Consolidation and Growth: Insights from Billboard's Glenn Peoples
- Eric Doades
- Apr 17
- 32 min read
Today we have Glen Peoples from Billboard to discuss the major trends within the music industry. Our conversation covers a lot! Including the rise of rollups and acquisitions to build label services, the increasing importance of music licensing, the role of AI in the music tech investment landscape, and the cyclical nature of consolidation and its broader impacts on the future of the industry.
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Episode Transcript
Machine transcribed
Dmitri: Welcome back to Music Tectonics, where we go beneath the surface of music and tech. I'm your host, Dmitri Vitze. I'm also the founder and CEO of Rock Paper Scissors, the marketing and PR firm that specializes in music innovation. You've probably noticed more music tech acquisitions in recent months. Some have been fire sales and some have been significant movers changing hands for capitalization reasons.
But overall, many have matured and as these players consolidate, it could mean more for the music industry as a whole. I. To help me understand what's happening and what it means for our industry. I've got the sharp minded Glen peoples with me from Billboard Magazine. Our conversation covers a lot, including the rise of roll-ups and acquisitions to build label services, the role of AI in the music tech investment landscape, and the cyclical nature of consolidation and its broader impacts on the future of the industry.
I think you'll get a ton [00:01:00] from this wide ranging conversation on consolidation. But first, we've got the news headlines for you with Tricia and Jade with our weekly rock paper scanner
Robot: rock.
Tristra: Hey everybody and welcome to Music Tectonics for our weekly news roundup. I was gonna say biannual news Roundup, but that would be, that'd be a little bit extreme. Like how in the world could you summarize all of the music industry's news? Just if you did it twice a year, that'd be, that's a crazy, that's a fool's errand.
This is Tristan New Year. Jager, the Chief Strategy Officer at Rock Paper Scissors, and today I have with me Jade. Hi, how's it
Glenn: going, Trista?
Tristra: Hey, why don't you introduce yourself for the
Glenn: people out there? Hi. Yeah, Jade, pre boy here I am an onboarding specialist slash new business manager slash sales wizard [00:02:00] here at Rock Paper Scissors.
Tristra: You should see his sales spells that are pretty intense.
Jade: They are enchanting.
Tristra: They involve a lot of burning of Dogecoin. Okay, so this week there have been a lot of, there's a lot of interesting news stories and I have a wide variety of things for y'all. Jade is here to help me expand and. Give some different perspectives on these stories.
So from the fabulous, ever informative and wonderful music ally, there was a very interesting piece a few days ago about a new startup that is a haptic music startup called, and I'm gonna butcher this. Oo. What this company does is they've created an app that gives you tactile feedback to make music feelable, and that's in quotes.
It's all on your smartphone. So basically what it does is it translates the beat, flow and texture of a song in real time, and it allows you to touch, they say the full details of your favorite song on your phone. So this was [00:03:00] originally a solution to deal with hearing loss. And there's a couple other products like that out there that allow people with either hearing challenges or loss, feel the music with their bodies.
But I found this really interesting that they were doing this on an iPhone as an app, and it also just sounds like a lot of fun.
Jade: Yeah. I have, uh, done some of this before. Have you actually, yeah. Yeah. So have you ever put on a haptic vest? Like a
Tristra: Yeah. Yeah. That's actually what I was thinking about for, I know some people provide those at stadiums and stuff like that for people with hearing, for, with hearing loss, like
Jade: a company called SubPac, like you put this on and it vibrates your whole core essentially within Sounds relaxing.
Also, how is that Cs? A couple years back and there was a way that you could interact with sound using air pressure.
Tristra: Whoa. And
Jade: you would put your hand in and you would feel like a shape, but there was nothing there. Sound impacts air pressure, right?
Tristra: Yeah.
Jade: So if you ho hold your cheek up to the iPhone speaker and someone's on a call, you will feel air pressure moving.
Cool. [00:04:00] So maybe they have found a way to magnify that. Yeah. Or maybe that's just running on the phone and there's a separate device that it hooks into that provides more haptic feedback. This, yeah. This is super interesting to me. I think this space is gonna heat up.
Tristra: Yeah. I just saw recently, and this isn't necessarily a musical application, but using sound waves to create waves and water that the, that could then be used to do something like say, clean up an oil slick.
Yeah. And or. Generate electricity even. So a lot of interesting potential for this crossover between sound and haptics is pretty, pretty cool. Now, of course, it's not a fun week unless you get to talk about David Israelite and the NMPA and David gave a talk. Earlier, this earlier last week, I believe, and of course he had a lot of things to say about Spotify podcasts and how they're using music that publishers believe they should be compensated for.
