Bring Me The Horizon tease new music with launch of YouTube series

Posted on April 1, 2023 by HD Radio Network

Bring Me The Horizon have shared snippets of new music as part of the launch of a new YouTube series.

READ MORE: Bring Me The Horizon: “Headlining Reading & Leeds is amazing. It’s been a crazy journey”

The new series, BMTHS5: Post Human EU, documents the band’s recent European headline tour, which wrapped up in February.

On the first episode, the band hit the road and linked up with Rammstein frontman Till Lindemann in Berlin, who “gave us booze” as the video’s caption reveals.

Included in the video are snippets of new music, though the release of any new music isn’t confirmed yet.

For now, watch the new video and hear the snippets of new music below.

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Last month, Bring Me The Horizon drummer Matt Nicholls said the band are set to release new music “pretty soon”.

The drummer confirmed in a new interview, that BMTH wrote and recorded “a bunch of stuff” during their tour of the US at the end of 2022, and “hopefully” a new single will be arriving in the near future.

The band have been working on new music in a studio built into the back of their tour bus with producer Zakk Cervini (who also produced their last release, 2020’s ‘Post Human: Survival Horror’).

“New songs coming? Yeah,” the drummer told Impericon. “We’re actually working on them at the minute. We’ve got a studio on our bus. We did it in America – we wrote a bunch of stuff, actually, and recorded some stuff in America as well. So hopefully one pretty soon.”

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David Lee Roth returns to stage for Las Vegas Performance

Posted on March 31, 2023 by HD Radio Network

David Lee Roth returned to the stage this week with the all-star cover band Royal Machines for a one-off live performance of Van Halen‘s ‘Panama’.

The show was a corporate event for Home Depot sales managers that took place at the Michelob Ultra Arena at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas earlier this week.

“Are we having a good time so far?” asked Roth as he led the group through a lively cover of ‘Panama’ including his signature ad-libs.

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Roth was not the only rock icon to grace the stage that night. Throughout their set, Royal Machine were also joined by Billy Idol, Linda Perry and Run DMC’s Darryl McDaniels.

The singer announced his retirement back in 2021. “I am throwing in the shoes. I’m retiring. This is the first, and only, official announcement… You’ve got the news. Share it with the world,” he said at the time.

The news came almost a year after the death of legendary guitarist Eddie Van Halen, who passed away from a stroke on October 6, 2020. Roth noted that he’d recently been thinking about his late bandmate, and was “encouraged and compelled to really come to grips with how short time is, and my time is probably even shorter”.

The announcement was followed by a farewell Las Vegas residency that was cancelled shortly after due to the omicron variant of COVID.

Recently, Roth shared a solo version of the 1980 Van Halen hit ‘Everybody Wants Some!!’. It arrived just a few months after another unreleased track, ‘Nothing Could Have Stopped Us Back Then Anyway’, making fans a bit skeptical of the singer’s retirement.

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Jimmy Page shares previously unreleased Led Zeppelin demo ‘The Seasons’ which became ‘The Rain Song’

Posted on March 31, 2023 by HD Radio Network

Jimmy Page has shared a previously unreleased Led Zeppelin instrumental demo, ‘The Seasons’.

The track, which you can listen to below, eventually formed the basis of ‘The Rain Song’ from the band’s 1973 album ‘Houses Of The Holy’.

Explaining how the track arose, Page wrote a message that accompanied the song on YouTube: “My original idea for the opening tracks for ‘Houses Of The Holy’ was that a short overture would be a rousing instrumental introduction with layered electric guitars that would segue in to ‘The Seasons’, later to be titled ‘The Rain Song’. Again there would be a contrasting acoustic guitar instrumental movement with melotron that could lead to the first vocal of the album and the first verse of the song.

“‘The Seasons’ was a memo to myself as a reminder of the sequence of the song and various ideas I’d had for it in its embryonic stage. I’d worked on it over one evening at home. During the routining of the overture now titled ‘The Plumpton And Worcester Races’, the half time section was born and the overture shaped in to the song, ‘The Song Remains The Same’. These rehearsals were done in Puddle Town on the River Piddle in Dorset, UK.”

