Eight Revenue Multipliers of the Music Industry

What's your music catalog actually worth, and where is the industry still leaving money on the table? 

This week, Dmitri is joined by our chief writer Tristra Newyear Yeager for a deep dive into eight revenue multipliers that they believe can grow the total addressable market for music. Building on last month’s conversation with Eleanor about the rising tide thesis, Dmitri and Tristra break down each multiplier one by one: catalog valuation, revenue recovery, artist and label services, licensing, AI licensing, fan growth, fan revenue, and new music products. Along the way, we mention a ton of companies that are actually building in this space right now, so keep an ear out if you're looking for tools to grow your own business.

They talk about where catalogs are becoming an investable asset class, why the industry still has multiple black boxes leaking royalty revenue, and how distributors are evolving into full platforms for artists and labels. They also dig into the complicated economics of AI licensing, from training data to generation to the songs that come out the other end, and look at emerging companies working on attribution, revenue recovery, and fan monetization across the space.

This episode is part of the Rising Tide miniseries, tied to this year's Music Tectonics Conference theme, Rising Tide: Grow the Music, Grow the Value. The conference takes place October 27 to 29, 2026, in Santa Monica.

Companies mentioned: Royaltyport, Beatlibrary, Primordial, Legitary, Luminate, Chartmetric, Viberate, Mogul, MusicInfra, Shine-X, Claimy, Curve Royalty System, AIMS, ONErpm, Orphiq, beatBread, SongStats, Sound Credit, LyricFind, Soundstripe, feed.fm, Soundtrack Your Brand, Merlin Connect, ClicknClear, Musical AI, Vocana, Laylo, Symphony OS, Audience Republic, Rap Fame, OpenStage, Fave, Even, Patreon, Vinyl Bar in Shibuya, Hook, AudioShake, Kitbetter, Tiny Vinyl.

Listen wherever you pod your casts:

Looking for Rock Paper Scanner, the newsletter of music tech news curated by the Rock Paper Scissors PR team? Subscribe here to get it in your inbox every Friday!

Episode Transcript

Machine transcribed

[00:00:00] Tristra: Hey, this is Tristra Newyear Yeager, the chief writer at Rock Paper Scissors, and I am here with one of my favorite people in music tech, also my boss Dmitri. Dmitri.

[00:00:10] Dmitri: You get paid to say that. Hey, Tristra.

[00:00:12] Tristra: I do not get paid to say that. There is no, no little, extra bonus slipped in my paycheck.

I, uh, really love, talking about the music industry with you, Dmitri, and today we get to talk about something which is both, fun and challenging, which are the eight revenue multipliers. Now, you had a great conversation with Eleanor a couple episodes ago, sort of laying out this thesis about the rising tide, how we can grow the total addressable market for music.

And today, I get to dive in deeper into this tide with you and really break apart

[00:00:47] Dmitri: Mm-hmm.

[00:00:47] Tristra: Really dig into what are these eight multipliers? how can we think about them? Why are they important? All those great things. So, it's a more in-depth episode today. I'm excited.

[00:00:55] Dmitri: Fun.

Yeah. No, I'm grateful for the opportunity, and I can't think of anyone better I'd like to talk to about this.

[00:01:01] Tristra: Aw.

And I didn't pay him to say that, so So, I'm just gonna go... You know, you've laid out what these multipliers are, and I think we should just go through each one of them and talk a little bit about them.

So-

[00:01:13] Dmitri: I do. Before we dive in, Tristra- Yeah ... I do wanna say this is a hypothesis. You know?

[00:01:18] Tristra: Yeah.

[00:01:18] Dmitri: Um, people who've been listening to my interviews with some other, experts from the industry have heard me talk about the idea that tech doesn't have to be a disruptive force. It can be- Mm-hmm ... an additive force.

It can be part of this growing the market for music, et cetera. And I just was thinking through, like, because these are not the categories I think the industry talks about. the industry talks about things about, like, music streaming, super fandom, premium experiences, remix apps, et cetera.

So I wanted to slice it in such a way that felt like, what is the functional contribution to the music industry in terms of growing revenue? So they're sliced a little bit differently. So I might have gotten them wrong, and actually I'd love to hear from our community and our listeners if they're like, "Wait a second, those two go together," or, "You're totally missing something else," or, "Yeah, this is irrelevant."

Like, I'd, I'd love to know if, like, we haven't quite got the eight multipliers right. So I just wanted to put that disclaimer out.

[00:02:07] Tristra: Yeah.

[00:02:07] Dmitri: I want that feedback. But I do think it's a helpful framework for having the conversation.

[00:02:12] Tristra: I think it's great to try to start to classify things and have a working theory.

 well, first off, let's talk about the, one of the ones that has been most in the news with the biggest dollar values, and that is catalog value. So, how this very interesting transition in the past few years, of, you know, catalogs especially of, well-established legacy artists and stars, uh, suddenly becoming what you could call an asset class.

 so suddenly people are like, investors say, "Hey, this is something we can invest in. It has a return that we can, you know, predict to some extent." you know, uh, how, what... You know, is, is music a different kind of asset class than other investment vehicles? Or can we find creative new ways to manage these assets?

What do you think?

[00:02:54] Dmitri: We're opening up a can of worms right from the start because there are people- ... which is great. I think it's important. Let's go there. Because people have varying perspectives on should we be talking about the value of catalogs? Should we be talking about songs and creative works as assets?

[00:03:08] Tristra: Mm.

[00:03:09] Dmitri: And I, you know, I can s- try to answer some of the questions you just asked in terms of like, is this a new investable asset? Um, why is it different? Is it reliable? Why is there growth? And all those kinds of things. But I think first we just have to just put it on the table and say, "Look, there's a lot of folks in the music industry who don't wanna think of songs or creativity or catalogs as assets.

They don't wanna talk about it as a commodity." You know, one of the things that you hear the types of big money and investment that's coming into the music industry say is, "Songs and song catalogs act differently than other commodities. They are different than gold and oil. They're different than AI stock or tech platforms or-"

[00:03:49] Tristra: Pork bellies.

[00:03:49] Dmitri: or pork bellies. That's right. but I do think it's important to talk about it, even if it's painful or if it starts to feel like we're veering away from the creative essence and orientation of why most people are in music and create music. It's bringing a lot of money and interest into our industry, where we've had this struggle with devaluation of music because it was given away for free, because we, we're supposed to do it for the promotion, for the aspiration, instead of do it because we make a living at it.

[00:04:19] Tristra: Yeah.

[00:04:20] Dmitri: And so I think it's important to look at those big movements of money, because if you're infu... Even if it is an exit for an artist, an estate or a celebrity artist, a legacy artist who's like, "Well, this is how I finally get to retire or pay my, heirs or, you know, uh, make sure my family's taken care of or put my kids through college," or, you know, what- whatever it is, it does infuse money into the industry.

So I just wanna say, like, I get the controversy of treating it as an asset, but I think it's important to understand. The other thing that the... One of the reasons I emphasize catalog value in this tech that optimizes the industry growth is because I think if you don't know where you stand, if you don't know what the value of your music is, it's very hard to measure success and growth beyond it as well.

