Warner Music Group CEO participated in Goldman Sachs’ Communacopia + Expertise Convention in San Francisco this week and shared ideas on an artist-centric fee mannequin.
At Goldman Sachs’ Communacopia + Expertise Convention in San Francisco on Wednesday (September 6), Warner Music Group CEO Robert Kyncl participated in a Q&A session the place he touched on WMG’s worldwide enlargement technique, his prior expertise at Netflix and YouTube and his ideas on what a shift to an “artist-centric fee mannequin” would realistically appear like.
Kyncl made clear his stance that making a useful different to the presently pro-rata fee system would require larger cooperation between music firms and streaming providers.
“If you happen to’re on the DSP aspect, clearly you don’t need one associate with this, one other associate with that. So that you need some sort of a scalable mannequin that may perform,” mentioned Kyncl. “So I feel it’s superb that there’s a push, particularly amongst the main music firms, to vary each income per person in addition to the pie distribution.”
Income per person on the DSP degree and the distribution of the cash allotted to royalties are the 2 main elements in figuring out a brand new fee mannequin, says Kyncl. He notes that income per person amongst streaming providers is “lagging inflation immediately” and that if Spotify’s month-to-month premium subscription payment had maintained alongside inflation for the reason that service’s US launch in 2011, it could value $13.25 immediately versus the $10.99 it now expenses — up from $9.99 just a few months in the past.
In Kyncl’s estimation, Spotify’s common month-to-month income per person is presently round $7.50, and there’s a “large alternative” to boost that quantity. Spotify reported an ARPU of round $4.58 per person in Q2 2023 — however that quantity consists of ad-supported customers.
“Specializing in the income per person is a really, essential a part of what the business must do,” mentioned Kyncl, who additionally confirmed the latest information of a three way partnership between WMG and Eliot Grainge’s 10K Tasks, through which WMG will take a 51% stake within the LA-based label.
“We’re bringing unbelievable expertise each on the artist aspect in addition to on the manager aspect into our pool,” mentioned Kyncl. “Clearly, we proceed to recruit and make investments (in) expertise expertise in addition to to arrange the corporate.”
Kyncl’s name for recurring worth hikes recommends the business take a web page out of Netflix’s playbook, whereby the corporate has systematically raised costs, particularly within the US market, since 2013.
Because the streaming firm rolled out its first streaming-only plan that excluded its mail-order film service in 2011, it has incrementally elevated its charges by seven totally different worth hikes — from $7.99 to $15.49, or practically 94% in barely over a decade.
“The quantity of labor and innovation that occurs round worth optimization (at) Netflix is unbelievable,” mentioned Kyncl. “I feel all of us have lots to be taught from that, and we should always undertake it.”
Kyncl additionally touched on the difficulty of generative AI within the music business — such because the pretend Drake and Weeknd collaboration that went viral earlier this 12 months.
“I feel the first duty sits with the consumption platforms — particularly the open consumption platforms the place the content material will find yourself,” says Kyncl, referring to platforms the place any person can add content material, particularly YouTube and TikTok.
Kyncl compares the AI-generated content material points immediately to the user-generated content material that grew 15-20 years in the past when YouTube began gaining important footing within the tradition.
“We constructed a really giant a number of finish greenback enterprise for our companions from fan-uploaded content material of their copyrights, that was utilizing their copyrights,” Kyncl says. “It required expertise, and deal-making, and partnership and all of that, and we utilized all and constructed it.”
Apparently, Kyncl’s view on the event of AI violating copyright is at odds with many different rights holders, who see the builders of AI expertise as carrying the brunt of the duty to not infringe copyright.
A number of authors have launched lawsuits towards OpenAI on the grounds that the corporate behind the cultural phenomenon ChatGPT infringed on their copyright once they used copyrighted works as a part of their AI-training course of.