How the music industry has changed: the latest from the experts

Amy Terrill: Good morning, everybody. How is everyone today? I know a few people were here for the summit, for the previous panel which is fantastic, about gaming, and now we’re going to talk about music. I’m Amy Terrill, I’ve Executive Vice President of Music Canada and I’ve got a fantastic panel here to my left. I’m going to sit down, we’re going to get started. I’m going to introduce our panelists. Then we have a bit of time here this morning, we’ll make sure we’re open for questions at the end. About fifteen minutes of questions at the end and there will be a roving mic so please wait until you’ve got a mic before you answer the question so that our online audience can hear as well. We’ll get started.

So, to my left is Alan Cross. I’m sure a lot of people know Alan, he’s a broadcaster, interviewer, writer, blogger, all sorts of thing, media guru…

Alan Cross: Just try to tell that to my parents, what I do for a living?

Amy Terrill: Well it’s hard to choose of all the things that you do, Alan. But, Alan, many people know about the successful documentary series, The Ongoing History of New Music, twenty years?

Alan Cross: Twenty, yeah.

Amy Terrill: That’s fantastic, that’s really great. Happy to have Alan here.

To his left is Steve Kane. Steve is the President of Warner Music Canada, has been so since the early 2000’s, and for a while before that, he joined Warner Music Canada in 2001. He worked in the industry for over fifteen years for other organizations. What I really enjoy about Steve is just some of the Canadian artists that he’s signed and he’s worked with to build Canadian and international careers. Some of those names that we love; Billy Talent, most recently our Scott Helman who just won an award. Yeah, it’s fantastic. A lot of other artists that you’ve worked with as well, Blue Rodeo had a very successful partnership with them. Welcome to Steve Kane.

Steve Kane: Thank you, Amy. Good morning everyone.

Amy Terrill: And then Paul Tuch, to Steve’s left, Paul is with Nielsen Entertainment, here in the Toronto office. Originally, Paul went to radio broadcasting at Humber, worked with The Record which is a music industry publication, for about ten years, I believe, as a chart editor and then got into our metrics area and has been working in that field since 1997. So, welcome, Paul.

So, we’re going to get started with the conversation. We’re talking about discoverability in the music industry. An industry which I think everybody knows has evolved significantly in the last twenty years. For certain, the distribution has changed. Our business partners really in the music industry today didn’t even exist twenty years ago. And I think we’re still in a period of evolution.

But, let’s start with discoverability. So, let’s define that, I guess, what does that mean in the music industry today? And, Steve I’m going to start with you. You’re working directly with artists so, what does discoverability mean to you and how does it drive your day-to-day?

Steve Kane: Well, I guess discoverability really has two distinct meanings. Obviously one of the roles of a record company is the discovery of artists. How we come across an artist, how we start that process of taking them out to a wider audience, that’s a very, quite honestly, a very small part of it.

And, has new technology changed how we discover artists, how an artist comes to our attention? Definitely. But, it’s no different finding an artist online than walking in to a bar and having a hallelujah moment. That part of discoverability, that’s still subjective. That’s still somebody falling in love with a song, with an image, with a presentation of musical work.

Discoverability for fans, discoverability for consumption, that’s the one that has changed so immensely. And how it’s gone from a very small voice, a very small group of people, you know, using a magnophone and how it works. Discoverability has gone from being broadcast or a narrow cast to a becoming a conversation, becoming a multi-level, multi-layered conversation with a lot more participants than there ever used to be. And, that’s part of the evolution of the music business that is continually ongoing.

So I’ve been doing this on the label side of things for close to thirty years and the only thing those thirty years have in common is change. That’s the one constant. How we take an artist out to market, that’s changed in essence but it’s still, as we navigate, probably the biggest change the recording music business has ever seen which is a move, in the recording music business, it is a move away from ownership to access.  And so, when you start talking about access and making access points easy to get in to, that entirely changes the game.

Again, for me, the two things that have never changed in this business is the continual evolution and secondly, value. Value remains, no matter what the carrier, values remains in the creation and the content. However we decide to find that discoverability, however we dive in to it, what we’re really looking for is a creative piece of work that moves us. That’s where the value lies and that’s why it’s so important that these new mechanisms of discoverability compensates intact creatives.

Amy Terrill: Alan, respond to that.

Alan Cross: Sure.

Amy Terrill: I mean, this notion, maybe to start with, that discoverability many years ago was in the control of a much smaller number of channels or number of individuals into much broader?

Alan Cross: We had our standard cultural gate keepers. There was radio, record stores, record labels, music stores, music magazines. They told us, they sorted through all the chat, and gave us what they believe was the best stuff. Our problem today is signal to noise. The barrier to entry into becoming a musician and having your music distributed around the galaxy has never been lower. Anybody can do it. The problem is that too many people are doing it and a lot of people who are doing it really shouldn’t be because we don’t have the cultural gate keepers who are there to discover them and nurture them and coach them and do all these other things. So as a result, we have a lot of really raw stuff out there and frankly, a lot of it wouldn’t have made the cut back in the old days. So it becomes very frustrating for the music fan or for people in my position in broadcast that are looking for the next big thing because it’s so much stuff to sort though. And after a while you just get jaded and tired.

I want a discoverability parody, method, algorithm, whatever it is. Just give me the stuff that I want. Just give me the stuff that’s interesting to me so I can amplify it from my own point of view. A signal to noise ratio, that’s our issue.

Amy Terrill: Paul, you measure what’s happening and, I know on the weekend or just last week, at Canadian Music Week, there was a really great national picture provided by Nielsen. What have you learned? What have you seen? What are the trends in discoverability?

