According to Pollstar, Metallica manager Peter Mensch will be the star in ILMC’s traditional Breakfast Meeting at London’s Royal Garden Hotel, March 9th. He will be answering questions posed by another manager legend, Ed Bicknell, who has been moderating the Breakfast Meeting since it launched 15 years ago. Conference organizers around ILMC head Greg Parmley have announced further program details for the 30th edition. 

Mensch also manages Red Hot Chili Peppers and Muse, and has worked with Aerosmith managers Steve Leber and David Krebs for AC/DC, Scorpions, Def Leppard and Michael Schenker.

In 2016, Mensch said YouTube is killing the record industry in an interview with BBC News.

"YouTube, they're the devil," he told a BBC Radio 4 documentary on the music business. "We don't get paid at all."

He said the site's business model, in which artists make money by placing ads around their music, was unsustainable.

"If someone doesn't do something about YouTube, we're screwed," he said. "It's over. Someone turn off the lights."

Mensch's arguments echo concerns raised in the annual report of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), which was released last week.

It said there was widening "value gap" between the volume of music consumed on free, "user-upload" services - including YouTube, Daily Motion and Soundcloud - and the amount of revenue they generate for the industry.

An estimated 900 million consumers on these sites resulted in revenue of $634m (£447m) in 2015. By contrast the world's 68 million paying music subscribers generated about $2bn (£1.4bn).

Read the full story at BBC News.