So these same tools that we might say are catalog valuation tools, they're also KPIs. They're key performance indicators for how your music or how your catalog or how your label or how your publisher or how your artists are doing as well. So I just wanna, wanna put that out there. Now, I can get to your questions if you want.

[00:05:21] Tristra: Yeah. So, you know, how can we manage these assets in creative new ways? I think that is the big question, right? 'Cause we're looking at artists who've been around for a while, right? how do you build a new generation of fans? how do you make sure that artist's, vision and sound translate into new formats and new ways of engagement?

[00:05:39] Dmitri: Right.

[00:05:40] Tristra: and what are the companies that are helping create this expansion for us?

[00:05:44] Dmitri: Right. And so everything you just said is almost throughout all of our eight multipliers. So we'll get into some of those, as we go through the categories. But in terms of like the role of technology in helping understand catalog value and then hopefully growing catalog value from there-

[00:05:57] Tristra: Mm-hmm

[00:05:58] Dmitri: I think there's streaming audit platforms, there's catalog valuation tools that help you actually look at what do you have here and what is its projected revenue. royalty revenue forecasting tools that don't have to be used by big catalog acquisition companies or publishers necessarily. the royalty revenue forecasting tools could be used by artists and managers and labels as well.

And then there's this other category that might not, on face value, seem like it falls in the catalog valuation side, which I call metadata optimization. There's companies-

[00:06:30] Tristra: Mm

[00:06:30] Dmitri: ... that are sort of helping you understand what music do you even have? Like what are-

[00:06:35] Tristra: Yeah

[00:06:35] Dmitri: ... what are, you know, what are the... how do the publishing and the, recording masters fit together so that you can see what ownership is there or, yeah, how much of it you control or administer.

But also like what's the BPM and what's the lyrical content and all that kind of stuff, because you can start to use those things to evaluate, oh, is this stuff good for sync or is this good for streaming or is this good for training or et cetera.

[00:07:01] Tristra: Yeah.

[00:07:01] Dmitri: So there's these big categories.

Now you asked specifically about what types of companies are we talking about. I've heard of at least four different companies, like music tech startups that are doing stuff in catalog valuation. Some of them don't only do catalog li- valuation. Some of them will fit into the other categories too. But if you look at companies like Royalty Port, Beat Library, those companies do a variety of things, but I, I know from talking to their founders that they give catalog valuation tools there too, and they can...

S- the reason I say they do other stuff is we're gonna get into revenue recovery. They're also-

[00:07:34] Tristra: Mm-hmm

[00:07:34] Dmitri: ... involved with revenue recovery. But they're, they're, they-

[00:07:37] Tristra: Yeah. There's

a lot of overlap-

[00:07:38] Dmitri: There's- ...

[00:07:38] Tristra: between

[00:07:38] Dmitri: those two fields. Right. Like if you, if you wanna know how valuable your catalog is, you might wanna see what songs you have and how they're doing right now and where you're not collecting enough revenue.

So you get kind of-

[00:07:47] Tristra: Mm-hmm

[00:07:47] Dmitri: ... a mix of those together. But the people that are like, "Hey, should I buy this catalog? Should I sell this catalog? What's the value of buying or selling this catalog?" They wanna just maybe focus on catalog value too. I've also heard of one called Primordial, primordial.net.

[00:08:00] Tristra: Yeah.

[00:08:00] Dmitri: Legitary. those are four of the companies that you hear about a lot. Interestingly There's a big company that, the big catalog companies use to get the data, and that's Luminate. And so they're-

[00:08:11] Tristra: Mm-hmm

[00:08:11] Dmitri: ... you wouldn't necessarily think of them as a music tech startup, but a lot of people are looking at the data that's sort of like people think of Luminate as having the, master record of how songs are doing, um, as well.

And so there's a, you know, you can look at a lot of other companies that provide either streaming data or, social data, audience building, audience size data as well. So you've got the, Chartmetrics of the world, the Vibrates, things like that, that you wouldn't necessarily thi- although actually I think Vibrate may ha- may have a catalog value tool now as well.

So some of them-

[00:08:41] Tristra: Yeah

[00:08:41] Dmitri: ... start off with like what are your analytics and insights around how songs or artists are doing? and then over time they might start to see patterns and be like, "Oh, we could actually help you understand the value of the catalog too."

[00:08:52] Tristra: And just to jump off and extend the discussion a little bit into our next revenue multiplier, which is revenue recovery.

Um, something that I think is near and dear to the hearts of many, many people in the music industry. and, you know, Dmitri, where do you think the biggest leaks in the pipes are when it comes to revenue?

[00:09:11] Dmitri: Wow, we are-- You're pulling no punches on this one, I have to say. All the-

[00:09:13] Tristra: Yeah

[00:09:13] Dmitri: ... all the dirty little secrets here.

Um-

[00:09:16] Tristra: Hard, hard questions for the music industry here.

[00:09:18] Dmitri: I mean, there's... I would say there's kinda like three categories of leaks, in a sense. Mm-hmm. Um, I think, one of them is, probably we just don't have a great system for tracking all the ways music's getting used, licensed, played- Yeah ... heard. And so you, you've heard about the black box.

People say the black box, and I always think, "I think there's more than one black box," because it's not all just performance rights royalties. I mean, you could also-

[00:09:44] Tristra: Yeah

[00:09:44] Dmitri: ... say what happens when labels do deals with platforms and artists don't see any income from it, even though the artists created the music and their contracts don't necessarily cover equity in platforms that you give a blanket license to or a pre-cleared license to.

[00:09:58] Tristra: Yeah.

[00:09:58] Dmitri: So, there's probably a lot of different places out there where there's leaks in value. Now, if a PRO or a major record label is getting paid, that's still part of the total value of the music industry. But then there's these intricacies about, but are the artists getting paid or the songwriters getting paid, or the right artist or the right songwriters getting paid?

 there's some leaks there. the buckets have leaks that lead into other buckets, and the question is, did they get to the right bucket? Um-

[00:10:24] Tristra: Yeah ...

[00:10:25] Dmitri: but e- but even-

[00:10:26] Tristra: And especially matching comes to mind when we talk about those, those struggles. That so matching the composition and the, um-

[00:10:33] Dmitri: Recording

[00:10:34] Tristra: recording side-

[00:10:34] Dmitri: Right

[00:10:35] Tristra: ... is still a huge challenge for the industry. As much as you know, people put a ton of effort into it, it's still, still quite a thorn in everyone's side.

[00:10:43] Dmitri: Exactly. So, you know, music, they say music's like water, right? We're paying for it like a utility now. but it also... It, it's not like water 'cause it seeps through the air.

It's very hard to track where it's being used, et cetera, as well. So I think ca- you know, the first category of where it's leaking is just we don't have a great system for knowing all the ways in which music is being used-

[00:11:04] Tristra: Mm-hmm

[00:11:04] Dmitri: ... to know... I mean, we talk about attribution on the AI side. There's just attribution in music in general.

