBA Shares More Details About Shuttered Venues Grant Relaunch
The SBA’s decision to reopen the portal on Saturday, more than two weeks after it crashed upon on launch on April 8, was met with a flurry of negative comments Thursday due to the short advanced notice. But representatives with the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA), which played a key role drafting the $15 billion Shuttered Venue Operators aid package, released a statement supporting the decision to reopen the application process on a weekend day. “Simply put, this is emergency relief that can’t come too soon,” says Audrey Fix Schaefer, NIVA board member and communications director. “Every single day that passes small businesses are receiving eviction notices, all the while $16 billion has been waiting for them. This is a lifeline for thousands of independent venues and promote...
Executive of the Week: CMN CEO Henry Cárdenas
“Never, no one expected that,” Cárdenas tells Billboard. “In fact, Noah [Assad, Bad Bunny’s manager] called me like three days before and said, ‘How many tickets do you think we’ll sell [in presale]?’ He thought it’d be around 150,000. I told him 200,000…. If Bad Bunny puts 50 dates more on sale today, he’ll sell them. In Miami, we sold out his three shows and there were 97,000 people waiting online to buy tickets.” Bad Bunny is arguably the hottest artist in the world right now, and ended 2020 as the most streamed act on Spotify. That he would sell was not in question. But, how did the Chicago-based CMN capitalize on the potential, and how did Cárdenas land the deal? Here, he explains what went into booking this tour when live music still seems so far away for so many. I have to thi...
How Billie Holiday’s Estate Has Led ‘An Afterlife of Tragedy’
“It’s not right that someone who was as awful to Billie Holiday as Louis McKay was would then have control of her likeness and her money,” says Danyel Smith, a former Billboard editor whose Shine Bright: A Personal History of Black Women In Pop is due early next year. “And it’s insane, at the end of the day, control of her money and likeness is in the hands of people who didn’t know her or have a relationship with her.” The last year has been unusually active for Holiday’s estate. She’s the subject of two movies: The United States vs. Billie Holiday, plus the Billie documentary that started streaming on-demand in December. Her haunting recording of the civil rights classic “Strange Fruit” took off during last su...
Shuttered Venue Grant Applications to Resume Over the Weekend
“We have completed rigorous testing and the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant application portal will reopen on April 24,” the SBA announced on Twitter at 9 p.m. EST on Thursday. “We will provide updated documents and guidance tomorrow. Interested applicants should register for an account in advance.” The link to the portal is svograntportal.sba.gov. Since the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant was passed in late December, the SBA has been tasked with creating the program and processes from scratch. Andrea Roebker, a regional communications director at the SBA, told Billboard in March that while the SBA was able to distribute Paycheck Protection Program loans soon after the CARES Act passed in March 2020, those were handled by delegate...
How to Watch Today’s Senate Hearing on App Store Fairness
Apple and Google will take the hot seat at a Senate Judiciary antitrust subcommittee hearing examining the companies’ app stores today (April 21), where Spotify legal official Horacio Gutierrez will testify as a witness. The hearing will address the Silicon Valley tech giants’ power over the digital app market through their app stores. Developers must pay Apple and Google between 15 and 30 percent of their revenue to appear on the companies’ app stores, without a clear alternative to reach consumers. Gutierrez is head of global affairs and chief legal officer at Spotify, which filed an antitrust complaint in the EU in March 2019 alleging that Apple abused its control over which apps appear in its app store to limit competition with Apple Music. You Deserve to Make Mo...
Paul McCartney, Chris Martin Join Pleas for Streaming Royalty Reform
The letter, backed by the Musicians’ Union and U.K. songwriters and composers body The Ivors Academy, is also signed by Bob Geldof, Boy George, Noel Gallagher, Damon Albarn, Jimmy Page and Kate Bush. It comes amid a U.K. Parliamentary probe into the streaming business that has seen major labels’ dominance of the market emerge as a central issue. The inquiry, which is being led by the Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS) Committee, is looking into the economic impact music streaming is having on artists, record labels and the wider music industry. The first stage of the inquiry concluded March 22 with government minister Caroline Dinenage saying she would support a referral of the three biggest music companies — Universal Music, Sony Music and Warner Music — to the CMA. Rou...
MLC Collects $40M for January, Makes First Rights Holders Payments
Overall, the MLC said that the mechanical pool of revenues amounted to slightly more than $53 million in royalties, which means that direct deals between services and publishers account for approximately $13 million. The Music Modernization Act and its regulations allow the services to carve out, or withhold, that portion of royalty funds from the MLC and instead pay them directly to the publisher. What amount is actually paid to the publishers for those direct deals is unknown because a publisher with a direct deal might negotiate a rate higher than the statutory rate; and if they do, that higher amount comes out of the service’s pocket, not the mechanical pool. But even though the MLC doesn’t collect those funds, it still gets the play reports for songs that are involved in those direct ...
Congress Members Call on Biden to Investigate Live Nation
The letter points to a 2018 Government Accountability Office report, which concluded that Live Nation holds more than 80% of the U.S. venue ticket sales market. It goes on to add that the Department of Justice has found that the promoter has repeatedly violated the terms of the agreement over the course of the last 10 years by threatening venues and forcing the bundling of artists with ticketing services. In 2019, Live Nation reached a settlement with the DOJ’s antitrust division agreeing to extend the 2010 consent decree governing the merger of Ticketmaster and Live Nation to 2025 and clarifying rules regarding threats and retaliation against venues that don’t sign with the ticketing giant. “We believe the prior admin...
UTA First Major Agency to Set Optional Return to Office Date
Returning to the office is completely optional for employees. Zimmer clearly states that any staffer who is not yet prepared to return to the office, even if they’re vaccinated, will not have to do so. The agency is requiring those who do come back to have been fully vaccinated, though. Read Zimmer’s note to employees here: With vaccinations rapidly increasing across the nation and California announcing plans to fully reopen by mid-June, I’m pleased to say a return to our UTA offices is near. More details will follow in the coming weeks, but at this point we are planning for a reopening of our Nashville offices on June 1 and our Los Angeles office on June 15. We plan for our offices in London to open on August 31 and New York on September 7. A cross-company team has been consul...