Paul Tuch: I think bouncing off of what Alan was talking about accessibility and everything is out there, everything is available. And, from what we’ve seen, we’ve done a consumer survey where we asked questions of a large number of Canadians and, so of asking how they discover music, how the consume music. And, I think it’s really interesting that with everything that’s out there, everything that’s at our fingertips, people still want to be lead somewhere. The biggest thing, for example, Spotify, one of the major streaming services, the biggest things over at Spotify are playlists. They are curated by somebody. Even though everything is out there to discover people need that curation. They want that curation. They want to be part of a community that, “If, somebody likes it, a large amount of people like it, I feel I should be part of that”. But, it gives you guidance to get away from that noise and find specific things.

Alan Cross: There’s always this need that people want to find someone just like them. That was one of the biggest attractions of Napster, because you would go online and find somebody with a music collection that reflected your taste and then, suddenly you were no longer alone. There was somebody somewhere else in the world who is just like you and that’s what playlists do.

Steve Kane: Exactly, the same concept behind is what’s driving the playlist closer of Spotify and Apple Music to a degree. It is that curator voice. And, Alan, I agree with you the barrier is very low, it’s entry, I won’t go so far as to say they shouldn’t do it but we’re still shifting. We’re still looking for that gold standard, as is radio. There’s a reason playlists are still like…

I still remember many years you addressing a CMW panel, a young artist getting up and bemoaning it was difficult to get on the radio. Your answer to him was perfect, it’s stuck with me all these years, “It’s supposed to be. It’s where the best end up.” How do the best end up there now? To me that’s what has changed and the curation piece is very important. Who are those curators now? I would argue that there are curators who are rising above that noise. If you look at playlists that have hundreds of thousands of followers, in some cases a couple million, they’re setting those filters. They’re looking at that landscape and moving those artists up their playlists. Then there’s all kinds of algorithms within Spotify that tell you that you want to be in that top three, top five, of a playlist because that’s maybe as far as people get.

The other part of that is, of course, playlists don’t happen by accident. This huge myth that, and again Alan’s point, that you just have to put it out there and it will be discovered? It’s nonsense. You scratch the surface of any viral, you know, in the music world, you scratch the surface of any viral stories, what you’ll find is a very sophisticated search engine optimization. You will find very clever content that is built, designed and released into the world with the idea that it is attractive to share to people just like you.

Alan Cross: Which is why Google ended up buying Songza. I was the director of curation for Canada before Songza went that way. That was the thing we had people, actual human beings, coming up with clever, clever, clever, highly, highly, highly filtered playlists with cute titles. We had one that was very, very popular, it was one of the most shared ones. We had this deal with, not Johnson & Johnson but Procter & Gamble, they wanted something for Mr. Clean. “We have a new flavor of Mr. Clean and we would like to embed a playlist in our Mr. Clean playlist, Mr. Clean website.” Okay, that’s an interesting form of native advertising, but fine. We’ve had somebody creating a playlist called “Rock Out with your Mop Out” and that was hugely popular. There were popular songs on the playlist but there were also some really left field pitches, which is really cool.

Amy Terrill: So Steve, how do you, as someone working with artists, how do you influence those playlists, those curators? How has that changed over the years, or is it very similar to the way you might have worked with radio in the past?

Steve Kane: Well, again, it’s interesting because there are so many points of entry. There are taste makers, there are playlists that you really want to work and see and make sure that they’ve heard your music and get on those playlists and start to move them up. They’ll only move up those playlists if they’re getting the reaction, if they’re getting the number of streams they like, that they like to see. We also have internal brands, Warner Music for instance has an international brand called Topsify, and those are our playlists. Universal has their own brand. There’s a bunch of great indie labels that have come together and they’ve to their own brand. You start to seed it in.

So, you mentioned Scott Helman earlier. We looked at Scott and we tried to think, “Okay, who’s this audience? Because it’s multi-layered. We want him on the same song list as Shawn Mendes because Shawn gets a lot of plays.” So we may stick Shawn Mendes on one of our playlists and Scott two, three songs below that. That has that, you know, consumer starts to consume what they like they are going to discover somebody that’s in the same age range, has a lot of the same demos, and you could say like for like. But we also take Scott Helman and put him on sort of coffeehouse playlist because the number of times I have heard people hear a Scott Helman song for the first time and say, “Wow, he’s like a young Paul Simon.” Bang, I want him on playlist right next to a Paul Simon song so someone can go from “Me and Julio” into “Tikka Masala” and say, “Wow, somebody’s still making that kind of music.” Then it’s a matter, you know, of getting those playlists up, getting those songs moving up the playlist.

Equally important and this again, is where barrier comes down and point of entry becomes much easier, for about three or four, no I would say about a month and a half, Scott’s number one streaming market was Paris. Now, there was also a video that Scott shot with a couple members of Walk Off The Earth, who he was on tour with in France. Scott walking along in front of the Eiffel Tower singing “Bungalow”, no sorry he was singing “Machine”, and a couple members of Walk Off The Earth walking behind him. That video we made sure to get into the hands of a few French taste makers, our French company helped us a lot to get it onto key playlists on their internal playlist and it caught on. So, all of sudden now, I’ve started to create an international story.

Modern Space, a band that has, you know, we’re only on one single, they have an EP out, The Edge has been a terrific supporter of them. They’ve got massive streaming action going on in Germany, the U.K. and the U.S. They don’t have a record out in any of those markets, yet, but those streaming numbers are going to help me convince my local partners in Germany, France and the U.S. to release them.

