SiriusXM
Drake Pauses Apollo Theater Concert After Man Falls From Balcony
Drake‘s Sunday night show at the Apollo Theater was momentarily put on pause after a man fell from the lower mezzanine balcony into the audience. “Just gotta make sure somebody’s OK,” the OVO rapper said after a crew member ran onstage to inform him of the fall. The incident occurred about 90 minutes into the show, just as 21 Savage walked out to perform “Rich Flex” and a slew of other Her Loss hits alongside Drake. The pause lasted about 15 minutes as venue staff treated the injured man. “Unfortunately, last evening an incident occurred with an audience member who landed in the orchestra from the lower mezzanine,” the venue said in a statement posted to Instagram on Monday (Jan. 23). “Drake, Apollo and SiriusXM halted the show immediately when learning of a potential fan injury and standa...
8 Best Moments From Drake’s SiriusXM Show at New York’s Apollo Theater
“I’d like to take you on a little journey tonight, if that’s ok?,” Drake asked onstage at the Apollo Theater on Saturday (Jan. 21). After two postponements last fall, the Toronto superstar finally graced the stage at the legendary Harlem venue on Saturday night for his first of two shows there this weekend. In partnership with SiriusXM and his radio show Sound 42, the concert was originally meant to take place on Friday (Nov. 11) but was moved to early December to mourn Takeoff whose untimely death occurred a little over a week prior. The show was then delayed again due to production issues. Twenty-five minutes after his scheduled set time of 9:00 p.m., a white screen lifted to reveal Drake sitting in a bedroom made to look like his old room in his mother’s basement. The other ...
SiriusXM Taps Former Wall Street Journal Marketing Chief for New Subscription Role
SiriusXM has brought on Suzi Watford, the former chief marketing officer for Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal, to oversee the satellite radio giant’s streaming subscription business, the company said on Tuesday. Watford will join SiriusXM in the newly created role of chief growth officer and report to Joe Verbrugge, SiriusXM’s chief commercial officer. Her position will also include oversight of corporate marketing, data and research across SiriusXM and Pandora. “Suzi has repeatedly demonstrated her ability to build and lead talented teams to evolve and grow profitable consumer subscription businesses, and we are thrilled to have her join us,” Verbrugge said in a statement. Watford has spent the majority of her career at Murdoch-controlled media companies like News Corp.’s N...
Garth Brooks’ 24/7 SiriusXM Radio Station to End After 6-Year Run
Six years after its launch, Garth Brooks’ SiriusXM channel, The Garth Channel, will go off the satellite and online radio outlet at midnight Oct. 1. The 24/7 station bowed in September 2016 while Brooks was midway through a multi-year, 390-date arena tour. In 2019, he started a three-year stadium outing that, after a pandemic pause, wraps this weekend in Dublin and sold more than 6.2 million tickets for the North American leg. As the tour winds down, Brooks says he felt it was time to close the radio chapter as well. “[The Garth Channel] sold a ton of tickets for us on the [arena] tour and a ton of tickets for us on the stadium tour and now the drive for what it was and what it stood for is coming to a close,” he tells Billboard. “We plan this purposefully for all our stuff to b...
The Ledger: How Do Music Executives’ Pay Compare to Other Entertainment Leaders?
The Ledger is a weekly newsletter about the economics of the music business sent to Billboard Pro subscribers. An abbreviated version of the newsletter is published online. Music industry executives at publicly traded companies are paid well – but they’re not the only ones. As Billboard reported in the inaugural Money Makers list of music’s highest-paid executives and stockholders at publicly traded companies, 10 business leaders earned nearly or more than $9 million in 2021. Of those, most of their compensation came from stock awards and stock options, not base salary or performance bonuses. For example, only 5% of SiriusXM CEO Jennifer Witz’s $32.6 million total compensation came from a guaranteed salary. As is common practice among publicly traded corporations, SiriusXM tied most of Wit...
Music’s Most Compensated: 5 Top Money Makers You May Not Know
Kang Hyo-won, Yoon Seok-jun (aka Yenzo Loon) and Kim Shin-gyu are hardly marquee names in the music business, but they accounted for three of its five largest paydays in 2021, according to Billboard Pro‘s inaugural Executive Money Makers ranking — a breakdown of executive compensation and stock ownership at publicly traded companies. All three are valued members of HYBE, the South Korean entertainment giant behind BTS, Tomorrow X Together, NewJeans and other K-pop acts, and in 2016, their efforts turning the company into a global success were rewarded with stock options that netted them the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars when the company went public last year. Stock options are often used to incentivize and reward employees when a company is privately held. In a statement to Bil...
