Thu 3 Oct 2024

In today's CMU Daily: In 2020, five former CAA agents set up Range Media Partners. CAA has now sued the company accusing its founders of stealing confidential information about the talent agency before launching Range. They also say Range is basically a talent agency, but pretends it isn’t to avoid regulation 

One Liners: Cooking Vinyl, Sentric, Kilometre Music Group, Heatwave Records, A Lawless Agency, Recording Academy, Armada Music, Roc-A-Fella Records, Symphonic Distribution, Mdundo, Tomorrow's Warriors, MOBO Awards, OVO Hydro, The Scottish Album of the Year (SAY) Award, Horus Music, BPI + more

Also today: Following the news that TikTok has walked away from licensing negotiations with Merlin, various representatives for the indie label community have issued statements; record producer Ken Caillat reckons Broadway play ‘Stereophonic’ rips off his memoir about working with Fleetwood Mac; Ticketmaster customers have reported tickets disappearing from their accounts

CAA accuses Range Media of stealing confidential information and masquerading as a management company to avoid talent agency regulations 

Talent agency CAA has sued Range Media Partners, the entertainment firm founded by former CAA agent Peter Micelli, in an explosive lawsuit that makes some big allegations. 

It accuses Micelli and the four other former CAA agents involved in setting up Range of stealing confidential business information from CAA as they prepared for the August 2020 launch of their new company. It also claims that Range operates as a talent agency but calls itself a management company so it can avoid the regulation that applies to talent agencies in California.

“Range is an unlicensed talent agency built on deceit”, the lawsuit declares. In early 2020, Micelli and his co-founders “sought to benefit Range by breaching their obligations to CAA and causing other CAA employees to do the same”.

Meanwhile, four years on, “Range skirts rules that California legislators and artists’ guilds put in place to protect those working in the entertainment industry”. 

Micelli left CAA in 2018 after more than two decades with the agency. He then had a two year stint with eOne before launching Range. However, his co-founders, Jack Whigham, David Bugliari, Michael Cooper and Mick Sullivan, moved straight from CAA to Range. 

It’s alleged that, in spring 2020, having already decided that they would launch Range that summer, the four outgoing CAA execs...

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Deals

• Cooking Vinyl Publishing and Sentric have signed a deal with Thom Rylance of The Lottery Winners, covering the band's entire back catalogue. 
• Sony Music has acquired Pink Floyd's recorded music rights for “about $400 million”, reports the Financial Times. 
• Kilometre Music Group has acquired the publishing catalogue of American record producer Ronald Latour Jr, known professionally as Cardo. 
• Universal Music Publishing Group has signed Jack Leonard, co-founder of big beat project Cheapcuts, to a publishing deal.
• Concord Music Publishing has signed producer, instrumentalist and songwriter Ben Wilson, known professionally as Ben10k, to a worldwide publishing deal. 
• Heatwave Records has been launched by former Syco Music Managing Director Tyler Brown and ex-Ultra Music Publishing A&R executive Harold Serero. The London-based label, focusing on signing artists from emerging markets, has partnered with US music and technology company Too Lost for distribution.
• A Lawless Agency has launched a new DJ talent roster featuring seven artists. The agency, founded by Clayton Wright, Lucy Fizz and Jasmine Blatt, represents talent across music, dance, events, fashion and nightlife. 
• Jamey Johnson has signed a label deal with Warner Music Nashville and will release a new song, 'Someday When I'm Old', tomorrow through the label and his own Big Gassed Records. 
• Universal Music Group Nashville and Timbaland's Mosley Music have signed singer-songwriter Colt Graves as the first artist under their recently announced partnership. 

People

• Alex Nutton has been promoted to Principal, Label Relations at Amazon Music. 
• Loretta Andrews has been appointed as Programmes Manager - Creation at the Institute Of Contemporary Music Performance
• Sam Kitchen has left Universal Music’s Decca Records to set up Canopy 19 PR, a radio and podcast promotions agency providing services to major labels, indies, distributors and artist managers. 
• Universal Music Spain has appointed Alicia Arauzo and Luis Fernández as co-Managing Directors. 
• Universal Music Finland has appointed Petri Mannonen as its new CEO. 
• Harvey Mason Jr has renewed his contract as CEO of the Recording Academy for an additional four years. 
• Armada Music has appointed Susanne Hazendonk as Head Of Catalogue. 

