BACKSTAGE PASS / Digital Power Players 2017
LAMAR: RICH FURY/GETTY IMAGES. WEINSTEIN: ALEX BERLINER/ABIMAGES. ISRAELITE: COURTSY OF NMPA. MARKS: COURTESY OF RIAA. CONNELL: JASON KRUPEK. KIM: CHRIS LEARY. LEVIN: DAVID GEFFIN. MASSIMINO: COURTESY OF SOUNDEXCHANGE. PHARRELL: GARY GERSHOFF.her album Witness. More than 50 million tuned in
from 190 countries to watch the singer eat, sleep
and endure a rigorous (but fun) roster of guests. The
fact that the livestream also addressed issues like
mental health, immigration and equality, says
Plotkin, “was as important to Katy and YouTube as
the entertainment.”BRENT WEINSTEIN, 42
Partner/head of digital media,
United Talent Agency
“It’s a huge agency priority to work
closely with our clients to launch
innovative new digital media
businesses,” says Weinstein, a 16-year
veteran of UTA, whose team in the
past year has launched Sofia Vergara’s Latin-
focused digital media company Raze and the
music-based lifestyle brand WeBuyGold with DJ
Khaled. The Encino, Calif., resident, who guides a
global digital crew of 30-plus, has offered digital
business guidance for events like the Consumer
Electronics Show and corporations including Delta
Airlines. The unpredictability of the digital media
world “keeps our heads on a swivel,” he says, “but
it’s also a big motivator.”
INDUSTRY ASSOCIATIONSDAVID ISRAELITE, 48
President/CEO, National Music Publishers’
Association
The NMPA turned 100 this year — and
threw itself a party at Cipriani in
Midtown Manhattan, complete with a
speech from Pharrell Williams, a
performance by Patti Smith, a
demonstration of Amazon’s Alexa personal
assistant for music streaming and the awarding of a
songwriting credit for “Imagine” to Yoko Ono. “It
was a once-in-a-hundred-years event,” says
Israelite, who has led the association since 2005.
The NMPA recently faced off before the Copyright
Royalty Board against Spotify, Apple, Amazon,
Google and Pandora in a trial to determine the
mechanical royalty rates those streaming services
will pay from 2018-2022. “It was a scorched-earth
trial against five companies, three of which are
among the world’s biggest,” says Israelite. “I’m
optimistic, but that was a challenge.”STEVEN MARKS, 50
Chief of digital business/general counsel, RIAA
“Five years ago, we used to joke that
flat is the new up,” says Marks of the
sales trend that marked the music
business for many years. “Now we’re
seeing growth,” says the Florida
native, citing the RIAA’s annual report in March that
showed music sales up 11.4 percent during 2016,
bolstered by the strength of streaming. Among the
next challenges for the record-industry trade group?
“We’re working hard on data issues,” says Marks,
“just having an authoritative set of ownership data
for both recordings and compositions.”
PERFORMING RIGHTSJ.D. CONNELL, 41
Vp new media licensing, SESAC
The acquisition of SESAC in January
by the private-equity powerhouse
Blackstone unlocked resources for
new opportunities at the rights
organization. “We have been able to
finalize a number of large domestic licensing
transactions worth tens of millions of dollars in
2017,” says Connell, a Tennessee native who lives in
Midtown Nashville. And under its new owners,
SESAC also has expanded abroad with, for example,
the creation of Mint Digital Licensing, a joint
venture with the Swiss authors’ rights group SUISA.
Connell reports sharpening “my skill set for
licensing into digital services in Europe.”ALICE KIM, 45
Chief strategy and digital officer, ASCAP
As ASCAP tracks “more than a trillion”
performances a year of the 10.5 million
works by 625,000 members, managing
that massive amount of data is crucial,
says Kim, who came to the performing-
rights organization in 2015. Since then, she has
helped strike a deal boosting information flow with
YouTube and also has played a key role in ASCAP’sdatabase initiatives with BMI and performing-rights
groups abroad, SACEM in France and PRS for Music
in the United Kingdom. “Because of ASCAP’s scale,”
she says, “our innovation has the impact of truly
moving the industry forward .”DAVID LEVIN, 46
Vp digital licensing, BMI
Streaming services, social media,
online video — all music-driven
platforms pose an ongoing challenge
for BMI and other performing-rights
organizations, says Levin. “We have to
educate the technology community of the rights
they’re exploiting and negotiate a fair value for those
rights,” says the Brooklyn resident. Most recently,
Levin helped close a long-term licensing deal with
Netflix that “values BMI songwriters’ contributions,”
he says — and gave BMI access to data to
“accurately compensate those writers.”JULIA MASSIMINO, 45
Vp global public policy, SoundExchange
For SoundExchange, which collects
digital royalties for noninteractive
music services (think Pandora and
SiriusXM), Massimino is making
things happen in Washington, D.C.
The Texas native helped push forward the
introduction this year of the Fair Play Fair Pay Act
(H.R. 1836) and the CLASSICS Act (H.R. 3301). The
proposed legislation, she explains, “would ensure
music creators have the right to get fair-market
value for their work when it’s used for commercial
gain by all types of radio services, regardless of the
technology used to broadcast it to listeners.”
SoundExchange advocates for creators, she says,
“in a political atmosphere characterized by near-
total gridlock.”
Contributors Rich Appel, Dave Brooks,
Ed Christman, Andy Gensler, Steve Knopper,
Robert Levine, Geoff Mayfield, Melinda Newman,
Paula Parisi, Alex Pham, Dan Rys, Eric Spitznagel
and Colin StutzNO. STREAMING SONG OF THE YEAR
“Humble”
Kendrick Lamar
633.8 million
streams in 2017
Source: Nielsen MusicLamar performed during
the Legends of the Fall
Tour at The Forum in Los
Angeles in April.NMPA’s Israelite hosted the gala luncheon where
Williams (left) received the organization’s centennial
s o n g w r i t e r i c o n awa r d in N ew Yo r k in M ay.64 BILLBOARD | SEPTEMBER 2, 2017