He's also concerned about PRO reform, but one of the most interesting things about this article in Billboard was. Just the [00:05:00] breakdown of where publishing is still making money. Of course, there's a lot of interesting, a lot of variety now and a lot of it's feels fairly predictable. But one thing that I found notable was that 1% of publishing revenue is still coming from sheet music.
It's like the thing that's so interesting about technological change. That all the technologies kind of stick around, right? Like you can still go online and buy a sthe, or I could buy some tack for my oxen.
Jade: I'm gonna go play a vinyl record this evening.
Tristra: Oh, with living dangerously? Yeah. Yeah. Like Amish 2.0 when you're into, when you're into vinyl.
But all of these technologies kind of stick around and so sheet music is still maybe not a huge source of revenue, but it's still. Enough to take up a percentage point, at least according to what was reported in billboards. So I thought that was really interesting and something for us to keep in mind that even as we talk about this incredible pace of change, all the other tech is gonna stick around for a while.
Like we still do use MP threes, right? We still, we still use vinyl records. There's still people [00:06:00] recording onto magnetic tape. They're still, I don't know, piano roles may be the only thing that come to mind that may not be in wide production and may not be purchased as much as they were once, obviously, not as much as they were back in the day.
Okay?
Jade: The 1% pub rev coming from sheet music. Is awesome. I would actually expect that to be higher. Yeah. Sheet music's a huge part of live performing. Yeah.
Tristra: Especially in educational contexts.
Jade: Yeah. Bands a lot of time. I mean, I haven't seen too many standup bass players fumbling around with an iPad on stage.
Tristra: They get enough worries. Yeah.
Jade: It's usually flipping through sheet music. Yeah, true. Um, yeah, I don't know if fake books are a part of that. Every musician I know has fake books, which are chord progressions in sheet music. That's, that's you fake along just the chord progressions
Tristra: and now you can AI generate sheet music and it'll be a deep fake book.
Yeah. Ah ha. Yes. I'm here all night
Jade: folks. Um, yeah. Also any arranging live performance playing with band mates, that's all I would expect. 1% to be higher. I'm bullish on that. I think that's gonna go up actually.
Tristra: Well, and with the love of analog [00:07:00] that is arising in the. In the passionate hearts of our Gen Z Friends and Gen Alpha, I think we're definitely gonna seem more and more interested in analog music representation, not just physical objects to play recorded music, but maybe sheet music too.
All right, you heard it here first. We're predicting a sheet music revival. Alrighty. Now, this is super interesting. In ours, Technica, this past week I read about MCP, which according to the headline is the new quote, USBC for AI unquote, that's bringing fierce rivals together. So it's interesting, it's a problem that once a technology matures to a certain place and once there are enough players on the field, you start to get.
To this place where it's like, how are we gonna get all of these things to work together? So open AI and Anthropic among other players are working to create a standard that would allow AI models to talk more fluidly and be connected more seamlessly and effortlessly with other software platforms like Gaming Engines, 3D modeling [00:08:00] software, that kind of thing.
And I think this is important because I think it shows a certain level of maturity in the AI market as it. Currently exists and it also shows that like it ain't so easy, just that you can't just add ai. I think for those of us who are not working in as developers, it, we can almost think about it as, can't you just plug that cord into that slot and.
Voila. You can use this model to do X, Y, and Z, but clearly there are a lot of other technical challenges to be solved, and standards can help solve those problems, or at least prevent people from having to constantly reinvent the wheel in a variety of unnecessary ways.
Jade: I mean, we were gonna up upgrade to fiber internet, and I was really into it.
I wanted fiber. Yeah, but they had to run a new line and I wasn't into that, so we just went back to cable. I could imagine a world. That's built on this where we run new fiber lines or something like that. That is, that's an AI hard pipe, essentially.
Tristra: Yeah. [00:09:00] We'll see if that happens. And I'm thinking, I don't know, there's some interesting questions here about that.
We'll get to some of the interesting questions about AI in just a second. We'll come back to ai. Yeah. Have,
Jade: have you read iRobot?
Tristra: Done in a while. So this is doesn't end well. It ends well, but it doesn't go well. Speaking of questionable ends, there was a really interesting piece in the angler called Eternal Celebrities. The multi-billion opportunity is coming. So what this piece covers is basically. How celebrities careers don't end with their physical death.
Now that we have AI holograms, et cetera, you can use a voice model to reproduce their voice. You can easily generate more, you know, video scenes with an actor, for example, or a musician. And this is both exciting, but it's also a very bizarre business challenge. So estate management has been a thing for [00:10:00] quite some time.
