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Today's music business news

TOP STORY

Indie labels suggest delaying Spotify's royalty payout revamp to allow proper consultation

IMPALA - the pan-European organisation for the independent music community - has asked Spotify if it can suspend its big revamp to the way royalties are calculated each month, in order to allow more debate about the changes within the music community.

That request comes at the top of a list of questions for Spotify about the changes it announced last month. Questions which, IMPALA says, will "assist Spotify in reforming its system, in a way that benefits the independent community, including the artists of today and tomorrow".

"IMPALA shares the view of streaming companies that the model created by Spotify in 2008 needs to be rethought", says Mark Kitcatt, CEO of Everlasting Records and Chair of the trade body's Streaming Reform Group. However, he adds, "The first test for change must be that it is understood to be fair and reasonable by all participants".

Independent labels, like artists and songwriters, are frustrated that Spotify is implementing its changes without much consultation of the music community beyond the major record companies.

As a result of those changes, Spotify will treat functional audio like white noise and bird song differently when allocating revenue to individual tracks each month. And, more controversially, it is introducing a 1000 play threshold for all music - so that any track must have been played at least 1000 times in the previous year to be allocated any money at all.

The changes are being made under pressure from the majors. That said, indies and music-makers have been raising concerns about the current streaming business model for years and some of the changes deal with those issues. However, some of the changes have divided opinion in the wider music community. And many are annoyed at the lack of consultation.

The 1000 play threshold is a particular focus in IMPALA’s questions, which you can read in full here. The trade group seeks clarity on how the threshold will work and data about the potential impact, and also proposes a number of refinements.

It also raises the competition law implications of freezing grassroots artists out of monetisation and asks "has Spotify considered the potential mental health impact on artists whose repertoire could be qualified as a failure under the new system?"

IMPALA also wants Spotify to respond to its owns proposals for reforming the streaming business model, which it published in 2021 and updated earlier this year. "What are Spotify's views on the proposals outlined in IMPALA's plan on how to change allocation of revenues?” it asks. “Can these also be integrated into the reform efforts?"

Of course, the extent to which any other proposals can be considered - or refinements to the 1000 play threshold can be discussed - depends very much on the answer to that first crucial question: "Can Spotify suspend the implementation of these new policies to accommodate further debate?"

Given that the streaming firm presented its changes last month very much as a fait accompli, the answer to that question will be particularly interesting.

ONE LINERS

One Liners: Griff x Chris Martin, Laufey, TuneCore + more

DEALS

Dutch music publisher Next Era Music has announced a deal with Downtown Music to use its publishing administration services. "We are very excited about the endless possibilities that this partnership with Downtown Music Publishing brings to the table", says Next Era’s Olga Heijns. "This collaboration not only strengthens our commitment to supporting artists globally but also opens up exciting prospects for the vibrant music scene in the Netherlands”.

APPOINTMENTS

DIY distributor TuneCore has appointed Brian Miller as its new Chief Revenue Officer. “After years of helping different businesses grow and scale sustainably, I’m looking forward to using that expertise to help independent artists harness the power of technology to reach new audiences and grow TuneCore’s footprint around the world”, he says. “It is an exciting time for the music industry and especially exciting for TuneCore, given our best in class product and services”.

10K Projects has announced three appointments. Max Gore has been named Chief Financial Officer, Blake Brown-Grakal has been promoted to General Counsel, and Samuel Cohen moves up to General Manager. “As we look forward to a new phase of growth at 10K, reinforcing our core executive team is crucial”, says CEO Elliot Grainge. “This executive team helps position us for the future as we continue to break new ground at 10K”.

Music mental health and addiction charity Music Support has named Joe Hastings as its new CEO. “Joe joins Music Support with the most amazing wealth of experience, at a really exciting time for the charity which sees our already formidable team delivering a bigger variety of services to more beneficiaries than ever”, says co-founder Matt Thomas. “We are entering a period of growth and development, and I couldn’t be happier that Joe will oversee it. And what’s more - he’s a truly wonderful human being”.

US agent John Pantle has joined London-based booking agency One Fiinix Live. “This business was built on creative ideas, entrepreneurship and personalities and John has all these attributes”, says CEO Jon Ollier. “The passion, drive and work ethic that John possesses is just incredibly infectious and, added to his experience in this industry, makes his arrival an incredibly exciting prospect for us. John will continue to be based in the US but will work remotely as part of our London-based team and his diverse roster of clients, most of whom he already books internationally, will further extend the global reach of our company”.

RELEASES

Griff has released new single ‘Astronaut’ featuring that Chris Martin off of Coldplay. “We listened to maybe 30 of my songs together, but he kept stopping ‘Astronaut’”, she says of the song, which she’d thought was finished. ”Chris advised me to strip it all back and keep things simple, so I had the cheek to ask him to play on it himself and I am so honoured he agreed”.

