The son of R&B legend Gladys Knight has been sentenced to serve two years in prison for failing to withhold payroll taxes for the restaurants that bore his mother’s name, federal prosecutors in Atlanta said.

Shanga Hankerson opened his first restaurant, Gladys Knight’s Chicken and Waffles, in Atlanta in 1997. Over the next several years, he opened at least three more locations in Georgia and Washington, D.C.

Hankerson, 45, “willfully disregarded his tax obligations for many years,” Acting U.S. Attorney Kurt Erskine said in a news release. During his sentencing Wednesday, Hankerson, who pleaded guilty in July, was also ordered to serve a year of supervised release following his prison sentence and to pay more than $1 million in restitution.

He was the sole owner of the business and was required to withhold payroll taxes from his employees’ gross pay. From at least 2012 to 2016, Hankerson failed to remit more than $1 million in payroll taxes, prosecutors said.

“While ownership of a well-known restaurant in our community has its perks, it also comes with great responsibility,” IRS Criminal Investigation Special Agent in Charge James Dorsey said. “Paying taxes is a way to give back to the community, but unfortunately Hankerson chose to use those funds for other means.”

Knight won a legal battle to sever ties to the business in 2017, and her son was ordered to stop using her name, likeness and memorabilia, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Brazilian sertanejo star Marília Mendonça has died in a plane crash in the state of Minas Gerais, according to an official statement posted to the singer’s Instagram page. The 26-year-old artist was on her way to perform in the city of Caratinga. All five passengers, including the plane’s crew, lost their lives in the accident.

“With immense regret, we confirm the death of singer-songwriter Marília Mendonça, her producer Henrique Ribeiro, her uncle and advisor Abicieli Silveira Dias Filho, and the pilot and co-pilot, of which we won’t reveal their names at this time. The plane took off from Goiania to Caratinga where Marília would perform tonight. At the moment, this is all the information we have.”

With more than 8 million listeners on Spotify and more than 22 million subscribers on YouTube, the folk singer-songwriter, who began writing songs at the age of 12, had become one of  biggest exponents of popular Brazilian music.

Last year, during the peak of the coronavirus pandemic, her three-hour #LiveLocalMarília Mendonça event on April 8, 2021, had over 3.3 million peak concurrent viewers on YouTube. That same month, she hit No. 6 on Billboard’s Social 50 chart. In 2019, Mendonça won the Latin Grammy for best sertaneja music album thanks to her 12-track set Em Todos Os Cantos. 

Earlier Friday, Mendonça had posted on her Instagram account that she was taking off to Minas Gerais, asking her fans to leave her food recommendations. “This is my reality my people,” she wrote. “Tell me here in the comments what delicious foods I can eat in this wonderful state.”

Mendonça is survived by her 1-year-old son, Léo.

Live Nation stock jumped nearly 19% on Friday (Nov. 5) following the company’s third quarter earnings report the day before. Share prices soared from $107.52 to an all-time high $127.75 before closing at $123.80, giving the company a $27.8 billion market value.

A line from the Grateful Dead’s “Truckin’” perfectly describes concert giant Live Nation over the last 20 months: “Lately it occurs to me, what a long, strange trip it’s been.” In March 2020, the scale of the pandemic’s effect on Live Nation’s touring business had so successfully scared off investors that Live Nation’s share price reached a nadir of $21.70, giving the promotion giant a market capitalization of $4.9 billion. As the live entertainment market crept back to life, the share price steadily progressed to a heady $100 on Oct. 5 — and kept going.

Business has grown from a virtual standstill in early 2020, to revenue of $2.7 billion in the third quarter of 2021. (That’s compared to $575.9 million in the year’s second quarter and just $184 million in the third quarter of 2020.) Investors with enough foresight and fortitude to buy stock at the pandemic low and hold their shares could have earned a six-times gain on their investment — and could make more as pandemic fears fade and fans show up for a full slate of tours over the next three years.

Former Grateful Dead members touring as Dead & Company, were one of Live Nation’s high points in 2020 after selling over 184,000 tickets to eight shows from June to August, according to Billboard Boxscore. “This isn’t just young kids going to shows because they’re not scared,” said CEO Michael Rapino during the company’s earnings call Thursday. “The Eagles just had a wildly successful arena tour,” he said, while Dead & Company “were out doing full stadiums.” Whatever uncertainty Live Nation had about the touring market’s recovery came into focus in the third quarter. “We saw huge demand across the board, of all ages, all demos [and] all markets,” said Rapino.

In fact, Live Nation may have too much of a good thing. After dozens of major tours were either canceled or suspended during the pandemic, artists are clamoring to return to the road. Live Nation promoted 5,563 concerts in the third quarter, more than triple its second quarter show count and 15 times more than the prior-year period. Its third quarter show count and attendance needed to grow by 56% and 85%, respectively, to reach pre-pandemic levels, however, and worries of over-crowding have persisted throughout 2021. “The good news is ’22 is going to probably be a record year,” said Rapino, but “there’s only so many Fridays and Saturdays” that attract the biggest crowds.

