C
HERYL KOH, AN ASPIRING
singer and student at the Univer-
sity of Southern California, was
selected from thousands of
applicants to sing in Mandarin over the
opening credits of the 2018 hit movie Crazy
Rich Asians. Koh was stunned by what she saw
as her big break — but then became stressed:
She had only a week to review the recording
contract and no money to hire an attorney.
Koh’s music industry professor,
Dr. Paul Young, pointed her in the
direction of University of California,
Los Angeles’ Music Industry Clinic
(MIC), a new student-run service
created by law professor and Azoff
MSG Entertainment co-president
Susan Genco, who designed it as an expe-
riential complement to her lecture course.
Koh applied for the clinic’s free legal services
and within a week, a small fleet of law students
were poring over her agreement.
“They were so helpful and they worked
so quickly,” says Koh. When the negotia-
tions grew unexpectedly complex — rapper-
actress Awkwafina contributed a rap to the
song that also played over the film’s clos-
ing credits — the clinic’s staff assisted her
throughout the process.
When Genco launched MIC in spring 2018,
she brought in two star instructors to help
oversee the program: Susan Hilderley, an
entertainment transaction lawyer and partner
at King Holmes Paterno & Soriano, and Jeffrey
Light, a 35-year music-industry veteran and
partner at Myman Greenspan Fineman Fox
Rosenberg & Light. Students who complete
Genco’s fall-semester class are eligible to
participate in the spring-semester clinic, for
which they obtain full course credit.
Over the past two years, Genco’s music
industry clinic has provided pro bono work
for 60 Los Angeles-based musicians, inde-
pendent labels and music companies, ranging
from sorting out royalty-collection issues to
crafting artist-producer agreements,
and from negotiating synch license
deals to identifying key points of live
performance contracts.
“I’ve worked as a music lawyer
now for 25 years and have always
wanted to give back,” says Hilderley.
“This is basically a two-fer — helping
people in the local music community
who can’t afford to hire a lawyer, while
teaching and training the next generation of
music lawyers.”
Local musicians like Kaurosh Poursalehi,
who goes by the stage name Roach, are grate-
ful for their efforts. Poursalehi says MIC’s ser-
vices allowed his group, Bikini Trill, to create
a band contract that showed it how to treat
the group as a business right when his band
started booking shows.
“I honestly didn’t know it was a thing,”
says Poursalehi. “We were able to [answer
questions like], ‘What if one of the members
leaves? What are the exact duties of each
member?’ Things we talk about, but never
actually put on paper.”
GOOD WORKS
Music Lessons
At UCLA’s Music Industry Clinic, law students get firsthand
experience — and local musicians get the help they need
BY CLAUDIA ROSENBAUM
L
AST AUGUST, WHEN
Chris Brown decided to release 10
new tracks, RCA Records decided
not to make them available as a
new album or collection. Instead, the label
added them to the beginning of his June 2019
album, Indigo, and called the new, 42-song
work Extended (Indigo). One of the new
tracks, “Overtime,” drew 10 million Spotify
plays, boosting the deluxe album from No. 13
to No. 6 on the Billboard 200.
Artists tacking on bonus tracks to
previously released albums is hardly new —
Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus, Rod Stewart, Lady
Gaga and others have done this for years,
both for CDs and iTunes. But in the stream-
ing world, the “deluxe album” has a new
benefit of extending the life of a big release.
Lizzo’s “Truth Hurts,” originally released
in 2017, did not appear on her album Cuz
I Love You last April, but she added it to a
deluxe version a month later and the song
rose to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. Shawn
Mendes, Young Thug and Kane Brown have
all followed a similar strategy.
“It helps refresh and maintain interest in
a current project,” says RCA co-president
John Fleckenstein. “While Chris Brown is
touring and promoting Indigo, it makes sense
to expand the offering versus starting a new
enterprise and marketing position.”
Adding songs to an existing release has
another benefit: If the bonus tracks take
off, they count toward streaming numbers
for the parent album. In “Truth Hurts,” Lizzo
earned a smash single and rejuvenated Cuz
I Love You; after she performed the song at
MTV’s Video Music Awards in August, the
album surged 6-4 on the Billboard 200. “It’s
audience behavior accentuated by record-
label marketing behavior to extend how long
songs last,” says Mark Mulligan, managing
director at MiDiA Research.
“Everybody’s always looking for that one
little gimmicky idea,” says Jim McDermott,
a former Sony and Universal new media
executive who is now a digital-marketing
consultant. “What it’s about now is reigniting
conversation and giving the inertia a bump.”
LONGTIME CURB RECORDS CEO DICK WHITEHOUSE DIED. DAVID OLNEY, THE NASHVILLE SINGER-SONGWRITER FOR EMMYLOU HARRIS AND LINDA RONSTADT, DIED AT 71.
Genco
Bonus Round
ADDING EXTRA TRACKS TO
ALBUMS GAINS STEAM AGAIN
BY STEVE KNOPPER
Koh onstage in Long
Beach, Calif., in 2019.
KOH:COURTESY^OFWCOPA.^ G
ENCO:^ TIMOTHYNORRIS.40 BILLBOARD • JANUARY 25, 2020