Podcasts about tarzan economics

We don't do shameless plugs here on Bubble Trouble, but we're making an exception for our esteem co-host Will Page on the publication of the paperback edition of Tarzan Economics, renamed Pivot: Eight Principles for Transforming your Business in a Time of Disruption. (Repeat from January, 2023). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Music Business Worldwide podcast supported by Voly Music.On this podcast, one of the industry's sharpest minds, Will Page, joins MBW founder Tim Ingham to cover a range of topics including pricing, streaming, royalties – and why the global industry is more local than ever.Page is the ex-Chief Economist of both Spotify and UK collection society PRS For Music. These days he's a consultant and the author of the book Tarzan Economics (aka Pivot), which presents compelling principles for business owners facing uncertain and disruptive times.Will is also the co-author of a new paper published by the London School of Economics and Political Science that focuses on what he calls ‘Glocalisation' of music. In other words, music has never been more global as an industry, yet when you dig into the most popular tracks in individual markets, they have a decidedly local feel.The Music Business Worldwide Podcast is supported by Voly Music.

Will Page returns to the show for a “state of the industry” episode. In last year's appearance he correctly called out the slowdown in streaming subscriptions, bubbles in web3, and more.Will believes the value of copyrighted music could hit $45 billion annually when the 2022 numbers are calculated — up $5 billion from 2021, which is already an all-time high for the industry.  Another massive shift is glocalisation”: the trend of local music dominating the domestic charts, as opposed to Western artists. This phenomenon isn't just being felt in music, but across every industry, from film to education.We covered both these trends, plus many more. Here's all our talking points: 1:33 Why the music industry is actually worth $40+ billion annually7:03 Physical music sales on the up and up10:47 How publisher and labels split up copyright value16:59 The rise of “glocalisation” will impact every industry34:39 DSP carnivores vs. herbivores 40:23 Why video vs. music streaming isn't a perfect comparison 46:31 Music as a premium offering in the marketplace 51:38 How to improve streaming royalties  1:06:05 AI music benefits that goes overlooked 1:10:07 Will's latest mix pays homage to Carole KingGlocalisation report: https://www.lse.ac.uk/european-institute/Assets/Documents/LEQS-Discussion-Papers/EIQPaper182.pdfWill Page's 2023 Believe in Humanity:https://www.mixcloud.com/willpagesnc/2023-believe-in-humanity/Listen: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | SoundCloud | Stitcher | Overcast | Amazon | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts | RSSHost: Dan Runcie, @RuncieDan, trapital.coGuest: Will Page, @willpageauthorThis episode is sponsored by DICE. Learn more about why artists, venues, and promoters love to partner with DICE for their ticketing needs. Visit dice.fmTrapital is home for the business of hip-hop. Gain the latest insights from hip-hop's biggest players by reading Trapital's free weekly memo. TRANSCRIPT[00:00:00] Will Page: I put so much emotional time and effort into making these mixes happen and going out for free.They get your DJ slots, but more importantly, it goes back to what makes me wanna work in music, which was a lyric from Mike G and the Jungle Brothers from that famous album done by the forties of Nature, where he said, it's about getting the music across. It's about getting the message across. It's about getting it across without crossing over.How can I get art across an audience without delegating its integrity? And it's such an honor to have this mixed drop in this Friday I mean, that's, made my year and we're not even into June yet.[00:00:30] Dan Runcie Intro: Hey, welcome to the Trapital Podcast. I'm your host and the founder of Trapital, Dan Runcie. This podcast is your place to gain insights from executives in music, media, entertainment, and more who are taking hip hop culture to the next level.[00:00:56] Dan Runcie Guest Intro: Today's episode is all about the state of the music industry, and we're joined by the One and Only, Will Page. He is a fellow at the London School of Economics. He's an author of Tarzan Economics and Pivot, and he is the former chief economist at Spotify. Will's second time on the podcast. Now, the first time we talked all about the future of streaming and where things are going in music, and we picked that conversation, backed up.We talked about a bunch of trends including the glocalisation of music, which is from a new report that Will had recently put out. We also talked about why he values the music industry to be close to a 40 billion industry, which is much higher than a lot of the reports about recorded music itself.And we also talk about a bunch of the topics that are happening right now, whether it's ai, how streaming should be priced, the dynamic between record labels and streaming services, and a whole lot more love. This conversation will always brings it with these conversations, so I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Here's our chat.[00:02:00] Dan Runcie: All right, today we have the one and only Will Page with us who is recording from a beautiful location. I don't know if you're listening to the pod you can't see, but will tell us where you are right now.[00:02:09] Will Page: So great to be back like a boomerang on Trapital. Dan, and I'm coming to you from the Platoon Studios. Part of the Apple Company Platoon is our label services company, which is owned by Apple. They're doing great stuff with the artists like Amapiano music from South Africa. And the best place I can describe to you here, it's like a Tardus.Have you've ever seen Dr. Who? There's a tiny door in this tall yard music complex in North London just behind Kings Cross. When you enter that tiny door, you enter this maze of the well class spatial audio recording studios of Apple. And it's an honor they've given me this location to come to Trapital today.[00:02:41] Dan Runcie: Well we're gonna make the best of it here and it's always great to have you on, cuz Last year, last year's episode felt like a state of the industry episode, and that's where I wanna start things off this year with this episode.A couple months ago, you put out your post in your Tarzan economics where you said that this industry is not a 2020 5 billion industry, the way others say. Mm-hmm. You say, no, this is almost a 40 billion industry. So let's break it down. How did you arrive there and what's the backstory?[00:03:12] Will Page: I get goosebumps when you say that you think like 10 years ago we were talking about a 14 billion business and now it's a 40, you know, skews a slurred Scottish pronunciation, but let's just be clear from one four to four zero, how did that happen?Well the origins of that work, and you've been a great champion of it, Dan, is for me to go into a cave around about October, November and calculate the global value of copyright and copyright is not just what the record labels publish, that famous IFPIGMR report that everyone refers to, but it's what collecting studies like ask F and BMI collect what publishers generates through direct licensing.You have to add A plus B plus C labels, plus collecting societies plus publishers together. Then the complex part, ripping out the double counting and doing all the add-backs, and you get to this figure of 39.6 billion, which as you say, you round it up, it begins with a four. And I think there's a few things that we can kind of get into on this front.I think firstly we should discuss the figure. I'll you a few insights there. Secondly, I think we should discuss the division. And then thirdly, I want to cover the physical aspect as well. So if you think about the figure, we've got 39.6 billion. We know it's growing. I think what's gonna be interesting when I go back into that cave later this year to redo that number, it's gonna be a lot bigger.Dan, I'll see it here on Trapital First. I think a 40 billion business in 2021 is gonna be closer to a 45 billion business in 2022. And one of the reasons why it's not labels and streaming, it's a combination of publishers are reporting record collections, essentially they're playing catch up with labels, booking deals that perhaps labels booked a year earlier.And collecting studies are gonna get back to normal after all the damage of the pandemic. And when you drive those factors in where you have a much bigger business than we had before. So for the people listening to your podcast who are investing in copyright, this party's got a waiter run. You know, don't jump off the train yet cause this thing is growing[00:05:18] Dan Runcie: And the piece I want to talk about there is the publishing side of this. If you look at the breakdown of the numbers you have, the publishing is nearly, publishing plus is nearly 13 billion itself. The major record labels own most of the largest publishers right now. Why isn't this number just automatically included? Wouldn't it be in everyone's advantage to include the fact that yes, Universal Music Group and Universal Music Publishing Group are together, part of the entity that make this, whether it's them, it's Warner Chapel, it's others. Why isn't this just the top line number that's shared in all of the other reports?[00:05:56] Will Page: It would be nice if it was, and indeed, I think the publishing industry around about 2001 used to do this. They haven't done it since. But it's like spaghetti. It's the best way I can describe it. I mean, how do you measure publisher income? You know, is it gross receipts by the publisher? Is it the publisher plus the collecting Saudi? That is money that went straight to the songwriter and didn't touch the publisher. So what the publisher holds onto what we call an industry, a net publisher, shares all these weird ways of measuring this industry that we have to be clear on.And it's, not easy. but I think what we do in the report is we try and make it bite size. We try and make it digestible to work out how much of that publisher's business came through, CMOs, the S gaps and BMIs this X over here PS music and how much do they bring in directly? And that allows you to understand a couple of things.Firstly, how do they compare vi to vis labels in terms of their overall income? And secondly, how do they compare when they go out to market directly, let's say putting a sync and a TV commercial or movie versus generating money through collective licensing that is radio or TV via ASCAP or bmr. So you get an interpretation of how these publishers are making those numbers work as well.[00:07:03] Dan Runcie: That makes sense. And then when we are able to break it down, we see a few numbers that roll up into it. So from a high level, at least what you shared from 2021, we have that 25.8 billion number from the recorded side. So that does fall in line with what we see from what the IPIs and others share. 10 billion Sure.From the publishing. And then you do have, the next 3.5 and then a little sliver there for royalty free and for the publishers' direct revenue that doesn't come from the songwriters. The next piece though, within the elements of how all of the revenue flows into that. We've talked a lot about streaming and we've talked, we'll get into streaming in a little bit, but I wanna talk about the physical side cause that was the second piece that you mentioned.We've all talked about vinyl, but it's not just vinyl. So could you talk a bit about where the trends are right now with physical sales and why this is such a huge factor for this number?[00:07:56] Will Page: Who would've thought on a Trapital podcast in May, 2023. We'll be talking about physical as a second topic on the agenda, but it's worth it. I mean, it's not a rounding era anymore. It's not chump change. in America, physical revenues largely vinyl outpaced the growth of streaming for the second year straight. It's not as big as streaming, but it's growing faster and it has been growing faster for two years now. That's crazy. Here in the uk the value of physical revenues to the UK music industry has overtaken the value of physical to Germany.Quick bit of history. For years, decades, Germans used to buy CDs. that's fallen off a cliff. They've given up on CDs. Whereas over here in Britain, we've all started buying vinyl again. So the value of vinyl in Britain is worth more than the value of CDs to Germans, that type of stuff you didn't expect to see.And if you go out to Asia, you see the CD market still strong. You've still got people who buy more than one copy of the same cd, of the same band. Don't ask me to explain the rationale for that, but it happens and it moves numbers. But after all this, when the dust settles, I mean a couple of observations, all the data to me is suggesting that 55, 60% of vinyl buyers don't actually own a record player.So I think it was Peter Drucker who said, the seller really knows what they're selling, and I don't think you're selling intellectual property or music cop right here. What we're actually selling is merchandise, you know, Taylor Swift, I got an email from Taylor Swift team saying they've got a marble blue vinyl coming out this week.Now we're talking about vinyl in the same way we used to talk about stone wash jeans, marble blue. This is like the fourth version of the same 11 songs priced at 29 99. Let's just figure that out for a second. I'm willing to give you 10 bucks a month to, access a hundred million songs on streaming services, but I'm also, it's the same person.I'm also willing to give you 30 bucks to buy just 10 of them. This is expensive music and I might not even be listening to it cause I don't even have a record player.[00:09:55] Dan Runcie: This is the fascinating piece about how we're calculating this stuff because the vinyl sales and all of that has been reported widely as a great boom to the industry and it has been.We've seen the numbers and in a lot of ways it brings people back to the era of being able to sell the hard copy of the thing itself, but it's much closer to selling a t-shirt or selling a sweatshirt or selling some type of concert merchant. It actually is the actual physical medium itself. So it'll be fascinating to see how that continues to evolve, how that embraces as well. On your side though, as a personal listener, do you buy any vinyls yourself that you don't listen to, that you just keep on display or?[00:10:34] Will Page: It's like your shoe collection, isn't it? Yes, right. Is the answer to that. But no, I mean, I will say that I got 3000 fi funk records in the house and they're all in alphabetical chronological order.So if they haven't been listened to, at least I know where to find them.[00:10:48] Dan Runcie: That's fair. That makes sense. So let's talk about the third piece of this, and that's the division of this. So you have the B2C side and you have the B2B side. Can we dig into that?[00:10:59] Will Page: Sure. this is, I think the backdrop for a lot more of the sort of thorny conversations happening in the music industry is now, you may have heard that in the UK we've had a three year long government inquiry into our business.We had the regulator turn over the coals, and so there's a lot of interest in how you split up this 40 billion dollar piece of pie. who gets what? And the division I'm gonna talk about here is labels an artist on one side. Songwriters and publishers on the other side as it currently stands, I would keep it simple and say two thirds of that 40 billion dollars goes to the record label and the artist, one third goes to the publisher and the songwriter.Now, when I first did this exercise back in 2014, it was pretty much 50 50, and when you see things which are not 50 50 in life, you're entitled to say, is that fair? Is it fair that when a streaming service pays a record label a dollar, it pays the publisher and the songwriter around 29 cents? If you're a publisher, a songwriter, you might say, that's unfair, cuz I'm getting less than them.I have preferences, issues, and I have any issues with this division. Well, let's flip it around. If you look at how B2B world works, licensing at the wholesale level, let's say you're licensing the bbc, for example, if your song's played on the bbc, you're gonna get 150 pounds for a play. 90 pounds goes to the songwriter and the publisher, 60 pounds goes to the artist and a record label.Now, is that fair? Why does the publisher win in the B2B market? By the record, label wins in the B2C market. And the one, the lesson I want to give your listeners is one from economics, and it's rarely taught university these days, but back in 1938, 1939, in a small Polish town called la. Now part of the Ukraine, ironically, free Polish mathematicians sat in a place called a Scottish Cafe, ironic for me, and invented a concept called Fair Division.And the question they posed was, let's imagine there's a cake and there's two people looking at that cake getting hungry. There's Dan Runcie over in the Bay Area and there's Will page back in Edinburgh. What's the best way to divide that cake up? And the conclusion they came up with is you give Will page, the knife.Aha, I've got the power to cut the cake. But you give Dan Runcie the right to choose which half. Damn, I've gotta make that cut really even otherwise, Dan's gonna pick the bigger half and I'll lose out. And this divider two model gave birth to the subject of fair Division and it simply asked, what makes a fair division fairer?How can I solve a preference? How can I solve for envy? I want that slice, not that slice. I'm unhappy cause Dan got that slice and not that slice. There's a whole bunch of maths in this. We had a third person that gets more complex. But I just wanna sow that seed for your listeners, which is when we ask questions like, why is it the label gets a dollar and the publisher gets 29 cents?There's gotta be some rationale why you know who bets first? Is it the label that bets first or the publisher who commits most? Is it label that commits most marketing spend or the publisher? These types of questions do with risk, often help answer questions of fair division, or to quote the famous Gangstar song, who's gonna take the weight?Somebody's gotta take a risk when you play this game, and perhaps there's a risk reward trade off, which is telling us who gets what Share of the spoils.[00:14:15] Dan Runcie: Let's unpack this a little bit because it's easy to see. May not be fair, but it's easy to see why the record labels get preference on the B2C side because as I mentioned before, the record labels have acquired a lot of the publishers, and especially in the streaming era, they were prioritizing that slice of the pie, their top line, as opposed to what essentially is the subsid subsidiary of their business, the publishing side.Why is it flipped with sync? Well, how did that dynamic end up being that way?[00:14:47] Will Page: That's an anomaly, which is actually blatantly obvious. You just don't think about it. And the way it was taught to me is anyone can record a song, but only one person can own a song. So I think, let's give an example of, I don't know, a Beach Boy song where I could ask for the original recording of that Beach Boy song to be used in the sync.Or I could get a cover band. So let's say I got a hundred thousand dollars to clear the rights of that song, and the initial split should be 50 50. If a band is willing to do a version of it for 10,000, the publisher can claim 90,000 of the budget and get the option. If the record label objects and says, well, I wish you used a master.Well, you got a price under the 10,000 to get the master in. So this kind of weird thing of bargaining power, if you ever hear. Let me scratch that again. Let me start from the top. Let me give you a quick example, Dan, to show how this works. One of my favorite sort of movies to watch when you're Bored and killing Time is The Devil's Swear, Prada great film.And then that film is a song by Seal called Crazy, incredible song, timeless. That guy has, you know, timeless hits to his name, but it's not him recording it. Now, what might have happened in that instance is the film producer's got a hundred thousand to get the song in the movie, and he's looking to negotiate how much you pay for publishing, how much you pay for label.Now the label is getting, you know, argumentative, wanting more and more, and the publisher is happy with a certain fee. Well, the film producer's got an option. Pay the publisher of the a hundred thousand, pay him 90,000, given the lion share of the deal. And then just turn the label and say, screw you. I'm gonna get a covers bant and knock me out.A decent version of it. And this happens all the time in TV films, in commercials, you'll hear covers of famous songs. And quite often what's happening there is you gotta pay the publisher the lion share of your budget and then just cough up some small chains to the covers bant to knock out a version.And then, so just a great reminder, Dan of anyone can record a song, but only one person can own the song that is the author. And that's why negotiating and bargaining power favors publishes in sync over the record labels.[00:16:59] Dan Runcie: That makes sense. And as you're saying that, I was thinking through five, six other examples of cover songs I've seen in many popular TV shows and movies.And this is exactly why?[00:17:08] Will Page: It's always car commercials. For some reason, every car commercial's got cover in a famous song. You think, remember that weird Scottish guy down Ronie Trapital? Yeah. That's what's happened. The publishers pool the rug from under the record label's feet at negotiation table.Another super important observation about the glocalisation trend, Dan, is I'm gonna take one of those 10 countries as our spotlight, Poland. Now the top 10 in Polands or Polish, the top 20 in Poland, or Polish. In fact, if you go to the top 40, it's pretty much all Polish bands performing in Polish, and you could say that's localization.But stop the bus. Most of those acts are performing hip hop, which is by itself a US genre. So perhaps we've got glocalisation of genre, but localization of language and artist. And that's a very important distinction for us to dissect. And perhaps it's for the anthropologist, the sociologist, to work out what's going on here.But it's not as straightforward as it's just local music. It's local music, but it's global genres, which is driving us forward.[00:18:08] Dan Runcie: And that's a great point for the people that work at record labels and other companies making decisions too, because there's been so much talk about hip hop's decline. But so much of that is focused on how this music is categorized and a lot of it's categorized solely on.What is considered American hip hop. But if you look at the rise of music in Latin America, which has been one of the fastest growing regions in the world, most of that music is hip hop. Bad Bunny considers himself a hip hop artist. You just brought up this example of Polish hip hop being one of the most popular genres there.So when we think about. How different genres get categorized, which genres get funding. Let's remember that key piece because hip hop is this culture and it's global, and that's gonna continue. So let's make sure that we are not taking away from a genre that is really one of the most impactful and still puts up numbers if we're categorizing it in the right way.[00:19:04] Will Page: Damn straight. I mean, I think genres are often like a square peg trying to fit into a round hole and in a paper published by London School of Economics, I was honored to use that line that I think I said on trap last time, which is rap is something you do. Hip hop is something you live. Rap could be the genre, hip hop could be the lifestyle.Maybe what those Polish acts getting to the top of the charts of doing is representing a lifestyle, but they're doing it in their mother tongue.[00:19:28] Dan Runcie: Well said. Agreed. Well, let's switch gears a bit. One topic that I wanna talk about, and I actually gave a talk recently, and I referenced you from this term, and its of music, was the glocalisation of music and why this is happening and what it means for Western music specifically in the us. But first, if you could define that term and explain why this is so important in music right now.[00:19:53] Will Page: Well, I'm so excited to be on Trapital talking about this because we are now officially published by London School of Economics, so I'm gonna make my mom and dad proud of me. At last Backstory, paperback of my book, guitars in Economics, retitled to Pivot. Apparently WH Smith's Travel and Hudson Travel said books with economics in their titles Don't sell an airport.So we've rebranded the whole book to Pivot and it's in airports, which is a result. that book, that paperback came out on the 6th of February and that night I was on the BBC one show and they had this great happy, clappy family friendly story. They wanted to bounce off me. They said, Hey, will, Isn't it great that the top 10 songs in Britain last year were all British ex?For the first time in 60 years, Britain got a clean sweep of the top 10 in the music charts. And I said, curb your enthusiasm because we're seeing it elsewhere. The top 10 in Germany, were all German. Top 10 in Italy, all Italian, ditto France, deto Poland. And if you go to Spain, the top 10, there were all Spanish language, but largely Latin American.So it's not just a British thing that we've seen this rise of local music on global streaming platforms. We're seeing it everywhere, cue some gulps and embarrassments live in the TV studio. But I made my point and I came out of that interview thinking. Well that stunned them. It's gonna stu more people.And I said about working on a paper called glocalisation, which with a Scottish accent, it's hard to pronounce. Let's see how you get on with it. Not localization and not glocalisation. Emerging to by definition and by practice glocalisation. I teamed up with this wonderful author, Chris Riva, who'd be a great guest on your show.He did a wonderful blog piece you may have read, called Why is There No Key Changes in Music anymore? It's a really beautiful piece of music writing and there isn't. Nobody uses key changes in the conclusion of songs. And we set out to do this academic study to explain to the world what's been happening in music and why it's relevant to everyone else.And what we saw across 10 European countries was strong evidence of local music dominating the top of the charts in these local markets on global platforms. Now history matters here. We didn't see this with local High street retailers, America, British, Canadian music dominated those charts. We still don't see it in linear broadcast models like radio and television, you know, it's still English language repertoire dominating those charts. But when it comes to global streaming, unregulated free market, global streaming, we see this phenomenal effect where local music is topping the charts. And you know, you look at what does it mean for us English language countries like ourselves?It means things get a little bit tough. It means exporting English language repertoire into Europe becomes harder and harder. Maybe I'll just close off with this quite frightening thought, which is Britain is one of only three net exporters of music in the world. The other two being your country, United States and Sweden.Thanks to a phenomenal list of Swedish songwriters and artists. And I can't think of the last time this country's broken a global superstar act since Dua Lipa in 2017. Dan, we used to knock them out one, two a year. 2017 was a long time ago, and it's been pretty dry since.[00:23:13] Dan Runcie: And that's a great point for the people that work at record labels and other companies making decisions too, because there's been so much talk about hip hop's decline. But so much of that is focused on how this music is categorized and a lot of it's categorized solely on.What is considered American hip hop. But if you look at the rise of music in Latin America, which has been one of the fastest growing regions in the world, most of that music is hip hop. Bad Bunny considers himself a hip hop artist, you just brought up this example of Polish hip hop being one of the most popular genres there.So when we think about, how different genres get categorized, which genres get funding. Let's remember that key piece because hip hop is this culture and it's global, and that's gonna continue. So let's make sure that we are not taking away from a genre that is really one of the most impactful and still puts up numbers if we're categorizing it in the right way.[00:24:07] Will Page: Damn straight. I mean, I think genres are often like a square peg trying to fit into a round hole and in a paper published by London School of Economics, I was honored to use that line that I think I said on trap last time, which is rap is something you do. Hip hop is something you live. Rap could be the genre, hip hop could be the lifestyle.Maybe what those Polish acts getting to the top of the charts of doing is representing a lifestyle, but they're doing it in their mother tongue.[00:24:32] Dan Runcie: Well said. Agreed. This is something that's been top of mind for me as well because technology in general has a way of making regions and making people in particular regions closer together than it does making the world bigger. It's like in, in a sense, technology can make the world seem bigger, but it actually makes it seem smaller, right? And I think that algorithms and bubbles that come from that are another symptom of this.But this is going to have huge implications for Western music. You mentioned it yourself. All of these markets that are used to being export markets, when they no longer have the strength to be able to have those exports, how does that then change the underlying product? How does that then change the budgets, the expectations of what you're able to make? Because if you're still trying to maintain that same top line revenue, you're still trying to maintain those airwaves you have, it's gonna cost you more money to do that, because you can't rely on the few Western superstars that you have to get, that you have to have equivalent of a superstar or at least a middle tier star in every region that you once had strong market share that you could export in.And it's gonna change cost structures. It's gonna change focus. And a lot of these expansions that we've seen of record labels, especially Western record labels, having strong footprints in different regions across the world, they're not just gonna need to have presence, they're gonna need to have strong results.And in many ways, try to rival the own companies that are in those comp, in those regions, the homegrown record labels, because every country is trying to do their own version of this and it's gonna be tight. This is one of the challenges that I think is only gonna continue to happen.