Digital music and attribution. When you sold a physical product, at least you knew that certain songwriters and certain performing artists and certain recording artists and producers were credited for being on that physical album, and you could count-

[00:11:24] Tristra: Mm-hmm

[00:11:24] Dmitri: ... how many got sold, how many got broken, and how many got returned.

There was at least some quantifiable thing. Very hard to do now with all the different fragments of the way digital music works. That's a, that's a fir- the first category is just like our systems are not that great at tracking everything. Music is not just like water, it's kinda like air. It's like, "Oh, did you see that air?

Oh, look at that. Count that air. Count that air over there." Music like air. but then I think the second category is, we're kind of losing opportunities to charge people for music because the licensing infrastructure isn't there. So in the first case, music like air, we have an infrastructure, but it's really hard to count.

It's really hard to measure. But then there's other new use cases where music gets used and we don't even have the pipes in place. You know, like even the air-

[00:12:11] Tristra: Yeah

[00:12:11] Dmitri: ... seeping out of the pipes, we haven't even built the pipes for new use cases of music. So I think that's a huge, big area. And I think the third area would probably have to do with, things that haven't even started yet.

So like that category is like things we know about, like gaming and social media. Like we're losing revenue opportunity there 'cause the pipes aren't quite right there. It's not like we understand exactly. It's like, "Oh, the TikTok agreements have now expired. We have to renegotiate from the beginning."

But it's not necessarily like we're tracking every use. It's more like, "Oh, how much is the advance gonna be here?" And then there's the emerging stuff like the AI and so forth, where I think, we need to solve it soon or else it's gonna be even worse.

[00:12:51] Tristra: Cool. A cheery, cheery note.

[00:12:53] Dmitri: Yeah.

[00:12:53] Tristra: Um, so what are some companies that come to mind in this category?

[00:12:56] Dmitri: So I guess, like, if we think about companies, I'm thinking I go with categories within the category. Royalty gap finders, rights matching and recognition engines, collection societies have their own technology that I think is probably useful to think about, publishing administration and royalty platforms, royalty accounting software, those kinds of things.

Each of those, some of them are specifically focused on revenue recovery. Some of them are just on, like, how do you track the flow of money? But in the process of tracking the flow of money, if you get better and more efficient at it, you are recovering revenue as well. So I think those are the categories.

I mean, you know, we, you and I have talked about Mogul as one. Um-

[00:13:36] Tristra: Mm-hmm

[00:13:36] Dmitri: ... you know, you go straight to their website and you can type in your artist name or Spotify URL, and they're gonna start looking for what music's owed to you. Um, so they're-

[00:13:45] Tristra: Yeah

[00:13:46] Dmitri: ... kind of scanning through to see if there's any registration gaps and uncollected royalty, making sure you've submitted all your registrations to the PROs, to the MLC, to SoundExchange, and then help you get paid.

Uh, make sure, make sure that anything that's missing can actually get fixed as well, so. Then there's, some that are working at even more of a bigger, B2B scale, like MusicInfra-

[00:14:07] Tristra: Mm-hmm

[00:14:08] Dmitri: ... which is really looking on both sides of the market to help them. I don't know, Tristra, do you wanna talk a little bit about how MusicInfra-

[00:14:14] Tristra: Yeah

[00:14:14] Dmitri: is involved with revenue recovery?

[00:14:16] Tristra: Well, yeah. It's especially, I think, on the publishing side where, you know, data is... w- where there's just a lot of data to track, and you need more, like, more nimble systems to handle it. the way they've set things up, because they are sort of the newest player on the field, makes it a lot easier for people to just, like, drag and drop, like, terabytes of catalog information.

And then, , they have s- you know, algorithms, et cetera, set up that will help you find where the problems are and where, you know, unlike the sort of previous category when we're talking about like, say, auto-tagging or AI-based tagging, this is more, you know, really taking, a close look at the data and trying to fill in the gaps so that we can plug those holes in the pipes.

[00:14:57] Dmitri: Yeah. Yeah. And then, you know, like they're, they're working at a massive scale.

[00:15:02] Tristra: Mm-hmm

[00:15:02] Dmitri: ... there's some other companies that I've come across that focus on something very specific. It kind of reminds me of the days when there were all these companies popping up to help with YouTube monetization-

[00:15:11] Tristra: Yeah

[00:15:11] Dmitri: multi-channel networks, where you could say you've got a whole catalog of music and you need to just go and make sure you're claiming every time the music gets used on YouTube so that as the primary rights holder, you're getting the ad rev share payment for every time that music gets used. So there's been a bunch of companies like that.

It feels like a lot of the music distribution companies have sort of taken on that role now as well. So if you have a distributor, you can opt into their YouTube monetization side. But there's also little, , other things that are popping up. Every time a new, revenue stream sort of becomes sizable enough, you get some startup that says, "Hey, we'll help you make sure you do that."

You know, SoundExchange obviously is helping with, collecting on the, non-interactive services-

[00:15:57] Tristra: Mm-hmm

[00:15:58] Dmitri: ... and SiriusXM, and-

[00:16:00] Tristra: Mm-hmm

[00:16:00] Dmitri: ... if they had it their way someday that it would be radio too, but neighboring rights. And there's a company called Shine-X that helps make sure that you're registered properly and collecting properly on SiriusXM through SoundExchange.

So, so like that's a very-

[00:16:12] Tristra: Wow

[00:16:12] Dmitri: ... specific example. I've s-

[00:16:13] Tristra: Yeah

[00:16:14] Dmitri: ... I've seen, a company called Claimie that's got, I saw them get a, an investment not too long ago, collect the full value of your publishing, the AI-powered administration service enabling rights owners to scale their business instead of chasing royalties.

Curve Royalty system is one that, uh-

[00:16:29] Tristra: Mm-hmm

[00:16:29] Dmitri: ... recently bec- I think became independent from the whole Downtown meets Virgin world.

[00:16:34] Tristra: Yeah. Yeah. in that sort of deal with the EU regulators.

[00:16:37] Dmitri: Yeah. So there's a lot of other companies that either handle that kind of royalty back office stuff or that go after a particular type of revenue stream and help you clean things up from there.

 I didn't even mention, I think, you know, this isn't really in revenue recovery, it might be more in the catalog valuation, but I just, I mentioned the idea that there's these metadata... Well, metadata cleanup companies too, and I was thinking of AMES API that helps you just un-

[00:17:01] Tristra: Yeah, exactly

[00:17:02] Dmitri: understand what music you have, whether it's for-

[00:17:05] Tristra: Yeah

[00:17:05] Dmitri: ... pitching to sync or whether it's for cleaning up metadata so you can see if there's any revenue recovery there. There's some, interesting ways you can use tools like AMES to, to do that as well.

[00:17:16] Tristra: Yeah. So we've already started talking a little bit about one of the biggest categories in the music industry, and one of the first, I think as, as you mentioned recently, one of the first sort of technological innovation sites, especially in regards to, like, distributing artists who were not signed to a label.

So let's talk about artist and label services, AKA part of the industry formerly known just as distro.

