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The National
Founder’s Letter: Turning the page...
January 2025 will mark the official tenth anniversary of Music Business Worldwide. It’s probably time for me to get a new photo done. But it’s also time for back-slapping celebrations, special ‘MBW is 10’ projects... and a fair amount of reflection.
The past decade in this industry has played host to a stunning amount of change – most of it, from a business angle, very positive indeed. Did you know, for example, that back in Q4 2014, Spotify had just 50 million Monthly Active Users (MAUs) and 12.5 million paying subscribers? A decade later, at the time this column was written (Q3-Q4 2024), SPOT’s MAUs were more than 12 TIMES as big, at 640 million MAUs, while subscribers, at 252 million, had ballooned to more than 20 times the size they were at the close of 2014.
commercial performance. The prime example: the major music companies getting accustomed to single-digit YoY streaming revenue increases, as opposed to the hockey stick annual gains we saw in that heady 2017-2023 period.
The other defining theme of 2024, as evidenced throughout this MBW Yearbook, is the expectation of, and preparation for, future change. From ‘artist-centric’ royalty model adjustments to the impact (both positive and scary) from generative AI, it was a year of taking stock and recalibrations.
“IT WAS A YEAR OF TAKING STOCK AND RECALIBRATIONS, PREPARING FOR FUTURE OPPORTUNITIES.”
As you’ll read in many of the interviews in this book – which compiles some of our best Q&As over the past year – many music companies are now looking at the next wave of opportunities with cautious optimism. AI’s role, in particular, is poised to radically reshape music production, distribution, and monetization. Whether it’s through AI helping artists produce music more efficiently or its potential to disrupt existing business models, the technology is impossible to ignore.
Similar boundless growth has boosted the live industry. A useful lens through which to view said growth: the explosion of Live Nation’s business (which subsumed Ticketmaster in 2010). In 2014, Live Nation’s annual concert revenues stood at USD $4.7 billion; a decade on, in 2024, Live Nation is expected to post annual concert revenues of around $20 billion.
Yet as the old adage says, what goes up must... well, eventually, stop going up quite as fast. And that’s perhaps what 2024 will be most remembered for amongst music biz circles – a year when the music rights business in particular got comfortable with steady, rather than spectacular, increases
Perhaps the most exciting opportunity for the music rights business, though, is the continued over-simplicity of the streaming model. The all-you-can-eat-for-around-tendollars model that has served the business well over the past 15 years is on the verge of being re-imagined, with a multi-layered pricing structure that absorbs more cost from – while skilfully rewarding – music’s biggest fans. Add into the mix the expected proliferation of satellite-based connectivity (see: Starlink) and the globalization of this industry may yet see another explosion. Money will follow.
The future’s bright! See you there.
Tim Ingham, Publisher & Founder, MBW
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Dan Nigro: ‘Not to get too philosophical, but it’s like Daoist philosophy…’
In the darkest days of the Covid pandemic, it was often hard to know what was going on in the outside world, while the struggle for connection was universal.
So, for Dan Nigro and Olivia Rodrigo, the start of 2021 was particularly surreal. That was when Rodrigo dropped her debut single, Drivers License, co-written with Nigro, and changed both their lives – and the world of pop music – forever.
Because, in a world where everyone was stuck in their own little bubble, Drivers License took off like a rocket and became a communal experience. Nigro and Rodrigo would call each other daily, questioning if the skyhigh streaming numbers could actually be real.
Friends would return from their daily jog to report the song was blasting from multiple houses in their neighborhoods. And Nigro himself would wake up every morning at 5am, heart racing, wondering what the hell the next day would bring.
“I’d never really been part of a meteoric record,” he laughs. “I never know when a song is going to be a hit anyway. But that record just took off to the stratosphere. Of course, I knew we were making something special but that never, in my mind, equates to sales or chart numbers. All I could think was, ‘This is good and it feels really good to be making this…’”
Almost four years on and Sony Music Publishing-signed Nigro really should be getting used to such super-sized success. Rodrigo’s 2021 debut album Sour, co-written and produced by Nigro, went on to become the most streamed album by a female artist on Spotify and
spawned countless hit singles. The 2023 follow-up, Guts, which Nigro also produced and co-wrote, has also been a global smash as Rodrigo – who first came to prominence as an actress on Disney shows – has become one of the world’s greatest pop stars (or maybe that should be rock stars, given the way she has returned punky guitars to the singles chart frontline). Nigro and Rodrigo were named 2024 Songwriters of the Year by ASCAP.
“EVERY HUNDREDMILE JOURNEY STARTS WITH ONE STEP AND EVERY NINE-STOREY BUILDING STARTS WITH ONE HANDFUL OF DIRT.”
And if that wasn’t enough, Nigro is equally closely involved with the rise-and-rise of another global pop femininomenon, Chappell Roan – not only cowriting and producing her The Rise And Fall Of A Midwest Princess album, but stepping in to release her songs through his own Amusement Records (now in partnership with Island) after Roan was dropped by Atlantic. Their work together features heavily in this year’s Grammy nominations, with Nigro shortlisted for Producer Of The Year, Non-Classical, while Roan’s work sweeps the Big Four (Album Of The Year, Record Of The Year, Song Of The Year, Best New Artist)
and beyond, and Rodrigo’s song Can’t Catch Me Now – written with Nigro for The Hunger Games: The Ballad Of Songbirds & Snakes – is up for Best Song Written For Visual Media.
All of which makes Nigro pretty much the hottest songwriterproducer on the planet. But his journey here makes the Driving Home 2 U road trip Rodrigo undertook for her documentary of the same name look like popping down to the local grocery store.
Nigro grew up in Long Island, New York, where his parents started him on piano lessons, aged five. Far from showing the talent that would make him the go-to guy for a generation of pop talent, he “pushed back on playing, performing and practicing – I kinda hated it”.
It was only when he picked up a guitar and got into grunge that the music bug bit, and he would spend his summers at the Jones Beach amphitheater, watching what alternative band was in town.
Eventually, he formed his own band, As Tall As Lions. They became a moderately sized emo noise, touring extensively and cracking the Top 100 with third album, You Can’t Take It With You
But the band split in 2010 and Nigro moved to Los Angeles, where he became a jingle composer and songwriter, getting as far away from his indie rock roots as possible to work with the likes of Sky Ferreira and Kylie Minogue. It was when he spotted Rodrigo singing on social media and reached out to suggest collaborating, however, that his career really took off.
“I just loved her voice and her
Chappell Roan
“WHAT DRAWS ME TO AN ARTIST? DO THEY HAVE AN INTERESTING SONG TOPIC, AND CAN YOU HEAR INTENSITY AND CONVICTION IN THEIR VOICE?.”
of a fanbase and then keep on building these little blocks.
I’ve always known that Chappell was a great live performer even before she was playing shows; with how good she was on the microphone and how much she could control her voice, you just knew she was going to be able to do something special on stage. It’s amazing for fans that get to experience such a great live performer.
our band breaking up was, we were creatively at odds. You could blame the other factors as well but, ultimately, if the creative juices are flowing, then everything’s cool.
Was it difficult to move on from the band?
That’s something a lot of people struggle with, because whoever you are is completely wrapped up in [the band].
conviction,” he grins, settling down to talk to MBW in his Highland Park studio. “Those are the things that draw me to an artist: do they have an interesting song topic, and can you hear that conviction and intensity in the voice? I was totally crazy about her writing style, so I felt I had to be a part of it.”
The rest, as they say, is pop hysteria. Nigro has even bigger plans for the future – he’s already working with Roan on a followup record and is now thinking of signing other artists to Amusement Records.
But, for now, it’s time to talk to MBW about Olivia, Chappell and what comes next…
How does it feel to be in the middle of this incredible moment with Olivia Rodrigo and Chappell Roan?
It’s pretty awesome. I couldn’t be happier with how things have been received.
With the Chappell stuff, it feels really incredible because we’ve been working at it for so long. We were trying to push through a certain wall and now we’ve got through, so that’s as good as it gets.
I grew up playing music and getting signed in the early 2000s and the way that you had to do it was, go out and play shows, prove to people how good you were in a live setting, grow a pocket
As Tall as Lions were a successful live act too – did you want to be a big rock star?
I don’t know if it was necessarily the dream to be a rock star. I loved the idea of going on stage and being in front of people but, quite soon into playing in a band, I realized I didn’t love it.
Once we started touring and were on the road all the time, I realized how much I hated not having a routine and I found myself quite disconnected from reality at some points. You’re living in this weird alternate bubble, where you’re moving around, going from show to show, you’re in a new city, you show up at a venue, you’re performing and then getting back in the van and doing it all over again.
The allure wore off quite quickly for me and I realized I like creating music more than I like performing it. You can show up to a venue and have 500 fans that love you, but still be losing money on the show. That’s really tough to deal with, being completely broke the entire time.
Is that why the band split up?
If we were getting along creatively, it would have been worth it. I never mind putting in hard work and really fighting for something; still to this day I’ll fight until the end for a good song and sacrifice so much for it.
But if you’re not getting along creatively, there’s no point to it. The main factor for
But I came into a creative group of people that were making music that was inspiring me. Unlike most people, I took a hard turn into completely trying to cut away from that side of my career.
I didn’t want people to associate me with the band, even though I’m proud of the band. I didn’t want anybody to think that was the style of music I was trying to create like, ‘Dan makes indie rock music’ or whatever. I didn’t want people to go to me for those things. It was actually easier for me to fully separate from it and try to start from square one.
Olivia Rodrigo starred in Disney’s High School Musical: the musical the series before her music career. Did you have any preconceptions about what sort of music she’d want to do?
The funny thing is, I had never seen the TV show – up to this day I’ve still never seen it. To me, it had nothing to do with that – I heard her voice, I thought she was great and the fact that she was on a television show was just some other thing that had nothing to do with me wanting to make music with her.
People were surprised she made such a rock’n’roll record. Did you realize you were going to get guitars back in the charts? I’m just there to service the artist. We had a love for guitar music and it was like, ‘This is what we’re doing’. It was never a thought like, ‘Will this song be
played on the radio?’
That never crossed my mind. Although the fact that you hear more guitars on the radio now is amazing.
It was still pretty bold to kick off Sour with something as uncompromising as Brutal though…
We can call it bold but, at the end of the day, we were just doing what Olivia wanted. It wasn’t about being bold, it was about being true to herself.
Did you feel any pressure coming up with the follow-up to Sour?
Yeah, of course! (Laughs) Not to get too philosophical, but it’s like Daoist philosophy. Starting the second record with Olivia, you’re looking at this mountain: these songs are finished, they’re mixed, they’re massive, you have all these accolades, you have Grammys, BRIT Awards and all these things – it’s like this mountain that has been created around this piece of work.
And then you walk into the studio and you’re looking at each other and it’s like the parable that says, every hundred-mile journey starts with one step and every nine-storey building starts with one handful of dirt. You have to be reminded of that. You’ve got to throw the first shovel of dirt at the building and go, ‘Cool, we’re going’.
I wouldn’t be being honest if I said it wasn’t an incredible amount of pressure. It definitely felt very intense to start on the journey again. It took us a while to get to the point where we felt comfortable.
You’re a Queen fan. Is Vampire Olivia’s Bohemian Rhapsody? [Laughs] That’s a very high compliment! I love that song and it does feel like there are different acts to it.
We spent all this time doing it and we were really excited about
it. We played it for some people in our circle pretty early on, before it was done. We were so pumped, we’d finish playing the song and they’d look us and be like, ‘OK, it sounds like three songs in one’. And we were like, ‘Yeah!’
There was a disconnect, but it was great, because you need those moments where you realize, ‘Oh wow, we still have work to do on this’. It helped push the song over the finish line because I knew the transitions didn’t feel right yet, and we really needed to work on making the parts all feel better.
half listening on their phones. I need them in the studio, paying attention, and I want the lyrics in front of their face so they read it as if they’re watching a lyric video. That shows how passionate I felt about it from day one.
Is that why you started your own label to release her music?
Yeah. I just felt so strongly about the project and about her that I was like, ‘This needs an outlet’. We basically started making songs, just her and I, and when we felt the songs were good and ready, we would just release
“I BECAME OBSESSED WITH THE WAY [CHAPPELL ROAN] THOUGHT ABOUT LYRICS. I WAS LIKE, THIS PERSON IS REALLY SPECIAL.”
How quickly after you started working with her did you realize Chappell Roan would be a pop superstar?
It was the third day. We started to write her song California and I just knew. I don’t know what it was, but I was like, ‘This person is really special’. I became obsessed with the way that she thought about lyrics and how thoughtful she was with the arrangement of the song.
I was so obsessed with that song when we made it. I wanted everybody to get excited about it because I knew things with her record label weren’t in the greatest spot. We invited the label over, and I printed out the lyrics to the song because I wanted them to listen – for the first 25 seconds of the song, there’s no music, it’s just her vocal.
I wanted to make sure when they were listening to it that they weren’t on their phones. The song’s not going to have any impact if they’re like ‘in a meeting’ or doing something and
them ourselves. It was really empowering to A&R a record together.
Is the label just a one-off for Chappell?
I’m now looking to develop the label more. It started 100% as a one-off, and I didn’t want to bite off more than I could chew.
Starting a label is a pretty intense endeavor. With someone like Chappell, I was so passionate about it, it didn’t really matter, I would dedicate as much of my time as I could because I believed in it so much. But now that things are going well, I could potentially take on something else – I haven’t spent too much time thinking about it yet, but it’s definitely on the cards.
How interested are you in the music industry side of things? I love it! I’ve learned there are so many factors involved in breaking an artist between the marketing, A&R, the production, the social media aspect… And I was always involved just in the music part
of it. In the past, I’d work with an artist and see how things would not have the right trajectory because of factors that had nothing to do with the music. I started to realize that I’d like to be more involved in helping grow the project in all areas.
If you’re working with the artist on their vision and then it’s marketed the wrong way, you’re like, ‘Why did we spend all this time working on the music if none of the other things are taken care of in the right way?’
How do you feel about the trend for multiple co-writers on songs?
The amount of songwriters on the song doesn’t mean anything. You have to service the song – if it takes four songwriters to make a song amazing, it takes four. If it takes six, it takes six. If it takes only two, great.
Just because a song has a certain amount of writers doesn’t make it a better or worse song.
Although it makes it more difficult for people to make money if there are eight writers on a song – you could have a hit song but if everybody only has 10% of it, it’s not as lucrative as the public might think.
Was it frustrating when other songwriters were added to the credits for songs from Olivia’s first album after they’d been released?
Sure, of course it’s frustrating – but it’s the music business.
Some of your songs have done very well on TikTok. Do you ever think about that platform when you’re writing?
I’ve never, ever thought about it for one second! (Laughs) I actually find it frustrating when people mention it in a session.
I don’t really work with people who think about those things either, but it can really pigeonhole the way you create.
At the end of the day, you don’t know where the song is going to take you and, if you’re setting up that type of boundary for yourself, you’re going to limit yourself.
Do you think you’ll continue to work with Olivia Rodrigo and Chappell Roan for the rest of their careers?
I would hope so. Things always change, but I have a great working creative relationship with those artists, and it makes me happy. It creates a big sense of fulfillment in my life.
And what chance is there of an As Tall as Lions reunion? (Laughs) I don’t know, we’ll see what happens! I keep getting lots of angry DMs on my Instagram about it so who knows, if the noise gets loud enough…
The original version of this interview appeared on MBW in November 2024
Olivia Rodrigo
Aaron Bay-Schuck: ‘At the end of the day, you can’t microwave artist development.’
Warner Records is on fire like no other time in its recent history. It’s seeing blockbuster success from several artists who, according to Bay-Schuck, are all true artist propositions – in this industry for the long-term, rather than just a quick streaming or TikTok hit.
These artists include the likes of Teddy Swims, Benson Boone, Dua Lipa, and – not least – country star Zach Bryan, whose No.1 US single, I Remember Everything (feat. Kacey Musgraves), bounced around the Top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 for months.
Alongside his fellow coChairman, Tom Corson, Aaron Bay-Schuck has led Warner Records to become a Top 4 record company in the United States, with market share shooting upwards.
Bay-Schuck’s industry story before Warner was an interesting journey – from being a junior at the A&R team of Atlantic Records, where he signed Bruno Mars, through to becoming President of A&R at Interscope, where he worked with the likes of Imagine Dragons, Lady Gaga, Gwen Stefani, and Selena Gomez.
For Bay-Schuck, his more recent success with Zach Bryan and co. isn’t evidence of Warner Records suddenly becoming a ‘hot’ label. In his eyes, it’s evidence of a patient, long-term, and consistent A&R strategy...
We’ve seen some real consistency of success from Warner Records over the last 12 months. What’s the secret behind that?
I would sum it all up with two things: patience and unwavering
commitment. When I say that, I mean patience and commitment from our artists, from this label. When I got here five-plus years ago, I was selling a vision that [meant] we may appear to be cold for a while, but if we are doing our jobs properly, we would wake up five years into this adventure with several of the biggest songs and artists in the world.
What that boils down to is all of these artists signed up for a journey. We told them very clearly that we are a label that doesn’t skip steps, that we like to take the long road to success, because we think on the other side of that
“I DON’T THINK ANYONE CAN LOOK AT THE SUCCESS OF ZACH, TEDDY, BENSON AND OTHERS AND CONSIDER IT A FLUKE.”
road is a really strong foundation that allows you to have a very long, healthy, sustained career.
And that’s not always the easiest thing for artists to hear. They want to be successful. They want to be successful quickly. But… they have subscribed to this plan of taking your time, building a fan base, building a core, releasing a lot of music, and therefore earning their way into the landscape of having hits rather than anybody considering
it a fluke or a moment of virality. And so it’s no surprise to me to see Zach Bryan and Teddy Swims and Benson Boone all having significant wins at the same time. And although their path to success has moved at different paces, you really see that all of these artists were patient and committed to the process and they found beauty in that process. And I don’t think anyone can look at the success any of those three acts or others on our roster have and consider it a fluke, and that’s why we’re in a really privileged position.
I really think what’s happening with Warner Records is a real testament to the culture and spirit of Warner Music Group too. [Outgoing Warner Music Group Recorded Music CEO] Max Lousada supported us, he blocktackled for us when I’m sure people were starting to get a little impatient, and so hats off to him and hats off to the Warner Music Group for allowing this kind of story to develop.
Was there any panic during those years you were building the roster? Were you asking, ‘Is this going to pay off? Have I done the right thing here? Should I have signed more short-term viral tracks?’
I don’t know that I would go so far as to call it panic, because –having a front-row seat to what we were developing – I was always extremely confident that the roster was really special. Maybe perhaps the rest of the industry and the world didn’t know that yet, but I certainly knew what we had and
believed in it. So I would call [that period] more ‘very antsy’! Maybe, at times, I wished that the artist development process could be expedited, but I always remembered at the end of the day, you can’t microwave it.
So were there ever moments of panic? No. Did the desire to get hot a little faster inform our A&R decision-making process? Yes, definitely from time to time. But ultimately, our confidence in what we were building never really wavered.
Is there a through-line in terms of the type of artists that you want to sign to Warner Records, and what does that tell us about
the identity of the label?
I’m a student of the business and I always considered Mo Ostin to be one of the greatest record company heads in history. And when you look back at the roster he created during his tenure, along with his team, that’s when you start to see a through-line that we wanted to recreate under myself and Tom [Corson]’s leadership.
