Cultura Voice

Warner Music Group has sold all of its shares in Spotify for more than half a billion dollars. Warner is allocating 25% of this money to its artists, but, unlike Sony, it’s not ignoring unrecouped balances when it does so – meaning that a significant proportion of this cash will actually remain at WMG. Warner today (August 7) confirmed it was no longer a stakeholder in Spotify, which floated on the New York Stock Exchange on April 3. WMG CEO Steve Cooper (pictured) told investors on an earnings call that Warner realized $504m in proceeds from selling 100% of its Spotify stock in the quarter ending June 2018. “I’m pleased to say that, in connection with the sale of our Spotify equity, an estimated $126 million will be credited to artist accounts on their June 30 royalty statements which are issued around the world in August and September,” said Cooper. That $126m equates to exactly a quarter of the $504m. MBW understands the $126m includes payments to Warner/ADA-d...

“All the talk these days is about artificial intelligence and what machines will be able to do in 20 years,” Alibaba Pictures President Wei Zhang says, from her penthouse office in Southern California with sweeping views of the San Gabriel Mountains. “Increasingly, people realize that it’s really the creative and emotional side of humans that machines cannot easily replicate.” Timeless themes are on Zhang’s mind these days as she tries to steer Alibaba Pictures—the film unit of China’s biggest e-commerce company—into a technologically evolving future. She set up shop in the Los Angeles area in 2016, tasked by CEO Jack Ma to develop Alibaba’s entertainment business and find stories to share with the content-hungry audience in China, soon to be the largest movie market in the world. Alibaba then invested and entered into a partnership with Steven Spielberg’s production company, Amblin Entertainment. That was in 2016, at the height of feverish Hollywood-China deal making, ...