Outgoing YouTube Business Chief Robert Kyncl in Talks With Warner Music for CEO Role

Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor Primary Wave Music, a top player in the music-catalog and publishing boom, has joined forces with Brookfield Asset Management in a $2 billion deal to invest in music copyrights, the companies confirmed. The news was first reported by the Wall Street Journal. Brookfield, which is new the space, will take a significant minority interest in Primary Wave, and commit $1.7 billion to fund a permanent capital vehicle focused on acquiring music rights from top acts. Primary Wave Music is primarily a music publisher but has become a leader in the catalog-acquisition business with its ability to market those catalogs biographical films, Broadway shows, song interpolations and brand deals. Its assets include interests in the catalogs of Whitney Houston, James Brown, half of the Prince estate, Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks and more.

LABELS & PUBLISHERSWarner Music has partnered with NFT marketplace OpenSea to help the record company’s artists do some of that Web3 stuff. “Fundamental to music’s DNA, is community – it’s artists and fans coming together to celebrate the music that they love”, says WMG’s Chief Digital Officer Oana Ruxandra. “Our collaboration with OpenSea helps to facilitate these communities by unlocking Web3 tools and resources to build opportunities for artists to establish deeper engagement, access, and ownership”.

Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor Phil Collins and his Genesis bandmates Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford have agreed to sell their publishing copyrights and “a mix of recorded music-income streams” to Concord Music Group, the company confirmed to the Wall Street Journal on Thursday. Sources told the publication the deal was for upward of $300 million. The deal includes the solo material of all three, most notably Collins’ multiplatinum solo albums and Rutherford’s band Mike & the Mechanics, which achieved chart success in the 1980s. The catalogs of Peter Gabriel and other former members of Genesis were not included in the deal. A rep for Concord tells Variety an official announcement will be made Friday morning.

Refresh for more: The top brass at Warner Bros Discovery held a company-wide town hall Wednesday over Zoom in which they laid out the current state of the company and the industry, acknowledging the hard times amid a slew of cost-cutting and layoffs and emphatically addressing merger rumors with CEO David Zaslav exclaiming, “We are not for sale, absolutely, not for sale.”

Mike Tindall has admitted he was almost the victim of a royal protocol faux pas during a private meeting with King Charles III. The former rugby player, who is married to the late Queen Elizabeth II's granddaughter Zara Tindall, described his blunder during an episode of his his sports podcast The Good, The Bad, and The Rugby. The 43 year old told his fellow hosts James Haskell and Alex Payne that he very nearly curtseyed the King, after mirroring his wife.

Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor Columbia Records has entered into a joint venture with former Capitol Records chairman-CEO Jeff Vaughn to launch Signal Records, the company announced Wednesday. The Los Angeles-based imprint will operate as a new label with Columbia Records of Sony Music Entertainment and begin operations immediately, with an artist roster to be announced in the coming weeks. As founder and CEO, Vaughn will lead the company’s creative direction and business development while utilizing Columbia’s marketing, promotion, and label services. Ron Perry, Chairman & CEO of Columbia Records, said, “I’ve admired Jeff’s work from afar for a while. He has incredible musical instincts, an infectious work ethic, and great passion. I’m looking forward to working together on this new chapter.”

Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor Orlando Wharton has been named executive vice president of Capitol Music Group and president of Priority Records. The announcement was made by CMG chair & CEO Michelle Jubelirer, to whom Wharton will report.  According to the announcement, in his new position, Wharton will sign and guide artists across CMG’s portfolio of labels, and will relaunch the legendary Priority Records label as a dedicated home for new, developing and established hip hop artists.  Wharton will assume his positions at CMG early next year, and will be based at the company’s offices in New York. The announcement closely follows the company’s hiring of Doja Cat co-manager Gordan Dillard as EVP of A&R and artist development.

Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor Days after top YouTube exec Robert Kyncl was named as the next CEO of Warner Music Group, the company revealed in an SEC filing that he will earn approximately $15 million in his first year on the job, depending on performance targets. When Kyncl’s name was first mentioned as a potential successor to outgoing CEO Stephen Cooper, who leaves after 11 years in the role, many wondered whether the job would be sufficiently appealing for the executive who led Netflix from DVDs to streaming and has been YouTube’s business chief for much of his 12 years at the company. However, the SEC filing makes clear that the job is financially appealing: He will receive a base salary of $2 million, a target performance-based bonus of $3 million and an annual grant of performance share units with an aggregate, pre-tax value of $10 million.

Sharing their best tips — in and out of the kitchen! Celebrity chef Judy Joo sat down with culinary icon José Andrés to chat about his food, success and podcast.

Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor The Temple of Dendur in the Egyptian art wing of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the most unique and visually arresting places in a city filled with them, containing the 2,000-year-old Temple itself along with other sculptures and pieces of art, a large reflecting pool and a giant, 25-foot-tall floor-to-ceiling window that extends the entire length of the hall and overlooks Central Park. It also may be the most unique and visually arresting music venue in the city. Over the years the room has hosted concerts by everyone from Interpol to the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, but it’s hard to think of a more fitting artist for such a setting than Pakistani singer Arooj Aftab, who won a Grammy earlier this year for her song “Mohabbat” from her latest album “Vulture Prince,” and was also nominated for Best New Artist.

EXCLUSIVE: In a coup for the agency, CAA has signed in-demand Indian filmmaker SS Rajamouli.  

Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor Since the dawn of radio, the United States has been and remains the only major country in the world where terrestrial radio pays no royalties to performers or recorded-music copyright owners of the songs it plays — a situation that is largely due to the powerful radio lobby’s influence in Congress. While the more than 8,300 AM and FM stations across the country pay royalties to songwriters and publishers, they have never paid performers or copyright holders, although streaming services and satellite radio do. On Thursday morning, Senators Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) introduced the bipartisan American Music Fairness Act, which aims to rectify that situation by “ensur[ing] artists and music creators receive fair compensation for the use of their songs on AM/FM radio. This legislation will bring corporate radio broadcasters up-to-speed with all other music streaming platforms, which already pay artists for their music.”

Robert Kyncl, a 12-year veteran of YouTube’s senior executive team, will become CEO of Warner Music Group on January 1.

Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor After a fast courtship, outgoing YouTube head of business Robert Kyncl has been named CEO of Warner Music Group and will replace Steve Cooper when he steps down next year.  According to the announcement, Kyncl and Cooper will serve as co-CEOs for the month of January 2023. As of February 1, 2023, Kyncl will become sole CEO of WMG and assume Cooper’s board seat on WMG’s Board of Directors. Kyncl brings strong music-industry experience to the job: YouTube is both the world’s largest video-streaming platform and the largest music-streaming platform, and he played a huge role in its negotiations with labels and publishers and generally received high marks (remarkably, considering the often-contentious relations between the two sides). He’s also pioneering force in the streaming business: Before he was chief business officer of YouTube, he led Netflix from DVDs to digital.

“I am Iron Man!” In another universe, the now-infamous line from the eponymous 2008 movie could have been spoken by Tom Cruise instead of Robert Downey Jr.

Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor Though she’s just 22, Noah Cyrus has seen some stuff. As Miley’s younger sister, her music and acting careers launched early — at 16 and 2 (!), respectively — and she released several pop-leaning singles and EPs during her teens, opened an arena tour for Katy Perry in 2017 and was even nominated for a Best New Artist Grammy in 2021. On the less positive side, there was substance abuse, a bad relationship and lockdown isolation — but she overcame all of it, and that battle informs nearly every song on “The Hardest Part,” her long-percolating debut album, which sees her truly finding her voice in a way that her previous recordings only hinted at. Surprisingly or no, the Nashville native did it by returning home, musically speaking. Although her main collaborators here are Northern Irish producer Mike Crossey (Arctic Monkeys, the 1975) and Australian songwriter PJ Harding (Chromeo, Ruel), the sound is country-leaning, heavy on harmonies, organic instrumentation and Music Row-friendly melodies; its big, stacked harmonies recall everything from the Chicks to Boygenius.

Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor What a long, strange trip the long-lost Creedence Clearwater Revival Royal Albert Hall concert album and film has taken in the half century since it happened. The show and the on-the-road footage were recorded by the BBC during the group’s first European tour in April of 1970, but never broadcast. The recording presumably got hung up in the notorious legal battles between the group and its original label, Fantasy Records, although footage from the concert popped up at various times over the decades (even in a TV commercial for a budget Creedence greatest-hits album in the ‘80s). Even more confusingly, Fantasy released a very similar live album titled “The Royal Albert Hall Concert” before realizing that the tapes had been mistakenly labeled and the album was actually recorded ten weeks earlier and 5,000 miles away at the band’s triumphant Oakland Coliseum homecoming concert (the album was quickly retitled “The Concert”).

Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor Considering their short lifespan and relatively slim discography, the Velvet Underground may be the most thoroughly excavated and documented rock band of their era: Nearly every studio and concert recording, acetate and demo has been scrutinized, digitized and optimized for the many awesome boxed sets that have been released since the world caught up with the group’s brilliance in the 1980s, a dozen-odd years after they split up. The foundation of that brilliance, of course, is Lou Reed’s songwriting, which combines a novelist’s gritty realism with equally confrontational rock music, but also includes soft, vulnerable songs like “Pale Blue Eyes” and “I’ll Be Your Mirror” — songs that are all the more poignant because you can sense, somehow, that the sensitive soul who wrote them isalso kind of an asshole.

Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor The first thing to know before seeing “Moonage Daydream,” Brett Morgen’s dazzling, exhaustive and exhausting memoir of David Bowie’s life and career, is that it assumes the viewer already knows a lot about the subject — his relevance, his influence, the brilliance of so much of his music, and the basics of his personal history. Like another recent historical film about an oft-trodden subject — Todd Haynes’ “The Velvet Underground” — it eschews the standard, chronological, done-to-death “Behind the Music”-style template that has become a predictable default for music documentaries and finds a dramatically different way to tell the story. In the case of “Moonage Daydream” — the significance of the second word of the title in this impressionistic film cannot be overemphasized — that different way is to let the man himself do all of the talking: Literally the only voiceovers heard in this 135-minute-long film are from Bowie (presenting real or conveniently fictionalized accounts of his life and work) and various interviewers. While that makes for an unusually free-form approach to structuring a documentary (and was enormously challenging for Morgen, who worked on the film for over four years and suffered a heart attack while doing it), in many ways it’s freeing: Instead of a rigid timeline or forced, overarching theme dictating the narrative, Bowie’s words do.

Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor Rina Sawayama is one of a handful of artists who released an album just as the pandemic was beginning and watched, astonished, as their stars rose during lockdown. The Japanese-British singer’s debut, “Sawayama,” was a wild fusion of Lady Gaga with nu-metal guitars, but also showed a penchant for sentimental ballads amid the power chords and intensity. The album won a co-sign from none other than Elton John, and its videos got her cast in the fourth installment of Keanu Reeves’ “John Wick” series, due in March. In fact, Elton was one of many people who spoke out against Sawayama’s exclusion from eligibility for England’s BRIT and Mercury awards because she isn’t a U.K. citizen, even though she’s lived in England since the age of 5. After #SawayamaIsBritish became a trending topic on Twitter, the British Phonographic Industry changed the eligibility rules to include anyone who lived in the country for at least five years, including her.