If you look at any of those acts – that range from Tom Petty to Fleetwood Mac to Madonna to Green Day and the [Red Hot] Chili Peppers… they were all fearless. They were all incredibly unique. They all took risks. They all had something to say and there
was just never anything traditional about them. And that’s what we wanted today’s Warner Records roster to represent.
I had lunch with Mo Ostin just before starting, and I asked him, ‘How did you keep your run going for so long?’ And he said, ‘Look, I wish I could give you some crazy, intelligent answer but there really wasn’t any secret sauce.’ He was like, Just sign incredible talent. Nurture that talent. Give them the space to develop at their own pace, but also know when to lean in and provide support and create a culture at a company where your artists feel incredibly safe, where the art and the artists are prioritized, and create a culture
Zach Bryan
Credit:
Trevor
Pavilik/Warner Music Group
within the company that is all about supporting those acts.
That’s ultimately what the through-line is with all of [Warner Records’ modern] acts: they truly are best-in-class talents who have very clear visions about who they are.
Zach Bryan is a big talent with a big impact on a younger generation, but he doesn’t seem to be what people necessarily think of as a ‘major label artist’. How did you discover Zach, and how did you come to sign him?
I’ve got to shout out to two A&R executives, Miles Gersh and Stefan Max. The two of them together introduced me to Zach Bryan and his music. Miles initially found Zach through a data angle, and Stefan found him through a fan. Stefan has since gone on to join Zach as his co-manager, along with Danny Kang. And Miles is here thriving as the day-to-day A&R for Zach.
When they first shared his music with me, [Zach] had put out a couple of independent albums. He was doing about 1-2 million streams a week, which is evidence that something is working, but not a particularly explosive data story. But to our ears, Zach’s music was undeniable. From the very first listen, we were all absolutely floored by the quality, in love with the poetry, his use of lyrics, his melodies.
And then we got on the phone with Zach. And what we discovered was, he was incredibly confident. He was incredibly clear on who he is. You could tell very quickly that Zach was going to be unwavering in how he wanted to move as an artist. And that’s something we always want to see; labels always will do a better job if the artist is front and center and leads the charge in describing the world that they want to be creating around their music.
More than anything, what gave
“IT WAS A BIT OF A SCARY PERIOD, BEING THRUST INTO THE [CEO] ROLE AT THIS COMPANY. WE HAD SUCH REINVENTION TO DO ON THE A&R SIDE OF THINGS.”
It was a bit of a scary period, to be thrust into the role that I was in here at this company, where we had such reinvention to do on the A&R side, and to be having to do that while in real-time the industry is also shifting dramatically in how it discovers talent, how it pursues it, all of that. That was a challenging thing to get our head around.
us the confidence that Zach had the potential to be a really significant artist, was that he had built this following, albeit a small one, while being an active enlisted member of the Navy. He had never actually done a show, he had never actually touched his fans. He had never met them. Everything had been created from afar, with Zach just picking up the guitar, singing, posting videos on YouTube. [But] the fandom was very real.
They weren’t streaming Zach Bryan for any one or two particular songs – these albums were being consumed. And that is something we don’t see very often, and something we know we can scale.
What we’re all watching is very historic. The rise Zach has had from never having done a show to launching a stadium tour three years into being signed here, is just phenomenal. But he deserves it. He’s truly a generational talent.
There was a moment there, which coincided with you taking the helm at Warner Records, where the industry seemed to be prioritizing viral hits. A lot of these artists who were signed off their social media virality haven’t really developed into true artist propositions. Has the industry matured beyond that? What is your view, when you look back on that period?
I feel we at Warner Records really never wavered from our commitment to real artist development. On the one hand, that was because we just don’t believe it should be done any other way. And on the other hand, coming into this company five years ago, we really couldn’t be competitive on the datadriven signings that everybody was trying to close. We didn’t have enough success to point at, to show artists why we would be a better option than some of the other great labels out there.
So we had to sign early. We had to develop things naturally, we had to find the skill set of being patient and being committed to our acts.
Now that everybody has caught up to how to use TikTok and these other platforms, and how to interpret the data, it’s fair to say there has been a bit more of a migration [across the major labels] to using gut instinct and signing early. And a lot of labels are seeing what we’ve been able to accomplish with some of the acts we’ve discussed, and are left thinking that perhaps… the instant gratification strategy wasn’t the right one, at least not for long-term success.
A few years ago if you saw virality on a platform such as TikTok, you could more confidently predict how that would then migrate to consumption once a song came out. Now, it’s a bit harder to know. If there’s real pre-release traction, if there’s great ‘pre-search’, as we call it, it doesn’t necessarily mean
that a song is going to come out the gates firing.
[That means] it’s very important to ask those additional questions to truly understand what it is that you’re signing. Is it just a song? Is it an artist proposition? How long has the artist been at this – do they have the skill set to be successful once the viral period has waned?
All these things are coming into play in evaluating the types of artists that we sign, and I’m sure other labels do the same.
There’s a bit more of a hybrid process developing across most major labels. Data is now being used more to support and confirm our gut instincts rather than being the leader in determining what we go after.
Warner Music Group CEO, Robert Kyncl, recently suggested that major music companies and their frontline labels have never been more ‘relevant’ to the industry – despite the fact artists can do more independently these days than ever before. Do you agree with what he said? Well obviously as the CEO of a major record company, I absolutely agree with Robert! And the truth is, he’s absolutely right. There is no way to truly scale to become one of the biggest artists in the world without the infrastructure, relationships, financial capability, all of the things that a major record company can offer. Having an army is an indispensable thing.
Can an independent artist have success on their own? Of course, we’re seeing it more and more frequently. But to truly be able to pull every lever required in the growth from an emerging act to a ‘broken’ superstar, you need a major record company. It’s just the truth. Also our access to [A&R] data, our visibility into everything that’s happening out there in the world from a musical standpoint, is unmatched.
The skills that artists learn by releasing music independently – marketing and promoting it with just them and their team –are invaluable. [But] once you do sign to a major record company, if you decide to do that, and your major record company is doing those things at the same time, you’re increasing your chances of success tremendously.
This question is my favorite because it might get a different answer on a different day: If you could change one thing about
“IT’S IMPORTANT TO ASK: IS IT JUST A SONG? IS IT AN ARTIST PROPOSITION? HOW LONG HAVE THEY BEEN AT THIS?”
perform quite quickly for a label to be able to continue to reinvest, and I don’t think that’s ever a fair position to put an artist into. I don’t think it’s wrong for me to say that getting a lot of money upfront is a gift and a curse.
And… I don’t think it’s great for labels either. We at least get multiple shots; we sign lots of acts. Artists get one or two shots.
I never feel we’re doing our job correctly if we aren’t creating a world for artists where they can truly just care about their craft, that they’re going into the studio on any given day and they’re just there to make music.
the music business, if I gave you a magic wand you could tap to change one thing, what would it be and why?
I think today my answer would be about the ever-evolving deal landscape. What we’re seeing is, because all the labels are aware of all the different things that are moving out there due to our access to all the data and analytics and the tools we use to find new talent, it’s making it that much more competitive.
It’s driving up the price of deals... In such madness to sign, you’re given such little time to develop real relationships with artists and their teams. The [pay] checks are big, and it creates instantaneous pressure on both the label and the artist to perform quickly. It’s counter to an artist development philosophy in a lot of ways.
If you spend big money upfront, [that artist’s music] then needs to
In sports… there are all sorts of ways for athletes to hone their skills before they’re really ready for primetime. Yet in the music business, you can have a kid who made their first song in their bedroom, [the song] goes on to become huge, and all of a sudden you give them a seven-figure check. Then [the industry] puts this crazy schedule and level of expectation around them, and they’re not ready for it.
That’s a really unfortunate part of the business.
I want to go back to the start of your career, when you were a junior in the A&R department at Atlantic Records. As I understand, you signed Bruno Mars, but it took years and you stuck with him outside the company before you actually got ink on paper years later... We started off this conversation [talking about how] patience and unwavering commitment have been the themes for Warner Records and our artists, and those were skills I learned all the way dating back to Bruno’s story.
I met him in a studio session, I think around 2005. I had built a good relationship with another songwriter named Phil Lawrence, and Phil was in the studio with me working on some records for some acts on the Atlantic roster.
Phil turned to me and said, ‘Hey, there’s another writer I worked with for the first time the other day named Bruno; I think he’s great. Do you think I could have him come by?’
I said of course, the more the merrier. So in walks Bruno, who very clearly was not there to write for anyone else! He was there to pick up the guitar and do a little impromptu showcase for me, and I’m certainly glad he did because it was one of the best things I’d ever seen.
I walked into [Atlantic] the very next day as a junior A&R guy trying to figure out his first signing, and made a passionate plea to my boss about this guy Bruno Mars, and... my boss didn’t see it.
[Bay-Schuck, Lawrence, and Mars] attempted over the next kind of three, four years to repeatedly bring Bruno back into [the label] and get people to see what I saw, but I was usually met with resistance. So what we did over those three or four years was really work hard on honing Bruno’s craft. I was putting Bruno and Phil into as many sessions as we possibly could. And through writing for other people, Bruno ultimately did find his voice and the rest of the story is what it is.
[Bay-Schuck eventually signed Bruno Mars to Atlantic in 2009, four years after he first brought the artist to the label.]
While living through that process, I was furious that I couldn’t get my boss to see what I saw. But now I look back on it, in the role that I’m in, and I’m incredibly grateful that he had the wisdom to say no, [that] he was able to see that a lot of the key ingredients weren’t there yet.
Because when I came back into [the label with Mars] for the final time, I brought in a star. I brought in a guy who had hits, I brought in a guy who had a clear musical direction, and all of a sudden it made sense.
Had I been given the green light to sign Bruno all the way back in 2005 or 2006, I think the story [would have been] different. He wasn’t ready. I, as an A&R guy, wasn’t as developed as I was a few years later when I finally got Bruno’s deal done. And so timing is everything with this sort of thing.
My inability to get Bruno signed
when I first wanted has ended up being one of the greatest gifts that I could ever have asked for in my career.
It was a fantastic lesson in persistence. I think about it all the time.
The original version of this interview appeared on MBW in March 2024.
Bruno Mars pictured in 2010, a year after Bay Schuck signed him to Atlantic Records
Sherrese Clarke Soares:
‘Every
human being in the world with internet access is
a potential audience member.’
Sherrese Clarke Soares is founder and CEO of HarbourView Equity Partners.
HarbourView has earned plenty of headlines since it was founded in 2021. Under Soares, the company has acquired premium recorded music and publishing assets performed by stars such as Wiz Khalifa, Nelly, Lady A, Florida Georgia Line and the late, great Christine McVie.
One of HarbourView’s biggest deals to date is its reported $325 million purchase of SoundHouse Acquisitions LLC in 2022, a catalog that includes royalty streams for songs by artists such as Tech N9ne, George Jones and Trey Songz.
HarbourView has made all of these acquisitions with the financial backing of Apollo Global Management, who partnered with Soares to launch the firm.
(Apollo recently partnered with Sony Music Group via a $700 million investment which is believed to have partly funded Sony’s buyout of Queen’s catalog.)
Over the past year, HarbourView has expanded its remit beyond music into other entertainment verticals, a good example being its investment in content company Mucho Mas Media, which produced the Netflix hit, The Long Game.
(It’s also continued to buy in music: subsequent to this interview with Soares being published, Harbourview confirmed its acquisition of a publishing catalog from Grammywinning James Fauntleroy.)
In March 2024, HarbourView announced a new source of funding for future deals,
having secured $500 million in debt from KKR via a private securitization of its catalog of music royalties.
Sherrese Clarke Soares is wellversed in the financialization of entertainment rights. Prior to starting HarbourView, between 2019 and 2021 she led Tempo Music, a pioneering music acquisition vehicle created with and bankrolled by Providence Equity Partners.
“WE’RE FOCUSED ON BUILDING AN ENTERTAINMENT PORTFOLIO WITH SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE. THE NETFLIX OF THE SPACE, IF YOU WILL.”
Before that, she spent 10 years at Morgan Stanley, where – between 2017 and 2019 – she founded and led the development of the firm’s entertainment, media and sports structured solutions platform.
Here, MBW asks Soares about HarbourView’s ambitions in the music and entertainment space, the apparent recent slowdown in streaming growth, the impact of elevated interest rates on music M&A, and much more…
It’s been around four years since HarbourView launched. To get an idea of your size and progress, could you bring us up to speed
with the company’s key stats? We have been pretty busy, as you can imagine. We own probably 75 to 80 underlying catalogs from across genres and vintages, ranging from things as seasoned as Fleetwood Mac and Pat Benatar to things as recent as Ruth B and things in the Latin space like Eslabon Armado and Peso Pluma.
We are really focused on building a portfolio that has something for everyone. I like to tell people I’m the Netflix of the space, if you will.
That’s how we talk about portfolio and portfolio construction, really centering a global audience, with a heavy hand on data and data analytics, where we think growth and global audiences are.
That’s led us to about $1.6 billion of total assets under management, or assets purchased – the [real] value may be higher than that.
Catalog M&A is a competitive space, and it’s become even more competitive in the years since HarbourView launched. How does HarbourView differentiate itself from other buyers in the marketplace? One, we’re focused on building an investment firm across the entertainment, media and sports segments. We invest in things outside of music [and] what that creates is a very rich ecosystem. It is more than acquiring only music and music catalogs.
I think it’s really allowed us to do some differentiated types of transactional structures with the artistry that we’ve worked with,
whether it’s to do things with just catalog only, catalog plus futures, catalog plus name, image, and likeness – we’ve done all of the above, looking at partnering with those artists around developing other types of content or adjacent types of content, looking at deals with content creators that we can look at investing in together. So we really are differentiated in that respect.
We really try to strike this middle note of being translators to the investor community around how to think about things in the entertainment, media and sports segment. Particularly because, as you and I know – we get to work in it every single day – it’s super fun, but as a consequence, that can be scary to investors. And so we try to demystify that. We try to put a lot of structure and institutionalization around how we think about that.
What is your buying criteria? How do you decide upon an asset you want to acquire? And how do you think about decay curves?
First, without getting too technical or spilling our secret sauce – one of the things that we’re really focused on is this global audience frame.
That means that every single human being, [anyone] in the world who has access to internet services or ways to engage in music – is a potential audience member. And the only way for us to cut through that global audience… is that we’ve really centered data analytics in the way that we look at things.
We’ve seen over 600 to 700 catalogs since we’ve opened our doors. We’ve [acquired] less than 10% of that. We say no a lot, and we say no a lot around things that don’t necessarily fit in our framework for how we see those opportunities and what we think that they mean to our portfolio.
We are really focused on [artists] who are double-clicking and triple-clicking into their audience, [who have] real resonance with their audience. A lot of that we can see in various data metrics that we look at, but also, qualitatively, we have a team that looks like a global audience, and that’s very intentional, because we believe that the world is plural and not singular.
We’ve seen some slowdown in the music acquisition space in the past two or so years, mainly been caused by escalating interest rates. How do you think the interest rate environment is going to play out over the next year or so, and how might that affect music’s M&A sector? It’s really hard to find any asset class, and any marketplace, that doesn’t have a correlation to interest rates. That being said… we have seen real resilience in the financing market for our own assets, with the ability to be able to price those assets really attractively. And we think that activity, at least for us, will continue.
I think a large part of that is the asset class is non-correlated [to other asset markets] and [it’s] a diversifier. Also, the way that you think about building a portfolio matters to [entities] like rating agencies and banks and things of that nature, which then indicate what you can finance portfolios at, which we think we center in a fairly differentiated way to our peer set.
As we look out on the horizon, we’re anticipating a Fed rate cut before end of [2024], and maybe a couple in 2025. That will benefit risk assets in a positive way, inclusive of music assets.
You recently made an investment into L.A.-based content company Mucho Mas Media, which was behind the successful Netflix movie
‘The Long Game’. What does this investment tell us about HarbourView’s strategy in expanding across entertainment and sports verticals?
Our saying is that content is queen, and that’s not only music content, it’s all content. If we want to be positioned against a global audience, [that] leads us to making similar thoughtful bets and things outside of music, particularly on the film and television side.
Mucho Mas is a film production company led by Javier Chapa, who’s a longtime film producer in this space. He’s focused specifically on Latinx audiences. We invested in Mucho Mas and also invested in creating product with him – creating film product that is designed for specific audiences with the idea around delivering high quality ROI.
We were able to do that in this first film called The Long Game... a sports story about five young Mexican-Americans who had a love for the game of golf in 1956, and couldn’t play golf for a number of reasons that we all understand and know well, given the place and time in history. They built their own golf course, they started their own team, and they went on to win the [Texas State] championship. And it’s a true story.
We loved the elements here... we saw some real data integrity coming off of our music catalog, actually, where we have a lot of Latin exposure, that told us this would be a really interesting thing to do.
And then, lo and behold, as people continued to find this film on Netflix, it [hit the] number one spot for a couple days on Netflix. It continues to prove the thesis that if we make great things for all audiences, and we double-click and triple-click on that audience, you can get really resonant opportunities, with real rate ROI.
HarbourView had a financial milestone in 2024 where you secured a $500 million debt package with KKR. What does that mean for HarbourView’s spending power, and does it tell us anything about KKR’s belief in music asset classes, as well as entertainment asset classes?
The deal we did with KKR is a half billion dollar securitization, something that they did with us on the back of exiting their investment in Chord [Music Partners]. It’s a real testament to our franchise, it does give us incremental firepower, and we’ve got more firepower
coming. So we’ve got lots of dry powder in the tank to really continue to identify high quality opportunities.
KKR, Apollo, they’ve all been great partners of our firm. And I think when you see large scale institutional partners like that partnering around this asset class, but in particular backing a firm like ours, you understand the power of the asset class, but also the power of the franchise that we’re building here.
As I tell all my creators, we really want to be residents of this space. We’re not going anywhere. I own HarbourView outright, this is my
life’s work, so we have to continue to invest with discipline so that we deliver a great return on investment for all of our investors.
We’ve seen some consolidation among music’s new class of acquisitive catalog owners. In this context, do you think HarbourView will be a buyer or a seller? And what’s your overall ambition for HarbourView? First, no, we’re not for sale. We are definitely a buyer, and we’re happy to be a buyer of all of these platforms that are looking to roll things up.
I do think that you will continue
HarbourView acquired the master royalty stream of George Benson (pictured) in Q4 2024
to see consolidation in this space, largely because there’s not that many fully independent firms, or if they are, they’ve been oneproduct firms, which is one of the things that is a true point of differentiation for us – that we are really centered on being an asset manager across entertainment, media and sports, and not only a music catalog platform.
Music is a majority of our business today, and it will continue to be a significant portion of everything that we do. But as we continue to diversify our product offering for our institutional investors, we’ll continue to see more and more things under the HarbourView banner.
HarbourView was created in partnership with Apollo Global Management, which is a huge investor in multiple different industries. MBW has reported that Apollo just invested $700 million into a partnership with Sony Music Group, to back Sony’s music biz acquisitions including Queen’s catalog. What’s your view on Apollo teaming up with Sony? How seriously is Apollo taking music assets?
