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business news CMU Digest
go through Chris Cook | Posted on Sunday, April 2, 2023
Big stories in the music world from last week…
Warner Music announced that it will cut about 4% of its global workforce, which means that about 270 positions will be eliminated. New boss and former YouTube exec Robert Kyncl is focusing on the potential opportunities created by new and future technologies. “WMG is positioning itself for a new phase of growth at the intersection of creativity and technology,” he said in an internal memo confirming the job cuts. “This is not a blanket cost-cutting move,” he later insisted in the memo, telling his staff, “Every decision has been thoughtfully made by our operators around the world, who have considered each label’s specific needs, skills and priorities, divisions and territories in order to set us up for our long-term success”. [READ MORE]
Music publisher and artist services company Believe has announced that it has acquired music publisher Sentric. It said the deal was Believe’s “first foray into building an innovative digital-first music publishing business”. Sentric, perhaps best known for providing rights management services to self-published songwriters, has partnered with Believe’s DIY distributor, TuneCore. This partnership will now extend to the entire Believe Group. Believe acquired Sentric from Utopia Music, which had only acquired the publisher in February 2022. The sale comes amid speculation about the future of Utopia Music, which is facing a series of financial challenges after a period of significant expansion through acquisitions a year ago. [READ MORE]
The American charging association BMI has welcomed a rates court ruling that will boost the earnings its members earn when they perform songs at shows and live concerts in the United States. It ends years of legal wrangling as BMI battled live giants Live Nation and AEG, as well as the North American Concert Promotion Association, to get better rates for its songwriters and publishers, replacing a previous practice in the late 1990s The rates. Both the American Song Copyright Institute, BMI, and ASCAP are regulated by so-called consent statutes, which allow special rate courts to set the royalty rates that each association can charge for the use of its respective repertoire. BMI didn’t get everything it wanted in the rates court ruling, but it will now get a 138% higher revenue share than before, and it will now apply to some of the usual concerts these days, too. [READ MORE]
South Korean internet company Kakao has confirmed that it has acquired a controlling stake in K-pop giant SM Entertainment. The announcement follows Kakao’s brief but high-profile battle with another K-pop giant, Hybe, for control of SM Entertainment. The latter was backed by SM founder Lee Soo-man, who sold most of his SM shares. But in the end Kakao offered a higher price to other SM shareholders, and Hybe quickly dropped its share purchase plan. It then announced that it would sell the SM shares it had bought — mostly from Lee — to Kakao. However, the dot-com only needed to own less than 40% of SM to control the business, and with many other SM shareholders also keen to sell at the price it was offering, Kakao ended up buying only about half of Hybe. This means Hybe still owns 8.8% of SM. [READ MORE]
Apple launches its custom classical music app, Designed to make browsing and exploring classical music catalogs easier, mainstream music streaming apps are often not set up to handle the classical genre differently than other genres. The official tagline states, “Classic works are multi-movement; famous works have hundreds of recordings with different orchestras, conductors and soloists; many composers have their own catalog categories, from Bach’s BWV to Mozart K’. The new application has a search function that takes all these factors into account. Apple Music Classical has been in development for some time, and the tech giant acquired existing classical music-focused streaming service Primephonic back in 2021 to help drive the new app’s offering. The app is available on iOS devices, with an Android version to follow and is free for existing Apple Music subscribers. [READ MORE]
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