UMG boss Lucian Grainge shared an optimistic message in his 2020 year end letter to staff.
UMG artists and songwriters “brought awareness to worthwhile causes that will help to repair a world so badly in need of repair,” wrote Grainge.
[We’ve added the bolding.]
Dear Colleagues:
2020!
For many of us, those four simple digits say all that needs to be said about the incredibly difficult year now finally coming to a close. “2020” has come to represent pain and loss on a scale none of us ever could have imagined. We can never forget the suffering that this year inflicted on so many. Likewise, we must never forget that even in the face of historic challenges, so many of you achieved great things personally and professionally.
Music Business Worldwide
December 18, 2020
Universal Music Group CEO and Chairman, Sir Lucian Grainge (credit: UMG)
Universal Music Group Chairman & CEO, Sir Lucian Grainge, has reflected on the past year in a memo to staff obtained by MBW.
While celebrating UMG’s “spectacular and record-breaking success” in 2020, Grainge also struck a note of contemplation, noting that the past 12 months has “come to represent pain and loss on a scale none of us ever could have imagined”. (Grainge, of course, was himself hit by COVID-19 in April.)
The note was sent yesterday (December 17), the same day that a Tencent-led consortium agreed to acquire a further 10% of UMG, in a transaction anticipated to take place during the first half of 2021.
Rolling Stone Menu Music’s Road Crews Are Overwhelmingly White and Male. Meet the People Trying to Change That
Artists and roadies alike are stepping up to address a long-standing industry problem
By Batuhan Toker/Adobe Stock
By the time he signed on for Justin Bieber’s
Believe tour in 2012, Lance “K.C.” Jackson had more than 30 years under his belt as a stage manager and touring pro; he’d worked with Prince, Destiny’s Child, Luther Vandross, and Earth, Wind, and Fire, among others. Now, on a tour headlined by a white artist, he drew quizzical looks backstage whenever he went to help Bieber with a harness that allowed him to descend onto the stage sporting wings. “There aren’t a lot of black props workers out there, so people were looking at me like, ‘Who is this guy? Can he make it happen?’” Jackson recalls. “It was a prejudgment.”
BBC Outlines Plans to Accelerate Diverse Representation on and off Screen
BBC, December 3, 2020
The work builds on the Creative Diversity Commitments made earlier in the year, and will be supported by the Creative Diversity Unit, under June Sarpong, the BBC’s first Director of Creative Diversity.
Among the plans, which will feature in a wide ranging report published next week, the BBC is announcing:
A new Disability Content Panel made up of creatives with a lived experience of disability from inside and outside of the BBC who will work with the BBC’s Creative Diversity Unit to support authentic portrayal in the BBC’s output