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He continued: “The first set of recordings were done at Olympic Studios with George Chkiantz. We then came to record at Stargroves, Sir Mick Jagger’s country home, and, like Headley Grange, with the Rolling Stones recording truck.

“‘The Song Remains The Same’ was played on a Fender 12 string, the same one used on Becks Bolero, with my trusty Les Paul number 1 on overdubs in a standard turning. ‘The Rain Song’ was an unorthodox tuning on acoustic and electric guitars. On live shows, it became a work-out feature for the double neck.”

In a previous interview with Classic Rock, Page had mentioned a demo of ‘The Rain Song’.

“I had a home demo of ‘The Rain Song’, but unfortunately the tapes have been lost. Which is a real bastard,” he said at the time. “I literally had the full piece from beginning to end. I had the Mellotron idea and everything on it.”

Page is yet to confirm whether or not the newly uploaded demo is the lost version he was referring to previously.

Meanwhile, the legendary Zeppelin guitarist previously said he was working on “multiple projects”, and confirmed that he had turned down working on Ozzy Osbourne‘s last album ‘Patient Number 9’.

Elsewhere, Nicole Scherzinger recently covered Celine Dion‘s ‘My Heart Will Go On’ in the style of Led Zeppelin on the second series of That’s My Jam.

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Believe buys Sentric Music amid speculation about future of Utopia

Posted on March 31, 2023 by HD Radio Network

Business News Deals Labels & Publishers Top Stories

By Chris Cooke | Published on Friday 31 March 2023

Music distributor and artist services company Believe has acquired music publisher Sentric Music in a deal which it describes as “its first break into building a digital-first innovative music publishing business”.

Sentric is perhaps best known for providing admin services and sync support to self-published writers including DIY artists, although it also has a more traditional music publishing business too.

Bigging up its new purchase, Believe said yesterday that “Sentric’s proprietary and innovative platform is one of the most advanced solutions in the market, able to manage publishing for self-releasing artists profitably and at scale, while also offering global publishing deals to rightsholders at each stage of their development”.

“Sentric’s backend platform offers a publishing infrastructure best fit for digital rights’ management”, it went on, “while providing songwriters and publishers with a suite of tools and actionable data to power their strategies through its user portal”.

Sentric already had an alliance with Believe’s DIY distributor TuneCore, powering the publishing services that it offers artists who are self-releasing their recordings and also control the rights in their songs.

Unlike with recordings, where self-releasing artists need to find a distributor, on the songs side songwriters can actually rely on their collecting societies to license their rights to digital services, if they so wish.

However, in the UK, that requires writers to join mechanical rights society MCPS as well as performing rights society PRS. Plus, many would argue, because of various data issues that routinely negatively impact on songwriter earnings, by working with a platform like Sentric writers can get paid quicker and more accurately.

Noting the existing TuneCore tie up, Believe’s statement went on: “Moving forward, Sentric’s integration will further strengthen publishing for TuneCore’s self-releasing artists and expand it to new geographies. Sentric will then offer publishing services to all clients within the Believe Group, who will be able to monetise their music seamlessly”.

Commenting on the deal and his company’s ambition on the songs side of the business, Believe CEO Denis Ladegaillerie says: “The acquisition of Sentric is the first step for Believe in the roll-out of a global and comprehensive publishing offer”.

“The growth and digital transformation of the songwriters’ market is opening-up many opportunities”, he adds. “We are excited to be able to immediately expand the services we provide to our existing TuneCore clients with Sentric’s best-in-class royalty collection service, while starting to work on future innovative products and services for all of Believe’s songwriters and publishers”.

Believe has acquired Sentric – in a deal that values the latter at €47 million – from Utopia Music, which only bought the publishing business a year ago. That earlier deal was part of a flurry of acquisitions at Utopia which at the time seemed to have ambitions of provide a wide range of distribution, data and rights management services across the music industry.

Those acquisitions greatly increased the size and significance of Utopia, but then later in the year it was announced that the company was downsizing its recently expanded workforce, and in January this year CEO Markku Mäkeläinen departed the company, with founder Mattias Hjelmstedt stepping into that role.

