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One liners: BMG, Live Nation, Christmas number one, more

By Andy Malt and Chris Cooke | Published on Tuesday 19 December 2017

Other notable announcements and developments today…

• BMG has signed a deal with Steven Spielberg’s film company Amblin Partners to administer its music publishing rights worldwide. “To be aligned [with Amblin] is not an obligation we take lightly”, says BMG’s Keith Hauprich.

• US music publishing company Pulse has signed a sub-publishing deal for Europe with CTM. “We are happy”, says CTM MD André de Raaff.

• Live Nation boss Michael Rapino has signed a new five-year contract to continue leading the live giant through to the end of 2022, according to an SEC filing. The new deal is worth $9 million a year including bonuses plus some lovely stock on top. Which is nice. For him.

• Help Musicians UK and the MOBO Trust have announced the first eleven artists to receive grants from the two charities’ new joint fund. Those artists are Agama, ArA Harmonic, Awate, Cat Delphi, Estée Blu, Griz-O, Haula, Lady Sanity, Merki Waters, Michelle O Faith and Signkid.

• Radio company Jack has announced plans to launch a new digital station early next year, which it promises will be “a brand-new format proposition that has never been heard anywhere in the world before”. What could it be? Maybe it’ll play music backwards.

• Ed Sheeran is currently heading for the Christmas number one spot with ‘Perfect’. However, he has some competition from a collaboration between Eminem and some guy called Ed Sheeran on ‘River’. Wham’s ‘Last Christmas’, Rita Ora’s ‘Anywhere’ and Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ make up the rest of the UK festive top five as of now. The actual Christmas chart for 2017 will be out on Friday, of course. By the way, don’t watch Mariah Carey’s new animated film of the same name as her ever-popular Christmas hit. It’s really terrible.

• Björk has premiered her new video for ‘Arisen’ on WeTransfer. What fun.

• Check out our weekly Spotify playlist of new music featured in the CMU Daily – updated every Friday.