Record Label

“So, you know, a couple of companies have gotten licensed. I guarantee you, I don't know, but I guarantee you, in my opinion, that those that product would be dumbed down.”

“Spotify is arguably the best bundle on the internet, but the reason why they were able to assemble the bundle is because they only needed to negotiate with like four, For entities.”

“If they had been forward-thinking and accepted that they would have created Spotify, we wouldn't be paying an extra 30% to a DSP.”

“We've learned from the labels that we have twice the engagement and half the churn of competing services. So that's sort of a curse where the per stream model, just the better we are as a product, the lower the per stream is going to look.”

“All of the major record labels are switching to this right now.”

“They're like a bank. That's all they turned into.”

“So these days of a record label are, Hey kid, you got talent. We're gonna develop you for six years. Like that doesn't happen. And now it's even more so. You only get a record deal if you already have an audience. So that, that no longer is, you know, the resp…”

“And that's what labels are great at. It's not so great at starting fires, but if you could start a fire, they got a hell of a lot of gasoline.”

“There's this threshold right around 300,000 that labels will approach you. So 303 100,000 monthly listeners on Spotify a month and labels start to look at you because you're at a dollar amount where they realize that they can make money off of you, especially …”

“It is interesting to see that even with software eating the world, record labels have continued to wield a ton of power that has taken away leverage from software businesses in the space like Spotify.”

“Most artists or at least rappers actually prefer the deals that the record labels gave them because they got more money up front. And they were able to do anything they wanted with that money.”

“I think Spotify in their music business has gotten to scale and has no potential to create a high operating leverage business. They're always going to be giving the same percentage of the profits to the record labels who have an unbelievable amount of bargaini…”

“There's gonna be An overcorrection, where artists want to be the winner, and the labels lose, and the companies lose, so I think it's gonna take that four to five years to get to that point.”

“All of the technology that's been introduced to the music industry is still one of the only businesses that doesn't have a direct relationship with its customer. So like, if you're a record label Spotify or Apple music or YouTube, they have the direct relation…”

“To deliver music, you have to have the rights of the record labels. They can always, they own the pricing power. And that's why, you know, Spotify after, you know, like building the best in class product, getting everybody to use it after 15 years or whatever,…”

“We had to wait all until, all up until we had stopped growing and actually started losing users before they agreed to give us the licenses we wanted.”

“Yeah, when you sign a distribution deal where a record label fronts you the money, you make the album, they then own the master, your royalty stream, again, independently negotiated, but you only end up with, like, 10%, 15%. Maybe if you're a really big artist…”

“Most of these startups, most of these artists are going to fail. And the record labels or the book publishers or the VCs are gonna have sunk all this money in to get to a point where we can even see if it's gonna work, and when 90 plus percent, I don't know wh…”

“When a record gets as big as, or a band gets as big as Arcade Fire, there's a percentage of people that know what label that record is on, but there's a much bigger percentage of people that don't know and don't care, like, even what a record label is.”

“This has become particularly an issue for Spotify because Spotify has this structure of their agreements with the record labels. So they're giving the record labels a fixed percentage of the consumer spend. So they can't give Apple 30% because they don't have …”

“I'm not going to judge how well Spotify's push into podcasting is going, which they're clearly doing because it's massively better, has a structurally massively better margin structure than paying record labels per stream in this content that they can actually…”

“Record income traditionally has been your smallest piece of the pie because record labels have screwed over artists for generations. So you're always forced to go on the road and sell merchandise and do all of these other things to subsidize the income essenti…”

“We're starting to see a generation of independent artists now that have broken that barrier that are starting to make money off of music as well, because they're putting out this music. The record labels are discovering them because they've already blown up es…”