The blockbuster Live Nation antitrust trial is finally coming to an end, and a federal jury will soon decide whether the company has used its size to wield unlawful monopoly power in the live music industry.

The New York jury heard closing arguments on Thursday (April 9), more than a month after the trial first kicked off in the case brought by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and dozens of state attorneys general. The DOJ settled with Live Nation just a few days into the trial, leaving 33 states and the District of Columbia to pursue the company’s divestiture of Ticketmaster on their own.

According to the Associated Press, the states’ lawyer, Jeffrey Kessler, told the jury in his final pitch on Thursday that Live Nation is a “monopolistic bully.” Kessler said the company controls 86% of major concert venues in addition to the artist promotion and ticketing business — a level of control he equated to “digging the moat around the monopoly castle.”

Live Nation attorney David Marriott countered in his own closing statement that while the company is indeed big, it is a “fierce competitor” that plays fair in the live entertainment industry. He said the states do not have any tangible evidence of monopolistic conduct, and that Kessler’s 86% figure is a misleading number calculated by excluding key venues, such as stadiums, from the pool of “major concert venues.”

“This is a gerrymandered market made up for purposes of this litigation,” Marriott told the jury, per the New York Times.

The lengthy trial featured testimony from venue bosses including former Barclays Center CEO John Abbamondi, who said Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino threatened to divert concerts if he switched to rival ticketer SeatGeek. Rapino denied making such threats when he later took the stand himself, saying the company has achieved its success through top-notch work, not anticompetitive conduct.

Other key witnesses included AEG Presents CEO Jay Marciano, Live Nation president of touring Omar Al-joulani and Drake’s manager, Adel Nur (aka Future the Prince). A slew of economics and other expert witnesses also testified.

The jury will begin deliberating in private on Friday morning (April 10). On a technical level, the verdict form asks whether Live Nation violated federal and state antitrust laws via two key practices: requiring artists to use its promotion services in order to play its amphitheaters, and threatening to withhold Live Nation-promoted concerts from venues that don’t sign exclusive primary ticketing contracts with Ticketmaster.

Financial damages could be on the table if the jury’s answer is “yes” to any of these questions. It would then be up to Judge Arun Subramanian to decide what kind of structural relief is required. The states want to break up Live Nation and Ticketmaster, but the judge could find that limits on the company’s business practices are sufficient.

Live Nation has already agreed to some such limits as part of its settlement with the DOJ, including opening up its back-end technology to rival ticketers, allowing rival promoters to book its amphitheaters and offering a non-exclusive primary ticketing option to venues. The deal also created a $280 million fund to be distributed to any states that chose to sign on, though just a handful of states took that route.

Pooh Shiesty will remain in jail after his bombshell arrest for allegedly barricading Gucci Mane in a Dallas recording studio and forcing the 1017 Records boss to sign a label deal release at gunpoint.

Shiesty (Lontrell Williams Jr.) was denied bail following a Wednesday (April 8) evidentiary hearing in Texas federal court, where he was charged last week with kidnapping and conspiracy to commit kidnapping over the alleged “armed takeover” in January. He faces up to life in prison if convicted.  

“Based on the credible evidence presented at the hearing, the court finds probable cause to believe that defendant committed the law violations alleged in the criminal complaint,” wrote U.S. Magistrate Judge Renée Harris Toliver in a detention order obtained by Billboard.

Wednesday’s hearing featured testimony from an FBI agent about police reports given the night of the incident, when Shiesty allegedly pulled an AK-style pistol during a business meeting and forced Mane to release him from 1017. Though Mane (born Radric Davis) has not been named in court, the charging documents identify this victim as “R.D.” and describe him as the head of 1017.

Shiesty’s attorney, Bradford Cohen, told reporters after the hearing that the entire case rests on “very questionable” witness statements, noting, “The FBI doesn’t take three months to arrest someone if they believe everything that was said on the night that it occurred.”

“They have no contract,” said Cohen. “They have no video of this alleged signing of a contract. They have no guns. They have no jewelry. They have none of that physical evidence.”

