Predatory Label Imposter Tries to Lure in Young Female Performers
The stories of young female performers getting taken advantage of in music by predatory producers and managers are endless, and are nearly as common as the broken hearts of the artists who trek to Nashville every year trying to make it in the industry. Young women are especially vulnerable as they put themselves in submissive positions while seeking anyone who can promise them stardom. Meanwhile shady characters looking for much more than just another client troll the streets and the internet.
This storyline is so common, Dale Watson has written about it in songs, and it is a recurring theme in the television drama Nashville. Nonetheless, the drive for some young women to “make it” in music, and the sleaze factor of certain characters is so pronounced, it’s an all-too-common occurrence when a story surfaces of a young girl either being taken advantage of, or signing her rights away prematurely.
READ: Katie Arminger Accuses Label of Wanting Her to “Sex It Up”
An especially disturbing account has surfaced out of Nashville involving an individual named Keith Messner, who was posing as a representative for Warner Music Group, including using the company’s logo, and reaching out to young girls via Twitter and email with big promises. With a bio of, “A&R guy, producer, mixer — country/rock/pop,” he would contact young female performers and ask them if they were planning to play or visit Nashville.
Even worse, an individual with the same name was convicted and sentenced to prison for molesting two teen girls in 2000 after luring them in by claiming he had cred in the music industry and would help launch their careers. “Messner told the girls he was close to a country music star and could help them begin singing careers,” says the report from McCall. Saving Country Music and other outlets have been unable to confirm if it is indeed the same Keith Messner in the two separate incidents, but the similarities are eerie.
From a Twitter account called “@Nashville_ar” that has since been deleted, Keith Messner reached out to a 12-year-old performer named Taylor Gayle saying, “U blow Taylor Swift out of the water. U will go far. Warner Music Nashville will be out in full force to see u perform at the Commodore. We are in your corner.”
Gayle has an upcoming performance at the Commodore Grille in Nashville on Thursday (8-11).
Keith Messner also sent Taylor Gayle an email,
It was great to meet you on Twitter. I was curious as to what your future career plans are? Do you have a manager to guide you with your career? Will you be coming to Nashville anytime soon? I’d love to see you play many of the venues here and get more exposure. You are an amazing talent. You’ve got a friend in Nashville.
Taylor Gale’s mother, Brandy Barnes, became suspicious. “I realized his email was not a Warner email address,” she tells Billboard. “He was asking in the email what her future plans were for her career … I then had a gut feeling I should check into him.”
That is when Barnes found the report on Keith Messner from 2000. Rick Barker, who runs an artist development firm called Music Industry Blueprint, reached out to Warner Music Nashville and confirmed that no individual named Keith Messner was employed by the company. Messner had also reached out to numerous other young female performers, and was following many of them on Twitter. During the investigation by concerned parents and artist representatives, Messner’s Twitter account was deleted. Twitter would not confirm if Messner deleted the account himself, of if it was after numerous individuals reported the account.
Keith Messner, or at least the Twitter portion of his predatory practice, appears to have been mitigated at the moment, but many other threats towards young performers, both male and female, loom out there as the dreams of stardom regularly get in the way of artists doing their due diligence to make sure they don’t end up with a bad deal, or worse.
“Taylor is performing at the Commodore Thursday night,” says Brandy Barnes. “We will be watching her very closely.”
August 11, 2016 @ 8:54 am
I know this is a serious article and stuff, and don’t want to offend Trigg, but that picture of this guy with the bow tie and the 45 record accolade thingy, made my day!
August 11, 2016 @ 4:08 pm
Nice vest. Looks like an 80’s prom picture. We should have set up a sting and lumped him up.
August 11, 2016 @ 6:24 pm
As a 27 year old man, I find it very discouraging that I’m practically one of the last few men in America who doesn’t mistreat or disrespect women the way I’m seeing this poser on twitter doing.
August 11, 2016 @ 10:26 pm
Oh, stop it. You probably creep girls out in the opposite way of this guy.
August 12, 2016 @ 7:38 am
Don’t be so hard on yourself
August 12, 2016 @ 10:57 am
Nah, most guys are still good. I really believe that. It’s just that the guy who is a creep or abuses women physically or verbally stands out more to you than the guy who opens the door for his date.
