What If Tech Grows the Music Industry Instead of Disrupting It?

That's the question host Dmitri Vietze presents to Vickie Nauman, founder of CrossBorderWorks, in this episode of Music Tectonics. Vickie has spent over two decades at the intersection of music and tech, working on sync licensing for video games and virtual worlds, and pioneering the concept of minimum viable music.

This is episode three in the Rising Tide miniseries, built around the theme of this year's Music Tectonics Conference, Rising Tide: Grow the Music, Grow the Value, taking place October 27 to 29, 2026 in Santa Monica.

Dmitri and Vickie unpack why technology and the music business have always clashed, why music is usually first to be disrupted by new platforms, and why volume based streaming rewards top artists while leaving mid tier and independent artists behind. They also get into generative AI, AI licensing deals, and why Vickie believes the future of music creation is not human versus AI, but a blend of both.

They close out on gaming as an untapped revenue opportunity, why most super fan apps fail to gain traction, and what gives Vickie hope about the next generation of musicians and fans.

Topics include music industry trends, music tech, artificial intelligence in music, music streaming, music licensing, sync licensing, gaming and music, and super fan monetization.

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Episode Transcript

Machine transcribed

[00:00:00] dmitri: If you follow music tech and innovation, you know Vickie Nauman, the founder of CrossBorderWorks, a consultancy that helps companies navigate one of the most complex landscapes in the industry: music rights and licensing.

But more than that, she's a beacon of positivity who deeply cares about founders, music, and the industry, and brings them together. She's worked on everything from sync licensing for games and virtual worlds to helping companies figure out the minimum viable music they need to actually get to market.

That's a concept that she pioneered, and she's spoken about it on previous Music Tectonics episodes. Vicki's also someone who cares deeply about where the industry is headed. She's not just solving today's problems, she's actively trying to shape what comes next, just like everyone at Music Tectonics, but she really has this special place, which is why I wanted her to help me answer the question: What if tech grows the music industry instead of disrupting it?

Welcome back to the podcast, Vicki.

[00:00:54] vickie: Thank you so much. It's good to be here.

[00:00:56] dmitri: Yay. So you've been in music innovation for a long time. Why does technology get such a bad rep from the music business?

[00:01:04] vickie: I know. It's, it's oil and water. And- ... um, and I have always seen it. You know, I've been doing this since 2000, and since the very, very beginning.

And I remember when the first Napster disrupted the industry, my initial reaction was more as a music consumer and a fan, where I thought, "Oh my gosh, this is going to be amazing. I'll be able to go and find any music that I want online. I won't be limited to what this, you know, my favorite Seattle record store has."

 and so I think that there's always been a control issue in the music business.

[00:01:40] dmitri: Hmm. Right.

[00:01:40] vickie: And that, the legacy of CDs and manufacturing plastic discs and vinyl, um, is control. The industry controlled the entire distribution chain. They controlled the artists that are being released.

They controlled the money. and so there was this original disruption back in 1999, 2000 around distribution. but ultimately, you know, where we've landed is that, that original disruption has opened up a new economy for music.

[00:02:17] dmitri: Hmm.

[00:02:17] vickie: But it doesn't necessarily mean that the music industry is in control of every single piece of the chain anymore.

[00:02:24] dmitri: Right. So there's a lot of tension. We see a lot of tension between these two forces, the force of sort of technological innovation and, uh, fan and listener behavior as a result of access to new things, new media, new music, new formats, et cetera. But then the folks that are, whose job it is to monetize recordings have a whole different kind of agenda.

They wanna reach those fans, but they wanna do it on their own terms, right?

[00:02:48] vickie: Right. Exactly. And, you know, and we also have a, a really long history of labels trying to do direct to fan, artists trying to-

[00:02:58] dmitri: Oh, yeah

[00:02:59] vickie: ... direct to fan. And where we've landed over the last 26 years has really been that there is an expectation from users that they can go to one platform and they can find all the music that they love.

[00:03:12] dmitri: Hmm.

[00:03:12] vickie: And so that value proposition, whether it's social media or on-demand streaming is, or even radio, you know, it, that's curated, but there's still a sensibility of like, "We're giving you everything that you need," that it doesn't really matter who owns the songs and that users ex- expect to have everything in one place.

Unlike film, where we know-

[00:03:39] dmitri: Right

[00:03:39] vickie: ... we can go to Disney for certain things, we can go to Hulu for other things, we can go to HBO for, a particular series. But we, music fans want everything in one place, and we've, created that over the years.

[00:03:52] dmitri: That is an interesting dynamic that Jimmy Stone and I discussed on the, the last episode about, why the industry's so small, of this difference between film and video having different catalogs.

