She has mastered the album release cycle. She has four versions of this album that make a clock, and you have to buy all four copies on vinyl. You still have the music on streaming, but she also has a tour that everybody is dying to see. That is going to be very, very lucrative for her.
Streaming is currently very much still a part of that. It’s at a height, but it’s a height that feels like it can’t keep going up. When things can’t keep going up in business cycles, investors take note and disruptors take note, and there will be something else at some other point. She wants to own every piece as much as she can, as long as this thing is still working for the rights-holders.
If you are doing well later in your career, you might say to the label, “Hey, before I renegotiate a deal with you, I would like to own my masters — not only of my current catalog, but also my back catalog, because all my fans still listen to all of that music.” Many artists will do this, renegotiate their deals, get better rights, and so on. In her case, she doesn’t have any ability to do so because it is owned by a financial family fund that doesn’t want to give it to her.
I don’t mean to be a firebrand here and bet against it. I think betting against streaming is perhaps unwise, but given that every supplier and musician is extremely unhappy at the moment, it seems like prices need to go up and it seems like this whole thing is a little bit on the edge. It’s happening at Warner Discovery. It’s happening at Netflix.
That’s really interesting to me, because the thesis of this conversation is that we have had 20 years of streaming and this model seems like it’s teetering. Spotify is the only major streamer that is not subsidized by a larger tech company. Apple Music is going to be fine because the iPhone is fine, right?Amazon Music is going to be fine because Amazon is fine. YouTube is going to be fine because Google exists. Spotify has to make it on its own.
I have always found those models to be a bit optimistic, because most other countries do not look like the GDP of the United States, where many of these tech companies get founded — though obviously Spotify was founded in Sweden. There is only so far you can go with user growth in countries that have lower base income and where people have more sensitivity to price fluctuations. You’re not going to get the US consumer everywhere you go around the world.
There’s so much. I know we have to talk about the power of TikTok and why it has been the most profound, radical, and fastest change I have ever seen in the music industry, but I also think that the algorithm is overblown. It thinks theTikTok account is an in-recovery smoker who is really into a bunch of very dated movie references.“TikTok is profound, and it has very meaningfully shifted what is happening in music.
There is some concern that people are only listening to music on TikTok, and that they need to listen to the really fast, sped-up version instead of the real one — which is a major trend we have reported about on, because that is their engagement with music. Perhaps TikTok is going to launch its own music service, but that would still put them in the world of just being yet another streamer. They would have to figure out how to succeed on the streaming side.
Part of what you’re saying, Nilay, is that music is more valuable than it has ever been. It might be undervalued financially, but in terms of value as humans, it is so essential to us. It has become the centerpiece of our social media. That’s amazing.That is true. When you start getting into the number of people who are actually getting wealthy off of the streaming model, it’s a very, very small, elite group of people that get to have a successful music career.
I’ll bring this back to Taylor Swift, because she did live through these eras. She was the product of a Nashville system and she did not have a built-in fan base when she released her first record. Now she has a massive fan base that she commands.
In 2020, you could have one breakout song that had hundreds of millions of streams on it on TikTok. Now I think that there is a realization of, “Can you do it again?” I think there’s just more and more scrutiny of whether you can generate multiple viral hits. This is the story of big content creators that has been coming out over the years of how actually truly demanding it is.
What I’m getting at is that the marketing funnel is really hard. And it’s getting harder because all of these things are marketing funnels for other places. You use TikTok to get someone to follow your Spotify, then they eventually go to your merch page, then they buy some merch, then they go buy a ticket, and then they eventually show up at your tour, et cetera. You are having to convert people from place to place to place to place, and those platforms don’t want you leaving.
He’s another nuclear, bright talent. He is a master of the platforms, and he makes compelling and well-produced content. Taylor Swift has mastered this inversion, creating demand for her actual physical albums, merch, and her tours. But the model of getting that $20 from touring isn’t working for everyone. Especially smaller artists that can’t front the money for a huge spectacular stage show.
In the case of touring, there are way more artists than ever that want to tour at the moment because they had to hold back during COVID-19. There’s huge supply strain constraints. The price of fuel is an increasing cost. Everything has just become more expensive in our world with inflation. So the basic math of going on tour doesn’t make sense not only because of all of those macro indicators, but also because there are more artists than ever that want to go on tour.
To your point, I think people’s expectations are rightly rising because they see something so spectacular, especially when you can go on YouTube and see a clip of the thing which was spectacular. Your expectation is, “This better be amazing.” That’s creating this upward spiral of, “I want a better show. I want it in bigger places. I want it to look grander.” So ticket prices are going up, and so more people want to get out on the road and capture more of those ticket prices.
I actually want to instruct the listener. If you go back in this episode to when I asked Charlie to explain music licensing, there was a sigh. Charlie was like, “Well, there are two parts of the song. There’s publishing and this, et cetera” It’s the exact same sigh when people have to explain NFT copyright. It literally is the same. We should just do a mashup of that sigh across all episodes. It’s the same one.
If so, I think this is where all the hedge funds buying up these music catalogs will have been overwhelmingly right, and they will shove it in our faces and say, “Look, this stuff was worth a hundred times more than what you thought it was, because when you’re in these virtual worlds, all you want to do is have some great background music going on.” Unless that all just gets written by AIs, then maybe not.