Apollo has been a great partner to our firm. They staked our firm. We are the investment manager on that, we invest that with our own discretion, subject to a few rules. They give us working capital to build on our firm, and in exchange, they participate in our firm’s success. They have been amazing partners. They’ve been mentors to our firm.
We were their first foray into the overall music space, but they pick partners who are experts at executing. We’re all a little bit different, obviously. Sony’s a great and outstanding global entertainment platform. [Apollo have] worked really well with Concord, which is an amazing publisher, and then we are an
asset management firm – three different ways to engage. They continue to support our firm in a myriad of different ways, and we continue to see that they will continue to put more capital behind this space, whether it’s with us or with others.
“APOLLO CONTINUES TO SUPPORT OUR FIRM IN A MYRIAD OF DIFFERENT WAYS, AND THEY WILL CONTINUE TO PUT MORE CAPITAL [INTO THE MUSIC] SPACE.”
The first time that most MBW readers would have heard your name is when Tempo Music Investments launched. Why did you ultimately end up leaving Tempo, and launching HarbourView?
I think the one thing that I did not fully appreciate when I launched Tempo was I was new to launching an asset management firm. I only owned a small percentage of that business, and I had started literally from scratch, from when I was pregnant with my son in 2015.
What I didn’t focus on was what I would have needed to really be able to scale the organization [in terms of] of human capital, for myself, ownership for myself, but also for my team.
There was nothing [behind the decision to leave] other than I knew I wanted to build something. And Tempo was… very narrowly focused just on music. I knew I wanted to build a firm around these themes, around entertainment, media and sports. It was a complete white space that we saw in terms of
institutionally skilled firms, or at least very few firms that do this in a multiproduct way.
And candidly, we’re still very much at the beginning, I tell people all the time that HarbourView is my third child. My daughter is almost 12, my son’s almost nine, and my company’s only three and a half years old. So I have a toddler.
And like anybody who’s a parent and knows what it is to have a toddler, you can take off some of the big proof locks, and they can put food in their mouths themselves, and things of that nature. But we still are growing.
If you had a magic wand and you could tap it to change anything about the music business, what would you change?
I don’t know. I love it so much... I don’t really have a ton of things that I would change.
I think we’re seeing the beginning of a change – the fact that we are plural, we are not singular.
What I will continue to hope to see in music is this mashup: Shaboozey, a child of immigrants, crushing it on the country chart; Post Malone going from pop to rock to country music; the K-pop collaborations with artists like Chris Brown; I really want to continue to see this mashup, because I believe strongly that Gen Z and Gen Alpha, this is the life and the world that they love to live in.
They love to live in this plural, “multi” dynamic, and it is not singular. And so if I had a magic wand, I would accelerate our pacing against that and really get the world to see that it is the answer, the intersectionality and the global audience of it all, and it is not in the singular, it’s in the plural.
The original version of this interview appeared on MBW in August 2024.
CONGRATULATIONS
MBW ON ANOTHER STELLAR YEAR
from JOE PUTHENVEETIL & FRED DAVIS
THE RAINE GROUP
Emmanuel Zunz: ONErpm has 550 employees and 40 offices globally... and it’s still 100% owned by
Emmanuel Zunz is CEO and founder of ONErpm, one of the music industry’s most interesting companies and something of a quiet giant.
When it was founded in 2010, ONErpm quickly gained ground in Brazil, where, to this day, it challenges the major record companies for market share.
Since finding success in Brazil, ONErpm has grown all over the planet, offering a range of partnerships to artists, from low-margin DIY distribution all the way up to higher-margin full-service deals.
Understood to turn over a substantial nine-figure sum each year, ONErpm is profitable – but it has to be. One of the most remarkable things about the company, over and above the fact that it runs more than 40 offices globally, is that Zunz continues to fully own the business.
He’s never taken a cent of private equity or venture capital money, and he’s rebuffed a number of acquisition approaches from major music companies and other parties.
According to Zunz, ONErpm has been on a tear these past few years. From 2021 to today, he says, the firm has more than doubled its revenues and profits.
Despite a challenging, heavily competitive marketplace, Zunz is projecting growth of another 50% to 60% over the next two years.
As he explains on this podcast, Zunz’s ambition is simple – to become the fifth-largest record company in the world while maintaining a profitable, sustainable business controlled by its founder.
its founder.
Read abridged/edited highlights from Emmanuel Zunz and Ingham’s conversation below, or listen to the full podcast –either above, or on your preferred service…
OneRPM is an independently owned and run company, but it’s also something of a ‘major’ indie. You have over 40 offices worldwide, 550 people employed. What do you think, generally speaking, about the term ‘independent’ as it relates to music companies?
The concept of being an ‘independent’ company is becoming outdated. For me, what it means today, for my company, is that we’re truly independent, because we’ve never raised any capital or debt. There’s nothing wrong with raising capital and debt, but [ONErpm’s setup] means that I still own the company, and I don’t have a boss. In that sense, we are a truly independent company that grows organically, taking our earnings and reinvesting them into the company’s growth.
But if you’re an artist choosing between ONErpm or [a major record company] I don’t think it matters whether [the company is] independent or not. What matters is: What is the company offering you?
Are they giving you commercial terms that make sense? Are they providing services and/or solutions that will help you grow your career? Is it a right fit in multiple ways? If so, go work with that company.
The majors have been around for a long time. They can provide
a lot of value, and they’re changing the way they work in many ways. There’s been this pretty significant transformation within the music industry over the last 20 years that gives more leverage to artists to negotiate better deals; there are no longer these gatekeepers that decide who gets to be successful or not. It’s a market that’s been democratized now.
So it doesn’t matter whether it’s a public company or a major label or an independent music company like mine. All that matters is: Are they offering good solutions and good services? Are the commercial terms reasonable?
Is there a notable difference between a ‘fully independent’ company like yours, and those that have lots of venture capital or private equity money in them? If you are majority-owned by a private equity company, you don’t have full independence to run your business as you see fit. You have stakeholders that require certain things.
That could be beneficial if the stakeholders are providing a lot of added value – if they’re lending services and guidance and providing not only capital but a network of like-minded people that can help grow the company. But you are not 100% in control.
That brings to mind Taylor Swift. She owns her masters and has a contract with Universal and Republic, which traditionally might have been described as a distribution or services deal – as far as we know, anyway. and also
she clearly is leading from the front in making artistic and business decisions about her career. Do you think that’s impacted the wider business and ‘independence’?
I don’t know the ins and outs of her deal, but she’s in control of her destiny, and that’s what it means to be independent. She’s working with a major label, but she’s still making decisions. She’s in control, so therefore she’s independent. That’s the way I see the world.
Overall, the market is heading in this direction, where whether you’re Taylor Swift or you’re Jay Z or you’re a beginning artist, you should be able to exercise control over your career. You should be able to find the right partner that
understands your vision and work with them.
A lot of people that I know who work at the majors understand that and work by that principle –and they’ll be successful. But those who operate in antiquated ways won’t be here for much longer; they won’t be relevant as either executives or as record labels.
This is why I say that the concept of being independent is somewhat antiquated. We’re all headed towards a world where we’re all competing for the best acts or artists, and it’s up to us to create value.
Whether they’re independent companies, wholly owned by their founder or owned by private equity or VC-backed, or if they’re
owned by the public markets… it’s the companies that provide the best services, create the most value at the appropriate price, that will succeed.
Which territories have you been investing most heavily in over the past few years, and why?
We’ve had some success in Africa; we want to double down on our investment in Africa.
Emerging markets are volatile, which makes them interesting but also slightly riskier.
When I started operating in Brazil in 2010, the exchange rate was two Brazilian real to one US dollar. Right now it’s five to one, and so I’ve lost over [half] my money in terms of currency. If it had remained at two-to-one,
ONErpm signed Nicki Minaj producer Malibu Babie in 2024
Credit: Joey James
ONErpm would be more than double the size it is today [in Brazil] in terms of revenue. So that’s the risk of going into emerging markets.
We’ve also been investing more in the Caribbean. The Dominican Republic has been a really great market for us because [artists from that market] have a lot of consumption in the United States. It’s more of an export market; Jamaica is also mostly an export market.
Nigeria is also mostly an export market. Most of the consumption [of] Nigerian music occurs in Europe, the UK, and the US. We’ve had great success in Nigeria. I think that Africa will continue to be a focal point for us.
We’re starting to get some traction [in the Middle East], specifically in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, where we have people on the ground.
We’ve invested in Asia. We need to do a lot more work there to gain real traction, but we’re finally seeing some traction.
I also think there’s a lot of opportunity in Eastern Europe: My next investment will be in those markets.
Because we’re self-funded, we’re not going out there and buying market share. It takes two to three years to see traction in a market [once you’ve invested], so we’re in it for the long haul in these markets; we don’t give up. I’ve never walked away from a market, and I’ve never shut down an office that I’ve opened.
The foothold of the majors isn’t as strong in emerging markets as it is in developed markets. Is that part of the reason for moving into those markets?
I don’t think that’s the reason why we’re going in there. I have a master’s degree in economics, and the focus [of that study] was on emerging markets, so I’ve always really liked emerging markets. I also think that the
“WE’RE IN IT FOR THE LONG-HAUL. I’VE NEVER WALKED AWAY FROM A MARKET AND I’VE NEVER SHUT DOWN AN OFFICE THAT WE’VE OPENED.”
I got offered, from a different firm, $8 million. I said, ‘You know what? Maybe I’m on to something here.’ I’m not trying to sell the company. If somebody knocks on my door and offers me an unbelievable opportunity, then I’ll consider it. It has to be a good fit. What I’m most interested in is I want ONErpm to last a long time. I don’t want it to go away. I don’t want to sell it and then it doesn’t exist anymore. I want it to be a long-standing brand that’s around for 40, 50 years to come.
unknown to me is appealing. I feel like, because of the unknown, anything is possible there, in some ways, because –and this comes down to psychology – ignorance is bliss in many cases.
I remember when I launched in Brazil, I didn’t really know what I was getting into. All I knew was that Brazil, at the time, was the fifth-largest economy in the world. I knew it had huge amounts of music production and a huge musical culture. And I suspected that the DSPs… were going to eventually open [in Brazil]. And so I made a bet.
Then if you fast forward, I think Brazil is [now] the eighth or ninth largest music market in the world, [and we have] 17%-18% market share in that market.
I don’t know if any other truly independent music company has gotten to that level of market share in such a prominent market.
The last time we spoke, in 2022, you said the majors had been making acquisitive noises around ONErpm, and you told them to go away. Has your phone rung since the potential Warner-Believe deal fell through?
The first time somebody tried to acquire ONErpm was 2013. I got offered $4.6 million for the company and then a month later
What’s your number-one ambition for one RPM in the next five years?
I have a three-year trajectory right now that I’m working towards, and that is to maybe grow the company by – not double it, but maybe grow by 50% or 60% by the end of 2026 [vs. 2023].
If I hit those goals, the company will be very, very profitable.
This market that we’re in today is one of the most challenging markets I’ve ever been in. There are some macroeconomic challenges; there’s diminishing returns on the value per stream. Facebook and TikTok aren’t paying their fair share.
In my opinion, we need new revenue sources. There’s not a lot of new innovation on the consumption side. We need another innovator in the market, and we don’t have that right now.
There’s so much money flooding the ecosystem that the market is crowded, making it harder to do good business. I think this is temporary for the next two to three years.
Despite these challenges, I think the goals that I’ve set out for the company are feasible, and if we hit those goals in two to three years, we’ll be the fifth-largest music company in the world.
The original version of this interview appeared on MBW in July 2024.
Jamie Oborne: ‘Don’t sign things you don’t fully believe in. Otherwise you’ll have to fake it.’
“A strong family is together forever – no matter what. A strong company, on the other hand, is more like a pro sports team.”
This is Netflix’s HR creed, with various versions of it attributed to the video streaming giant’s co-founder and Chairman, Reed Hastings. It rather dismantles the template record executive claim that each new artist signing is “now part of the Limetree Records/BCA/Interplanetary Music Group family”.
Reed Hastings is absolutely right, of course: a music company is not a real family. Real families care little for industry showcases or amplifying TikTok trends. You can’t drop real family members –unless you’re especially heartless – by blocking their number and asking your VP of A&R to send a curt email.
Raising a real family? That’s worry, it’s exasperation, it’s joy that makes your heart burst from your ribcage. It’s seeing potential in people like no one else can, and experiencing a physical sickness when they waste it.
All of which being true… you should hear Jamie Oborne when he says, self-knowingly, that certain artists signed to his management company, All On Red, are like “family” to him. Because Oborne speaks about some of these people – The 1975’s Matthew Healy most acutely; Jack Antonoff most effervescently – as if they’re blood fraternity, not clients.
“People sometimes say to me, ‘You’re a good salesman for your artists’,” explains Oborne. “The irony is that, in general terms, I’m actually a really shit salesman.”
The solution to that shortcoming? “Don’t sign things you don’t fully believe in. Otherwise you’ll have to fake it.”
Oborne tells MBW that his music empire – for management company All On Red and his record label, Dirty Hit – just had its best year ever. That goes both commercially, and in terms of the enjoyment levels of the two companies’ shared proprietor.
Highlights included The 1975’s ‘At Their Very Best’ tour, which saw the band play 93 arena-sized
“WORKING WITH JACK IS WONDERFUL. IT’S A CONSTANT EXCHANGE OF IDEAS AND CONVERSATION. I’M VERY GRATEFUL FOR IT.”
dates across North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Oceania, ending in August 2023. Just one month later, the band embarked on the ‘Still… At Their Very Best’ tour, adding another 60+ dates across Europe and North America.
Says Oborne: “The 1975 tour has been incredibly personally rewarding, watching that band be as brave and unflinching as I’ve ever seen them. You can’t not be inspired by the dedication they show and their commitment to their form. They are artists in the true sense of the word.”
Elsewhere, Jack Antonoff – by
multiple measures, the most successful non-featured producer in the world – signed to All On Red as a management client in 2023, in addition to striking a JV deal with Dirty Hit to release the albums of Antonoff’s own band, Bleachers. (Bleachers’ first LP on Dirty Hit, a self-titled album, was released in March, with the NME calling it “a triumphant portrait of Antonoff’s talent”.)
Antonoff’s work behind the desk with The 1975 on 2022’s chart-topping Being Funny In A Foreign Language seeded his relationship with Oborne. It also pre-dated Antonoff’s work on two of the most important records of the past decade: Taylor Swift’s Midnights and Lana Del Rey’s Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd.
In February 2024, Antonoff won the Grammy for Producer of the Year for the third year in a row; two months beforehand, Antonoff told MBW that Oborne had “changed my life in just about every positive way”.
Oborne volleys back similarly effusive praise: “Working with Jack is wonderful. Like all of my best management relationships, it’s a constant exchange of ideas and conversation. I’m very grateful for it.”
Oborne’s world since MBW last caught up with him hasn’t been without tumult, though. There was the small matter of Matthew Healy’s short-lived relationship with Taylor Swift in the summer of 2023, for one thing – a story feasted upon by tabloids – while The 1975 frontman caused upset with his contribution to a podcast from puerile/absurdist American
comic, Adam Friedland.
Elsewhere, Dirty Hit has moved into a post-Wolf Alice era, after the band left the indie to sign a global deal with RCA/Sony Music in late 2022. (One suspects that Oborne remains pained by the nature of this split. He won’t be drawn on specifics, aside from a diplomatic: “It’s quite natural to feel deeply attached to stories that you helped build.”)
The active Dirty Hit roster, meanwhile, continues to blossom. Acclaimed records have arrived from acts like The Japanese House, Benjamin Francis Leftwich and beabadoobee – with Oborne calling new signing, Saya Gray, “ridiculously good”.
Thanks to artists like this, Dirty Hit stands as one of the most important global distribution partners of Universal’s Virgin Music Group, a relationship that began with UMG/Ingrooves over a decade ago. (The 1975’s latest album was released fully independently around the globe. The band’s first four albums are licensed by Dirty Hit to UMG, though sources suggest they will begin reverting to Dirty Hit’s ownership towards 2030.)
Plenty to dig into then, as we sit down with Oborne for his first interview with us in six years…
How did All On Red’s management of Jack Antonoff come about?
Literally from the first day we met in person at Real World Studios [for The 1975 album in 2022] in Bath, we had a connection. As time developed, we talked more and more and became friends. I didn’t have any insight into Jack’s management situation changing, which doesn’t surprise me now as I’ve learned that Jack is an incredibly loyal person so he would never have mentioned it.
But by the middle of [2022] his previous situation had come to an end. He knew I very much admired what he’d done
“SOME LABELS I’VE WORKED WITH [AS A MANAGER] MIGHT DESCRIBE ME AS STUBBORN. I’D DESCRIBE IT AS BEING FOCUSED ON THE ARTIST’S VISION.”
of the story is that Dirty Hit is uncompromising in the artists it signs and the way you promote those artists – even though they’re not always the most obvious commercial hitmakers. By not compromising yourself, you ignore easy commercial wins, things are inevitably more of a slog, but you forge a clear identity. That identity then attracts talented people, including the most successful active producer in modern music...
professionally, and he’d made clear that he admired what [Dirty Hit/All On Red] had achieved too. By October [2022], I had a feeling that he was about to ask me if I’d be interested in managing him. It was very organic. It was like all of the best things in my professional life – no agenda, completely unplanned, completely serendipitous.
On the Bleachers [Dirty Hit] side of things, I saw Bleachers when they played Shepherd’s Bush Empire that September [2022]. I just went to support Jack, with no expectations. I was fucking blown away. I’ve never seen anything like it before. I saw one of the best bands on the planet live, and it left me flummoxed why no one had properly marketed it before. I felt passionate about signing Bleachers to Dirty Hit.
It benefited us that Jack had witnessed The 1975 campaign from inception to execution [for Being Funny In A Foreign Language] and was impressed. I don’t mean that in an egotistical way. Myself and Ed [Blow] believe that the best artist marketing campaigns have very defined visual and communicative ‘rules’. That’s something [Dirty Hit] is great at.
It’s interesting to hear you suggest that Jack’s signing was “serendipitous”. Another version
It’s 100% true that there isn’t an artist on our label or our management company who isn’t there because we completely believe in them and their vision.
But it’s funny: when Jack and I have conversations about the list of people who want to work with him, he comes back to the same thing: ‘I need to meet them in person, because I need to believe them.’
That’s that’s the biggest factor for him [in choosing the artists he works with]. Not what the numbers are. ‘Can we get them to Electric Lady? I need to make sure I believe what they’re saying.’
What do people get wrong about Jack Antonoff?
They probably think he’s a digital producer. Wrong. Wrong! He is so analog, it blew my mind. Also, people think he works on loads of stuff – wrong! He works on very little; it just so happens that a lot of it is massive. When I first experienced Jack in the studio with Matthew and George [of The 1975], I saw he had no ego, at all. So I don’t think people know who Jack really is; it’s just that some people have bought into some of the media around him [and his work with superstars like Taylor Swift], which is designed for clicks, frankly.
I’m excited by the idea of punching through the false ceiling of who people think he is. I think I’m a pretty good judge of
creative talent at this point –that’s something I can say about myself without feeling too much of a ****! – and Jack is a powerful creative mind.
