NEWS
A new startup is offering to help solve what’s become an unlikely mystery for music's top artists and their business managers: how much money they’re actually making.
It’s a question that’s become surprisingly hard to answer in a world of micropayments from a fast-multiplying number of platforms and music distributors around the globe. But it’s one that’s taken on new urgency as artists scramble to replace the revenue they long earned from touring before the pandemic halted concerts a year ago. Many are turning to their future royalties for a lifeline and need to know exactly what they’re expected to earn altogether in order to borrow against it or to maximize the price their copyright interests can command on the soaring music-asset market.
Until recently, music’s business managers have largely had to manually input earnings into spreadsheets to track their clients’ proliferating revenue streams. But last July, HIFI, a new financial services company catering to the music community, quietly launched an invite-only royalty dashboard that pulls in data from publishers, distributors, performance rights organizations including DistroKid, TuneCore, AWAL, and SoundExchange. Eight months later, HIFI has become a popular tool among music’s business managers, and signed up thousands of mostly independent artists, tracking many “tens of millions” of dollars, says Matt Pincus, an investor and board member of HIFI.
Now HIFI founder and CEO Damian Manning is expanding access to its service called “Cash Flow” that allows artists to get paid a salary twice a month based on their expected royalty income for the year. He’s also building HIFI Enterprise, a version of the royalty dashboard designed for artists signed to major record labels, in collaboration with some of the music industry's top business managers, though getting the major labels to allow HIFI to access their full data presents a serious challenge.
“We initially built the solution to service indie artists, and indie artists' managers and their teams,” Manning said in an interview over Zoom. “What we've discovered is the artists in the major label system, the managers in the major label system, major publishing system, had the same set of challenges they're looking for solutions for.”
The three major record companies declined to comment for this story.
Currently, HIFI’s “Cash Flow” service works by rerouting an artist’s royalty revenue from labels, publishers, and distributors through the company's coffers, allowing HIFI to analyze how much an artist is expected to make throughout the year, and adjust compensation accordingly.
“[Cash Flow] looks at the pipeline and historical earnings of given artists, and forecasts what they're going to be earning over the next rolling 12 months,” Manning says. “Then we guarantee a payment to them that arrives every two weeks, no matter what. If they earn more than we guarantee, we pass through the rest as a bonus, and they can cancel at any time.”
HIFI charges a 2% administration fee for use of Cash Flow but does not charge a fee for access to its standard royalty dashboard. (Enterprise partners will be charged a fee, which HIFI has not disclosed.) Business managers around the industry say Cash Flow and products like it will provide artists with more leverage and flexibility as they move throughout their careers, and HIFI says there is strong demand -- even from major artists.
“The idea that someone who’s big doesn’t ‘need the money’ -- I don’t think it’s a question of needing the money, it’s not wanting someone else to be holding your money,” says Andrew McInnes, Diplo’s manager and CEO of TMWRK Management, who notes the business managers he works with have embraced HIFI. “Anything that makes a business on the scale of Diplo more efficient is good for me, it’s good for Diplo, and it’s good for his business manager.”
“Getting a big check for publishing every two years is not conducive to setting up a good financial flow for anyone,” Mike Merriman, the founder and president of PARR3, a consulting firm that specializes in business management for entertainers, including clients Kehlani, Dillon Francis and 6LACK. Merriman believes that services like Cash Flow will allow artists to reduce the need to take big advances from labels and maintain more leverage in contract negotiations. “Instead of doing a deal where the label takes 82% and you take 18% of sales, you can leverage that to something much more in your favor,” Merriman says.
HIFI, which is currently only available to U.S. residents, also has plans to expand its offerings internationally.
Some managers are hoping that the company, and other services like it, will pressure the majors into providing more information to its artists in a more accessible fashion. “[HIFI] can become much more interesting and more exciting and more of a game-changer if the payors move to more real-time information,” says Mark Kaplan, a music business manager and partner at Citrin Cooperman, whose clients include The Black Eyed Peas, Snow Patrol and Interpol.
“Sometimes these label statements are set up to be overly complicated and light on data,” another business manager, who wished to remain anonymous, tells Billboard. “It's a 300-page pdf, but it's not even really telling you what you want to know. We need more transparency and more accountability.”
Just days after landing her fourth No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 with “Drop Dead,” Olivia Rodrigo is now getting major recognition from Niall Horan.
In a recent conversation with Rolling Stone published April 30, the former One Direction member shared insight into how he approaches songwriting, highlighting the comeback of bridges in pop and pointing to Rodrigo as a key influence behind it.
“It’s great to hear [bridges]. I feel like Olivia Rodrigo has been a big influence on that for pop writers,” the Irish artist said, before singing part of the “Drivers License” bridge. “What I like about Olivia’s music is [that] you feel like you’re getting one song and then you get a completely different song. It completely flips on its head musically, goes somewhere different, brings you to a bridge, brings you to some weird musical breakdown thing. Whatever [she] and Dan Nigro are up to is a good little team they’ve got going there. It’s definitely influencing people, including myself.”
Horan also spoke at length about his upcoming project Dinner Party, set to arrive June 5 through Capitol Records. He has already released two tracks from the record, including the title cut and “Little More Time,” both produced alongside Afterhrs, John Ryan and Julian Bunetta. The album rollout will be paired with an extensive 22-date tour across Europe, Ireland and the U.K. The Irish singer’s new release follows 2023’s The Show, which debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200. During the interview, Horan also mentioned that his next era leans more into rock elements, something he connects back to his long-standing love for bands like Blink-182.
“That drum sound is something that we were trying to chase, and that comes from that late-’90s, early-2000s punk-rock era,” he said. “Rock’s been a big influence in my life since I was a child. I write pop songs, but dressing them up in a different way sometimes is quite cool. And now, the way my career is going, I’m completely thinking about live shows all the time. I learned so much from being on the road and being out there every night. There’s only so much sitting on Spotify you can do and reading comments before you actually get an idea of what people actually think. You can see it in the room. The rockier stuff really goes off at the shows.”
The “Slow Hands” hitmaker also has two U.S. stadium dates lined up for this year. Joining longtime friend and Grammy-nominated country artist Thomas Rhett, Horan is set to perform at GEODIS Park in Nashville on July 9 and Hersheypark Stadium in Hershey, Pennsylvania on July 19, with Live Nation handling promotion for both shows. Kashus Culpepper and Emily Ann Roberts will open the concerts. With such a packed touring schedule, all four remaining members of One Direction are expected to be on the road with new music this year. When asked about attending his former bandmates’ shows, Horan gave praise to Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson.
“I went to Harry’s show a couple of years ago, and that was just wild. Madness going on there,” he said. “It reminded me of the 1D stadium shows where it was just seas of people jumping up and down. Watching the things going on on the floor, all the fans dancing around, I love that. You feel a sense of pride watching the boys doing what they love to do, and the communities that they’re able to create. I’m going to try and get to a Louis show of some capacity in the next few weeks.”
Horan is now the fourth One Direction member to drop a new album this year. Tomlinson released How Did I Get Here? in January, Styles hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally in March, and ZAYN followed with Konnakol earlier this month on April 17.
