As someone who turned down the project (from Feb. 2020), I can tell you the things that I have an issue with:
1. Ian presented himself as a Nytimes writer to me, from his nytimes address, after he had already left the Nytimes. He presented his project as a Nytimes venture, and linked to the project AT the Nytimes, that he insinuated was one in the same. I felt like this was intentionally misleading to seem as though it was going to be a Nytimes affiliated project.
2. He never presented this project as some sort of a charity, or as something where the profit was intended to fund journalism. He presented it as a creative collaboration, one which combined journalism and images with music as an exciting new creative concept. He said that because of this, it was garnering interest from Netflix, etc.. and that's why we should be interested in participating. He didn't have money upfront because of the $50K he put into it, but the insinuation was that it definitely had monetary potential. It was NOT presented as some sort of a charitable contribution to a worthy journalistic cause, regardless of how he presents it in his FAQ currently.
3. He DID mislead about the fact that Synestesia was himself. In his email, he talks about how "we are working with Synesthesia Media on this." Meaning what? Ian is working with Ian on this? Now, I was able to see in a later, more detailed email, that money going to Synesthesia was money going to him because they put "ian" in parenthesis in a payout section, but he did obfuscate and make Synesthesia out to be a totally different label from himself. Whether it's NOW on his imdb page or not is irrelevant.
4. Lastly, while he did talk about working with a lot of musicians, which turned me off, I would NEVER suspect that it would be something like 450 musicians and 2000 tracks in 1 year. That is the most blatant part of this whole thing. It's obviously more of a stream farm at that point. If you can point to any other "compilation" or "project" like that, where one person has 50% of the writer credit for each track simply for providing field recordings, I'd love to see it.
While I dismissed the thing outright for not providing upfront compensation, it DEFINITELY was not a normal pitch. I'm not saying it was illegal, but "scam" is not a legal term. You can easily call something like this scammy for the intentional obfuscation. And just because something isn't illegal, it can be a worthy topic of conversation.
February 2020. I should say I wasn't totally accurate about the Synesthesia stuff. Re-reading the email, the second email seems to actually come from Synesthesia, and spoke of Ian in the 3rd person, except in one section, when it implied that Ian was actually Synesthesia. So, it's confusing unless you read carefully. It's essentially just copypasta that he's forwarding on. There is another section that I think is pretty grossly misleading that I noticed from the faq though, now that I know what artists signed onto:
"Ian mentioned 50/50 splits, but here we have Synesthesia taking some
too, right?
No. Synesthesia’s portion is Ian’s portion. There is not an additional deduction coming off from revenue for Synesthesia."
From what I understand, this isn't exactly true, or it's worded in a very misleading way. The label (Ian) takes 50% off the top (Ian's portion). But then Ian is crediting himself as an artist and also taking 50% of the artist portion of every track. So, "Ian's portion" as Synesthesia is 50%, but then "Ian's portion" as artist is 25%, for a total of 75%, if I understand correctly. And the "collaborating" artist's portion 25%. But, I never got to the contract stage, so I could be wrong.
Right, as I said, I think the whole thing was slapdash and needlessly confusing. Had he put more care into comms (which I think the artists deserved), lots of this could have been avoided. My point is just that this is a very different sin.
As for the splits and how they flow, I plan to post more about that in the sequel with as much documentation as I can swing. But the TLDR from everything I've seen / been told so far is that three things are still true: (1) At no point in the flow of things did/does Ian personally receive any money (nor equivalents like tax breaks), (2) Synesthesia is just an empty bucket that dumps money into the non-profit, (3) any marginal revenue to the non-profit hasn't had any direct impact on Ian's salary, and never had any obvious path of doing so.