[00:26:14] Will Page: You're opening up a real can of worms. I get it. Pardon to your listeners, we're getting excited here. Day of publication, first time we've been able to discuss it on air, but I know I'm onto something huge here and you've just illustrated why just a few remarks. One, some of the quotes that we have in the paper were just phenomenal. We have Apple included in the paper. We have Amazon, Steve Boom, the head of that media for Amazon in charge of not just music, but Twitch audio books, the whole thing. He's looking at all these media verticals. He makes this point where he says, as the world becomes more globalized, we become more tribal. Stop right there, as he just nailed it.What's happening here? It's The Economist can only explain so much. This is what's so deep about this topic. I wanna toss it to the anthropologist of sociologists to make sense of what I've uncovered, but it's massive. Now let's take a look at what's happening down on the street level with the record labels and the consumers. You know, the record labels are making more money and they're devolving more power to the local off seats. You know the headcount in the major labels, local off season, Germany, France, and Vietnam or wherever is doubled in the past five years. It hasn't doubled in the global headquarters. That's telling you something.If you look at how labels do their global priority list, maybe every month, here's 10 songs we want you to prioritize globally. So I had a look at how this is done, and across the year I saw maybe 8, 10, 12 artists in total, and there's 120 songs. There's not that many artists. You think about how many local artists are coming out the gate every week hitting their local labels or local streaming staff, up with ideas, with showcases and so on.Not a lot of global priority. Then you flip it and you think about the consumer, you know, they've had linear broadcast models for 70 years where you get what you're given. I'm gonna play this song at this time and you're gonna have to listen to it. FM radio, TV shows now they're empowered with choice and they don't want that anymore.They want what's familiar. What comforts them. They want their own stars performing in their own mother tongue topping those charts. So this has got way to go. Now, a couple of flips on this. Firstly, what does this mean for artists? And then I'm gonna take it out of media, but let's deal with artists.Let's imagine a huge festival in Germany. 80,000 people now festival can now sell out with just German X, no problem at all. So when the big American X or British X commanded like a million dollars a headlining fee, you wanna go play that festival. That promoter can turn around and say, sorry man, I can't generate any more money by having you on my bill.How much are you gonna pay me to get on stage? Price maker, price taker? You see what happens. And then the last thing, and there's so much more in this paper for your listeners to get to, and let's please link to it and you'll take, I'll take questions live on your blog about it as well, but. There's a great guy called Chris Deering, the father of the Sony PlayStation. Did you play the Sony PlayStation back in the day? Were you're a fan of the PlayStation.[00:29:08] Dan Runcie: Oh, yeah. PS one and PS two. Yeah. Okay.[00:29:11] Will Page: You, oh, so you, you're an OG PlayStation fella. So he's the father of the PlayStation and launching the PlayStation in the nineties and into the nineties. He offered us observation, which is when they launched a SingStar, which was karaoke challenge.In the PlayStation, he says, we always discussed why the Swedish version of SingStar was more popular in Sweden than the English version Science. Intuitive enough. Let me break it down. Gaming back then was interactive music was not, you interacted with your PlayStation, that's why you killed so much time with it. Music was just a CD and a plastic case that broke your fingernails when you tried to open it. That's how the world worked back then and gaming offered you choice. I could try and do karaoke with those huge global English language hits where I could go further down the chart and buy the Swedish version and sing along to less well known Swedish hits. And the consumer always picked the Swedish version. So as a bellwether, as a microcosm, what I think Chris Ding was teaching us was we saw this happening in gaming long before you started seeing it happen with music. 20 years ago when there was interactive content, which gaming was, music wasn't, and consumers had a choice, which gaming offered a music didn't.They went local. Today, Dan, we're dealing with music lists, A interactive, and B offers choice. And what we're seeing is local cream is rising to the top of the charts.[00:30:33] Dan Runcie: And we're seeing this across multimedia as well. We're seeing it in the film industry too. Even as recent as five, 10 years ago, you release any of the blockbuster movies that were successful in the us, almost all of them had some overseas footprint.Some of them definitely vary based on the genre, but they were always there. But now China specifically had been such a huge market for the Hollywood and Box office specifically, but now they're starting to release more of their own high ed movies and those are attracting much more audiences than our export content can one.Two, the Chinese government in general is just being very selective about what they allow and what they don't allow. And then three, with that, that's really only leaving certain fast and furious movies and Avatar. That's it. The Marvel movies are hit and missed depending on what they allow, what they don't allow, and how, and it's just crazy to see the implications that has had for Marvel Studios for everyone else in Hollywood as well.When you think about it, and we're seeing this across multimedia, I think there's a few trends here that makes me think about, one is. Population growth in general and just where those trends are and how different corporations can approach the opportunity. Because I look at Nigeria, you look at Ethiopia, these are some of the fastest growing countries in the world.And you look at the music that is rising more popular than ever, whether it's Amapiano or it's Afrobeats, that's only going to continue to grow. And that's only from a few regions in the huge continent of Africa. So when we're thinking about where success is gonna come from, where that lines up with infrastructure, people have been seeing it for years.But the reason that we're seeing the growth in Africa, the growth in Latin America, the growth in a lot of these markets is this trend of glocalisation and it's only going to increase. So if we're thinking about where we wanna invest dollars, where we wanna build infrastructure in the future, we not just being folks that live in the western world, but also elsewhere in the world, this is where things are heading.[00:32:37] Will Page: Let me come in down the middle and then throw it out to the side. So, Ralph Simon, a longtime mentor of mine, is quoted in the paper and where he's actually gonna moderate the address here at the Mad Festival here in London, which is for the marketing and advertising community here, where he says, what you've uncovered here that headwind of glocalisation is gonna affect the world of marketing and advertising this time next year.That's what will be the buzzword in their head. So if you think about, I don't know, a drinks company like Diagio, maybe they've got a globalized strategy and a globalized marketing budget. When they start seeing that you gotta go fishing where the fish are and the fish are localized, they're gonna devolve that budget and devolve that autonomy down to local offices. So the wheels of localization, this rise of local, over global, they've only just got started, if I've called it right. We're onto something way bigger than a 20 minute read LSE discussion paper. This goes deep, deep and far beyond economics. But then you mentioned as well China, I mean just one offshoot observation there, which is to look at education.If you look at the UK university system, about a third, if not more, of it is subsidized by the Chinese government and Chinese students here. Great for business, slightly dubious in its business, besties, charging one student more than another student for the same product. But that's what we do over here.And I recently, we made a fellow of Edmar University's Futures Institute, which is an honor to me, you know, gets me back home more often. Fine. And I was learning from them that. The quality of students coming from China to study here in Britain and across Europe is getting worse and worse. Why? Cuz the best students have got the best universities in China.They no longer need to travel. So there's a classic export import dilemma of, for the past 10, 15 years, universities have built a complete treasury coffer base of cash around selling higher education to the Chinese. And now the tables are turning. I don't need to send my students to you universities anymore.I'll educate them here. Thank you very much. So, like I say, this stuff is a microcosm. It's got a can of worms that can open in many different directions[00:34:39] Dan Runcie: And it's gonna touch every industry that we know of to some extent, especially as every industry watches to be global to some extent. This is going to be a big topic moving forward.Let's shift gears a bit. One of the terms that was really big for us. That came from our podcast we did last year. We talked about herbivores and we talked about carnivores, and we talked about them in relation to streaming. We haven't touched on streaming yet, and this will be our opportunity to dig down into it, but mm-hmm.For the listeners, can we revisit where that came from, what that means, and also where this is heading? What does this mean for music streaming right now as it relates to the services and competition?[00:35:24] Will Page: Well, when I first came on Trapital, that was in a small Spanish village of Cayo De Suria and I didn't think I'd come up with an expression that would go viral from a small village in Spain to be, you know, quoted from in Canada, in America.And Dan, this is quite hilarious. we have a new secretary of state of culture here in the UK. The right Honorable MP, Lucy Fraser KG, Smart as a whip. Brilliant. And when I first met her, you know what the first thing she said was, I listened to you on Trapital. I wanted to ask you about this thing you've got going called herbivores and carnivores.So right the way through to the corridors of power, this expression seems to have traveled. What are we talking about? Well, the way I framed it was for 20 years we've had these streaming services, which essentially grow without damaging anyone else. Amazon is up. Bigger subscriber numbers. Apple's got bigger subscriber numbers.YouTube and Nancy's bigger subscriber numbers. And then Spotify. Nancy's bigger subscriber numbers. Everyone's growing each other's gardens. That's fine. That's herbivores. What happens when you reach that saturation point where there's no more room to grow? The only way I can grow my business is stealing some of yours.That's carnivores. And the greatest example is simply telcos. We're all familiar with telcos. We all pay our broadband bills. How do telcos compete? Everybody in your town's got a broadband account, so the only way you can compete is by stealing someone else's business. The only way here in Britain Virgin Media can compete is by stealing some of skies.The only way that at and t competes is by stealing some of com. So that's carnival competition. Now, the key point for Trapital listeners is we don't know what this chapter is gonna read like cuz we've never had carus pronounce that word correctly. Carus behavior before. We've never seen a headline that said, Spotify's down 2 million subs and apple's up 2 million, or Amazon's up 3 million and you know, YouTube is down 3 million.We don't know what that looks like. So I think it's important for Trapital to start thinking about logical, plausible scenarios. You kick a one obvious one, which is again, a lesson from the telcos. When we do become carnivores, do we compete on price or do we compete on features? Let me wheel this back a second, you know, we'll get into pricing in more depth later. But downward competition on price tends to be how carnivores compete, and that'll be a fascinating development given that we've not seen much change in price in 22 years in counting or as we saw with Apple, they roll out spatial audio, they charge more for it, they've got a new feature, and they charge more for that feature.So do we see downward competition blood on the carpet price competition, or do we see. Upward competition based on features. I don't know which one it's gonna be. It's not for me to call it. I don't work for any of these companies. I've worked with these companies, but I don't work for any of them directly.But we have to start discussing these scenarios. How's this chapter gonna read when we start learning of net churn amongst the four horseman streaming services that's out there. It's gonna be a fascinating twist, and I'm beginning, Dan, I'm beginning to see signs of con behavior happening right now, to be honest with you.I can see switchers happening across the four, so I think we're getting there in the US and the UK. What are those signs you see? I'm just seeing that in terms of subscriber growth, it's a lot bumpier than before. Before it is just a clear trajectory. The intelligence I was getting was, everyone's up, no one needs to bother.Now I flag, you know, I signed the siren. I'm beginning to see, you know, turbulence in that subscriber growth. Someone could be down one month, up the next month. Maybe that's just a little bit of churn. The ending of a trial period, you don't know. But now for me, the smoke signals are some of those services are seeing their gross stutter.Others are growing, which means we could start having some switching. I can add to that as well. Cross usage is key here. I really hammered this home during my 10 years at Spotify, which is to start plotting grids saying, who's using your service? This person, that person, and next person now ask what other services are they using?And some data from America suggests that one in four people using Apple music are also using Spotify. And one in four people using Spotify are also using Apple Music. Cross usage confirmed. So if that was true, what do you make of that? With a public spending squeeze? With inflation, with people becoming more cost conscious in the economy with less disposable income, maybe they wanna wheel back from that and use just one, not two. And that's where we could start seeing some net churn effects taking place as well. So, you know, imagine a cross usage grid in whatever business you're working on. If your Trapital listeners and ask that question, I know who's using my stuff, what else are they using? Um, that's a really, really important question to ask to work out how this carnivore scenario is gonna play out.How are we gonna write this chapter?[00:40:23] Dan Runcie: This is interesting because it reminds me of the comparisons that people often make to video streaming and some of the dynamics there where prices have increased over the years. I know we've talked about it before to tend to a 12 years ago Netflix was cheaper than Spotify was from a monthly, US price group subscription.And now tough, tough. It's right. And now it's nearly twice the price of the current price point. That it is. The difference though, when we're talking about when you are in that carnival, when you're in that carnival market, what do you compete on? Features or price? Video streaming, you can compete on features essentially because the content is differentiated.If you want to watch Wednesday, that Netflix series is only one platform that you can watch it on. Yeah, you need to have that Netflix subscription, but in music it's different because if you wanna listen to SZA's SOS album, that's been dominating the charts. You can listen to it on any of these services.So because there are fewer and fewer limitations, at least, if your goal, main goal from a consumption perspective is to listen to the music, how do you then differentiate, which I do think can put more pressure on price, which is very interesting because there is this broader pricing debate that's happening right now about why prices should be higher.And we've seen in the past six plus months that Apple has at least raised its prices. Amazon has done the same, at least for new subscribers. Spotify has announced that it will but hasn't yet and this is part of that dynamic because on one hand you have these broader economic trends as you're calling them out, but on the other hand you do have the rights holders and others pushing on prices to increase.And then you have the dynamic between the rights holders and then the streaming services about who would then get the increased revenue that comes. So there's all of these fascinating dynamics that are intersecting with this her before shift to carnivores[00:42:23] Will Page: For sure. Let me just go around the block of those observations you offered us. All relevant, all valid and just, you know, pick off a few of them. If we go back to Netflix, I think Netflix has a, not a herbivore. I'm gonna talk about alcohol here cause it's late in the day in the UK. A gin and tonic relationship with its competitors. That is, if Dan Runcie doesn't pay for any video streaming service, and let's say Netflix gets you in and I'm the head of Disney plus, I say, well, thank you Netflix.That makes it easier for me to get Dan to pay for Disney Plus too. They compliment each other. They are genuine complimentary goods. They might compete for attention. You know who's got the best exclusive content, who's gonna renew the friends deal, whatever, you know, who's gonna get Fresh Prince of Bel Air on?That could be a switch or piece of content too, but when you step back from it, it's gin and tonic. It's not different brands of gin, that's really important technology, which is they've grown this market of video streaming. They've increased their prices and the same person's paying for 2, 3, 4 different packages.If I added up, I'm giving video streaming about 60 quid a month, and I'm giving music streaming 10 and the sixties going up and the music's staying flat. So it's bizarre what's happened in video streaming because the content is exclusive. Back to, how do music carnivores play out again? Could we see it play out in features?I listen to airport cause they've got classical and I listen to Spotify because it got discovered weekly. Is that plausible? Personally, I don't buy it, but you can sow that seed and see if it takes root, as well. I think just quick pause and Apple as well. I think two things there. They've launched Apple Classical. That's a very, very good example of differentiating a product because it's a standalone app like podcast as a standalone app. The way I look at that is you can go to the supermarket and buy all your shopping. You can get your Tropicana orange juice, you can get your bread, get your eggs, get your meat, get your fish or you could go to a specialist butcher and buy your meat there instead. Apple Classical for me is the specialist butcher as opposed to the supermarket, and they're offering both in the same ecosystem. It'd be incredible if they preload out the next iOS update and give 850 million people an Apple classical app.Imagine if they did that for Jazz, my friend. Imagine if they did that for jazz. Just if Apple's listening, repeat, do that for jazz. So there's one example. The other example from Apple is to go back to bundling. You know we talk about 9.99 a month. I chewed your ear off about this topic last time I was on your show.Just to remind your listeners, where did it come from? This price point in pound Sterling, in Euro in dollar that we still pay for on the 20th of May, 2023. It came from a Blockbuster video rental card that is when reps, he got its license on the 3rd of December, 2001. Not long after nine 11, a record label exec said if it cost nine 90 nines, rent movies from Blockbuster.That's what it should cost to rent music. And 22 years plus on, we're still there, ran over. But what does this mean for bumbling strategies? How much does Apple really charge? If I give $30 a month for Apple One, which is tv, music, gaming news, storage and fitness, all wrapped up into one price. Now, there's a famous Silicon Valley investi called James Barksdale.Dunno if you've heard of him from the Bay Area where you're based. And he had this famous quote where he said, gentlemen, there's only two ways to make money in business. Bundling and unbundling. What we've had for the past 10 years is herbivores. Unbundling. Pay for Netflix, don't pay for Comcast. Pay for Spotify. Don't pay for your CDs, fine. What we might have in the next 10 years is carnivores bundling, which is a pendulum, swings back towards convenience of the bundle and away from the individual items. So Apple, take 30 bucks a month off my bank balance. Please take 40. All I want is one direct debit. I don't care about the money, I just want the bundle.And I don't want to see 15 direct debits every month. I just wanna see one. I think that's a very plausible scenario for how the next 10 years it's gonna play out as we shift from herbivores to carnivores[00:46:31] Dan Runcie: And the bundle benefits, the companies that have the ability to do that, right? You can do that through Amazon Prime and get your video, your music, your free shipping or whatever is under that umbrella. You could do that through Apple. You mentioned all the elements under Apple one. Spotify has some element of this as well, whether it's exclusive podcasting and things like that. So you're starting to see these things happen, one thing that you mentioned though earlier, you're talking about going through the supermarket and all of the items that you could get there versus going to the specialty butcher.One of the unique aspects of the supermarket thing though, is that. You go into the supermarket, yes, you can get your high-end Tropicana, or you can get the generic store brand, but you're gonna pay more for that high-end Tropicana because you're paying for the brand, you're paying for everything else that isn't gonna necessarily be the same as the generic one.That may not necessarily be the same quality or the same taste. We're seeing this a bit in the streaming landscape now and some of the debates that were happening. You've heard the major record label executives talk about how they don't necessarily want their premium music. They see their content as HBO level and it's being in a playlist next to rain music, or it's next to your uncle that is playing some random song on the banjo and they're getting essentially the same price going to the rights holders for that song.And in the supermarket that's obviously very different, each item has its own differentiator there, or econ has its own price point there and its own cost, but that isn't necessarily the same thing in music. Of course, the cost of each of those tracks may be different, but the revenue isn't. So that's gonna be, or that already is a whole debate that's going on right now. Do you have thoughts on that?[00:48:21] Will Page: Well, you tossed top Tropicana, let me go grab that carton for a second. It's one of the best economic lessons I ever learned was visiting a supermarket in America cuz it's true to say that when you go into one of your American supermarkets, an entire aisle of that precious shelf space, it's dedicated to selling inferior brands of orange juice next to Tropicana.Just very quickly what's happening there, the undercover economist, if you want, is a bargaining power game. Tropicana knows The reason Dan Runcie pulled the car over, got the trolley, went into that supermarket is to get a staple item of Tropicana and other stuff. By the time it gets to the till, Tropicana could be $5.By the time he gets to till he spent $50. So here, subscriber acquisition cost contribution is really high. They're getting you into the mall. What you do once you're in the mall is anyone's business, but they got you in. Otherwise you would've gone to the deli across the street. So they could say to the supermarket, I'm gonna charge you $7 to sell that Tropicana for $5 in my supermarket.Supermarket knows this, they know that Tropicana's got the bargaining paris. They counter by saying, here's an entire shell space of awful brands of orange juice to curb your bargaining power to see if the consumer wants something different. Now is this Will Page taking a stupid pill and digressing down Tropicana Alley. No. Let's think about this for a second today, Dan, there's a hundred thousand songs being onboarded onto streaming services. Is there anybody what? Marching up and down Capitol Hill saying We want a hundred thousand songs. No, the floodgates have opened them. It's all this content. Two new podcasts being launched every minute.All this content, all of these alternative brands to Tropicana. But you just wanted one. And I think the record labels argument here is that one Cardinal Tropicana is worth more than everything else you're offering by its side. So we wanna rebalance the scales. Now this gets really tricky and very contentious, but what is interesting, if you wanna take a cool head on this topic, it's to learn from the collecting studies, which is not the sexiest thing to say on a Trapital podcast, but it's to look at your Scaps and your BMIs and understand how they distribute the value of money for music.Since their foundation in the 1930s, scap has never, ever treated music to have the same value. They have rules, qualifications, distribution, allocation practices, which change the value of music. And they don't have data scientists then. And to be honest, I don't think they have data scientists now, but they always have treated the value of music differently.When they were founded, they had a classical music distribution pot and a distribution pot for music that wasn't classical music. Ironically, their board was full of classical composers, and I think that's called embezzlement, but we'll leave that to the side. What we have here is a story of recognizing music as different value in the world of collecting Saudi.I call that Jurassic Park, but in the world of music streaming with all those software developers and engineers and data scientists, 22 years of 9.99 money coming in and the Prorata model, which means every song is worth the same for money going out, and that's your tension. That's your tension. How do you get off that?Tension is anyone's business. We got some ideas we can discuss. User-centric is one, autocentric is another. I've got a few ideas for my own, but I want your audience to appreciate. In straight no chaser language we call it. That's the undercurrent of what's going on here. How do you introduce Trapitalism to communism?[00:51:38] Dan Runcie: You mentioned there's artist centric, user-centric, but you mentioned some ideas you had of your own. What are those ideas?[00:51:44] Will Page: Can I bounce it off? Use my intellectual punch bag for a quick second. Yes, and I've worked 'em all. I've worked on the artist centric model. I've worked on artist growth models. That's up on YouTube. I've worked on user centric, but I'm just, I'm worried that these models, these propositions could collapse the royalty systems that these streaming services work under. The introduction of user centric or artist centric could become so complex, so burdensome, the royalty systems could break down.That's a genuine concern I have. It's not one you discuss when you talk about your aspirations and the land of milk and honey of our new streaming model that you envisage. Back in the engine room when you see how royalties are allocated and calculated and distributed out to right holders, I mean they're under stress anyway.Any more stress could snap it. So I come at this model, my proposition from the one that's least likely to break the system. I'm not saying it's the best model, but it's the least like least likely to have adverse impact on the system. And it came from my DCMS Select Committee performance in the UK Parliament, which your listeners can watch, we can give the link out, which is I said to the committee in terms of how you could change the model.What about thinking about duration? This wheel back since 1980s when B BBC radio plays, let's say Bohemian Rhapsody, it will pay for that song twice what it would pay for. You're my best friend, members of Queen wrote both songs, both released within three, four years of each other, but one lasts twice as long as another.So duration is not new. We factor in duration a lot in our music industry. We just never thought about it. If you look at Mexico, the Mexican collecting Saudi, which is so corrupt as an inside an army barracks, if you look there, they have sliding scales, duration. They factor in time, but they say the second minute is what?Less than the first. But I'm giving you more for more time just adding, decreasing scale. Germany, they have ranges in your country. America, mechanical licensing collective, the MLC in Nashville, they have overtime songs that last more than six minutes get a 1.2 multiplier. So I've been thinking about how could you introduce duration to this business?And the idea I've come up with is not to measure time. That'd be too complex, too burdensome. Every single song, measuring every second of consumption. How do you audit there? If you're an artist manager, but I wanna measure completion, then I think this is the answer. I want songs that are completed in full to receive a bonus and songs that are skipped before they end to receive a penalty.Not a huge bonus, not a huge penalty, but a tweak. A nudge that says, I value your attention. I value great songs, and you listen to these great songs and it captures my entire attention. You deserve something more. But if I skipped out after the first chorus, you deserve something less. I think that small nudge is a nudge in the right direction for this industry, and it wouldn't break the systems.So there it is. Tell me now, have I taken a stupid pill?[00:54:42] Dan Runcie: What I like about it, and I've heard other people in the industry mention this too, you're able to get something closer to what we do see in video streaming. I forget which app is specifically, but their threshold is 75%. So they acknowledge that yes, if you don't wanna watch the credits, you don't wanna listen to the closeout, that's fine.But if we at least get you for 75%, then we are gonna count that, and then that then can get used internally. That can then get used in different areas. But I think it provides everyone better data and analysis, much better data to be able to break down than. Whether or not you listen to the first 30 seconds, that's such a low threshold, but that's essentially where we are today.I think the biggest thing, regardless of what path is chosen, because as you and I both know, there's trade-offs to everyone. So instead of going through all the negative parts about it, I think it's probably more helpful to talk about it collectively, you accept the fact that there are trade-offs. You accept the fact that people are gonna try to game the system regardless of how you go about it.Because we have seen duration work elsewhere and it does get at that particular thing that we're trying to get at there is help there. And you mentioned other things such as, yes, if you're listening to the Bohemian Rhapsody, you, which I think is at least seven minutes and 15 seconds, most likely longer versus two minute song that is clearly idealized for the streaming era.There still should be maybe some slight difference there because listening to a minute and 30 seconds is very different than listening to five minute and 45 seconds to be able to hit that 75% threshold. So between that and then I've heard other topics such as which artists you start your session with should have some type of multiplier on there, and as opposed to someone that gets algorithmically recommended to you to be able to put some more onus on the on-demand nature of music streaming.The tough thing is that these things do get tough in general. Anytime there's any type of multiplier or factor in, there still is a zero sum pot that we're taking the money out of. So accepting the trade-offs, I like the direction, I think that there's a few ways to go about it that could make it more interesting, but in general, I do think that any of the proposed options I've seen at least, allow a bit more of a true economic reflection of where the reality is as opposed to where things are today.And I understand where things are today. It's easy. It's easy to report, it's easy to collect on and pay people out, relatively speaking. But like anything, there's trade offs.[00:57:14] Will Page: Yeah, it's really easy today. Even drummers can work out their royalties and no offense to drummers, but that's telling you something.But two points on my dura