And it really... It's so funny how, like, the timing of when an industry is getting disrupted or changed, how, you know, like where they are in terms of timeline. And, you know, like in s- some ways maybe that's because music is a smaller file than video.

[00:04:18] vickie: Mm.

[00:04:19] dmitri: So music got disrupted first because bandwidth wasn't big enough for film and TV yet, and so that moment in time spoke to this opportunity.

So for film and TV in the sense they had a little more time to say... They could almost see what happened to music and say, "Well, hold on a second. We'll give you some stuff here, but we wanna build our own streaming service," or, "We wanna invest in this video streaming service that's different." And so then you have this totally different dynamic between music and video streaming service, which is kind of interesting.

[00:04:45] vickie: Well, I think, I think that's part of it, and I also think that there's a, you know, like you don't listen to a playlist of films. you know, you-

[00:04:53] dmitri: Hmm.

Right ...

[00:04:54] vickie: you don't co-mingle those. You have a two-hour block or maybe you're watching a series and we-

[00:05:00] dmitri: A binge watch. A, a playlist is a binge watch.

[00:05:02] vickie: Exa- exactly.

It is kind of a binge, it is kind of a binge watch. I think the other thing that's really important, though, is that, I've studied this and, you know, the reason that music is always the canary in the digital coal mine-

[00:05:17] dmitri: Hmm

[00:05:17] vickie: ... is that it is the perfect medium for connecting a tech solution, a new platform, some sort of new experience to someone's personal needs and interests.

And-

[00:05:31] dmitri: Hmm

[00:05:32] vickie: ... you know, if we had, cell phones and internet pipes and platforms that did not have music running through them, they would be really boring. They would be really, really boring. And so-

[00:05:45] dmitri: They sure would.

[00:05:46] vickie: So tech companies, they immediately think, "How can we... We built this new solution. How can we get adoption?"

Music. Music makes things personal. Music connects them to consumers. You know, music lovers are always going to flock to something new, and so music is always first because it's so, it's such a personal medium and it's the-

[00:06:09] dmitri: Hmm

[00:06:10] vickie: ... it's the best way to try to get- consumers to come to your platform

[00:06:15] dmitri: It's the cool factor, right?

It's the cool factor. Right. It's the soundtrack of not just TV and film, it's the soundtrack of everything. And that's actually kind of interesting, Vickie, as you talk about that, I'm thinking about, you know, one of the challenges of music is that it can be more passive for the listener.

[00:06:29] vickie: Mm-hmm.

[00:06:30] dmitri: The, one of the advantages of it, its passivity is, means you can apply it to so many things, right?

You can apply it to sync TV and film, to gaming, to fitness, to wellness. Whereas watching a TV show, you're not gonna do while you're meditating, right?

[00:06:41] vickie: Right.

[00:06:42] dmitri: Or playing a game, you're not gonna do while you're meditating. Well, actually, for some people, gaming probably is meditating, but, but, um, but the, the, that soundtrack, that audio quality, on the one hand makes it harder to charge for because it doesn't have your full attention, but on the other hand, it can apply to so many other verticals-

[00:06:58] vickie: Exactly

[00:06:59] dmitri: and experiences.

[00:06:59] vickie: You can integrate.

[00:07:00] dmitri: Yeah.

[00:07:00] vickie: You can integrate music into so many things, and I often think about, you know, you h- if you're out at a restaurant, you get a meal, and then you taste it, and maybe you need to add a little salt and pepper, and that salt and pepper enhances it, makes it way better.

And that's kind of how I think of music in a lot of these experiences, is that, yes, maybe there's a lot of, you know, film or, or shorts that are running in, in a short-form platform, but you add music and it's going to enhance it. It's going to make it better. It's going to round out the entire experience.

And I think the music consumers, are just, you know, so passionate about artists and about music, and so they, they tend to, you know... Like, it's hard right now to get people to adopt. It's very noisy marketplace, but they see something from an artist and they think, "Oh, well, if that music is in there, then it might be something worth trying."

And that's that little spark that every tech company is looking for.

[00:08:00] dmitri: The chili crisp, the cilantro. The tajin.

[00:08:04] vickie: Exactly.

[00:08:05] dmitri: We're going beyond salt and pepper. I, I wanna go back to something before we move forward, 'cause there's a few things I wanna unpack. Could things have gone differently with the emergence of digital music from downloads to streaming and from social media and gaming to UGC and social media ads, or is this the way it had to happen?

[00:08:21] vickie: It's so fascinating, becauseI was in the mix of all of that in, back in the day, and-

[00:08:27] dmitri: Yeah ...

[00:08:28] vickie: I think that, you know, it's hard for, it's hard for people now to imagine what it was like, but there were probably at least five, maybe seven years where every single industry conference was, " The sky is falling.