I think going back to Elvis, we had a great episode on this actually about artists estates and their sort of afterlife. If you wanna go back, it was a Halloween episode, I think. A year or two ago, but it's becoming more and more complicated because you can license someone's likeness and image to via AI and create new content even if they have been deceased for years.
So this is a challenge for the managers and lawyers of the world, and so it'll be interesting to see how this all plays out. It's poorly regulated to some extent, I would say, and correct me if I'm wrong. But it feels like there's a lot of uncharted territory here about what's appropriate and how people would be remunerated for the use of the estate's assets in a way.
And I think this is just a really interesting field. The other question that it begs is what's gonna happen with all the new still living talent that wants to get a piece of all this? What if we can just, what if Arnold Schwarzenegger just like dominates content for [00:11:00] the next 50 years, even if he passes away?
Like I think that's kind of a problem.
Jade: I got two things to say about this. First of all, why did they have to make this image look like? It's like the ghost of Pop Punk's past or something. Like, that's creepy, but okay, I'm here for it. Second, do you think people are gonna care about Elvis in 50 years?
Genuinely. Someone asked me this outside of the music world when they were asking me, is this a few years back? And someone was like, do you think people are gonna care about Elvis? 'cause they had just visited Elvis. Like Graceland. Graceland. Yes. Yeah. So you're, yes,
Tristra: I, I don't know. I think it's probably the question is, it depends.
So the one thing that Elvis's estate did really well, and there's been a great book written about this is, and it's actually we covered it in our episode as well, is that they managed his IP with such savvy that they kept him relevant. So some Wow. Some. States will be able to pull that off and I think some estate will fail.
Just if you look at the past with say, poets or writers, if you had a really hardworking [00:12:00] friend who loved a poet, sometimes they would edit their work and get it out there and republish it and publish it in collections and basically ask Act as an impresario for this. Deceased poets work. Mm. And I think we're gonna see something like that, but magnified and across media and with AI so that it, it's no longer just like reprinting someone's masterpiece but generating new content around it.
Or another masterpiece possibly if we, if someone lucked out and did a really good job.
Jade: Yeah. You got my wheels turning and shout out to all those folks that are adjacent. To the artist that keep it alive and make it possible? Yeah. There's a, there's a Unsu
Tristra: Heroes, there's a
Jade: local story of a guy in town who was, uh, just a prolific printmaker.
And he had a warehouse and house full of prints and some of 'em got flooded and lost. And there was another person in town who was like his champion and still works to this day to preserve what he was making, which is,
Tristra: yeah. And that's also why you can have huge [00:13:00] icons from the past that completely fade out of public memory and out of, sometimes even out of history and just.
End up in little footnotes. Last, but definitely not least. Adweek had an interesting piece recently, which is called Trump's Tariffs will make AI costs soar, but adoption won't slow. So this kind of baffled me a little bit, and again, I would love not the Trump, the tariffs making things more expensive. I think it's pretty clear how that would happen.
But the fact that adoption still wouldn't slow, I. I have a question about that. I think that's an interesting conclusion that the piece comes to from talking to various experts around the ad space in particular. But when I, when you look at something like PEW'S research, which they released recently. Now, albeit this is from 2024, so things are changing pretty rapidly, but only about 10% of US workers who.
Had access to AI or used AI used it regularly and found it really helpful in their work. The rest folks either kind of [00:14:00] had tried it and were like me, it didn't really do anything for me. It didn't really help my job. Or maybe even what is AI or a one, as some people call it what? I'm gonna start calling it that.
Yeah. Who doesn't want a technology that can generate music? That sounds just like foreigner and is great on a hamburger. Yeah, so what this to me says is that we're in this, there seems to be this kind of truism that. AI, and a lot of CEOs are actually pushing this in a bunch of different industries that their workers need to adopt ai.
If they don't, they're gonna be fired in some cases. Depends on how harsh the CEO and his memo are. But there's also this true. Like a pretty big question mark on the part of workers about how useful it's, if the adoption is coming from the top down, which is what is happening to some extent in some industries.
I have questions about what the cost, the impact of cost is gonna be versus folks that are working from the bottom up. Like a lot of people in the creative industries or [00:15:00] encoding or engineering. You were mentioning Jade, you said you had some friends that found generative ai extremely helpful in their studies.
Jade: Yeah. I. As much as I hate it, I happen to agree with this. Trump's tariffs will make ai. AI costs soar, but adoption won't slow. I think that we, the people that are, the power users using it are not gonna go away from using it, even if it's a small group. I also think there's some other interesting things around economics here.