It is also at the point now where I can take all this data, and Paul was part of an excellent Panel at CMW, that can show as my streams go up it gives me an opportunity to walk in to Alan’s colleagues and say, “This is what people are choosing. They’re choosing it, look at how often they’re playing it. Why isn’t it on this radio station? Because it’s clearly coming up to the cream.” One of the interesting reactions at the panel that I found a little alarming was, and I don’t know where the fellow was from but he was a broadcaster who his immediate reaction was, “Well, you know, they only have to listen for thirty seconds for it to count as a stream.” That sounded to me like it was coming out of a place of fear. These are tools that I think you guys are now using in a very effective way.

Alan Cross: Absolutely. If there was some sort of unified dashboard that brought together sales, streams, views and all that stuff…

Paul Tuch: We’re about to do that, so…

Alan Cross: Okay good, that would be fantastic. Because right now radio stations rely on chart positions, and rely on if they’ve got enough money, call them. That’s fine but that’s only the tip of the iceberg now. There’s so much more music that’s being discovered out there that doesn’t go through the chart, that doesn’t go to record stores. Someone will bubble up on YouTube and all of a sudden have 1.5 million views over two days. We should be paying attention to that, especially if you’re focusing on the millennials.

Paul Tuch: Getting back to discoverability and the wealth of material that’s out there, I guess a lot of it’s not very good, but a lot of it is. It also has made available, more than ever, before the real niche formats that are never going to get big sales or never going to get big numbers when it comes to the chart. But, before, if you like country-rap, you weren’t going to find it many places.

Steve Kane: I want to meet that guy.

Alan Cross: Me, too.

Paul Tuch: Or any other real niche format. Now you can find that material pretty easily and feel like it’s part of…

Alan Cross: You know what’s coming my way? Goth folk. I’m getting a lot of, I swear to God.

Paul Tuch: So they’re all dressed in black and they’re drinking a lot of coffee.

Alan Cross: They’re drinking a lot of coffee, they’re playing acoustic guitars and talking about the undead. I mean, it’s really interesting stuff.

Steve Kane: It goes back to what we were saying earlier about discoverability becoming less homogeneous. There are all these niches that you can get to them a lot easier than you used to be. The fans of those music, those communities, they start to find each other. To my mind music marketing has always been based on tribal datable. What we’re finding with, again, streaming services, blogs, the entire world of people actually being to communicate it now, is those tribes are coming together faster and faster.

Alan Cross: They are breaking apart faster and faster.

Steve Kane: Yeah, and going in to subsets so again, it goes to you noise and signals as well. As marketers, as broadcasts, we need to be paying attention to those rides.

I think about a band like REM that took four, five, records, albums to break and to really establish a mainstream audience. We’re find that that’s turning around a lot quicker. That has its pluses and minuses. Sometimes I wish bands, I wish artists were able to wood shop and toil a little more so that when we do deliver them to broadcasters we can look at it with complete certainty that we know they are going to be able to deliver beyond one song, beyond one touring cycle. That they’ve actually put the work in and they’re not going to get in the band and realize that a twenty-four hour drive is going to be the norm for them for the next six months and you just watch them just wilt.

Amy Terrill: Paul, are we seeing any differences in demographics? In terms of, you know, what are we seeing in some of the stats?

Paul Tuch: As far as we’re looking at the survey that we’ve just completed. People are still listening to the radio and discovering that that’s still the number one form of discoverability but teens and millennials are maybe not getting their discovery from the radio. They’re getting it from their friends, they’re getting it from streaming, they’re getting it from social media. I think the age group – teens and millennials – are separating themselves from the pack of certain traditional forms of how we garve our discoverability of music. They’re getting it with using the technology that’s available. I think one of our stats was that 71% of people, or 80% of people will listen to music through smartphones but these millennials are over 90%. It’s where they’re getting their music, not just the service but how they’re listening to it.

Alan Cross: And here’s the interesting thing, too. If they can’t find what they’re looking for using their technology, it doesn’t exist. And, therein lies a problem with some traditional, terrestrial radio broadcast. I’m going to get on my soap box again, I have a radio show that’s been running for twenty years. It is insanely popular over the air but we can’t make it available online for on demand listening because of a variety of regulatory issues. The problem is that my program ends up being torrented illegally with a lot of money being left on the table for everybody involved. That’s for the people who actually want to go through the trouble of actually seeding and then downloading. As far as millennials and teens are concerned, they don’t even know I exist because my product is not available on their platforms. This is something that the broadcast industry, copyright boards, collective, record labels, have to exist because we have these Ephemeral radio programs that are broadcast once or twice, disappear forever unless some enterprising kid puts it on a torrent.

Steve Kane: But you can exist online and you can exist on their technology. There’s licensing that allows you to do that.

Alan Cross: Yes, but…

Steve Kane: What you’re craving then is a permanent download. We have a regime that allows you to license that properly and make it available and if the market is there to sustain it, then those licensing fees have to be built into your business model.

Alan Cross: I agree. Totally. Introduce me to that collective. I have talked to every single one and we have yet to come up with an easy, unified, simple way of doing this. Currently what we have to do, I’ve had legal opinions on this, is we have to go to at least five different bodies and make five different negotiations and pay five different advance fees before we can even think about it. So, in theory it’s possible, in practicality it’s not.

