Slush 2015: ‘Future of Music Business’ report
The music industry was the first protagonist at Slush today in Helsinki, Finland, where a group of managers and entrepreneurs took the stage to share their views on the “Future of Music Business”.
Talks were opened by moderator Thomas Ford from the music startup Soundrop. Ford picked Spotify’s Jenny Hermanson’s and Univeral Music’s Ankit Desai's brains on streaming services, while Johan Lagerlöf of X5 Music and Jyrki Rosenberg of MixRadio followed-up to deepen the subject of playlists as the epicentre of the digital monetisation in the audio streaming realm.
Deezer’s Gerrit Schumann was interviewed by Per Roman (GP Bullhound) and couldn’t avoid the predictable question regarding the postponed IPO of the French streaming platform: after stressing that investors’ interest is still alive and kicking, he briefly confirmed that the postponing decision was made on the heels of the currently poor market conditions specifically within the entertainment sector, mentioning Pandora and Netflix as examples of public companies whose recent performances have cooled off the financial community’s enthusiasm.
Particularly interesting were Believe Digital’s Denis Ladegaillerie's and Soundtrack Your Brand’s Andreas Liffgarden's contributions. According to Ladegaillerie's view, the music industry is bracing itself for a decade of growth after coping with 10/15 years of decline.
Comparing the first wave of digital music services with the current model, he stated that the former generated on average $45 per user annually whilst the latter generating $120. Ladegaillerie said he expects that more and more of the additional revenues will be invested in music creativity, with marketing strategies and operations also dramatically improving thanks to the huge amount of data that streaming platforms are making available to all stakeholders.
Andreas Liffgarden - a former Spotify manager who launched Soundtrack Your Brand with former Beats manager, co-founder Ola Sars – focused on B2B, pointing it out as a massively neglected sector that the music industry is failing to monetise. According to Liffgarden, music monetisation is stuck with the 9.99/month paradigm (a fee no one dares increase) and the industry is treating the huge B2B marketplace as an “analogue affair” only, which is completely undisrupted by digital and, depending on how pessimistic or optimistic one chooses to project figures, ranges from 3 to 11 billion dollars in value (compared to the whole music turnover, reckoned at 15 billion dollars). More details on www.soundtrackyourbrand.com.
Slush continues tomorrow, Thursday the 12th. The session "Building the next-generation media and entertainment company" will be particularly interesting to media-oriented attendes.
(Giampiero Di Carlo)