[00:17:39] Dmitri: Yeah.

[00:17:40] Tristra: Right? 'Cause it's not just about distribution anywhere anymore. Distribution's become a bit of a commodity, and a lot of these services are really offering far more tailored or, you know, carefully, crafted services to artists at a bunch of different levels in their career.

[00:17:54] Dmitri: That's right. And in some ways, this artist label services distribution category could cut across a lot of the other things that we have on this list as multipliers because they're kind of like the front door for either independent artists or independent labels to actually get into the market, to get onto streaming services, et cetera.

But they're also, you know, some of them are doing deals with Roblox, or some of them have a sync pitching function, or some of them have new types of revenue streams, et cetera. So in some ways, they'll go across all that. And, you know, if, the question was what technology categories help grow the market for music, it seems a little bit weird to say distributors because the big growth of the independent sector through distribution has already been happened.

Like, it's no longer about, oh, here's a new technology that can do a thing. Now they can keep doing it better. But I do think as the front door for many independent labels and many independent artists, it's important to remember that that increased access is what created the kind of musical scale that does give us an opportunity to grow genres, niches, and fans over time.

So there's just the category of distribution itself, even though a lot of people say it's been commodified and the price of paying for distribution has come down, it's become harder and harder for new distributors to enter the market.

[00:19:08] Tristra: Mm-hmm.

[00:19:09] Dmitri: But it's these-- It's almost funny. While we're talking about building out premium music streaming services, super apps for the fan, distributors are kind of becoming super apps for artists and labels.

And so all-

[00:19:21] Tristra: Yeah

[00:19:21] Dmitri: ... these other pieces come in. but I'd be curious to... I mean, you know, when you talk to a distributor like ONErpm, they're building an entire tech platform so that you can scale not only as an artist, but that artist becomes a label. That label becomes somebody who starts not just putting out their own stuff, but signing other artists.

And there's, like, this fractal growth component where a solid tech-savvy distributor like ONErpm, who is a Rock Paper Scissors client, so I know a little bit about them, and full disclosure. But they're thinking like, "Hey, we didn't just help your artist build their business. We're not just gonna help your label build your business.

We can help a label have sub-labels and build their business." There's all this other technology that comes in that leads to growth and optimization that's not just catalog valuation, revenue recovery, but actually how do you do these deals? How do you structure enterprise-level management of this fractal growth distribution of distribution, you know?

It just gets real complex.

[00:20:18] Tristra: Yeah.

[00:20:18] Dmitri: But I'd, I'd be curious to hear what other companies come to mind when you think of the artist and label services category too, 'cause I think we can flesh it out beyond distributors.

[00:20:25] Tristra: Well, I think tech has let us, has let, you know, us as an industry break down what usually was packed and bundled into a traditional deal with a label, for example, into separate functions.

So, for instance, you've got things like, Orphic, which is with a Q. And they have a specially, harnessed AI agent that will do something like, say, lay out a release strategy for you with dates that will shift if you, if you miss a deadline, and do other cool things like suggest interesting brand opportunities based on your, visual assets, on your music, on how you talk about yourself, et cetera.

So, you know, that, for instance, is like something that I think a, a label or management company would've helped an artist with in the past. Um, you also have folks like beatBread, who are... And other advanced companies, there's a couple of them out there that, basically play the sort of, for lack of a better word, banking function of what a label used to do.

So giving people advances based on past performance, um, and projection of future streams. and that's kind of an amazing tool that an independent artist can use. So, uh, and last but not least, there are places like SongStats or Chartmetric, that look at very specific music-centric usage, followers, social, media, data and help, uh, suggest viable, , future paths for an artist.

So there's a lot of ways that if, you know, an artist or, an artist who ma- I mean, someone who manages a, an artist who's maybe on the emerging side or, independent can really use a lot of these tools to do many of the things that a major label would've done. and, uh, you know, major label folks, you may be like, "Yeah, we still do it better."

That's totally, totally possible, valid. However, the fact that someone can do some of these things was not possible in some cases as recently as, like, seven years ago.

[00:22:13] Dmitri: Or

[00:22:14] Tristra: last year. So there's been a-- Yeah, yeah, or last year.

[00:22:16] Dmitri: Yeah.

[00:22:16] Tristra: There has been so much progress in this realm to give people all sorts of tools that they can use to analyze their career and find a, strategic path forward as an artist.

[00:22:25] Dmitri: I, I love that you gave that diverse set of examples, Tristra, because yeah, you know, when I first put it on there just thinking, "Hey, we have to credit distributors," but when we expand it out to kind of artist label services, and really, like, back office, the first two categories that we did, catalog valuation and revenue recovery, could kind of feel like back office for big companies.

We get in here and it feels like back office for individual artists or smaller teams or managers, where it, it's like, well, how does that grow the market? How does that tech grow the market? It allows you to manage so much more. It allows you to track on all the revenue streams and all the metadata, all the marketing tools, all the sync opportunities.

You know, you take something like s- something as simple as sound credit, where you're actually tracking splits the studio. All of a sudden you have less fights later, you have more collaboration-

[00:23:13] Tristra: Mm-hmm

[00:23:14] Dmitri: ... you have more productivity, more creativity, which then optimizes for more revenue as well. So I really love how you've spread that out with more diversity, and I like that you mentioned Orphic because they...

I remember first hearing about them on stage at Music Tectonics at the Universal Music Group startup bootcamp, where U-

[00:23:31] Tristra: Yeah

[00:23:31] Dmitri: ... UMG allowed some startups to kind of get on mic to pitch directly and get feedback immediately from UMG folks, which was super cool to see something that could be used by independents also being heard, from the label perspective.

So I'm glad you shouted them out.

[00:23:45] Tristra: Yeah. Another really interesting area that, you know, speaking of independent artists, that has opened up, for independent artists are licensing opportunities. And, you know, obviously some of the biggest licensing deals are done by majors and by people who dedicate their entire lives to, to figuring out how to license music, fairly.

But there's been a lot of, fascinating progress with people who, you know, for, for people who normally would be shut out of some of these deals. So, I wanna talk for a second about that essential part of the music industry. I'm wondering, you know, are there new, directions that licensing is heading that you feel is going to, uh, grow the TAM, Dmitri?

 you know, are there things that are changing music licensing, like the way we listen to music or use music?

[00:24:28] Dmitri: Um, I think there are endless opportunities for music licensing because I think n- I know, I know we talked about revenue recovery and how things are broken and where the leaks are and stuff like that, but I think everyone's thinking about the maturation of digital music.

Just the fact that music can be shared and transferred so much more easily now than shipping physical product to somebody to listen to-

[00:24:51] Tristra: Yeah

[00:24:51] Dmitri: ... and, and figure out and there's so much metadata and optimization of understanding what's in a song, a recording. And, you know, it goes from everything from sync, like just having more opportunities for sync now that television and film and, other types of video content are just so ubiquitous that it's not like there's only four studios to pitch to, to potentially-

[00:25:15] Tristra: Mm-hmm

[00:25:15] Dmitri: get your music heard by a massive audience. to social media video, specifically micro sync too, you know, , all the social media platforms that have video and advertising components, they also have libraries where you can have pre-cleared music to put into your, either your organic social videos or your advertising.