I’ve been insanely lucky to have worked with a few people I could describe that way. There was one night that sticks in my mind, when [The 1975] were making Being Funny…, where Matthew and Jack were sitting in a studio talking about how the new genre in music is ‘quality’. It’s such a nice way of explaining what I’m trying to describe.
How would you define yourself as a talent manager?
I’m emotionally invested in the artists I work with, which is why I have quite a small personal roster of management clients. If I don’t have an emotional connection with someone, I can’t do it.
I’m a manager who is very protective of my artists’ rights; I always want to make sure that they’re the main beneficiary of their work. That might mean some of the labels I’ve worked with over the years may describe me as stubborn; I would describe it as focused on the artist’s vision. Though I understand that some people might find it frustrating, it’s coming from a reasonable place. Whether it’s A&R or management, the artists I’m attracted to working with are right about what they do 90% of the time, or more. My job is to provide that final 10% and guide them to wherever their goal is, whether that be creative, financial, whatever.
I think most people would agree that I’m a rational person. I’m not, like, a shouter-manager. Life’s too short for that. I’d rather
get my own way by being right than by shouting.
If I’m being honest, I think in the music industry, people sometimes get confused. They think it’s about their ego, whereas actually, it’s always about the artist’s ego, because that’s the very origin of why they create.
The 1975 have never been bigger globally, across all corners of the earth. And they have a solid ‘body of work’ to call on for live shows, which helps feed into a restless creativity in terms of staging, sets etc. But their touring schedule has really been something – I count over 150 dates since late 2022, each in support of the most recent album. How do you keep up with that sort of pace, both creatively and practically? By holding on! I had a call from
Matthew Healy
[Matthew Healy] this morning talking me through ideas for what he wants to do next musically. It’s really exciting, but I was saying to him, ‘You need to have a break.’ It’s difficult for me to talk about Matthew in an interview like this because I’m so protective of him. I have felt his pain over this past year.
It sounds like you are constantly flitting between management, friendship and fraternity with this individual.
Yeah, but that’s what it’s like, though, isn’t it? I have genuine love for these people. They are part of my family, you know? That’s a great thing. And it seems to be a reciprocal thing.
I’m detecting quite a lot of general negativity in the music industry about artist
development right now, especially in the UK. People say that in the TikTok age, in the age of masses of music being uploaded and created and spread across the internet, getting people to care about artists seems like an uphill battle.
It is harder than ever to develop a foundation for an artist to break from, that’s true, and there are a few reasons for it.
But speaking frankly, sometimes I feel the greatest enemy of artist development today, or the biggest pitfall of artist development today, is the artists themselves, and their lack of patience.
I’ll explain: culture, communication and media messages are so quick at the moment that I feel artists, even young artists, sometimes want to
bypass [essential] stages of their development. But just because you can upload something to DistroKid, it doesn’t mean that you fucking should! Maybe your music isn’t good enough. Maybe you need to spend five years in a rehearsal room, getting good at your instrument and finding fluidity with your bandmates.
People are so trained for instant gratification now, they even want it in their artistic statement. I’d extend that to people who work in the music business – they often want something to work straight away, and don’t want to put the work in to make it happen. This isn’t me just being a boomer; it’s my personal experience. You’ve got to put in the 10,000 hours; I don’t know a way around it.
One of the biggest music industry headlines of recent
The Japanese House
“JUST BECAUSE YOU CAN UPLOAD SOMETHING TO DISTROKID DOESN’T MEAN YOU F**KING SHOULD! YOU’VE GOT TO PUT IN THE 10,000 HOURS.”
months has been Los Angelesbased 10K Projects selling a 51% stake in its company to Warner Music Group for over USD $100 million. Throughout Dirty Hit’s existence, you’ve always been extremely proud of being fully independent, as exemplified by every record you’ve released via Ingrooves/Virgin Music Group, under which you’ve kept all rights – including The 1975’s latest album. Offers must have come in to buy Dirty Hit, or at least to buy a piece of it. Why haven’t you been tempted?
I’m a human being so the appeal [of oodles of money] is sometimes there and sometimes not. When I’m feeling really tired or embattled, it has its appeal! But my default thought on this is that I really love what I do. I truly feel like we’re building something of cultural importance, in our own way.
I love the autonomy we have, and I hope the artists who work with us believe in [the importance] of that autonomy too. It would be very difficult for me to put a price on that, or on the ambition I have for this label. The soul of what we do is the fact that we live and die by our own decisions.
On a purely business level, I suspect a lot of people who have sold their catalogs [in recent years] are going to find out that the reason someone wanted to
pay so much money for them is because they’re worth more than that [figure].
I’m not talking about Elliot Grainge there, by the way. I know little about his label, but I met him once at his dad’s house in LA to watch an Arsenal game and he seemed like a lovely guy. From what I know, it sounds to me like [10K] got an amazing deal.
Our usual final question, and I’m keen to see how your answer has changed from previous interviews: if you could change one thing about the music business, what would it be? This question confuses me a bit, because I really believe we are all the architects of our own change. So I guess I’d change the false narrative that there are no choices.
It’s like when I see artists or
managers moaning about having signed [modern-day] record deals and how they should be getting X or Y instead. And I tend to feel, ‘Well, then gamble on yourself,’ you know? Maybe don’t let your management company take a big advance because that’s how they are [commercially incentivized]. Maybe don’t blame the label who signed you – blame the lawyer who advised you to take the deal!
Don’t get me wrong: there are good deals and bad deals, and there are definitely still a few systems that exist to the detriment of artists. But they are usually based on old-fashioned business models that you can challenge by betting on yourself.
The original version of this interview appeared on MBW in April 2024.
beabadoobee
Salaam Remi on producing, the music business, and ‘pushing the transparency button’.
Salaam Remi is, by any measure, a World’s Greatest Producer.
A Grammy winner, he’s worked closely – and made timeless hits – with musical legends from Nas to Amy Winehouse, Alicia Keys, The Fugees, and many more. He’s also an accomplished music biz executive and entrepreneur.
And it’s as an entrepreneur that Remi (aka Salaam Remi Gibbs) recently hit MBW’s headlines: his music rights management company, Analog Metaverse, announced a global music
publishing admin deal with Warner Chappell Music in July.
Analog Metaverse represents a catalog of around 2,000 highquality songs, including many of Remi’s own productions. The firm’s song portfolio includes “Girl On Fire” by Alicia Keys, “Money In My Pocket” by Dennis Brown, “All I Want Is You” by Miguel and J. Cole, “Revolution” by Dennis Brown, “Fu-Gee-La,” by The Fugees, and “Here Comes the Hotstepper” by Ini Kamoze. Here, we ask Salaam all about
his career, Analog Metaverse, and the secret to being great in the studio...
I know you go way back with Warner Chappell CEO Guy Moot, but what were your reasons for picking Warner Chappell as your admin partner for Analog Metaverse?
A lot of it does come down to the head of the company… being able at least to speak to the head of company and for them also to see the vision for what you’re
Salaam Remi presenting his friend, Guy Moot, with the Sir George Martin Award at MBW’s UK A&R Awards ceremony in 2022
doing. I think it was very important for me to have that ongoing relationship, that we’ll be able to see eye to eye.
So it just felt like a proper fit, as I knew who all the players were. There are at least five or six people [at Warner Chappell] that I have a 20-plus year relationship with.
A well-worn story in the music business over the decades is that young creatives would take an upfront check and not thinking through what they were giving away – what it might mean for the next 10 or 20 years.
One day, when I was working at Sony, L.A. Reid said, ‘Hey, you’re going to appreciate this man. I just signed this paper.’ I was like, ‘What happened?’ He’s like ‘Man, I just got all my songs back.’ And I was like, ‘What do you mean?’
He’s like ‘I stopped producing, we did our deal with Warner Chappell years ago. I didn’t keep producing, so I never made the commitments. But hey, there was a 20 year conversion. I just got all the songs back. Don’t Be Cruel, the New Edition records, everything.’ And I was like ‘wow.’
Being able to see that day when your songs actually end up back in your hand, and then you have the option of what you want to do with them going forward… What I’m doing with all of our clients [at Analog Metaverse] is really giving them a clear path on at least knowing what their options are, and not always to just focus on upfront cash and all those things. Really looking at what might be best for them. And everyone has to make their decisions on what’s best for them, but when it comes down to it, if you don’t know all the options clearly, that is the biggest problem I see.
These 30 years that you’ve been working in the business, you’ve seen the transition from CD to
“THE FINANCIAL WORLD HAS BEEN SHOWN THAT MUSIC’S INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY WILL CONTINUE TO HAVE VALUE DECADES DOWN THE ROAD.”
way to go so the songwriters can benefit properly. But the first thing was that people had to get used to the consumer now knowing that these songs are available, and looking for them. And now, after this streaming era, there will be another era, and that’s really [what the] name of my company [is about], Analog Metaverse – understanding what happened in the analog world, now we’re carrying that to whatever [is next].
download to streaming. When you zoom out on that, on balance, do you think streaming has been a positive thing for songwriters and producers, or not?
I think it has. I had the opportunity for five years to work at Sony, reporting to Doug Morris. He looked at me one day and said, ‘Salaam, you know what, I sold the same song on 45, LP, CD, digital download, YouTube, now we’re streaming. The Top 10 Songs of someone’s life. They will always keep going back to playing those top 10 songs in whatever format that they’re available in.’
What streaming did was make it so that you really could play a 90-year-old song, next to a 40-year-old song, next to a song from last week, without any need to manufacture. It just had to be digitally available. And the reality is that that aspect of it allows so many songs that would have been dormant [to be revived] –because [otherwise] there wouldn’t have been any marketing or… someone to go and reissue those songs, to print them again.
Yes, the streaming [royalty] numbers need to be adjusted. [With] the master royalties, the major labels definitely have a strong play on it. Now the publishing side is starting to catch up, but there’s still a long
What do you generally make of this frenzy of catalog buying that we’ve seen in the music industry over the last five-plus years? It’s shown the financial world that there is intellectual property that is the real estate of the music business, that will continue to have value 20, 30 years down the road. On the flip side, I felt that there were a lot of people who ran into [selling their catalog but] didn’t really see the full picture, that some of the value that they were receiving now, financially, also was going to [have a downside]. But it just depends on what their personal needs were at the time.
I didn’t want to be in a position where if I want to do my life story [as a movie], I have to ask [people] on Wall Street to use my songs, because now it’s just a commodity. When it’s about that, that’s a little dangerous to me, because of the fact that it can just be moved around. [That’s] already happened [in the music industry]: if you were on a smaller boutique label, and your label helped you, and now you’re sucked up in a big corporation, and you’re one of 55,000 titles [owned by this corporation and] you can’t even find a human to talk to about your life’s work.
But as far as the amount of money that’s been put into the space, I think it’s a positive thing.
I wanted to talk to you about
Amy Winehouse. You had a very close working relationship with her. Why do you think she was such an exceptional talent? And what’s it been like for you to watch this new generation of fans start to discover her music and fall in love with it? That must be very fulfilling for you to watch.
The thing is, when I met Amy, I was at a different point… I had just lost my mom, I had just moved to Miami. I was winded… What had just happened to my life?
And then someone walked in and actually put a spark to it, at 18 years old, and was able to sit down and sing some stuff, and made me feel like, ‘Wow, ok, there’s something else for me to learn here and really take [a different approach to] Jazz-hip hop.’
what she left, and what she continues to leave, just as with many other artists, will be something that’s special.
You talked about having lost yourself for a minute around the time your mom passed and you moved to Miami. What are the best ways you’ve found to break out of self doubt and get creative and start making progress again?
I don’t think I’ve really had a lot of self doubt. But what I would do is, if I would get bored in one space, I would just… go to another place.
I’ve been blessed with a father who was in the business, who was born in Trinidad, came to America, played guitar, he worked with Belafonte, he worked with The Fat Boys, he worked with a lot of R&B artists [like] Gloria Gaynor.
“I’D PRESS THE TRANSPARENCY BUTTON. IF WE ALL KNEW WHAT WE WERE CREATING WAS WORTH, WE’D BEHAVE DIFFERENTLY.”
[I once said to Amy] ‘You’re 27 and now I’m meeting all these new girls at 18. And they’re like, “I’ve been listening to Amy Winehouse my whole life, like since I was nine.”’ And she said, ‘Wait a minute. Oh, wow…’
The people that Amy was inspired by, some of them had passed on before she was born, and [Amy] will continue to inspire.
That really crystallized part of my job – it’s to help different people now create the frequencies and the songs and the lyrics that will last beyond their existence and beyond my existence, that will inspire people that we’ll never know. I think that is the core of creation.
I met Amy right after my 30th birthday, and she wasn’t here on my 40th. But the reality is that
He did pretty much all the genres that I worked on.
So I had a blueprint of someone who went through different phases. So for me, I’m able to say, well, I worked with some reggae artists, with some R&B artists, Amy Winehouse, Lauryn Hill. I switch genres, I just go to a whole other place.
Being a New Yorker, I felt like that’s really a cosmopolitan city where Jamaican culture, Latin culture, Black American soul culture, that’s all part of being a New Yorker to me, and I was able to just go place to place, go to big band even for a while. ‘Wow, we’re at Carnegie Hall, this is what we’re doing now.’
And it gave me the challenge of learning something new. And I think that childlike curiosity is what actually drove me in every
different way, even when it came to being an executive.
So I feel that, whenever there’s a block, it just means you need to learn something.
You said May 14, 2022 – your 50th birthday – was the last time you produced. Do you have any ambitions left to fulfill in music? That date was important to me because I had my first record out with my dad, with Kurtis Blow in ‘86 [as keyboard player on Blow’s Kingdom Blow]. So it was a 34-year career. That’s a pension!
During the pandemic, some of the top artists were asking me to come out and work with them in L.A., Hawaii, different places, and I was like, ‘I’m not coming out of my house. Forget about it.’
I got to a place where I felt like, ‘You know what? I’ve made enough records. So if I make anything now, it should really be great.’
I started teaching in 2018 with Serona Elton at the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami, and that’s where I met Josephine Westphal [Analog Metaverse’s VP of Royalties and Administration] and also Kwame Kandekore [Head of Legal and Business Affairs].
And it was a great thing for me, because seeing other people now be able to do things… it’s like sitting on this perch and waiting for a young Mike Tyson to walk up. You go, ‘You know what, kid? You can do it. You’re the greatest.’ Whether they know it or not, they could be the greatest!
I feel really proud when I’m able to see somebody else fulfill their dream. You don’t have to fulfill my dream. That’s the way I feel about what I have to do in music – creating spaces where the information that Analog Metaverse is helping to make available to more people, they’re going to take this information and do better with it for whatever they want to do.
I [work with] some younger producers who really want this, and they really are on it, the same way I felt in my 20s and teens, when I wanted to be in the studio 90 hours a day. There wasn’t enough hours in the day for what I wanted to create. So I let them go with that passion, and kind of just coach them from the sidelines.
I really want to … plant a tree, not knowing who’s going to bear the fruit, who’s going to eat the fruit from it, or see the shade. That’s the goal for me.
I learned a lot from great people, every conversation that I’ve had with every musician, every engineer, to [executives like] Rob Stringer to Sir Lucian
Grainge, to Jeff Fenster to Barry Weiss, anyone I’ve had a conversation with, now I can put that information back into someone else who might not even know anything about those people, but now that information keeps getting passed down.
If you had a magic wand that let you change anything you want about the music business right here and now, what would you change and why?
I would definitely push the transparency button. If we all knew what we were creating was worth, then we would behave differently about how to make it work.
I feel like there are too many
cloaks. The more transparent the business becomes, and the more that everyone sees what they’re worth, I feel like it’s going to make a better business and a more creative business, rather than 10 people benefiting and thousands of people just walking into a wall.
That’s really what the goal is to me. And I feel like that’s really what I’m looking for –transparency, absolute transparency. Because even when you say ‘This is in my contract,’ you also have to go through insurance company [type] hoops in order to get paid for it.
The original version of this interview appeared on MBW in September 2024
Key Songs In The Life Of…
Ole Obermann
One of the ways to tempt/trick senior execs into doing MBW’s Key Songs… interviews is to tell them it’s easy. Fun, in fact!
Certainly compared to a grilling on strategy or a trawl through financial results, the unadorned task of picking seven (or so) tracks that have shaped their personal and professional lives is an underarm lob; a soft and fluffy one focused on music rather than the music business. Go on...
Ole Obermann, Global Head of Music Business Development and IP at TikTok is, quite rightly, having none of it. “It’s actually been more stressful than any other interview I’ve done, because you cannot narrow it down to seven songs, you just can’t!”
And when you consider how many tough questions he will have been asked about his company’s recently resolved dispute with Universal (and supporting cast), that’s a real cri de coeur.
As with many problems in the modern music industry, however, it was Taylor Swift who had the solution: “I was inspired by the Eras tour. I went chapter-bychapter through my life, reflected on what was going on during those times, and there’s always a song that you associate with those memories and those distinct periods of your life.”
Obermann’s industry story so far includes stints as a senior exec at first Sony and then Warner, before joining TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, in 2019. His Key Songs, however, take us on a longer, deeper journey, not just through eras, but across continents, from Long Island to Nigeria via Ibiza...
1) Iron Maiden, Where Eagles Dare (1983)
I grew up on Long Island, outside of New York. My parents are German and Danish and they had moved our family over before I was born.
“I WAS AN OBSESSED METALHEAD GROWING UP. I WAS IN A BAND; I HAD A GIBSON FLYING V GUITAR AND A PRETTY AMAZING MULLET.”
I think we had a very sort of European upbringing, in a way. I have vivid memories of my father playing classical music on the record player every weekend morning.
My song choice from this era is not a classical piece, although I do think that definitely shaped my interest in music and my appreciation of music – we’ll kind of come back to that later on.
Instead I’m going down a very different route with Where Eagles Dare by Iron Maiden.
I was an obsessed metalhead growing up. I was in a High School band, we were decent. I had a black Gibson Flying V guitar and a pretty amazing mullet.
We were very inspired by Dave Murray and Adrian Smith, who are the two guitarists for Iron Maiden; I was just so into it.
Bruce Dickinson’s vocals are incredible. And they’re just incredible storytellers. I also loved Eddie, the mascot, I loved everything about them.
There’s a venue on Long Island called the Nassau Coliseum, it’s still there to this day. It’s a big old beat-up stadium, but all these metal bands would come through there and I saw many Iron Maiden shows there.
I still listen to this track today, because it’s just a quintessential Iron Maiden song. I go back to metal in general quite a lot; it’s followed me through my life.
2) Beastie Boys, No Sleep Till Brooklyn (1986)
So this is the early/mid-nineties, which were my college years and just after. Perry Farrell, with Jane’s Addiction, was establishing Lollapalooza and I got to go to some of those shows where you had Beastie Boys, Smashing Pumpkins, Luscious Jackson, Green Day, loads of great bands from that era.
I actually really struggled on this, because which band do you choose out of all that, let alone which one track? Especially if you throw in A Tribe Called Quest, Buggin’ Out, or De La Soul, Me Myself And I; they all represent that era. But I went with No Sleep Till Brooklyn because I remember it as a fun, somewhat carefree, party time of life and this song completely represents that. Plus, I grew up in Long Island, but I was born in Brooklyn, so I think I could really relate to the song and that genre.