Some questions we don't have to answer today, but would be, how much would you pay for a Turkey on Thanksgiving day?
Tristra: Oh, that's true.
Jade: $75. $150, would you pay $215 for a Turkey?
Tristra: That's a And do you have a Turkey you're trying to unload on me here? No, I just think that on
Jade: Thanksgiving Day, if I have plans to make Thanksgiving food or whatever Yeah.
And it's, the expectation is that I should get a Turkey, I'm gonna go to the store and get it no matter what.
Tristra: Yeah. Same thing with Christmas trees. However, I'm not gonna go and buy a Turkey on whatever, April 11th. [00:16:00] For $200. Just 'cause I feel like having a Turkey. Right? No. And so I think that's a good point.
The places where AI is truly the most useful. I mean, in some ways this could help suss out exactly where AI actually has the most value for workers. Yeah.
Jade: Could look at iPhones too. I mean, the new iPhones have AI on dev on device. Oh boy. Like how much Do you use an iPhone? I, yes, I do use an iPhone,
Tristra: but I have an old, I get old secondhand iPhones 'cause I bless you.
That's how I roll. That's how I roll.
Jade: Bless you. The older, the iPhone you have, then you're, and it's still working the cooler you are in my book. Wow. Okay. If you're, if you still have an iPhone four and you're making it work, you are the coolest person.
Tristra: My problem is, I keep dropping them on the pavement as I run.
They don't like that. Just note to everybody, don't throw your iPhone down on the street as you're running as fast as you can.
Jade: Did you hear that Apple uh, s. Supposedly flew in three, like seven thirty seven full iPhones like two days ago.
Tristra: Yeah, I heard I did read about that, so that was hilarious. It's like, that's funny.
Airlift all these little mirror babies into the US as fast as possible. [00:17:00] Jade, this has been a really fun news romp with you this week. Thank you, tro. All right. Likewise.
Dmitri: Glen Peoples has covered the business side of music for Billboard for over a dozen years. He focuses on financial topics, closely covers. Public companies earning reports and pours over annual reports and other financial disclosures. He also covers startups and new technologies, catalog acquisitions, global trends, the streaming business and market research in the music business.
As the number of publicly traded music companies exploded, Glen created the Billboard Global Music Index that. Measures the value of 20 publicly listed music companies he founded The Ledger, a weekly newsletter that focuses on financial and economic topics in the music business. And along with Jay Gilbert of Your Morning Coffee, Glenn also co-host Behind the Set List, a podcast that interviews.[00:18:00]
Musicians from Shania Twain to Daryl Hall about their concerts, songs, and their thoughts on aspects of the business. Glen is currently based in Los Angeles, but has also lived and worked in New York and Nashville, all the music cities. Hey Glen, welcome to the podcast.
Glenn: Thank you for having me. I haven't lived in Miami, the other music city.
Dmitri: That's a good one too. Then there's New Orleans. There's Austin. Yeah, there's here. Portland
Glenn: there. There are many, but the three main ones, let's say the three
Dmitri: biggies. I've been there. Three biggies. Well, I'm excited to have you here. It's been a while since you and I have caught up. I've been following you for as long as, longer than I think you were at Billboard.
You used to have a newsletter even before that, I believe, when you were in Nashville. And I've always appreciated how you have a special lens that you're looking out across the, uh, the music industry and music tech. And so I'm excited about your perspective and there's some stuff going on. In the music industry right now that I think needs a kind of like, let's pump the brakes a little and talk about what's going on.
What signs do you see, [00:19:00] Glen, that consolidation is happening in music and music tech specifically?
Glenn: There's, there are definitely signs everywhere. I would say the consolidation is not in music tech per se, and it, it depends on how you wanna define tech, right? Um, if you want a very expansive definition of.
Music and technology, then yeah, it's everywhere. But I think the main consolidation right now is with companies building out their label services, label ownership, and taking a more global position. So you see a lot of major labels in a lot of companies expanding to emerging markets. Companies expanding their label services.
We're at a time when labels are not only owning their recorded masters. Artists can. As I'm sure that you've had on here many times talking to people about the impact of [00:20:00] social media and TikTok, artists don't need labels as much as they used to. They can certainly go with a label if they want, and if they wanna be a global star, that's probably the best way to go.
But there are a lot of options. And, and I think the everybody, the majors, everybody sees that there's gonna be less ownership of the majors and record labels and more administration, more distribution, as there are more and more artists who want to get in on what few streaming royalties are out there for them.
