Panel is from 2014 (!)
Listened because I wanted to hear from Tom Freston
Irving Azoff
Live music has never been stronger
Recorded music as % of artist revenues has dropped from 30-40% to 5% in last 10 years
Daniel Ek – founded Spotify at 23, college dropout, rejected from Google job
Thought Napster was most amazing invention ever
Discovered so much music, but didn’t work for the artist
“Make something more convenient than piracy” and people will pay for it
Took 3.5 years to get the first licenses – lost his hair through the process (a joke)
Spotify 10M subs (vs Netflix 350M)
Music always had some form of free – unlike most tv/film
Seeing a lot of interesting global behavior – eg, turned on Turkey, saw bump in German subs because of the 4-5M Turkish people living in Germany
Spotify is a platform, not in business of direct to artists
Long successful partnerships with labels
Whenever an artist tours, their tracks always make Top 100 in that city
In Sweden, streaming took off first, and most valuable aspect Spotify provided was transparency, which gave everyone more data to better negotiate deals, for artists to understand what’s happening
Paid ~$1B that year (2014) for rights (to labels)
Listeners can follow artists – now artists have direct communication with fans
Streaming is biggest change since inception of recorded music
Tom Freston – led MTV for many years
Started MTV with no experience, no money, but a team that was passionate about music
Record industry notoriously resistant to change, resisted all new media formats including stereo
Once you get young artists, discover you can sell records, the record companies change their minds
Any enduring youth business always comes from outsiders – MTV, Vice
More music than ever, but doesn’t drive culture same way as 80s, 90s – tech culture seems to have replaced it
Used to think people would never watch sitcoms on phones – but that’s what the kids do now