Shiesty was charged last week alongside eight alleged co-conspirators, including his father, Lontrell Williams Sr., and the rapper Big30 (Rodney Wright Jr.). Prosecutors say these individuals barricaded the recording studio and robbed Mane’s associates of Rolex watches, a 1017 chain and a Louis Vuitton bag.

The alleged incident came just a few months after Shiesty’s release from prison on federal gun charges. He was still on post-release house arrest in January — a factor cited by Judge Toliver in Wednesday’s detention order.

“In light of that fact and the fact that the conditions of pretrial release at this court’s disposal are the same or similar to those defendant has already violated, the court finds that there is no condition or combination of conditions the court can impose in this case which will reasonably assure defendant’s appearance as required or the safety of the community or another person if released,” wrote the judge.

While some headlines say Pershing Square’s offer to buy the Universal Music Group (UMG) values the company at $64 billion — which would make it by far the biggest music industry deal ever — if you get into the details of the offer, it looks like Pershing Square’s founder and CEO, Bill Ackman, is trying to buy the major on the cheap. At least that’s the assessment of some Wall Street music investors and music industry executives.

For one thing, despite all the headlines touting the more than $60 billion valuation of the convoluted offering, the cash option, if it were available for all shares — which it is not — wouldn’t even be bigger than UMG’s initial public offering.

Pershing Square’s valuation is based on its forward-looking view that UMG’s stock price will have a projected value of 30.40 euros ($35) per share on Dec. 31, 2026, which would give the deal a valuation of 55.55 billion euros ($64 billion). However, if you read Pershing Square’s letter to the UMG board, it says UMG shareholders may elect to receive all cash or a mix of stock and cash consideration. If shareholders choose to receive all cash, they will receive 22 euros a share, which would give the deal an overall value of 40.34 billion euros ($43 billion).

In short, $43 billion would put the deal below UMG’s valuation after its first day of trading, when it closed at 25.10 euros, giving it a 46 billion euros valuation — then about $54 billion. But even the $43 billion valuation is a pie-in-the-sky figure, because Pershing Square is only proposing to bring 9.4 billion euros ($10.85 billion) to the table to pay for its deal by injecting 2.5 billion euros ($2.89 billion) in cash, raising 5.4 billion euros ($6.23 billion) in debt and getting another 1.5 billion euros ($1.73 billion) toward the financing by selling UMG’s Spotify holdings.

The non-binding offer will pay shareholders 5.05 euros ($5.82) a share and the equivalent of a 0.77 share in new UMG stock, which would see the share count fall by 17%, from 1.833 billion to 1.541 billion shares.

If you add in the $2.5 billion that Ackman still has in UMG stock — he paid $4 billion in 2021 for about 10% of UMG and, in 2025, sold about $1.5 billion of that, leaving him with a 6.2% stake in the company — that means he’s trying to take control of UMG for a total of about $12 billion, not $64 billion. In addition, he’s only bringing $5.5 billion of Pershing Square’s own money to the table. If shareholders agree to the Pershing Square proposal, at the end of the deal, Pershing will own an 11.7% stake in UMG shares, according to a Billboard transcript of a Pershing Square conference call with Wall Street analysts.

What Ackman is really trying to do, say music industry financial executives, is take over UMG on the cheap — or at the very least, ignite UMG share price increases.

As one music industry financial investor puts it, “Ackman is saying, ‘Trust me, I’m the man. I’ll put a great board in; we will get listed in the U.S., and we will get rid of the guys in Europe, and off we go.’ That executive describes the Pershing Square offer as a “non-transaction transaction. Is he really buying the company or is he saying, ‘Put me in charge and the company will do better’?”

A music industry financial executive similarly says, “While the offer is impressive on its face, it’s financially structured with very little cash, new debt and a very large equity component in a new UMG structure. Shareholders are not getting a premium in cash; they are taking a bet on the valuation that Pershing Square says it can get in the future.”