3) Steve Reich, Music For 18 Musicians (Original ECM Recording, 1978)
Now we shift gears in a big way, and we kind of come back to what I mentioned at the beginning, with the classical music influence
My first job out of college was at BMG – there were still five majors at the time. I worked in the jazz and classics part of the label system as a Product Manager, an entry level job. One of the labels that we distributed was ECM, founded by an incredible guy called Manfred Eicher.
We worked all of the catalog and new releases on the label, and part of that catalog was Music For 18 Musicians by Steve Reich. It is classical music in its roots, but it’s very minimalist, almost like a Philip Glass sound.
He never became massively well known, but there are some very hardcore followers of his music. And this one album I
would listen to on repeat constantly.
Even to this day, especially if I want to go into a deep thought sort of trance state, this is the album that I will put on.
4) Wilco, Shot In The Arm (1999) I left BMG in ‘98 and went to graduate school at Northwestern University in Chicago.
When I got there, I knew Wilco already, but I didn’t really know them, not like I would get to know them.
Jeff Tweedy is Chicago-based, so they were often playing smaller venues around that area. So I got to see him in a very small venue in Chicago when I was living there for the two years of graduate school.
The song that I chose is A Shot In The Arm, which is a little earlier in their discography [from 1999’s Summerteeth].
I have to also mention the project with Billy Bragg called Mermaid Avenue, where they wrote and recorded some songs using never-heard Woody Guthrie lyrics. I absolutely love those albums.
There are a lot of songs on there that I could and would have chosen, but the one that really jumps out, if I have to pick one, is Shot In The Arm.
5) Radiohead, Black Star (1995) After graduate school I moved to San Francisco, which is where I met my wife, Stephanie.
We were actually set up by some friends, and for our first date we had a nice dinner, but that is not what we remember most.
What we remember most is that after dinner we went to an amazing record store called Amoeba Music and we spent hours just going through the vinyl racks together and talking about music.
There was a lot of stuff that we bonded over, but Radiohead was
most definitely a band we both loved. Again, it was really hard to pick a single song here, but Black Star is the one I’m going with. We were talking about those days ahead of this conversation, and we both just completely associate this song with when we first met and when we were first getting to know one another; it’s an incredible memory for me.
6) Black Coffee, Stimela (2005) We’re shifting gears quite a bit again here.
I love Ibiza. I spend a lot of my time there, as much time as I can. Even going way back, I was drawn into electronic music. There was a series called Global Underground, with DJs like Danny Tenaglia, Deep Dish and Sasha and Digweed, in the late ‘90s/ early 2000s, so I was listening to a lot of that stuff. And then when we moved to London and I got to spend more and more time in Ibiza, I went pretty deep, getting to know the DJs who were playing the clubs there.
The one I will choose here is Black Coffee. It’s actually really hard to choose a song of his, because I think of sets that he plays, as a whole. But there’s a song called Stimela, and that was the one that broke him.
I really enjoy keeping an eye on what DJs like Dimitri Vegas and ANOTR DJ are doing in that dance music community, because they all really lean into the culture and they’re often the first to play and sample really interesting music from around the world and have been leading the way on that for quite a while – ahead of much of the rest of the industry, in fact.
And actually, I’ll link this back to the classical upbringing again. I think a lot of this electronic music, especially some of the deeper house music, it’s very sort of orchestral.
The way these really talented DJs produce and engineer this
music, they’re creating symphonies.
7) Bleachers featuring Bruce Springsteen, Chinatown (2020) As I mentioned, I was born in Brooklyn, grew up in Long Island, but I also lived in New Jersey for a number of years.
Bruce Springsteen, obviously, is from New Jersey, and I was lucky enough to see the Broadway show he did a few years ago, telling the story of his life through his songs, which I could really relate to.
But the song that I’m going to pick is a collaboration with Springsteen. Bleachers, Jack Antonoff’s band, have a track called Chinatown, with Bruce Springsteen, which was very
I’ve been at TikTok for about five years now, so I went back and I thought about all these songs that have broken over that time.
They’re so diverse, they’re from everywhere, and it’s really hard to pick one, but there’s a track called Love Nwantiti by Ckay, a Nigerian artist.
It’s an Afrobeats song, and it’s a really beautiful, slow, melodic kind of love song. Really early on, our guy who works the SubSaharan Africa markets was sharing this and telling us that this is really blowing up and saying it could end up breaking out and becoming a worldwide thing.
Sure enough, weeks/months later, it’s huge in the UK chart, the US chart and the global charts,
“IN THE LAST FIVE YEARS AT TIKTOK, I’VE BEEN ABLE TO BE A PART OF THESE SONGS. THAT’S WHAT I’VE ENJOYED THE MOST.”
critically acclaimed, but is not as well known as it should be. It is the most amazing song. The lyrics are amazing, the harmonies are amazing, those two singing together… and of course Jack’s from New Jersey as well, so to hear two generations coming together is really special.
What’s funny is that when I saw Springsteen on Broadway, I sat next to Jack. I didn’t know him at the time. I mean, I knew who he was, I was working at Warner Music at the time, and maybe I should have introduced myself. But I didn’t, because he was so into the show, as was I.
Now, I’m lucky enough to have met him and I’ve discovered many songs by Bleachers and I’m loving them.
8) Ckay, Love Nwantiti (2019) Sorry, I need a bonus track.
he’s playing sold out gigs in London and New York and all over the place.
I have to mention that because it represents what I love so much about the last five years at TikTok. I feel like I’ve been able to be a part of these songs, which, in most cases, people haven’t even heard of the artists. And then some crazy viral moment happens on TikTok and two weeks later you’ve got 50 million views, a million creations, it’s starting to work on Spotify and Apple, it’s in the charts…
That’s been the thing that I’ve enjoyed the most about working here and that’s why I really wanted to include this as a bonus track.
The original version of this interview appeared on MBW in July 2024.
J. Erving on RAYE, independent artists, and why he sold Human Re Sources to Sony Music.
J. Erving is the founder of Los Angeles-based Human Re Sources, a distribution and services company whose successful clients to date have included Brent Faiyiz, Pinks Sweats, Ant Clemons, and YBN Nahmir.
Right now, though, people are focusing on Human Re Sources for one artist more than any other – RAYE, who recently won a record six BRIT Awards in London, having received a record seven nominations.
The British singer/songwriter signed with Human Re Sources in 2022, after parting ways with her former label, Universal’s Polydor. There is, then, lots to ask Erving about in terms of the growth of independent artists like RAYE –and what that reflects about the wider music business.
On this podcast, we also ask him about his previous life as an artist manager, his personal motivations, and his decision in 2020 to sell Human Re Sources to Sony Music/The Orchard. (Erving has since operated as both the head of Human RE Sources within The Orchard, and as an EVP for Sony Music.)
Read an abridged/edited version of the Q&A below, or listen to the podcast online…
We’ve just seen RAYE break all-time records at the BRIT Awards in the UK, winning six awards. What significance can we put on the fact that an independent artist has dominated a traditionally pop music biz ceremony in that way?
We joke that if she had been signed to a frontline label, people
out there would have said it was rigged – that somehow the label paid for it!
The way in which RAYE won at the BRITs is really a testament to who she is as an artist, and as a person. She’s persevered, kept her head down, done the work and stood for what she believes in from an artistic perspective.
“THERE’S STILL A LOT OF DISCOVERY HAPPENING AROUND RAYE; WE HAVE SOME OTHER DOMINOES THAT WE NEED TO KNOCK DOWN.”
We all know RAYE ended up frustrated with her previous label relationship, primarily because, from what I can tell, there were some doubts about her ability to be an ‘album artist’ – which seems silly in retrospect. But I also know that label fairly well, and the part of the story that’s not often told is that they’ve had great success with ‘self-contained’ artists – Sam Fender being an excellent example. There’s no doubt that for RAYE, being an independent artist was the better route. Why do you think the creative chemistry, which didn’t work in her label situation, works with Human Re Sources?
I can’t really speak to a previous label situation – obviously I wasn’t involved. What I will say in fairness
is any music executive who’s been in the business for some time has missed some things, right? I’ve missed a lot of stuff!
All I can speak to is, when I heard the album, when RAYE played it for me. And you speak [about] chemistry; it didn’t require chemistry to make the album, because it was already done. I was [just] able to hear it in the same way that RAYE heard it. That in itself made us aligned in terms of how we felt about the body of work that she had created.
There’s still a lot of discovery happening around RAYE right now; we still have some other dominoes that we need to knock down, in other territories and whatnot. But the folks that are discovering this album are hearing it the way that I did. She performed at the O2 Arena [in London] the other week, with 18,000 people singing every word to songs that are supposed to be ‘album cuts’. That’s a true testament that people have bought into RAYE holistically –it’s not about any particular single or song. It’s really about her as an artist.
We’ve now seen an independent artist dominate the BRITs, just as we’ve seen independent artists dominate mainstream awards events in Latin America, Scandinavia, and elsewhere. That, with the exception of maybe Chance The Rapper, hasn’t yet been the story in the US. Do you think that story will eventually come to the US – an independent artist dominating the Grammys?
RAYE, pictured at the 2024 BRIT Awards
I’ve been pretty vocal that I feel like the Grammys got it wrong [in 2024] as it pertains to RAYE. She is not the first artist, nor is she going to be the last artist, that they’ll get it wrong with.
I’ve had some spirited debates with some folks in and around the Grammys. One of my takeaways was the work that we have to do in making sure that everyone – myself and everyone around me – who’s eligible to vote is weighing in, taking all of the necessary steps to have a voice.
[Subsequent to this article being published, RAYE was nominated for three Grammys in 2025, including Best New Artist.]
Spotify recently announced that $4.5 billion of the $9 billion they paid music rightsholders in 2023 was generated by the independent sector. What does this tell us about the industry and the way that it’s moving?
I think $4 billion of that could have gone to Bad Bunny [laughs]!
I think it’s a testament to this: Five years ago, when I launched Human Re Sources, I was listening to the young artists, young executives, young managers, who were talking about independence. And I was recognizing a shift in how these artists and executives were looking at independence and ownership.
I grew up in an era where all we wanted to do was get a record deal. It felt like when we got an artist signed to a major label, we had a partner that was going to pay for everything and make magic with these artists.
Someone asked me recently what’s different from when I came up in the game versus now. The access that these artists have to speak directly to the consumers is very real. The beauty around what’s happening in the music business now is that it’s not old guys like myself that are gatekeeping – folks on Reels and
“THE ACCESS THAT ARTISTS HAVE TO SPEAK DIRECTLY TO CONSUMERS IS VERY REAL. FOLKS ON REELS, TIKTOK, AND YOUTUBE TELL US WHAT THE HITS ARE.”
TikTok and YouTube are telling us what the hits are, what they’re excited about. [Spotify’s] numbers are just reflective of where the community is at and where, and the fact that there is the ability to have success as an artist independently in this new music business model.
What were some of the things that were going through your mind when you sold Human Re Sources to Sony Music – and went inside the company at The Orchard – in 2020? I believe you’d only recently just reunited with Troy Carter.
I want to be clear about one thing first: It’s not possible for me to ‘reunite’ with Troy, because we’re never not together. We’ve been in each other’s pockets, in each other’s hearts; that has and will never change.
There were two individuals, initially, that made me comfortable with being at Sony and at The Orchard: Rob Stringer and Brad Navin.
Both of them are very forwardthinking in terms of where the music business is going. But more importantly, they both made me feel very comfortable in that I would be able to develop real artists – not rushing a report card, not having to look over my shoulder every two seconds, not having to do something that compromises who [Human Re
Sources] want to be as a company to make a couple of dollars and hit some numbers. Both Rob and Brad supported me in taking my time to really develop artists in the right way. I don’t think you get that everywhere, really putting the artists first. They’ve both also done an amazing job of leaving me alone at times... and giving me teaching moments when I need it. We patted each other on the back and shared a few cocktails at the BRITs. But now it’s back to work. For RAYE, it’s Saturday Night Live, Met Gala, Coachella... and it’s about making some more hit records.
A philosophical question: what personally drives you?
I’ve been blessed to be surrounded by amazing people that had a very high level of success, both from a business perspective, but also from a personal and real-life perspective. So I don’t have to look very far for motivation.
I look at what Troy [Carter]’s building with Venice; I look at my friend Shawn Gee that’s over at Live Nation and what he’s building; I look at my friend Ryan [Press] and what he’s doing at Warner on the publishing side; my friend Sterling [Simms] at Columbia, and what he’s doing on the A&R side. Like, my friends are crushing it. Every time I feel like I’m accomplishing something, they do something else amazing. And I’m like, ‘Shit, I gotta get back to work!’
And then, I have kids. So it’s about trying to be something and someone that they can be proud of. Between my family, my mother and father, and my friendship group, I’m surrounded by people who motivate me on a daily basis.
The original version of this interview appeared on MBW in March 2024.
Milana Rabkin Lewis:
‘When artists say they want to be independent, what they really mean is they want to be autonomous.’
On the Music Business Worldwide podcast, MBW founder Tim Ingham was joined by Milana Rabkin Lewis, the founder and CEO of Los Angelesbased Stem, a distribution and services company.
Stem has created a flurry of headlines in the music biz trade press. Never more so than in the summer of 2023, when it announced it had secured a $250 million credit agreement with Victory Park Capital – a deal which transformed the size and scope of artist advances that Stem can offer. For a company that has grown used to seeing some of its biggest independent artists jump to major label deals, that $250 million raise was a game changer for Stem and Rabkin Lewis.
Long-term listeners to MBW’s podcasts may remember that this wasn’t Rabkin Lewis’ first time speaking to us. She last appeared in 2020, just at the tip of the pandemic, and she volunteered a number of predictions about the music businesses, many of which have already come true, or at least partly come true.
In the below interview, Milana and Tim discuss – with some agreement, but not always –several crucial recent topics in the music business, from TikTok vs. Universal Music Group to artistcentric streaming royalties to artificial intelligence, and of course Stem – aka: why Milana truly believes she is building a music company fit for the future.
Read an abridged/edited version of the Q&A below, or listen to the podcast online...
What are the most interesting things going on with Stem?
A number of years ago, we became more curated as a platform. So when we sign a client at this stage, it’s because someone internally has a point of view. And when you have someone on a team [who’s] incredibly passionate or has a point of view, or is excited about an artist, the way that they move with that artist is entirely different. That’s what makes it exciting to watch my team engage with artists today. We’ve had a number of great successes. It’s everything [including] identifying artists that are baby acts [who have] never released music, that we get to put up for the first time and break into the world. We’ve had a lot of successes over the years with artists like that, dating back to the early days of Giveon and Omar Apollo, to, more recently, artists like Veeze. A number of them end up signing with the majors and that’s okay, but it’s still exciting to be the home that launches them. Even earlier on, [Stem signed] people like Bad Bunny. And we were working with Big Loud when they first launched Morgan Wallen. So it’s been fun to see that trajectory.
Then there’s a lot of artists who had been with a major label and then decided to become independent, and we get to be part of their strategy in becoming independent. To me, it’s feeling like we’re making impossible things possible. And that’s a mantra that I live by.
When the majors come in to sign your artists, are you seeing any changes to the deals they’re offering?
I’ll say this: I don’t know if anyone actually values being independent. I know that’s pretty crazy for someone like me to say, and the reason I say it is because I think there’s a big difference
between independence and autonomy. And I think people conflate the two.
I think when artists say they want to be independent, what they really mean is they want to be autonomous, and at different stages of their careers, the value in that is going to change. If you’re an emerging artist – there’s very few of them who actually truly want to do it independently, because what they really want is access to capital investment, and a team that really cares about them, to be able to get them off the ground. And I think they’re
“ARTISTS WANT INVESTMENT, BUT THEY ARE NOT WILLING TO SIGN EVERYTHING AWAY FOREVER. THE MAJOR LABELS REALIZE THAT AND ARE ADAPTING.”
willing to trade ownership [to] a certain extent in order to get that.
Now what I think is changing is they’re not willing to sign everything away forever. And I think that the major labels are realizing that and adapting. But [artists are] willing to give the rights away to [early] projects for a very long time [to labels], because it warrants a bigger advance and it warrants a bigger investment.
What does that mean for a company like Stem and the opportunities that lie ahead? It means we have to be more aggressive. We have to be able to underwrite our capabilities or accept the fact that those types of artists who are just shopping for the largest check size are not the right fit for us. That’s okay. The
good news is that there’s enough out there.
What’s interesting now is that the major labels are also becoming more diversified in the type of deals that they’re structuring. And I think it’s conflating what people’s perception of the independent market is. It’s really hard to size it, because there’s a lot of these bigger players that are providing market share to the major record label companies, and they’re taking very low fees for being able to retain those clients, and attract them, and they’re making that trade because they know that maybe they’re trading near-term revenue for long term enterprise value. I think it’s a very smart trade and it makes a lot of sense.
Let’s talk about the artist-centric royalty payment model that we’ve seen Deezer and Spotify implement. My guess is that this model is probably a net positive for Stem, because you do have big artists you work with, ‘professional or professionally aspiring artists’, as Spotify calls them. But at the same time, there’s this debate over the kind of arguably arbitrary categorization of an artist not being worthy of monetization, or not being worthy of being on a platform. What’s your perspective?
I just had a two-hour conversation about this with an artist of ours who had become friends with [DJ and producer] Justin Blau, who’s also a tech founder, and I want to give you his perspective.
But before I share what we talked about, I think [artistcentric] is net positive. The reason why we chose to be curated [as a distributor] is because we realized that everyone else is delivering a s***-ton of content every single week and [you want to] advocate for your artists.
I have so many friends who are [DSP] editors. They come to my
house, and sometimes we’ll work together and I’ll watch how they edit and it’s crazy to me – there’s a dashboard and they’re looking through all of the releases and they’re organized alphabetically. So if you’re an artist with a name that’s [further down the list] they’re never getting to your name.
It’s wildly inefficient because of how much volume there is. Versus when we deliver stuff at Stem and they look at what we’ve delivered. It’s a short list, so when we deliver something, it stands out. And I think [what] we’re
going to start seeing is [that] there’s going to be different types of – call it “music storefronts” that are going to emerge, that are going to be homes for more sounds, and – call it “longer-tail content.” And I think what would be great is if the Apples and the Spotifys and the Deezers and TIDALs of the world were reserved for more human artists.
Then the question becomes about AI music, which I don’t want to go too far into, because I don’t have that much of a formed opinion around it. But it does bring the question which Justin
[Blau] asked me, which is ‘Why should music be valued? Why should music be worth anything? Why should people pay for music?’
And my instant reaction to that was ‘Of course they have to pay for it. It’s valuable. There’s cultural value to it.’ And he’s like, ‘But why is it worth paying someone’s time? Is it only worth something because someone’s spent time doing it? So what happens if you diminish that time to zero?’
I would say that you’re paying for the mental and emotional
Big Loud, home to Morgan Wallen (pictured), was distributed by Stem before inking a deal with Republic Records in 2024
“I’M VERY MUCH IN FAVOR OF THE ARTIST-CENTRIC MODEL. I’M IN FAVOR OF ASSIGNING DIFFERENT VALUES TO DIFFERENT TYPES OF MUSIC.”
Sheeran. He’s been practicing his craft and he performs now with the band, which is like the cutest thing in the world.
