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BMG CEO Hartwig Masuch has a crazy idea to keep competitive against the majors in the music business: Treat artists fairly. “The biggest threat for us — and it’s not fatal — is if the other guys become good, fair and transparent,” Masuch cheekily says of BMG’s business model, yet …

Following buyouts from multiple heirs, the independent music publisher and talent management company Primary Wave has acquired a significant stake in Prince‘s estate. As the Minneapolis Star Tribune first reported, Primary Wave last month bought out 100 percent of interest in the estate from Omarr Baker, Prince’s brother. Primary Wave …

This story appears in Rolling Stone‘s 2021 Future of Music issue, a special project delving into the next era of the multibillion-dollar hitmaking business. Read the other stories here. A tour of Lyor Cohen’s career can be taken, rather efficiently, through the sheer number of rap lyrics in which he …

Hip-hop artist TheHxliday is 19 years old and determined to have true creative control of his visuals as he makes his way up the music business. He’s looking to a cell-phone company to achieve that. The Baltimore native, real name Noah Malik Lee, signed a deal with Motown Records last …

Classic soul acts Earth, Wind and Fire and the Isley Brothers are the latest beneficiaries of Verzuz‘s prolific post-show bump, with both groups climbing the Rolling Stone Charts following their Easter Sunday special last week. The Isley Brothers made their debut on the Artists 500 Chart at Number 323, seeing …

Unfettered froth and chaos hit Wall Street this week. What started as a Reddit group of retail investors pitching money into “meme stocks” like GameStop quickly snowballed into a David-and-Goliath story involving multibillion-dollar hedge funds, government agencies, and even U.S. senators. On Thursday, investment app Robinhood abruptly delisted stocks with …

The catalog acquisition frenzy in the music industry continues to accelerate. Right now, the gorillas in this jungle include Larry Mestel’s Primary Wave and Merck Mercuriadis‘s Hipgnosis Songs Fund, two investment and management firms: in 2021 alone the latter company has acquired copyrights and/or income streams from Neil Young, Lindsey …

In the last few months, there’s been more public discussion than ever about fairness, transparency, and opportunity in the music business. If you’re willing to read on for a couple of minutes — and trust that this middle-aged white guy awkwardly quoting 2020 protest songs is worth listening to — …

Artists can try to go viral on their own on TikTok — but a hand from Isabel Quinteros Annous almost guarantees it. As the artist-relations manager at the video app, Annous is the bridge between record labels and TikTok’s influential tastemaking platform, working with stars’ marketing teams to orchestrate hits …

In 2020, a “top 3 biggest pet peeves” TikTok created by a marketing company without a website can land a former high school football player a record deal. “Psycho!” is just the fifth track ever released by the 19-year-old Mason Rupper, a Salt Lake City, Utah native who began writing …