Pershing Square is betting that all current shareholders will choose to take the equivalent of 77% of their shares and 5.05 euros, instead of cashing out and choosing to take 22 euros a share. However, if shareholders do choose to take the all-cash payout, the math doesn’t work. As the Barclays Bank European Media Equity research analyst team puts it, “There is in effect no cash alternative.”

If, as Pershing Square expects, existing shareholders choose to take the equivalent of 77% of a share for each share outstanding and 5.05 euros, the cash component works out to 9.3 billion euros, which the money on the table would just about cover. Alternatively, the 9.4 billion euros cash offer on the table will only allow shareholders to buy, at 22 euros a share, 444.3 million shares — or just 23.3% of outstanding shares.

It’s unlikely that all shareholders will choose to take all cash, and it’s equally unlikely that all of them will choose to instead take the 0.77 a share trade-in deal plus 5.05 euros a share — meaning it will probably be a combination of both. But as Barclays’ European Media team puts it, either way, “The number of shareholders that can get €22.00 per share or 100% cash would be very small.”

Others wonder if the offer is even real. “Isn’t he just trying to stimulate share price? He is doing what activist investors do,” says a senior music industry executive.

If that was Pershing Square’s main intention, Ackman is off to a good start, as UMG’s stock closed at 19.06 euros on Tuesday (April 7) — up nearly 11.5% from the April 2 close of 17.10 euros. According to the music industry financial executive, Ackman’s offer served as a huge advertisement that UMG’s stock is undervalued, and “he just got at least 10% richer.”

Ackman has previously said he believes UMG shares are undervalued and do not reflect the company’s performance, a point he extensively reiterated on Tuesday’s conference call. He is not alone in that assessment, as others have noted that UMG has been producing strong results but has not been rewarded when it comes to its share price — something that UMG management agrees with. Just last week, in an apparent bid to boost the share price, UMG announced it would buy back about 500 million euros ($574 million) worth of its shares. In a statement at the time, UMG CFO Matt Ellis said, “We currently see a meaningful dislocation in UMG’s market valuation.”

But that effort isn’t enough for Pershing Square. During the conference call, Pershing executives laid out that while UMG’s performance has been strong, UMG management hasn’t paid enough attention to the share price. In particular, Ackman cited the company’s ownership of about $2.7 billion in Spotify shares and said the market is giving UMG no credit for that stake.

“There’s been no presentation by the company of what the plans are for that holding. In general, we hear from shareholders that they just find the business hard to understand, difficulty getting their questions answered,” Ackman said during the conference call, according to the Billboard transcript. “They’re surprised almost every quarter with puts and takes in the earnings. And really this relates to how investor relations have been handled by the company.”

Later in the call, according to the Billboard transcript, Pershing Square Capital Management chief investment officer Ryan Israel said, “We think that we can add a lot of value [by helping] capital allocation and shareholder communications. And we think the combination of those two things can be very powerful to allow for very significant earnings per share growth over time.”

During the call, Pershing Square outlined where it believes it can deliver value to shareholders. But some worry that despite having a five-year history of UMG ownership, Pershing Square’s understanding of the music business still falls short.

The music industry financial executive says there are always “serious concerns about how a financially structured transaction” will impact investment in artists and songwriters. “Many CFOs of the larger financial institutions have shown they are not concerned about investments” in A&R when it comes to getting cost savings to raise a stock price valuation, the executive adds.

But Pershing Square’s Israel addressed that concern during the conference call, saying, “We agree with management that the first priority of the free cash flow of the business is investments and acquisitions that further improve the competitive position of the company.”

Industry insiders are nevertheless skeptical that that will remain the case. As another senior music industry executive puts it, “Did you listen to the conference call? It was like the greatest hits of someone who knows just enough to be dangerous.”

Salt-N-Pepa is getting support from Irving Azoff’s Music Artists Coalition (MAC) in litigation with Universal Music Group (UMG) over rights to the iconic hip-hop duo’s catalog of hits.