Isabella Lovestory has released new single ‘Fuetazo’ featuring Villano Antillano.

GIGS & TOURS

Laufey has announced that she will play London’s Royal Albert Hall on 16 May. "It’s such an honour to play at Royal Albert Hall”, she says. “It’s one of those venues that has historically brought different musical worlds together, which I strive to do as a musician”. Tickets go on sale on Friday.

The Bigo & Twigetti label has announced that its next night showcasing some of its artists will take place on 22 Feb. On the bill are Curve Ensemble, Anna De Bruin, Tony Woollard, Jim Perkins, Angus MacRae and Dan Hewson. Tickets are on sale now.

LABELS & PUBLISHERS

David Dollimore launches new dance label in partnership with Geffen

Former Ministry Of Sound and RCA boss David Dollimore is returning to dance music with the launch of new label Disorder Records, in partnership with Universal Music’s Geffen Records. The new company has also partnered with Manchester’s Warehouse Project to launch WHP Records.

“Disorder will be an incubator for the future of dance music and redefine the landscape as we see it”, says Dollimore. “This label will be a portal to the underground club world, distilling future trends for mass consumption”.

“We will be leading a generation forging alternative routes to the top, outside the confines of dated traditional structures”, he goes on. “The Disorder artist will resonate in fashion, culture, lifestyle and entertainment, across multiple platforms, forming a new gen of future visionaries within the field”.

Geffen President Tom March adds: “At Geffen we are always looking to partner with our industry's most successful and innovative entrepreneurs. I couldn’t be more excited to partner with David as he heads back to what I consider him to be the best in the world at - signing and A&R-ing dance music. Between us, we have worked with many of the great names in the last 20 years of electronic music. I am so happy to be joining forces with him now”.

Starting out as an intern at Ministry Of Sound, Dollimore rose up the ranks to head up the label, working with artists including Eric Prydz, Duke Dumont, Axwell, Benny Benassi, MK and Avicii.

He then oversaw the label’s sale to Sony Music UK in 2016, after which he was named President of RCA Label Group. He left RCA earlier this year, replaced by new co-Presidents Stacey Tang and Glyn Aikins.

DEALS

MLC unveils network of five partners to help with matching work

US mechanical rights collecting society The MLC has announced the launch of a Supplemental Matching Network. And as dull as that sounds, it's about trying to put more money into the bank accounts of songwriters, which is definitely a good thing.

Through this new network, the MLC will be utilising the services of Blokur, Jaxsta, Pex, Salt and SX Works. Because, says the society's Head Of Analytics & Automation Andrew Mitchell, “these vendors bring complementary technologies and capabilities that can be effectively leveraged to serve our members. This network reflects our ongoing commitment to evolve in innovative ways to best achieve The MLC’s mission”.

The MLC was created by the US Music Modernization Act and administrates the mechanical royalties paid by streaming services to songwriters and music publishers within the American market. To do that, it needs to match each recording streamed to the song contained in that recording - in data terms matching an ISRC to an ISWC - and then figure out who owns the copyright in that song and therefore who needs to be paid.

Mitchell adds that, in putting together this network to help with the matching process, “we conducted an extensive due diligence process to select the initial set of vendors".

The boss of one of the selected companies, Phil Barry at London-based Blokur, is "THRILLED to be working with The MLC to help drive incremental royalty distributions to songwriters and publishers in the biggest digital music market in the world".

DIGITAL

Tidal lays off 10% of its staff

Tidal has laid off about 10% of its staff as part of wider downsizing efforts at its parent company Block.

Confirming the redundancies, a spokesperson for the streaming service said “we do not take these decisions lightly and we are sincerely grateful for the contributions of our impacted teammates".

The cutbacks at Tidal follow Spotify's announcement on Monday that it is instigating a dramatic round of downsizing that will impact 17% of its global workforce, so about 1500 people. According to Bloomberg, the Tidal redundancies will affect about 10% of its employees, although it has a much smaller headcount to start with, so that's about 40 people.

Block, the company headed up by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, acquired a majority stake in Tidal in 2021. Dorsey told Block's investors last month that the company would make redundancies across the group in a bid to bring the workforce down to no more than 12,000 people. As of the end of the third quarter of this year, the Block group at large had over 13,000 employees.

LEGAL

A fourth woman accuses Sean 'Diddy' Combs of sexual assault

A fourth woman has accused Sean 'Diddy' Combs of sexual assault, claiming that she was raped by the rapper and two other men at his studio in New York in 2003, when she was just seventeen.