But I had this conversation with him where I invited him to Coachella and he’s like, ‘I don’t really want to go.’ And I was like, ‘Why?’ and he says ‘I don’t really want to see bands perform.’ So I left it at that. I just thought he was moody.
eventually. I just don’t believe that the ability to create your own music at home negates people standing in a stadium or an arena watching Adele with their hearts racing.
I hope you’re right. That would be devastating to me, that version of the future.
benefits, you’re paying for the clarity that music can bring to you, you’re paying to be moved. Or if it does something more pedestrian, like shuts out noise and helps you focus, then there is definitely a value in that. I guess you end up with the argument that not all music is valued the same. There’s a cost to maintaining that amount of music, to managing it, to curating it, to having to invent ways to be able to surface editorially appropriate music… And that’s expensive. That takes up a lot of the cost on the side of the DSPs to manage that, which takes things out of the profit margin, which is ultimately one of the reasons why they need to be able to take a higher cut of the songs that are on that platform. That’s the cost of providing the platform, and I think that if you clean that up, there’s better economics for everyone.
So I’m very much in favor of the artist-centric model. I’m very much in favor of separating different types of music and assigning a different value for the type of music depending on what its value is.
I recently had one of the most insane conversations with a 10-year-old, that terrified me. My nephew’s 10, he’s an aspiring musician. He is a cute little redhead who’s in the school rock band, who looks like a mini Ed
And then a couple months later I invited him to a very special show that Ed Sheeran and John Mayer did together, and I was like, ‘You gotta go see John. These guys are like the best living guitarists today.’ And he’s like, ‘I don’t care. I don’t want to see the artists perform their music. I want to perform the music the way that I believe it should be performed.’
And there’s a theory out there among the tech community, too, that I’ve heard, which is that in the future, people will not care to listen to music from people they do not know. It’ll become hyperlocal again.
I’m not sure I buy it. Spotify recently pinched an analogy of mine, which is about football players. There are millions of people who play football, but only a tiny fraction of them are even borderline professional level, and then of course an even smaller share are the Messis and Ronaldos of the world. Of course, as a kid, you want to participate in football, but eventually, you’re going to go to a stadium to see the best of the best. And even being in the audience, you are participating. Being part of the crowd, watching the best of the best, that is participation. And you don’t fold your arms and say ‘I’m not interested unless I get to run out and play with them.’ I don’t think that’s just a generational difference. I feel like that’s a realization that’s going to have to arrive,
Joshua Harris was a very early tech entrepreneur in the early 90s, who created the first company that live-streamed video on the internet. And he pretty much predicted the influencer culture today, back in the ‘90s.
I had a conversation with him in 2011, and he said to me ‘In the future kids are going to broadcast themselves brushing their teeth and it’ll be sponsored by Colgate. And people are going to be watching other people pick out outfits, get dressed and they will be paid for that. And the clothes will be free… And it’s going to take away people’s attention spans from wanting to see television and pay for movies and go to theaters and people are going to become more isolated and disconnected from each other.’ And I was like, ‘You’re crazy. That’s never gonna happen.’
At the end of his prediction, did he say ‘And then the Horsemen will come and then the skies will go black’? I have to maintain a belief that the emotional power of music will prevail.
I pray you’re right and I hope you’re right. But… if you’re building for the future of something, which is what I think my job is – to build for the future – [then] I have to continually ask myself, ‘But what if this is true? What needs to happen in order for that to be true? And what are the things that I could personally do to preserve the integrity of the industry that I value?
The original version of this interview appeared on MBW in April 2024.
Emily Stephenson:
‘Majors and independents have the same end goal. Being aligned is crucial.’
Emily Stephenson was named President of Publishing at Downtown Music in 2023 after an 11-year tenure at the company that’s seen her move through the ranks.
She took on the leadership title after a transitional time at the company that saw it pivot from a more traditional publishing approach to focusing on offering services and encouraging clients to own their rights (under the leadership of former Downtown
Global President, Mike Smith).
Since then, Stephenson has overseen bringing together Songtrust and Downtown Music Publishing under one management, alongside a raft of significant deals.
Those deals include an admin services agreement with Spirit Music Group (whose catalog includes hits recorded by The Who, John Legend, Tim McGraw, Camilla Cabello, Jay-Z and Madonna), plus deals with
Grammy-winning singer/ songwriter Colbie Caillat, Amsterdam-based independent Next Era Music Publishing and South Asian company Outer Voice.
After growing up in Nashville, Stephenson had a solid understanding that you could make a living working in music and the songs business is what she connected with most.
Upon graduating with a degree in communications, and doing
the rounds in internships, she set her sights on New York.
Stephenson joined Downtown in 2012 in a very intentional move that started by emailing the Founder and Chairman of Downtown Music Holdings, Justin Kalifowitz.
Kalifowitz kindly responded to her email, they met for coffee, and when a job became available, he gave Stephenson a call.
“We were quite small at the time so it was a great opportunity for me to get in with a company that was going to be growing quickly, where I could get my hands in a lot of different areas of the business and understand different processes,” Stephenson remembers.
After her first son was born, Stephenson moved back to Nashville in 2018 to be closer to family, which is where she’s based today.
Here, we chat to her about her career to date, the music publishing business at large, TikTok, AI, and much more besides...
What are the biggest lessons that you’ve learned across your career?
I would not be where I am in my career today if I had not found work/life balance and if I had not been in a company that supported that. I think it’s important to remember that balance is not always 50/50. There are going to be times when life is heavier and there are going to be times when work gets heavier. Finding ways to make space for both and setting boundaries for yourself is really important.
When I look back on my career, if you told me I would have been President in 2024, I would never have believed you. But I look back and know that when I was early in my career, I took the time to invest in what I was doing: to work really hard, to soak up as much as I could, to respond to
emails quickly, show up on time, be reliable and take notes. All those little things built a foundation that allowed me to grow quickly. Setting yourself up for success later on, whatever that looks like for you, has been another important learning.
What are some of the ways that you establish work/life balance now?
You have to do it for yourself. For me, I start [the work day] a little bit earlier… well, earlier than the rest of the Nashville music industry, which is not saying a
You’ve been President at Downtown Music Publishing since 2023. Which qualities make a good leader?
The qualities in the leadership I’ve seen that I’ve responded well to are transparency, communication and vision. Transparency can also be vulnerability. I had a meeting yesterday with a colleague, our knowledge bases are very different, we’re at different places in our career, but I really value that person’s opinion. So I wanted to ask a bunch of questions and get a bunch of feedback.
“THERE’S AN ELEMENT OF BOLDNESS THAT’S REQUIRED, TO NOT SHY AWAY FROM HARD AND BIG DECISIONS.”
tonne, but I start early. And when I am done, when I’m with my kids for the rest of the day, my phone is away, laptop closed, and I am all theirs until they go to bed. If I need to check back in after bed and I don’t have plans, I have no problem getting back on and cranking out a bunch of emails or preparing for the next day. For me, that works. I would never expect our team to log on after their kids are done — in theory, you should be able to do your job in the 40 hours a week that’s allotted for it.
It’s about figuring out what is and isn’t important for you. I’m one of those moms who does not want to miss a school performance or a class Valentine’s Day party. If that’s a priority for me, barring something else that’s massively urgent at the company, I will block that time off in my calendar and ensure I’m there. By setting boundaries like that, it keeps me happy at work. When I’m here, I’m 100% Downtown, I’m not distracted. And vice versa when I’m with my family.
It’s also about engagement. Not just ‘We’re going to share the numbers with you because we’re so transparent’, but truly being like, ‘This is where we’re at, this is the work that you’re doing and this is what it’s leading to’. I think that’s really important. There’s also an element of boldness and confidence that’s required to not shy away from hard and big decisions and from going for those really big deals that you feel you may or may not even get a meeting for. We’ve been bold and brave in what we’ve gone after and that’s been really beneficial for us.
What’s the best piece of careerrelated advice you’ve ever been given?
It’s about taking time to make the right decisions. There are going to be times when you feel like you have to make a decision right away – and maybe you do. But in the instances where you have a little space or can push to make sure you have all the right data and information, be extremely thoughtful about it.
Going back to what I was talking about earlier, it’s also about investing in yourself early in your career and seeing the time that you’re putting in as building blocks of the foundation that the rest of your career is going to be set upon.
From where you’re sitting, what is the most exciting development happening in today’s music business?
I love seeing independents making a lot of waves. The majors have their place in this industry and they do what they do really well, but more so than ever, independent companies, artists and writers have a lot more ability to impact and succeed than they ever have.
Is there anything you’d like to see change that would further strengthen the position of independent companies and artists moving forward?
A lot of it’s already happening. Something that’s top of mind here in Nashville is, for so long you had to be with a major to get radio play and you had to get radio play to be successful. That formula is changing really quickly.
One thing that is a huge conversation point is digital licensing and how majors license differently, or are approached with different types of deals by the DSPs than some companies that might be just a publishing company or just a record label. Fair and equitable licensing is really important. Both majors and independents all have the same end goal so being aligned on how we get there and garnering the same respect from the different services is crucial to that.
TikTok is a big player in that conversation and Downtown expressed support for UMG/ UMPG pulling its catalog from the service. How might your licensing deal with TikTok evolve
“I LOVE SEEING INDEPENDENTS MAKING A LOT OF WAVES. THEY HAVE MORE ABILITY TO IMPACT AND SUCCEED THAN THEY EVER HAVE.”
in future?
It was really important for us to show public support for songwriters and artists in relation to what UMPG and UMG were doing. That’s been our mantra from day one, regardless of what the platform or service or rights type is.
As far as TikTok goes, we have the publishing company, but we also have a large bulk of rights and different rights types that we license for between FUGA, CD Baby and the various companies that we have under the umbrella.
So because of the size of Downtown, we are able to negotiate fair deals for our clients and we’ll continue to use every effort to champion the rights of our clients. We will see what that looks like with TikTok but that’s where we are right now.
Would you like to see anything different from the platform moving forward?
We’re still trying to figure out what TikTok’s place is in the music industry: is it a consumption platform or is it an exposure platform? We did this in the early days with YouTube too and the argument can be made for radio: is this a discovery tool? Is it a consumption tool?
So if you’re asking what I would like to see change about TikTok, I would just say I would like to see songwriters and artists
compensated fairly for how users are using the platform.
AI has been another big talking point in the music industry recently. What are your thoughts on the potential of the tech and the dangers of it? How are you dealing with it at Downtown? There’s two sides of AI: there’s the side that we have benefited from greatly by using it for things like trust, safety, data analytics and income tracking. We are not afraid to lean into technology at Downtown — part of one of our core tenets is to use technology to collect as much money as possible for a songwriter.
The side of AI that is about creating music and using lyrics that our writers have written to create a new song, that’s scary. The biggest challenge will be for publishers to figure out how and if to license their catalog to AI platforms.
It’s so new that a lot of media or tech companies are trying to loop some of that into licensing structures that already exist and that just doesn’t work. As far as Downtown goes, we are really involved in the conversation both here in the US and in Europe, particularly.
How do you see the role of a publisher evolving in the future?
I think we’re seeing it. People are responding really well to Downtown’s transition to a services-based company, which, for us, means that we are focused on doing publishing administration deals and not necessarily co-pub and traditional publishing deals. People want to maintain and own their rights. There’s a lot of different ways that music is being used and not necessarily generating as much revenue as it used to. It used to be that someone bought a CD and you got paid for that. Now, it’s micro pennies. So people maintaining their own rights is
really important.
With that comes a renowned focus for publishers and for us at Downtown in ensuring that we’re collecting royalties in the most efficient and organized way possible and using technology to ensure that we’re collecting every single penny our writers are owed. That’s hard because there’s a lot of different third parties involved in helping us do that, but we’re using every best effort.
We’re focused on using technology, we’re focused on our administration efforts, we’re focused on efficiency, but we’re also not losing sight of the creative side. That’s something that’s required to balance a successful music publishing company: what is your sync team doing and how are they rethinking the catalog? How are they putting music in really creative spots, and looking for new clients to sign that are garnering a lot of success and prioritizing maintaining their own rights? There are a lot of different priorities here at Downtown.
What would you change about
the music industry and why?
Data integrity is a really important thing to have captured right now: trust and safety. There’s a lot of things that we need to focus on and spend time figuring out just to ensure that the right people are getting paid the right money.
If you could go back to the beginning of your career and tell yourself one thing, what would it be?
If I look back at the beginning of my career, I’m actually really proud of how I approached it. I’m proud of how hard I worked. But I would have never thought that I would be where I am today. So I would just say, ‘Don’t underestimate how far you can go and how successful you can be’.
I was just excited to be working in the music industry and I was going to do everything I could to make sure I did a good job. I truly am proud when I think back on what I was doing and I wish the same for anyone entering the music industry: that they’re looking ahead, setting goals and finding people who they can
follow and learn from early on so they too can find that success.
How about future plans and ambitions? What are you working on for the next year and beyond?
We’ve hit a really healthy stride here at Downtown and, culturally, we’re in a really good spot. People are happy, the numbers are good, the roster is happy, growing and creative and making a tonne of amazing music. I’m really excited to take the momentum that we have right now and see where it takes us.
We have a lot of visions, goals and objectives that we were really thoughtful about. Using the momentum that we have right now to follow through with those is going to be really fun. Personally, I just want to keep working hard, enjoying watching my kids grow up, and maintaining the balance between having a really fun job and an even better family.
The original version of this interview appeared on MBW in March 2024.
Colbie Callat
Milk & Honey now represents Travis Kelce and 80 other sports stars – but its world still ‘revolves around the songwriter’
Having turned 10 in 2023 and now fast approaching 50 employees, Los Angeles-based Milk & Honey recently pulled off its biggest deal yet.
The company – best known for its representation of music songwriters, producers, and artists – has confirmed its acquisition of VMG Sports.
The buyout brings 15 NFL athletes onto Milk & Honey’s books, including one you’ve
probably heard of, wherever you live: Travis Kelce.
That’s a global celebrity right there who (obvious romantic interest aside) has nothing to do with the music business.
So what’s going on at M&H?
The VMG deal builds on Milk & Honey’s existing sports talent agency business, launched in 2021, which M&H founder/CEO, Lucas Keller, has been quietly building with an executive team
of 20 dedicated employees.
With that, the firm now represents over 80 athletes in total – nearly the same volume as its music roster.
According to Keller, the VMG move crystallizes his company’s growing stature in the big-money world of sports entertainment.
Yet the “backbone” of Milk & Honey’s global operation, he says, remains the same: music and, more specifically, songwriters.
Milk & Honey’s Lucas Keller (left) and Nic Warner
“Songwriters are as big a priority for us as ever,” says Keller, speaking to MBW following the VMG announcement. “If anything, they are an even bigger focus for us. At 10 years we continue to dig deeper and deeper into music.”
Adds Keller: “I think some folks look at the stature of the sports world and wonder if we’d abandon music, but it’s anything but that. We just realized that we can offer the same great
advocacy, personal service, and guidance to athletes that we can to music talent.
“As we grow our stature across the world of entertainment, our influence and ability to advocate on behalf of songwriters – the leverage we can use on their behalf – only increases.”
Milk & Honey launched in 2014 with one client – Keller’s friend and business partner, who became kind of a godfather to
the M&H roster – David Hodges, then best known as a member of the band Evanescence.
Hodges has since gone on to create songs with/for superstars, including Ed Sheeran, Carrie Underwood, and more, with his work selling over 150 million records.
Meanwhile, Milk & Honey’s roster in music has mushroomed.
Run a finger down the Billboard Hot 100 in any given week and you’ll quickly find a song penned or produced by a Milk & Honey songwriter, from Hodges to Oak Felder, Stuart Price, J. White Did It, Jamie Hartman, Andres Torres & Mauricio Rengifo, Jenna Andrews, and more.
In addition, over the past eight years, the company has quietly built its artist representation business – led by Dave Frank – with an emphasis on DJs/dance acts.
The 30-plus artists repped by Milk & Honey today include acts such as Oliver Heldens, Benny Benassi, Massano, Chris Avantgarde, HI-LO, Gioli & Assia, Wuki, KAS:ST, Slushii and recent signing Maya Jane Coles.
The company’s artist roster cumulatively played over 1,500 shows in 2024, including over 50 in Ibiza in the summer.
Joel Corry, who boasts a number of international hit singles – including UK No.1 Head & Heart with MNEK – recently signed to Milk & Honey via the company’s London-based office, run by Ant Hippsley. (Corry is managed by Dave Frank alongside London-based George Corton.)
Other British signings at Milk & Honey include multi-Grammy award winner Stuart Price, plus Finn Keane, Tom Mann, and The Elements.
“Joel marks our commitment and flag in the ground to represent great UK artists – and there will be more,” comments Frank.
Credit: Blake Young
When Keller started Milk & Honey, he was glad to hang up his past life managing rock acts – switching it for an experience he refers to as a “higher-octane version of touring and artist management” via the dance space.
Keller adds “When we started our electronic division, we had a thesis of cross-pollinating our great songwriter roster with artist talent.
“DJs are touring producers and so the electronic dance artists we manage get to ‘jump the line’ on access to the best songs from our writers. For years, we’ve been putting a lot of hit songs into the [DJ/dance] community and will continue to... but Milk & Honey artist clients get priority!”
Keller is passionate about A&R and expects talent management companies like Milk & Honey to play an increasing role in the creation of hits in the years ahead.
“We have great relationships with the major labels, but as they contract in size and become more data-driven, great A&R is going to have to happen outside of that system,” he says.
“This is why we’ve invested in a 16-person, in-house creative A&R team inside our ‘management’ company – with a fully-staffed administration department that tracks and chases every deal we do.”
He adds: “We’re particularly seeing a drive at the [majors] to centralize A&R admin across labels right now.
“It might be economically sensible for them but it will make each of those labels ‘spokes on the corporate wheel’ even more than they are now.
“We predict that will create a bottleneck for talent and [access to] producers. Companies like ours will have to step in and take up the slack.”
Milk & Honey’s songwriterproducer roster has in recent years co-created global smashes
like Dua Lipa’s Levitating, BTS’ Butter, Luis Fonsi & Daddy Yankee’s Despacito, James Arthur’s Say You Won’t Let Go, and more – totaling what the company boasts as north of a billion equivalent album sales.
With five offices – Los Angeles, London, New York, Nashville, and Dallas – and employees in 15 states in the US, Keller claims that “no other music management company has [Milk & Honey’s] footprint and on-the-ground access in multiple key markets”.
He adds: “We export more songs to the international marketplace than any other songwriter producer management company.”
Are there any common threads between representing songwriters, artists, and athletes?
Keller says yes.
“It’s quite simple: Our job is to
raise all of our client’s brand value and help them tell their stories to the world.”
In addition to its talent representation business, Milk & Honey has been a serious player in the music catalog space over the past few years – both by selling catalogs for its own clients, and as a third-party broker in the middle of deals.
Keller estimates that M&H’s brokerage business has overseen over $250 million in catalog transactions since 2020.
“We have become one of the industry’s foremost experts for pop songwriters selling in that $2 million to $40 million range of deal,” says Keller. “It’s a very regular business for us, and we believe we’re one of the best out there at doing it.
“Also, we know our lane: we leave the nine-figure ‘iconics’
M+H’s roster has co-created smashes for the likes of Post Malone (pictured)
deals to the investment bankers and entertainment lawyers, but we can really help active current pop songwriters who are selling.”
