Author: JD

Former Warner Music Group recorded music chief Lyor Cohen has named his new label ‘300’ and completed his distribution deal with Atlantic, he revealed to Billboard in an interview in this week’s magazine. Cohen is starting 300 with his fellow ex-Warner Music colleagues Todd Moscowitz (ex-Warner Bros president) and Kevin Liles (ex-EVP Warner Music). All three had also worked together at Def Jam, which Cohen ran in the ’80s and ’90s. The name 300 comes from Greek history of the 300 Spartans that fought in a vicious battle against thousands of Persian soldiers in 480 BC. “It was a battle that changed the way wars are fought,” says Cohen. “These guys found that if you were well synchronized, strategic, loyal with great planning and preparedness you could do much more with less and be highly effective.” Cohen’s thinking is that having a smarter, nimbler, more efficiently run music company that uses fewer resources to do more for artists has become necessary in the 21st Century music business. The idea is to better align cost structure to the industry’s current needs, where many new artists are naturally entrepreneurial by marketing and building buzz themselves on platforms like YouTube, Twitter and Instagram. It may be small but 300 will also have the flexibility to tap into the global distribution infrastructure of a major music label. “We’re deep believers in the record business,” says Moscowitz, who describes 300 as a content company rather than label. “And we feel artists should be also be rewarded for the risks they take.” Over the last 14 months Cohen has spent a lot of his time with digital companies trying to understand exactly what the possibilities could be and it has hugely influenced how he and his partners have structured their new business. “I spent an enormous amount of time inside these digital distribution companies just talking and engaging with them and understanding what these companies now know about our music fans — something we in the music business never knew for all the years I’ve worked in it. I see a lot of opportunities and asked an insane amount of questions.” The new company is looking to recruit 25-30 music veterans in areas like radio promotion and marketing alongside younger staffers who breath digital particularly in areas like data mining and data management, explains Liles. “We want entrepreneurial people, industry veterans that are loving the opportunity of the change to the here and now,” says Liles. “We also want people from outside the industry, chief content officers, chief consumer officers.” The company is getting backing from a wide range of investors, led by Google, which has put in around $5 million, according to one person familiar with the terms. “With YouTube, we have a long history of supporting artists and content creators. So we’re excited to invest in 300, a new, innovative company designed to create opportunities for artists,” said a Google spokesman in a statement. Another key investor was investment firm Columbus Nova, which recently took a significant stake in digital music service Rhapsody. He’s also being backed by Israeli-American hedge fund billionaire Noam Gottesman’s Toms Capital, whose offices Cohen has been working from since soon after he left Warner Music (the company is currently seeking their first formal office). Former Warner Music digital chief Alex Zubillaga (and in-law of Edgar Bronfman Jr.) is another backer. Zubillaga has a track record of digital investments including FanBridge and Chartbeat. One other investor is Andres Santo Domingo, co-founder of Brooklyn-based Kemado Records and a son of one of Colombia’s richest families. There are other investors who have declined to be identified. The investment agreements were pulled together by veteran media investment banker Aryeh Bourkoff and Ori Winitzer of LionTree. Despite speculation around the time of Cohen’s exit from Warner Music in September 2012, a year after billionaire Len Blavatnik took control, his old team and its current owner could not be happier to have him back in the fold, albeit as his own self-contained unit. “Lyor, Todd and Kevin all have well-established reputations as accomplished executives and entrepreneurs,” says the normally quite reticent Blavatnik in a statement. “This agreement will provide Warner with a great source of artistic talent and creativity and we are thrilled that they chose Warner as their home.” Craig Kallman and Julie Greenwald, the co-chairs of Atlantic Records, are especially excited about the prospect of having Cohen focused on the music and artists again and being part of their extended team. “I’ve seen them out there again on the hunt for new artists. I’m really confident in them knowing the A&R talent of the three of them,” says Kallman. This article was first published in Billboard Magazine –Subscribe Now

Marvin Gaye’s family is responding in a major way to Robin Thicke’s lawsuit claiming that “Blurred Lines” wasn’t stolen from Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up.” On Wednesday, the family went nuclear with counterclaims that allege that Thicke stole the summer mega-hit and also committed copyright infringement on Gaye’s “After the Dance” to create his song, “Love After War.” What’s more, the new legal papers obtained by The Hollywood Reporter suggest that Thicke’s  “Marvin Gaye fixation” extends further to more songs in the Thicke repertoire. Perhaps even more consequential, Gaye’s family also has set its sights on EMI April, the song publisher now owned by Sony/ATV that has business relationships with both sides. According to the counterclaims, EMI has breached a contract and its fiduciary duty by failing to protect Gaye’s songs, attempting to intimidate the family against filing any legal action, failing to remain neutral when faced with a conflict of interest and attempting to turn public opinion against the family. The penalty for those acts, says the Gaye family, should be that EMI loses all profits on “Blurred Lines” as well as rights to administer the song catalog of Gaye, known as the “Prince of Soul.” Thicke & Company v. Marvin Gaye’s Family Pharrell On ‘Blurred Lines’-Marvin Gaye Lawsuit: ‘All You Have To Do Is Read