This week, I'm running back an interview I did with Will Page in 2022. It was our most popular episode of 2022 and we talked about a lot of topics that are still timely and still being debated right now in the industry. One of the most unique insights into the state of the music business today doesn't come from a record label exec. Not from an agent. Not from an artist. No, it comes from Scottish economist Will Page, who served that role for Spotify from 2012 to 2019 — a period of explosive growth for the streaming giant. But if you ask Page about streaming's future, he's not nearly as optimistic as the rest of the industry. “The party has to come to an end,” as he told me on this episode of Trapital.Page believes the music industry is transitioning from a “herbivore market” to a “carnivore” one. In other words, future growth will not come from brand-new customers — it'll come from the streaming services eating into each other's market share. Not only has subscriber counts possibly tapped out in Page's opinion, but streaming services have also put a ceiling on revenues by charging only $9.99, a price that hasn't budged in 20 years despite giant leaps in technology and music catalog size.  That against-the-grain prediction was one of many Will shared with me during our in-depth interview. But he has plenty more research- and experience-backed thoughts on touring, vinyl records, Web 3.0, and everything in between. Believe me, this is an interview you don't want to miss. Here's everything we covered: [3:21] The Global Business of Music[4:15] Vinyl Records $1.5 Billion Recovery[08:54] Will's Bearish View About The Future Of Streaming[14:46] Ongoing Price War Between Streaming Services[18:33] The Changing Economics Of Music Touring [21:44] Performing At Festivals Vs. Tours [24:57] The Evolution Of Music Publishing[28:34] How Music Revenue Gets Distributed To Publishers[32:41] What Does A “Post-Spotify Economy” Look Like? [33:44] The Current Business Landscape Of Hip-Hop Listen to Will's mix right here: https://www.mixcloud.com/willpagesnc/we-aint-done-with-2021/Check out Will's Podcast, Bubble Trouble, where he breaks down how financial markets really work.Read Will's book, Tarzan Economics: Eight Principles for Pivoting Through Disruption.Listen: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | SoundCloud | Stitcher | Overcast | Amazon | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts | RSSHost: Dan Runcie, @RuncieDan, trapital.coGuests: Will Page, @willpageauthor Trapital is home for the business of hip-hop. Gain the latest insights from hip-hop's biggest players by reading Trapital's free weekly memo. TRANSCRIPT[00:00:00] Will Page: When you have 110 million households, and you have more than 110 million subscribers in the United States, then we are in a race to the finishing line before herbivore turn into carnivores.In oil, we have this expression called peak oil, which is we know that we've extracted more oil in the world than is left to extract an oil that's left is gonna be even more costly to get out the ground. I think we're in peak subscriber territory where at some point soon we're gonna start seeing growth happen through stealing other customers as opposed to finding your own.[00:00:29] Dan Runcie Intro: Hey, welcome to the Trapital Podcast. I'm your host and the founder of Trapital, Dan Runcie. This podcast is your place to gain insights from executives in music, media, entertainment, and more who are taking hip hop culture to the next level.[00:01:12] Dan Runcie Guest Intro: For today's episode, let's revisit the most popular episode that we did in 2022. That's the conversation that I had with Will Page. Will Page is the Former Chief Economist for Spotify, the author of Pivot, and Advisor consultant to many of the companies that are leading the music industry today. In this conversation, Will and I talked about a lot of topics that are still timely and still being debated right now in the industry.The price of streaming. Streaming, especially for Spotify, is still $9.99 in the. Pound and Euro in many markets. But Spotify wants to keep that price for several reasons. They want to continue to grow as much as they can. They also want something in return from the record labels. They want some type of concession if they're going to raise their prices.But as we've heard, the push has got louder and louder from the record label CEOs that want that price to increase. So we talk about some of the origins of that debate and where that may be. Then we also talk about some of the competition among the digital service providers as well, whether it's Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon Music, and others.We talk about how it's transitioning from a herbivore market to a carnivore market now that the market's getting saturated. You probably heard that term a bit over the past year that originated from this podcast. So we talk about that a number of other timely things and more we'll eventually have will back on the podcast soon.But this is a nice precursor to refresh the memory a bit and with some of the topics that are still going on in music today. Here's our episode. Hope you enjoy it.[00:02:48] Dan Runcie: Some of the work you've done for a company that is very heavily focused on playlist, which is Spotify, and I think more broadly looking at the streaming era we're in right now.This is a great time to chat because we just saw the IFPI results and streaming as continuing to grow as we've seen. But I feel like you probably spotted a few interesting trends about where things are heading, and I think that's a question mark for a lot of people. Streaming continues to grow, but how far can it grow?What are we seeing in terms of differences within genres or regions? What are some of the things that stuck out[00:03:21] Will Page: to you? I'll give you a couple. The first one is the global business. Well, last time I looked at United Nations, I think there's 208 countries in the world. The global yearbook that we're discussing here has, I think 58.So we have to be careful what we define as global. I think Africa's clubbed together as one continent and where they need to work on that. But I think the global business is growing, but it's also becoming more American. So if you go back to when Spotify launched America, 22, 20 3% of the business round about just over a fifth.Today it's 37%. So we have seen the business grow and become more American, and that raises questions, you know, economic questions like globalization, questions, should poor countries catch up with rich ones? The theory says yes. The reality often says no. So we're seeing this kind of lopsided growth where the business is growing, but it's growing in favor of an American market.The biggest country is growing at the fastest. That's a positive problem, but I just wanna flag it, which is, that's not how it was supposed to play out. And then the second thing I'd wanna point to as well is just vinyl. this vinyl recovery is just, well, I don't know how much my bank balance is responsible for this vinyl recovery, but I'm telling you, Is define the laws of gravity.Now, we're now looking at vinyl being worth one and a half billion dollars, which is more than it's been worth in the past 30 years. It's worth more than CDs, cassettes, and downloads, the three formats that we're supposed to declare that vinyl is dead. But there's two things you can kind of cut out the vinyl recovery, which I think will be of real interest to your audience.Firstly, on the consumer side. I saw a survey which suggested that the majority, just over half of all vinyl buyers today, don't own a record player. I mean, something's cooking here. So what are we buying it for? I'll extend that as well. the cost of wall frames to frame vinyl on your wall often cost more than the record itself.So I'm willing to pay more for vinyl to you know, framed on my wall than I am for the record. And by the way, I don't have a record player. There's a lot of people who will tick those bizarre boxes. But on the crater side, something else is interesting. This'll take a little bit of working through.But if we think about the streaming model, it's monetizing consumption. That's what it does. So if there's an album with 10 songs, three killer and seven filler songs, and an album, and let's say Dan Runcie wrote the Three Killer Tracks and Will Page, he wrote the Seven Duff Filler Tracks. On streaming, Dan might walk away with all the money and I'll walk away from none because we're only streaming the killer tracks and nobody's touching the filler.As the album model kicks out from vinyl, I would get 70% of the cash. That's crazy because nobody knows what's being consumed and it's a lot of cash. If I just kind of do some rough math here of a million fans streaming your hip hop record on Spotify, and let's say they're stream. 200 times in a month when the album drops, you only need 20,000 of them of that million to make the same amount of money from vinyl than you would do from streams, which is entirely plausible.But then how do you pay the copyright owners from those songs on an album is very different from how you pay them on a stream. If you go back to the late seventies, the, one of the most successful records of all time was Saturday Night Fever, the Bee Ges and a bunch of other people. It's crazy to think that Ralph McDonald's Calypso strut his record there, which nobody has listened to, got the same royalty as staying alive by the Bee Gees because it was a vinyl record.So to reiterate, on the consumer, I don't know how many of these vinyl records are being played, and on the crater side, it raises questions about how these craters are gonna getpaid.[00:06:53] Dan Runcie: That's a good point book that I don't think is being talked about as much about the vinyl search because there's so much like wow, about just how much is being purchased.I think I even saw the stat that Adele's 30 album sold 8,000 cassettes. Or there was stuff tied from Stat about that, and I think the similar thing that you said, lines up having those people actually still own a watman or whatever type of cassette player that they have. So I do think that that is something that probably there could be a deeper analysis on because.A lot of the people that write the filler songs, how do they feel? Or whether you're a songwriter, whether you, you know what's behind it, especially when you know that there's so much clear path to be able to determine, okay, this is going to be the lead single, this is what we're gonna push most from this album.It really shifts things even more to where things are going in terms of a single market. Like the way that people have talked about pop music for a while now, right? And I guess that brings a, brings me back to the streaming trends that you mentioned. Overall, we're in this area, as you mentioned, streaming itself, the US penetration is grown from 22%, I believe you said is now through your 35, 37, somewhere around there.But where do we go from here because as you've written before, the price of music streaming, at least the monthly subscription hasn't necessarily been increasing. The average revenue per user overall because of the international growth is decreased, and you have plenty of people that are still trying to get there, fair share of what they can.It's streaming so. It's in like five, 10 years from now. If you could see into the future, where do you think streaming distribution is? I think the good thing is that people have smartphones and there's more and more growth from that perspective. So streaming is going to grow, but on the other hand, the economics of these things do have some theoretical goal point where we've maximized the global penetration of this.What do you think about, where that is going?[00:08:54] Will Page: Let me unpack it in two different lanes. Firstly, I'll deal with the saturation point question, which is, you know, how long can this party keep going for? It's three o'clock in the morning, who's gonna call time on it? And then secondly, I wanna deal with the pricing point on its own lane as well, but on saturation point, you're now in a situation where I put it as in America, we've had herbivores. We've had Spotify growing Apple, growing Amazon, growing YouTube, growing. Everybody's reporting growth, Pandora even is growing. What we are gonna see some point soon is carnivores.Which is Apple will grow by eating into Spotify's growth, or YouTube will grow by eating into Amazon's growth. So the key question we gotta ask is when do we go from the herbivore market? We're in today to a carnival market of tomorrow, and I output Spotify's US subscriber number around about 45 million, Apple at 49 million. We dump on top YouTube. Amazon, Pandora, you're well past 110-120 million. Now, that's important because I reckon and there's around about 110 million qualifying households in America that has at least one person who could pay for a streaming service. This is crucial because if you look at what Apple One's bundle is doing $30 a month for news, music, television, gaming, fitness, and two turbos of storage per six account holder. It's a household proposition they're saying to the home, I got you convenience. Everyone under this roof is covered with Apple products. So when you have 110 million households, and you have more than 110 million subscribers in the United States, then we are in a race to the finishing line before herbivore turn into carnivores.In oil, we have this expression called peak oil, which is we know that we've extracted more oil in the world than is left to extract an oil that's left is gonna be even more costly to get out the ground. I think we're in peak subscriber territory where at some point soon we're gonna start seeing growth happen through stealing other customers as opposed to finding your own.So I just wanna put that warning flag out there. Just now we're partying like it's 1989, fine, but at some point the party has to come to an end and gross is gonna come at the expense of other players that then flips, you know, from the A side to the B side of this record. We flip it over to price and then the pricing debate is interesting.I published this work called MELD Economics,uh, which we can cite on your, your wonderful website there. Which was to look at 20 year history of the nine 19 price point, and its crazy story back in the 3rd of December, 2001, over 20 years ago. Today Rhapsody got its license for a $9.99 offering, which had 15,000 songs.First point. The origins of 9 99 bizarrely date back to the Blockbuster rental card. Some coed up label executive would've said, if it cost 9 99 to rent videos from Blockbuster, that's what it should cost to rent music. Secondly, there was only 15,000 songs with limited use case. There was no smartphone back then.No apps, no algorithms. That was all a weird welded into the future. So you just. 9 99 for 15,000 songs. We are now chatting in early April, 2022, and it's still 9 99 in dollar in Euro and Sterling, but we're offering a hundred million songs. That's the crazy thing. So in the article, Mel Economics, what I do is I strip inflation out in the case of the uk, 9 99 has fallen down to six pounds, 30 pence.Remember, you know, Family Plan makes music cheaper too. If 2.3 people are paying $40.99, that's six pounds 50. There's way too many numbers in this conversation for Trapital, but still we'll stick with it. Student plan makes it cheaper too. So music in real terms, has fallen to six pound 30, which is less than a medium glass of Malbec wine, so 175 milliliters of Malbec wine costs than a hundred million songs, which is available offline on demand without adverts. That for me, is certified bonkers. I don't understand what we've done. We're offering more and more, and we're charging less and less, and you only have to leave the ears to the eyes on the video streaming to see what they're doing on the other side of the fence.Netflix has got me from $7.99 to $8.99 to $12.99, to now $14.90. In the space of 15 months, and I haven't blinked Disney plus. The reason I'm paying $4.99 on Disney Plus is because I paid $19.99 to get Cruella live on demand. So they're charging more and more, but only offering part of the wells repertoire set for eyeball content.We are charging less and less and offering more and more of the wells. Ear hole content, so it's like two ships passing each other in the night. It's a very interesting dilemma.It's intriguing because when you look at the way that video is structured, as you mentioned, you have all these price increases, and I think Netflix for some plans is, you know, $18.99, it's approaching that level, but in music, It's this thing where, yeah, there's some price differences where I think I saw today that Amazon music is increasing a dollar, but that's from $7.99 for prime subscribers to that being $8.99. So we still have to cross that.I wonder if I won't cost that.[00:13:57] Dan Runcie: I mean, honestly, I feel like there's something here because when I think about this, I think about a few things.Obviously you do have this fight where the artists wanna get more and the labels wanna get more, you know, not just for the artists, but for themselves. And obviously Spotify wants to earn more logically. You would think, okay, if you increase the price and people just understated the economics of what's likely.If Spotify increased up to 1299 a month for the standard base rate, how many folks would boing. But to your point earlier, I have to imagine that the fear is looking at the trends and where that penetration is. If they jump up to $12.99, then they're going to lose those customers to the other streaming services that haven't jumped there yet because of that thought of, you know, shifting to that carnivore mentality of competing with each other. So because for roughly 80% of the content that they do offer, it is roughly the same between each of these services. It's led it to be more of a price war then in video streaming, where most of them do have some differentiated content.[00:15:02] Will Page: A hundred percent. And two things to bolt onto your very eloquent points there. And firstly, let's just remind ourselves that Apple launched superior sound quality. You may remember the, commercial of Lossless audio. You buy your AirPods, which cost two years of Apple Music or Spotify to put in your ears and you get superior sound quality, the subtext underneath it said at no extra cost. That was the actual marketing message. So there again, we are improving the offer we're supplying more but we're charging less in real terms. And that's a really interesting kind of point kind of cut into. And the second thing, and we should get balance into this discussion cause it's delicates, we have to remind ourselves that, you know, there's 120 million subscribers in America.There's still another 120 million to go, but we know they're not that interested in paying for music because they haven't paid yet. Now the best way to attract them is not necessarily to raise price. So we gotta remember that there's still, you know, oil to extract. It's not gonna be easy oil to extract, but the best way to get to it might not be to raise price, but there's a catch to this.I can remember in the early nineties, right up to 2010 piracy, ripping the asset out of this business and concept promoters were saying. We love piracy because the kids are getting music for free so they can pay more on concert tickets. I wonder if now they're saying we love Spotify because they don't raise prices, which means we can raise ours.This is not a discussion of how to rip off the customer. This is a discussion about value exchange and I just wonder whether recorded music is leaving value on the table. That's the key pointto hammer on.[00:16:32] Dan Runcie: That's a good point. And I think that also made me think too, could there be some notion of maintaining the perception of Spotify as something that still has high pricing power and still has high consumer surplus, because then that helps the stock price.And then seeing that the major labels are all invested in Spotify itself. It's about like having that perception of, you know, the future growth and whatever it is. So what you just said made me think about that being a factor potentially too.[00:17:02] Will Page: A hundred percent. And of course, you've gotta distinguish the Spotify Apple music cost structure from that of the video streaming companies in that they have a kind of variable cost.You double your business, you double your cost base. Whereas Netflix, you jump up costs and you have, you jump up your revenue, you know, you raise me from 7 99 to 14 point 99, the cost of that content was fixed. And I'm still consuming the Fresh Prince of Bel Air on Netflix to this day. That was a fixed cost deal that he did to get that content and that's margin to Netflix.So, you know, the cost structure matters to this one as well.[00:17:33] Dan Runcie: Definitely. And you mentioned live music there, and I think there's a lot to think about from that perspective. I Feel like we're in this post pandemic. I mean, we're still not out of it, but we're in this post quarantine era, more artists than ever are trying to tour and get out there trying to capture what's there, but also from an economic perspective from that.Most people are only gonna go to a certain number of live events per year, and we have this 18 to 24 month run coming up where everyone wants to make up for what they couldn't do in the past two years. How will that shift, not just who then goes on tour together, and then how they may split those profits, what the availability looks like?And if they're not able to do what they may have done on tour in the late 2010s, how does that affect future touring? I think that's a piece of it that, you know, we still haven't necessarily seen the impact of, but it just feels inevitable based on where things are heading. You did it.[00:18:33] Will Page: Absolutely. Now on touring, I was lucky and I gotta do some great work on the UK live industry, and I can only speak for the UK here.I know a lot of your audience in the US but I think these points will carry. The first one was to work out how much is spent on concert tickets in Britain during the, the normal year of 2019, and the answer was 1.7 billion pounds. That's more than was spent on recorded music a lot more than was spent on recorded music, which makes sense, you know, you pay 120 pounds on the Spotify account, you're paying 240 pounds to go to Redding Festival. Two days in the muddy field in Redding, cost more than 365 days of all the wells. But what I noticed there was the industry is changing in its growth. I showed that between 2012, the year of the London Olympics and 2019, The live music industry in this country had exploded and grow, but it was lopsided.All the gro came from stadiums, festivals, and to lesser extent arenas. The theaters, the 2000, 3000 capacity theaters like the Philmore West over where you are, they were getting crushed. They were actually shrinking in size. So we have this lopsided live music industry, which is going right in the direction of the head as opposed to the long tail, the stadiums, the festivals, the arenas, as opposed to the theaters, the clubs, the university venues.And that's interesting cuz that's gonna change the dynamics of how you make money from live. Do you go from doing your tour of an album to doing a tour of your festivals for that record? And what does that mean? The cost structure for the insurance and all those things that bands have to consider when they're hitting the road.I mean, credit to capital. You've had some great podcasts recently on this topic, but as, a big rethink coming along in this live music market, it's not the same as we had back in 2019. It's changed fundamentally, and it is the breadwinner for most artists' income. I think it makes up about 70% of what an artist has to live for comes from the road that vanished.How do we get it back?[00:20:22] Dan Runcie: I feel like Cardi B has been a good. Case study on this specific point here, right? It's been four years now since she released an album, and she's yet to go on a true proper tour in that time. That said, she's done plenty of festivals where she's earned more on those festival guarantees that she likely would on tour.She's also done many private events where she's likely earned that save amount, if not more. So there's a whole economic argument to be made, and I think there's also some risk involved too, right? I think that festivals do give you the opportunity to. Get that major bag, you get the high number, the revenue that comes through, but maybe your fans will be a little bit more forgiving if your set piece at your festival isn't the most extravagant thing, especially if you're not the headliner at it.But on a tour, I think it changes. It's a little bit more pressure, everyone wants to see that Instagramable or talkable moment to then sell future tickets and just the production cost and everything with travel. It still is something that is very worthwhile, but I think we've just started to see some of that segmentation there.Especially for someone like her. I would add residencies too. I know she's done a few different things in Vegas here and there, but yeah. Still yet to do that 30 city worldwide tour.[00:21:44] Will Page: Yeah, I think you gotta think with your head and your heart. Your head says like you point out the economics favors festival.Your back line's there, your insurance is covered. Travel's already covered. I have numerous hip hop bands perform at festivals in Europe, and that's one of the big advantages. The costs are all taken care of by the festival, but your heart says, what does that do to intimate relationships with your fans?[00:22:05] Dan Runcie: Right?[00:22:05] Will Page: I mean, you're staring at 50,000 strangers in the muddy field. That's different from staring at 2000 friends in the Fillmore West. So the head and the heart's gotta come into play here. What I would add though is that there are rumors, I would say here in the UK at least, that the promoters are saying, I'll pay you a ton of money to perform at the festival to make sure that you don't go on tour.And that's an interesting situation. If you build one too many houses, you collapse a property market. If you have one too many tours or one too many festivals, you collapse live music industry. So there's ways in which people are trying to restrain the market to festival. At the expense of the theaters.That certainly is coming through in the data. We're seeing the theater business take a kick in while festivals go on a roll.[00:22:45] Dan Runcie: Yeah, because I think about, you look at the artists that are touring stadiums now, whether it's your Taylor Swift's or Beyonce's, they wouldn't be able to do that if they didn't have the individual tours at smaller venues when they were starting out. Being able to build that intimate fan base, like you said, like you get to that point, right? And I do think that as good as festivals can be, it is much more of a lucrative cash grab that is, I don't wanna say necessarily short-term thinking, but I think you ideally wanna have some type of balance there, right?Get the big bag that you can get from something else. It's almost no different. I think running a business, right? Okay, sure. You may be able to do a speaking fee or do some type of, you know, thing here or there, but hey, you can't do that all the time, especially if it's not an audience you're tapped into.You still need to do some of the things that could set you up for the long game.[00:23:37] Will Page: Yeah, and there's an infographic that I'll share with you to pass onto your audience here. I wrote an article in The Economist called Smells like Middle-Aged Spirit as opposed to Teen. Nice play on Words hat to Dave Gro and Kurt Cobain.But what I was looking at was the average age of festival headliners over time. This is a du pessimistic Scottish economist. This is what you do with your spare time. Okay, so in the nineties when radio head to Glastonbury, the average age of a festival headliner is 25, 26 years old. all these hot bands were coming through the Brit Pop era.You know, there was so much development of new talent. By 2012, I think it had got up to 58 and I got a lot of criticism for that article. But then Glastonbury that year had the WHO and Lionel Richie headlining, which I think was 17 and 73 years old apart. And then you can see the conveyor belt problem, which is okay, it's a quick cash grab.It makes sense. But that's not the conveyor belt of how we developed talent for tomorrow. That's just how we cash in our chips at the casino today. So it does raise questions, I'm not saying it's like the doomsday scenario here, but we just need a healthy balance of, you know, a seeded for future growth and then the big stage for exploiting that moment today, which could be the pyramid stage at Glastonbury, the headlights stage at Monterey over in the States.So I just think we're getting a little bit lopsided here. We're a bit short termist and how this business needs to develop.[00:24:57] Dan Runcie: Agreed on that. Switching gears a bit. One thing that you wrote recently that stuck out to me, you did this deep dive on music publishing, and I think this is another area that kind of has some of that short-term, long-term perspective on it, because you look at the people who get the share of the copyright pie, at least today, and from music streaming perspective, a lot of that has been much more in the favor of, the recorded side and then the people getting compensated on the recording side. But with that, the songwriters and the publishers, a lot of them necessarily in that timeframe, didn't get a lot of that. But I think in this wave now where we're seeing more catalog deals and we're seeing people understand the value of that, things may be starting to shift and there's likely other things as well.But what do you think about the way that the publishing side has been seen in what the future opportunities are for that side of the business?[00:25:54] Will Page: Well, the way that labels and publishing were taught to me in terms of what makes them distinct from one another goes back to my Aunt Dorian Loader, who worked in the music business from 1959 at Deca Records, right the way through to 2012.She ran Enzyme records with Nigel Grange, Lucian's Half-Brother. They were responsible for Shead O'Connor, who sold 11 million albums based on the Prince cover. And she once said to me, will, this is how the music industry works. The record label pays for your drugs and the publishing pays for your pension. I just kind of, that's a nice succinct way of summarizing how the business works.That was then, this is now clearly times have changed, I think, but it reminds us about, you know, what makes the business different. And then that piece of work that you cite is something called global value of copyright, where I'm really keen to educate this. Regardless of whether you're coming from a label perspective, a manager, an artist, a songwriter, there's a C with a circle on it called copyright.We get that, and it involves record labels. It involves sound exchange. It involves artists. It involves ascap, BMI, GMR, Czek. It involves publishers, David Israeli, and the great folks at the NNPA. It Put the whole thing together for me, all this spaghetti and strain it out. And what I was able to show was that in 2020, copyright was worth 32.5 billion, way bigger than what you've just heard from IFPI way bigger than what Czek would say.This is the entire thing. And the split was about 65% labels, 35% to the publishers. Now, if you go way back to 2001, when we used to sell CDs by weight of pate. In the cocaine capitalism days, you know, record labels back then. The split was much more in favor of labels, you know, more than three quarter labels, less than a quarter to the publishers.And what we've seen happen in the years in between is quite an interesting story. Labels went from boom time with CDs to bust with piracy, and now they're booming again with streaming. And the inverse, the opposite happened. Publishers as labels went bust. ASCAP, BMI kept on reporting record breaking collections, so you have a hair tore toys analogy here of labels going really fast and falling off a cliff.Publishers just trundled along with record breaking, not massive record breaking collections, but it kept on growing their bases. So, the questions these throw up is what type of industry are we moving towards? Are we going back to a business model which paid labels over three quarters of the pie and publishes less than a quarter, and is that a good or a bad thing?Or in this post Spotify economy where we're seeing companies like Peloton, Twitch, TikTok, come to the business, is that gonna have a completely different balance? Now why this matters to your audience is not just on the crater side, but also on the investment side. You pointed out catalog valuations. We can dig into that if you want, but just a high level point is, let's say that in a few years time, I go into my back cave again, calculate the global value of copyright, and instead of 32 and a half billion, it's 40 billion.I'll come on Trapital show, I'll make an exclusive announcement. Copyright today is worth 40 billion, seven and a half billion new dollars. Have come into this business, I want the audience to start thinking about who gets what share of that marginal new dollar. Is that gonna split publishing side or is that gonna split label side?And if you're investing in catalogs, be the master rights, be the author rights that really bears, there's a huge educational drive here to understand the balance of this business of copyright.[00:29:15] Dan Runcie: So there's a few things you've said there that I wanted to dig into. Of course, for streaming Spotify and its competitors around 75%.Is going to the recorded side a quarter to publishing. But from a breakdown, what does that look like for the TikToks, the Roblox and the Pelotons? What does that share of revenue from those plays look like?[00:29:38] Will Page: So, The best way I could do this is if I just talk about ratios. There's three Rs in this business.There's share of revenue, there's ratio in this rights pool. They mean different things. Most experts get confused. With these three Rs, I'm gonna stick to ratios. That is, if I give the label a dollar, how much do I give the publisher, the songwriter, this collective management organization. So we stick to the conventional streaming model Today, I would say that if you give the record label a dollar, you're giving the publishing side of the.24 cents, you know, a decent chunk of change. But still the pure cousin of the record label on YouTube, I think it could be as high as 35 cents, 40 cents even. Because there's a sync right? Involved in those deals. And then when you take that observation of imposing the sync right into deal, and you expand it to Peloton or TikTok, potentially even more, and then you can flip it and say, well, what happens if the future of TikTok is karaoke?Not saying it's gonna happen, but it's not implausible if that was the case. That favors publishers even more. So there's all these weird ways that the business could develop, which could favor one side of the fence. The labels and the artists continue getting three quarters of the cash or the other side of the fence.Publishers and songwriters start enforcing their rights and getting. A more balanced share and that that's what we need to look out for when we're investing incorporates. That's what we need to look out for. If you're a singer and a songwriter and you're trying to understand your royalty statements[00:30:57] Dan Runcie: mm-hmm.Well, like how much higher do you think? I mean, if you had to put a percentage on it for the TOS or the Pelotons, and I guess as well, you made me think of sync deals, right? Like for the folks that are selling, or their song gets placed on one of these hulu series or one of these HBO Max series, like what does that ratio look like, you know, from a ballpark for those.[00:31:20] Will Page: So I think a 50 50 split would be the upper bend of the goal. If, if a song is placed in a Hulu TV show or you know, an artist I've worked with for many years, Yu Dito Brazilian composer, his songs now in this famous easy Jet commercial over here in Europe. The artists and the publisher would see around a 50 50 split of those revenues.Now, would that happen in the world of streaming? Unlikely. But I think if you can get to a stage where you're giving the record label a dollar and the publisher 50 cents as a ratio, and I've gotta repeat the word ratio here, you know, that's potentially achievable with this post Spotify economy. I don't think it's gonna happen with the business we're looking at today, but I think that's a potential scenario for the business developing tomorrow.That's the thing. If I can quote Ralph Simon, a, a longtime mentor to me, he always says, this industry is always about what's happening next. And then he goes on to say, it always has been. It's a great reminder of just, you know, we're restless souls in this business. We've achieved this amazing thing in the past 10 years with streaming.Got there. Banked there what's coming next, who would've thought Peloton would've had a music licensing department 18 months ago? Now they're like a top 10 account for major labels.[00:32:30] Dan Runcie: It's impressive. It really is. And I think it's a good reminder because anytime that you get a little bit too bullish and excited about what the current thing is, it's, we always gotta be thinking about what's next.And you mentioned a few times about a post Spotify economy. What does that look like from your perspective? I think there's likely a number of things that we've already talked about with more of these other B2B platforms or where these other platforms in general, having licensing deals. But when you say, or what do you think about post Spotify economy?What comes to mind for you?[00:33:02] Will Page: Let me throw my fist, your words, your jaw, and try and knock you out for a second. We talked about price for a minute, and we talked about streaming. We haven't talked about gaming, but you noticed the Epic Games. It's just acquired band. I learned a fascinating stat about bandcam, which relates to my book Tarzan Economics.There's a chapter in the book called, "Make or Buy", where I sat down with the management of the band radio head. We went through the entire in Rainbow Story for the first time ever, a real global exclusive. Explain how that deal worked out, what they were really achieving when they did their voluntary tip jar model.And by the way, can I just put a shout out to one of your listeners and live from the Ben Zion. Best remix of Radiohead I've ever heard in my life is Amplive, Weird Fishez hip hop version of the entire album. But Radiohead tested voluntary tip jar pricing. Now check this out. If you put your album out on Band Cap, could be a vinyl record.Remember, it's the people who are paying to stream who are also buying vinyl. So if you put a ban, an album, my own banquette, and you say name your own price, no minimum, and there's a guidance there of 10 bucks, the average paid is. People go above 40% asking, and that could be for a super rich blockbuster artist who tries something out in band camp.That could be for some band who's broken Brooklyn, Robin and coins together, trying to make them breed. People go 40% above asking when you say name your own price. And that's interesting for me. there's a great academic paper by Francesco Cornell from Duke University. She asked, how should you price a museum?An intuition says Top-down. Museum should set the price. Adults 10 bucks, kids, five bucks, pensioners, some type of discount arrangement. But she said, no, let the visitors set the price because that way rich people will give you even more and poor people can attend and you'll see more cash overall. And I would like to see a little bit more of that experimentation around pricing compared to the past 20 years where we've had a ceiling on price, where if you really love a band, all you can give a platform is $9.99 and not a penny more.I think that's, we're suffocating love. We're putting a ceiling on love and we need to take that ceiling and smash through it and let people express love through different means. But I love that ban camp story. Whatever you suggest, I'll give you 40% above cuz it's art. We're not dealing with commodity, we're dealing with culture and that's why we gotta remind ourselves.[00:35:13] Dan Runcie: It's like the Met model, right? Where at least the last time I went, it was like $20 was the recommendation. But to your point, it at least had some vary of a threshold. But the people, a lot of the people that go there that have a lot of money end up giving much more. So I hear you on that. That's a great note to end on. Will, thanks again. Thank you so much.[00:35:33] Dan Runcie Outro:If you enjoyed this podcast, go ahead and share it with a friend. Copy the link, text it to a friend, post it in your group chat. Post it in your Slack groups. Wherever you and your people talk, spread the word. That's how capital continues to grow and continues to reach the right people. And while you're at it, if you use Apple Podcast, Go ahead.Rate the podcast, give it a high rating, and leave a review. Tell people why you like the podcast. That helps more people discover the show. Thank you in advance. Talk to you next week.