Steve Kane: Many businesses go through the same thing and they manage to it. A song has a collection of rights holders… It’s not actually five different negotiations because most of us have a ‘Favorite Nation Clause’ built into our licensing, so listen, I’m not saying it’s easy. Sometimes it is onerous. It’s not impossible. These license regimes and licensing systems are in place to protect and compensate creatives. They’re not there to be an aid to start ups and that’s been a huge problem from the very beginning of, you know…

Going back to immediately post-Napster, how the music industry should have seen this coming and they should have licensed to this one and that one, which we did. It took us a minute and we got a lot of it wrong. I look at the current conversation going on around YouTube, we got that wrong. We made a deal out of a place of, “Well, something’s better than nothing.” I think is you haven’t read Irving Azoff’s open letter to YouTube I encourage you to do so. I really zeros in on the succinct problem of trying to create a licensing framework for the constant moving and seeing the rapid change in technology.

I would love nothing more, Alan, than to make sure that “The History of New Music” is available on every format, on every platform, because it’s a fantastic program. It provides a lot context for where music has been, where it’s going. Those regimes exist, we do have to get them tighter. We do have to make Podcasting licensing a little easier to get to. You have to acknowledge that what you’re doing is creating a permanency on that download.

Alan Cross: No, I agree.

Steve Kane: And, we have a regime, whether it’s Apple download, I know what they pay us to sell a download and what that license involves. We’ve got to figure out how to make it a little more streamlined. In Canada, we do have a number of collectives that are representing different right holders. In other countries, they’ve managed to come up with one collective. That’s… Hopefully we can work toward that but it’s not impossible. I think the idea that we don’t want to work with new businesses is a fallacy. And, we can point to hundreds of services around the world that we’ve managed to license, some of them really good deals for both the provider, some of them really good deals for the creators and rights holders.

Amy Terrill: That’s great. My job is so easy. Just get the three of you started, it’s been fantastic.

Let’s talk about video streaming for a little bit. Paul, can you talk to us about that and what the numbers are showing?

Paul Tuch: So, video streaming in Canada was always… it was always the way people streamed. The numbers were huge for video compared to audio. And then, Spotify came on board and the reputation they had in the U.S. and around the world, that brought audio streaming up more but the seat changer was really when Apple Music came on board. Because it came on board at the same time in the U.S. and Canada…

Alan Cross: It really made that much of a difference?

Paul Tuch: Oh yeah. Right away, right away. To the point now where year over year video streaming is up 19%, audio streaming is up 390%.

Alan Cross: Yeah, but we started from a very low bar.

Paul Tuch: Yeah, that’s granted but for the last two weeks for the first time since we’ve been tracking streaming, audio streams have surpassed video streams. So, I think that’s probably a very good thing, especially if the audio streams are coming from a paid streaming. But, it’s showing that these services are really capturing people.

Amy Terrill: I don’t know Steve, it seems to me that what we’re seeing is a difference in marketing. So, the marketing of these services, certainly Spotify came to the market with some impact, and Apple Music. I mean, prior to that Rdio was serving Canada, a great service, but it really seemed to be the industry that knew about Rdio and it just didn’t penetrate the consumer markets?

Alan Cross: They didn’t ever release their audience figures for Canada. But, having worked with Rdio a little bit I was told the numbers were quite robust.

Paul Tuch: Yes.

Alan Cross: And they were doing quite well and the reason that Rdio disappeared had more to do with a boardroom decision as to who should pick apart the carcass of Rdio. Somebody’s going to write a book on why Rdio died and it’s going to be ugly.

Amy Terrill: Is that your fifth book then?

Alan Cross: No, it’s not mine. I’ll make a lot of enemies telling this story.

Amy Terrill: What do you think, Steve? What, what do you see as the difference in terms of now the impact of Apple Music, as an example, and Spotify?

Steve Kane: Well, Apple has clearly a huge competitive advantage. They had a billion credit card numbers. When they launched, for instance, you know, they launched in Canada, for me it was one easy decision, “Tick.” I like their product, I trust that they’ve had my credit card information for ten years. The interface is pretty, you know, awful but also instinctual, I mean I find my way around it. But again, Spotify, I found as their interface became more and more like Rdio, I grew to like it more. Spotify, again, they’ve got the… they’ve got a worldwide brand and they were able to take advantage with that.

But, I’ll go back to something. You know, value lies in the content and the creator. I’ve had this conversation with every streaming service, every download service. I remember when some of the companies, probably people in this room work for, whether it was Bell, Telus or Rodgers, when they all launched their own music stores on their phones, they all did a terrible job. They don’t market. They accumulate subscribers. What drives their subscriptions? Yeah, are these special offers but it’s access to that music, it’s access to that content. Without that, what do they mean?

And, you know, I think it’s fantastic when we’re able to partner with them on their spotlight program, which we had a couple of our artists win, and that’s a social thing. It’s their fans, it’s their family and friends voting them up the charts. Emerge, it’s the same thing. It’s, you know, people interacting with content, they’re providing us a nice little box to put it in but it’s the artist’s presence that actually drives it. So, what it is doing for us is it’s offering us some great partnerships. Make no doubt about it.

The reach of Apple is so valuable to us. The most valuable piece of real estate in the retail world is that front page of Apple, every Friday. It’s the first thing I do when I wake up, is I look and check to see how many slots did we get on that? It’s funny because it’s just a continuation of what we used to call the ‘’ten foot roll’, the “ten foot rule”. You wanted your record in the first ten feet of a retail establishment. That was your goal, that’s what you worked for. So, you know, we’re still doing that. What brought people in to Sam the Record Man? It was the release of the new Genesis record, it was the release of the new… It was about the content.

The delivery system will come and go. Creativity and content, that’s what drives it.

