Taylor Swift leaves lifelong label
Taylor Swift has announced that she is leaving her lifelong record label, Big Machine Label Group (BMLG), to sign with Republic Records and Universal Music Group (UMG). The financial terms of the deal have not been made public. As part of her new contract, Swift, 28, asked that “any sale of [UMG’s] Spotify shares result in a distribution of money to their artists, non-recoupable”. She said that the label had agreed to this, “at what they believe will be much better terms than paid out previously by other major labels”.
Swift highlighted this as “a sign that we are headed towards positive change for creators — a goal I’m never going to stop trying to help achieve, in whatever ways I can”. Swift has not single-handedly brought about this change. In March 2018, UMG were the last of the major labels, following Warner and Sony, to commit to sharing any money generated by the sale of its Spotify equity with its artists. In May, independent label rights body Merlin sold its equity stake in Spotify and passed on the proceeds to its members. UMG is the last of the major label groups to divest itself of its shares in Spotify, a contentious issue given Spotify’s fall in value. The Swedish streaming giant floated on the New York Stock Exchange for the first time this April, opening at a share price of $165. It reached highs of $196.28 in July but has since fallen to $134, a fall of more than $11.5bn.
Paz de la Huerta sues Weinstein
Actor Paz de la Huerta filed a lawsuit accusing Harvey Weinstein of raping her in 2010 and then embarking on a campaign of harassment that harmed her career. The lawsuit filed in LA superior court alleges Weinstein raped De la Huerta twice in New York in December 2010, taunting her with phone calls between the two assaults. New York police said a year ago that they were investigating De la Huerta’s allegations. No charges have been filed in the case, but Weinstein is charged there with the rape of another woman. In a new allegation, the suit states that the following month Weinstein exposed himself to the actor in a Beverly Hills hotel when she went to confront him. She alleges Weinstein tried to get De la Huerta to have a sexual encounter with him and another woman.
About a year after the incidents, De la Huerta was fired from the HBO show Boardwalk Empire, and the lawsuit states she has reason to believe Weinstein was involved. It cites a photograph that appeared in the New York Times of Weinstein talking to Martin Scorsese, a director and executive producer on the show, a few weeks before her departure.
Weinstein’s attorney Ben Brafman pointed out the lack of charges in New York, and said De la Huerta’s “newly minted version of events including her new California claims are equally preposterous and the product of an unstable personality”.
Pranksters plant ‘stolen Picasso’
It almost sounded too good to be true: A Picasso painting stolen in one of the world’s most famous art heists had been found under a tree in a snowy Romanian forest. It emerged it was totally too good to be true, part of an elaborate and carefully staged piece of performance art by a radical Belgian theatre company.
Picasso’s 1971 Tete d’Arlequin (Harlequin’s Head) was stolen from the Kunsthal gallery in Rotterdam six years ago in what has gone down as one of the most remarkable art heists of modern times. It was one of seven paintings, along with a Monet, Gauguin, Matisse and Lucian Freud, taken with startling speed and ease in the dead of night. Two Romanian men, Radu Dogaru and Eugen Darie, were jailed by a court in Bucharest in 2013 after admitting their part in the thefts. Security, the ringleader said, had been “practically non-existent” and he entered “just with a screwdriver.” They smuggled the paintings in to Romania in pillowcases before trying, and failing, to sell them on.
