Sure, Streaming’s Transformed the Music Business. But What’s Next?

Cooper’s business, which works with talent like Ed Sheeran, Lizzo and Dua Lipa, turned over a record $4 billion-plus in 2018. Yet when Cooper took up the role in 2011, the same year Spotify launched in the U.S., things looked rather different: a then-piracy-hit WMG was telling investors that “the recorded music industry has been declining and may continue to decline.”

The record industry continues to enjoy double-digit annual growth from streaming, with the market expected to post over $20 billion in global revenue in 2020. Yet a question hangs in the air: after streaming, what’s next? What will be the next major innovation in the way fans connect with artists? Hrivnak also nodded to AR-related possibilities created by Facebook’s new Portal TV hardware. She said Facebook is now testing new AR filters which could potentially allow folks to “have a lip sync battle with Nanna, where [you] look like a rap bad-ass and Nanna looks like a rocker.”

Universal Music Group, the biggest music rights company in the world, posted streaming revenue growth of approximately $500 million, year-on-year, in the first nine months of 2019 Cooper is unfazed by such trends, espousing of his confidence in a “nice future for the music business.” “Right now, there’s a 50 million-track universe and it’s either free or $10 [per month], plus or minus. My view is that if [streaming services were] organized to allow people to choose by genre, or by number of tracks per day, hi-res sound, global [or] local, whatever it is, the music industry and the tech companies would have been ahead [of where they are now] by way of revenue optimization.”

Surprise: The best way to “stand out,” in Cooper’s view, is signing to a global major record company. “There are somewhere around 10,000 active artists on [the major labels’ collective] rosters – the three of us, Universal, Sony and Warner,” he said. “The estimates I see are that there are 15 to 20 million musicians on YouTube and there are hundreds of millions of kids mimicking or lip syncing musicians on TikTok. “Streaming allows anybody and everybody to upload [music],” he said.

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