And, we partner in marketing these people. It’s funny, you mentioned video earlier, again, I’m old enough to remember we used to talk about videos as being commercials for an album. We now treat videos as an advertisement for the entire brand. And, that’s how we use it now.

Alan Cross: The brand is the artist?

Steve Kane: The brand is the artist, which again is a big change because I would never in a million years, twenty years ago, ever let the word brand slip from my lips while I was sitting with an artist or, in some cases, even a manager.  I mean, that would have got you a stake through the heart. Now? Any artist that is worth their salt and knows what they’re doing and has chosen this as a career, they know they’re a brand. Sometimes they have to spit that word out, but they all acknowledge what’re they’re doing is building a brand. Touring, merchandise, records, what have you.

Paul Tuch: The other thing about YouTube is that it’s not a music service. They have music on their service but it’s not… it’s the vast amount of material that’s on YouTube… I mean, there’s a lot of these new stars that are doing programming on YouTube, they’re not musicians, they’re not creating music products. When we, when we started, when Billboard started their quick streaming as a part of their Hot 100 chart, as part of their album consumption chart, it was decided among the industry that video streams would not be part of that. One of the reasons being is that they didn’t want something like hours of Harlem Shake to effect the success of that song when people were pointing and viewing that, those videos that maybe not going there to listen to the song, they were going there to watch the video of people dancing around or a stupid cat video or something. And so, I think when someone’s going on an audio stream service they’re going there specifically to listen to music. Whereas on YouTube there’s other distractions and things around that.

Amy Terrill: I don’t know, my teenage kids pretty much discover all music on YouTube.

Paul Tuch: I think you’re right, yeah. But, they may… I think there was a study that I read last week where… where they’re going on to YouTube, they’re not staying there for very long. They stay there for maybe an hour and then leave. They click the continuous play button and that keeps going but they may not be around to watch it.

Steve Kane: One of the issues, I don’t know that I 100% agree with you Paul, they are a music service and they’re a music service that gets away with an awful lot. Because, like Amy, my daughter can build a playlist, build a queue on YouTube, minimize it and go about her business. And there’s been a lot talk in the past, a lot of public talk for the past few weeks about the value gap. And, when you look at the rate of consumption of video streams, of music video streams on YouTube and what they contribute back as a fee? It’s really quite outrageous. And those are the kinds of deals that we have to get better at anticipating, at the best we can, technology and where it’s going to go. The deal that we made with YouTube many years ago is a very different world. Yes, it’s not entirely music service but I would venture to guess that it’s had a lot to do with building their business.

Paul Tuch: For sure.

Steve Kane: And again, I’ll refer to Mr. Azoff’s letter, when YouTube tells us it’s difficult to police their station and police their content, they have a cable that they keep their original programming behind. They do it. They can keep pornography off, they can keep questionable material off, it’s a will. They know that music is a huge driver for them and that anything that they do that makes it harder to access that could impact their overall business.

Spotify, Rdio, Apple Music, one of things and one of the conversations that we have to have with these services as we go in to renew our deals is, “You need to make your ad supported service, your “freemium” service just a little bit uglier.” If you’re really… if your goal is to drive subscriptions and to grow your business via a great subscription base, why on Earth would you make your free service, your ad supported service just negligible from your paid service? I grew up with radio, I grew up with television, I can take a couple ads every couple of minutes, it’s no big deal.

Amy Terrill: On that issue of moving subscribers from “freemium” or ad supported to paid, what do you think is, kind of the answer?

Alan Cross: Well it’s tough because we have a generation and a half that has grown up on free music or music that is nearly free. I have a nephew that has never been in a record store in his life. He doesn’t understand the need to buy anything on iTunes. And you know, for most of his life he had no credit cards so it wasn’t an option to buy stuff on iTunes, especially since mom was not really interested in helping him out.

So, what we have right now is, in the United States, I think the figure is, forty dollars a year on music purchases per person. Something around that. Forty dollars a year buying music. Now, when I was seventeen I couldn’t get out of a record store for less than forty dollars. So when you have everybody charging $9.99 a month that’s $120 a year, that’s three times the average spend. I’m not saying that $120 isn’t a good deal, it is. Especially when you’re coming from my history and the history of those of us who went into record stores or even those of us who gorge on iTunes still. The problem is that we’ve got this generation that is not accustomed to paying anything for music. What do we do with that? I don’t know what the answer is, other than education, other than making the value worth it.

Paul Tuch: I think it might have been easier if we went straight from streaming was closer to when physical and digital were there and piracy wasn’t involved because once that bottle was open, a lot of people felt the need. The people that grew up with the ability to get music for free whenever they wanted, it’s harder to get the genie back in the bottle, I think.

Amy Terrill: But Paul, I noticed on the Nielsen figures that, I think it’s streamers are spending more, when you look at full spend, so money spent on festivals, concerts, everything all in, streamers are actually paying more than other types of music listener.

Paul Tuch: Music fans, people who are engaged in music and who actively search out music, and we find they are the paid streamers, they are engaged in all forms of music purchasing. Whether it be festival or shows or merchandising or anything that follow… and still buying physical product. The money is spent from people who are truly music fans. You see if from the percentage of people who are paid streamers, are paying more money for all these extras.

Amy Terrill: So that should be encouraging.

