Universal Music Group: The Gatekeepers of Music

Now streaming is still the most important digital channel by far, but you're starting to see these new things emerge. So for an artist, there is a lot more complexity to distributing your product now.  

On the opportunity side, NFTs could unlock special album incentives. You could get access to certain live stream. You can get limited edition albums. That's an interesting kind idea of incremental revenue for these players, but a key role for, as we've talked about, for these labels, is also this VC element to it. Imagine if I was a mid-tier artist... See more

Arman: Prior to this industry, prior to 2000, when Napster and the ripping services emerged, it was an interesting model for this business. You had a few dominant, large labels that controlled every aspect of music from the discovery of the talent, to the producing of the songs, to the recording of the songs, because they own the studios because it... See more

As we talked about briefly earlier, the publishing part of this business, which is still a teens part of revenue and profits, their core function is to go track down usage of the content and get paid for it. Well, a blockchain does that for you just using good old fashioned cheap technology. I think there is a challenge to the industry, the publish... See more

In the Western world and the big markets, we've come back a little bit full circle to say, "Hey, we'd like you to consume music at the price points you were comfortable with," and this is nominal. We haven't gotten into real yet, but for that price we're not going to give you a vastly better experience.

Historical Inflection Points

And so what you've ended up with, not surprisingly, is a few key players that happen to own the majority of the IP that is kind of a must have in this industry to have a product offering and a handful of distributors that have gotten scale on distribution of great user experiences like a Spotify, Amazon, a YouTube, whoever you might want to think a... See more

What's driven the growth of this industry for the last five to 10 years is this emergence of streaming. We just talked about how it's more than half the business today. It was single digit seven years ago and so that's just been rapid. All of the growth of the value of streaming has basically come from a few developed markets, historic markets that... See more

You bought an album, it was a bundled product. Back in the days, singles weren't even a big part of the business. So, you had to buy 12, 15 songs from an artist in an album format. You had to pay upfront for the perpetual use of that and every incremental piece of music you bought cost you money. You had to have this high threshold for wanting to c... See more