12 Predictions for the Future of Music
Strange Article.<p>1. Record labels will become more relevant than ever - by specialising and becoming experts in very specific niches they will be able to amplify artists better than ever, owning audiences and data to ensure that they become the &quot;go to&quot; for artists looking to succeed.<p>2. &quot;Platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Peloton, BandCamp&quot; doesn&#x27;t make a huge amount of sense. TikTok is already breaking artists - but it&#x27;s well recognised in the industry that a break through on TikTok (for example) needs  a lot of follow through. Young audiences might coalesce around a song briefly, but that doesn&#x27;t necessarily translate into mainstream success. YouTube, Peloton and BandCamp are VERY different platforms indeed. Peloton success comes from curation - which requires access to curators, and labels remain (and probably will remain) the gatekeepers of these relationships. BandCamp is not really a platform that helps market artists - but is a destination for good indie marketing where the margin is far higher than other stores like Apple Music and Spotify.<p>3. This has been the case for years. One of the major labels did some consumer research 5 or 6 years ago polling a bunch of late millenials&#x2F;Gen-Z on current hit songs - they all recognised the breakthrough hits but barely any recognised or even cared about the artists. This is amplified by lean back consumption driven by &quot;music second&quot; entertainment platforms like TikTok and playlist-driven platforms like Spotify where you can consume music without ever being aware of the artist.<p>4. The impact of &quot;ancillary deals&quot; is always overestimated in the industry. Sync (using music in adverts, or TV shows, or movies) is a hugely lucrative revenue stream for artists and songwriters - in that if you land a single sync deal, the payday can be huge: tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Thing is, against total revenues in the industry they are a tiny tiny part - a few percent. So while they can be very lucrative and life changing at a micro level they are not so significant at a macro level. Other deals - brands deals, etc, rely on having an engaged audience who care about the artist, and care about what the artist does - which is at odds with the previous &quot;no one cares about artists any more&quot; position. So yes - for successful artists with a great marketing machine behind them and the right connections, brand endorsements and other &quot;artist brand&quot; related licensing activity can be very lucrative. But that requires a whole lot of things to fall into place.<p>5. It will be interesting to see how this one plays out. I think a lot of the appeal in heritage (&quot;dead&quot;) artists is that the audio is an artefact, and represents something that was capturing a moment in time. This is just my gut instinct, but I think that a deep fake vocal performance of Etta James in Cadillac Records would actually have had much less impact than Beyoncé&#x27;s reinterpretation.<p>6. Holographic performances are already happening. James Brown performing holographically at weddings? Not a change. Artist estates are incredibly protective of the brands they represent, and the chances of this happening are almost zero.<p>7. I don&#x27;t really know what to say about this, because it&#x27;s really how music has been operating since day dot - influence, absorb, appropriate is a very common cycle in music, cf K Pop, Reggaeton and pretty much all the big &quot;break through&quot; genres.<p>8. Already a huge business. Merck Mercuriadis (erstwhile manager of, amongst others, Beyoncé  and Guns&#x27;N&#x27;Roses) runs Hipgnosis Songs Fund a music publishing acquisitions fund, which is paying enormous multiples on revenue to acquire the publishing rights on famous songs. There are a whole host of other investment managers trying to do the same thing, but I think Hipgnosis is currently leading the pack because they are so well funded and are so well equipped to better exploit the rights, having a deep understanding of the ecosystems surrounding publishing. Not just old songs though - BIG songs is where the value is - things that people will still be listening to in 20 years.<p>9. The &quot;huge portion&quot; going to Apple, Google, etc is not such a huge portion really - the labels and publishers (though, less the publishers) ensured that the deals that were done to launch the &quot;all you can eat&quot; music services benefitted them. These services cannot operate without the catalogues represented by the majors (Universal, Sony, Warner) and so they still hold a lot of bargaining power. There&#x27;s definitely a concern within the industry about Spotify&#x27;s podcast play, because as Ted points out you&#x27;re bringing in more audience but splitting the revenues thinner. However, if Spotify can end up owning the audio experience (I don&#x27;t think they want to own video - they experimented, then pulled back) and become the gatekeepers for all &quot;major league&quot; audio content then that has huge value for musicians as well as other audio creators. Get them in with a big name podcast, then send them to a playlist; or, get them in with an artist, and drive revenues for a podcaster.<p>10. Innovations in music have always come from outside music. The length of CDs was (supposedly) determined by the length of a recording of Beethoven&#x27;s 9th Symphony favoured by the wife of one of the Japanese Sony execs working on the CD format. Saying &quot;major decisions about distribution, publicity, curation, presentation, etc. will be determined by Silicon Valley and its offshoots&quot; kind of ignores the fact that major decisions about distribution, publicity, curation, presentation, etc. have always been determined by external parties - whether radio &amp; TV networks, magazines &amp; newspapers, live promoters like Live Nation, or record labels themselves. Innovation coming from outside the music industry is actually a really positive thing, because the music industry is REALLY BAD at innovating, and even worse at spotting innovations that are going to disrupt them. How do you tackle this? Get more innovators into the music industry - and this is happening, albeit somewhat hamstrung by budgets.<p>11. Record labels will be increasingly sophisticated, with &quot;playbooks&quot; that they can spin up to guarantee audiences and exposure. They will be data aggregators and offer huge value to artists who fit within their model. The waffle about nepotism is just... bizarre.<p>12. Most execs I know are doing everything they can to diversify the revenue streams for the artists they work with. Great! Doesn&#x27;t mean they want out of the music business though. In fact, most execs I know love the music business and stay working in music despite being able to make more money elsewhere. Some people are happy to sell soap powder - but the reason you make more money selling soap powder is no one really cares. Getting to work with musicians day in day out is what drives most people in music, and for many people that&#x27;s worth more than money.