Music News

• 🤖 Katy Perry sells her catalog rights to Litmus Music for $225 Million

  • Get caught up: What does it mean to sell your catalog rights? 

  • The deal includes her stakes in master recordings and publishing rights for the five albums she released between 2008 and 2020.

• 💸 BTS Members renew contract with Big Hit Music

  • The seven-member KPOP band will resume making music and touring post-2025, when some of its members will have completed their mandatory military service. Read more here.

• 🎵 Blink 182 announce One More Time

  • This will be the band’s first album with the trio of Travis Barker, Mark Hoppus and Tom DeLonge since 2011.

  • On the pop-punk topic… Olivia Rodrigo’s sophomore album ‘Guts’ shot to number one on the Billboard Album Charts this week, with ‘Vampire’ taking the top spot on the Billboard 100.

• ⚪ Upcoming: The Sphere in Las Vegas opens September 29th with a series of performances by U2

  • The $2.3 billion structure contains the world’s largest interior and exterior wraparound LED displays.

  • Note from the editor: Imagine being able to read your emails on this thing 😍😍

Entertainment News

• 📖 George R.R. Martin, John Grisham among 17 top authors suing ChatGBT

  • The major lawsuit led by the Author’s Guild alleges OpenAI’s ChatGBT stole the copyrighted work of the authors to train its AI program.

• 🎤 WGA and AMPTP issue rare joint statement on renewed negotiations

  • Although the statement was fairly straightforward, it holds deeper significance, as it is the first time the parties have done so in this tension-filled negotiation cycle.

• 🎥 Taylor Swift was able to release her movie mid-strike by doing everything Hollywood won’t actually do: meeting unions’ demands

  • The pop star reportedly met all of SAG-AFTRA’s demands to film and produce what will likely become the top-grossing tour film of all time.

  • She received the green light from the union to release her self-funded film (Swift reportedly spent between $10-$20M on it) via AMC Theaters, who has exclusive distribution rights.

  • Demands included higher salaries for crew members and more generous streaming residuals.

Interview with Chad Kenney, Creative Director of Brownies and Lemonade

This week, I caught up with Chad Kenney, who is best known for his work as the creative director of Brownies & Lemonade. B&L is one of LA’s premier events companies focusing on the cutting edge dance and hip-hop realm. In several years of operation, B&L has worked with some of the biggest names in contemporary dance / hip-hop music as well as the next wave of future top-tier talent, including Skrillex, Diplo, Porter Robinson, RL Grime, Madeon, and Alison Wonderland to name a few. The team has also activated showcases and stages at SXSW, Coachella, EDC, Lollapalooza, Ultra, and HARD Summer, and outside of the US, co-produced tours in Australia and Japan.

At B&L, Kenney handles everything from lineup curation, visual and branding design, A&R, partnerships, to even a little bit of Twitch streaming and podcast hosting. He is also, unfortunately, a die-hard fan of the LA Clippers. Check out his podcast All This Noise here where he plays co-host with Valerie Lee.

Our conversation is below:

AvA: Let’s go back to the beginning… How did Brownies & Lemonade start?

Kenney: Brownies & Lemonade was started by our founders, Kushan and Jose, who were throwing apartment parties down around UCLA in Westwood. House parties became the ethos of Brownies & Lemonade, and they wanted to take that raw energy and excitement and funnel that into more legitimate events.

They evolved into warehouse parties that were more a mixture of local hip-hop DJs and up-and-coming artists. When I came on board around that time in 2012, we started to transition fully into booking artists from SoundCloud, which was a place where we could find cool electronic music talent who wanted to play their first LA show. We would fly them out and let them crash on our couches. Then we started to book artists like Louis The Child and Jai Wolf who went on to bigger heights, and the parties grew in popularity.

In those early years there wasn't really a scene around what we were doing yet, but it quickly became known that if you wanted to see the next wave of what was going to happen in electronic music, you'd want to pop into a Brownies & Lemonade show. That’s when we started seeing agents and managers and even big artists coming through to see what was up. It was an amazing period of time getting to help break those artists.

AvA: You guys have always had Artists coming back to play at B&L events. How do you approach Artist development, and what are some Artists you’ve seen come up through your events that you’re excited about?

Kenney: With artist development, you want to try and have a certain awareness or some foresight into the trajectory of a certain artist or their respective scene. You wouldn't want to catch something at the crest of the wave, you want to catch it before it starts to rise. Many of these artists who have gone on from their bedrooms to becoming mainstage festival acts, have this sort of X factor… combining the tools, the trajectory, a growing fanbase, and a little bit of magic dust.

