About This Episode
On today’s episode, we interview Keith Jopling, Consulting Director at media insights and analysis firm MIDiA Research and founder of The Song Sommelier, the media platform bringing vinyl values to the world of playlists. Throughout his more than 20 years of experience in the music business, Keith worked as an executive consultant for some of the music industry’s key organizations, from major and independent labels to IFPI and Spotify.
Today, we catch up with Keith to talk his path from pharma to the music industry and break down his recent report for MIDiA on Five Trends Changing Music Marketing. How should the music industry approach continuous decline of radio listenership? How can the label system manage growing content volumes in the post-album streaming era? Can we build a system that would bring fair value to the artist, when the entire music industry is priced at $9,99/month?
Buckle up for an hour of insider’s talk on the key challenges and opportunities of the modern music industry.
Topics & Highlights
15:28 — On Spotify's Development and Moving into Podcasting
At the time, Spotify could have gone in a lot of different directions to keep their growth. They’re always looking for what’s next, which is the smart way of thinking. I mean, Spotify is driven by one of the smartest people around. It’s very much in Daniel’s vision, the way that they keep growing the business, and he’s always thinking: “Okay, what is next and what’s the right timing for it?” [...]
Spotify had a central bet system — which people know about now — which was about gathering the insights, figuring out where Spotify could play and how quickly they could succeed. So a lot of [my work] was to do that, do it differently and do it better. How you assess an opportunity? Not boiling the ocean, but doing it with a light touch, and bringing frameworks to it. We did the early work on podcasts, we did the early work on the creator marketing, we took a hard look at music video and voice, and the whole thing about taking on radio through the ad tech. It was about assessing what's next, how do we do it and when? [...]
I think the genius of how they’ve moved into podcasting space was all about timing. They could’ve done it five years ago — It would’ve been too early. If they’d have done it now — it would’ve been too late. So the fact that they stepped in about a year ago and really, really pressed hard on that pedal —they timed it just right.
24:40 — On Managing Linear Decline of the Radio Format
David Weiszfeld: Recently, you wrote a piece on MIDiA called “Five Trends Changing Music Marketing”. The first thing you mentioned was managing linear decline, related to radio consumption and so forth. Why is managing linear decline a big trend or a big challenge for the industry as a whole?
Keith Jopling: I think if you look at the music business as a whole, you’ve got the radio industry that is worth 50 billion dollars. It’s a huge chunk of value that you do not want to lose. So, how is business going to migrate to digital formats and not lose that revenue? Will that revenue will shift over to the likes of Spotify and YouTube — something that still filters through to artists? Or, if you’re in radio, where do you go from here? How do you maintain relevance? How do you make sure you’re still a key part of the culture, both in terms of what consumers listen to and how artists come up through the system?
I’ve done some work with radio broadcasters, and I found that an issue is just a lack of confidence. Like they feel like they’re a bit battered and bruised by on-demand audio, and they feel like they ought to start copying what they do. So, they’ve become more interested in data, playlists and so forth — basically, they’ve become interested in things that they’re not so good at. Whereas if they really focus on things that they are good at, which is programming, bringing personality to it, being curators that people trust, exploring music as a cultural scene — that way they can do much more with that, even in these new environments. I think that the industry will have to figure out a way of recognizing that and playing to those strengths. [...]
One of the things that you find with strategy is that the grass is always greener on the other side. There’s a lot of envy between businesses: leaders look at high growth business over there, and they want some of that. You know, Spotify and Apple and Amazon, they all suffer from that as well. So, I mean, sometimes it’s for the best — but it gets dangerous when you’re diversifying too much and leave behind what you’re really good at. And then it becomes a total mess.
This is one of the reasons why the industry needs to collaborate more — and it’s on labels and publishers to drive this collaboration. So: don’t forget about the radio. Don’t leave it behind — work with the radio to build on its strengths. The biggest competition that music faces is other formats. We see it all the time with the analysis we do at MIDiA. Video is eating up more time, gaming is eating up more time, social is eating up more time. Podcasts are eating up more audio time away from music. So you’ve got to look at competition as being everything — that’s how it works in the attention economy. We all know that. Now, we need to understand what to do about it.
