Film music is ready for its close-up, thanks to Matt Schrader and Gravitas Ventures, which has acquired North American rights to Score: A Film Music Documentary. Schrader, a three-time Emmy-winning, writer, editor and news producer, directed this labor of love. Sixteen months, two crowdfunding campaigns and 50 interviews later, Gravitas has swooped in to give […]
The Warner Bros. summer blockbuster Suicide Squad is killin’ it at the Grammys, with five nominations, the most of any visual media project. Music supervisors Gabe Hilfer and Season Kent were the tune team behind the Best Compilation Soundtrack for Visual Media nomination for Suicide Squad (Collector’s Edition). In addition, the song “Heathens” received three nominations: one […]
Duran Duran is embarking on an international litigation adventure that will have ramifications for U.K. music artists with U.S. publishing interests. The ’80s super group seeks to take advantage of a standard provision under stateside law that allows authors or their heirs to reclaim copyright after 35 years of third-party exploitation. The catch is, the group is based […]
The Pittsburgh Symphony settled its 55-day strike, with a new five-year contract secured by the American Federation of Musicians, Local 60-471 negotiating committee on behalf of the PSO. The deal, concluded Nov. 23, extends through 2021 and includes freezing certain pension benefits and a pay cut of 7.5% the first year. It’s been a rocky year […]
Concert touring has in many ways become the lifeblood of the popular music industry, as artists seek to recalibrate earnings after the disruption of streaming. So it was no surprise that the executives onstage at the Billboard Touring Conference were able to fill the venue for “Contemporary Touring Strategies: The Agents’ Perspective,” Nov. 9 at the […]
A pop act manager’s job is “making irrational people do rational things,” SB Projects’ Scooter Braun shared in a Q&A session at the Billboard Touring Conference & Awards yesterday. As manager to Justin Bieber, Kanye West, Ariana Grande and many more, Braun – whose bio claims he has “broken more new artists than any other […]
The Philadelphia Orchestra may have settled its strike less than 48 hours after walking off the job, but on the state’s westside, there’s no end in sight for the strike at the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, whose musicians hit the picket line the same weekend as Philadelphia, Sept. 30. The Fort Worth Symphony musicians also continue their walkout, which began Sept. […]
Warner Bros. summer smash Suicide Squad is the first soundtrack of 2016 to be certified gold by the RIAA, having sold more than the requisite 500,000 units in a scant six weeks. During that same period the film more than $315 million domestically and $700 million worldwide. The soundtrack features tunes by Skylar Grey, Eminem, Twenty One Pilots, […]
So you wanna be a YouTube star? Whipping up a rapt fanbase and tens of millions of hits per month? Kurt Hugo Schneider did it, and shared his tactics for music production, marketing and filmmaking at Spikes Asia. Schneider, who started on YouTube in 2008 and has 7.4 million subscribers racking up about 40 million […]
For the first half of 2016, strong growth in revenues from subscription streaming services more than offset declines in unit based sales of physical and digital music download products, according to the RIAA. Overall revenues at retail increased 8.1% on a year-over-year basis to $3.4 billion, the strongest industry growth since the late 1990’s. At wholesale, […]