The one thing I would say to this is I'm not sure it matters if there was money that went to Ian or the non-profit. If, for instance, any funding of his series was going to have to come out of his pocket, but instead came out of the non-profit, due to this project, then that is money that is going to Ian. Second, if they truly did make some money to go towards journalism, then it doesn't make sense that the artists weren't getting paid at the same time. It sounds like he's saying he "personally" didn't make any money, but that "the project" did, which is some verbal jujitsu. Any money that is made is supposed to be split upfront,not delayed only on the artist payout side. But, again, this is just me parsing various statements, like you. In the end, I realize that none of the artists are getting much money. That's the biggest part of the problem. It's a massive library of music intended to be a passive income stream, and promotional vehicle (as artists were also required to promote the series) for his Ocean series. Pitch it like that to the artists, and nobody would have signed on.
For the first bit, we have to draw a distinction between "this money helped further a project that Ian has a career/social interest in" and "this money helped Ian in some explicit financial sense". The former is certainly true; the latter doesn't seem to be. He has a multi-year salary deal that's separate from any royalty incomes / marginal donations in general. So even in a world in which this project made real money, it wouldn't have changed his personal take-home. And the non-profit is well-funded enough that these revenues (less than costs to-date!) just aren't material to whether he'd get paid or not in future years.
As for the money, I'm working on a sequel that will have more details and context there. My understanding is that most artists now have the transparency they need to understand earnings to date. Did anyone make much? Seems like the answer is no. But paid ads were indeed run and people did indeed listen and royalties did indeed accrue for payout (100% of which are now set to go to artists from December on).
As to what artists were pitched, I can only speak to the emails I've been provided. Per my main text here, I think you can find *both* narratives in them: (1) a story about upside in the form potential major attention, (2) a story about furthering the work of the non-profit via a quite large group project. So far as I can tell, the potential articulated in 1 was based on real discussions, but was oversold on expected *average* impact. My stance was and is that this is net bad, if also pretty normal to the industry. I think Benn's video (its over-reaches aside) created a needful bit of awareness there: most of these visions don't pan out, and artists need to either push for guarantees or sign expecting the lower end of the forecast.
That all said, my understanding is that a heavy majority of artists have not taken Ian up on his offer to either pull their music penalty-free or assign over 100% of the royalty rights while keeping the songs online. I'll have some hard numbers on that in the sequel. But this seems a meaningful proxy to me. Some are clearly upset, as I think they had the right to be. But lots seem to have weighed his responses and decided to stay on.
One more thing to add, I notice that Ian has been pointing to his FAQs section of his website in some of these articles coming out: Example Fader: "He also pointed to The Outlaw Ocean Music Project's FAQs section, which states that hope of earning more streaming revenue through exposure from the project "should not be the key motivation for an artist to join."
Well... using your Wayback Machine link, I can see that this FAQs section was added on DEC. 8th, AFTER this whole controversy started.
All I can say is "charity" or writing music to help "fund a good cause" was not his pitch to me. It just wasn't. I'd go so far as to say he was actively avoiding phrasing it like that, and leaning HARD into the sync opportunities. When I first turned him down, he reiterated the sync licenses that could happen. Whereas, I've been approached maybe a dozen times over the years to contribute to compilations explicitly for a specific charity. So, he could have appealed to artists' altruism if he had wanted to. He probably wouldn't have gotten 450 artists to sign on that way though.
Yeah, that's my understanding too: most (if not all) of that particular set of FAQ is new and post-video. I didn't weight any of it as coming prior. (There were other FAQ docs that he'd emailed out to artists that I did weigh, but only based on what was written there explicitly; not what only seems to have come later.)
I can't speak to how he approached each artist, as (despite a lot of copy/pasting) there's obviously just a lot of variation there. But from the emails I was provided by artists, I see him both stating versions of "this whole project is to empower the mission of the non-profit" and "hey you could make some real money here too". As I say in the piece, I think the latter bit was over-selling. While the potential did exist in a theoretical sense, it just wasn't super likely for any artists past the first wave to end up with some kind of career break or significant income. While I do think he (again from the emails I've seen) did try to expectation-set as things went on, the net presentation feels wrong to me, even in context of it ultimately being (aggressive) fundraising for a good cause. This is why I called on him to apologize. (Which he did, which obviously each artist can weigh as they will.)
