Warner Chappell Music UK (WCM UK), the music publishing arm of Warner Music Group, has announced the promotion of Amber Davis to the role of Senior Vice President.

She will also continue in her position as WCM UK’s Head of A&R and will report into Shani Gonzales, WCM UK’s Managing Director.

In addition to continuing to oversee the A&R department, Davis will take on a broader role in shaping the publisher’s overall UK strategy.

Davis joined WCM UK in 2014 as Creative Director and was named Head of A&R in 2019.

Bertelsmann is bringing forward the long-planned leadership change at BMG, which was announced in January 2023.

Thomas Coesfeld, the current CFO of BMG, will now become the music company’s new CEO with effect from July 1, 2023.

He succeeds the founding CEO Hartwig Masuch, who, according to the company, is leaving BMG and Bertelsmann “at his own request and on the best of mutual terms”.

According to Bertelsmann, “due to his personal plans for the future, Hartwig Masuch had requested an earlier departure” from the company, but will remain associated with Bertelsmann in an advisory capacity until 2026.

The CEO changeover was originally scheduled for January 1, 2024.

The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) and Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI), two performing rights organizations operating in the US, have teamed up to form a joint task force aimed at addressing fraudulent activities associated with musical works within the collective management ecosystem. 

The alliance builds upon the two parties’ SONGVIEW collaboration, launched in December 2020, to provide detailed copyright information, including reconciled ownership shares and administration shares of music licensed in the US.

The newly formed task force comprises a diverse team of copyright, technical, distribution, legal, business, and product experts from both ASCAP and BMI.

Music companies are jumping into the virtual-artist space in a big way.

The three majors – Sony Music, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group – have all invested in virtual artist projects, but they are hardly the first.

The trend really began in Japan and Korea as far back as the 1990s, but back then, the technology was experimental, expensive and – maybe most importantly – audiences may not have been ready for virtual singers and bands, represented by cartoons or avatars and with no presence in the real world.

All that seems to be changing today, with social media sites often acting as incubators for a new generation of virtual artists.

Polar, created by TheSoul Publishing, boasts 1.9 million followers on TikTok. Lil Miquela, the brainchild of music producer Trevor McFedries and tech entrepreneur Sara DeCou, has 2.8 million Instagram followers.

But the phenomenon didn’t start with social media.

In fact, you can trace the history of virtual artists all the way back to the middle of the 20th Century, when Hollywood cartoon producers and comic book companies cashed in on the burgeoning rock music scene with bands like The Archies and the Grammy Award-winning Alvin and the Chipmunks.

Australian music tech company Jaxsta has launched an online record store for vinyl records, catering to the renewed popularity of physical music formats and the nostalgia associated with vinyl.

Vinyl.com went live on Monday (May 15), offering a catalog of vinyl records across all genres with verified creative contributions metadata on every album.

According to Jaxsta, the “iconic” vinyl.com URL “offers a deep catalog of vinyl records, powered by Jaxsta’s Official Music Credits”.

Kakao Entertainment, the entertainment division of South Korean internet company Kakao Corp., is doubling down on its metaverse push with the launch of a new four-member virtual K-Pop girl group called MAVE.

Kakao launched MAVE in January through its Metaverse Entertainment joint venture with South Korean mobile game developer Netmarble. Metaverse Entertainment was founded in August 2021.

The group’s members are Siu, Zena, Tyra, and Marty, who are presented as human-like avatars with natural-looking movements and facial expressions.

Reuters says the members can speak four languages: Korean, English, French and Bahasa, although they are not able to respond to prompts and only rely on scripts prepared by humans.

Apart from MAVE, Metaverse Entertainment also developed another virtual character called RINA, described as a 22-year-old with a “free-spirited lifestyle who loves fashion and music and is passionate about what she likes.”

RINA already has 32,600 followers on Instagram, which was launched on March 29, 2022, and has amassed 2.3 million likes and 138,000 followers on TikTok.