How are we going-"

[00:08:46] dmitri: Right

[00:08:47] vickie: ... "to get people to pay for music? How are we going to rebuild this?" And- It's really easy to just blame labels or to blame the rights holders and say, "If they would've just adopted everything immediately, we would've captured immediate value." And there's some truth to that. there was an old guard in the industry at the time, and they wanted to put the toothpaste back in the tube.

They wanted control back, and they wanted this very, very lucrative business of selling CDs to people that cost a dollar and you sold them for 22. I mean, you do not come across business models like that very often. so I think the industry could certainly have adopted everything more quickly. but we were in a card catalog stage and we had to migrate everything into, into modern systems.

And it wasn't just music, it, you know, then rights holders that slowed things down. There, there, you know, there weren't really structures set up around business models, reporting. We didn't have ubiquitous Wi-Fi. For all of- Right ... the people who are, you know, grew up as digital natives, you know, you never even thought about whether you had Wi-Fi or not.

But there was a good, 10 years from the 2000 to probably 2010 where we just didn't, we didn't even have it in hotel rooms. And so there was a, you know, we didn't have operating systems for devices that could support music. We didn't have cloud-based services. AWS didn't exist. We didn't have, bandwidth and Wi-Fi.

Even when we had Wi-Fi, we were streaming, you know, like 35K files that sounded terrible. And there was a lot of things that in those early days that I think hindsight, we can definitely look back and say we needed all of that. Um, we needed the infrastructure, we needed standards, we needed, business models, we needed the recordings and the publishing and the performance rights to all come together.

Um-

[00:10:59] dmitri: Right

[00:11:00] vickie: ... and we didn't have all of that. But I think that, what we've got now is we've got a new guard, largely, of people at the labels and publishers who are embracing tech. They do not move fast. but- ... but, and that's always a problem marrying up the pace of- Right ... innovation and adoption between the tech industry and the music industry.

[00:11:22] dmitri: And, and f- and fan behavior and consumer behavior. Yeah.

[00:11:25] vickie: Exactly. Exactly. But I think one thing that you said that, is so critical that not a lot of people talk about is that, made a huge difference in the olden days when we were just trying to rebuild the industry and now, is that in those early days, the industry looked at the market and we looked at consumers, and there were the mass consumers of music were people who listened to radio and they bought maybe one or two CDs a year And they, so they spent maybe, radio is free, and so they spent maybe $30 a year on music.

And there was this, always this subset of people like me and probably you who spent 30 or $40 a month on music, and we spent- Yeah ... all of our free time in record stores. But that was a really small segment, and there was a really active discussion around this in the early days that it was all about the passive listener.

It was about-

[00:12:32] dmitri: Right

[00:12:32] vickie: ... people who listened to radio, casual fans, maybe they went to a couple concerts.

[00:12:38] dmitri: But didn't spend money.

[00:12:39] vickie: They didn't spend that much money. And so-

[00:12:41] dmitri: Yeah

[00:12:41] vickie: ... the idea of $120 a year subscription increased the spend for casual fans at an exponential level over the way it was in the '90s before digital.

 but we left behind the people at the top of the pyramid who spend 40 or $50 a month.

[00:13:04] dmitri: Ah, interesting.

[00:13:04] vickie: And, and we're now getting back to that in all the super fan-

[00:13:07] dmitri: Right

[00:13:08] vickie: ... and fan, direct fan initiatives that we're seeing.

[00:13:12] dmitri: Yeah. Very interesting. So you've ta- you talked about the kinda early phases of disruption.

 you know, and we've seen other phases come through, right? With user-generated content.

[00:13:24] vickie: Yeah.

[00:13:24] dmitri: Uh, the content ID system at YouTube being a response in exchange for the DMCA takedown notices.

[00:13:31] vickie: Right.

[00:13:32] dmitri: Uh, and then, you know, we s- we're still seeing the negotia-- A- as far as I can tell. You, you can tell me wrong.

You're, you're more of an expert on this. We're still seeing the negotiations with the Metas and the TikToks of the world. I don't think those conversations are done because YouTube is now competing with Spotify for how many billions of dollars they're paying to music rights holders. Meta and TikTok, there's so much music, so much music activity happening there, they're not paying for it, which is gonna be interesting with this emerging premium subscriptions on the Spotifys of the world, where they might start to act a little bit more like what Instagram and TikTok have, a little more of this interactivity, this soul of music taking place on the streaming service for either upsells or, or premium subscriptions, et cetera.

But each of those feels like they each took a little bit of a hit against the value of music. The first the Napster, then the unbundling of the album with downloads, then, you know, streaming service, the negotiation shifted once again. Now gradually, all of the total value of music got bigger and bigger, for how much rights holders are getting paid in, in those processes.