I think that's still a huge growth area. We're still-

[00:25:39] Tristra: Mm-hmm

[00:25:40] Dmitri: ... figuring out how advertising works best for social media viewers and fans and music's role in that. We had, Graham Harrison from, Blue Sound Professional, who works in physical spaces where music's played, talking about, on the, on the podcast not too long ago, talking about how the combination of visual with audio is so much more powerful than any of them individual as well.

So there's really-

[00:26:04] Tristra: Mm-hmm

[00:26:05] Dmitri: ... a financial value to putting music into videos that I think will continue to grow. There's obviously all the fitness and wellness apps. There's automotive, there's airplanes. I mean, I've seen a battle between YouTube and Spotify on Delta Airlines to which- ... which one do you get to test out when you're in your flight on the way across the country or, or something like that.

 and there's also new and specialized DSPs that are emerging, digital streaming providers that might have, a smaller use case for a smaller catalog to license as well. There's the interactive stuff. There's new types of licenses that have to be negotiated around the interactive stuff. And then if we really wanna get crazy, I'm probably leaving some stuff out here, but if we really wanna get crazy, there's sort of like the combination of licensing music along with NIL, name, image, and likeness, where you start to say-

[00:26:55] Tristra: Yeah

[00:26:56] Dmitri: what new types of experiences could we license music to I mean, there's gaming, but then there's-

[00:27:02] Tristra: Yeah

[00:27:02] Dmitri: ... there's holograms and beyond as well.

[00:27:04] Tristra: It feels, it feels like the name, image, likeness h- is, you know, is sort of really a bleeding edge right now, and there's a bunch of sort of piecemeal, court proceedings and filings and et cetera, et cetera, from very large artists like Taylor Swift.

 but there is... Like, you can just imagine, tech allowing that to trickle down to everybody, and that would be an interesting es- you know. Add, add like things like facial recognition ubiquity to that. Like, where are we going with this?

[00:27:28] Dmitri: Yeah.

[00:27:28] Tristra: But it definitely will be an interesting development and could have, uh, the capacity to expand, the music, uh, total addressable market.

So let's name a few of the big players in licensing. I mean, there's specialty licensors who do one type of content like LyricFind.

[00:27:44] Dmitri: Yeah.

[00:27:44] Tristra: Um, and, you know, then there's people-

[00:27:46] Dmitri: I think, I think

LyricFind proves that there's so much growth possibility for-

[00:27:50] Tristra: Yeah

[00:27:50] Dmitri: ... for licenses. I know they've been around for a while now, but basically lyrics were an expense.

They weren't like an asset you could sell, right? You,

[00:27:58] Tristra: Yeah

[00:27:58] Dmitri: ... that makes no sense, right? Lyrics are part of the song, so they're not an expense. But if, you know, like if you print lyrics into your booklet in a, in vinyl or cassette or or CD, like it's like, "Oh, well," you have to decide, "Do I wanna spend the extra money to let people see the lyrics?"

But LyricFind went and said, "Wait a second, there's a revenue opportunity here. There's all these websites popping up that want to share the lyrics with people. Now that booklets are going away, people wanna find the lyrics somewhere. They're advertising against it." And they went out and did deals with all the publishers on one end, and then they started offering these licenses to websites, apps, music streaming services, car companies, et cetera, where every place you might wanna see the lyrics displayed, you can, license it and actually do it legally, pay the rights holders, et cetera.

And then on top of that, now they, bought the company Rotor, so they also can go to record labels now and say, "Hey, if you don't have lyric videos, you're missing out on a revenue opportunity. We can help you create lyric videos at scale." And so that's another new revenue stream for some of these companies that didn't have the bandwidth or the technology to take an entire label's catalog worth of songs and create lyric videos.

[00:29:06] Tristra: Yeah. And then there, a sort of the micro sync/commercial music, world like Soundstripe, Feed.fm, Soundtrack Your Brand. and, you know, the micro sync, it feels like it's one of those things that, we'll get these crops of startups that come around and all are trying to do something with sync.

 and someday someone's gonna crack it, but it feels like it's still one of those areas that's hasn't quite come together. I think that's a big potential area if, the tech and, usage patterns could align.

[00:29:34] Dmitri: Right. The s- the Soundstripes of the world are really interesting 'cause they're trying to, always trying to decide, "Am I pitching to traditional TV and film?

Am I pitching to advertising agencies or am I going to creators?" A lot of them go to creators-

[00:29:45] Tristra: Mm-hmm

[00:29:45] Dmitri: ... like YouTube and Instagram and TikTok creators and say, "Oh, you should license music. You don't have to worry about it getting taken down," et cetera. And those creators are just really hard to wrangle. But you mentioned a couple other brands which I think are totally different categories.

Feed is a specialist at licensing music functionally into fitness and wellness apps. Mm-hmm. And providing curation as well as some technology tools for that curation. So that to me is, like, a really cool growth area that I wanna see grow even more.

[00:30:13] Tristra: Yeah.

[00:30:13] Dmitri: You know, whether, they're existing fitness studios or fitness apps that are working with Feed or somebody's building their own wellness or fitness app, I think there's cool opportunities for new licensing revenue there.

And then you mentioned Soundtrack, formerly called Soundtrack Your Brand, totally different thing. It's like a Spotify for venues, retail, et cetera. It's like if you're a business- Yeah ... and you wanna play music. What's cool about that is they have curation tools especially for those types of settings that are different than what you might do inside of, Spotify.

They also-

[00:30:42] Tristra: And

[00:30:43] Dmitri: ... are licensed properly.

[00:30:44] Tristra: And just to specify, the curation tools are things like, language. you can basically block certain terms, words, or subjects. so if you have a retail space, you don't suddenly have F-bombs being dropped

[00:30:54] Dmitri: Right ...

[00:30:55] Tristra: from the speakers.

[00:30:55] Dmitri: Right. And, and then, you know, like, just looking at what the potential size of that market is, how many stores or public places are playing music and they're not using the right license?

Something like Soundtrack-

[00:31:07] Tristra: Mm-hmm

[00:31:07] Dmitri: ... can help you make sure you have licenses with all the PROs and you're having the right kind of licenses to use music.

[00:31:12] Tristra: Yeah.

[00:31:12] Dmitri: I wanna shout out one other specific thing, which is Merlin has something called Merlin Connect, which is specifically to help startups and music tech companies license music, from independents, which is super cool.

And, and we could go on. We mentioned NIL.

[00:31:28] Tristra: There's a lot of them. Click and Clear, you know, for sports and like there's all sorts of really interesting specialty licensing startups.

[00:31:33] Dmitri: And there's some that are focused on medical too. Like, there's literally some who've-

[00:31:36] Tristra: Yeah

[00:31:36] Dmitri: ... gotten clearance, so that you could actually get a prescription for music.

I think we all need a prescription for music- That's amazing ... but it's a cool new licensing thing that actually has- ... medical functional support.