1. I deleted a bunch of comments here (and issued bans) where there was a clear lack of interest in real engagement. While I'm happy to entertain all critical questions, however pointed, I owe no debt to trolls. In the interest of transparency though, the deleted comments were about (a) my relationship with Ian (absolutely none going into this), (b) whether I have some kind of class interest to side with journalists (literally the opposite of what this newsletter does), (c) whether I under-represented the artists (I had *extensive* conversations with Benn and others, and made several public offers to work in their POVs and emails as I went), (d) that it was unprofessional of me to not try to find evidence for whether Ian referred to himself as an active NYT reporter after he'd left them (I stand by my commentary there; though note that I was happy to edit in the first example that someone showed me of Ian doing so, and even gave a $25 donation to the preferred charity of the person who flagged it to me). Anyway, I remain happy to answer additional concrete questions on those and other related topics. Just no to active trolling.
2. I'm working on a sequel that will go into more depth on the financials and some other FAQ / side criticisms that came out of the original. Ian and his staff/lawyers/accountants have been cooperating. Just taking time to sort it all out. Hopefully before the new year.
"Ian doesn’t draw a penny from Synesthesia, and has a fixed salary deal with Outlaw Ocean that doesn’t factor any royalties."
So where does the money to pay his salary come from, and how much is he making? All of this seems like the same legal jiggery-pokery that accountants and lawyers engage in for their clients to be able to claim "legitimate" income. The only question here is: did he and/or the companies he owns profit from music more than the composers themselves profited from it?
Sounds like Jeremy Arnold made this article literally to back up Ian's lies and reinforce a lot of scummy behavior under the guise of misunderstanding. You're just as despicable as Ian. Go to hell.
How closely did you review their Form 990 because there is a big missing amount that is not accounted for as well as incorrect information and other issues.
1. Unaccounted for Expenses:
According to the IRS: Form 900 must be publicly available and also that on Schedule "O",
'All organizations must describe their accomplishments for each of their three largest program services, as measured by total expenses incurred'. and the IRS gives specific examples of the types of services and amounts spent for each that should be listed
But their Schedule O only lists unspecified "Contractor Services" for $299,525
2. Form 900 is fraudulent because they do not disclose that one of the main other businesses that they are interacting with is being operated by a family member (ie his wife).
3. There is a line item that says that there is an outstanding expense of $60,000 for Royalties.
Given a Net income of $1,132,554 this means that Royalties (the main driver for the Income) made up less than 6% of the amount earned
All of this reminds me of the time that I briefly went into business with my Neighbor.
He said that we would split the money earned from the project 50 - 50 with my share being about $500.
Right after the project was over, I found out that he had been paid over $3000 in total.
When I confronted him, he said we did split the money 50-50.
$500 for him, $500 for me and the other $2,000 went back into the business
Needless to say, our business partnership (and friendship) ended that day.
To your larger question, I'm neither an accountant nor a lawyer. I did look through the 990 in detail, yes. But I'm hardly competent on all the IRS rules that govern it. Whether they'll find the offered disclosures sufficient is their lane. That said, I did ask about the contracting fees, and will have more on what they covered in the sequel.
To your second point, Ian's wife has zero connection with any of this. She isn't a co-owner, a board member, or a beneficiary in any material way. That was all just mistaken conjecture.
To your third point, I'd encourage perspective: outsiders can only glean so much from a single doc without additional insight/context. As it happens, those royalties are unrelated to the music project.
Well, I'll keep an open mind and I look forward to 1) their explanation of the $300k in undocumented contracting fees and 2) How much (if any) of the +1.6M in assets currently on the books will be distributed to the artists that actually created the original IP since it appears that the transparency required for a 501(c) Corporation is sorely lacking.