In this episode of the Evolving Leader podcast, co-host Jean Gomes welcomes back former guest Will Page. Will is the former chief economist at both Spotify and PRS for Music, visiting fellow at London School of Economics and his widely acclaimed book ‘Tarzan Economics' has just been published in paperback under the slightly different title ‘Pivot: Eight Principles for Transforming Your Business In A Time Of Disruption'.Pivot: Eight Principles For Transforming Your Business In a Time of Disruption Jo Caulfield ‘Supermarket loyalty card'  0.00 Introduction2.14 Why has the title of the book changed for the paperback?3.04 A quick summary of the eight principles.5.39 You say in the book that these principles give us cause for optimism and even confidence. Can you talk about why that it?11.38 Which is the principles would be most salient for our audience? 1. Big data, big mistakes.17.27 How can we stop ourselves making a snap judgement or challenge the contradictions around data, and how do you hold that in your head in other forms of decision making?19.42 2. The growing gig economy23.57 Given the Tarzan Economics predictions, what do you think are the most likely few things that will change this year? 27.20 How are these principles changing your life and mindset? How is it shaping your world? Social:Instagram           @evolvingleaderLinkedIn             The Evolving Leader PodcastTwitter               @Evolving_LeaderYouTube           Evolving Leader The Evolving Leader is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside production.WE NEED TO HEAR FROM YOU!https://www.smartsurvey.co.uk/s/EvolvingLeader/