But the individual streams started to feel devalued in a sense, or people got a sense of music as maybe it's not free, but it's close to free, or it's not per unit purchase, but it's all you can eat and s- so forth. Do you think those moments in technology post-Napster also devalued music?

[00:14:51] vickie: Well, I think the-- I have an aversion to the devaluation of music, because-

[00:14:58] dmitri: The

concept

[00:14:59] vickie: because I do believe that tech companies value music. I believe that consumers value music. But I think that what has happened is it's this big tangle around the business models that we have. And one of, one of the significant problems that I think leads to the sense of devaluation is that Music is in all of the platforms of social media, DSPs.

Everyone is interested in scale.

[00:15:32] dmitri: Mm-hmm.

[00:15:34] vickie: You know, the rights holders are interested, the publishers, the labels, the platforms. Everybody's interested in scale, reaching the most audiences. But d- scale doesn't always mean that it works for everyone. And-

[00:15:51] dmitri: Hmm

[00:15:51] vickie: ... I think when you are an artist who's mainstream, who is, gets, puts on, put on every playlist, users want to listen to your music over and over and over again.

They're, um, you know, they're artists that are, getting marketed by the major labels. They're the 1%, they're at the very, very top of the heap. You know, they always made money. You know, they made money back in the old days. They're making money now. They make money everywhere in between because they are the biggest artists on the planet.

But and for the baby bands and for people that are just starting out, and maybe they just want to release music to express themselves, they don't make very much money. They never really made money before and, but there's a middle layer there of artists-

[00:16:36] dmitri: Yeah

[00:16:36] vickie: ... who really wanna build a career. Maybe their music is also, maybe it's like industrial music or metal or something that people don't necessarily listen to on repeat over and over and over again.

It doesn't get placed in all the playlists. It doesn't-

[00:16:52] dmitri: Hmm ...

[00:16:52] vickie: lend itself-

[00:16:52] dmitri: It's not coffee shop music.

[00:16:54] vickie: Exactly. Exactly. It's not pop. And that music struggles in a volume-based business model.

[00:17:04] dmitri: Mm-hmm.

[00:17:05] vickie: And if you are not making, you know, like 100 million streams w- of active engagement on a regular basis, you're not gonna make very much money because it's all based on volume.

And I think that that's really where the devaluation takes place because it's not very satisfying as a fan to say, "Oh, you know, hey artist, you know, I love Mogwai and, you know, they're still around and I streamed your songs." Doesn't really feel like much in the way of fandom. It doesn't really deliver a ton of value for me to stream their music once in a while.

 and so this is part of why I'm always, I'm always on this quest, Dmitri, for new business models and different ways to deliver music to consumers because I don't think that the volume-based structure works for everyone.

[00:17:59] dmitri: Hmm. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. You know, I started the conversation by saying we're gonna talk about what if tech grows the music industry instead of disrupting it, and I've been talking about a lot of disruption

Yeah. And we-- I, I do wanna promise our listeners we're getting to the other side of the coin, but there's one thing we have to bring up before we get there, and I'm, I'm dying to hear your ideas about what it could be other than disruption. I think you're the perfect person for this because you think about those new business models you were just mentioning.

We're faced with another form of disruption right now, the training of generative AI models on unlicensed music or maybe on licensed music. That could also be disruptive. But it's all playing out right now. If we get the licensing structures wrong, some people believe it'll chip away at the value of music across the board, a Napster-type moment, or maybe even, I don't know, worse.

But-

[00:18:49] vickie: Right

[00:18:49] dmitri: ... they're saying markets could be flooded with songs, musics will come down in value, human creators will lose out. But I was hoping the two of us could pause-

[00:18:57] vickie: Mm-hmm

[00:18:57] dmitri: ... and look at what it would take to make the emergence of generative AI music creation into a net positive for the growth of the music industry.

Can we, Vickie, can we fantasize about that?

[00:19:07] vickie: Yeah. Yeah. No, I, I think about this a lot because I think You know, when I compare it back to the early days of piracy, the, you know, all of the music was stolen, and it was used in a similar way, only it was made available intact. You know, full songs were ripped, put on servers that are P2P, and made available to consumers for free.

And so people got to download them, they got to stream them, they got access to everything. we have a similar situation where all those songs have been taken and put into streaming, or in training structures, training models, but they're not, they're not discoverable as the songs. And so they're getting, they're in the blender and I think the-- I think there h- absolutely has to be compensation for that.

I think that whether or not a song is used in attribution for an output is... There t- that's a separate issue.

[00:20:08] dmitri: Hmm.

[00:20:09] vickie: But I think that everyone does need to be compensated for this. And once again, we have problems where we have, you know, major stakeholders that are doing licensing deals, and they will get the lion's share.

And then we have all of these independents and smaller companies that are floating around out there. those are probably representing the same artists whose volume-based streaming models don't work very well. Are they getting compensated? are they getting compensated fairly? What is that? what is fair compensation?

