Universal Music Group: The Gatekeepers of Music

The old, pre-digital structure of the music business led to a fan relationship funnel with multiple gatekeepers, primarily major record labels.

In many instances, companies have leveraged structural advantages to achieve seemingly unassailable positions in their relative markets. Streaming services that host user-generated content (UGC) have significant advantages over other services due to copyright ‘safe harbours’, which has led to the dominance of services like YouTube. We have been tol... See more

Take the music industry, for example. From Napster to the iTunes Music Store and now Spotify, the last two decades look a lot like an exercise in how to use internet platforms to effectively deny income to musicians while extracting maximum value in content and data.