[00:31:47] Tristra: So speaking of licensing, one of the biggest and sorest spots right now, when it comes to licensing is related to data that's used to either train or maintain an AI model.

Um, I mean, this is a tough one because the rules are still being determined in the courts, and in some ways copyright, people on many sides of this issue, whether you're arguing for fair use or you're arguing that artists need to be compensated differently, which I've, was on, on the other end of the spectrum, is that, you know, we don't really know if copyright is going to be the right container to hold the concept of ownership, that a creative person has when their data is taken and used to train a model or used in inference in maintaining a model.

So, and what i- what is the output? Can the output then be licensed and be copyrightable or, licensable, monetizable? So, I mean, I'm not gonna m- uh, talk about a can of worms. We're not gonna totally pull out all these giant night crawlers, but, how, you know, if we get licensing right, I think there's some theories that this could grow to be as big as streaming when it comes to revenue source.

What do you see there? What are you thinking about?

[00:32:56] Dmitri: So, there's so many possibilities here, and it's hard to say, like, these are the companies that are solving this right now, because some of them are the the generative AI platforms that have to solve some really hard things. Some of them took some shortcuts to try to bring it to market without- Ahem

solving some of those problems Suno. Um- ... but, you know, I do believe there are some models that haven't even been imagined yet, but I think it's really important-

[00:33:22] Tristra: Mm-hmm

[00:33:22] Dmitri: ... for us to look at all the ways in which people are using tech to start thinking about AI licensing, because that's what actually allows for the monetization of the rights of music, whether it's the composition or the recording.

There's also some NIL stuff, name, image, likeness stuff, that's I think involved with AI too, because when you prompt somebody's name, you're not just using their music. You're actually now talking about their style. You're talking about-

[00:33:46] Tristra: Yeah

[00:33:47] Dmitri: ... their voice, and their stylistic likeness is relevant to this too.

So there, I think there's gonna be licensed AI music training platforms that we should be looking at here, 'cause if they're licensed, then they're, creating a revenue stream for the music industry. And I also wanna emphasize-

[00:34:02] Tristra: Yeah

[00:34:02] Dmitri: ... that There's-- I think there's two forms of payment that need to happen with generative AI.

One of them is on the training side.

[00:34:09] Tristra: Mm-hmm.

[00:34:09] Dmitri: Yes, you have permission to train on this and build our model. And then one of them is on... Well, maybe there's three, 'cause then there's the generation side, like the person who's using it. This is probably built into the same license, but the person who's using an AI platform is saying, "Hey, I want a song that sounds like Tristra but is reggae and, doesn't have any didgeridoo," or some-something like that.

Then all of a sudden, you know-

[00:34:31] Tristra: Hey,

hey, I love my didgeridoo.

[00:34:32] Dmitri: But-

[00:34:33] Tristra: You're not getting rid of it

[00:34:34] Dmitri: ... but, so that's, that's kind of the front end. The training and generation is kind of like one end of where I think-

[00:34:38] Tristra: Yeah ...

[00:34:38] Dmitri: money can be exchanged for the use of that. But then there's the back end. then Dmitri takes Tristra's, regenerated song-

[00:34:45] Tristra: Didgeridoo

[00:34:45] Dmitri: and-

[00:34:46] Tristra: Didgeridoo solo.

Yeah

[00:34:46] Dmitri: ... I publish it to Spotify. I, I distribute it to Spotify, to Apple, to YouTube, to wherever, and I'm generating money off that. I think the original rights holders are co-writers in this, so you need to really have-

[00:34:59] Tristra: Yeah

[00:34:59] Dmitri: ... both payment for the training and then also payment for the listening at the other end.

[00:35:06] Tristra: Yeah.

[00:35:06] Dmitri: And so-

[00:35:07] Tristra: Yeah

[00:35:07] Dmitri: ... if we get it right, we could be creating some great music that is a collaboration between the original songwriter and recording artist or rights holders and-

[00:35:16] Tristra: Mm-hmm

[00:35:16] Dmitri: ... the AI user who becomes the AI creator, so that they both get a split from all of that. So the technology-

[00:35:23] Tristra: Yeah

[00:35:23] Dmitri: ... required for those two things are not exactly the same, because one of them has to do with how do we train the data, and one of them has to do with how do we track the payment for the use of those, listening of those songs or the sync of those songs somewhere else-

[00:35:36] Tristra: Mm-hmm

[00:35:36] Dmitri: back to both the AI creator and the original songwriter or recording artist.

[00:35:41] Tristra: With the understanding that the output could be seen as directly competing with the original.

[00:35:46] Dmitri: So I got a solution for that.

[00:35:47] Tristra: So it's a little bit different from... Yeah. That's, that's-- I mean, there's a lit- it's a little bit different from the, you know, from the previous copyright model, um-

[00:35:53] Dmitri: Right

[00:35:54] Tristra: because rarely when someone violated copyright, they're either copying it, they, or, you know, they usually weren't going to the trouble to-

[00:35:59] Dmitri: So there's two solutions

[00:36:00] Tristra: ... try to rewrite your book. Yeah.

[00:36:01] Dmitri: There's, there's two

solutions for that. Everyone's talking about, oh, let's put these Udios and Sunos in a walled garden so that can't happen.

It won't compete elsewhere. But there's also-

[00:36:11] Tristra: Sure

[00:36:11] Dmitri: ... a curation-

[00:36:12] Tristra: Yeah

[00:36:12] Dmitri: ... tier.

[00:36:12] Tristra: There's- Yeah, Deezer, Deezer just said that 50% of their uploads are AI generated.

[00:36:16] Dmitri: Yeah, insane.

[00:36:17] Tristra: So-

[00:36:17] Dmitri: So it's getting out of the- It's already ... walled garden.

Um-

[00:36:19] Tristra: Yeah.

[00:36:20] Dmitri: Yeah It's leaking bad. There's, there's squirrels. These songs are squirrels.

[00:36:23] Tristra: Squirrels. It's like a squirrel infestation.

[00:36:27] Dmitri: That's what, that's what our AI panel should be called, squirrel infestation.

[00:36:31] Tristra: Exclamation mark, yeah.

[00:36:32] Dmitri: But there's a curation layer that could happen there, and there's a very extreme version, and then there's a lighter version. One of them is, what if Taylor Swift said, "I want my fans to collaborate with me.

This is not about-

[00:36:45] Tristra: Hmm

[00:36:45] Dmitri: ... Suno training on my stuff. This is my stuff, and my fans and I are gonna have a collaborative opportunity." Sh- Taylor Swift's gonna ha- I'm making this up. Yeah. Say that Taylor Swift has her own AI ecosystem where she says-

[00:36:58] Tristra: Mm-hmm

[00:36:59] Dmitri: ... I've got one more song needed for the album. I've got the melody and the chorus, and I want help writing the lyrics."

[00:37:05] Tristra: Mm-hmm.