The main focus for Milk & Honey, though, remains getting songwriters and producers onto hits – and then getting them paid.
With that in mind, we ask Keller about a hot-button topic right now: Spotify’s plan to recategorize its current Premium subscriptions as ‘bundles’ – i.e. music plus audiobooks bundles.
Via this recategorization, Daniel Ek’s company is able to pay out a lower mechanical royalty rate in the US for each of these subs, thanks to a 2022 agreement with publishers.
Says Keller: “Spotify may have a good point about bundles, and they’d also say their margins are too thin. Lest we forget that the major labels were in business
with Spotify from the beginning, and I think there’s good reason to blame them [for this situation] as well.
“I think they should all get in a room and figure it out, but the ultimate result should not be to take from songwriters.”
Adds Keller: “Songwriters are tired of being lied to. It’s bullshit.”
Speaking more generally about the economic situation for writer/ producers he represents, Keller says: “It’s a changing world right now, where the writing is on the wall for FM radio.
“As everyone knows, there is a chasm between what a No.1 radio song was worth for a songwriter or producer versus a billionstream record on Spotify.”
He adds: “You can’t just sit back and complain about that fact. It’s our job as songwriter and producer managers to be
progressive about how to stack out businesses for producers and writers so that they aren’t just reliant on publishing money from streaming.
“It’s deeply important to Milk & Honey that being a songwriter is still a job in the next decade.”
Nic Warner, Keller’s business partner and General Manager of Milk & Honey, gets the final word: “The next 10 years managing songwriters is actually the most important. There will be more change in how writers get paid and it’s going to get difficult; the next 10 years won’t be like the last 50 years. Serious songwriters and producers will need the most experienced managers they can find.”
The original version of this interview appeared on MBW in April 2024.
Milk & Honey-managed Finn Keane won Songwriter Of The Year at MBW’s Music Business UK Awards in November 2024
Credit:
Chris Frazer-Smith
Donna Caseine: ‘You can’t advocate for something if you don’t believe in it.’
Donna Caseine, who is today EVP and Global Creative Director at Reservoir, was destined to work in music from an early age.
While growing up in Los Angeles, her mom worked at Disney and her dad ran a recording studio, where she’d sit in sessions, watching people record and create.
“I was the kid with the headphones listening to every note, dissecting the music and trying to isolate a vocal, a bass or a drum. I was also the kid reading the liner notes,” she says. “There was no choice for me, there was no, ‘What else am I going to do with my life?’. It was an instant love. It’s always been music.”
Thanks to the early exposure and access, Caseine got a job straight out of high school as an assistant to the assistant of one of her dad’s studio clients. She was tasked with answering the phone by the second ring, which eventually graduated into giving feedback on songs.
That led to an assistant job at what was then MCA Music Publishing, where she started working for one of her mentors, Carol Ware, who was married to the late songwriter Leon Ware (who co-wrote songs for Marvin Gaye, Michael Jackson and Minnie Riperton, amongst others).
It was while working for Ware that Caseine learned the delicate balance between working for a corporation while advocating for the interests of creators.
She explains: “Corporations, at that time, had different agendas. The synergistic agenda was success, but there wasn’t transparency in deals and there were different philosophies in the corporate strategy that aren’t necessarily aligned to a
creative mind.
“Carol would often come and say, ‘I’m so frustrated that this is our strategy in moving forward with this writer’. I got to feel and see how it affects both sides.”
That experience shapes Caseine’s approach to publishing today. “I’m an artist/writer advocate, so I lead from there, but there’s this business of music, and both need to coincide,” she says.
“I often think of the creative team as being the heart of a company and business affairs, the deal team and things like that being the head of the company. You definitely need both to survive.”
“MY APPROACH TO A&R IS, DO I LOVE IT? CAN I WORK WITH THIS PERSON? DO WE HAVE A SHARED VISION AND A PLAN THAT WE CAN WORK ON TOGETHER?”
MCA merged with Polygram to become Universal Music Publishing, where Caseine spent 20 years until she joined Reservoir to open its West Coast office eight years ago.
While at UMPG, Caseine worked with the likes of Prince, Mariah Carey, Alanis Morissette, Ariana Grande and Jill Scott.
She was promoted to her current role at Reservoir in 2020. There, Caseine has been involved in working with the catalogs of Joni Mitchell and Joe Walsh, signing songwriters like
Ali Tamposi and Steph Jones. She was recently instrumental in signing publishing admin deals with Snoop Dogg and Death Row Records.
Discussing the latter, Caseine says: “From the Olympics to The Voice, and all that is in between, Snoop is everywhere and more culturally relevant than ever. In addition, he has new music coming out, which will bring Snoop’s music and artistry front and center again, as well.
“What he and the Death Row team are doing for the legacy of Death Row and moving the brand forward, it’s a really proud moment for me and for Reservoir to be on Team Snoop.”
Here, we chat to her about A&R, lessons learned across her career, developments in the music business, and more besides.
Do you have any habits or rituals that ensure you bring your best self to work?
I’m a runner, so I run five out of seven days a week, and I start my day off with that. It’s a moving meditation. At times, it’s an opportunity to spend time with friends.
It’s oftentimes an opportunity to contemplate a deal, a response to something or work through what to do next. The day can get away from you so I’m really encouraging when people, certainly myself, do something for themselves every day.
What’s your approach to A&R? How do you get the best out of the creatives that you’re working with?
My approach to A&R is, do I love it? Can I work with this person? Do we have a shared vision and a plan that we can work on
Credit: Becky Yee
together to accomplish, along with their other team members?
As I say to my team, just because a writer happens to be available, doesn’t mean they are a Reservoir writer. If I don’t feel something for myself, if I don’t feel something from the team, then it’s not something I can advocate for. You can’t advocate for someone, something, if you don’t believe in it, if you don’t love it.
How do you help songwriters build careers in today’s environment, when it can be difficult to make a living from music?
It’s constantly evolving. You have to go with your ears and your heart. Every successful artist is a new artist once. It’s about being able to communicate opportunities to our writers and talk through the merits of doing that session and spending time developing artists, being part of that story.
Can you pinpoint the biggest lessons that you’ve learned across your career?
Part of it is, ironically, part of my daily ritual of running. I’ve run almost 19 marathons now and my career has been a marathon. It hasn’t been a sprint, success hasn’t happened overnight.
It’s about consistency, having patience and continuing to move forward, especially in music, which is challenging on days when you get No more often than you get Yes. When there may not be the right artist to sing that song, or that writer is a baby writer trying to get to an A-list writer. Maybe you can’t infiltrate that this week, but if you have a plan, maybe you can in six months. It’s about being patient and thinking about a long-term vision.
What’s the best career-related advice that you’ve ever been
“I’VE RUN 19 MARATHONS – AND MY CAREER HAS BEEN A MARATHON, NOT A SPRINT. SUCCESS HASN’T HAPPENED OVERNIGHT.”
given?
The advice that I keep reminding myself of is to have a short-term memory!
You don’t know what someone’s day is like. When you email them and they don’t respond immediately, maybe they can’t. If someone sends a follow-up note, great. I love the follow-up. I love the assertion. Not the aggression, but the assertion and the reminder to pick something back up with someone.
You may not get a deal with someone that you’re passionate about who you desperately want to work with. If I don’t get a deal, I don’t think that writer is less talented because they don’t end up at Reservoir. My thing is, how do I continue to work with that writer?
One of the life lessons that I got early, thankfully, in my career, was being handed a roster and looking for opportunities for the writers that I was working with and the writers that were coming into town.
I kept reaching out to this wonderful woman, a publisher named Judy Stakee, who would always come back and say, ‘How about Julian Bunetta?’ I would say, ‘Great,’ and we’d set up these sessions. Then, Julian finishes his deal and he’s no longer at Warner Chappell. I tried to sign him to Universal and didn’t get the deal,
he decided to go to another company. You know what? I continued to work with him and when he finished that deal, I saw him at a BMI Pop Awards, he came up to me and said, ‘I’m out of my deal. Do you want to talk?’ I ended up getting that deal and he went onto produce many albums and singles for One Direction. That was a lesson for me in being patient. It’s a small industry, learn how to work with people. You never know how it’s going to come around.
What would you say is the most exciting development happening in the music business right now?
The different genres and people coming together.
What I’ve really loved about part of my career story is having an appreciation for writers coming from different territories, whether they’re coming to LA and trying to write with LA writers, or sending writers to Nashville or London. Now, with the DSPs, every week you can listen to a playlist that has this song next to this genre, next to this genre. That’s exciting to me.
Also, look at what different artists have been doing lately in crossing genres. That’s how people are listening to music, because it’s not the radio format of just listening to pop, R&B or country music, you’re listening to a lot of different things together now. One of the many things that I love about music is the endless discovery.
You’ve spoken about how you’d like to see creatives better compensated. Are there any other big picture changes that you’d like to make TO the music business?
I don’t know if it’s a change but more opportunities like this to tell stories. One of the things that has been on my mind is looking
at the success stories of 2024, like Shaboozey and Teddy Swims. Teddy was signed to Warner at the end of 2019 — that’s a long process in belief, identifying talent and working with it, not just finding it and going, ‘Well, that didn’t work for a single so we’re done, you’re dropped’. Sabrina Carpenter just released her fourth album.
Those roles in different places might change. Maybe you’re not at the right place, maybe you sign a deal and you’re like, ‘This is it’, and maybe it’s not it. But hopefully, with talent and people who are believing in you and advocating for you, you can find
your way and find your listener.
If you could go back to the beginning of your career and tell yourself one thing, what would it be?
Be patient. Patience is hard because you’re excited and everyone would prefer things to happen immediately. But be patient, trust yourself and think about things long-term. I’m very proud that I’ve been able to do that. It hasn’t been easy.
How about your future plans and ambitions?
I have big dreams for Reservoir. I believe in what we’re doing,
in the way that we work and support our writers and the way that we come together.
One of the things I say to the team, to myself, to any people who are listening, is that the writers are signed to Reservoir. They’re not signed to Donna Caseine. I firmly believe that someone hopefully remembers who signed them, but people will absolutely remember who did something for them. My strategy, my approach, is to do something to be part of their story.
The original version of this interview appeared on MBW in November 2024.
Caseine now works Joni Mitchell’s catalog, following a 2021 deal that saw Mitchell ink a global publishing pact with Reservoir
Credit:
Marcy Gensic
Denis Ladegaillerie has Believe back in his arms –
and he’s
eyeing a huge acquisition.
Prediction: the recorded music industry is likely to see at least one $1 billion-plus acquisition of a distribution and services player over the next two years.
Surprise: the company behind said acquisition could well be Believe.
That’s according to Believe founder and CEO, Denis Ladegaillerie, speaking exclusively to Music Business Worldwide
Ladegaillerie picked up the phone to MBW following the news that his consortium – which Ladegaillerie jointly owns with EQT and TCV – now owns 95% of Believe via a recent share tender process
Ladegaillerie made clear that, under the ownership of the new consortium, Believe is planning to spend EUR €200 to €300 million per year on acquisitions to grow its global business.
That’s two to three times bigger than the firm’s yearly acquisition budget following its IPO, he said. (Believe has in the past acquired companies like TuneCore in the US, Sentric Music in the UK, Venus Music in India, Nuclear Blast in Germany, and more.)
“We will consider a transformative [acquisition] target in the next 24 months,” said Ladegaillerie, confirming that such a deal would require additional capital to that currently in Believe’s M&A budget.
“You have a lot of mid-level businesses in the market, perhaps more on the publishing side than the recorded music side.”
Noting that Believe was seeking to find the “right strategic fit”,
Ladegaillerie praised several recorded music businesses, including artist services companies and mid-size indies.
He also noted that larger companies with strong music publishing catalogs, including Kobalt and BMG, may be open to transformative partnerships in the months and years ahead.
(Amongst relevant companies recently in the news: US-based Create Music Group recently achieved a $1 billion valuation, while SoundCloud, at a similar valuation, is seeking a financial event that may result in new investors or a sale.)
“Any company may not necessarily be for sale at any point in time, so you have to be pragmatic about these things,” said Ladegaillerie when discussing Believe’s potential “transformative target”.
He added: We would need to feel strongly that any [acquisition] target could bring us growth acceleration and improved positioning in the market.”
Believe is particularly interested in accelerating its business in the US and the UK, said Ladegaillerie.
“The No.1 driver of our acquisition strategy is the world’s Top 10 markets,” he said. “We’re already in the top three players in four of those markets – France, Germany, Japan, and India.
“But we haven’t achieved that in the US and the UK [predominantly due] to us not previously investing at the level required to do so.”
Ironically enough, Ladegaillerie and co. may face competition
to pull off a “transformative” acquisition of an artist services company in the States from Warner Music Group, whose CEO, Robert Kyncl, has indicated that he’s keen to swiftly grow WMG’s presence in the so-called “middle class” artist market.
Kyncl and Warner, of course, came close to tabling a $1.8 billion takeover bid for Believe (rivaling Ladegaillerie’s own consortium-based acquisition plan for the company), but WMG ultimately didn’t form an offer and pulled out of negotiations.
In a wide-ranging discussion abridged into the following Q&A, MBW asked Ladegaillerie about his personal experience of that Warner process.
We also discovered why he thinks an extraordinary amount of growth is coming to large-scale companies that service indie artists, and how Believe – under new ownership – plans to make the most of that opportunity...
Your consortium with TCV and EQT now owns 95% of Believe (technically 94.99%!). What happens now? Will you buy the additional 5% at some point? We are pretty much where we wanted to be. Our objective was to have a new set of shareholders who could grow the business at an accelerated rate. We have started engaging in deeper discussions with larger [acquisition] targets, which we were not in a position to do previously.
Tomorrow, if we need to raise [additional] capital, we are in a position with our base of shareholders to do that in a way that’s easy and efficient.
To answer your second question, the goal in the grand scheme of things is to take the company fully private. We will have dialogue with the market authorities about the best way, and when, to take that step but there is no hurry.
You’re talking about raising funds. That suggests EQT and TCV are strategically aligned with you on heavily investing in tomorrow’s music business.
Absolutely. Our thesis and the main reason we sought new shareholders is that there’s an opportunity to accelerate our profitable growth story through acquisitions in a number of markets.
I’m talking about larger acquisitions than we’ve done recently. We’ve been doing EUR €100 million of bolt-on acquisitions per year. Our target now is to do about two to three times that amount.
What characterizes your acquisition targets right now?
We are aligned with EQT and TCV to supercharge our existing organic growth. We will continue to invest in our organic growth strategy and make acquisitions to grow market share.
The No.1 element of our acquisition strategy today is in the Top 10 markets. We want to become a No.1 player in those markets. We are already the largest player [on local repertoire] in France; the third largest player in Germany; the largest player
in India; the third largest player in Japan. We want to do more. The US, UK, and Japan are all key priorities for us.
At the same time, we will continue making very qualitative, targeted acquisitions across [smaller] markets as you’ve seen recently in Turkey, the Philippines, and elsewhere.
Why is the US of such interest when you’ve traditionally not over-invested there? And what’s your game plan? it’s not easy making a splash in the world’s biggest market!
We believe the US market is starting to transform towards independent [services companies]. We are considering a transformative [acquisition] target in the next 24 months. There are a lot of mid-level businesses in the market, perhaps more on the publishing side than the recorded music side.
Any company may not necessarily be for sale at any point in time, so you have to be pragmatic about these things.
We would need to feel strongly that any [acquisition] target could bring us growth acceleration and improved positioning in the market.
Ladegaillerie, pictured when Believe IPO’d in France, 2021
Credit: Cyril FussienBelieve
That’s big news – and speaks to your ambition. Surely you’re going to need more than €300 million per year?
During the Warner [discussions] someone actually asked me: ‘Hey Denis, rather than Warner buying Believe, do you actually want to buy Warner?!’ [laughs]. That gives you a sense of how big we’re thinking. The €300 million a year figure is for ‘business as usual’ acquisitions. What we’re discussing here is separate. We are not preventing ourselves from looking at any company.
What you see right now is a very dynamic market with a number of mid-level companies in the USD $1 billion to $2 billion range considering their strategic options. I think the probability of something transformational, very significant, at scale happening in the next 12-24 months is extremely high.
We want to operate as a credible, better alternative to major labels in the world’s biggest markets.
Believe and BMG’s annual revenues are at similar levels. Did it twig your attention that, just as all of the Believe/Warner/ takeover noise was happening, Thomas Rabe, CEO of BMG parent Bertelsmann, suggested that BMG might consider a merger with a rival music company?
[Laughs] Yes, of course! As I said, we’re looking for businesses where there is an ability to [combine] and actually accelerate the business.
We have some synergies with BMG but we’re very different in terms of geographical positioning etc. However, it’s one of the interesting discussions that we should have in the market!
Now the dust has settled, what’s your take on what happened with Warner? At one point, their hostile takeover attempt looked
like it might snatch Believe from you – then it was all over. Several positives resulted from that process.
It was a very strong validation of our model and our status as a modern, innovative, wellstructured, technologically strong music company.
I like Robert; I like the Warner team. They’re very smart people and we had good discussions. I personally opposed the hostile [takeover] because I think the opportunity ahead of us is very significant. I didn’t want to get dragged into an integration over the next two years where there’s such a big opportunity ahead of us [as an independent company].
My last takeaway: watching the Warner [negotiations] made me appreciate that Believe has a really smart team who are also very experienced in music.
Believe IPO’d in summer 2021, and it was an exciting time. Now that you’re seemingly on the way to re-privatization, what are your feelings on the experience of going public? What have you learned from it?
It has been generally costly –getting listed means paying a lot of lawyers and bankers! –but it’s also been very positive in terms of elevating the level of requirements by which we operate as a business.
It’s also helped us understand how investors view the music market. Even as a [potentially] private company in the future, we will hold ourselves to the same standards that we have abided by as a public company.
A couple of quick questions on recent industry themes/ headlines: What do you make of the major music companies suing Suno and Udio over alleged copyright infringement? Technology companies are using copyrighted music as raw materials for machine learning
to then create products that have value. If you’re doing that, you must get consent [from the copyright owners] and remunerate them. Defending that is part of our duty towards artists.
Other companies like Google, Meta, etc., are acknowledging that if they use music [for gen AI], they need to compensate artists and collaborate with the industry. For companies that do not have that dialogue and who are stealing content to build their model, these [lawsuits] are the logical outcome.
Going after these companies that are not behaving right, while having constructive dialogue with those taking a reasonable approach; that is the right way to go.
Sony Music boss Rob Stringer recently suggested that in some mature markets, it’s time for Spotify to charge a fee for its free tier, effectively bringing the end to ‘free’ interactive audio streaming. What do you think? I think Rob is asking the right question: When is it time to make that balance between free and paid? It’s an ongoing dialogue with Spotify.
In India, for example, we have spoken to Spotify about the fact that locally you still have a few players with a very generous free tier which is probably preventing the [adoption] of subscriptions in that market.
My take on this has always been the same: Whether it’s Sony or Believe, we are aligned with Spotify in the sense that we all benefit from maximizing the value of people listening to music.
If [changing] the free tier would generate more revenues by encouraging [currently free] users to subscribe, then Spotify, like us, has a vested interest in doing it.
The original version of this interview appeared on MBW in June 2024.