And I don't think we know, I don't think we know what that is yet.

[00:20:43] dmitri: Yeah.

[00:20:43] vickie: But I'm seeing the same patterns of market share-based deals in, for AI companies, and then probably within, when those deals come to expire in one to two years, then they will move to what music is actually being used. And there's a big black hole there.

We, we don't quite have structures in place to figure that out. But I do think about where will this land? And there's a couple of things. When you look at all the disruptions that we've had over the last 25, 26 years- Mm-hmm There have been a lot of things that have burst on the scene that had potential to be massively disruptive.

Blockchain, live streaming, you know, Web3, all sorts of, you know, smaller, smaller things that the things that survived are things that are mainstream and that the average consumer wants to engage with. So I think about that. Mm-hmm. Does the average consumer want to sit and use their free time, their very scarce free time, to sit and create songs and distribute them out into DSPs?

Is that a mainstream use? I don't really feel like it is. I think it's niche.

[00:21:58] dmitri: Hmm.

[00:21:58] vickie: I think that's niche. And so I think there's a lot of oxygen being taken out of the room right now around The fear that music will now be in the hands of non-musicians and that music will, will be better than what r- artists will be able to create.

And I don't believe that. I believe that artist-driven music is always going to surprise us and bring us new things. But what I do believe is that the music creation process has forever changed. Mm. And that because of AI, and it's not just generative AI, but, you know, processing, mastering, mixing, new tools, samples that don't have, you know, rights-related problems.

There's going to be an entirely new suite of creator tools that will come out of this, and I think that that is the most positive... I think that's the most positive outcome.

[00:23:01] dmitri: Mm.

[00:23:02] vickie: And I think that, you know, it's not only big artists that are using AI for help with songwriting, um, for mixing, for noodling and coming up with very, very fast ideas and iterating on them.

There's also, if you think about the democratization of music, I think that we will have tools that will probably lift up markets like Southeast Asia and Asia and Africa and South America, where people don't have a digital audio workstation in every home, but maybe some things will be m- l- much more cost-effective, and that those markets that are kind of struggling economically to be able to afford all the tools that we take for granted in North America and Western Europe, that we will, we will probably lift, more creators up in those markets.

And those are also the fastest-growing markets that we have right now.

[00:24:01] dmitri: Hmm. Yeah. It, it's funny, it's almost like the generative AI, like, prompt-based song creation stuff, which is taking the oxygen out of the room partly because of this licensing and attribution and, remuneration conversation.

There's, like, two pieces to it. There's the sit down, write songs. That's where they're generating their money right now, right? they're the ones- Right ... that's saying they're getting, what is it, $300 million of annual revenue for people paying subscriptions to do that. So somebody's paying for that.

Right. Whether they're fans versus people who are trying to hack the system and put- Right ... and j- just flood the streams and hire fraud bots, according to Tim Ingham from Music Business Worldwide, that's the majority of the use that he thinks is happening out there. Whether it's that, some sort of style laundering, I like to call it-

[00:24:44] vickie: Mm-hmm

[00:24:44] dmitri: um, of music. but the other side is what happens on the consumption of that music. Like right now, those, most of those songs are not getting listened to any more than the very longest tail of indie music. It's flooding the market. Some of the distributors and some of the streamers are, are, streaming services are trying to put up filters so that it's not totally flooding the market, or at least tagging it so you know whether you're listening to an artist or an AI creator of some sort.

But maybe there's some revenue to be generated there eventually when so- there's AI songs that are created by, whether they're formal veteran musicians or new types of musical creators, but they somehow get the algorithms right for human-connected listening.

[00:25:25] vickie: Yeah.

[00:25:25] dmitri: Whether that becomes a revenue generator for the artists whose music's being used to train the LLMs as well, it's a complicated one.

[00:25:35] vickie: It's really complicated, and I think right now we are... One of the flaws that we have in our discussions, our collective discussions around this, is we're thinking of it in a binary world. That the-

[00:25:48] dmitri: Yeah

[00:25:48] vickie: ... on one hand, it is 100% human-created, and on the other hand, it is 100% prompt-based from non-musicians.

And I do think the fraud conversation is a really, really important one. but if we take that out and we just think about creation I don't believe that it is going to be binary. I don't think it is now. I think that it is a million shades of gray in between human and machine, and music is going to be a blend of all of these things.

Maybe you're writing a song, but you're using, you know, Claude to help you with the lyrics. Maybe you are recording and you're playing your musical instruments, but you need a, you know, a standup bass and you don't have a standup bass player, and so you go in and you get the standup bass piece that you need to integrate into the song.

And so it's 80% made, but then there's a little bit there that you've pulled from a machine. And if you go up another 5,000 feet, that's kind of how music is created now.

