The most frequent complaint I hear about streaming services is that they don’t pay artists fairly. Michael Pelczynski, the former Vice President of Strategy at SoundCloud, took that complaint personally. Over his five years with the streaming service, he helped conceive and implement a novel payment scheme that received much praise.

In an hour-long... See more

“There’s no doubt in my mind that we’re going to go through a very similar journey where even the concept of what a podcast or audio actually is will become re-imagined.”

He understood that physical distribution was going away, that digital license strategies needed to change. He shared his view back then that Pandora should be incentivized to build a subscription business, Spotify to enter the radio space, new entrants to have an advantage in the beginning, and much more international access to digital content. The... See more