The allegations come in a lawsuit filed with the courts in New York. Combs was sued last month by three women accusing him of sexual assault, including his former partner Cassie Ventura. That particular lawsuit was immediately settled, but the others continue to go through the motions.

In the new lawsuit, an unnamed woman says that she met a friend of Combs in Michigan in 2003, and he invited her to join him and the rapper in New York. She was then flown to New York by private jet where she met Combs at his studio. There she was given "copious amounts of drugs and alcohol" before Combs and two other men took turns raping her.

A legal rep for the plaintiff told the BBC: "As alleged in the complaint, defendants preyed on a vulnerable high school teenager as part of a sex trafficking scheme that involved plying her with drugs and alcohol and transporting her by private jet to New York City where she was gang raped by the three individual defendants at Mr Combs' studio. The depravity of these abhorrent acts has, not surprisingly, scarred our client for life".

The lawsuits filed against Combs last month were prompted by New York’s Adult Survivors Act, which provided a one year window in which the alleged victims of sexual assault could file new legal proceedings, even if alleged incidents occurred sufficiently long ago that lawsuits would usually be barred by the statue of limitations.

Combs denies all of the allegations that have been made against him. He said in a statement yesterday: "Enough is enough. For the last couple of weeks, I have sat silently and watched people try to assassinate my character, destroy my reputation and my legacy".

"Sickening allegations have been made against me by individuals looking for a quick payday", he went on. "Let me be absolutely clear: I did not do any of the awful things being alleged. I will fight for my name, my family and for the truth".

LABELS & PUBLISHERS

Record industry tells US Copyright Office training AI with existing music is "rarely, if ever, fair use"

The use of music to train a generative AI model "will rarely, if ever, be fair use". Or so say three organisations representing the US record industry which have again hit back at arguments made by tech companies that training generative AI models with existing content constitutes fair use under American law, meaning they don’t need permission from copyright owners.

The first principle of copyright - say the Recording Industry Association Of America, American Association Of Independent Music and Recording Academy - is "to promote human creative endeavours".

"That purpose is served", they go on, "by protecting human creators from having their works used to develop generative AI models that threaten to displace human creators by producing outputs that do not embody human creativity while supplanting works of human creativity in the marketplace. Such uses will rarely, if ever, be fair uses".

The three organisations were responding to the US Copyright Office's ongoing inquiry into the impacts of AI on copyright. Thousands of submissions were made to that inquiry by both AI companies and copyright owners.

Among other things, they set out in black and white the core disagreement between the AI sector and the copyright industries, ie whether or not consent must be sought before existing content is used in AI training or whether such use is fair use.

Following the first round of submissions, interested parties were able to submit 'reply comments'. The deadline for doing so was yesterday. In their reply comment, the record industry groups also dispute the idea that tech companies having to navigate copyright and secure licences to make use of existing content will stop the potential of AI from being realised.

They say the Copyright Office should reject “the false and dangerous dichotomy posed by some of the tech companies and their supporters … suggesting that humanity and, by extension, the Office and Congress, is faced with a binary choice to either reap all the benefits that AI promises or respect the long-established legal rights of human creators".

"There is no reason that implementations of AI cannot both reach their full potential and protect and respect the rights of creators at the same time", they go on.

"In fact, the application of a clear and predictable legal framework to AI is likely to foster, rather than hinder, its development by eliminating legal and business uncertainty; limiting the risk of litigation; and, most important, ensuring that our society continues investing in human creativity".

AND FINALLY

Judges wave away appeal over Tyga’s Vans ‘parody’ shoes

Tyga and MSCHF did infringe Vans’ trademarks when they made their ‘Wavy Baby’ shoes, an appeals court in the US has ruled. Because, it said, just taking some shoes and making them look weird doesn’t count as a parody.

The appeals judges upheld an earlier ruling banning MSCHF from selling the shoes, saying that “no special First Amendment protections apply” that would protect the creation of the shoes as a parody, and that it was pretty likely that Vans’ trademarks had indeed been violated.

The shoes look like a pair of Vans Old Stool trainers that have gone all, well, wavy. They were hit with a trademark lawsuit by Vans almost as soon as they were launched in April 2022 - the company arguing that because it often collaborates with musicians on limited edition shoes, consumers would likely believe that the MSCHF/Tyga tie up was another of those deals.

MSCHF argued that, with the Wavy Baby product, it was clearly making a very clever joke about the shoe industry which was allowed under US law. However, the judge overseeing the case disagreed, saying that the parody was not “successful” and would create confusion among consumers. Because, he reckoned, those consumers - like him - would not get the joke.

An appeal was launched soon after the original ruling, and was supposed to be fast-tracked. But it’s only now, a year and a half later, that we’ve received the decision that the original ruling was correct.