It’s sorta like all the hysteria surrounding crime in America right now. The incidents that do happen (tragic and sickening as they are) are not the norm, but thanks to the digital, information 24/7 age and plenty of businessmen and politicians who seek to profit/benefit from scaring people, make people think that we are living in the last days of man. People may be more narcissistic, by in large they are still good. It’s just that you naturally pay attention more to the abusive husband, than the husband who is faithful and kind to his family.
August 13, 2016 @ 9:58 pm
Oh, brother.
Yeah there’s like 7of us.
August 12, 2016 @ 1:20 am
; __ ;
August 12, 2016 @ 5:59 am
I saw the FaceBook post from Rick Barker. Someone had commented that the picture of the perp Messner was informative and revealing about his purported A&R cred: why is he holding a 45RPM vinyl record instead of current music media (CD)? An interesting observation…
August 12, 2016 @ 9:35 am
Clearly that photo is from the 90’s or somewhere around there, right before the time a guy of a similar name got popped for child molestation.
August 12, 2016 @ 10:16 am
Heard a story once about a young man asking Roy Acuff “How can I make it in country music?” Acuff’s reply was “Learn to play bass guitar, son, there’s always work for a good bass guitar player.” The moral, as I take it, is make your dreams realistic, be able to play an instrument, sing backing vocals or write halfway decent songs. The young women people like Messner prey on are the ones who’ve set their sights on stardom.
August 12, 2016 @ 11:31 am
Good job on the mom’s part for looking into this and catching on to this creep.
August 13, 2016 @ 3:08 pm
I hope someone contacts the police. There should be a parole violation in there somewhere.
August 21, 2016 @ 4:24 am
YES! If he is the same scum that was convicted before, he’s a registered sex offender and should be LOCKED BACK UP.
Trigger, if you find out any updates on this creep, please post them.
January 3, 2022 @ 10:15 am
Keith is a scumbag. Multiple fraud and luring minors. Steals from his friends and family.
January 5, 2022 @ 2:05 am
I don’t know I I’m dating him right now scared I’m getting played
November 13, 2022 @ 9:52 am
I worked with this prick for 6 months at my college. I was 21. He found his way into the radio organization at my college. It’s a community college that doesn’t background check apparently if you’re not living on campus. He would sit in on all of my news shows multiple times a week for 6 months. He told me that he could get me an internship at Iheart Radio over the summer. He even “put me in contact” with the person he allegedly knew from Iheart. Turned out to be a burner phone number that he would just text me through. He made up story after story about how he’s a University of Tennessee alumni who was recruited by Warner for A&R and that he scopes out colleges for talent. My lucky day right? I believed it all for months. One day in the studio I asked him about why I couldn’t find any info on him and Warner. He told me that someone stole his identity in the late 90s and molested a couple teens and then killed himself in prison and that he sunk 12,000 dollars into SEO to hide his name on the internet. That didn’t sound right so I jumped down the rabbit hole and started looking things up and after enough digging found his criminal record and predatory social media behavior. This person is a monster. He lied about every major piece of information about his life to me. I found articles from Warner Music saying that he’s never worked for the company and then I checked the University of Tennessee alumni records and there’s nothing indicating he ever graduated let alone attended the institution in the first place. I filed a report with my college after I learned about all of this and then a week later he was gone. He made up a story about how nobody in the radio station appreciated him and that we were all ungrateful and how we’ll never amount to anything in the industry. I blocked his number after that but he sent me a couple angry voicemails chastising me about how “I didn’t appreciate him” and that’s why he was leaving the station and then he followed it up by offering to set up a van I could “run a live radio show out of”. I have no idea what that would have looked like but I’m glad I didn’t. I got played for 6 months and now I can’t show my radio segments to any schools or employers because he sat in on all of them. I don’t even have the recordings because he kept them under the pretense of “sending them to Iheart for evaluation”. If you ever run into this guy report him immediately. All he does is lie and he preys on the wishful thinking and aspirations of young people who want to do what they love.