Will Page was working for the UK Government Economic Service in the income tax division, and moonlighting as a music writer for Straight No Chaser magazine when his life changed almost overnight. Pretty soon he was living in London, and helping to shape the new music business and the economics of music streaming.   Page eventually went on to work at Spotify where he was the chief economist. Will's work is regularly featured in Billboard, The Economist and the Financial Times. His book Tarzan Economics was published in paperback this month, and retitled Pivot: Eight Principles for Transforming your Business in a Time of disruption. Here he discusses “how music responds to suppression,” the need to “press pause on nostalgia,” what qualifies as “content,” and the idea that “the internet can scale just about everything but one thing it can't scale is intimacy. [And jazz] is an intimate form.” www.third-story.com www.wbgo.org/studios www.patreon.com/thirdstorypodcast www.tarzaneconomics.com  

We don't do shameless plugs here on Bubble Trouble, but we're making an exception for our esteem co-host Will Page on the publication of the paperback edition of Tarzan Economics, renamed Pivot: Eight Principles for Transforming your Business in a Time of Disruption.

Will Page was Chief Economist of Spotify and PRS for Music and is the author of the critically acclaimed book Tarzan Economics. Some Will Page references to read alongside the pod. This chart from The Economist on the age of festival headlinersNew Year New Ideas, key chart showing the growth of stadiums and festivals below - think Big Eventer) Billboard: Examining Covid's Impact on UK's live and recorded industriesMusic Business Worldwide: Live Music Goes From Suffering to RecoveringIQ Magazine: Economist Will Page on Live Music's Resurgence Financial Times: Roar of the live music crowd drowns out stadium income from sport Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry. To join our community of listeners, sign up to the weekly UP Newsletter and follow us on Twitter @UnffclPrtnr

In the first EcoPrint special episode of the FuturePrint podcast, Frazer sits down with Beate van Loo-Born following her highly-popular presentation at the FuturePrint Leaders' Summit in June 2022.Sustainability is one of the biggest problems we face in the 21st century. Beate, Master in Sustainability Leadership and current Head of Global Business Management at SIX Financial Information, provides perspective into how we can tackle this issue. She explains the concepts of black swan, green swan and Tarzan Economics, and why a shift in mindset is key to solving systemic problems.Subscribe to the FuturePrint podcast nowVisit the EcoPrint websiteVisit the FuturePrint websiteConnect with Beate van Loo-Born on LinkedInConnect with Frazer Chesterman on LinkedIn

Will Page is the former Chief Economist at Spotify and PRS, and author of Tarzan Economics. What's important about 285 miliseconds? Will reveals the psychology behind the Spotify Play button, and we discuss the pricing of streaming service subscriptions. https://tarzaneconomics.com/ Producer and co-host: Hayleigh Bosher Co-host: Jules O'riordan Editor: Eliza Kania

To commemorate our 100th episode of the YMC podcast, your hosts Jay Gilbert and Mike Etchart had an opportunity to interview one of our favorite experts in the digital music space, Mr. Will Page. The author of Tarzan Economics and the former Chief Economist at Spotify has a unique perspective on the goings on in the industry today, and also where the industry is going in the future. He brings both an educated analytical mind and the incredible passion of a music creator and fan - a truly unique and refreshing combination - to his viewpoint, and we always expand our own knowledge when we hear from him.  We hope you enjoy the interview!    