Music’s Top Money Makers: The Highest-Paid Executives and Stockholders at Publicly Traded Companies
Kang Hyo-won is not a marquee name in the music industry. The South Korean producer is better known as Pdogg, the studio wizard behind hits by K-pop supergroup BTS and other acts on the roster of Korean entertainment company HYBE. Because Kang played a key role in HYBE’s global success, his employer gave him 128,000 stock options in 2016 that turned into about $35 million when Kang exercised them. (All currency conversions to U.S. dollars in this story are based on the average 2021 exchange rate.) That made Kang the second-highest-paid music industry executive last year among those whose earnings are publicly disclosed. Yoon Seok-jun (aka Lenzo Yoon) and Kim Shin-gyu, co-CEO of HYBE America and chief artist management officer, respectively, also benefited from HYBE going public. Yoon nette...
SiriusXM’s Senior Director, Country Programming JR Schumann to Exit
JR Schumann, senior director of country programming at SiriusXM, will exit his role July 15, the company has announced. SiriusXM’s vp, programming, Darrin Smith, will then oversee those channels on an interim basis. “After almost seven years, I’ve decided to leave SiriusXM and pursue other opportunities and adventures,” Schumann said in a statement. “I’m beyond proud of everything my team and I have accomplished and wish everyone at SiriusXM nothing but continued success.” Schumann joined SiriusXM in December 2015, and his role included overseeing SiriusXM’s country and Christian programming, as well as the Elvis Radio channel. Prior to his role at SiriusXM, Schumann served as operations manager for Cumulus Media’s Dallas stations, as well as program director duties for country stations KS...
Florence + the Machine Cover John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy” for SiriusXM: Stream
Florence + the Machine swung by the SiriusXM studios recently to cover the John Lennon classic “Jealous Guy.” Stream the performance below. During the session, Florence Welch and her band imbue the 1971 single with a dreamy, acoustic quality as she plays with the melody and warbles, “I was dreaming of the past/ And my heart was beating fast/ I began to lose control/ I began to lose control/ I didn’t mean to hurt you/ I’m sorry that I made you cry/ Oh no, I didn’t want to hurt you/ I’m just a jealous guy.” The former Beatle first recorded the track in 1971 as an album cut for his sophomore solo offering Imagine, but it became a belated hit a decade later when Roxy Music crafter their own version of the song as a tribute to the fallen singer upon his 1980 death. Advertisement Related Video A...
Harry Styles Talks Showing His ‘Bum Bum’ on Film, Denies ‘Daylight’ Is About Taylor Swift on Howard Stern
Harry Styles visited Howard Stern’s SiriusXM show on Wednesday morning (May 18) to perform a pair of tracks from his upcoming Harry’s House album, talk about getting naked on screen and reveal his reaction to Will Smith’s Oscar’s attack on Chris Rock. Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news But, of course, the things Stern was most interested in was whether the sensual House song “Cinema” — which includes the line “if you’re getting yourself wet for me I guess you’re all mine” — is about the singer’s paramour: actress/director Olivia Wilde. “Most of the time when I write songs they kind of start out as, like, I guess mine,” Styles said while measuring his words. “It’s important to write from whatever you’re going through at the time,” he added, saying ...
SiriusXM Celebrates Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month With ZHU, JVNA, More
It’s officially Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, and to commemorate the occasion, SiriusXM has announced a slate of special programming that highlights the community’s electronic dance music artists. Steve Aoki’s Remix Radio, for example, will broadcast an exclusive mix on Channel 104 from May 25-31. Featuring tracks by all Asian producers, it will play alongside music by the likes of ZHU, Qrion and Wax Motif. To mirror Aoki’s 2021 “APIDA ON AIR” initiative, Elephante and JVNA will appear as guest DJs, among others. Meanwhile on Channel 305, 88rising Radio has invited AAPI artists like Stephanie Poetri, Ilima-Lei Macfarland and Tiffany Day to hop on the air as guest hosts throughout the entire month of May. Notably, 88rising ...
EBIDTA, AOI, OIBDA, WTF? Why Companies Report Different Financial Metrics
With music companies’ fourth quarter earnings starting to roll out this week, news reports have been filled with the usual alphabet soup of accounting jargon, abbreviations and acronyms. It can get confusing, especially since some of the most visible financial metrics don’t have strict definitions. Spotify, Warner Music Group, Live Nation, SiriusXM and other companies publicly traded in the U.S. adhere to what are called Generally Accepted Accounting Principles set by the Financial Accounting Standards Board. GAAP standards allow investors to reasonably trust companies will fairly represent their business results using the same rules and language. Left to creatively interpret their own finances, companies would have different approaches to measuring their revenue, expenses and liabilities....
