Dave Goldberg on music Music

He understood that physical distribution was going away, that digital license strategies needed to change. He shared his view back then that Pandora should be incentivized to build a subscription business, Spotify to enter the radio space, new entrants to have an advantage in the beginning, and much more international access to digital content. The... See more

The music industry is one that has never ceased to have a need(s) for revamping and improvement. It is interesting to see that Goldberg, and I am sure many others, had the vision for a better future back then. Today, we are still grappling with ways to allocate more resources to music creators and incentivize fans but is not an easy task.

This is way before the music scene that we see today and the podcast industry that has added huge revenues to audio streaming platforms. Catalogs were the main source of income for these streaming platforms and for labels, while new releases were adding more to losses on the balance sheets than gains.

David Bruce Goldberg (October 2, 1967 – May 1, 2015) was an American management consultant and businessman. He was the founder of LAUNCH Media and the CEO of SurveyMonkey. He was married to Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook.

He did not mention as he was not able to witness the power of the algorithms in the music business, thanks to these platforms being able to gather organize and analyze data to the point of being able to learn what sounds and lyrics were desired by who, in what locations and when.

"Music was becoming a purely digital product." Goldberg wrote on this memo. I was not able the exact release date of this memo, but we believe it was release in the early 2000s.

He foresaw the strategy of testing on new releases consumers before added money is spent to ensure that it isn’t wasted. In short, the new release business was to become like an independent label. Publishing and recorded music A&R should be combined to ensure that all recorded music releases had a combined publishing deal and that you can captu... See more

Sriram Words: "From the Sony hack, Dave Goldberg writes a fascinating, educational memo to Lynton on the state of the music industry. I saved this years ago when the hack was reported on and I'm always struck by how big of a loss Goldberg is to all of tech."

According to Goldberg, the record company needed to act like a music publisher for new releases- putting up very little money but not trying to hold artists for long contract periods or to keep as much of the revenue. Advances would be $50k with a 40% revenue share after the advance. Losses in new releases are generally driven by expensive fixed he... See more