As someone who turned down the project (from Feb. 2020), I can tell you the things that I have an issue with:
1. Ian presented himself as a Nytimes writer to me, from his nytimes address, after he had already left the Nytimes. He presented his project as a Nytimes venture, and linked to the project AT the Nytimes, that he insinuated was one in the same. I felt like this was intentionally misleading to seem as though it was going to be a Nytimes affiliated project.
2. He never presented this project as some sort of a charity, or as something where the profit was intended to fund journalism. He presented it as a creative collaboration, one which combined journalism and images with music as an exciting new creative concept. He said that because of this, it was garnering interest from Netflix, etc.. and that's why we should be interested in participating. He didn't have money upfront because of the $50K he put into it, but the insinuation was that it definitely had monetary potential. It was NOT presented as some sort of a charitable contribution to a worthy journalistic cause, regardless of how he presents it in his FAQ currently.
3. He DID mislead about the fact that Synestesia was himself. In his email, he talks about how "we are working with Synesthesia Media on this." Meaning what? Ian is working with Ian on this? Now, I was able to see in a later, more detailed email, that money going to Synesthesia was money going to him because they put "ian" in parenthesis in a payout section, but he did obfuscate and make Synesthesia out to be a totally different label from himself. Whether it's NOW on his imdb page or not is irrelevant.
4. Lastly, while he did talk about working with a lot of musicians, which turned me off, I would NEVER suspect that it would be something like 450 musicians and 2000 tracks in 1 year. That is the most blatant part of this whole thing. It's obviously more of a stream farm at that point. If you can point to any other "compilation" or "project" like that, where one person has 50% of the writer credit for each track simply for providing field recordings, I'd love to see it.
While I dismissed the thing outright for not providing upfront compensation, it DEFINITELY was not a normal pitch. I'm not saying it was illegal, but "scam" is not a legal term. You can easily call something like this scammy for the intentional obfuscation. And just because something isn't illegal, it can be a worthy topic of conversation.
Just for context before I get into the weeds here, what date did he contact you?
February 2020. I should say I wasn't totally accurate about the Synesthesia stuff. Re-reading the email, the second email seems to actually come from Synesthesia, and spoke of Ian in the 3rd person, except in one section, when it implied that Ian was actually Synesthesia. So, it's confusing unless you read carefully. It's essentially just copypasta that he's forwarding on. There is another section that I think is pretty grossly misleading that I noticed from the faq though, now that I know what artists signed onto:
"Ian mentioned 50/50 splits, but here we have Synesthesia taking some
too, right?
No. Synesthesia’s portion is Ian’s portion. There is not an additional deduction coming off from revenue for Synesthesia."
From what I understand, this isn't exactly true, or it's worded in a very misleading way. The label (Ian) takes 50% off the top (Ian's portion). But then Ian is crediting himself as an artist and also taking 50% of the artist portion of every track. So, "Ian's portion" as Synesthesia is 50%, but then "Ian's portion" as artist is 25%, for a total of 75%, if I understand correctly. And the "collaborating" artist's portion 25%. But, I never got to the contract stage, so I could be wrong.
Right, as I said, I think the whole thing was slapdash and needlessly confusing. Had he put more care into comms (which I think the artists deserved), lots of this could have been avoided. My point is just that this is a very different sin.
As for the splits and how they flow, I plan to post more about that in the sequel with as much documentation as I can swing. But the TLDR from everything I've seen / been told so far is that three things are still true: (1) At no point in the flow of things did/does Ian personally receive any money (nor equivalents like tax breaks), (2) Synesthesia is just an empty bucket that dumps money into the non-profit, (3) any marginal revenue to the non-profit hasn't had any direct impact on Ian's salary, and never had any obvious path of doing so.