[00:37:05] Dmitri: Or, "I want you to change the beat," or, "I want you to help me with my mashup album. Fans, I've written the songs. I want you to mash up each of these songs, and we'll release them, and our fans will become famous with me, and our fans will-

[00:37:19] Tristra: Mm-hmm

[00:37:19] Dmitri: ... get a revenue share with me." And it turns into a whole fan engagement campaign where everyone's like, "Holy shit, I am co-writing with AI a song with Taylor Swift," or-

[00:37:30] Tristra: Yeah

[00:37:30] Dmitri: something like that.

[00:37:31] Tristra: Yeah.

[00:37:31] Dmitri: It could be anybody. It doesn't have to be her.

[00:37:32] Tristra: Kind of like what Grimes tried to do with her when she was letting her people use her voice model. Um-

[00:37:36] Dmitri: Yeah, but, but Taylor Swift might control the model a lot more-

[00:37:39] Tristra: Yeah,

[00:37:39] Dmitri: more s- sustainable ... tightly, and also might have-

[00:37:41] Tristra: Yeah

[00:37:41] Dmitri: ... a fan base that actually does wanna collaborate with her in that kind of way.

[00:37:45] Tristra: Yeah.

[00:37:45] Dmitri: Then you could take it to, to sort of like the remix level, where it's not necessarily like you're gonna do the whole thing, but just sort of like, "Hey, we're doing a remix contest with my AI rather than out there in the world with somebody else's, and we only pick one that... One or three, the summer remix and the winter remix and the Christmas remix-

[00:38:01] Tristra: Yeah

[00:38:01] Dmitri: that we're gonna release. But the rest, the rest are just you had fun with it, but you can't monetize it.

[00:38:07] Tristra: Cool. And so, right now we're, I think we're just at the attribution phase, so trying to figure out what went in, what's impacting, , what a model outputs. And, the folks that are doing that are companies like Musical AI for training data, Ekoa for inference data, which is sort of the next step after you have a trained model.

 and, you know, there are other people out there trying to address some of these issues, like pretty much head on, which is, is great. I mean, I feel like the response has been so much faster than, in past, technological wobbles-

[00:38:37] Dmitri: Yeah

[00:38:37] Tristra: ... in the music industry.

[00:38:38] Dmitri: And, and, and I think, like I said at the beginning, I think a lot of the solutions are gonna come from generative AI companies solving it themselves as well.

I'm not saying there won't be an ecosystem of other tools and layers-

[00:38:49] Tristra: Yeah

[00:38:49] Dmitri: ... but even just the idea that you can charge people tokens rather than subscriptions is, a potential growth area for music. Like, just getting people's behavior to be like, "Oh, I'm gonna pay on a per use basis," starts-

[00:39:03] Tristra: Mm-hmm

[00:39:03] Dmitri: ... to feel like, oh, you could, , you could start to optimize beyond the, the all you can eat subscription.

But anyway, there's a lot to be said about this, but I wanted to just pull out-

[00:39:10] Tristra: Absolutely

[00:39:10] Dmitri: ... AI licensing as a separate category because it's so just emerging now.

[00:39:15] Tristra: Yeah, absolutely. so we're s- we're talking a bit about fans and how fans might interact with music in the future. Let's talk a bit about fan growth.

That is another revenue multiplier. So basically, what I, uh, what I assume fan growth is, not making your fans taller. but you get more

[00:39:32] Dmitri: fans. It's making them wider.

[00:39:34] Tristra: Uh, but not taller and wider, but that they would be many, many, many of them.

[00:39:38] Dmitri: Right.

[00:39:38] Tristra: and that that would be sort of a positive feedback loop.

 and part of that is about making better connections with people, right? So it's not just about, like, getting more you know, quote-unquote, "bodies" or human-like, users out there, but also, having those connections be stronger and how to figure out how to segment and target those so that you're not just constantly blasting the same, mediocre message to everybody just in an attempt to sort of get, shake as much loose as possible.

[00:40:05] Dmitri: You got it. Yeah, I mean, it's just been so hard to reach fans now in a way-

[00:40:10] Tristra: Mm-hmm

[00:40:10] Dmitri: ... that makes sense, that turns it into trackable data, trackable audiences, people you can sell to. And, you know, this is where our two categories, fan growth and then the next one is, like, increasing fan revenue. there's some blurry lines there, like some of these companies do a little bit of both.

But-

[00:40:27] Tristra: Yeah

[00:40:27] Dmitri: ... helping people find you, helping people find new music, helping, bands find fans is hard to do without a plan and without being across multiple places and so forth. So you have different types of apps or functions within existing platforms that help you bui- not only build your fans, but also track them and, identify them and tag them in such ways that you can do stuff with it later as well.

[00:40:56] Tristra: Yeah. So there's an interesting case of, you know, something like Vocana, which is a, very new independent music only, platform, a DSP, but they have ways that fans and artists can interact pretty directly, kind of like, you know, the good old MySpace vibe. and I think that's another interesting area within some existing platforms that could expand.

I know, you know, Spotify and Apple have both experimented in various ways, shapes, and forms with direct messaging and inboxes and all that stuff. and with fan, you know, with fans getting messages from artists or, like, you know, offers directly from artists. So, I feel like though that's, no one's, like, we haven't quite cracked it, right?

Again, the behavior isn't quite there.

[00:41:39] Dmitri: Yeah.

[00:41:40] Tristra: It's very fragmented and scattered, but I think that's a really fertile potential area for growth.

[00:41:46] Dmitri: Yeah. So what kind of companies are we talking about here that do this stuff? You mentioned Vocana as a streaming service, but there's also individual platforms, Yeah

as well.

[00:41:55] Tristra: Well, like drop services like LELO.

[00:41:57] Dmitri: Right.

[00:41:57] Tristra: Right?

[00:41:57] Dmitri: Yeah.

[00:41:57] Tristra: Um, and there's more, you know, AI-powered marketing platforms like Symphony OS that help people buy ads, and ads may be annoying, but they are great. I mean, they are a discovery mechanism on all sorts of platforms, and, uh, that... I mean, Symphony OS does a bunch of other stuff as well, but those kind of things are helpful for discovery, which is really fan growth, you know?

Yeah.

[00:42:19] Dmitri: Yeah, I think, I think competitions are also another good one. You know, there's the-

[00:42:23] Tristra: Uh-huh, I love it

[00:42:24] Dmitri: ... uh, Audience Republic has something like that where you can-

[00:42:26] Tristra: Yeah ...

[00:42:27] Dmitri: go out and, give an offer, and the more people share it, the more, you more likely are to win something, and that it creates some viral growth there as well.

[00:42:36] Tristra: Yeah. Or even Rap Fame, which is a hip hop only, , community, but it has millions of users and the whole, the whole thing is sort of tuned to give people as much actual human feedback as possible to their music, so.

[00:42:48] Dmitri: Yeah.

[00:42:49] Tristra: Um, that's another interesting, interesting example.

[00:42:51] Dmitri: Cool. So the other category that I wanted to bring up is fan revenue, Tristra.

You-

[00:42:55] Tristra: Yes.