MAC submitted an amicus brief on Tuesday (April 7) to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which is reviewing a lower court’s dismissal of the lawsuit brought by Cheryl “Salt” James and Sandra “Pepa” Denton against the world’s largest music company. The dispute stems from UMG’s refusal to revert the rappers’ master recordings after they exercised the so-called “termination right,” a tenet of copyright law that allows creators to claw back their intellectual property decades after signing it away.

A New York federal judge ruled in January that Salt-N-Pepa has no termination rights because the duo was not actually a party to any of its 1986 contracts with Next Plateau Records, which has since been absorbed by UMG. These deals were executed by the duo’s music producer, Hurby “Luv Bug” Azor, and do not say anywhere that Salt-N-Pepa owned its songs.

MAC, the advocacy group founded by Azoff in 2019 alongside artists like Don Henley, Dave Matthews and Anderson .Paak, warns in its amicus brief that the lower court’s decision creates a dangerous roadmap showing record labels and music publishers how to hold onto copyrights past the termination window.

“This ill-conceived rule makes it trivially easy for publishers or distributors to evade termination: By transferring rights to a new entity and ensuring an author is neither a party to nor an executor of the new grant, publishers and distributors can entirely insulate themselves from an author’s enforcement of statutory termination rights,” reads the brief. “Accepting such a rule would render decades of negotiation and eventual compromise between authors and distributors — as codified in the 1976 Act — entirely meaningless, nullifying the hard‑won protections the 1976 Copyright Act affords authors.”

MAC, joined by writer advocacy group Authors Alliance and legal organization Public Knowledge, says Congress explicitly created copyright termination to address creators’ inadequate leverage and compensation early in their careers. The brief notes, for example, that Bob Dylan received only a $100 advance in his first publishing deal in 1962, and Bruce Springsteen signed away his entire catalog to a manager in exchange for just 3% of royalties in 1972.  

Also on Tuesday, the National Society of Entertainment & Arts Lawyers (NSEAL) submitted its own amicus brief in support of Salt-N-Pepa. Authored by the New Orleans-based music attorney who recently won a landmark appellate ruling on the global reach of copyright termination, the brief focuses on the “work for hire” exception to termination rights.

Under copyright law, work created in the scope of employment is not eligible for termination. Though the lower court did not focus on this exception in the Salt-N-Pepa ruling, NSEAL argues that the decision implicitly determined — incorrectly — that the rappers were working for hire in 1986.

“Inherent in the district court’s conclusion that there was no ‘transfer of copyright ownership’ by Denton and James, is a determination that the subject recordings were ‘works made for hire,’” writes NSEAL. “Respectfully, making that determination without any factual development or legal explanation was reversible error, and the case should be remanded.”

Salt-N-Pepa’s lawyer, Richard Busch, praised both briefs in a statement to Billboard: “That these amazing groups of the top people in the industry filed these amicus briefs speaks volumes not only to the strength of this appeal but to its importance to all artists in the music industry.”

A rep for UMG did not return a request for comment on the amicus briefs on Wednesday (April 8). The company’s own appellate brief is due next month.

Following Pershing Square’s bid to acquire Universal Music Group (UMG) on Tuesday (April 7), the music giant has confirmed that its board of directors received the “unsolicited and non-binding proposal” in a brief press release in which it expressed “complete confidence in” the company’s strategy under chairman and CEO Lucian Grainge.

“The Board of Directors, together with its advisors, will review the proposal in accordance with its fiduciary duties and analyze its implications for shareholders, employees, artists, songwriters and other stakeholders,” the release reads.

It adds, “The Board of Directors has complete confidence in UMG’s strategy and the leadership of Sir Lucian Grainge and the Company’s management team. UMG will have no further comment on the proposal until the Board of Directors completes its review.”

The offer from the Bill Ackman-founded investment firm values UMG at more than $60 billion. The proposed deal, which would entail a 9.4 billion euros ($10.85 billion) total cash or 5.05 euros per share ($5.82) offer to shareholders, would result in UMG merging with Pershing Square SPARC Holdings and would move the new entity’s headquarters from the Netherlands to Nevada, while its stock would move from the Euronext Amsterdam to the New York Stock Exchange.