So there's a lot of roll-ups, a lot of acquisitions. That are allowing companies to expand their services businesses and expand globally as well. That's where the growth is. The growth is not in United States and some other really mature markets. If you want high growth, you need to be in markets that are relatively low revenue right now in North Africa and Asia [00:21:00] especially.
That's where the high growth is and that's where the streaming growth and subscription growth is, is gonna be. And as these markets become more valuable, there will just be a bigger group of creators there to work with.
Dmitri: Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. When we talk about signs and consolidation, are there particular kind of rollups that were notable for you to say, oh yeah, this is what's happening?
Glenn: Downtown, which was required by Universal recently was rolled up a bunch of different companies. Song Trader is doing the same right now based around sync and writes, but I think there will always be companies that that, that go out and raise money and put together a roll up just to take all these startups that are out there.
Put 'em together and try to create more value together than they can create independently. I think downtown is especially good example [00:22:00] because I think they're gonna prove their worth when they're acquired by Universal. They have the right idea. If you have the right idea with a rollup,
yeah,
you're gonna get acquired.
That's, that's the goal. To make your money back. Song Trader, which does music licensing is putting together. A bunch of companies and there's just so much opportunity in music licensing right now. Look at YouTube. YouTube is the biggest, is it the biggest media platform in the world by advertising revenue.
And in the us, YouTube is, has the TV viewing time of, I think they're above Netflix now. That's a lot of user generated content. That's a lot of content that needs to license music. They need simple solutions. I. They might have some ai, generative AI solutions somewhere down the road. That's a group of people who wants to license music and needs something.
So I think music licensing has definitely come a long way, and as [00:23:00] there's more creations online, YouTube, and social media, there's just more opportunity than a license music. I think in a lot of ways, I don't think I'm a typical, typical consumer. Like in music. I can't compare myself. I don't think anybody who works in music is a typical music consumer, right?
You can't compare yourself to others and say, this is what I do. So this is what the average American does. And I think I'm pretty average when it comes to YouTube and I've watched a lot of YouTube and it's replaced TV viewing time for me, and I think that's pretty typical of. Americans of any age right now, and it's just a huge opportunity in music to license music to them.
Dmitri: On the first seven minutes of this conversation, I think you laid out two big trends around why these consolidations or these mergers and acquisitions have value. The one you mentioned, the kind of the roll up of label services or. Product services. I don't even know if they're not labels that are involved.
I don't know if they're label services, but this transformation of what it means to, [00:24:00] to be a distributor and what it means to be an artist without a record label as kind of justification downtown. Saw that coming. I. They wrapped up all these companies and then saw the value that there would be to something like a major record label that would want more of that part of the market.
And now you're talking about the synchronization and other licensing. That song traders specialize in justifying growth there because there's gonna be more and more need for licensing. So that's pretty cool how you mentioned those two, but you also painted the picture. That's what I think the Glen Peoples does is sees what those bigger market.
Possibilities are as a way to explain what's happening in the market and another thing that's happening. Consolidation is something that seems to happen cyclically in all kinds of verticals, all kinds of markets. And I'm curious, what does it say about the state of the music industry that there's we're in that cycle?
Right now,
Glenn: I think it says that it's the industry's in a transformation period that. [00:25:00] It's easier to buy than build, and it's faster to buy than build in most cases. When you look at where the industry is now, I think it was predictable many years ago, but for companies to start building internally all the services and all the products, they would need to get to the point where they are today.
I think usually they, they buy these companies rather than build them. And when you're a major music. You tend to buy your way to growth, and it's always been that way. They're always buying independent labels. That's where the real innovation tends to come from. Over the years, over the decades, majors buy smaller labels and add 'em to the conglomerate.
Now they're at a point where the growth is coming Internationally, the growth is coming from services not being a quote unquote traditional record label. Right. They're, it's hard to say. Traditional record labels really doesn't mean much anymore, does it? They, they do so many different things in so many different ways, but the [00:26:00] consolidation just says there's opportunity there.
They didn't build for it in the past, and so now they're buying their way to it. Interesting.
Dmitri: What do you think this wave of mergers and acquisitions will do to affect the larger music industry? I mean, you've talked about the justification for this need for these new types of services or these increased needs that built out.
These startups are rolled up, these startups that then get bought by bigger and bigger companies. But how do you think the, the music industry is gonna be affected by these roll-ups and these mergers?
Glenn: That's a very good question. I think the one aspect that many people are most concerned about is the loss of independent ownership and how that plays out in a practical sense.
It's hard to say. I can't say that, but I think there's a large portion of the music business that does not want their business or does not want the industry to be. Held in such a concentrated way and they want more diversity. They [00:27:00] don't want three companies owning such a huge share of label ownership and distribution, which is the situation we have now and it's more fragmented in publishing, but it's still a small handful of companies represent the majority of of publishing activity.