Legal

• Martin Shkreli has admitted it is "highly likely" that multiple people have copies of Wu-Tang Clan's supposedly one-copy-only album 'Once Upon A Time In Shaolin'.
• Roc-A-Fella Records Inc has been denied a ruling on Jay-Z's copyright termination rights for his album 'Reasonable Doubt' ahead of an auction for Damon Dash's stake in the company.
• The European Union has requested additional information from Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube regarding their content recommendation algorithms under the Digital Services Act. 
• Russell Simmons has been ordered to pay $3 million to three sexual assault accusers after failing to comply with lawsuit settlements. 

Platforms

• Symphonic Distribution has partnered with Twitch to allow its artists to include their music in the Twitch DJ Program, enabling them to earn royalties when their tracks are used in DJ sets on the platform.
• Mdundo has announced that it expects to pay out between $1.1m and $1.3m in royalties to artists in 2025. The African streaming service, which currently boasts 36 million monthly active users across the continent, is pursuing a 'hyperlocal' strategy to drive growth in countries where global streaming services have a limited presence.
• Spotify has rolled out a new feature called 'Offline Backup' that automatically creates a playlist of recently streamed and cached songs when users lose internet connectivity. 

Live

• City of Edinburgh Council has implemented a new policy to charge commercial events, including Oasis's upcoming reunion concerts, for the full cost of hosting them.
• Sony Music UK & Ireland has announced that Mark Ronson, Cat Burns and Jake Bugg will perform at the Music Industry Trusts Award (MITS) ceremony honouring Jason Iley. 
• Tomorrow's Warriors has announced the return of its annual flagship celebration, I AM WARRIOR, on 26 Oct at London's Jazz Café.
• Serious and Black Lives in Music have launched the Equaliser Mentorship Programme, designed to develop live sound professionals from global majority backgrounds. 
• The MOBO Awards has announced that it will be held in Newcastle for the first time on 18 Feb 2025 at the Utilita Arena Newcastle. 
• The Southbank Centre has launched a custom-built experimental sound system called Concrete Voids, featuring over 80 concealed speakers in the Queen Elizabeth Hall auditorium. 
• London's night czar Amy Lamé has announced she will step down from her position at the end of this month. 
• The OVO Hydro in Glasgow is the first arena to receive Commended status as part of the Greener Arena accreditation scheme.
• The Night Time Industries Association has announced that the Night Time Economy Summit 2025 will take place in Birmingham at Hockley Social Club on 5 and 6 Feb 2025. 
• YouGov has found that ticket touts are costing UK music fans more than £145 million annually on concert tickets. 

Other Industry News & Events

• Jack Antonoff has announced plans to build public recording studios in LGBTQ+ youth shelters through his charity the Ally Coalition. 
• The Scottish Album of the Year (SAY) Award has announced its ten album shortlist for 2024, with the winner set to receive £20,000. 
• Horus Music has expanded its publishing division to offer sync services for independent artists. 
• Pirate Studios and Small Green Shoots have launched the £180,000 Studios For All Fund to support charities and organisations in England with studio time over three years. 
• UK record industry trade body BPI has published its inaugural ‘Five-Year Strategy For Diversity, Equity & Inclusion’. The document outlines the BPI’s vision to promote DEI within the organisation itself and across the wider music industry.
• The Richard Antwi Scholarship has named Tareic Alphonse as its seventh and final scholar. Alphonse will receive a full scholarship for University Of Westminster's Music Business Management MA course, starting later this month. 
• Music Minds Matter has received funding from PPL Giving to support the mental health of musicians across the UK. 
• The Beatport Group has opened applications for its third annual Diversity + Parity Fund. The $150,000 fund aims to support organisations championing diversity and equity in the dance music industry.
• UK collecting society PRS For Music has reported a significant growth in songwriting as a profession, with 37,000 music creators joining the organisation in the past five years.
• Music Moves Europe Awards has announced fifteen nominees for its 2025 edition, recognising emerging European music talent. 

