From a legal perspective, no area of entertainment is changing faster than music. With CD sales down 15 percent this year and downloads skyrocketing, musicians, publishers, and record labels are scrambling to recover revenue any way possible. This changing entertainment landscape has meant more work for Minneapolis-headquartered law firm Lommen Abdo Cole King & Stageberg—Lommen Abdo for short.
Formed via a 2006 merger of two Minneapolis firms—one focused on litigation, the other on business and entertainment law—Lommen Abdo now boasts one of the Midwest’s largest entertainment law practices. The merged firm has six attorneys (out of 37 total) working on music, film, and new-media issues, including broadcast licenses, recording contracts, production agreements, and the other pacts that make the music biz go ’round. Its clients include young musicians such as Anna Nalick and Grammy winner Jonny Lang, as well as old-school recording artists such as Booker T. Jones and Johnny Rivers; another client is Garrison Keillor. The firm’s film credits include last year’s locally produced hit Sweet Land.
Ken Abdo, the firm’s vice president and a 20-year veteran of entertainment law, says that the entertainment division focuses on getting artists paid. “Artist advocacy is a major theme for us,” he says. “We have a legion of litigators. That’s let us bring it to a national level as we pursue litigation and class action on behalf of artists’ rights.”
That might mean working with labels to craft equitable artist contracts or keeping an eye on any murky area of the Internet where music might be used to make a buck. (Think YouTube, for instance—unlicensed music is part of its revenue-producing model.) “The use of copyrighted songs on Internet-driven platforms that create revenue—that creates a lot of issues,” Abdo notes. “Do people have the right to use them? How much should they pay? What associations should be paid? It’s new commerce. We’re trying to define what those rights will be.”
Revenues in Lommen Abdo’s entertainment division have seen a 75 percent rise in the past year. They’ll go up even further this year, thanks to the hiring in April of New York–based veteran entertainment lawyer Bob Donnelly. “Representing artists has opened up opportunities for us in employment law, tax law, estate planning,” Abdo says.