There is a long list of artists who have made their LA debuts with us, but it’s exciting to see artists like Knock2 and ISOxo who are sort of a “third generation” of B&L artists, where they actually were fans of our brand when they were teenagers, watching and wanting to one day be a part of this experience. And they're now our headliners. ISOxo did around 600 tickets at his first headline show with us in LA back in October of 2021, and two years later, Knock2 and him sold out four nights at the Shrine within a few hours. So to go from 600 tickets to 20,000 in two years, is not a fluke. It’s a huge wave starting to crest.

We try to craft community experiences that take the artist’s vision and amplify it in a real, significant way. We've cultivated our own community that is actually creating its own next stars.

AvA: You all have mastered the art of teasing lineups, and then delivering with acts like Madeon, Louis The Child, Diplo, Alison Wonderland & others. How much of the programming is set going into events vs. unstructured?

Kenney: It’s a healthy (or unhealthy) balance of both. It’s an interesting mixture of things that are planned out in advance, but maybe presented to seem a little bit more mysterious. I think that has always worked in our favor, because that's what our audience gets excited about. I think we've earned their trust on the lineup we’re going to deliver. Los Angeles is also a hard place to program in general given restrictions like radius clauses and other obligations, plus it’s the number one play for most artists. We see a lot of them who want to do their own show, especially post-pandemic, however many of them want to do non-traditional types of events with B&L: pop-ups, special guest appearances, or even have us co-present their headline show. We recently just went up with a show with Metro Boomin backed by the Symphonic Orchestra, so we definitely still get a lot of really cool, unique opportunities that come our way in advance.

AvA: You just put on Rattleship this past July 4 for two sold out nights inside the USS Hornet in the Bay Area. Can you talk about how you approach owning IP and creating larger experiences than a warehouse party or show at a traditional venue?

Kenney: A lot of the IP that we had for events in the past were smaller, more community-driven shows that were niche. But we see the value in doing multi-day, higher capacity festival events, especially as cool experiences in non-traditional locations. That is something that we identified after the pandemic: people just want to go to cool shit. They not only want escapism, but also want the community around them to funnel back into their own interests

I think being into dance music is one part of it, but also taking the next step, and being a dance music fan who also loves a really cool location, or loves people who share the same values when it comes to the way that they interact with their music. That's who we're trying to appeal to. With Rattleship, we were able to throw a rave on a decommissioned aircraft carrier, with people dressing up in sailor outfits to see headliners like Madeon and TroyBoi. But you also get to see a whole lineup of new artists that three years from now you're gonna look back and be like “I saw one of their first shows on an aircraft carrier.”

AvA: Talk about your creative process and some aspects that are important to you when approaching shows.

Kenney: My creative process is very hands-on and granular. I went to school for art, studying theater at UCLA, so I've been trained in a very traditional art background. I think that dance music is, in a lot of ways, the new theater, and a lot of modern day entertainment is theatrical. Set pieces, texture, tangible things, and surprising your audience with visual elements that are interesting or draw from a more traditional art are things that fans love. I think a lot of dance music is not very creative, and we rely on a lot of very formulaic kinds of elements. So anything with a little bit of character, and texture within dance music can get noticed pretty quickly as being cool and unique. I think you see a lot of people now who succeed in having that approach. Take Fred Again.., there's something about what he does that just is, is overflowing with personality, and is weird and sad and theatrical. I think that's really important to keep in mind in your creative process.

AvA: What is one piece of advice you'd give to someone just starting out in the business?

Kenney: This is something that extends beyond business, into a personal approach as well: Instead of trying to establish what your brand is, or what your look is, or who your key demo is, it's more important to identify your core values, your objectives and the essence of what your business or your brand is. Then evaluating everything else as “does it adhere to those core values or those rules that we've established?”

For us, when it comes to booking artists and taking on huge opportunities, we always ask, “is this us?” Most of the time if we would say no, we would pass on it. Now, that means passing on huge money-making opportunities that in the short term would have been really viable, but may have completely diluted our audience or led us down a totally different road that we couldn't come back from. Always sticking to the “is this us?” and then, by extension, your fan base: “is this for our fans, for our community?” That is a guiding light principle that will help you in the long run more than a lot of what people get taught these days in hustle / grind culture and how to gamify things. I think you need to go back to the basics, establish your core values and stick to them.

👋 Thanks for reading this week’s newsletter and see you next week!

This newsletter is written by Warner Bailey (connect with me here). Edited by Malik Figaro.

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