Creative agency North Inc. has hired Dave Allen, formerly of Apple Music, as director of artist and music industry advocacy.
Allen comes to North after a long career in music, beginning as bassist for the post-punk band Gang of Four and culminating as a digital music visionary at eMusic.com, Intel and as of late, Apple Music where he spearheaded partnerships with artists and their managers as a member of the artist relations team. This is Allen’s second stint with North; he was previously a digital strategy director in 2010. In his new role at North, he will pioneer a forthcoming music venture and collaborate with artists and their managers to help them seek new revenue streams in the constantly shifting music business.
“I’ve spent more than two decades working in both the music and tech industry, and I want to use what I’ve learned to level the playing field for musicians by creating revenue streams that go directly to the artist,” Allen said. “I want brands to license music directly from artists that are as authentic as their brand.”
North has been built around music since its inception—in fact, CCO Mark Ray and managing director Rebecca Armstrong bonded at their first meeting over a Radiohead song they were both listening to at the same time. Ray was the force behind independent label Undertow Music, which worked with artists such as Jay Bennett of Wilco, and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah.
“It made perfect sense to collaborate with Dave on our vision of bringing bands and brands together in a new context. Our ambition is to develop, with integrity and soul, new revenue models between artists and brands,” Ray said. “Dave, like North, has music in his DNA.”
Review: Writer-Director Halina Reijn’s “Babygirl” Starring Nicole Kidman
The demands of achieving both one-day shipping and a satisfying orgasm collide in Halina Reijn's "Babygirl," a kinky and darkly comic erotic thriller about sex in the Amazon era.
Nicole Kidman stars as Romy Mathis, the chief executive of Tensile, a robotics business that pioneered automotive warehouses. In the movie's opening credits, a maze of conveyor belts and bots shuttle boxes this way and that without a human in sight.
Romy, too, is a little robotic. She intensely presides over the company. Her eyes are glued to her phone. She gets Botox injections, practices corporate-speak presentations ("Look up, smile and never show your weakness") and maintains a floor-through New York apartment, along with a mansion in the suburbs that she shares with her theater-director husband ( Antonio Banderas ) and two teenage daughters (Esther McGregor and Vaughan Reilly).
But the veneer of control is only that in "Babygirl," a sometimes campy, frequently entertaining modern update to the erotically charged movies of the 1990s, like "Basic Instinct" and "9 ½ Weeks." Reijn, the Danish director of "Bodies Bodies Bodies" has critically made her film from a more female point of view, resulting in ever-shifting gender and power dynamics that make "Babygirl" seldom predictable — even if the film is never quite as daring as it seems to thinks it is.
The opening moments of "Babygirl," which A24 releases Wednesday, are of Kidman in close-up and apparent climax. But moments after she and her husband finish and say "I love you," she retreats down the hall to writhe on the floor while watching cheap, transgressive internet pornography. The breathy soundtrack, by the composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer, heaves and puffs along with the film's main... Read More