The one thing I would say to this is I'm not sure it matters if there was money that went to Ian or the non-profit. If, for instance, any funding of his series was going to have to come out of his pocket, but instead came out of the non-profit, due to this project, then that is money that is going to Ian. Second, if they truly did make some money to go towards journalism, then it doesn't make sense that the artists weren't getting paid at the same time. It sounds like he's saying he "personally" didn't make any money, but that "the project" did, which is some verbal jujitsu. Any money that is made is supposed to be split upfront,not delayed only on the artist payout side. But, again, this is just me parsing various statements, like you. In the end, I realize that none of the artists are getting much money. That's the biggest part of the problem. It's a massive library of music intended to be a passive income stream, and promotional vehicle (as artists were also required to promote the series) for his Ocean series. Pitch it like that to the artists, and nobody would have signed on.
For the first bit, we have to draw a distinction between "this money helped further a project that Ian has a career/social interest in" and "this money helped Ian in some explicit financial sense". The former is certainly true; the latter doesn't seem to be. He has a multi-year salary deal that's separate from any royalty incomes / marginal donations in general. So even in a world in which this project made real money, it wouldn't have changed his personal take-home. And the non-profit is well-funded enough that these revenues (less than costs to-date!) just aren't material to whether he'd get paid or not in future years.
As for the money, I'm working on a sequel that will have more details and context there. My understanding is that most artists now have the transparency they need to understand earnings to date. Did anyone make much? Seems like the answer is no. But paid ads were indeed run and people did indeed listen and royalties did indeed accrue for payout (100% of which are now set to go to artists from December on).
As to what artists were pitched, I can only speak to the emails I've been provided. Per my main text here, I think you can find *both* narratives in them: (1) a story about upside in the form potential major attention, (2) a story about furthering the work of the non-profit via a quite large group project. So far as I can tell, the potential articulated in 1 was based on real discussions, but was oversold on expected *average* impact. My stance was and is that this is net bad, if also pretty normal to the industry. I think Benn's video (its over-reaches aside) created a needful bit of awareness there: most of these visions don't pan out, and artists need to either push for guarantees or sign expecting the lower end of the forecast.
That all said, my understanding is that a heavy majority of artists have not taken Ian up on his offer to either pull their music penalty-free or assign over 100% of the royalty rights while keeping the songs online. I'll have some hard numbers on that in the sequel. But this seems a meaningful proxy to me. Some are clearly upset, as I think they had the right to be. But lots seem to have weighed his responses and decided to stay on.
One more thing to add, I notice that Ian has been pointing to his FAQs section of his website in some of these articles coming out: Example Fader: "He also pointed to The Outlaw Ocean Music Project's FAQs section, which states that hope of earning more streaming revenue through exposure from the project "should not be the key motivation for an artist to join."
Well... using your Wayback Machine link, I can see that this FAQs section was added on DEC. 8th, AFTER this whole controversy started.
All I can say is "charity" or writing music to help "fund a good cause" was not his pitch to me. It just wasn't. I'd go so far as to say he was actively avoiding phrasing it like that, and leaning HARD into the sync opportunities. When I first turned him down, he reiterated the sync licenses that could happen. Whereas, I've been approached maybe a dozen times over the years to contribute to compilations explicitly for a specific charity. So, he could have appealed to artists' altruism if he had wanted to. He probably wouldn't have gotten 450 artists to sign on that way though.
Yeah, that's my understanding too: most (if not all) of that particular set of FAQ is new and post-video. I didn't weight any of it as coming prior. (There were other FAQ docs that he'd emailed out to artists that I did weigh, but only based on what was written there explicitly; not what only seems to have come later.)
I can't speak to how he approached each artist, as (despite a lot of copy/pasting) there's obviously just a lot of variation there. But from the emails I was provided by artists, I see him both stating versions of "this whole project is to empower the mission of the non-profit" and "hey you could make some real money here too". As I say in the piece, I think the latter bit was over-selling. While the potential did exist in a theoretical sense, it just wasn't super likely for any artists past the first wave to end up with some kind of career break or significant income. While I do think he (again from the emails I've seen) did try to expectation-set as things went on, the net presentation feels wrong to me, even in context of it ultimately being (aggressive) fundraising for a good cause. This is why I called on him to apologize. (Which he did, which obviously each artist can weigh as they will.)