32:42 — On Managing Streaming Economics and Growing Song Volumes:
This is a challenge for labels and artists, much more than it’s a challenge for the platforms. The platforms can manage this through stations, through playlists and increasing personalization. But the supply side hasn’t solved it yet. If you’re an artist, you’re competing with an increasing number of other artists or songs. However many it is now — 40,000/50,000 tracks a day, I’ve lost count. The point is, it’s a lot. It’s too much. And then, as a label, obviously, your challenge is economics. You don’t know which songs to back but you have to put money behind those tracks to grow them. It's your job is to market those. So, you need to know what works, quickly: which ones to drop, which ones to pursue and persevere with? But first of all, you’ve got to keep getting more through — otherwise, you’re going to lose market share.
The label system needs some reassessment. Even though they are better with the reactive stuff nowadays, they can see what’s working, and they tend to know whether to drop it or to press on. But it’s still a very human effort — to market a track. You need to buy into it, you need to work it hard, and you need to stick with it and see which audience is going to resonate with it. All of which is a human effort. Which is very, very exhausting.
So in the next 1-3 years, the big success stories in music will be marketing technology. Maybe this is an opportunity for Soundcharts. Maybe it’s an opportunity for the Feature.fm-s of this world — or anyone who can give a sense of automated tools, with attribution, that would allow to put more songs through the system. To know what’s working sooner, and to know which are the songs to invest in on the bigger scale — because they’re already working.
That is a huge challenge for labels, that have previously been quality over quantity operation. Now they have to be a quantity optimization type-operation — and they still have to do the quality bit on top. So it’s interesting to see how the distribution players are going to be able to do this, the likes of AWAL and Kobalt — they have a different story to tell because they’re managing far more tracks. And how the majors are going to respond to it as well.
38:43 — On Post-Album Era and Managing Post-Album Creativity
David Weiszfeld: I speak to a lot of artists who are wondering what to do with post-album creativity. I’ve seen a stat that 73% of people under 25 have never listened to an album the way the artist intended it. What’s what do you think is going to happen for artists and fans? How are people going to listen to music?
Keith Jopling: I’m the last person to want to talk about the death of albums because, for a long time, it was my preferred way of enjoying music. It’s not anymore. But even if I flipped, many people in my demographic will always stick with albums. There’s always something special about an album. I think we’ll always have that — but we’ll find that it’s more and more niche, just like vinyl became more and more niche.
But I think the song has become the thing — and, obviously, video is very important as well. Both of those formats are being augmented differently. The song has been multiplied in various different ways: it’s been remixed, we are seeing more acoustic versions, more producer versions of every track.
And then with video — we’re seeing longer content, which encompasses one or two songs, almost in the form of an EP. It’s just a way of artists telling their stories. I think it’s going to work pretty well for platforms like YouTube — and they’re already stepping into sponsoring documentaries and so on. Documentaries, behind the scenes, live video. We’ve already seen music movies get to a scale we’ve never seen before. There’s gonna be lots of interest in exploring the catalog and that way. [...]
In a post-album world, you’ve got so many different formats to work with — I think it’s probably more exciting for artists than we think. I think artists are going to celebrate the idea of stepping out of an album cycle, where you work on this thing for two or three years, and it is expected to last for the next two or three years. I mean, we’ve seen artists who have put life and soul into an album for two or three years, they drop it — in two weeks, no one can remember it even happened. I think we’re going to see a lot more creativity around that, which is great.
David Weiszfeld: It’s a bit scarier for traditional companies, that work term of “I will give you X advance for Y album for Z length, and I will make A revenue”. Right now, it’s becoming more like “I’m going to give you advance for I don’t know how many songs, we’re gonna release songs in a kind of “always on” cadence — and then maybe we’ll do this album/compilation thing.
44:15 — On Global-Local Music Culture
As for global-local culture, hip-hop music is the classic example: we’ve got all these urban artists coming through local labels. If you’re a hip-hop artist breaking through in the US or UK, the next thing is to try and expand globally — that what labels always done with pop, rock, whatever came before.
But these days, it the scene that travels. Grime, hip-hop, drill, all of those genres have traveled the world, but they always surface through local artists. It’s definitely happening all over Europe, in Latin America — let’s see what happens in Asia for that repertoire. It’s the scene that is exported globally — not the artists. So it's the scene that goes globals, and then gets its own local interpretations, talking about local political and local social issues.
I think it’s fascinating because then it’s about how labels and management companies will adapt to that. They need to collaborate faster, they need to move away for breaking an artist in one market and then expecting local markets around the world to just take that artist and push them. So all of that is just going to require a change in terms of how labels have always done things and how they think.
