Universal Music Group: The Gatekeepers of Music

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

From the late '90s to mid-teens to mid-2010s, the industry was in decline, partly because of this ripping issue coming to the fore, but partly because they weren't offering the consumer a product they wanted that was increasingly becoming digital in the consumers buying, but not so much digital in the industry's mind.The first attempt by the indust... See more

Data's becoming a hugely important aspect of this business. Again, an individual can tie into data streams from various outlets, be it social media, be it streaming, but the ability to capture a full picture, looking at the physical, looking at the global data, looking at every outlet, again, when I have 39, 40% market share in a market, I get data... See more

Just step back to the role of the majors today, they still have this traditional VC and production ecosystem role, which they've always had...On top of that now, they still have all the guts of the physical. They have this marketing promotion organization globally that we just talked about that's being set up to deal with this complexity. And perha... See more

Secondly, your strengths to distribution increasingly get fragmented. So in the early days of streaming Spotify as the leader was the dominant platform, but we've seen not only other large leading streaming platforms develop and we can get into that dynamic because that's a very interesting part of the market as well, but we've now started to see d... See more

So let's use video because I just think it's a great example. If you think about music and how you consume music, you actually consume catalog product a lot. I certainly do. And I think most consumers do. Songs that I've listened to once, I will listen to again and again, and again, at some point. With video, that's less the case. Once I watch seas... See more

Most people's soundtrack of their lives, as the industry talks, it is created from the late teens to the mid to late twenties. That's what you listen to your whole life for the most part, and your discovery goes down pretty quickly after that...

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.

One risk was over the last five years, you saw technology players, tech forward, skinny labels as they call themselves, emerge to try to disrupt the major labels, whether that was a Distrokid at the low end or an Orchard or Grooves in the mid segment or Believe Digital. They were trying to say, hey, we can use technology to do like 80%, 70%, 50% of... See more

And so that certainly helped a little bit with demand, but it didn't solve this more monetization issue that consumers seem to have, which was why do I need to pay every new piece of content I want to consume? ... The consumer proposition wasn't fully resolved. It was just a step by the industry in the direction. It also wasn't great for the indust... See more