Steve Kane: Yeah and what’s very encouraging about that is, i’m trying to remember who did this study but as Paul was saying, they buy more. They buy more tickets, they buy more t-shirts, they’re involved in an artist’s entire brand. They’re also the artist’s number one ambassadors. People who are paying for streaming, people who are consuming on a live level, they’re also the ones that are at the vanguard of the people like us. They’re the ones who want to tell their friends, “Go and check this out.” And I love the fact that all of these subscription services and all these music services do give the fan an opportunity to turn into an ambassador for their favorite artist. And so, those sharing functions which we’ve legitimize and monetize become very important.

And what I love about it is, again, when I started in this business word of mouth meant going up and talking to somebody and tell them about a great band. You actually had to use words. Now being able to have word of mouth with the click of a button and to be able to spread it, and again, It goes back to part of the role of curation, part of the role of, “Why does everybody need a record company? They can just put it online.” We build compelling, fun, engaging content that Paul, as a fan, wants to send to Rob over there to say, “I know you’re a fan of x,” or “You’ve got to check this out, this is a great song and it’s well presented.” But, those possibilities now are what keep us excited and engaged and again goes back to the democratization of curation. Everybody gets to be a curator, everybody gets to be a marketer, everybody gets to touch that band’s career and impact it and hopefully impact things like, if you’re in a music meeting where they go, “Geez, look at the shares on this. That must mean something.”

Alan Cross: Yeah, it’s like the old days when you had one friend who went out the record for $7.99 and they made the investment and as a result created the relationship with the band. If they liked it they would tell all their friends and you would have to invite people over to listen to the record but that was all done in person. Now you don’t have to do it that way. Now you can do it worldwide. It’s really, really cool.

And your point about number of shares, I’d love to be able to see that on a dashboard, especially if it’s a new artist that we’ve never heard of.

Paul Tuch: There’s an artist coming out of Los Angeles named Bishop Briggs and the only reason I found out about her, Bishop Briggs, is because three people over the course of two days shared a sample of it. Wow, this is a great song and a great artist and now if you look at some of the radio charts you can see ads….

Alan Cross: [inaudible 00:46:09]

Amy Terrill: Yeah.

So Paul’s got his marching orders. You know what you need to do when you get back to the [crosstalk 00:46:14].

Paul Tuch: Well yeah, we are actually doing that with our connective product for the U.S., it’s coming in Canada. But, it takes sales that air play data and social metrics as well, so Wikipedia views and Facebook likes, Twitter mentions and all that.

Alan Cross: Wikipedia views?

Paul Tuch: Yeah.

Alan Cross: Great, that’s fantastic.

Steve Kane: I’ll give you one, Alan, there was a young artist that was just recently signed to Atlantic Records called Kiiara, the song is called “Gold”. It was a bidding war over this artist. One song. She had a SoundCloud with four or five, but it was this one song that captured everyone’s imagination. It became a bidding war. She never performed for…

Alan Cross: So how’d you find out?

Steve Kane: SoundCloud. She was now northward of a million listens on SoundCloud. American A&R departments particularly they’ve got an army of interns that just troll SoundCloud and YouTube, et cetera, looking for those metrics. “A million people listen to this, I guess we should check it out.”

Amy Terrill: So Alan you need to hire a whole bunch of interns now to do the trolling.

Alan Cross: I have a couple and that’s exactly what they do. I also…

Steve Kane: By the way, after she signed to Atlantic they were able to pitch it to Apple and Apple used that same track in a watch commercial.

Alan Cross: Wow.

Steve Kane: Sorry, just to finish that.

Alan Cross: See and this kid, whoever this kid is, just suddenly out of the bedroom into the worldwide spotlight.

Paul Tuch: That’s probably the one thing that’s a little bit easier to do in our now. Not necessarily easier but instead of having to slog it out in clubs every night and hope for some demo tape to come through, you can see a certain level of success before…

Steve Kane: Yeah that becomes… that becomes an early indicator. I don’t think, again in the case of Kiiara, had she not had a drawer full of songs that could back up “Gold”, had she not been interested in being a performer, there’s all those elements. Sometimes the discoverability of a song or artist may have gotten truncated, may have gotten a little easier, but they still have all the other magic fairy dust about them.

Paul Tuch: Sure.

Amy Terrill: Alan, let’s bring it back to radio for a moment. So, how does radio evolve or succeed in this changing landscape?

Alan Cross: Well, we need to embrace these new metrics. Radio for the longest time, like I said earlier, is all about charts and call in. And there’s more to what the audience is doing and consuming and listening and demanding and wanting and wishing for than just charts and call in. And there’s also more than just a music director who has got a good gut and will make a call because he or she hears something in a particular song, that’s not enough. It’s still just one person doing this tiny little bit of curation when if we could have all of this other stuff. And again, this idea of an unknown artist somehow magically acquiring a million listeners on SoundCloud, well yeah, this is something that we should know about. Which is why we have the Pitchforks of the world, and the Stereogums and everybody else, are also worth checking it out because every once and a while you’ll see something or hear something there, see that there is a number attached to it and that number has real meaning because those are real people. And radio needs to be educated to get away from their old way of doing things because that’s not what’s going to move the needle in the future.

Amy Terrill: Does Nielsen have, you know, any insights in to how radio… Let’s say radio is able to evolve the way Alan would like it to evolve, could move with the demographics?

Paul Tuch: The panel we did last week, we really looked at instances where songs are getting huge amount of on demand steaming but are just not being played on radio.

Alan Cross: A quick example, it’s a couple years old, but here was this guy that had racked up twenty million, twenty-five million views, and nobody was playing it on the radio yet.

Paul Tuch: Right. Now, part of that is not necessarily the song but also the video portion of that.

Alan Cross: Right.

