Dave Goldberg on music Music

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

He shared on this memo that a digital-only recorded music company will be a much more profitable one after one-off restructuring costs. It will have lower revenue and higher margins. Its revenue will be very stable and grow with the overall digital music market growth. It will be a much more valuable company with its revenue base solidly coming fro... See more

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.

Water and Music are doing a great job marrying web3 to the music industry and creating a large community of musicians, executives, tech heads ad fans in order to create the next music movement. It is not easy to solve the multiple issues that a behemoth, never-ending, moving industry faces.

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.

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.

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

"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.

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."