So people tend to want more diversity and tend to distrust. Large, powerful companies, and I think that goes well beyond music, right? Nobody wants a monopoly. Nobody wants a duopoly. People want options, and if you don't wanna go through a major music company. You just don't have as many options as you used to from a practical sense, what difference does it make?
I don't know. It's hard to say. It's, I think that's, there's some downstream effects maybe in licensing. Um, but then again, the majors tend to get better rates than the indies. And so if you're just concerned about your royalty rate, then be involved with a major, not an indie. I think the [00:28:00] consolidation is ultimately a good sign.
It means that there's money being pumped in to acquire companies, to roll them up. To invest in them and to build out the ideas that the founders originally had. And you know, most startups are built to be acquired. They're not built to run standalone forever. And so when there are acquisitions, when there's consolidations, I think it's the market working very well.
You want these companies to be acquired and the founders move on. And then we integrate the. Company or that product, and then you get as much value out of it as you can. Yeah, I think consolidation ultimately is pretty good. In the past. You can look at different waves of music business history where consolidation was there as a necessity.
In the two thousands, labels were consolidating distributors consolidated just because business was shrinking. And so you wanted to consolidate, you wanted to [00:29:00] eliminate as much back office, redundant expenses. You could, and that's how the labels got through the lean years. So there was, consolidation means different things at different times, I think.
Mm-hmm. And now with the business growing, it's certainly better than it was in the past. Consolidation was an ugly after effect of. Piracy and, and the download revolution and the migration to streaming, which as you overall revenues really shrunk over 15 years, and they've been growing for about 10.
Dmitri: So there were different moments of consolidation for different reasons.
In a way, in some cases, people were picking up the assets of a failed industry, and now they're leveraging technology or synergies in a successful industry.
Glenn: It's very successful industry. It's a good thing that there's money coming into startups. There's money coming into, uh, fund companies to acquire and roll up startups.
That's [00:30:00] all good and healthy, I think. And it certainly was not that in the past. And yeah, I think back to. Sony BMG merging, I think back to all the labels that merged and there are a lot of layoffs. That's the thing about consolidation that I should point out the, the downside of consolidation is somebody's always gonna get laid off.
And even in the good times, like now when a company acquires another company, they're not gonna keep everybody on board. So that's one downside of it, but I think it's consolidation is certainly much better when the market's growing than when it's shrinking.
Dmitri: Seems a little bit of what you're saying is consolidation is a inevitable outcome in certain cycles for a variety of industries and verticals, and sometimes it's under dire circumstances, sometimes it's under better circumstances, so, so at least now it's under, possibly under better circumstances, not for the people that get laid off necessarily, but for the market as a whole, for the industry.
Glenn: Yeah. I think as long as [00:31:00] there are ambitious people in finance, ambitious entrepreneurs, you're gonna have consolidation of some sort. Now some is more impactful than others. When you have Ticketmaster and Live Nation merging, that's a really impactful consolidation that might not pass muster right now with regulators actually in the Trump administration.
They probably let it through Biden, probably not. So these waves of consolidation also determined by who's sitting in the White House and what their opinion on market consolidation is. It seems like US regulators found it hard to say no to a lot of consolidation over the years until the Biden administration took a different stance.
We'll see how it turns out with Trump, but I don't see it continuing like it was for the previous four years.
Dmitri: Yeah. All right. We have to take a quick break and when we come back, let's get into the investment side of the market. We'll be right back.
AD: What makes news in music tech? Find out at our next seismic [00:32:00] activity online event taking place April 23rd at 10:00 AM Pacific, 1:00 PM Eastern, 6:00 PM UK time.
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Dmitri: Okay, we're back.
Glen, I wanted to ask you a little bit about the music tech investment side. I know you don't focus specifically on this, but you do have this broader market view in your coverage at Billboard. What's the trajectory of the music tech investment market the rest of this year, 2025 and into 2026? What's your Spidey sense telling you, or what observations do you have about what investment we'll see in music tech in terms of quantity and quality?
Glenn: I must say that Kristen Robinson at Billboard covers, uh, tech and especially where the [00:33:00] money's going and AI a lot better than I do. So when you say music tech investments, I think AI and I, I think that's where a lot of the money is going. I think there's an opportunity and AI and elsewhere, let's talk about ai.
There's gonna be AI in, in music creation, there's gonna be AI that helps creators create music. AI in digital audio workstations. So there's a lot of opportunity there, and I think that's gonna continue for years to come. What I hear from people is that AI can help, and not just ai, but there's a lot of opportunity to help music rights owners do their work more efficiently and cost effectively, and that we're now entering a period.