Paul Tuch: I mean, it gets a ton of audio streams, it gets a ton of video streams. But, in Canada we never have really had an urban radio format. There were a few stations, a number of years ago that leaned that way that never really took hold. R&B, Hip-Hop really does well on streaming. Drake did 22.5 million streams on audio on demand streams last week, but those songs are not being played very much on the radio. Now you’d think that if people are actively looking for it, playing it, and want to listen to it on streaming they might want to hear it on the radio station. Maybe a top forty format radio station, maybe they’ll say, “Well, this audience wants to hear these songs.”

Alan Cross: Well, the other thing is the way that the record labels continue to market things in the old, traditional way. “This is the single, we want you play the single.” And that’s the… Yeah. It’s the ecosystem.

Paul Tuch: It tends to take a little bit longer though. I think that the radio… And we see it with songs, it’s… now, it starts… the life of the song starts at streaming and radio takes a hold of it and sales happen and then there’s a peak and then radio and sales drop off and the streaming continues. It’s a long tail now for these songs, they have longer lives because of the streaming community.

Steve Kane: Let me ask you this Alan, in this world, as we see it right now, discoverability on radio… Because we see the streaming go this way and maybe radio comes in about here and then we see a nice upswing in sales and streams because now we’re being amplified by traditional terrestrial radio. So, perhaps radio remains the strongest force for lean back discoverability. Take a song like Lukas Graham, seven years ago, massive streaming numbers around the world, no radio to speak of. No radio to speak of at that point. Now, we were seeing it go through the roof as far as streaming and singles downloads. Radio starts to come on board, gets a fantastic reaction, maybe because there’s already a built in audience, but maybe that lean back audience, they’ve now discovered a new artist.

And, I mean, you know, I’m not a broadcaster, I’ve never worked in radio, but I have to think, is there discussion within the industry that maybe that’s now our role? It’s that lean back audience that’s going to discover things. Because, when we look at centralized playlists, so David Corey adds something to CHUM FM, that means seven of the most important hot AC stations across the country automatically add it. David drops that record, seven stations automatically drop that.

So, at a time where, you know, playlists become centralized, become even tighter and again, I completely understand why playlists have to be tight, it’s part of the product that you’re selling, there has to be a predictability… As I look at it, I’m trying to figure as I target my audiences, my consumers, who am I going after first? At what point do I start to kick in my marketing that centers on radio as opposed to my marketing that centers on streaming and access?

Alan Cross: We need to figure that out.

Steve Kane: Yeah.

Alan Cross: I mean, It’s kind of like when you introduce a song, you introduce it at alternative and then it goes to bass then it goes to rock then it goes to pop…, so maybe this is yet another layer. Streaming, alternative, AAA, whatever else we may have.

Steve Kane: It’s fun to have this conversation not, well we could still be over a beer.

Alan Cross: We could.

Alan Cross: Maybe playlists need to be more flexible and we’ve seen for example, you bring us a song and it continues to do well but then all of a sudden it’s superseded by another track from that album because of the streaming numbers or whatever it is. Maybe we need to go, “This is the one.” Depends how fast we want to react. It also depends on the nature of your listening show because chances are the streaming people are far more “early adopter” than the ones who experience the lean back listening from radio.

Amy Terrill: Let’s see if there’s any questions from the floor. I think we’ve got a microphone? If you could say your name and where you’re from that would be great.

Greg: Hi, I’m Greg Taylor from the University of Calgary. The… I guess it’s not a word but a phrase “Can-Con” has not come up, not once.

Alan Cross: Oh! I would be happy to talk about it.

Greg: Is it dead? Is it just dead?

Alan Cross: Oh, no, absolutely not.

Greg: How does Can-Con… We just had the JUNOs in Calgary this spring. How does that fit into this new streaming digital world, or does it?

Alan Cross: Absolutely it does. First of all, one thing that is never going to change is the fact that we are living next door to the greatest net exporter of popular culture on the planet. So, in order to maintain our identity we have to somehow have some protection put in place. What form that protection takes is going to be a very long, interesting, highly volatile political discussion. Should terrestrial radio, for example, still be at 35% or 40% or 45% or whatever it is when the online world is unregulated? How do we make sure that our artists get to tell our stories to our people? I really, I mean, this is going to be such an explosive discussion because there are so many organizations in Canada who are… exist solely because of Can-Con and cultural protectionism. So, if we have to act them to change their ways, they’re going to fight back. So it’s… I can’t wait for this discussion to begin because it’s going to be a good one.

Steve Kane: I agree 100% and there still needs to be some form of… regulatory board to make sure that living next door to what we live next door to, that we can continue to expose Canadian music, Canadian film, Canadian television over what are public airways. What form that’s going to take and how it has to evolve is going to be absolutely fascinating.

I will say one thing about it, the red… the regulation is 35%, 40% – 45%, that comes from the broadcasters as they fight for radio license. And again, I’ll refer back to a panel at CMW many years ago, when that was the hot topic for the panel I was on, and I said at that time, “Guys, stop offering, stop promising 40% – 45% because one day the CRT is going to believe that that’s what you want to do” and low and behold that day came and it was a very hard thing.

Steve Kane: That’s usually the way this happens.

Alan Cross: This conversation’s a little bit more though.

Amy Terrill: Well, it’s a good point because it seems like, you know, we’re seeing in playlist consumption that most consumers are lean back consumers so radio is a natural medium for that same inclination.

