Universal Music Group: The Gatekeepers of Music

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

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

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

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

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

Because I'm going to have the hottest new songs. The problem is the consumer wants more than that. They want the old stuff to. So all of a sudden the power in that relationship moves from the distributor who can create new content and also has the consumer relationship to who owns the IP that the consumer wants, the IP that consumer wants a lot of ... 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...

...if you dig a little deeper, the reason indie labels and direct distribution have gained a bit of share is related to the fact that as we spoke about earlier, we've seen the barrier to creating and distributing music collapse.