To prevent a log jam of artists rushing for venues, Live Nation plans to extend its concert pipeline through 2023 and into 2024. “You’re never going to have a bunch of tours on the same weekend piled on,” said Rapino.

Besides, the concert business can ramp up only so quickly, noted president and CFO Joe Berchtold. In the short-term, promoters are constrained in hiring staff and artists have a more difficult time getting road crews and buses (as Billboard reported in June). Whatever wrinkles exist will be smoothed out over time as the company will return to a pre-pandemic level of activity, said Berchtold.

While the supply of concerts is undeniable, the state of consumer demand is less clear. Billboard has reported about troubling no-show rates for some concerts — 10% of fans who bought tickets in 2019 and 2020 to see Guns N’ Roses did not show up. Established live acts such as the Eagles and Zac Brown have suffered from no-show rates as high as 25% at some concerts. Separately, Steven Severin, co-owner of independent venue Neumos in Seattle, told Billboard in September it has seen 20–30% no-show rates at some shows that would normally attract an older audience. That’s a damaging trend for a promoter or venue owner that counts on food and alcohol purchases on top of ticket sales.

But Berchtold pushed back on reports on the topic, saying, Live Nation has seen a “low single-digit” rise in no-show rates from historical averages. “It seems that the people that want to go to the shows are going to the shows,” he said.

LiveOne, the music media company that changed its name from LiveXLive in September, should prepare to go to trial with a former investor who claims he was defrauded of millions of dollars in cash and equity by company chairman and chief executive Rob Ellin or renew mediation and settle the three-year-old lawsuit outside of court. That’s according to a New York judge’s ruling Thursday (Nov. 4) after declining to dismiss fraud charges filed by investor Joe Schnaier in 2019.

During Thursday’s hearing, LiveOne attorney Steve Iser asked New York state court judge Jennifer Schecter to dismiss Schnaier’s fraud claims, arguing that Schnaier did not properly investigate Ellin’s claims before making his investment.

But Schecter declined that request, noting that Ellin made “knowingly false, material statements of fact” to induce Schnaier into investing $1.25 million in the then-fledgling media company LiveXLive (LXL) in early 2017. Those alleged misrepresentations include a claim by Ellin in 2016 that LiveXLive had “signed an IPO” worth $75 million to $125 million with the Bank of Montreal and a claim Ellin had secured the livestreaming rights to festivals including Coachella, Glastonbury and Bonnaroo — none of which turned out to be true.

Iser conceded in a July court filing that some of the representations made by Ellin were false, writing “had LXL obtained the rights to stream any major music festivals, such festivals not only would have been listed on LXL’s website so its subscribers could pay LXL to view the festivals, but there would have been press releases and/or disclosures of such streaming rights in LXL’s public filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.” In court Thursday, Iser argued that Schnaeir was an accredited investor who had worked as a licensed securities broker for over 20 years and should have done a more thorough job conducting due diligence. If Ellin’s statements about the IPO or representations about his plans to merge LiveXLive with SFX and Quello had been true, they would have been disclosed to the Securities and Exchange Commission with accompanying paperwork.

“Every material misrepresentation is disclosed in SEC filings,” Iser told Schecter during the hearing. “Whether there’s a merger [would be] disclosed in SEC filings.”

Schnaier can’t claim fraud, Iser argued, because he had done almost no due diligence beyond “talking to the employees of LiveXLive,” ignoring “numerous hints of falsity” while failing to challenge Ellin’s assertions that documentation backing up Ellin’s claims was proprietary.

“I think someone as sophisticated and savvy as Mr. Schnaier would have said, ‘Wait a minute, you just told me all of this so-called proprietary information,’” Iser argued. “But he didn’t do that. And he’s an experienced broker and never checked to see if these things were proprietary.”

Schnaier’s attorney Josh Wurtzell said that Schnaier had spoken with a few members of LiveXLive’s management team and admits he wished he had been provided with more documentation, but as someone who had done similar in the past  “nothing unusual stood out to him.”

Iser’s line of argument, however, did not meet the high legal hurdle required to warrant the dismissal of fraud charges, Schecter said, and the judge suggested Iser save his defense for the jury. Noting that LiveXLive had exhausted its last legal remedies for having the case dismissed, Schecter encouraged both sides to weigh “the risks and strengths” of the case and consider meditation and settlement.

“Know that you are headed for trial. There will be expense. There will be uncertainty,” she said. “Are the parties determined to go to trial?”

Iser told the judge there were previous discussions about mediation and “now that this motion has been decided, I expect us to return to those conversations.” Wurtzel indicated he too was open to mediation.