By Andrew Dalton, Entertainment Writer
LOS ANGELES (AP) --It's expensive to promote a Katy Perry hit, a music executive told a jury that will decide how much the pop superstar and other collaborators on her 2013 song "Dark Horse" will pay the creators of a Christian rap song.
Just how pricey? More than $13,000 for a wardrobe stylist for one night. More than $3,000 for a hairdo and over $800 for a manicure. Nearly $2,000 for flashing cocktail ice cubes.
Steve Drellishak, a vice president at Universal Music Group, testified Wednesday that expenses like these are essential to the brand of Perry.
"She always has to be in the most fashionable clothes, the most fashionable makeup," said Drellishak, who is the first witness to testify after a nine-person jury found that Perry and her "Dark Horse" collaborator improperly copied elements of the 2009 song "Joyful Noise."
"She changes her look a lot," Drellishak said. "That's core to what the Katy Perry brand is."
Attorneys for the creators of "Joyful Noise," a song by plaintiff Marcus Gray who released it under the stage name "Flame," say Capitol Records received more than $31 million for the "Dark Horse" single and the album and concert DVD on which it appeared. Attorneys for both sides told the jury Tuesday that Perry herself earned $3 million, minus $600,000 in expenses.
An attorney for Capitol Records told jurors Tuesday that expenses trimmed the label's profits to roughly $650,000. Capitol Records is owned by Universal Music Group.
Drellishak said the huge marketing campaign for the album, manufacturing and digital transmission costs, employee salaries and artist royalties are among the expenses that have to be factored in.
The figures used by Capitol and the defense come partly from dividing the earnings of the album it was on, "Prism," by the number of tracks on the album — 13 in the original edition, 16 in the deluxe edition. But plaintiff's attorneys have said that as arguably the biggest hit on the album, the share should be bigger.
Those kinds of calculations, and how more generally to separate the money surrounding a single song from the album, artist and company it comes from, could prove a challenge for jurors.
They're likely to get the case Thursday after closing arguments that are scheduled for morning.
Drellishak's testimony reflected the massive digital shift the music business has undergone in recent decades, a shift that has also given singles precedence over full albums amid the short attention spans spawned by streaming.
He said "Prism" has sold 1.2 million physical copies, but "Dark Horse" has been streamed 1.89 billion times.
"Dark Horse," a hybrid of pop, trap and hip-hop sounds that was the third single from Perry's 2013 album "Prism," spent four weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100 in early 2014. It earned Perry a Grammy Award nomination and was part of her 2015 Super Bowl halftime performance.
Jason King, a professor who specializes in pop music called by the defense testified that the success of the song was driven primarily by the enormous star power of Perry, whose previous album, "Teenage Dream," had yielded five huge hits, and that specific aspects of "Dark Horse" were relatively insignificant.
"Katy Perry had enormous celebrity brand value before the release of 'Dark Horse,'" said King, an associate professor at New York University. "That kind of celebrity can drive the success of a single, because the public is primed."
King also said that the song's marketing and Perry's devoted fan base, neither of which had anything to do with the disputed parts of the song, were also key factors in its success.
"She has a deep and intimate relationship with her fans," Key said. "She calls them Katy cats."
Perry testified early in the trial, but has not appeared since, nor have most of her co-defendants, including producer Dr. Luke. Gray has been in court every day.
While copyright infringement claims are common in music, they rarely result in such losses for high-profile artists.
A jury in 2015 returned a multimillion verdict against Robin Thicke and Pharrell over their 2013 hit "Blurred Lines." The judgment, which remains on appeal, was in favor of the children of Marvin Gaye, who sued alleging that "Blurred Lines" copied from their father's hit "Got to Give It Up."
Carrie Coon Relishes Being Part Of An Ensemble–From “The Gilded Age” To “His Three Daughters”
It can be hard to catch Carrie Coon on her own.
She is far more likely to be found in the thick of an ensemble. That could be on TV, in "The Gilded Age," for which she was just Emmy nominated, or in the upcoming season of "The White Lotus," which she recently shot in Thailand. Or it could be in films, most relevantly, Azazel Jacobs' new drama, "His Three Daughters," in which Coon stars alongside Natasha Lyonne and Elizabeth Olsen as sisters caring for their dying father.
But on a recent, bright late-summer morning, Coon is sitting on a bench in the bucolic northeast Westchester town of Pound Ridge. A few years back, she and her husband, the playwright Tracy Letts, moved near here with their two young children, drawn by the long rows of stone walls and a particularly good BLT from a nearby cafe that Letts, after biting into, declared must be within 15 miles of where they lived.
In a few days, they would both fly to Los Angeles for the Emmys (Letts was nominated for his performance in "Winning Time" ). But Coon, 43, was then largely enmeshed in the day-to-day life of raising a family, along with their nightly movie viewings, which Letts pulls from his extensive DVD collection. The previous night's choice: "Once Around," with Holly Hunter and Richard Dreyfus.
Coon met Letts during her breakthrough performance in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe?" on Broadway in 2012. She played the heavy-drinking housewife Honey. It was the first role that Coon read and knew, viscerally, she had to play. Immediately after saying this, Coon sighs.
"It sounds like something some diva would say in a movie from the '50s," Coon says. "I just walked around in my apartment in my slip and I had pearls and a little brandy. I made a grocery list and I just did... Read More