Key Songs In The Life Of…
Walter Jones
It doesn’t take long for Sony Music Publishing’s EVP, Head of A&R, Walter Jones to own up. It doesn’t even take any questioning. Unless ‘Really?!’ counts as questioning.
Reflecting on the normally tortuous selection process behind his seven Key Songs he, initially, says: “You know what, it wasn’t difficult at all.”
Then, after just one word of incredulity on MBW’s part, he continues: “I’m not saying it didn’t take some thought… in fact the really challenging part was… OK, I’m lying, it was difficult! [laughs].”
Jones is currently enjoying his second spell at Sony. First time round, from 2009 to 2016, the company was called Sony ATV. He left there for a five-year stint as Co-Head of A&R at Universal Music Publishing Group, until SMP CEO Jon Platt tempted him back in 2022.
Across that period Jones has signed and worked with artists including H.E.R., Lil Baby, Quay Global, Chi Chi, Lil Yachty, City Girls, Alessia Cara, G-Eazy, A$AP Rocky, Pusha T and many more.
H.E.R. appears in his list, via a track that he believes perfectly illustrates the best that can come from the intersection of A&R and artistry.
The other tracks, he explains, are as much a narrative as a playlist. He says: “In the end, I tried to tell my story. For me, it’s about the songs, of course, but it’s also about the albums, and the artists and the time and the place. It’s about memory.
“I remember where I purchased pretty much all my music over the years, what I was doing when I bought it, how I felt when I was opening it – because all those things were so special to me.
“I feel bad for kids today, because they don’t get those feelings, or that true sense of ownership, of something that they wanted so bad and finally get in their hands.”
Track number one certainly proves the point about his selections being about story as much as song. You suspect it will be nowhere to be found in his 2024 Wrapped compilation – but it’s Jones’ first musical memory and so the perfect, if not predictable, place to start…
1) Andrea McArdle, Tomorrow (1982)
I’m in first grade, this is 85/86. My grandmom was an assistant choir teacher for our school. To join the choir you had to sing The Sun’ll Come Out Tomorrow from Annie.
But, because I didn’t want to join the choir, I would intentionally sing flat every time, not just auditioning for the choir, but whatever we sang every time we went to church as well. Same as when she told me to go and learn the piano: ‘No, I wanna DJ instead’ [laughs].
So, I never made the choir – I just had to go with them wherever they went.
Now when I hear it, it’s a great memory. I can see everyone in their blue pants, white shirt and red vest, the choir’s uniform. I’m still glad I managed to avoid joining though!
2) Guy, Groove Me (1988)
I’m nine or 10 years old now, and I just remember this song playing on the radio, with my older cousins and aunts singing and dancing to it.
It’s a very early Teddy Riley composition and production, so it has a real pedigree. Plus it’s a real up-tempo song, and dancing to songs like this was a big thing back then for the family.
Because music was still a family thing at that time, I’d listen to what they listened to when I was this age. I was sort of on the verge of discovering my own things, but mainly it was whatever was on in the home.
Or sometimes in the car, in the backseat, with WBLS or Kiss FM
playing. There are a lot of memories. That said, even now, if hear this track, it still sounds really good to me.
3) Big Daddy Kane, Smooth Operator (1989)
I still remember buying this – on cassette! There was a record store right on Fifth Avenue in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, called Records and Tapes.
I walked over there, I think it was $3.99 [for It’s A Big Daddy Thing, Kane’s second album from which Smooth Operator was the lead single] and I had just enough. I had a little radiocassette player in my room and I just played that tape, both sides, all day – for days.
Big Daddy Kane was from Brooklyn, and he was just the smoothest guy. He was Big Daddy Kane!
This was definitely around the time I was discovering what was happening. Hip-hop was in an interesting place, but my love for hip-hop wasn’t necessarily triggered by anyone in my family, because there was so much RnB and gospel there.
Hip-hop was something that was happening outside of my house, something I was discovering on my own – or with my friends.
Daddy Kane was also a happy balance, he was a rapper but there was a lot of R&B in there. It was a good bridge.
4 & 5) Wu-Tang Clan, Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) (1992) / Nas, Illmatic (1994)
I remember listening to Wu-Tang Clan, 36 Chambers in the car with a friend of mine. There were so many curse words in the beginning, and in all the skits; I just remember thinking, ‘Wow, I can’t believe Jason’s mom is letting us listen to this!’
That’s how I got a lot of the rap initially, through friends. And Wu-Tang was something different
“I REMEMBER WHERE I PURCHASED PRETTY MUCH ALL MY MUSIC OVER THE YEARS, WHAT I WAS DOING WHEN I BOUGHT IT, HOW I FELT WHEN I WAS OPENING IT.”
again from Big Daddy Kane. They were different from everyone. And with Nas, I’ll never forget this day. I was going to a basketball game with my good friend JJ. We both had Walkmans at the time, but on this particular day he’s sharing his earphones with me, because he has Illmatic and I don’t. I knew straight away, I have to get this.
I went to Records and Tapes, got home, pressed play and my God, it was like a movie. It was so descriptive. I could see everything, I could smell it! And I automatically put myself in every scene.
Everything was familiar, in terms of where I was raised. It was a very real thing to us – and that whole record is very special. It still is. It’s a landmark release and I fell in love with it from top to bottom. And sorry, in both cases, I have to have the whole album, because they are both very complete pieces of work. Like I say, they’re almost movies to me, they hang together.
6) Montel Williams, This Is How We Do It (1995)
So this is 2003/4. I’ve graduated from college and I’m on my journey, driven by my love of music, finding my way as a young adult.
I get an opportunity to go out and road manage and DJ for Montel Jordan. He had this massive hit, This Is How We Do It,
which came out maybe 10 or so years before I was with him.
But because it was such a hit, this song gave me the opportunity to travel the world with him. It showed me the power of a song, what a song can mean to people, how far it can take you and how it can have almost a life of its own. I had to play it night after night after night – that was non-negotiable!
He had already been touring for years off the back of this, and here I am, this 21-year-old kid getting to tour the world with him, because of hit records that he had written.
I honestly don’t know when I would have got out of the country for the first time if it hadn’t been for Montel and this song.
I learned so much from his manager at the time – she still is his manager, his wife, Kristin Jordan. They gave me these rules to follow and I did exactly what they asked; I didn’t want to mess up.
I was also a younger guy
leading grown men, telling them what we expected and what we needed. It’s so funny now when I look back on it, but I got so much out of it.
I think the biggest thing was people management and communication, how to speak to people in order to get them to do what needs to be done.
And even though I must have played it and heard it over a thousand times, I still love that song!
7) H.E.R., Damage (2021)
I executive-produced the three or four projects that H.E.R. did. This song is on her debut album, Back of My Mind.
I remember when we did this session, I heard this loop playing and I called H.E.R. and another writer, Tiara Thomas, into the studio to listen to it and write to it, because I knew I felt something right away.
Montel had previously told me a cheat code, which was to take a
hit and make another hit out of it. Which, is what he did with This Is How We Do It [the track is built around Slick Rick’s Children’s Story].
In this case, we made a cultural hit with Damage by reworking Herp Alpert’s Making Love In The Rain, produced by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis [1987].
That one sticks with me, because we worked so hard to make it happen. We tried to clear the initial sample, but it got denied. So then we had to go replay it. We even worked to try and get Jimmy and Terry to replay what they had originally done, but that didn’t work out either. In the end we were able to get a fantastic musician by the name of Jeff Gitty, and he nailed it. He captured the absolute essence of the original song. That was a moment for me.
The original version of this interview appeared on MBW in October 2024.
Wu-Tang Clan
SoundCloud’s Eliah Seton on superfans, sale rumors, AI, and the future of music.
Eliah Seton joined SoundCloud as the company’s president in 2021, becoming its CEO two years later. In that time, he has marshaled the company past some major milestones, most notably the fact that SoundCloud posted its firstever annual profit in 2023.
SoundCloud is a significant player in the music streaming market, with a huge catalog: Seton confirms that it currently hosts some 400 million tracks.
However, being a streaming service is just one part of SoundCloud’s story. With tens of millions of artists on the platform, SoundCloud is also a distribution and services provider for the people who make the music.
For Seton, SoundCloud’s real magic lies somewhere between these two points, between being a streaming platform and a distribution and services platform provider for artists.
That’s because Seton and his team are laser-focused on the artist-fan relationship and how SoundCloud can enrich that connection.
It’s fair to say that Eliah and SoundCloud were loudly talking about superfans significantly before most in the music business.
This focus on fans has manifested in a few ways at SoundCloud in recent years, including its famous experiment with Fan-Powered Royalties for independent artists – aka a “usercentric” royalty model.
Fan-Powered Royalties has not only partnered with indie artists, it’s also partnered with Warner Music Group and Merlin.
The biggest headline surrounding SoundCloud lately is the news that the company is headed towards some kind
of financial event – either a sale, or possibly an IPO, or some kind of fundraise – that follows investment into the firm in recent years from the likes of SiriusXM, The Raine Group and Temasek.
Read abridged/edited highlights from Eliah Seton and Tim Ingham’s podcast conversation below, or find it on your favorite audio service…
SoundCloud is operating in a world of multiple streaming services and what seems like endless distribution or services companies. What makes SoundCloud unique?
Very simply, SoundCloud connects artists and fans together directly. Hundreds of millions of fans and millions of creators engage together directly on SoundCloud every day. We’re
really have a broken business model as a result.
In between, though, there’s one place in music that does this, that connects artists and fans together directly at scale, and that is SoundCloud.
Today, we define SoundCloud across two different business segments: What we call our fan business, and our creator business.
The fan business looks like a DSP, it’s an ad-supported and subscription service offering all across the globe, in 19 monetized markets, with 400 million tracks on the platform – the 100 million tracks that traditional DSPs have, and then another 300 million that are from creators who are not coming through those same traditional pipes.
Then the creator side is millions
“WE’RE A TWO-SIDED PLATFORM THAT’S EXCLUSIVE TO MUSIC, AND THAT’S TOTALLY DIFFERENTIATED IN THE WORLD TODAY.”
a two-sided platform that’s exclusive to music, and that’s totally differentiated in the world today.
[The recorded music business] is an industry where you spend billions of dollars against trying to reach your end user, but [have] no ability to reach that end user, which in the case of major labels is the fan.
And then at the other end of the spectrum, you have traditional DSPs [digital service providers], who pay so much of their cost structure to content owners and [have] no [ability] to work directly with artists, and
of creators who are coming to the platform to upload their music and find their fans and build their fan base, paying us a subscription, distributing through us.
In 2024, SoundCloud announced integrations with a number of new AI-related tools, including Soundful, which enables creators to make original music “in a couple of seconds using artificial intelligence,” and Fadr, a platform that offers AI music tools like vocal removal, song splitting, remixing, etc. What is SoundCloud’s policy on AI? And how are you working
with these companies?
First things first: we are an artist-first company, we always have been, we always will be. Obviously we are compliant with all of the relevant laws, with our partnerships with all the rightsholders who have made their voices heard on issues pertaining to AI.
We acquired a set of AI capabilities and machine learning capabilities three years ago, when we made the acquisition of Musiio, and that’s transformed our ability to use AI to enable creators to get heard by fans… and to give rightsholders – major labels, independent labels – the opportunity to find what’s next, find their next signings.
And that’s how we’re trying to use AI, but we also view AI a little bit differently, which is we’ve got this – as I described before – this great engagement, this virtuous cycle between fans and creators coming to the platform and engaging with each other.
Depending upon the research you look at… there are probably 75 million real music creators on the planet. Our view is that AI is likely to 10x that number, and it’s not going to take that long.
I’ve talked a lot about the analogy to photography. Fifteen years ago, nobody was sitting around thinking, ‘Oh, there are 2 billion photographers on the planet.’ And then Instagram came along. And suddenly there are 2 billion photographers on the planet.
That didn’t replace expert photography, it actually enhanced expert photography, but it also gamified it. It allowed anyone to play with photography, right on their phone.
I believe we’re going to see a similar tidal wave in music creation through AI tooling. And even knowing that this happened in photography, it’s hard to wrap our heads around the fact that there could be 500 million, a
“WE FEEL THAT NOW IS SOUNDCLOUD’S MOMENT, GIVEN OUR POLE POSITION IN CONNECTING ARTISTS AND FANS TOGETHER DIRECTLY.”
first platform, especially one oriented toward independence, that was obviously a good thing. It was also an opportunity to clamp down on fraud and have a more transparent and just way of splitting a fan’s subscription.
billion music creators on the planet.
Generative AI tooling is potentially going to be the great democratizer of music creation because all of us across the planet who have access to a smartphone will have access to music creation tools, whether it’s writing a lyric or dropping a beat or collaborating with someone, writing a hook or remixing something, whatever.
So long as we establish the right legal and commercial frameworks around this, we’re going to have hundreds of millions of music creators playing with music, and we’re very excited about what that future holds.
SoundCloud innovated FanPowered Royalties, or what you could call a “user-centric” royalty model. More recently, we’ve seen a number of streaming services sign deals with rightsholders for “artist-centric” royalties, to use a term coined by UMG Chairman and CEO Sir Lucian Grainge. From your perspective, what is the fairest way to pay royalties to artists?
For those who don’t know, FanPowered Royalties, [as opposed] to the traditional streaming model of pro-rata payments, divides up a fan’s subscription [revenue] against the artists that a fan listens to. This gets more artists paid more. So as an artist-
We view it as a product, just like the rest of our platform, that needs to evolve. And we love the fact that there are other players thinking about new models, because the traditional model certainly does not work and certainly does not get artists paid. And that really brings to mind a very straightforward premise for us here, which underpins our whole roadmap – that streaming is not enough. The vast majority of artists… cannot earn a living wage from streaming alone.
But streaming is also not enough for fans either, at least not the fans that we’re focused on. Sure, for some fans… it’s enough to put a top hits playlist on in the background and call it a day. But our fans are way more engaged than that. Our fans spend way more money on music each year than a passive listener.
Superfandom and willingness to pay is as old a role as there is in music. Think about all the different examples of this – merch and live [events]. Even in a download environment, 80% of the revenues were driven by 20% of the fans.
If you were in a physical [music] environment, you went to HMV to buy your favorite artist’s catalog in CDs. You spent as much money as you’ll spend for a streaming subscription in an entire year. But in a streaming environment, if I’m looping Frank Ocean’s Blonde all day, every day, and I just can’t get enough, I’m paying the same 10 or 12 bucks that someone who literally forgot that they are subscribed to that service is paying.
Streaming hasn’t killed the superfan, but it has certainly suppressed fandom in a way
we’re prepared to unlock. And let’s be real, streaming is also not enough for streamers. It’s a hard business model to make the math work. And we’re not so interested in the zero-sum game that is defined by a fan-powered model, or a pro-rata model, or artist-centric model, whatever. This in the end is dividing the pie into thinner and thinner slices. We’re more interested in putting new pies on the table. And… we feel like we’re in a position to capture that opportunity.
You’ve been talking about superfans, and monetizing the link between hardcore fans and artists, for some time. Now there’s this narrative rush towards superfans, particularly at the publicly traded music rights companies. What does this mean, both in terms of the industry as a whole, but also to SoundCloud, in your view?
[It means that] the founding purpose of SoundCloud has never been more relevant, has never
been more important. It’s the center of gravity in music.
We feel that now is SoundCloud’s moment, given our pole position in connecting artists and fans together directly.
When I was at Warner running ADA, and BMG was our largest partner, I remember one of their biggest commercial successes was a Keith Richards box set. This was like a lacquer piece of furniture. It had music in it, but nobody was listening to the music.
If they wanted to listen to Keith Richards, they were streaming it with their preferred service. But there were 1,200 people on the planet who needed to have this thing, needed to put it on their coffee table, or in their living room. It was a status symbol, it was a badge of their super fandom.
These fans have a very high willingness to pay. They want to unlock access to a relationship with an artist that they love. And you need a marketplace to
do that. You need a two-sided marketplace that has direct access to artists and fans to facilitate that.
So when we hear about rights holders talking about trying to build relationships with fans, I’m not surprised. They need to do that. What we’re excited about at SoundCloud is that’s what we do every day. We’re a social platform in music, and now finding ways to productize that and monetize that, and put dollars in artists’ pockets through that relationship that they have directly with their fans. That’s going to be the new “pies on the table.”
[There’s a lot of talk about] rising prices at streaming services – that’s not that interesting. What’s interesting is non-streaming monetization opportunities.
You’ve told MBW that SoundCloud is exploring various financial options. One of those options is to acquire, but also, as a profitable growth company,
Billie Eilish famously broke through on SoundCloud with Ocean Eyes
you were considering raising money. You didn’t mention IPO specifically, but that must be one thing that’s possibly on the table. And there have been headlines about a potential sale. Where are you in the process of sale/IPO/raising money?
Our destiny is in our own hands. As anybody familiar with Soundcloud could tell you, that’s not always been the case. But it is now. We’re a profitable growth company –such an important box for us to check in terms of our health. And we’ve got these massive lanes of growth available to us.
We’ve talked about what the tidal wave of new music creators coming from AI tooling could do for our business. That’s obviously a massive, transformational opportunity. [There is also] the international growth opportunity. SoundCloud is a global brand, but we are not a global business. And there’s so much opportunity in closing that gap and creating a real commercial opportunity for us in dozens and dozens of markets around the world where people use our platform and have access to it and an awareness of the brand.
The analogy I talked about with staff is, we have brought this company to base camp. And with those growth opportunities available to us, we are now on the path to the summit. So the question is how do we get to the summit? How quickly can we get there? And who’s coming along with us?
We’re going to take a different approach to this process than I think [businesses] normally do. We’re going to be more transparent about it. We’ve earned the ability to pick and choose what we do, when we do it, and with whom, on our time. That hard work of readying the business for that has been done. And now we’re looking to find our new partners who can come aboard to scale the mountain with us.
We anticipate that, barring unforeseen circumstances, [we] will bring that opportunity to market and explore who the right fit to scale the mountain is for us.
Two final questions: What is your number one ambition as you run SoundCloud today, and in the years ahead? And if you had a magic wand to change anything at all about the global music business today, what would it be and why?
My number one ambition for SoundCloud – this is an easy one. Alex [Ljung] and Eric [Wahlforss] founded this business to empower artists and fans to share and connect through music.
The founders poured their heart and soul into it. Hundreds and hundreds of employees have left their mark on this place. But I think we can all agree SoundCloud has not yet had its moment. [What we are doing] is the future of music. It is the now of music.
So realizing the vision and having the opportunity to be a
steward for this place – and not just make it the healthiest it’s ever been, but to actually scale that mountain and look out from the summit – that’s my number one ambition. And it’s not just mine, but it’s our team’s.
And then one thing I would change about the music industry, it’s hard not to answer – get artists paid. We are a platform that sees not just thousands, not just tens of thousands, but literally millions of creators who are trying to get heard, trying to find their fans, trying to get paid.
And that one thing I would love to wave my wand to change is the one thing that we are looking to transform by virtue of the products and services on our platform.
We’re trying to do that every day, person by person, product by product, and I don’t have a magic wand, but the 400 of us here at SoundCloud are trying to make that happen nonetheless.
The original version of this interview appeared on MBW in July 2024.
SoundCloud launched emerging artist program Ascending in 2024, featuring Laila! (pictured)