One of the most unique insights into the state of the music business today doesn't come from a record label exec. Not from an agent. Not from an artist. No, it comes from Scottish economist Will Page, who served that role for Spotify from 2012 to 2019 — a period of explosive growth for the streaming giant. But if you ask Page about streaming's future, he's not nearly as optimistic as the rest of the industry. “The party has to come to an end,” as he told me on this episode of Trapital.Page believes the music industry is transitioning from a “herbivore market” to a “carnivore” one. In other words, future growth will not come from brand-new customers — it'll come from the streaming services eating into each other's market share. Not only has subscriber counts possibly tapped out in Page's opinion, but streaming services have also put a ceiling on revenues by charging only $9.99, a price that hasn't budged in 20 years despite giant leaps in technology and music catalog size.  That against-the-grain prediction was one of many Will shared with me during our in-depth interview. But he has plenty more research- and experience-backed thoughts on touring, vinyl records, Web 3.0, and everything in between. Believe me, this is an interview you don't want to miss. Here's everything we covered: [0:00] The 3 R's in the business of music[3:15] Will's experience being a DJ[7:10] Lopsided Growth Of Music Streaming In Global Markets[8:59] Vinyl Records $1.5 Billion Recovery [13:18] Will's Bearish View About The Future Of Streaming[15:22] Ongoing Price War Between Streaming Services[22:59] The Changing Economics Of Music Touring [26:16] Performing At Festivals Vs. Tours [30:50] The Evolution Of Music Publishing[34:32] How Music Revenue Gets Distributed To Publishers[37:35] What Does A “Post-Spotify Economy” Look Like? [40:00] Will's Biggest Issues With Web3 [47:01] The Current Business Landscape Of Hip-Hop Listen to Will's mix right here: https://www.mixcloud.com/willpagesnc/we-aint-done-with-2021/Check out Will's Podcast, Bubble Trouble, where he breaks down how financial markets really work.Read Will's book, Tarzan Economics: Eight Principles for Pivoting Through Disruption.Listen: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | SoundCloud | Stitcher | Overcast | Amazon | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts | RSSHost: Dan Runcie, @RuncieDan, trapital.coGuests: Will Page, @willpageauthor  Trapital is home for the business of hip-hop. Gain the latest insights from hip-hop's biggest players by reading Trapital's free weekly memo. _____TRANSCRIPT Will Page  00:00The best way I could do this is, I just talk about ratios. There are three R's in this business, there's share of revenue, there's ratio, and as rates pool, they mean different things. Most experts get confused with the three R's.I'm gonna stick to ratios that is, if I give the label $1, how much do I give the publisher, the software, there's collective management organization? So we stick to the conventional streaming model today, I would say that you get the record label $1, you're giving the publishing side of the fence 24 cents, you know, a decent chunk of change, but still the poorer cousin of the record label. On YouTube, I think it could be as high as 35 cents, 40 cents even because there's a sink right involved in those deals.Dan Runcie  00:46Hey, welcome to the Trapital Podcast. I'm your host and the founder of Trapital, Dan Runcie. This podcast is your place to gain insights from executives in music, media, entertainment, and more, who are taking hip hop culture to the next level. Today's guest is Will Page. He is the author of a book I cannot recommend enough. It's called Tarzan Economics. It's a guide to pivoting through disruption. This is a must-read if you're working in music, media, or entertainment. He is also a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics. He is the former Chief Economist at Spotify. So if you are interested in where the music industry is heading, where trends are going, this is the person to talk to. I was first put onto Will's work, he had released this white paper called Rockonomics. And it was a breakdown on how artists were using Twitch. I wrote about the report in Trapital because I was fascinated by it. And then he and I started talking from there. So it was only a matter of time before he came on the podcast. Will and I covered a bunch in this episode, we talked about the growth of streaming, we also talked about the growth of vinyl, and how that impacts the economics for a lot of artists and songwriters and publishers. We also talked about the price of streaming services. Most services are still $9.99 per month in the US. So we talked about why that is for music compared to video streaming, where Netflix Hulu, and Amazon have been increasing their prices for their respective services. We also talked about music publishing and why Will thinks that that catalog will continue to grow. We talked about live music and some of the potential constraints where now the next 24 months everyone wants to go on tour. But there's only so many venues and so much money that consumers have unwillingness to see live shows. So we've talked about that we talked about trends in hip hop, we'll have a bunch of exclusive numbers to share in this. And it was great to talk to him. It's been great to also Jessica T to learn from him. I honestly do believe that he's one of the sharpest minds in the music industry. And it was a pleasure to have him on this podcast. And I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Here's my chat with Will Page. Alright, today we got the one and only Will Page with us. He is well known in the music and media space as an economist, but he also spent a lot of time as a DJ. And I feel like that could be a good place for us to start the conversation. Will, talk to me about your DJ experience and what you've been doing there recently.Will Page  03:22Well, I've been DJing since the age of puberty. And it was all inspired by one lyric by a rapper called Mike G from The Jungle Brothers from an album called done by the forces of nature, where he dropped his library. He said it's about getting the music across the message across getting it across without crossing over. And unlike a 14-year-old kid when I hear this, and I just thought about those words, getting the music across without crossing over, how do you get out to an audience without diluting its integrity. I'm only 14 at the time. But that just resonated with me so strongly, and I just kind of dedicated a huge chunk of my life to trying to get the music across to an audience that would otherwise not have heard it. And I'm not diluting how it's been presented. That's what a DJ can do. You can thread songs together in a way that gets music across without its dilution without crossing it over.Dan Runcie  04:11And I feel like, for you, you've been able to carry that through, you had we're not done we are done with 2021 I was able to do a quick drop for that as well. So I think what's likely inspiring for a lot of folks is that there's so many people that have music backgrounds and passions early on, but there's a pause if they're not able to continue that but you've been able to keep this as part of your charity, which I think makes so much of what you do with this space authentic because you yourself are someone who releases music.Will Page  04:40Yeah, I mean, the mix cloud allowed me to scale what I was doing anyway, if I go back to university in the late 90s early noughties you'd make mixtapes mix cassettes. There's a great way to date girls, but you could only do maybe like 50 100 at tops. Mix cloud allows you to take what you do and scale it scale what you love to do and the mixer UK only gave us a drop for weighing in dama 2021. That makes us no-hit 27,000 on Mixcloud meaning have overtaken Erykah Badu one of your former guests, I believe. So, you know, to get to 20,000 unique people with a mix that you care a year crafting together, that means the world to me.Dan Runcie  05:15It's a lot. And that's powerful, too. I imagined that you're always not just finding the sounds that make the most vibe for the year. But you're also thinking about, okay, what is the way that things are moving, especially at the pandemic? I feel like it's such an interesting year to have something like that. Because I think for some people, it's a year that they want to remember a year, they don't want to remember as well. But I feel like you probably already have a few things lined up for the mix you'll do at the end of 2022.Will Page  05:45Yeah, I mean, you're always looking for the bands that are not on Spotify, not an Apple Music, I think about half of my mix this year, you will not find in a streaming service. And I'm proud of that you're going to Discogs to find those rare white label bootleg vinyls, you're going to the source to the artists who are in the studio recording. And to you know, profile bands like Sault, or London-based bands, S-A-U-L-T, on that mix. That meant the world because I've been watching them rise over the past few years now. And, you know, to this day, nobody has any idea what the band look like, who the band are made up of, you know, this, like punk music, they're rejecting the system, they're doing it completely separately. And they're, you know, not hitting millions of people on Spotify with their music, they've let the music do the talking. So I often think about mixed culture as a break it down this way, the internet can scale just about anything, but it can't scale intimacy, and a playlist or as an intimate, that's just a bunch of songs straddle together and work them through the shuffle play feature, but a mix, a DJ mix of 60 minutes seamless mix, where you have vocal drops, you have beat mixing, you have layering, all those techniques that you've honed over the years, that's intimate. So what I'm able to do with mixtape culture is to scale intimacy, and that goes out for every other DJ you've had on your show. That's what we're trying to do right.Dan Runcie  07:05For sure. And I feel like that's a good segue to chat a little bit more about some of the work you've done for a company that is very heavily focused on playlists, which is Spotify. And I think more broadly, looking at the streaming ever we're in right now, this is a great time to chat because we just saw the IFP results. And streaming is continuing to grow, as we've seen, but I feel like you've probably spotted a few interesting trends about where things are heading. And I think that's a question of art for a lot of people streaming continues to grow, but how far can it grow? What are we seeing in terms of differences within genres or regions? What are some of the things that stuck out to you?Will Page  07:43I'll give you a couple. The first one is the global business. Well, last time I looked at the United Nations, I think there's 208 countries in the world, the global yearbook that we're discussing here, has I think, 58. So we have to be careful what we define as global. I think Africa's clubbed together as one continent with a need to work on that. But I think the global business is growing, but it's also becoming more American. So if you go back to when Spotify launched, Americans made up 20 to 23% of the business round, about just over a fifth today, it's 37%. So we have seen the business grow and become more American. And that raises questions, economic questions, like globalization questions, should poor countries catch up with rich ones, a theory says yes, the reality often says no, so we're seeing this kind of lopsided growth where the business is growing, but it's growing in favor of an American market, the biggest country is growing at the fastest rates. That's a positive problem, but I just want to flag it, which is that's not how it was supposed to play out. And then the second thing I'd want to point to as well as just vinyl, this vinyl recovery is just Well, I don't know how much my bank balance is responsible for this vinyl recovery. But I'm telling you, is defying the laws of gravity. Now we're now looking at Vinyl being worth one and a half-billion dollars, which is more than it's been worth in the past 30 years. It's worth more than CDs, cassettes, and downloads the three formats that were supposed to declare that vinyl is dead, but there's two things you can kind of cut out the vinyl recovery, which I think will be of real interest to your audience. Firstly, on the consumer side, I saw a survey which suggested that the majority just over half of all vinyl buyers today don't own a record player. I mean, something's cooking here. So why are we buying it for now I'll extend that as well. The cost of wall frames to frame vinyl on your wall often costs more than the record itself. So I'm willing to pay more for vinyl to be called New framed on my wall than I am for the record. And by the way, I don't have a record player that a lot of people will take those bizarre boxes, but on the creator side, something else is interesting. It'll take a little bit of working through but if we think about the streaming model is monetizing consumption, that's what it does. So there's an album A 10 songs, three killer and seven filler songs and an album Let's say Dan runs, he wrote the three killer tracks, and we'll page the seven Duff filler tracks. On streaming, Dan might walk away with all the money, and I'll walk away with none. Because we're only streaming the killer tracks and nobody's touching the filler. As the album model kicks out from vinyl, I would get 70% of the cache. That's crazy because nobody knows what's being consumed. And it's a lot of cash by just kind of do some rough math, you have a million fans streaming your hip hop record on Spotify. And let's say they're streaming it 200 times in the month when the album drops, you only need 20,000 of them of that million to make the same amount of money from vinyl than you would do from streams, which is entirely plausible. But then how do you pay the copyright owners from those songs on an album is very different from how you pay them on a stream. If you go back to the late 70s. The one most successful records of all time was Saturday Night Fever, the BGS, and a bunch of other people. It's crazy to think that Ralph McDonald's Calypso struck his record there, which nobody has listened to, but the same royalty as staying alive by the BGS. Because it was a vinyl record. So to reiterate, on the consumer side, I don't know how many of these vinyl records are being played. And on the creative side, it raises questions about how these creators are going to get paid.Dan Runcie  11:16That's a good point. But that I don't think is being talked about as much about the vinyl search, because there's so much like wow, about just how much has been purchased. I think I haven't saw the stat that Adele's 30 albums sold 8000 cassettes or there's a self-titled stat about that. And I think the similar thing that you said lines up, I think those people actually still own a Walkman or whatever type of cassette player that they have. So I do think that that is something that probably there could be a deeper analysis on. Because a lot of the people that write the filler songs, how do they feel whether you're a songwriter, whether you know what's behind it, especially when you know that there's so much clearer path to be able to determine, Okay, this is going to be the lead single that this is what we're going to push most from this album, it really shifts the exhibit more to where things are going in terms of a single market and like the way that people have talked about pop music for a while now. Right. And I guess that brings me back to the streaming trends that you mentioned, overall, we're in this area, as you mentioned, streaming itself that US penetration has grown from 22%, I believe you said is now 30 to 3537, somewhere around there. But where do we go from here because as you've written before, the price of music streaming, at least the monthly subscription hasn't necessarily been increasing. The average revenue per user overall, because of the international growth is decreased. And you have plenty of people that are still trying to get their fair share of what they can. It's streaming. So it's in like 510 years from now, if you could see into the future. Where do you think streaming distribution is I think the good thing is that people have smartphones, and there's more and more growth from that perspective. So streaming is going to grow. But on the other hand, the economics of these things do have some theoretical point where we've maximized the global penetration of this. What do you think about where that is going?Will Page  13:17Let me unpack it in two different lanes. Firstly, I'll deal with the saturation point question which is, you know, how long can this party keep going for it's three o'clock in the morning, who's going to call time on it? And then secondly, I want to deal with the pricing point on its own lien as well. But on saturation point, you're now in a situation where I'd put it as in America, we've had herbivores we've had Spotify growing Apple growing, Amazon growing, YouTube growing, everybody's reporting growth, Pandora even is growing. What we're gonna see at some point soon is carnivores, which is Apple will grow by eating into Spotify as growth or YouTube will grow by eating into Amazon's growth. So the key question we got to ask is, when do we go from the herbivore market we're in today to a carnivore market of tomorrow, and output Spotify as your subscriber number right about 45 million, Apple at 49 million, you dump on top YouTube, Amazon Pandora, you're well past 110, 120 million. Now that's important because I reckon there's around about 110 million qualifying households in America that has at least one person who could pay for a streaming service. This is crucial, because if you look at what Apple one's bundle is doing $30 a month for news, music, television, gaming, fitness, and two terabytes of storage per six accountholder is a household proposition. They're saying to the home, I got you convenience. Everyone under this roof is covered with Apple products. So when you have 110 million households, and you have more than 110 million subscribers in the United States, then we're in a race to the finishing line before herbivores turn into carnivores. In oil. We have this expression called Peak Oil, which is we know that we've extracted more oil in the world and has left to extract an oil All that's left is going to be even more costly to get out of the ground. I think we're in peak subscriber territory where at some point soon we're going to start seeing growth happen through stealing other customers as opposed to finding your own. So I just want to put that warning flag out there just now we're partying like it's 1989 Fine, but at some point, the party has to come to an end and growth is going to come at the expense of other players that then flips Neil from the east side to the B side of this record, we flip it over to price. And then pricing debate is interesting. I published this work called MelB economics, which we can cite on your wonderful website there, which was to look at the 20-year history of the 19 price point. And it's crazy story back in the third of December 2001. Over 20 years ago today, Rhapsody got its license for 999 offerings which had 15,000 songs first point, the origins of 999. Bizarrely deep back to the blockbuster rental card, some cooked-up label executive would have said that it cost 999 to rent videos from blockbuster. That's what it should cost to rent music. Secondly, there was only 15,000 songs with limited use case there was no smartphone back then no apps, no algorithms, that was all a weird world into the future. So you just had 999 for 15,000 songs we're now checking in early April 2022. And it's still 999 in dollar and euro and Sterling. But we're offering 100 million songs. That's the crazy thing. So in the article MelB economics what I do is I, strip inflation out in the case of the UK 999 has fallen down to six pounds 30 pence. Remember, you know family plan makes music cheaper to have 2.3 people are paying 4099, that's six pounds, 50. There's way too many numbers in this conversation for capital. But still, we'll stick with it. Student plan makes it cheaper to sew music in real terms has fallen to six pounds 30 which is less than a medium glass of Malbec wine. So 175 milliliters of Malbec wine costs more than 100 million songs, which is available offline on-demand without adverts that for me is certified bonkers. I don't understand what we've done. We're offering more and more, and we're charging less and less. And you only have to leave the ears to the eyes on the video streaming to see what they're doing on the other side of the fence. Netflix has got me from 799 to 899 to 1299, to now 1499 In the space of 15 months, and I haven't blinked Disney plus, the reason I'm paying for 99 and Disney plus is because I paid 1999 to get Cruella live on-demand. So they're charging more and more, but only offering part of the world's repertoire set for eyeball content. We're charging less and less and offering more and more of the wells, your whole content says like two ships passing each other in the night. It's a very interesting dilemma.Dan Runcie  17:49It's intriguing because when you look at the way that video is structured, as you mentioned, you have all these price increases. And I think Netflix for some plans is you know, at 99 It's approaching that level. But in music, it's this thing where yeah, there's some price differences where I think I saw today that Amazon music is increasing $1 But that's from 799 for Prime subscribers to that being 899. So, Ross thatWill Page  18:17I wonder if like what caused that?Dan Runcie  18:21I mean, honestly, I feel like there's something here because when I think about this, I think about a few things, right? Obviously, you do have this fight where the artists want to get more and the labels want to get more, you know, not just for the artist, but for themselves. And obviously, Spotify wants to earn more logically you would think, Okay, if you increase the price, and people just understated the economics of what's likely, if Spotify increased up to 1299 a month for the standard base rate, how many folks would blink. But to your point earlier, I have to imagine that the fear is looking at the trends and where that penetration is, if they jump up to 39 or 1299, then they're going to lose those customers to the other streaming services that have been shoved there yet, because of that thought of, you know, shifting to that carnivore mentality of competing with each other. So because for roughly 80% of the content that they do offer, it is roughly the same between each of the services, it's in when's it to be more of a price war, then in video streaming, where most of them do have some differentiated contentWill Page  19:26100% And two things to hold on to a very eloquent point there. And firstly, let's just remind ourselves that Apple launched superior sound quality, you may remember the commercial of lossless audio, you buy your air pods, which cost two years of Apple Music or Spotify to put in your years and you get superior sound quality, the subtext underneath it said at no extra cost. That was the actual marketing message. So there again, we're improving the offer. We're supplying more, but we're charging less in real terms. And that's a really interesting kind of point can occur. into it. The second thing and we should get balanced into this discussion, because it's delicate is we have to remind ourselves that, you know, there's 120 million subscribers in America, there's still another 100 and 20 million to go. But we know they're not they're interested in paying for music because they haven't paid yet, the best way to attract them is not necessarily to raise price. So we got to remember that there's still no oil to extract, it's not going to be easy oil to extract, the best way to get to it might not be to raise the price. But there's a catch to this. I can remember, in the early noughties, right up to 2010 piracy, ripping the asset out of this business. And concert promoters were saying, We love piracy because the kids are getting music for free so they can pay more on concert tickets. I wonder if now they're saying we love Spotify because they don't raise prices, which means we can raise hours, this is not a discussion of how to rip off the customer. This is a discussion about value exchange. And I just wonder whether recorded music is leaving value on the table. That's the key point to hammer home.Dan Runcie  20:57That's a good point. And I think that also made me think too, could there be some notion of maintaining the perception of Spotify as something that still has high pricing power is still as high consumer surplus because then that helps the stock price. And then seeing that the major labels are all invested in Spotify itself. It's about like having that perception of you know, the future growth and whatever it is. So what you've just said made me think about that being a factor, potentially to the 100%.Will Page  21:27And of course, you got to distinguish the Spotify, Apple Music cost structure from that of the video streaming companies, in that they have a kind of variable costs, you double your business, you double your cost base, whereas Netflix, you jump up costs, and you have you jumped up your revenue, you raised me from 799 to 1499, the cost of that content was fixed. And I'm still consuming the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air on Netflix to this day. That is a fixed-cost deal that he did to get that content. And that's margin to Netflix. So you know, the cost structure matters in this one as well.Dan Runcie  21:59Definitely. And you mentioned like music there. And I think there's a lot to think about from that perspective. I feel like we're in this post-pandemic. I mean, we're still not out of it. But we're in this post-quarantine era, art more artists than ever are trying to tour and get out there try to capture what's there. But also from an economic perspective, from that most people are only going to go to a certain number of live events per year. And we have this 18 to 24-month run coming up where everyone wants to make up for what they couldn't do in the past two years. How will that shift not just who that goes on tour together? And then how they may split those profits, what the availability looks like. And if they're not able to do what they may have done on tour in the late 2010s. How does that affect future touring? I think that's a piece of it that, you know, we still haven't necessarily seen the impact of but it just feels inevitable based on where things are heading.Will Page  22:58You did absolutely know on touring. I was lucky and I got to do some great work on the UK live industry. And I can only speak for the UK here. I know a lot of your audience knew us, but I think these points will carry across. The first one was to work out how much is spent on concert tickets in Britain during the normal year of 2019. And the answer was 1.7 billion pounds. That's more than was spent on recorded music a lot more than was spent recorded music which makes sense, you know, you pay 120 pounds on your Spotify account, you're paying 240 pounds to go to Reading Festival for two days in a muddy field and reading costs more than 365 days of all the world's music. But what I noticed there was the industry is changing in its growth. I showed that between 2012 The year of the London Olympics, and 2019 the live music industry in this country had exploded and grow but it was lopsided. All the growth came from stadiums, festivals, and to a lesser extent arenas, the theaters, the 2000 3000 capacity theaters like the Fillmore West over where you are, they were getting crushed. They were actually shrinking in size. So we have this lopsided live music industry which is going right in the direction of the head as opposed to the long tail. The stadiums or festivals The arena is as opposed to the theater as the club's the university venues. And that's interesting because that's going to change the dynamics of how you make money from live. Do you go from doing your tour of an album to doing a tour of your festivals for that record? And what does that mean for the cost structure for the insurance and all those things that bands have to consider when you're hitting the road? I mean, credit to trap tool. You've had some great podcasts recently on this topic. But as there's a big rethink coming along in this live music market is not the same as we had back in 2019. It's changed fundamentally and it is the breadwinner for most artists' income I think it makes up about 70% of what an artist has to live for comes from the road that vanished. How do we get it back?Dan Runcie  24:49I feel like Cardi B has been a good case study on this specific point here, right. It's been four years now since she released an album and she's yet to go on a true proper tour in that time, that said she's done plenty of festivals where she served more on those festival guarantees that she liked what on tour. She's also done many private events where she's likely earned that same amount, if not more. So, there's a whole economic argument to be made. And I think there's also some risk involved, too, right? I think that festivals do give you the opportunity to get that nature back, you get the high number, the revenue that comes through, but maybe your fans will be a little bit more forgiving if you're set-piece at your festival isn't the most extravagant thing, especially if you're not the headliner at it. But on a tour, I think it changes it's a little bit more pressure. Everyone wants to see that Instagrammable or tick talkable moment to then sell future tickets, and just the production costs and everything with traveling. It still is something that is very worthwhile, but I think we've just started to see some of that segmentation there, especially for someone like her I would have to go residencies to I know she's done a few different things in Vegas here and there. But yes, I still yet to do that. 30-city worldwide tour?Will Page  26:12Yeah, I think you got to think of your head and your heart. Your head says like you point out the economics fevers, festivals, your back lines are your insurances cover travels already covered. I have numerous Hip Hop bands perform at festivals in Europe. And that's one of the big advantages. The costs are all taken care of by the festival. But your heart says what does that do to intimate relationships with your fans, right? You're staring at 50,000 Strangers in the muddy field. That's different from staring at 2000 friends in the Fillmore West. So the heading the horror is going to come into play here. What I would add, though, is that there are rumors I would say here in the UK, at least that the promoters are saying I'll pay you a ton of money to film at the festival to make sure that you don't go on tour. And that's an interesting situation. If you build one too many houses, you collapse the property market. If you have one too many tours or one too many festivals, you collapse like the music industry. So there's ways in which people are trying to restrain the market to festivals at the expense of the theaters that certainly is coming through in the data. We're seeing the theater business, take a kick in well, festivals go on a roll.Dan Runcie  27:12Yeah. Because I think about you look at the artists that are touring stadiums now whether it's your