Outlaw Ocean: How a Pulitzer winning journalist allegedly scammed 400+ artists
Ian Urbina, a former New York Times journalist was accused earlier this week by musician Benn Jordan of scamming 400+ artists into sharing royalties
Happy Friday everyone!
Rarely does a day go by when Twitter is not rife with debates ranging from Crypto Maximalism, Geo-Politics to the usual Drake vs Kanye stuff
While Drizzy and Ye seem to have made amends to their decade long beef, and are even performing a concert together at the Memorial Coliseum in LA, live-streamed on Amazon Music as this hits your inbox ⏯
However, this one particular debate that caught our attention this week was 42-year old Atlanta-based artist Benn Jordan’s exposé on “former” New York Times Reporter Ian Urbina.
What’s the tea?
In a tell-all 20 minute YouTube video, Jordan exposed how Urbina- who is a 49-year old American investigative reporter, formerly working for The New York Times, scammed 400+ artists including Jordan into getting them to create music for ‘free’ in exchange of using their work for his project titled ‘Outlaw Oceans’
At this point, you might be thinking, hold on- why would an artist possibly create music for someone for free?
Well, here’s the tricky part.
Urbina reached out over email to artists such as Jordan, and claimed to use their music to supplement his work with ‘The Outlaw Ocean’ project, over which Urbina’s 2019 book also became a New York Times Bestseller 📚
Here’s an example of how he reached out to Jordan’s manager 👇🏻
So what’s the catch here? He did not even work at New York Times anymore 🤯
As Jordan talks about later on Twitter, Urbina continued using his NYT Email ID long after he quit the company, to deceive artists into believing that the project had significant backing, and promised a bunch of false potential collaborations for a documentary with Netflix and a book publishing deal with Knopf 📝
None of which obviously came to fruition 🤷♂️
Again, your brain might be going, well but aren’t there contracts and shit around this stuff? How could someone who did not actually create the music collect royalties from it?
Well, our Pulitzer Award winning journalist friend had another trick up his sleeve.
In the contracts with the artists, Urbina set up the collaboration of the artist with a Record Label called ‘Synesthesia Media’, which wait for it… was a company registered in the name of his wife 👀
On face value, what looked like a usual 50/50 split between the artist and the label for handling the distribution and marketing of the project, ended up becoming more like a 98% share to the label, after some confusing middlemen being added such as DistroKid and Warner Music, according to Jordan’s video.
Check out the entire video right here 👇🏻
Ever since this entire thing blew up, Urbina first branded it as ‘mass-trolling’ and ‘bullying’ but has since issued an apology for failing to meet artist expectations 👇🏻
You convince artists to invest their time, brand, effort, audience, trust and creativity into your project, it’s important to communicate with them fully, ensure they get royalty statements and paid on time, answer their questions quickly.
I failed to do these things. The label I created to run the project and the subcontractor I hired to do these things surely could have done much better.
I apologise unequivocally.
Well, the good news is that the 400 odd artists are free from their contracts, and can now collect 100% of the royalties to the music they created 💰
Look, one may argue that this could be a case of artist’s being more careful in terms of who they tie up with, but if anything, this just exposed how complicated the entire monetisation part of the music industry is tilted against creators themselves.
Of course every story has two sides, and probably Urbina felt that he would benefit the artists with this ‘alternative story-telling’ using music.
However, after watching Jordan spit out the facts in his video, its pretty obvious that Urbina knew exactly what he was doing 🤷♂️
I’ll leave you guys to be the best judge. Have a good weekend everyone 🍻
And is also involved in making money out of having unsuspected artists mix Noam Chomsky's texts with music. https://www.chillfiltr.com/introducing-the-noam-chomsky-music-project