Ellie Goulding has filed suit in the UK against her former managers, TaP Management co-founders Ben Mawson and Ed Millett, along with TaP's parent company HNOE Ltd. The headline framing — that Goulding didn't know Live Nation owned her management company — is the version that's traveled fastest since Variety broke the story Monday. But buried a few paragraphs into the claim is the part that should actually worry people in the artist-management business: language allegedly barring Mawson and Millett from steering any of their clients away from doing business with Live Nation.
That's not a passive conflict of interest. That's a contractual leash.
The Ownership Nobody Told Her About
Goulding signed with TaP in 2018, coming off nearly a decade with Sarah Stennett's Turn First Artists and its successor, First Access Entertainment. What she says she didn't know: Live Nation had already been the controlling shareholder of TaP's parent company, HNOE, since 2015, when it picked up 50.1%. Live Nation bought out the rest in 2019, and Mawson was installed as HNOE's CEO. From there, according to the claim, Mawson and Millett reported directly to someone designated by Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino.
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