She’s already one of the most famous mononymous celebrities in the world, and now Academy Award, Emmy and Grammy winner Cher has partnered with Irving Azoff’s Iconic Artists Group to expose new generations to her prolific, six-decade-long music career.
IAG has acquired Cher’s full interest in her past sound recordings and compositions for a sum that the company declined to reveal.
The estate of legendary British singer Joe Cocker has entered into an agreement with Irving Azoff’s Iconic Artists Group to acquire and develop the singer’s five-decade catalog. The acquisition includes the singer’s music intellectual property assets, including his interest in his sound recordings, compositions, and his name, image and likeness; further terms were not disclosed.
After working as a singer through the early 1960s, Cocker burst into the mainstream in 1969 with his electrifying cover of the Beatles’ “With a Little Help from My Friends,” which topped the British charts and sparked a major U.S. following, thanks in large part to his show-stopping performance at the Woodstock festival (and subsequent film). With his powerful and unmistakable soul-blues voice and explosive stage presence, Cocker’s popularity grew with the “Mad Dogs & Englishmen” tour, live album and film, which featured an all-star band helmed by Leon Russell.
Read more at Variety.com
’Tis the season for Dean Martin — the one month of the year when he’s ubiquitous once again, haunting tinseled malls and cocktail-party playlists, a ghost of Christmas past whose voice can make even the balmiest West Coast day feel like a marshmallow world in the winter. Of the 10 most-played Dino tracks on Spotify right now, seven are holiday novelties — jovial corn for popping. “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” is No. 1, with 351 million streams, presumably racked up largely between Black Friday and New Year’s Day.
It’s a strange state of affairs for an artist who was once a year-round fixture of the entertainment landscape — a genial omnipresence whose breezy, boozy, hardly-workin’ charm came across on every platform he touched, from stage to screen to radio to records, in comedy and drama and celebrity roasts.
“I’m very pleased about this partnership,” Ronstadt said. “It feels like home”
Following deals with the Beach Boys and David Crosby, Linda Ronstadt is the latest artist to sell her catalog to Irving Azoff’s new company Iconic Artists Group.
Although Ronstadt is one of the best-selling artists of all time, the fact that she’s not a songwriter makes her deal different from the Beach Boys, who sold a controlling interest in their intellectual property, and from David Crosby, whose deal contained his publishing rights. Instead, Iconic has acquired Ronstadt’s assets, in a sale that includes name and likeness to promote the masters.
Twin sisters Casey and Timolin Cole were born into a life of unusual luxury in Hancock Park to a father nicknamed “King” whose success was so great that the historic Capitol Records building not far away in Hollywood was nicknamed “The House That Nat Built.”
Caretakers of legendary singer-bandleader-pianist Nat “King” Cole’s legacy and estate through their King Cole Productions, for decades they have helped maintain and advance their dad’s uniquely American story. It’s one that began with his youth as a precocious Chicago teenage jazz pianist and ended, in 1965, with his death from lung cancer at age 45, an icon whose crossover success and remarkable musicality changed 20th century American culture.