David Weiszfeld: The thing you mentioned about hip-hop is so true. If you look at the top charts on Deezer and Spotify it’s basically local hip hop. I mean, of course, when Drake releases an album, he’s a 1-20 for a week, and everybody is pushed down 20 slots. But actually, there’s a lot of local urban music that is just taking over the local charts. American music used to dominate the industry. It’s kind of counterintuitive, but if I give you a way of listening to any music in the world, you will go for local artists. In your high school, when you talk to your friends, it’s gonna be about that verse that is talking about that politician — or that cultural moment in your country.
Take Lil Tecca, for example, who is massive in America. He’s not known in France. People know Ransom, the song — but I don’t think he would sell out 2k tickets in France, which wasn’t the case 10 years ago. If you were the Lil Tecca-size act, you would be huge in France — there wouldn’t be any problem.
49:25 — On Managing Music Value
I think that’s the biggest challenge of the industry, without a doubt. Stephen Cooper’s comments the other day were really interesting. So the head of Warner was saying that, if you were to go back in time and look at when the first streaming deal was done, would you do the “entire catalog for $9.99” type-deal?
That doesn’t exist in other media: it doesn’t exist in games, it doesn’t exist to video — it’s unique to music. Many people in the video world want the same thing, but they’re never going to get it, because it doesn’t work for the business. In fact, we’re seeing the opposite. We’re about to see three or four huge global video-streaming services launch, and nobody has the full catalog. Customers have to make a choice: which two or three am I going to subscribe to?
Steven Cooper’s point was that if we’d have started off the same way, maybe now we’d have more value in the industry. If we'd sliced and diced it, by genre or by frontline catalog, then we might've got a different overall value aggregation in the business.
I think we are going to see some interesting models arise: artists with subscriptions, managing the communities better, monetizing like small-middle global businesses. And the team around them is going to be different from what it is today — it’ll still involve managers, labels, and streaming platforms, but it would be a different formula.
David Weiszfeld: You’ve mentioned fan up-sells as a way to maximize the value of music. The other way to approach it would be: how can artists maximize their revenue without it becoming too much? That’s a big question we’re getting from people, saying: I get money from streaming, live and publishing; I want to do those deluxe packages and sell hoodies, T-shirts, and tickets. And then, in the end, it just feels too much — you feel like you're exploiting fans for money, and, you know, it’s still art. So, where is the line?
Keith Jopling: It’s really tough because you’ve got to do all of those things. I look at ticket prices sometimes, and I think, you know, they’ve crossed the line, from being good value to being exploitation. There are some artists I’d love to see live — I’m just not gonna pay the hundreds $100+ dollars to do that.
But It’s hard because that’s the way they’re making money. Some would say that as an artist, you have to spread out, and do music, write for other artists, performing in more than one band, etc. But that’s not the solution — the industry itself has to extract better value from the systems it has. To get back to that equation, the $9.99 price point and the nature of that deal. There’s going to be some economic changes to the way music is put out there.
I believe whatever trends take hold of an industry: at the moment it’s volume, and data, and the commoditization that’s going on — I’m always interested in the counter-culture. I’m really interested in young people under the age of 20 who get obsessed with vinyl or even cassettes. And they do want to read the liner notes, and they do appreciate conceptual artwork, and the image of the artist they’re following. Those things might be pushed out right now — but they are still very important to us as human beings, and to how we appreciate and identify with music and artists.
So I’ve created The Song Sommelier to bring art back — we call it vinyl values to playlists. That’s what it is. It’s playlists plus original artwork, which is done by our artist, Mick Clark, a proper artist who did album cover in a day, when you really thought through the concept. And then some writing around it and really good curation.
It may be aimed at people who are older — but actually, some very young people really love it as well, because they appreciate what is currently missing. And what’s missing is context. And that old fashioned kind of quality over quantity type ethos and thinking. You know, it’s always going to be a niche, but it’s amazing to see people find it around the world. We work with Soundsgood, so it doesn’t matter what streaming platform you use, you can discover our playlists through it. So at the moment, that’s where we are. But we’re going to build it up into a curation platform with its own events, podcasts, and so forth. Maybe, it’s just a way of rethinking music journalism.
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Founder & CEO, Soundcharts.com & bsharp.biz
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