The Sheet Music’ Blurred Legal Lines: Licensing Tangle Between Thicke, Gaye Parties Rolls On Robin Thicke Sues to Protect ‘Blurred Lines’ from Marvin Gaye’s Family This court battle was triggered in August when Thicke and his producers Pharrell Williams and Clifford Harris Jr. went to a California federal court with the aim of preemptively protecting “Blurred Lines” from allegations that it was illegally derived from Gaye’s song as well as Funkadelic’s “Sexy Ways.” Requesting declaratory relief, the plaintiffs stated that “being reminiscent of a ‘sound’ is not copyright infringement.” In the latest court papers, Frankie Gaye and Nona Gaye say that not only does the lawsuit concern “blatant copying of a constellation of distinctive and significant compositional elements of Marvin Gaye’s classic #1 song,” but that Thicke himself candidly admitted as much. The Gayes point to pre-litigation interviews given by Thicke to GQ and Billboard. To the first publication, Thicke said: “Pharrell and I were in the studio and I told him that one of my favorite songs of all time was Marvin Gaye’s ‘Got to Give it Up.’ I was like, ‘Damn, we should make something like that, something with that groove.’ Then he started playing a little something and we literally wrote the song in about a half hour and recorded it.” But Thicke’s tune supposedly changed after the lawsuit was filed. Here is a TMZ interview with the singer, quoted in the latest legal papers: “Q: So, so, when you, when you wrote [“Blurred Lines”], do you like think of Marvin Gaye like when you write the music? A: No.” The Gaye family quotes music critics at The New York Times, Vice, Rolling Stone and Bloomberg Business Week who have remarked about the Marvin Gaye resemblance in “Blurred Lines.” The countersuit also presents an expert report by musicologist Judith Finell detailing “at least eight substantially similar compositional features” with Gaye’s original. The similarities are said to encompass the signature phrase, vocal hook, backup vocal hook, their variations, and the keyboard and bass lines — “far surpassing the similarities that might result from attempts to evoke an ‘era’ of music or a shared genre,” according to the court papers. While the countersuit makes the case that the public has detected Gaye in Thicke’s other songs — “including the similar bridge and identical lyrics from Marvin Gaye’s ‘I Want You’ in Thicke’s similarly-themed work, ‘Make U Love Me'” — it brings a second copyright infringement claim only over Thicke’s “Love After War.” That song is said to share a similar chorus, hook melody and more with Gaye’s “After the Dance.” (Listen below.) If the countersuit against various parties including Universal Music and Geffen Records stopped there, it would be a noteworthy example of the legal issues that arise in copyright law in controversies over songcraft. But the Gaye family, represented by attorneys Richard Busch and Paul Duvall at King & Ballow, add more. In fact, what makes the case possibly precedent-setting is the allegations lodged against EMI. EMI is the co-publisher of producing superstar Williams and is said to co-own and control “Blurred Lines.” The Gaye family owns rights to “Got to Give It Up” and “After the Dance,” but says it has assigned the rights to administer and protect those copyrights to EMI. Hence, a claimed conflict of interest. According to the countersuit, EMI’s “misconduct” includes failing to identify and raise claims based on entrusted Marvin Gaye copyrights, and after allegedly admitting that a claim was viable, “subsequently instructing its litigation attorney to intimidate the Gaye Family from filing an action by antagonistically warning that any lawsuit would be frivolous.” The Gaye family asserts that not only did EMI refuse to bring counterclaims after seeing a “renowned musicologist’s report,” but that it gave “strong biased support to the Blurred Writers.” To support the claim that EMI has breached its legal, contractual and ethical obligations, the Gaye family says that the chairman of EMI contacted its legal representative and accused the family of “ruining an incredible song,” “killing the goose that laid the golden egg” and being responsible for “Blurred Lines” not receiving an MTV Video Music Award. He also allegedly complained that the lawsuit might kill any chances that Thicke would win a Grammy Award for Song of the Year. The Gaye family also accuses EMI and representatives of Williams and Thicke of “the planting of a knowingly false story in the press that the Gaye Family supposedly turned down a “six figure settlement,” (no such offer was made) in order to make them appear unreasonable.” This is intolerable, say the counter-claimants. “Not only did EMI fail to bring this action, which is necessary to carry out EMI’s duties to protect the Gaye Family’s copyrights,” says the countersuit, “EMI attempted to dissuade the Gaye Family from pursuing this action by repeated threats and tactics to intimidate the Gaye Family and its representatives.” Now a contractual rescission is demanded in light of EMI’s alleged decision to take no action on the “golden goose” that is Robin Thicke’s hit. (Sony/ATV is one of the counter-defendants.) “The EMI Defendants control approximately thirty percent (30%) of the music publishing market throughout the world,” says the family’s court papers. “Accordingly, there is a strong likelihood that conflicts of interest, such as the one in the present case, will arise again between the EMI Defendants and the Gaye Family.  Based upon the blatant and egregious breach of the EMI Defendants’ fiduciary duty and their covenant of good faith and fair dealing, the EMI Defendants have proven that they cannot be trusted to remain neutral and impartial, and that they are unworthy of the level of trust and professional conduct which is required of a copyright administrator charged with protecting the Gaye Family’s important interests in copyrighted works created by Marvin Gaye.” The countersuit adds, “The Gaye Family should not be compelled to remain in this contractual relationship.” We’ll add responses by the Thicke camp and EMI as they come. This article was first published by The Hollywood Reporter