The Kanye masters event rumbles on through another week, Lily Allen announces she’ll go independent for her next album and one of the USA’s biggest music publishers associations warns songwriters to keep an eye on royalties from live-streamed events. The week’s news recapped...
SXSW has announced it will have a virtual conference in March 2021, following the Covid-19 related cancellation this year.
“Regardless of platform, we will continue to bring together the brightest minds from creative industries worldwide,” says Roland Swenson, CEO and Co-Founder of the festival, in a release online.
The team behind the event is also working with City of Austin officials on a physical event, planned to take place in 2021, although no other details have been released.
Chance the Rapper revealed he made a giant pile of cash from his famous New Era ‘3’ caps – $6 million, according to a comment unearthed from an old interview.
We take our hat off to him.
Lily Allen wants to make a new record and she’s offering birthday messages to do it. The singer has taken to the fan site Cameo, offering "whatever fans need" her to do, in return for some cash.
The singer says on her Cameo page: “It’s getting closer to the time I want to start releasing music again and it's the first time in my career that I’m going to be putting an album out not on a major label, so I'll be using these funds to finance my musical output.”
Allen released her first four albums on Regal, an imprint of Parlophone records.
In response to criticism that he hasn’t practiced what he’s preaching on the masters front, Kanye West announced this week he’d return the 50% ownership of masters to all artists signed to his G.O.O.D music label.
In the meantime, lawyers and journalists have scoured Kanye’s contracts, mostly concluding he’s had some pretty good deals. We liked this summary of what can be learned from Kanye’s contracts from Shawn Setaro. Interested in the masters debate more generally? Read our blog post
David Israelite, the President & CEO of the National Music Publishers’ Association in the US, warns that, in the race to get their platform working, live-streaming services are ignoring traditional royalty structures.
“The rules of the game are clear, yet many platforms and app developers are part of a concerted effort to normalize not paying music creators properly. They claim the multiple rights involved are cumbersome and clearing music with many publishers is time consuming. This is a smokescreen for the very real race-to-launch that these companies engage in, which puts songwriters’ rights and the royalties they have earned on the back burner,” writes Israelite, in a column this week