[00:26:58] dmitri: Hmm.

[00:26:58] vickie: Right? I mean, we've, got drum machines, we've got synthesizers, we've got-

[00:27:02] dmitri: Samples ...

[00:27:03] vickie: you know, all sorts of, all sorts of tools right now.

And it wasn't that long ago that, people used to say that DJs who were remixing were not real artists either.

[00:27:18] dmitri: Right. Yeah. Yeah, totally. It's interesting when you talk about the binary, view or argument on this, there's, like, another dichotomy that's in it as well, which is just this question of like, is AI gonna kill anything and devalue everything, or is AI gonna open up access-

[00:27:35] vickie: Right

[00:27:35] dmitri: and create opportunities and so forth. And I think y- it's very easy for the human mind to go to that black and white, left and right binary thinking, male and female, you know, all-

[00:27:47] vickie: Yeah

[00:27:47] dmitri: ... that kind of binary thinking when there's another way in which you can look at it in terms of fractal thinking, like seeing patterns within patterns instead of either/ors.

And it makes me think when you talk about the opportunities for, creativity in, in a non-binary way, you know, if you look at the ABBA Voyage thing, that's-- there must be some AI being used there. I mean, we're creating holograms. We're certainly training something on songs, on biometric data. You know, the same thing's being repeated by Pophouse with Kiss as well.

That's supposed to come out at some point. Another company called Hyperreal is using Hollywood CGI techniques to basically take a human celebrity and scale the performance and as well as the songwriting, and maybe even interactions with people and so forth. So you have this opportunity for if you built a brand as a celebrity, a personal brand, if you're a Taylor Swift or a Bad Bunny or a BTS, you could easily create a whole different type of experience.

And as a songwriter, or the owner of a song catalog, you could start to create a new type of live experience-

[00:28:53] vickie: Mm-hmm

[00:28:54] dmitri: ... with holograms or avatars or, or whatever. It doesn't-- It could be IRL, it could be on a screen or something like that too. So that's, that's where we get a little further out. You know, obviously Pop House and, and s- I saw Ozzy Osbourne has one.

 they're already doing this kind of thing, but it could get to the point where even smaller acts, because of the use of technology, could start to have a kind of IP that goes beyond that passive low-price listening and into more of an engaged, interactive experience.

[00:29:21] vickie: Yes, exactly. And, you know, and before that, we had Tupac on stage at Coachella.

[00:29:26] dmitri: Right. Yeah.

[00:29:27] vickie: And, um, and so I think the jury is out for me on how widespread that is. Is it just a handful of iconic artists? And-

[00:29:37] dmitri: Right ...

[00:29:37] vickie: I, like, I love that ABBA, the band members, that they said, "People don't wanna see us now." You know? Like, "People wanna see us back then. They wanna see us in '70s garb, and they wanna see us in our prime."

 and I love, I love that, you know, the way that they were just very kind of a about that. and you know, everyone, we're human, right? So we have, we have limited lifespans, so I think there's a handful of iconic artists that can get recreated and that they can live on.

 I don't know what that means for anyone except the very, very top.

[00:30:15] dmitri: Yeah.

[00:30:16] vickie: And, you know, once again, you know, the very top is where, you know, we have so much concentration of, you know, popularity and, revenues. But I do believe that, there's so much opportunity for creativity, and it's, you know, what comes out of not only generative AI, but, you know, improvements in rendering, improvements in the quality.

You know, you look at Looney Tunes that we grew up in and, you know, compare that to animation now, and it's- Yeah ... jaw-dropping.

[00:30:51] dmitri: It is.

[00:30:51] vickie: So I, I think that all of that is possible. estates, you know, people like, you know, these iconic artists that left, you know, before we got everything we wanted out of them.

[00:31:02] dmitri: Right.

[00:31:02] vickie: Prince and Janis Joplin and, you know, Kurt Cobain-

[00:31:06] dmitri: Whitney houston

[00:31:06] vickie: ... all of these guys. Yeah. You know, all of that is possible, but it has to come down to the artist permission or the estate's permission.

[00:31:16] dmitri: Yeah.

[00:31:16] vickie: And I love what- Yeah ... Pop House is doing because they're working really closely with, estates and, with, you know, if they're living artists.

 but I think that is where there's just a core issue here, which is opting in, and artists need to drive how their music is represented or their agents and, you know, labels or whomever is representing their intellectual property, and they need to absolutely 100% control their name, image, and likeness.

And so, you know, we can't just let a tech company that wants to gobble up you know, gobble up- Yeah ... a huge amount of market share, exploit artists without those artists' permissions. It's just really, really crystal clear to me.

[00:32:02] dmitri: Vickie,

 I love how you sit right at this intersection just perfectly.

