Black River Entertainment has finished the restructuring of its promotion department today with its hire of Brian Rhoades to the position of Director of Promotion, Northeast.
“Brian is fired up and ready to go,” says Black River VP Promotion Rick Baumgartner. “From our first meeting, Brian possessed professionalism and an understanding of the difficulties facing promotion people in this ever-changing environment. I have no doubts we have made the right choice. He will be an incredible asset.”
Rhoades’ background includes time at CBS Records, Reprise Records, Epic Records, Capitol Records, Columbia Records and Virgin Records. He has worked with some of music’s biggest including The Rolling Stones, Janet Jackson, Mariah Carey, Bruce Springsteen, Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac, Paul McCartney and more. He was most recently Northeast Director of Promotion for EMI Records Nashville, where he worked with Eric Church and Troy Olsen.
His first day on the job is July 1 and after then he can be reached at brian@blackriverent or 615-780-3070.
Black River is preparing to release Craig Morgan’s first new music since he signed with the label in April. His single “This Ole Boy” ships to country radio this week and impacts in July.

Pandora Media went public this week on June 15, with an offering priced at $16 per share. The stock opened at $20 a share, hitting a high of $26 and closing at $17.42. On Tuesday, before shares went onto the open market the company was valued at $2.6 billion. At one point on Wednesday the value had climbed to $4 billion. But by the end of the day on Thursday, the stock had dropped 24% and once again was worth about $2.1 billion. As of this writing mid-day June 17, the stock is down about 3% at $12.85 per share for a market cap of about $1.96 billion. So what happened to the wings on which Pandora was soaring?
A large part of the problem can be traced to BTIG Research analyst Richard Greenfield who came out shortly after the IPO with a sell rating and a price target of $5.50. [ouch]
Greenfield pointed to a new scenario with more competition for the web radio service from companies such as Spotify and Turntable.fm.

“While Pandora is creating a large active user base, its reach/frequency continues to pale in comparison to terrestrial radio, as does its profitability,” says Greenfiled. “Pandora’s fundamental problem is that active users and listening hours are growing rapidly, but those listener hours have fixed (and annually escalating) royalty costs per streaming hour (fees to music labels).”

Another way to explain the above comment is to say that the business doesn’t scale.
In an interview posted on AllThingsD, writer Peter Kafka asks Pandora CEO Joe Kennedy about the effect of Internet and Pandora coming to auto dashboards. Kennedy says, “We’ve had announcements from six of the world’s major automakers — Ford, Toyota, GM, Mercedes, BMW and Hyundai — and they’ve all said, ‘we’re going to integrate Pandora into our vehicles going forward.’ Now, the nature of automotive is, it isn’t a flip-the-switch phenomena. It rolls out over several models, over time. And then you have a replacement cycle that’s about 7 years per car. So I think of automotive as a snowball, that starts out relatively small, but builds and builds and builds and builds. You get out to years five to ten, and it’s tremendously big.”
 

Black River Entertainment has announced the addition of Bill Lubitz to its staff as Director of Promotion, West Coast. Lubitz will continue to be based in Las Vegas.
Previously West Coast Promotion Manager with Quarterback Records, Lubitz has an extensive background in radio where he spent nine years with KWNR/Las Vegas. He was also part of the original team that opened Stoney Creek Records.
“Bill was the perfect person for this job,” says Black River VP Promotion Rick Baumgartner. “Greg McCarn (Black River GM) and I heard his name from so many people that we thought he had a huge PR machine behind him. That says a lot about how well he does his job.”
Congratulate him at [email protected].