Artist News

• Erland Cooper has achieved his first number one on the Official UK Classical Album Chart with 'Carve The Runes Then Be Content With Silence', released by Decca imprint Mercury KX. The album was buried underground in Orkney for three years before its release, with all digital copies deleted. 
• Ozzy Osbourne has been announced for induction into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame for his solo career on 19 Oct. 

Indie community reacts to TikTok circumventing Merlin 

Representatives of the independent record label community across Europe have criticised TikTok for walking away from licensing negotiations with Merlin, the global digital licensing agency that negotiates deals on behalf of thousands of indie labels and distributors around the world. 

When Merlin’s current TikTok deal expires, labels and distributors will need to sign direct deals with the social media company. The indie community rejects claims from TikTok that it is seeking to circumvent Merlin, and deal directly with its member labels, as part of efforts to crack down on streaming fraud and the delivery of copyright infringing music. 

The indie labels and their representatives mainly see this as a divide and conquer strategy from TikTok, which they believe is hoping to force individual labels into less favourable deals. And that’s the kind of strategy that Merlin was established to combat. 

As well as indie label trade groups IMPALA, AIM and UPFI, the independent publishers have also called on TikTok to rethink its new strategy via their global trade group IMPF.

Fleetwood Mac producer says stage play about a fictional band rips off his memoir 

The writer of the Tony Award winning Broadway play ‘Stereophonic’ - which centres on a fictional rock band as they struggle to make a new album in the recording studio - has been accused of ripping off a 2012 memoir written by record producer Ken Caillat. That book, called ‘Making Rumours’, is about the producer’s experiences engineering 1977 Fleetwood Mac album ‘Rumours’. 

In a lawsuit filed with the courts in New York, Caillat says that David Adjmi’s play is actually “an unauthorised adaptation” of his book. To that end, Caillat is suing Adjmi for copyright infringement. 

A number of journalists covering ‘Stereophonic’ have noted the parallels between Fleetwood Mac and the fictional band in the play, which includes men and women, Britains and Americans, and two couples. And, in some cases, connections have specifically been made between the story told in the play and that recounted in ‘Making Rumours’. 

However, when asked about all that in media interviews, Adjmi is adamant that any similarities between his play and Caillat’s memoir are coincidental.  

He told the New Yorker, “When writing ‘Stereophonic’ I drew from multiple sources - including autobiographical details from my own life - to create a deeply personal work of fiction”. He then added, “any similarities to Ken Caillat’s excellent book are unintentional”.

Disappearing tickets not the result of Ticketmaster hack, says Ticketmaster 

Ticketmaster customers across the US have reported tickets being transferred out of their accounts without their permission, with one ticket-buyer then finding that her stolen tickets were being resold via ‘verified resale’. 

Some people affected, and some media commentators, have linked the trend to the massive hack of Ticketmaster’s platform earlier this year. However, the Live Nation ticketing company denies that passwords were taken in that incident, insisting that the unapproved ticket transfers are likely the result of customers having their email accounts hacked. 

WGAL News 8 reported on the experience of Amanda Shaffer from Pennsylvania, whose Pink tickets were transferred out of her Ticketmaster account without permission. “I woke up and saw an email saying, ‘Hey, your transfer to this person was successful’”, she told the news station. “And I was like, ‘Wait. I’m sorry. What?’” It was Shaffer who tracked where her tickets had ended up, finding them being resold on the Ticketmaster platform via ‘verified resale’.

🎧 Approved: A Place To Bury Strangers

A Place To Bury Strangers have cemented the be-all-end-all space for over-the-top post-punk/shoegaze destruction.

Their latest single ‘Fear Of Transformation’ is a snarling, gothic techno-punk track that feels like getting body slammed by a wave out at sea. The track spirals around frontman Oliver Ackermann’s confrontation with internal paralysis. 

“Sometimes fear builds up and pins you in a cage”, Ackermann confesses. “A conversation occurs in my head where I have to convince myself to just fucking do something to break out of it”. This struggle manifests sonically in ‘Fear Of Transformation’, a jagged dialogue between the temptation to retreat and the drive to shatter self-imposed limits.

The band’s forthcoming seventh album, ‘Synthesizer’, promises even more of this raw, wild and loud catharsis and is out tomorrow.

🎧 Listen to ‘Fear Of Transformation’ here