YouTube’s Music-Royalty System Is ‘Ripe for Abuse,’ Report Claims

Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor Two decades ago, as the turn-of-the-century NYC indie-rock scene burst out of its East Village and Williamsburg incubators, few probably expected that the Yeah Yeah Yeahs would end up having the most wide-ranging career of the bunch. After all, a trio consisting of a wiz-kid guitarist, powerhouse drummer and a fireball lead singer might have made for explosive shows and a scrappy, deceptively diverse debut EP, but with no shade intended to the Strokes, Interpol, LCD Soundsystem, TV on the Radio and all the others, the multiple musical directions the band would go did not seem to be in the cards. The Yeahs had the first hit single of the pack (2003’s “Maps”) and varied their approach with each successive album, peaking with 2009’s unexpectedly electronic-heavy “It’s Blitz.” That album represented the end of that particular thread: The group released one more, rockier album “Mosquito” in 2013 (which, significantly, fulfilled their major-label contract) and then basically went on hiatus. In the years since, singer Karen O released a stellar collaboration with Danger Mouse, “Lux Prima” and co-composed the score for the animated film “Where Is Anne Frank?,” guitarist Nick Zinner also scored films and worked with Phoebe Bridgers and Songhoy Blues, and drummer Brian Chase started his own label. Such hiatuses are often permanent, but the group reunited for a tour in 2017, and five years and a pandemic later, there’s finally a reunion album — and it continues the group’s evolution with a powerful, more seasoned take on their earlier sounds.

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.

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.

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.

Emanuel Okusanya It hardly seems possible that, more than three years after the blockbuster success of “Old Town Road” — which became the longest-charting single in Billboard history and the most-platinum-certified single, with 15 at last count — and many, sometimes-controversial videos and television performances, Lil Nas X is only now on his first major tour. The artist’s 29-date “Long Live Montero” tour made two sold-out stops at New York’s prestigious Radio City Music Hall this week, and he didn’t disappoint in terms of music or visuals (although he did keep things relatively PG, apart from kissing one of his male dancers behind a curtain).

Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor There’s been no shortage of neo-R&B albums over the past few years, but so many of them are led by breathy female singers who feel like they’re singing in your ear — very few have had full-voiced singers at the forefront. And although Muni Long isn’t a belter and does put on the bedroom voice on a couple of tracks, her first full-length album is a blast of vintage ‘90s R&B that isn’t trying to be cute: It’s filled with frank lyrics about of love and sex from an artist who’s been around for more than a minute. Working under the name of Priscilla Renea, Muni has long been a songwriter whose soul and pop smarts helped forge hits such as Ariana Grande’s “Imagine,” Fifth Harmony’s “Worth It,” Rihanna’s “California King Bed,” along with tracks for Mariah Carey, Kelly Clarkson, Madonna, Mary J. Blige, Miranda Lambert, Selena Gomez and more.She released strong albums under that name too — 2009’s “Jukebox” and 2018’s “Coloured” — but neither of those records had the sparkle, innovation and warmth that her songwriting catalog contained. A change of name, an independently-released EP featuring the haunting, quirky hit “Hrs and Hrs,” and suddenly, Muni Long is a new artist with a remarkably seasoned and strong debut album.

A serial sex offender who preyed on underage schoolgirls during a catalogue of rape and abuse was jailed for six years today.

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.”

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.

Content warning: This story contains discussion and descriptions of alleged domestic violence and sexual abuse.Rapper Mystikal has pleaded not guilty to charges of rape, domestic abuse and robbery.On Monday September 19, Mystikal – real name Michael Lawrence Tyler – entered a plea of not guilty (as reported by Alternative Press) at Ascension Parish court, Louisiana, in response to charges of first-degree rape, domestic abuse battery (specifically, strangulation and false imprisonment), drug possession, robbery and criminal damage to property.Tyler was arrested on Sunday July 31 in the Louisiana town of Prairieville, after deputies of the Ascension Parish Sheriff’s Office interviewed a suspected survivor of alleged sexual assault at a hospital the night prior. Deputies have accused Tyler of the attack, during which it’s alleged he took the survivor’s car keys and sexually assaulted her.

Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor When YouTube chief business officer Robert Kyncl announced late last month that he’ll be leaving the company after 12 years in the job, many observers quickly moved him to the front of the line to replace outgoing Warner Music CEO Steve Cooper, who’d announced just two months earlier that he’ll be stepping down after 11 years in the job. After all, Kyncl knows the music industry  — 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, a transition that was much more complex and fraught with potential failure than he and the company made it seem.

[Warning: Potentially Triggering Content]

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 While the title of the “world’s greenest music festival” may be impossible to determine with total accuracy, Norway’s long-running Øya is as close as it gets. The festival — which has featured Kanye West, Kendrick Lamar, Robyn, Lana Del Rey, the Cure and hundreds of Norwegian acts since it launched in 1999 — has been named an “Outstanding” honoree by the international non-profit A Greener Festival nine out of the last 10 years the awards were held, and is certified as an “Environmental Lighthouse” by the Norwegian foundation of the same name. In 2010, it even received an honorary award from Norway’s minister of agriculture for its work in promoting organic food. 

Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor Reach Music Publishing has acquired a 50% copyright interest — together with 100% of the writer’s share, including global administration rights — in the song catalog of Public Enemy’s Chuck D, one of the most influential rappers and lyricists in hip-hop history. Further terms of the deal were not disclosed. As a founding member and chief songwriter of Public Enemy, Chuck D co-wrote nearly all of the group’s songs, including such classics as “Fight the Power” (theme song to Spike Lee’s 1989 film “Do the Right Thing”), “Bring the Noise,” “Welcome to the Terrordome,” “Shut ‘Em Down,” and “He Got Game,” all of which are included in the Reach Music acquisition. In total, over 300 songs are included in the deal. 

Jem Aswad Senior Music Editor YouTube, the world’s largest streaming platform for music, announced that it has paid more than $6 billion to the music industry in the 12 months between July 2021 and June 2022 — some $2 billion more than it said it paid in the previous 12 months. Like last year, the announcement comes in the form of a blog post from the platform’s head of music, Lyor Cohen. While short on specifics, the post does outline some of the contributing factors. “We want our twin engine of ads and subscriptions to be the #1 contributor of revenue to the industry by 2025,” Cohen wrote. “That’s why YouTube is monetizing all music formats (short & long form video, audio tracks, Live, etc.), on all platforms (desktop, tablet, mobile, and TV), in over 100 countries. And overall watch time of music content on YouTube across desktop, tablet, mobile, and TV continues to grow year over year.”