You're, you're, never really leaning either way. You're, you're seeing the value on both sides, and it makes you such the perfect person to have this conversation because you're constantly helping both sides find each other, find the, balance, which is so awesome. I wanna ask you, because we kind of promised it in this episode.

 and this is, again, more, more like, you know, fantastical brainstorming or, crystal ball gazing. What technology do you think has the possibility of doubling or even 10X-ing the music industry's revenue? I'd love to do a little brainstorming or, or, idea, creation with you on this.

[00:32:41] vickie: Well, I'm very... As you probably know, I'm very, very deep in the gaming world. Um, I work with a lot of different games, and my sole focus is to try to help gaming companies bring artists and licensed music into games, and to do that in a way that is not background, but it's foreground. And-

[00:33:03] dmitri: Hmm

[00:33:04] vickie: ... the, um... So I'm very bullish about the future of games, virtual worlds, this next generation that has grown up without a stigma around gaming.

You know, when I was growing up, there was kind of a stigma. I mean, you know, I went and played Centipede and, you know, and Frogger. but there was kind of a stigma, and there isn't anymore. And so I think-

[00:33:26] dmitri: Yeah

[00:33:26] vickie: ... gaming and, a spectrum of experiences around gaming are a wide open field. And you think about virtual concerts, virtual representations of artists' name, image, and likeness, music rights, all of that.

I think that, that spectrum is really, really ripe for music. but it isn't necessarily going to lift the entire industry. I think that it's-

[00:33:54] dmitri: Hmm

[00:33:54] vickie: ... much more about bespoke, you know, handpicked, few artists, a few songs, really helping them break. I would love to really see bands break in games, and I think it's right there for the taking, and it's mostly music rights that's blocking it, and that's-

[00:34:12] dmitri: Mm

[00:34:13] vickie: that's what I'm working on. Um- Hmm ... so I think gaming is huge, and I think that it is, it, you know, it's not necessarily an enormous-- I can't really put a number on what that looks like, but I think there's enormous potential to reach 3.5 billion people, to have music in the foreground, people discover music, people engage in a meaningful way with artists, and for artists to then figure out how to use the tools of gaming to leverage their own careers.

 so I think that is, enormous.

[00:34:43] dmitri: Love it.

[00:34:44] vickie: But I also-

[00:34:45] dmitri: Yeah, that's great

[00:34:45] vickie: ... but I also think that, you know, there's a lot of s- lot of kind of scuttlebutt and talking about, you know, is, is streaming, is audio-only streaming going away? Is it no longer going to just be music in the background and audio? Is everything going to be audiovisual?

Are DSPs going to continue to derive the same amount of value? I'm really encouraged by how all of the DSPs are currently differentiating a little bit. And-

[00:35:18] dmitri: Hmm ...

[00:35:19] vickie: I believe that there's way more opportunity in, that landscape to do things differently because, you know, like 10 years ago, we basically had the same service just under different brands, you know, same catalog, same business model, same price point.

 you know, but you've got Apple, Google, Spotify, Deezer, Rhapsody, Qobuz, Tidal all doing the same thing. That's really silly. You know, you don't have to have a degree from the Lund School of Economics to know that you don't wanna b- you don't wanna become a commodity, and that's kind of-

[00:35:54] dmitri: Yeah

[00:35:54] vickie: ... a commodity business.

So I think that differentiation in these streaming services is going to be really, really important. and I think some of it is going to be better capturing the super fan. but a lot of companies are confusing e-commerce with engagement, and you can't just keep selling colored vinyl, and you can't just keep charging super fans more and more and more without giving them something more.

And that's a nut. If we can crack that nut of the people that we talked about earlier in the podcast that spent $40 or $50 a month on recorded music, not one CD a year, we've never really met their needs. And- Hmm ... um, and I think that it might be some standalone apps maybe But I think it's more likely to be where the fish are already swimming, which is social media platforms and DSPs that will start to differentiate and innovate and capture that additional value, that we are not currently monetizing, which are these big super fans.

And, you know, we only-- you know, all of us love music, but when we get into the super fan world, it becomes music nerds and it becomes like, "I love these five artists." It's not about I want to get a catalog of a hund- 100 and 200 million songs.

[00:37:24] dmitri: Hmm.

[00:37:24] vickie: So then how can we-

[00:37:25] dmitri: Right.

That's

so good point. Yeah. That's such a good point.

Yeah, I mean, that could be super fan experiences, like fan clubby kind of stuff. It could be subscriptions to an artist-specific platform or world, um, the Youngblood kind of stuff that's emerging or, I'm just trying to think what-- Give me a little more specificity around what you think that might look like.

