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This is, by some distance, the music business story of the year. Tomorrow morning (September 21) in Europe, as New Yorkers are sleeping and Los Angelenos are drifting off, 60 percent of the world’s biggest music company will hit the stock market. That’s the slice of Universal Music Group (UMG) …

Timbaland‘s been busy. Over the last year, while the producer was introducing the world to Verzuz and brokering deals with Apple Music and Peloton, he was also quietly putting finishing touches on a new platform called Beatclub — an early version of which went live a few months ago. The …

CALL IT A RIOT, revolution, or regime change — the music business today looks nothing like what came before it. Thanks to the fierce pace of tech advancement and the insatiability of young, internet-grown audiences, the multibillion-dollar global industry is an entrepreneur’s playground. Record-label bosses share a throne with engineers and algorithms; …

Jeff Jampol has managed the estates of the Doors, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, and Tupac Shakur. “None of my clients tour,” he says. “They’re all dead.” That hasn’t stopped him from generating big money on their behalf, whether it’s organizing a touring exhibition of Cobain’s artwork, setting up Oliver Stone’s …

The copyright bonanza in the music business continues. On Monday morning, Concord Music Publishing announced the purchase of Downtown Music Holdings’ entire portfolio of 145,000 owned and co-published music copyrights. Here are just some of the stars with songs included in the deal: Adele, Aretha Franklin, Beyoncé, Blake Shelton, Bruno …

UPDATE (4/9):The Small Business Administration said Friday evening that the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant portal was still “temporarily suspended” and would remain so through the weekend as technical issues were resolved. A re-launch date was not announced, with the SBA adding, “When a reopening date is determined, we’ll provide updates …

One of the cleverest ads I’ve ever seen from a music-streaming service arrived in April 2018 — and it was geared toward other business players, not consumers. Following years of strong growth for the record industry, labels had been facing up to the idea that annual increases in audio-streaming subscription …

The news that Bob Dylan has sold his full publishing catalog to Universal Music Publishing Group, in a deal estimated to be worth more than $300 million, is a big surprise in the career of one of music’s greatest songwriters. It’s likely one of the biggest deals of this kind …

Ghazi Shami was building computers long before he championed hit records. “Tech and music have always been simultaneous for me,” says Ghazi, who operates his own music distribution company and record label, Empire, responsible for hits from Money Man, Migos, and Tyga. “I got my first real job right after …

Last Thursday, at a West Hollywood mansion-turned-content house owned by social-media app Triller, Swae Lee contemplated his business strategy while eating buffalo chicken bites. Lee spent the evening alternating between snacking on the microwavable bites (catered by Frank’s Red Hot), livestreaming on Twitch (with several influencers and esports competitors surrounding …