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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 — …
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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 …
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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 …
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Subscription music-streaming has ushered in new growth for recorded music. But you can’t keep up that growth without also making it easier in the first place for artists to create new songs — the very products that power this new economy —argues Splice, a tech start-up that wants to not …
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Major music companies are allegedly spending tens of thousands of dollars to boost view counts on the world’s largest streaming service. How the companies are doing it, though, is entirely legal on YouTube, thanks to a type of Google advertising that one digital marketer describes as “the legit way of …
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