Then it was announced that Utopia had sold back one of its other acquisitions, music industry directory and data platform ROSTR, to its founders. After which another company it had tried to buy in early 2022 – LA-based music rights management and licensing platform SourceAudio – sued the firm over the collapse of that deal.

Shortly before the Sentric sale was announced, Swedish business news site Breakit reported that Utopia’s subsidiary in that country, Utopia R&D Tech, was facing demands for tax payments of eight million kroner – about £625,000 – as well as other legal claims over unpaid bills and a bankruptcy petition filed by employees over the alleged non-payment of pension payments.

Another employee told the business site that they had not received their most recent salary payment. A spokesperson for Utopia told Breakit: “We sincerely apologise to all affected employees and stress that we are taking this matter very seriously. All late payments have been identified and will be resolved in the coming days”.

Profits from the Sentric deal will presumably help Utopia meet those financial demands. Though, of all the businesses that Utopia acquired, Sentric was the one most relevant to the company’s much stated wider mission of addressing data and royalty payment issues across the music industry in order to ensure every music-maker gets “fair pay for every play”.

READ MORE ABOUT: Believe | Sentric Music | Utopia

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BMG bigs up rights and royalty management capabilities in stats brag memo

Posted on March 31, 2023 by HD Radio Network

Business News Labels & Publishers

By Chris Cooke | Published on Friday 31 March 2023

BMG boss Hartwig Masuch bigged up his company’s rights and royalty management capabilities in a memo to staff yesterday, which accompanied the publication of various financial stats in the annual report of its parent company Bertelsmann.

While the recordings side of BMG has continued to grow in recent years and, according to yesterday’s memo, “reached a new high with a 40% share of total revenues”, BMG is still bigger on the songs side of the music rights business.

On the songs side, there are more complexities to navigate and more administration to complete to ensure songwriters get paid whenever their music is played. Collective licensing is a much bigger deal when it comes to songs, meaning that effectively interacting with the big network of collecting societies around the world is key.

And with digital, music publishers and collecting societies need to identify what recordings contain their songs and then claim the royalties they are due, which is complicated by the fact song copyrights are usually co-owned, and the music publishing sector has traditionally dealt with the mechanical rights and performing rights separately. All of which can cause delays and deductions in songwriter payments, or stop the songwriter from getting paid entirely.

There are data challenges on the recordings side too of course. And for both songs and recordings, deals with user-generated content platforms create extra issues around identifying what music users are including in their videos.

With that in mind, Masuch’s memo honed in on BMG’s investments “in our capabilities, our systems, our processes and our people”. As a result of those investments, he added, “the past year has seen significant developments, migrating our systems to the cloud for speed, resilience, and flexibility, introducing new AI tools for income tracking and sync and, of course, further adding to our teams all over the world”.

“We continue our relentless drive to eliminate the frictions and inefficiencies which have plagued the music industry for decades”, he went on. “In the past year we have again halved the time to register a song with societies and digital services worldwide. And we have increased the acceptance rate of automated registrations to a new high of 99.7%”.

“We want our clients to receive their income generated anywhere in the world as quickly as possible”, he went on. “The US and the UK have doubled the accounting cycle for all publishing clients to quarterly. At the same time, 99% of global revenues are now accounted to our artists and writers within the same accounting period we receive them, no matter the country these royalties were generated in. This all was achieved while royalty data volumes processed tripled compared to last year. And we’re far from finished”.

“From our industry leading YouTube optimisation team to our new royalty system which runs seven times faster than its predecessor”, he continued, “we remain focused on being the most reliable and effective partner for artists, songwriters and rightsholders globally”.

In terms of the financial stats, Masuch bragged: “BMG’s revenues increased by 31% last year to €866m. That’s over €200m more than in 2021 and three times more than the previous year’s revenue increase of €61m. Importantly, our growth did not come at the expense of profitability, and we actually increased our margin to 22.5%”.

The memo was technically from Masuch and Thomas Coesfeld, the latter being the company’s current CFO who is set to takeover as CEO next year.