Two notes:
1. I deleted a bunch of comments here (and issued bans) where there was a clear lack of interest in real engagement. While I'm happy to entertain all critical questions, however pointed, I owe no debt to trolls. In the interest of transparency though, the deleted comments were about (a) my relationship with Ian (absolutely none going into this), (b) whether I have some kind of class interest to side with journalists (literally the opposite of what this newsletter does), (c) whether I under-represented the artists (I had *extensive* conversations with Benn and others, and made several public offers to work in their POVs and emails as I went), (d) that it was unprofessional of me to not try to find evidence for whether Ian referred to himself as an active NYT reporter after he'd left them (I stand by my commentary there; though note that I was happy to edit in the first example that someone showed me of Ian doing so, and even gave a $25 donation to the preferred charity of the person who flagged it to me). Anyway, I remain happy to answer additional concrete questions on those and other related topics. Just no to active trolling.
2. I'm working on a sequel that will go into more depth on the financials and some other FAQ / side criticisms that came out of the original. Ian and his staff/lawyers/accountants have been cooperating. Just taking time to sort it all out. Hopefully before the new year.
"Ian doesn’t draw a penny from Synesthesia, and has a fixed salary deal with Outlaw Ocean that doesn’t factor any royalties."
So where does the money to pay his salary come from, and how much is he making? All of this seems like the same legal jiggery-pokery that accountants and lawyers engage in for their clients to be able to claim "legitimate" income. The only question here is: did he and/or the companies he owns profit from music more than the composers themselves profited from it?
Sounds like Jeremy Arnold made this article literally to back up Ian's lies and reinforce a lot of scummy behavior under the guise of misunderstanding. You're just as despicable as Ian. Go to hell.
How closely did you review their Form 990 because there is a big missing amount that is not accounted for as well as incorrect information and other issues.
1. Unaccounted for Expenses:
According to the IRS: Form 900 must be publicly available and also that on Schedule "O",
'All organizations must describe their accomplishments for each of their three largest program services, as measured by total expenses incurred'. and the IRS gives specific examples of the types of services and amounts spent for each that should be listed
But their Schedule O only lists unspecified "Contractor Services" for $299,525
2. Form 900 is fraudulent because they do not disclose that one of the main other businesses that they are interacting with is being operated by a family member (ie his wife).
3. There is a line item that says that there is an outstanding expense of $60,000 for Royalties.
Given a Net income of $1,132,554 this means that Royalties (the main driver for the Income) made up less than 6% of the amount earned
All of this reminds me of the time that I briefly went into business with my Neighbor.
He said that we would split the money earned from the project 50 - 50 with my share being about $500.
Right after the project was over, I found out that he had been paid over $3000 in total.
When I confronted him, he said we did split the money 50-50.
$500 for him, $500 for me and the other $2,000 went back into the business
Needless to say, our business partnership (and friendship) ended that day.
To your larger question, I'm neither an accountant nor a lawyer. I did look through the 990 in detail, yes. But I'm hardly competent on all the IRS rules that govern it. Whether they'll find the offered disclosures sufficient is their lane. That said, I did ask about the contracting fees, and will have more on what they covered in the sequel.
To your second point, Ian's wife has zero connection with any of this. She isn't a co-owner, a board member, or a beneficiary in any material way. That was all just mistaken conjecture.
To your third point, I'd encourage perspective: outsiders can only glean so much from a single doc without additional insight/context. As it happens, those royalties are unrelated to the music project.
Well, I'll keep an open mind and I look forward to 1) their explanation of the $300k in undocumented contracting fees and 2) How much (if any) of the +1.6M in assets currently on the books will be distributed to the artists that actually created the original IP since it appears that the transparency required for a 501(c) Corporation is sorely lacking.
Looks like you created this article literally in Ian's defense. How much is he paying you to lie for him and defend his scam? Shill.