Cultura Voice

The news that Scoot Borchetta’s Big Machine Label Group was being sold to Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings for circa $300m has caused some major fallout. In response to the news, Taylor Swift – whose first six studio albums are owned by BMLG – penned an open letter in which she claimed that the sale of her masters to Braun was beyond her “worst nightmares”. Swift suggested that she learned about the BMLG buyout “as it was announced to the world”, despite her father, Scott Swift, being a minority shareholder in Big Machine. (He is thought to own 4% of the company now being sold to Braun.) In addition, Swift claimed that, despite having “pleaded” with Borchetta to take ownership of her masters, the closest she came was a contract renewal offer from Big Machine which would have enabled her to “earn” back the rights to her albums one-by-one. She rejected this offer, she says, in favor of her new deal with Universal Music Group. Swift claimed: “[I]  wa...

Entertainment One has entered into an agreement to acquire 100% of the shares of UK-based Audio Network Limited (Audio Network) – a production music specialist and one of the world’s largest independent creators and publishers of original music for use in film, television, advertising and digital media. The buyout is being valued at approximately US $215 million. The announcement was made today (April 11) by eOne’s President and CEO Darren Throop, with Global President, Music Chris Taylor, and alongside Audio Network’s Founder & Chairman Andrew Sunnucks and CEO Robb Smith. Audio Network, with nine offices worldwide, boasts an expansive catalogue of over 150,000 fully-owned tracks, in addition to relationships with more than 1,000 composers, singer-songwriters and emerging commercial artists. Entertainment One says this talent will ‘benefit from [eOne’s] rich traditional record label services and extensive film, television and brand capabilities’. It adds: ‘The addition o...

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, ...