Where, and I wrote about this last week where just more basic fundamental blocking and tackling is gonna be important for rights owners. [00:34:00] The days, especially in the US of double digit streaming growth are over, and rights owners can get a lot of value outta their catalogs by. Doing things more efficiently.
So how the rights are managed, there's matching, there's a think, there's so many areas where technology and AI can help companies work more efficiently. You, you cut expenses and that increases the value of your catalog. Just as generating more revenue would, you can either make a buck or save a buck. And so I think in a lot of instances, there's gonna be opportunities and a great need to save a buck.
And it's really the unsexy stuff and the back office stuff a lot of the times. But that's where a lot of startups operate because there's a need for this stuff. There's a need to help companies. Work more efficiently.
Dmitri: Yeah, sure. As more revenue streams have opened up, there's more work for people to do.
And so over time the back office has grown quite a bit for [00:35:00] a lot of rights holding music and IP companies and artists and managers as well. There's a lot to do. So I could see where at some point you say all these tools have created these distribution and licensing and monetization opportunities, but it's also created more work.
So then other tools come in to, to help you accomplish all that work, I think is what you're getting at.
Glenn: Yes. Last time I was in downtown LA a few weeks ago, I saw these little igloo sized robots delivering food around, and I thought, those are very cool. Somebody's out of a job. But that's something to be said about doing work more efficiently.
And it's the same with music rights administration and just val, just value just getting value out of a catalog. There's a lot of work to be done, a lot of expense to be saved. I don't know if it's gonna necessarily put anybody outta work. Hopefully it'll allow them to work better, more efficiently and get more done.
Dmitri: I guess the question is what you do next if you're done looking through spreadsheets, because now machines do it for you, what are you gonna do after you're done [00:36:00] looking through spreadsheets? That's the, that's always the question, right? Somebody is gonna get put outta work. The question is whether that person will grab another role in something that's less tedious, something that only humans can do.
Glenn: Yeah, it is. It is the, as the music business is growing, I think it's a better time to get laid off. Ultimately. It's never a good time, but it was worse to get laid off 15 years ago. Yeah.
And
Glenn: I know a lot of people that I used to work with, they're out of music and kind of jobs shrivel up. And there are new openings, but not everybody's suited for those.
And so there are a lot of people used to work in music who are doing other stuff, and they might still wanna be in music if they had their choice. Hmm. So if you're gonna get laid off at any time and be replaced by some kind of automation, it seems like now might be a better time than. That's wave a validation.
We talked about a,
Dmitri: that's a hopeful spin. I haven't heard yet, Glen, so thanks for that. It's interesting you're talking about some of the kind of innovation but [00:37:00] also efficiencies that come with innovation. With innovation. How will the continued maturity of music streaming affect innovation and new ideas in the coming years?
What do you think's gonna happen next as music streaming? As the primary revenue driver in the music industry.
Glenn: Well, I know that, you know, this is no secret that music royalties or streaming royalties are not adequate for a lot of artists. That people are always, they always wanna supplement streaming with something else, and that could be touring.
Touring is not. From what I can see in what Billboard has reported, not as profitable as it used to be for all, but the top artists touring is an expensive proposition. Um, where else do you go to make money? And now the big talk is about superfan and superfan platforms and. I guess ultimately some kind of place where you build [00:38:00] communities where there's some kind of customer relations, management type of offering.
So I think that, you know, how that shakes out has yet to be seen in what's successful and what's not successful. We'll find out over the coming years, but I think there's some money going there and there's a lot of interest there because streaming for a lot of people is not enough money. They want more.
They want to get more out of every relationship they have. And I think it makes sense intuitively that you wanna get as much value as you can out of each fan as you can. And maybe you don't wanna have to hit the road for 12 months and with the cost of buses and gas today, what they are, maybe there's a better way to do it and.
We verse, which is owned by Hi, mainly K-Pop, but it's also used by a lot of other artists outside of K-Pop. I think that's a [00:39:00] template. You know, it is a place where fans gather. They buy digital goods, they buy live streams, they buy merchandise. And I've never been comfortable thinking that yes, the, the future is selling more t-shirts and or selling more vinyl and.
Super fans are mentioned, the super fan economy. It's selling more overpriced vinyl. I don't know if that's a good strategy. I think there's gotta be some different better ways to get value out of your fan base so that that's a priority because there's a demand for it. The problem is that there has to be platforms good enough that the consumers want to use.