[00:42:55] Dmitri: I think, uh, y- I, I referred to it a little bit there. and, you know, it's tied to that fan growth piece as well, but, And it could be a lot of different things. I'm thinking about companies that maybe take some of that fan growth and then help you optimize it and turn it into a thing. You know, we've had, , Rob Sealy from OpenStage the podcast in the past.

 OpenStage is really interesting because it does a lot of different things. You could think of it like a CRM for music, but the, the-

[00:43:20] Tristra: Mm-hmm

[00:43:20] Dmitri: ... couple of things that I think f- help elucidate this category of increasing fan revenue, segmenting your audience, understanding your audience, capturing your audience-

[00:43:28] Tristra: Yes

[00:43:28] Dmitri: everywhere they are, and then giving them an offer like VIP tickets or tickets in advance, directly buying tickets from artists on the one hand, and then they also have this API for creating fan experiences like VIP experiences online and platforms, things like what Yungblud or the Gorillaz have done-

[00:43:46] Tristra: Mm-hmm

[00:43:46] Dmitri: using that data, and then they can see which fans are really engaged.

[00:43:51] Tristra: Well, that's the other really interesting thing is if you find people who have bought something, often they would be willing to buy something again.

[00:43:57] Dmitri: Mm.

[00:43:57] Tristra: Right? Than the scotch will get. And if you're just blasting out the same messages to everybody from the most, like, apathetic person to the most, like, hyper-engaged super fan, you're kind of doing everyone a disservice.

And so I think that things like OpenStage are great for that. Another company that comes to mind, and I think this is a new category that's really exciting, is fan-generated, merch and content. and Fave is one platform that is kind of empowering fans, helping them actually gain, licenses so they can do this, IRL UGC, and create all this cool new stuff that maybe an artist never even thought of, but that's really relevant to...

I mean, we think about Taylor Swift with her tour and the friendship bracelets, right? Like, fans often come up with their own cultural symbols and, you know, items that are like they wear as badges of honor to show their fandom. And why not empower that? And why not let the rights holders benefit from that, as much as the fans do?

[00:44:55] Dmitri: I like that you mentioned Fave too, because Fave was debuted at the Music Tectonics Conference several years ago. It was, Jaquel, the founder's first pitch, and she ended up raising money through contacts she made there, et cetera. So I love this idea that at Music Tectonics this year, we'll, we'll showcase these companies that, um, help expand, the revenue for the industry.

I'd mention, Even is an interesting company to look at for some of this-

[00:45:19] Tristra: Mm. Mm-hmm

[00:45:19] Dmitri: ... direct-to-fan sales stuff. You could go big with companies like Patreon as well, where there's a subscription model that's really interesting. And then I think, you know, there's the idea that we talked about on the recent Jimmy Stone, interview on the podcast- of super apps.

The idea that it's your-

[00:45:36] Tristra: Yeah

[00:45:36] Dmitri: ... your streaming service is gonna have all these other things, tickets and merch and other things there as well.

[00:45:42] Tristra: And, and honestly, e-commerce is hard if you're doing it yourself. I think that's something that unless you've had, some kind of e-commerce venture, you may not be aware of, but it's really hard, and artists have enough frigging stuff to do.

 So

[00:45:53] Dmitri: speaking of e-commerce, we should get to our last category. Yes.

[00:45:57] Tristra: We got... It was also the coolest, biggest, strangest category. Yeah.

[00:46:00] Dmitri: Yeah, it is. New, new music products, and so by that we mean it could be physical products, but it could also be other ways of paying to listen to, use, interact with music.

We gotta wrap up, but let's do a quick shout-out of some really varied, uh, uh- ... uses of this. What do you got, Tristra?

[00:46:19] Tristra: Well, we have, , interesting sort of app labels like, , Vinyl Bar in Shibuya, uh, who are constantly putting out new and very quirky ways to interact with music and play music, and I'm sure I could see that really, building into some, into a place where artists and songwriters can, you know, can get...

Can, can actually license music and do really interesting things and have fans interact in new and exciting ways. there's also stuff like, Hook, which is a remix platform, you know, where you can... And it, you can share within the platform with other people, but you can remix songs and mash up songs and do all sorts of other crazy fun stuff.

That's like a great entry point into music creation, honestly.

[00:46:59] Dmitri: I also like-- Oh, speaking of music creation, you have a, a lot of, you know, Jacob Collier has released, you know, virtual plugins where you can play his chorus. So, like the musician-

[00:47:09] Tristra: Hmm

[00:47:09] Dmitri: ... becomes the customer in a way. Uh- Yeah ... or Josh Bell has also recorded his Stradivarius a-as a virtual instrument that, you know, , producers can now use- Yeah

as well. and then there's things like AudioShake, another past winner of the Swimming with Narwhals Music Tectonics startup competition. AudioShake, won early and n- and just this idea that you can start to generate more - revenue by having a way to split your stems and do more things with that music.

But I don't wanna leave out physical products. You have companies like-

[00:47:42] Tristra: Yes

[00:47:43] Dmitri: ... Kitbetter, which is a totally new form factor for selling merch that has updatable digital music and other assets, even potential to-

[00:47:51] Tristra: Stickers

[00:47:52] Dmitri: ... chat with your artists, et cetera. Or something like Tiny Vinyl, which is just leveraging, you know, a really easy-to-buy small piece of physical product as well.

Yeah. There's lots of possibilities here.

[00:48:02] Tristra: Yeah. There's also the premium side. I know there's a, a gold vinyl company, like that actually prints, records on, um, I believe it's on gold itself or gold leaf or something. But yeah, there's a lot of... Well, there's a huge broad spectrum of price points and market approaches that could be taken here.

[00:48:17] Dmitri: So here's the thing. We're just getting started. We've named these eight categories: catalog valuation, revenue recovery, distribution, artist label services, licensing, AI and licensing, fan growth, fan revenue, new music products. We've got blog posts and LinkedIn posts about this if you wanna get into detail, but we really wanna hear from you as well.

So if we missed out on a category or on a company within the category, if you're building something, we actually wanna hear from you. In fact, on August 19th, we're doing our next Seismic event, Music Tech Tools That Increase Revenue and the Labels and Managers That Use Them. We're still looking for a couple of startups to pitch what they're doing there.

We also have opportunities at the conference itself, where you could do a demo or you could shout out at the open mic, you could compete in the startup competition, et cetera.

[00:49:07] Tristra: Narwhals.

[00:49:08] Dmitri: The Swimming with Narwhals competition, et cetera. So do reach out to us if we missed you or if we shouted you out and it, it was appreciated.

 but this is what happens at the conference. We're talking about the kinds of companies that are gonna make a difference for growing the industry.

[00:49:22] Tristra: Amazing. Thank you, Dmitri. That was a really fun whirlwind tour of the, eightfold noble revenue multipliers.

[00:49:28] Dmitri: Yes.

Tristra, as always, a huge pleasure to unfold and, unpack all this with you.

Thanks for doing it.

[00:49:35] Tristra: Absolutely.

Let us know what you think! Find us on LinkedIn, and Instagram, or connect with podcast host Dmitri Vietze on LinkedIn.

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.