From your point of view, what is the biggest challenge facing independent music publishers?
I would say that the biggest challenge is data management on a global scale and marketing strategy in an oversaturated and fragmented market.
What is the biggest opportunity?
There’s opportunity in the exploration of other income opportunities. Audiovisual and sync seems to work very well for indie artists, for example, while direct to fan strategies are also a growing trend.
How do you anticipate the music industry changing over the coming years in terms of what you do?
Data management will increasingly become a crucial differentiator and critical ability in light of exponential growth of data volumes and the need to properly analyse it for opportunities. The current trends in fragmentation of repertoire will probably continue. AI will probably close avenues of income while facilitating others. Educating on the music ecosphere and rights management to writers and artists will become even more important as indie artists need to be ever more managing multiple areas of their career. Income from live music is hyper concentrating on fewer festivals, so rebuilding a healthy live market for indies must be on the radar for its importance for these artists.
How can music publishers best engage with your company in particular to further their own business?
Again, the ability to work with current and standard data formats to accelerate registrations and data exchange is crucial. Data analysis is only possible when the data is reliable. There are still significant gaps in this area. Going back to education, joint initiatives between publishers and societies have already proven valuable and can and should be expanded.
What’s coming up for you that our members should be aware of?
We will continue with our UBC Jam live music project, which brings together independent artists and publishers in a UBC hosted live show devised to create connections between them.