Taylor Swift or Beyonce is they wouldn't be able to do that if they didn't have the individual tours, that smaller venues when they were starting out being able to build that intimate fan base, like you said, like you get to that point, right. And I do think that as good as festivals can be it is much more of a lucrative cash grab that is I don't want to say necessarily short-term thinking. But I think you ideally want to have some type of balance there, right? Get the big bag that you can get from something else. It's almost no different than I think running a business right? Okay, sure. You may be able to do a speaking fee or do some type of you know, the thing here or there. But you can't do that all the time, especially if it's not an audience are tapped into. You still need to do some of the things that could set you up for the long game.Will Page  28:05Yeah, and there's an infographic that I'll share with you to pass on to your audience here. I wrote an article in The Economist called smells like Middle East spirit, as opposed to teen spirit and ice play on words had to Dave Grohl and Kurt Cobain, but what I was looking at was the average age of festival headliners over time. This is a doer pessimistic Scottish economist, this is what you do is your spare time. Okay. So in 92, and Radiohead did Glastonbury, the average age of a festival headliner was 2526 years old. And all these hot bands were coming through the Britpop era. You know, there was so much development of new talent by 2012. I think it got up to 58. And I got a lot of criticism for that article, but then Glastonbury that year had the who and Lionel Richie headlining, which I think was 70 and 73 years old, apart, and then you can see the conveyor belt problem, which is okay, it's a quick cash grab, it makes sense. But that's not the conveyor belt of how we develop talent for tomorrow. That's just how we cash in our chips at the casino today. So it does raise questions. And I'm not saying it's like the doomsday scenario here. But we just need a healthy balance of, you know, a seedbed for future growth. And then the big stage of exploiting that moment today, which could be the permanent stage at Glastonbury, the headlights siege up on a roof and mistakes. So I just think we're getting a little bit lopsided here. We're a bit short term system, how this business needs to developDan Runcie  29:25Agreed on that. Switching gears a bit. One thing that you wrote recently that stuck out to me you did this deep dive on music publishing, and I think this is another area that kind of has some of that short term, long term perspective on it, because you look at the people who get the share of the copyright pie, at least today. And from a music streaming perspective, a lot of that has been much more in the favor of the recorded side and then the people getting compensated on the recording side. But with that the songwriters and the PA brochures. A lot of them necessarily in that timeframe didn't get a lot of that. But I think in this wave now where we're seeing more catalog deals, and we're seeing people understand the value of that things may be starting to shift and there's likely other things as well. But what do you think about the way that the publishing side has been seen and what the future opportunities are for that side of the business?Will Page  30:23Well, the way that labels and publishing were taught to me in terms of what makes them distinct from one another goes back to my Aunt Doreen Lauder, who worked in the music business from 1959 at Decca Records right the way through to 2012. She went enzyme records with Nigel Grange loosens half brother, they were responsible for Sinead O'Connor who sold 11 million albums based on the prints cover. And she once said to me, Will, this is how the music industry works, the record label piece of your drugs and the publishing pays for your pension, just kind of as a nice succinct way of summarizing how the business works. That was then this is now clearly times have changed, I think. But it reminds us about you know what makes the business different. And that piece of work that you cite is something called global value of copyright, where I'm really keen to educate this industry, regardless of whether you're coming from a label perspective, a manager or an artist or songwriter, there's a C with a circle on it called copyright. We get that and it involves record labels. It involves SoundExchange involves artists involves ASCAP, BMI, GMR says EQ involves publishers, David Israeli, and the great folks at the NMPA, and Wall Street, but the whole thing together for me all this spaghetti and straightened out. And what I was able to show was that in 2020, copyright was worth 32 and a half-billion dollars, way bigger than what you've just heard I FPI, way bigger than what CS EC would say, this is the entire thing. And the split was about 65% labels 35% to the publishers. Now if you go way back to 2001 when we used to sell CDs by way of pallet and cocaine capitalism, these have no record labels. Back then, the split was much more in favor of labels no more than three quarters labels less than a quarter to the publishers. And what we've seen happen in the years in between is quite an interesting story. Labels went from boom time with CDs to bust with piracy, and now they're booming again with streaming. And the inverse the opposite happened publishers as labels went bust, ASCAP, BMI, kept on recording record-breaking collections. So you ever hear the toys analogy here of labels going really fast and falling off a cliff publishes as trundled along with record-breaking, not massive record-breaking collections, but he kept on growing their base. So the question he threw up is, what type of industry are we moving towards? Are we going back to our business model which paid labels over three quarters of the pie and publishers less than a quarter? And is that a good or a bad thing? Or in this post-Spotify economy where we're seeing companies like peloton Twitch, TikTok comes to the business is that gonna have a completely different balance. Now, why this matters to your audiences, not just on the creator side. But also on the investment side, you pointed out catalog valuations we can dig into that if you want. But just a high-level point is let's say that in a few year's time, I go into my Batcave again, calculate the global value of copyright, and instead of 32 and a half billion is 40 billion, I'll come on traps or make an exclusive announcement cooperate today is worth 40,000,000,007 and a half billion new dollars have come into this business, I want the audience to start thinking about who gets what share of that marginal new dollar, is that going to split publishing side? Or is that going to split the label side. And if you're investing in catalogs, be the master rights be the author rights that really matters. There's a huge educational drive here to understand the balance of this business of copyright.Dan Runcie  33:45So there's a few things you said there that I wanted to dig into, of course, for streaming Spotify and its competitors around 75% is going to the recorded side a quarter to publishing but from a breakdown what does that look like for the Tiktoks? The Roblox and the peloton what is that share of revenue from those plays look like?Will Page  34:08So the best way I could do this is if I just talk about ratios, there's three R's in this business, there's share of revenue, there's ratio, and as rights pool, they mean different things. Most experts get confused with three R's. I'm gonna stick to ratios that is if I give the label $1, how much do I give the publisher, the software, there's collective management organization. So we stick to the conventional streaming model today, I would say that you get the record label $1. You're giving the publishing side of the fence 24 cents, you know, a decent chunk of change, but still the poorer cousin of the record label on YouTube, I think it could be as high as 35 cents 40 cents even because there's a sync right involved in those deals. And then when you take that observation of imposing the sink right into a deal and you expand it to peloton or tic tock potentially even more, and then you can flip it and say well what happens in the future of TiC tock Because karaoke not saying it's gonna happen, but it's not implausible if that was the case that favors publishers even more. There's all these weird ways the business could develop, which could favor one side of the fence, the labels, and the artists continue getting three-quarters of the cash. On the other side of the fence publishers and songwriters start enforcing their rights and getting a more balanced share. And that's what we need to look out for when we're investing in corporates. That's what we need to look out for. If you're a singer and a songwriter. And you're trying to understand your royalty statements.Dan Runcie  35:27Like how much higher Do you think I mean, if you had to put a percentage on it for the Tiktoks or the pelletize? And I guess as well, you made me think up sync deals, right? Like for the folks that are selling, or their saw gets placed on one of these Hulu series or one of these HBO Max series? Like what is that ratio look like, you know, from a ballpark for those?Will Page  35:50So I think a 50-50 split would be the upper end of the goal. If a song is placed in a Hulu TV show or you know, an artist I've worked with for many years Eumir Deodato, Brazilian composer, his songs now in this famous EasyJet commercial over here in Europe, the artists and the publisher would see around a 5050 split of those revenues. Now would that happen in a world of streaming? Unlikely, but I think if you can get to a stage where you're giving the record label $1 and the publisher 50 cents as a ratio, and I got to repeat the word ratio here, you know, that's potentially achievable, that listen, post-Spotify economy, I don't think it's going to happen with the business we're looking at today. But I think that's a potential scenario for the business developing tomorrow. That's the thing is, if I can quote Ralph Simon are a longtime mentor to me, he always says, this industry is always about what's happening next. And then he goes on to say, it always has been as a great reminder of just your will restless souls in this business, we've achieved this amazing thing in the past 10 years, we're streaming got that bank there. What's coming next, who would have thought peloton would have had a music licensing department 18 months ago now they're like a top 10 account for major labels.Dan Runcie  36:59It's impressive. It really is. And I think it's a good reminder. Because anytime that you get a little bit too bullish and excited about what the current thing is, we always got to be thinking about what's next. And you mentioned a few times about a post-Spotify economy. And what does that look like? From your perspective, I think there's likely a number of things that we've already talked about with more of these other b2b platforms or with these other platforms, in general, having licensing deals, but what do you say? Or what do you think about post-Spotify economy? What comes to mind for you?Will Page  37:32Let me throw my fist your words, your joy, and try and knock you out for a second. We talked about price for a minute. And we talked about streaming. We haven't talked about gaming, but you noticed that Epic Games just acquired Bandcamp, I learned a fascinating stat about Bandcamp, which relates to my book tours and economics. There's a chapter in the book called Mako by, where I sat down with the management of the band Radiohead, we went through the entire in rainbow story for the first time ever a real global exclusive to explain how that deal worked out what they were really achieving when they did their voluntary Tip Jar model. And by the way, can I just put a shout out to one of your listeners, and fly from the Ben-Zion I bet remix of Radiohead have ever heard in my life is live. We're fishies Hip Hop version of the entire album. But Radiohead tested voluntary Tip Jar pricing. Now check this out. If you put your album out on Bandcamp could be a vinyl record. Remember, it's the people who are paying to stream who are also buying vinyl. So if you put a band and album out on Bandcamp, and you say a name, your own price, no minimum, and there's a guidance of 10 bucks, the average paid is 14 People go about 40% asking, and that could be for a super-rich blockbuster artists who try something out on Bandcamp there could be for some band who's broken Brooklyn Robin and cons together trying to make them breed people go 40% above asking when you say name your own price. And that's interesting for me, and there's a great academic paper by Francesca Cornelli from Duke University, she asked how should you price a museum and intuition says top-down mindset, the museum should set the price adults 10 bucks kids, five bucks pensioners, some type of discount arrangement, but she said no, let the visitors set the price because that way rich people will give you even more and poorer people can attend. And you'll see more cash overall. And I would like to see a little bit more of that experimentation around pricing compared to the past 20 years where we've had a ceiling on price where if you really love a band, all you can give a platform is 999 and not a penny more. I think that's we're suffocating love. We're putting a ceiling on love. We need to take that ceiling smash through it and let people express love through different means. But I love that Bandcamp story whatever you suggest I'll give you 40% above because it's our we're not dealing with commodity we're dealing with culture and that's what we got to remind ourselves.Dan Runcie  39:43It's like the Met model right where at least the last time I went it was like $20 was the recommendation but to your point it at least at some variable threshold, but the people a lot of the people that go there that have a lot of money end up giving much more so I hear you on that I, I noticed though, when you're talking and thinking about the future of this, I didn't hear many of the typical buzzwords and things that you hear about the music industry. Now whether it is NFTs or Web 3.0 or Metaverse, well, maybe to some extent with the Epic Games comparison, but what is your take on that piece of the puzzle, Spotify era.Will Page  40:20I need $1 and a glass every time I hear these words. So I'm just back from Austin, Texas, South by Southwest, a vague recollection of what happened over there. But I'm telling you, those words were bouncing around more than anything else. Here's a way of capturing of your listeners. This is the first time I've been to South by Southwest where nobody asked me what band did I see last night? Everybody asked me what VR headset that, I try this morning. And that's a sign of the times there and that is a sign of the times. Hey, did you try the Amaze VR headset? You know the make the stallion booty tour? Yeah, I tried that this morning, what Band-Aid nobody wanted to know about bands with pulses. Everybody wants to know about VR headsets. So we live in interesting times. And I think we're in a bit of bubble trouble here. I really do. I don't think this whole thing has been thought out correctly. Firstly, I'll give you an example of where I think the problems gone wrong. And secondly, I want to give you an example from history to show that we've been here before. So with NF T's, it is not. It's not an example of a woman who is happy to spend 1000s 10s of 1000s of dollars on a handbag because they can walk up and down Sixth Avenue and people will see that woman carrying that handbag, the signaling value isn't there. You know, I can buy a token that says I've seen the Mona Lisa on this day and put it in my locker. And if I show you my locker, you can see that I've seen the Mona Lisa that day, and you could buy a token and put it in your locker and you could show your friends that you've seen the Mona Lisa that day, but nobody can buy the Mona Lisa, we can just buy this NFT adaption of the Mona Lisa, but we can't share it across platforms. And that's where I'm struggling. That's where I'm struggling as irrational as that might be to spend 20 $30,000 on a handbag that makes you feel good having the world see you were fine. Do what you got to do. But with NF T's is not a cross-platform token. I'm worried that that's a problem with the model with the price of NF t's just very quickly, there is a term I want to introduce to your show called wash trades, which will meet a legal of 1936 which is basically if you're selling your house, you might employ an estate agent on the buyer side as well as the sell-side to cook up the price. And you can see if you try to do this in the stock market, you spend a lot of time and the chokey six years in jail for manipulating prices. Wash trades have been illegal since 1936. I think there's a problem with wash trades, manipulating the price of NF T's because they're unregulated. So I don't want to be the doer pessimistic, Scottish economist, in the room here pour cold water on this hype machine. But I have some issues with the product. And I have some issues with the price the product is docked to your locker and your locker only the price can be manipulated by ways which be declared illegal in financial markets. Conventional financial markets by wrapping that up. Here's my lesson from history. No Dan, in your record collection. Do you remember a rock band called kiss? Oh yeah. Were you a member of Kiss Army by any chance?Dan Runcie  43:08I was on the show.Will Page  43:11Right so if we go back to before I was born 1975, Kiss one of the biggest rock bands in America had something called Kiss Army for their super fans. So you could have kiss wallpaper because models. You could even have Kiss toilet paper. That was one of their top sellers. You could wipe your butt who key with Gene Simmons. That was one of their biggest sellers. And in 1975 They ran a competition on the competition was to say Hey fans, if you want to see a picture of the band with the makeup off there does famous black and white makeup. And we're going to have this competition you pay to enter and five lucky winners will be sent a photograph of the band for the makeup off. Now you're thinking NF TS kiss 1975 Where's he going? Follow me. Hysteria breaks out all these kiss fans in the kiss army want to see Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley with a makeup off. So crazy hyperemic competition the winners are announced the envelopes are sent out. There was five lucky winners get the envelope. They need scissors to open the envelope a pill it is black and white photograph of Kiss with makeup off. And after five seconds of exposure to natural light. The picture feeds genius, genius marketing incredible. But I'm struggling to see the difference between that and 1975 Kiss. You're competing for photographs, which feed in natural light and NFTs today so something I stress my big tours and economics is when you stare into disruption. It's really important to remind yourself that you've been here before and I think Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley have been here before.Dan Runcie  44:37It's an interesting take. And I do think about the first piece of what you're saying just in terms of something that stays in your wallet. And how do you share that elsewhere? I have seen some of the social platforms making it easier to be like oh hey, you could connect your Coinbase wallet to this whether it's Instagram or I think they're working on it now or to Twitter and you could make that your profile Make sure or you know the people that of course, you know will right click copy paste and save it put that as their profile pictures in different places. So I guess in their minds that's their version of being able to walk down fit that with the duty at Birkbeck, right. Will Page  45:15That's interesting. That to your point, that takes you back into handbag territory that corrects for the problem. Let's see if it goes but equally does the NFT lose its exclusivity when we do that as well. So it might work in the short term and might lead to the demise of NF T's over the long term because they're not that special. After all, they're just an icon for your profile picture. So is great to hear that there's that type of thinking going on that justifies my,  justifies my view.Dan Runcie  45:41Who knows? I mean, we're still early right but I do think that if I see your profile on social media, you turned into a board ape, we may have to have another podcast conversation I did.Will Page  45:55But I tell you asked him was obsessed with these topics. Even Austin, Texas Music conferences, get obsessed with the next big thing but this year, it was just bizarre how many references I heard to web three NF Ts, but if they can just give a quick shout out to the company amaze VR who are doing the mega stallion tour I watched make the stallion four times in Austin, Texas, I saw more VR of Nicholas Deleon and I saw of any live bear. But you know, they had the longest queues of the entire conference. If you judge success by queues demand exceeding supply, they won South by Southwest for the longest queues.Dan Runcie  46:27That's impressive. And of course, it makes a big star she's been doing a lot. I've heard a lot of good things from base VR too. I think that though, it'd be a great point to pivot and talk a little bit more about hip hop, the as we know, hip hop has been able to see a lot of its potential even more so. In the streaming era with us, given the popularity that's there. We've seen the numbers, we've seen the growth as well. And I know that you've studied this a lot, especially on the international perspective, just seeing how hip hop is growing in other countries. But I think some of that growth is looking different than what we may be used to seeing in the US. So what is your perspective right now on the state of hip hop with regards to streaming,Will Page  47:09you speaking about something that's close to my heart, but if I can start by saying, one thing that your podcast has done for me over the years, that reminds us of that famous quote, which has been reiterated by many rappers, which is rap is something you do hip hop is something you live, and we can forget that from time to time can drink a bit too much Kool-Aid and forget those golden words. Rap is something that you do. Hip hop is something that you live, you don't have a choice with hip hop, you live it, rap, I mean, you could play a jazz track, then you could do a rap track, you have a choice there, but hip hop is an eighth. And I want to pull those words up. Because when we talk about the genre of hip hop, I wonder whether it's really a bit of a square peg in a round hole here to take words, which means describe a lifestyle and their attitude or mentality, and then say that it's now a genre. Maybe rap should be the genre and hip hop should be the culture. So I just want to throw that out there for your listeners. And I'd love future guests to come on and pose them that question. If we're discussing the genre of hip hop, are we missing a trick that aside, some stuff which has been popping with hip hop mean, firstly, just the size of the audience in America, just north of 90 million people, there's 90 million regular listeners of hip hop that is phenomenal. If you think about how far the genre has come, the culture has come in 30-plus years. And secondly, who's out there in front. I mean, I would put YouTube as the number one venue for hip hop in the United States, Spotify, Apple, Amazon, they're all doing their things. But I think it's worth just reminding ourselves how important YouTube is to our culture. As opposed to Amazon Spotify. Apple is depressing your thumb on a piece of glass during a track. Repeat. Rap is something you do hip hop is something you live and you've had to Mercer, one of my longtime mentors on your show, just we'll back to that past podcast to get to where I'm coming from on that point. I think the interesting thing for me speaking as a non-American on a podcast with a large American audience to watch how it's growing out of the countries and one of the most interesting things for me was non-English speaking hip hop. Now, my sister who's a French translator, Annie, she introduced me to a rapper called MC solo way, way back in the day, back in the 90s. Even and I don't speak French, but the rap was just incredible, like the way that the French language flowed over a beat. He certainly won't recall any tempo. That was incredible. So, you know, I've always had an appreciation for how hip hop travels beyond its borders, playlists. Without Borders. Hip hop is without borders. So I just wanted to introduce your audience to a very interesting backstory in Holland and the Netherlands, where Spotify the first country, we scaled him outside of Norway and Sweden was the Netherlands. We got big there really quickly 2011, 2012 era and because we got big we could put some local foot soldiers on the ground to help with curation. And for the first time ever in the company's history. We started taking Hip Hop curation seriously outside of our core markets and because we're supplying curation that was met with demand and all of a sudden, we started seeing these Dutch language hip hop artists explode in Holland, Ronnie flex being a great example. I think around 2018, we ran the data. And we learned that Drake was the number one artist in the world on Spotify. Yet in Holland, he was an eighth biggest hip-hop artist. And the seven above him were Dutch rapping in a local language of Dutch. And that was just jaw-dropping to think about globalization, culture, back to the Jungle Brothers the lesson they taught me in 1989, getting the message across without crossing over how you can have local language, hip hop travel, like no other genre there is across the world. And you're seeing that happen in Germany, France, you're seeing it happen in Asia. And so it's important to apply a global lens to hip hop and ask what is it about this culture, which is leading it to travel in a way that other cultures are not traveling is that the expression is that the belief is that the conviction that comes through hip hop, and that's that there's a book on that topic, and then you'd be a perfect person to try and write it, I can get you an agent. And I'd be out of my depth, but just so really important see to so which is why is this culture traveling, like no other culture, I can see on a music platform.Dan Runcie  51:12It's fascinating. It's something I've thought about a lot. I'm glad you mentioned that, because I think about a rapper, like Devine from India, or I think about some of the artists from the Middle East as well. And I think there's similar trends there where hip hop is still the most dominant thing, but they're artists that are from their regions are the ones that are the most popular. And I think it stems back to thinking about the origins of hip hop and looking at where a lot of those other countries may be. Now you look at what the public enemy had done, or even look a bit earlier, like Grandmaster Flash and have done their share of realities of the environments that they're in their storytelling in a way that isn't being done by the mass media. And we're in an era now, you know, more than ever, we see everything happening in the world where, what a lot of the heads of states, or what a lot of the governments or main distribution, communication platforms in these countries are sharing isn't necessarily reflecting what's happening in those places. So because of that, you have people wanting to speak out on that. And I think that because people realizing what the public enemy was able to do in some of those other groups here by them saying, you know, we are the black CNN, we are the voice communicating that I think you saw a lot of that in these other countries. So even if it's different artists, you're seeing them share their version of what's happening on the ground. And I think, like anything else, the evolution of that continues to grow over time. It's been, it's been really fascinating to see that. And I think that is what, at least for me always makes it feel like this is the global language that keeps everyone connected in this space. Even if people are speaking clearly different languages from artists you don't know there's that common theme that you can tell even if you're watching a music video or getting a vibe of what they're doing. There's so many through lights there.Will Page  53:02Those comments are deeper than Loch Ness, so they can quickly top it up with two thoughts, just thinking aloud here. This is why I love about your podcast is with the way you take the conversation with just firstly, just a historical point. And as I mentioned with my book tours and economics, when you're staring at the disruption to remind yourself that you've been here before, when I hear stories about suppression by governments leading to a rise of hip hop as a culture rap as an art form. You just got to go back to 1877 New Orleans and remind yourselves how jazz came into being your Creole people. You know, when Jim Crow laws were reintroduced through the backdoor before since the African American community overnight, so you took classically trained middle-class Creole people brought into a culture which had the blues and African drumming, and out of that suppression came the creation that was jazz. And it's just I love when you alluded to government suppression resulting in creativity. It's just interesting to think how we keep on you know, history doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes. And it's rhyming here when you start to think about the origins of jazz to what we're seeing happen with hip hop. And then the second thing I mentioned earlier that, you know, the internet can scale just about anything you want, but it can't scale intimacy. I wonder whether that's what hip hop is doing because it's, it's a postcard its storytelling is beginning with the word imagine and asking you to imagine the picture these words are creating, you know, that's doing something which I don't think your conventional verse-chorus, verse, chorus, rock or pop song is going to deliver. So the message getting the message across without coordinate crossing over. The message that we're getting across with hip hop is different from other forms of music. And that might explain a little bit about success at home and overseas that we've seen on streaming.Dan Runcie  54:43Definitely. Well, well, this is great. Thanks again for coming on. If you're listening, definitely make sure that you check out Tarzan economics. I can't recommend this book enough. I think that will is extremely sharp. And he's a thought leader in this space and it's been great to learn from him. So well. Thanks for coming on. And before we let you go, is there anything else that you want to plug in or let the travel audience know about?Will Page  55:07I have gotten no more travel plans to the States this year. But if they can just ask the audience to check out the mix on Mixcloud we ain't done with 2021 with a shout-out from Dan Runcie, himself, and many others, Mike G is on that mix Lord is on that mix. But I just hope that your audience because the show trapped will mean so much to me. I just hope the audience sees me as a DJ first and an economist a distant second that I can just land that point at the end of this podcast, I'd be happy.Dan Runcie  55:33That's a great note to end on. Well, thanks again.Will Page  55:36Thank you

