Watch: A conversation on the future of the music industry

On Thursday, February 16, Axios senior media reporter Sara Fischer and business reporter Erica Pandey hosted conversations examining the future of the music industry in today’s digital world, how technology has impacted artist compensation and how policy is keeping up. Guests included Grammy-nominated DJ, producer and entrepreneur Steve Aoki and Audius co-founder Roneil Rumburg. The View from the Top sponsored segment featured SoundExchange president and CEO Michael Huppe.

Steve Aoki explained what has inspired him to take chances as an artist in the digital world and how new technologies have helped him reach expanded audiences.

• On using emerging technologies like the metaverse, NFTs and Web3: “A few people are like…let’s see how this works if I implement it into my world, which is what I’m doing with the Aoki verse, which is what I’m doing with my NFTs, which is what I’m doing when I’m deejaying in these spaces or interacting with places like Sandbox and creating my own worlds in there, I’m like, I want to see what that looks like, just to show you guys it’s already working in our small little niche ecosystem. Of course it’s small because it’s brand new, and what it will become will become the norm.”
• On his experience playing a concert on Fortnite: “It reached over 2 billion people. I mean, that’s just absurd to me to hear. I don’t know how many people were in the game, but I’m assuming it is the biggest show I’ve ever done, as far as how many people were attending.”

Roneil Rumburg explained how music industry business models have changed from both artist and audience perspectives.

• On the shift away from one size fits all music monetization models: “I think the biggest shift that we are seeing happen is away from this one size fits all streaming and monetization model as I call it. What I mean by that is on a lot of the existing channels there’s a fixed subscription price, creators don’t really have any kind of input or control of how pricing works, and don’t really have any agency around how their content is offered…we’re moving towards a world where the diversity of offerings is increasing substantially, and fragmentation that exists around how music is monetizing is increasing.”
• On current issues surrounding artist compensation: “I think the pithiest way to explain this I’ve come across is to look at the market size of music. It’s about $42 billion a year in overall revenue, and that’s when you combine merchandise, ticketing, recorded music, like everything right? And artists are only capturing about 12% of that right now, the other 88% is actually going to various different middle people that exist in different parts of that supply chain.”

In the View from the Top segment, SoundExchange president and CEO Michael Huppe highlighted the vast opportunities and challenges that have arisen surrounding artist compensation in a new era of technology and social media platforms.

• “As we think about all these new technologies like Web3 and metaverse, they’re great and exciting platforms, but they’re often built on the backs of creators. And we have to make sure that labels and artists and songwriters and publishers are all part of the discussion because they deserve to participate fairly in the wealth that these new platforms inevitably are going to create.”

Thank you SoundExchange for sponsoring this event.