Dave Goldberg on music 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

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

Yet, the final component of the streaming ecosystem — artists and their teams — are still pretty much where they were in 2010 regarding algorithmic optimization. Today, most algorithmic strategies follow a kind of "throw spaghetti at a wall and see what sticks" approach: make sure that the metadata you provide to DSPs is as complete and accurate as... 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

When the distribution technology changed with the internet, there was going to be the great unwind, and then the great rebundle, in the form of Google and Facebook and Twitter and all these new bundles. I think music is a great example of that. It made sense in the LP and CD era to put eight or 10 or 12 or 15 songs on a disc and press the disc and ... 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

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