Building is destroyed, but we will be back. | | | | Megan Thee Stallion at Rolling Loud, Oakland, Sept. 28, 2019.
(Miikka Skaffari/WireImage/Getty Images) | | | | | | “Building is destroyed, but we will be back.”
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| | rantnrave:// Devastation and resilience in tornado-wracked NASHVILLE. Honky-tonk hearts and hugs to Music City... I was today years old (yesterday years old by the time you read this) when I learned that the CARL CRAWFORD who runs 1501 ENTERTAINMENT, the label MEGAN THEE STALLION is publicly feuding with, is the same Carl Crawford who a decade ago became the worst free agent signing in the history of my beloved BOSTON RED SOX. I don't resent athletes wringing hundreds of millions of dollars out of team owners who have way more money than they do, but let's just note that this particular deal was one the underperforming Red Sox left fielder never came close to recouping. If the Red Sox were UNIVERSAL MUSIC, he might still be paying them back with any money he's made in the past couple years from a billion-plus streams and other assorted Megan Thee Stallion revenue. Sports contracts, of course, aren't record deals. They're more transparent and less complicated, and the teenage or 20someting athletes signing their first ones tend to know exactly what they're signing. In the case currently unfolding on INSTAGRAM, TWITTER and elsewhere in candid detail, Crawford and Megan are feuding over a deal signed when both were new at this. She was a 20-ish up-and-coming rapper who, she told her fans in an Instagram post, "didn't know everything that was in that contract," a 360 deal that gives the label 60 percent of her recording income (she splits her 40 percent cut with her producers, engineers and collaborators) and 30 percent of her touring and merchandise revenue. He was an athlete-turned-label-owner who, in his own words, "knew absolutely nothing about [the business]. Zero." She says her management at ROC NATION told her it's an unconscionable deal andthe label's paying her pennies on the dollar. He says she owes him money. She says he's trying to block her from releasing her upcoming album, SUGA; he says he isn't. They're in court in Texas—the reporting on what exactly is happening there has been weirdly thin and sketchy—and very much online, she on Instagram, he in an unusually transparent interview with Billboard's CARL LAMARRE, some of which reads like inside baseball and some of which reads like he's letting you rifle through the papers on his desk. We readers are offered a glimpse of the transparency that the artist, and maybe even the label owner, didn't have when they first went into business together... JUICY J also went public on his label recently, with Twitter posts, references to PRINCE's "Slave" era and a song subtly titled "F*** COLUMBIA RECORDS." That dispute, too, seemed to partly involve music the artist was more interested in releasing than his label was. But the complaint desk at Columbia apparently heard what he had to say. On Saturday, he tweeted, "Spoke to @ColumbiaRecords We are all good!"... A day after she was fired as CEO of the RECORDING ACADEMY, DEBORAH DUGAN offered more evidence of what she has called GRAMMY AWARDS nomination rigging. In one case outlined in a new written complaint, supported with email evidence, Dugan says Grammy producer KEN EHRLICH pressed the Academy to nominate an unnamed superstar artist he's known since childhood for "Record, Album and Song" at this year's awards in the hope it would lead to the artist performing on the show. Dugan had promised a day earlier to hold the Academy accountable, and her termination may prove to be more of a beginning than the ending the Academy hoped it would be... Here's a running list of companies and people pulling out of SXSW, and here's a TEXAS MONTHLY piece explaining what would be lost, in very human terms, if the festival, which starts next week, is canceled. SXSW officials continue to say they're moving forward... Meanwhile QUARTZ informs us there are "already more than 65 songs on Spotify that include 'coronavirus' in the title and "another seven with 'covid19' or 'covid-19' in the title." SEO songwriting, it's a thing... BEHRINGER, the Swiss gear company, goes after a music journalist with an anti-Semitic attack, apologizes, then apparently deletes the apology. This is an amazingly calm and measured, even blissful, response by the journalist, PETER KIRN... RIP MIKE THRASHER. | | | - Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator |
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