One thing I've noticed over the years is the best startups. Always put the consumer first, and they don't put rights holders first. Think of what Spotify would've been if they built something like the Wrights owners did with their early streaming services. [00:40:00] The early streaming services didn't have the consumer in mind.
Spotify worked because they have the consumer in mind and they built a really good product that people wanted to use. So launching products just because rights owners and artists want it. It doesn't mean anything if you can't create something that consumers want to use. So that'll be the big test.
Dmitri: Let me ask you one more thing.
This has been great. There's, like I said, there's only one Glen peoples lens to look through, and this is, I think you, you really do add something from your analytical approach to the larger market. But I wanna ask you one more thing before we we wrap up. Are there any other segments of music tech that you're keeping an eye on, and why would those be?
Glenn: I wouldn't say I keep an eye on it, but I think I have very limited insight into hardware. But there's always so much innovation in music hardware and I did a, a podcast and we interviewed Howard Jones recently, and he was talking about a new contraption that he used for his album, and there's always new [00:41:00] technology that artists can use and that pushes music forward and allows them to be.
Creative in ways. It's not something billboard covers much. It's something I pay a little bit of attention to. It's not like I, I hang out at NAM every year and see what new instruments are out there. I know that there's always new instruments that are pushing creativity and I think that's, I think that's great.
It's, I think it's probably a lot more difficult to get funding for a hardware company than a software company. So that's the downside of if we're talking about startups and who gets funding, who doesn't. I spend most of my time looking at
more the
Glenn: financial side than the tech startups that are getting money.
I do talk to startups. I do, we do report on who's getting funding and who's getting acquired. More of my focus goes on, on what the, typically the bigger companies are doing, and I follow publicly traded companies really closely, and they're incredibly active and growing and acquiring, and it's a really interesting [00:42:00] time of transformation.
So if we're talking about funding, I, I tend to pay more attention to the, the companies that get a few hundred million in. Securitization funding than the startup who gets a few million, and there's a lot of that out there. There's a lot of securitization, there's a lot of big dollars changing hands, going into music catalogs, going into music companies.
It's a pretty exciting time. There's a lot going on
Dmitri: and it's interesting what you've done with the Billboard Global Music Index to actually track the. Increased number of publicly listed music companies when you started that. It does not seem like there's music IPOs every day now, though. It seems like there was a phase of that.
Will we see more coming down the road?
Glenn: Yeah, that's a good question. Song Trier was looking into an IPO this year. I think it was reported last year. The trend, I think, has been more companies going private than going public. There was a big spurt a few years ago. That's when Warner went public. That's when [00:43:00] Universal went public.
Some companies went public through SPACs Reservoir Media and Deezer. There certainly has been a slowdown. StubHub has filed for an IPO, I wouldn't put that StubHub exactly in the music category. I don't even think the filing said how much music they sell, how much music represents of their business compared to sports or other events.
If you wanna be generous, let, let's call StubHub a music company. So there's one endeavor went public few years ago, just went private, believe went public few years ago, went private last year. So I think going private is more common these days, but there's still a lot more public music companies than there were.
10 years ago. Spotify hasn't even been a public company for 10 years, and there's just been so many more that followed that. So I think there'll be more opportunities to add companies to that index. I think it's a, the index was, I just created that just to help people [00:44:00] follow the increasing number of.
Public music companies because there had been so many in just a short period of time.
And I
Glenn: think it's, I could add Avex in Japan, for example, to the list. Might be one I should add. That's a public company, but I think, I think I'll be taking off some over time too. Hypnosis went private, round hill went private.
So yeah, it's been shrinking and I think, I think, yeah, IPOs are not as common as they used to be. I think that was just a period of time where everybody was excited about streaming growth and Wall Street was taking notice and not a period of time. We're gonna replicate, I think anytime soon. So that's why you saw so many IPOs
Dmitri: I.
Glenn: Interesting.
Dmitri: Glenn, this has been great. I know, I know I pushed you on some music tech questions and you've referred us to Kristen Robinson who we'll have to have on the podcast. She's a great billboard writer. Definitely follow everything she writes as well. But again, really appreciate your perspective on things.
Looking at the larger market, and you've been doing it for a while, really helpful to have your [00:45:00] kind of analysis of the impact of consolidation is where the larger market's going over time. So thanks so much for joining me. Thanks for having me. Thanks for listening to Music Tectonics. If you like what you hear, please subscribe on your favorite podcast app.
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The Music Tectonics podcast goes beneath the surface of the music industry to explore how technology is changing the way business gets done. Weekly episodes include interviews with music tech movers & shakers, deep dives into seismic shifts, and more.