Former Chief Economist at Spotify Will Page joins the podcast and shares his expertise. As a prolific public speaker, music communicator, and author of Tarzan Economics, Will's writings are regularly featured in Billboard, The Economist and the Financial Times. He sits down with Brian and Nick to discuss the various issues surrounding Performance Rights Organizations, as well as the music industry's problem with diminishing engagement. Show Notes: [1:16] - How Will got involved with Spotify. [4:23] - A deep dive discussion of Performance Rights Organizations. [20:50] - Will's proposed solution to these issues. [24:39] - Will's thoughts on blockchain and Smart Contracts. [31:53] - How the music industry is missing out on the opportunities posed by the gaming world. [36:15] - Why Will thinks simplifying copyright and collection is the only path forward for the music industry. Find Will on LinkedIn and check out Tarzan Economics.

In this week's episode, listen to one of the headlining events of the 2021 Music Tectonics Conference featuring a fireside chat with Will Page and Vickie Nauman. Tune in as Will Page, former chief economist at Spotify and author of Tarzan Economics, and music technology consultant Vickie Naumen explore the reinvention and growth of the music industry during the pandemic. Will and Vickie dive into current trends including podcasts, livestreaming, and the resurgence of vinyl. Will shares his economic analysis of the music industry and his predictions for the future. Where is the music industry headed in the coming years? Discover how TikTok is changing the way consumers discover new music and their listening habits. How can one TikTok shape the entire rediscovery of a band like Fleetwood Mac? Find out on this week's episode. The Music Tectonics podcast goes beneath the surface of the music industry to explore how technology is changing the way business gets done. Visit MusicTectonics.com to learn more, and find us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Let us know what you think!

Es ist die erste englische Ausgabe von »Campus Beats« - und zu Gast ist direkt ein revolutionärer Denker, Unternehmer, Autor: Will Page ist ehemaliger Chefökonom von Spotify und PRS for Music. Er leistete Pionierarbeit im Bereich Rockonomics, indem er Arbeiten zu Radioheads »In Rainbows« veröffentlichte, BBC 6Music rettete und den globalen Wert des Musikurheberrechts darlegte. »Tarzan Economics: Eight Principles in Pivoting through Disruption« ist sein erstes Buch, die deutsche Version »Disrupt« ist im Campus Verlag erschienen. Will publiziert regelmäßig in Billboard, The Economist und der Financial Times. Der Autor ist Visiting Fellow der London School of Economics und Fellow der Royal Society of Arts. It is the first English edition of »Campus Beats« - and the guest is directly a revolutionary thinker, entrepreneur, author: Will Page is the former Chief Economist of Spotify and PRS for Music where he pioneered Rockonomics, publishing work on Radiohead's In Rainbows and saving BBC 6Music and articulating the global value of music copyright. »Tarzan Economics: Eight Principles in Pivoting through Disruption« is his first book, the german version »Disrupt« is published by Campus Verlag. Will is a regularly featured in Billboard, The Economist and the Financial Times. The author is a Visiting Fellow of the London School of Economics and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

In this episode of the Evolving Leader podcast, co-host Jean Gomes talks to Will Page, former chief economist at both Spotify and PRS for Music, visiting fellow at London School of Economics and author of the recently published ‘Tarzan Economics: Eight principles for pivoting through disruption'.  0'00 Introduction0.43 Background to your career and what you are working on at the moment.6.32 Tell us the story of how your father introduced you to the core principles of economics.11.45  How many large organisations have a chief economist?13.59 What is your book Tarzan Economics all about? Give us the pitch.16.22 What advice are your giving to leaders in terms of shifting their mindset to work with disruption rather than to fight it? 19.24 When we think about how consumer's consumption of music has shifted to a non linear model, how applicable is that shift to other markets, and how do you think like that when you are used to thinking in a linear abstraction from the past?22.18 Talk to us a little bit about how you spot when to pivot (which is a key part of knowing when to jump from vine to vine).29.24 How do economists within an organisation need to shift, what's the agenda that they need to set for the next decade?34.30 How do you hold the tension between preserving the value of the business and its growth and innovation for the future?42.09  Can you talk to us about the OfCom framework and how that influenced some of your thinking?48.45 Let's talk about Tower Records and the notion of the long tail.53.23 What's your take on the short/medium/long-term outlook for the global economy?61.15 So what's your focus now?Social: Instagram           @evolvingleader LinkedIn             The Evolving Leader Podcast Twitter               @Evolving_LeaderThe Evolving Leader is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside production.

After a year of pandemic-spawned disruption, the commercial real estate industry is undergoing a period of growth—and change. Spotify's former Chief Economist Will Page joins Spencer Levy to discuss his new book, Tarzan Economics, and what lessons commercial real estate can draw from the music industry's disruption.

Former Chief Economist at Spotify Will Page is Peter's guest on episode 6 of I've Been Thinking. Peter and Will discuss his book, Tarzan Economics, and the examples within showcasing economics impacting music but also everything in our wider culture. Will reveals how streaming is changing the way music is written, how a high street chain we're all familiar with broke a hit record and why other older media streams should look at the music industry for clues as to how best adapt to the changing technological landscape around us. Please do subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss future episodes and a positive review is always appreciated. You can order Will's book, read further writing and listen to playlists curated by Will on his website - www.tarzaneconomics.com Peter can be contacted on Twitter, @peterfrankopan or via his website - www.peterfrankopan.com Produced, edited and mixed by @producerneil

Author Will Page, former Chief Economist at Spotify, joins us this week to discuss his book Tarzan Economics and how brands should be preparing for their own "Napster moment".

Today we get a question about bringing traffic to your website (but with the wrong tool). You might try something like Mango Tools to boost your SEO. SPONSOR: podcastbranding.co If you need a logo, artwork, full website or an audit of your current brand, check out www.podcastbranding.co MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE Behind the Desk Podcast https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/behind-the-desk-the-story-of-late-night Tom Webster Podcast https://tomwebster.media/archive/no-one-likes-pizza/ Tarzan Economics https://amzn.to/3iJA4si Podcast Magazine hot 50 https://podcastmagazine.com/hot50 Timber https://timber.fm/ Rich fairvalueadvisors.com Podcast Rodeo Show https://www.podcastrodeoshow.com Podcast Review Show https://www.podcastreviewshow.com Support The Show - Be Awesome https://www.askthepodcastcoach.com/store TOPICS 00:45 Sponsor: podcastbranding.co 02:39 Players That Build Traffic? 05:25 Behind the Desk Podcast 08:03 Your Stats May Fluctuate As We Go Back to the Office. 10:15 Three Things To Not Discuss 11:56 Are We Stressed Out? 16:07 Waiting Too Long To Ask For Feedback 18:55 Podcast Rodeo Podfade 23:05 Consitent Value More than Schedule 28:47 Microsoft Nerd Out 1 30:31 Our Awesome Supporters 34:10 Live Broadcast From the Middle of Nowhere 37:47 Starlink Nerdout 2 39:25 Podcast Magazine Hot 50 40:44 Timber 45:50 Should I Mix Long and Short Content 57:25 What's Coming Up? Every week Dave Jackson from the School of Podcasting and Jim Collison from the Average Guy Network answer your podcast questions. This episode 347 is part of the Power of Podcasting Network

Gabriella Mirabelli and Will Page, former Chief Economist of Spotify, discuss his new book, Tarzan Economics, and how music's disruptive story provides pivotal lessons for any business facing disruptive change.

“Music was the first to suffer, and the first to recover, from the forces of deep technological disruption, making it something we can all learn from.”  – Will Page, Tarzan Economics (Simon & Schuster, April... The post Will Page. Tarzan Economics. appeared first on Up Next.

Will Page, Former Spotify chief economist and author of ‘Tarzan Economics: Eight Principles for Pivoting Through Disruption’ Taking Stock on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and Spotify.      Download, listen and subscribe on the Newstalk App.     You can also listen to Newstalk live on newstalk.com or on Alexa, by adding the Newstalk skill and asking: 'Alexa, play Newstalk'.

Join James Cridland and Sam Sethi on this week's deep dive into subscription services.SPECIAL GUESTS: - Will Page - Author of Tarzan Economics, Visiting Fellow at The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and Former Chief Economist at Spotify and PRS for Music.- Charles Van Winkle - Former Senior Computer Scientist II at Adobe Systems and now Senior Software Engineer at Descript IN THIS PODCAST: Twitter Spaces is now available to (almost) everyone, on iOS and Android, if you have more than 600 followers. Apple’s Podcasts Connect still isn’t allowing new podcasts from some users.Apple Podcasts iOS 14.5.1 app has changed the way it displays episode notes, it no longer supports HTML links.  The new iOS 14.5.1 Apple Podcasts app now takes hours to deliver new episodes to your listeners. Spotify’s recently-acquired Clubhouse-like service, Locker Room, is to be called Spotify Greenroom. Headliner has integrated with “Megaphone by Spotify”.Cleanvoice is a new service promising to automatically remove all those “uhhhh” words from your recordings. It’s $3 a shot, but could save quite some time in editing. Ximalaya has filed for a US IPO. The largest online audio platform in China (with spoken-word and music content), it has 250m monthly users, and 5.2m active content creators. JustPod’s Yi Yang newsletter about podcasting in China, is also available in English.Free editing software Audacity has 'been acquired' by a new company, Muse Group.The Australian part of Podcast Day 24 will be an in-person event in Sydney NSW on June 7, it’s been announced. The conference announced its first set of speakers this morning; it’s part of a 24-hour event in Australia, Europe and North America.Buzzsprout Podcast hosting and a whole lot more

Welcome to series four of Take My Advice (I'm Not Using). Today's guest is Will Page, the former Chief Economist of Spotify and PRS for Music where he pioneered 'Rockonomics'. At PRS he published work on Radiohead's In Rainbows and saving BBC 6Music. At Spotify, he helped redefine catalogue and articulated the global value of music copyright.In this episode, we discuss how Will's determination to work in the music business led to him becoming the industry's first Chief Economist. We also explore the concept of 'builder's and 'farmers' in tech businesses, as Will explains how Spotify founder and CEO, Daniel Ek, successfully bridges the gap between both.There's also a conversation about the danger of NPS (Net Promoter Score), the rising importance of consumption over transaction data, NFTs (non-fungible tokens), and how data has impacted the creative process in music.LINKS:Will Page's new book, Tarzan EconomicsNPSistheworst.comWill's LSE articleFuture Work/Life newsletterFuture Work/Life websitePodcast episode with Christopher Lochhead on Category Design and 'niching down'Podcast episode with Ben Legg on Portfolio Careers See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this short episode of the Bookomicast for Leaders Who Are Readers, Christian Gladwell, Global Chief Executive of M&C Saatchi Performance picks Tarzan Economics by Will Page. To become a Bookomi member and get our free weekly email CLICK HERE Meanwhile, if you'd like to go deeper into Will's OMI, you can get your own copy of the book from the Bookomi section of our independent bookshop partner  HERE. 

In this week's episode former chief economist at Spotify Will Page speaks to Linda Yueh about the near destruction of the music industry at the hands of online piracy and its subsequent recovery on the backs of digital streaming platforms. The story offers a trove of insights on how to confront the metamorphosis we are all facing in dealing with the Covid-19 era, as accelerating tech and economic changes reshape our work, our play and our very minds.  To buy Will's new book Tarzan Economics click here: https://bit.ly/2RjJsaH  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bambos Eracleous, Partner and Head of the Odgers Interim Media & Entertainment Practice, talks to Will Page, the music industry's first Chief Economist. Bambos and Will cover a wide range of topics including the challenges and opportunities for the music business, the boom in copyrights and back catalogues, content overload and what economics can tell us about the next wave of digital disruption across Media and Entertainment. They also discuss Will's new book Tarzan Economics, which shares the lessons he's learned as a ‘Rockonomist' and how they can be applied by individuals, industries and institutions that are facing change and disruption of their own. A fascinating listen, not only for those interested in the music business but for anyone staring at their own ‘Napster Moment'. Don't forget to like and subscribe for more episodes of our Media & Entertainment Podcast You can connect with Bambos and Odgers Interim here: www.linkedin.com/in/bambos-eracleous-0b021a3/ www.odgersinterim.com/uk/ And with Will at:   https://www.linkedin.com/in/wpage/