“While business performance has been strong, UMG’s share price has languished,” Ackman wrote in a Tuesday letter to UMG’s board of directors that mentioned uncertainty over UMG investor Bolloré Group’s 18% stake in the company, its decision to delay a U.S. stock offering and the under-utilization of the music company’s balance sheet as reasons for the stock’s overall downward trajectory since its closing price on the first day of trading. “Notably, none of the above issues relate to the company’s execution of its music business, and importantly, all of the above issues can be addressed in a merger transaction.”

Ackman, who held a call to address analysts’ and shareholders’ questions about the proposed deal earlier on Tuesday, wrote that he expects the deal to close by the end of the year.

Miles Gersh was promoted to executive vp of A&R at Warner Records, the label announced on Tuesday (April 7).

Gersh, who joined the company in 2019 and was most recently vp of A&R, introduced Zach Bryan to Warner Records Group CEO & co-chairman Aaron Bay-Schuck in 2020 based on the success of his independent releases. Bryan signed to Warner Records the following year and has since scored five top 10 albums on the Billboard 200, including two No. 1s: 2023’s self-titled set and this year’s With Heaven on Top. He’s also notched three top 10s on the Billboard Hot 100, including the No. 1 smash “I Remember Everything” featuring Kacey Musgraves.

In addition to Bryan, Gersh has helped develop emerging talent including bunii, IShowSpeed, Maddox Batson, CJ and Veeze. Prior to Warner, Gersh worked at Doug Morris‘ 12Tone Music. He has been recognized on Billboard‘s 40 Under 40 and Country Power Players lists.

“Miles understands that true artist development starts with a deep respect for the creator’s voice,” said Bay-Schuck in a statement. “The partnership he’s built with Zach and his other outstanding artists reflects his commitment to authenticity and his drive to help our talent win on their own terms. Miles is a vital part of the future of Warner Records, and this promotion is a testament to the key role he’s played in elevating our music, our teams, and our culture.”

Gersh added, “I’m deeply grateful to Aaron and [Warner Records executive vp & head of A&R] Karen [Kwak] for their mentorship and for their belief in me as I take on this new role. They’ve championed a culture I’m proud to be a part of — one that consistently puts the artist first. We have a remarkable roster, backed by the incredible Warner team, and I’m excited to build on our momentum to help take our artists to the next level while bringing game-changing new talent into the fold.”

A warrant is out for the arrest of a 55-year-old woman who allegedly stalked and threatened Lindsey Buckingham for years before physically attacking the Fleetwood Mac frontman last month.  

Michelle Dick was hit with felony charges that carry potential prison time in a Friday (April 3) criminal complaint brought by the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office and obtained by Billboard. A judge signed a warrant for Dick’s arrest, ordering that she be held on $300,000 bail if apprehended.

Prosecutors claim Dick has stalked and repeatedly threatened Buckingham with violence since 2021. The harassment allegedly escalated to physical violence last month, when Dick is accused of hitting Buckingham with her car and dousing the musician with an unknown substance in Santa Monica.

Dick is charged with seven total counts of stalking, making criminal threats, assault with a deadly weapon, battery and vandalism. In addition to targeting Buckingham, she’s also accused of stalking another individual referred to in court filings as “Stephanie N.”

Buckingham previously won a restraining order in 2024 requiring Dick to stay away from his family and cease all contact. In court filings from that time, the singer and guitarist said Dick began calling him and his family members in 2021, claiming to be Buckingham’s child and threatening to kill them.

The restraining order petition also claimed Dick had called in threats to venues where Buckingham was performing in 2022. She then went away for a couple of years but allegedly returned in 2024, showing up at the family’s Los Angeles home and making more threatening phone calls.

“She is clearly mentally unfit and harbors delusions, which makes her scary to me and unpredictable,” wrote Buckingham in a court declaration.

Reps for Buckingham did not immediately return a request for comment on the criminal complaint on Tuesday (April 7). Dick could not be located.