[00:37:48] vickie: I know. Well, that's the hard thing is there have been so many companies that have, have tried- Yeah ... to do something for super fans. And and I wrote about this in this entrepreneurship article, like, a year or so ago. But one of the inherent problems is if you are building that and you require the artist to do extra things, release unreleased songs, um, you know, unfinished demos, do little videos every day, engagement, all of that.

You know, like, this happens in the K-pop world, but they're structured really differently. You know, they have, like-

[00:38:27] dmitri: Yeah

[00:38:27] vickie: ... you know, entities that look over everything around that artist. And here in, you know, North America and Western Europe, artists just really don't wanna do all of that. And so every-

[00:38:38] dmitri: Hmm

[00:38:38] vickie: every young company that comes to me with a idea around a super fan app, I'm like I will tell you one piece of advice, and that is if you are requiring the artists to do anything, your app will fail because they will engage for a short time, and then guess what? They're artists. they wanna go and make music and go in the studio, and they don't wanna, they don't wanna do that, and the managers are not gonna do it.

So, I think there's a, there's something there, and I know from projects that I've worked on and, like strategy for a couple companies that what all those super fans really want, they wanna see bands live. They want access to tickets. They wanna get closer to the artist in some way, shape, or form.

They wanna be belonging. they wanna be in a community, and those things are really hard to monetize. Yeah. Um, but it's there. It's there. I just don't know exact- If, if I knew what it was- Yeah ... I would be building it.

[00:39:41] dmitri: Yeah. Nice. We'll get there. We're s- I think we're seeing some new versions of that emerge.

 just good to see that kinda like where your thinking is going as a, as a potential validation for things that we wanna see tested out in the marketplace.

[00:39:54] vickie: Yeah.

[00:39:54] dmitri: Um, Vicki, this has been a blast. I don't think we've covered everything. In our last couple of minutes here, what gives you hope in music in this larger conversation?

[00:40:03] vickie: You know, every time I go see a live show, whether it is a-

 young band that's, hyper-talented and I've never heard of or a band... You know, my formative years are, like, a lot of '90s music, and so I see, you know, Alison Moyet, and I see all these artists that were heroes to me back then that are still performing.

I am inspired, and every time I see that, I feel like, um, there is nothing else that replicates that connection between fans and artists in a live setting, and I think I feel like that human creativity is what keeps me going. And I do think that we're going, we're entering into an era kind of like before and after the internet with AI, and that so many things are going to change.

But I will bet on artists any day of the week

[00:40:58] dmitri: Yeah, definitely. I see it too. podcast listeners probably heard me say I've got a teenager who's in a hardcore band that's playing out at all ages clubs in here in Portland-

[00:41:09] vickie: Yeah

[00:41:09] dmitri: ... like two times a month, going to shows two or three times a week, and they are actually spending money.

These, the bands aren't making a ton of money, but there is money being exchanged. They, the, the kids do appreciate it. Yeah. They will pay the 5, 10, 20 bucks to go to a show. They, they will buy the T-shirt, the merch. There's a whole merch scene, kids making their own zines and stickers and shirts. There's printing presses, collaborative, creative, um, printing presses where you can get a membership and make your merch.

It's, I mean, it's a whole thing. But it, it, there is that swing too. That's the other side of this whole conversation. But that human connection-

[00:41:46] vickie: Yeah

[00:41:47] dmitri: ... always come, it always comes back to f- do... Even if it's the folks going to the ABBA Voyage shows, right? Yeah. They wanna be in a room full of other people.

[00:41:55] vickie: Yeah.

[00:41:55] dmitri: Even if they're watching holograms.

[00:41:57] vickie: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And I love, I love that you brought up zines and kind of the generational shifts, because I feel like this really young generation, I mean, they love playing guitars, you know? And how many years have we been told, "Oh, rock is dead. Nobody wants to play guitar.

It's all hip hop and electronic music." No, it isn't, you know? people wanna play guitars. They wanna create. They wanna collaborate. They want to-

[00:42:20] dmitri: They wanna mosh.

[00:42:21] vickie: They wanna mosh. They wanna do all those things. They wanna create zines, and I think that I get really inspired by that young generation too, because I feel like they see the world differently.

They see music differently. there is this element of, you know, do you just wanna listen to music? Do you wanna play around with it? Do you wanna remix it?

[00:42:40] dmitri: Yeah.

[00:42:41] vickie: That's... There's a lot of, there's a lot of big open questions. But, you know, like I see inspiration from the artists and inspiration from the next generation, and those two things to me spell optimism.

[00:42:54] dmitri: Absolutely. Love it. Always love talking to you, Vickie. Thanks so much for coming back on the podcast. Looking forward to seeing you in October at Music Tectonics. Appreciate everything you do.

[00:43:03] vickie: Excellent. It's great to see you.

[00:43:05] dmitri: Likewise.

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.