Alan Cross: Maybe playlists need to be more flexible and we’ve seen for example, you bring us a song and it continues to do well but then all of a sudden it’s superseded by another track from that album because of the streaming numbers or whatever it is. Maybe we need to go, “This is the one.” Depends how fast we want to react. It also depends on the nature of your listening show because chances are the streaming people are far more “early adopter” than the ones who experience the lean back listening from radio.

Amy Terrill: Let’s see if there’s any questions from the floor. I think we’ve got a microphone? If you could say your name and where you’re from that would be great.

Greg: Hi, I’m Greg Taylor from the University of Calgary. The… I guess it’s not a word but a phrase “Can-Con” has not come up, not once.

Alan Cross: Oh! I would be happy to talk about it.

Greg: Is it dead? Is it just dead?

Alan Cross: Oh, no, absolutely not.

Greg: How does Can-Con… We just had the JUNOs in Calgary this spring. How does that fit into this new streaming digital world, or does it?

Alan Cross: Absolutely it does. First of all, one thing that is never going to change is the fact that we are living next door to the greatest net exporter of popular culture on the planet. So, in order to maintain our identity we have to somehow have some protection put in place. What form that protection takes is going to be a very long, interesting, highly volatile political discussion. Should terrestrial radio, for example, still be at 35% or 40% or 45% or whatever it is when the online world is unregulated? How do we make sure that our artists get to tell our stories to our people? I really, I mean, this is going to be such an explosive discussion because there are so many organizations in Canada who are… exist solely because of Can-Con and cultural protectionism. So, if we have to act them to change their ways, they’re going to fight back. So it’s… I can’t wait for this discussion to begin because it’s going to be a good one.

Steve Kane: I agree 100% and there still needs to be some form of… regulatory board to make sure that living next door to what we live next door to, that we can continue to expose Canadian music, Canadian film, Canadian television over what are public airways. What form that’s going to take and how it has to evolve is going to be absolutely fascinating.

I will say one thing about it, the red… the regulation is 35%, 40% – 45%, that comes from the broadcasters as they fight for radio license. And again, I’ll refer back to a panel at CMW many years ago, when that was the hot topic for the panel I was on, and I said at that time, “Guys, stop offering, stop promising 40% – 45% because one day the CRT is going to believe that that’s what you want to do” and low and behold that day came and it was a very hard thing.

In the world of streaming, in the world of access, we still use the global music market as a way to insert Canadian music into the conversation. The example of Scott Helman and the streams he was getting in Paris or in Germany, or Meghan Patrick who’s a young country singer that we just signed, we seeded her song into some national based playlists. 60% of her streams are coming from the U.S. audience. That allows us to turn around when we hear the wolves of Canadian content from some radio stations, it’s like, “Yup, look at us. Guys, here’s an example where people are actually choosing it, they’re choosing to listen to it on their playlist. They’re not skipping forward.” So, I think a lot of what is happening in the unregulated market can actually be looked to… to verify that people do want to hear this music. And that if we can get the mix right, and I don’t know if it’s 35% or if its 30% but I do believe that there is something to be said for it. We’ve got to figure out, again, what that balance is and how we used the new world to illustrate to broadcasters that people do want this.

Alan Cross: Here’s the problem, it’s that for the longest time Can-Con was treated as a broccoli. You had to cover 35% of your dinner plate with broccoli, whether you like broccoli or not, you had to eat it. It was good for you, “Trust us, it’s good for broccoli farmers, too. And, eventually you will learn to like your broccoli.” That’s been the prevailing attitude for a very long time. Now, however, Canadians realize that we punch far above our weight internationally when it comes to exporting music internationally for a county of our size and populations. We are doing stupidly well and we are the envy of many, many nations around the planet.

I think one of the bigger… big aspects about the Can-Con debate that’s going to be coming up is, how do we take what we have and export it?

Steve Kane: Correct.

Alan Cross: Make us bigger, not just in Canada, but make us bigger in the world.

Steve Kane: And again, it goes back to what we were saying earlier, about when some of those barriers come down and pointed access is easier… Points of entry are proliferating around the world and that’s good for us and that’s good for Canadian artists.

Amy Terrill: We’ve got another question.

Speaker 6: Hi, I’m Geneviève… my God, I’m Geneviève Côté from SOCAN. I head the Quebec/Montreal office of SOCAN. There’s a few things. One, I’m glad that Steve brought in Meghan Patrick and Scott because all these two days I’ve noticed that a lot of the people on the panels have been talking about American stuff even though they’re Canadian. And so, Can-Con starts with us. And say, talking about Meghan Patrick, who is absolutely fabulous and by the way has Chad Kroger songs, that’s the single, so Canadian with Canadian.

My question Steve, you talked about the fact that you put Meghan on a playlist. You, as Warner Music Canada, have some weight because of the Warner brand. Now when you’re in the Quebec market none of us have that real weight. And I mean, we have weight within our small, little, francophone market but when we get to Spotify then we kind of get, “Oh yeah but the skip rate on that is way too high.” We don’t have that weight. How do you see the weight being weighted, if I can put it that way?

Steve Kane: And again, you’re right, we’re fortunate that we have some internal… very big internal playlists that we can use that have a lot of ears on them. We also go and we look for those taste makers. We look for those… those playlists that are being curated and have a couple of hundred thousand followers and we work them in the same way we would work a radio station. We are getting the materials to them. We’re sharing the information with them.

We’re saying, you know, it’s like going through a light rotation and then building up. It’s like, “Put us at number thirty on your playlist and just… let’s see what kinds of reaction we get.” We have a team of people in house that curate, and they create their own playlist. One of our most popular playlists from the Warner Music Canada office, is from one of the kids who has a huge knowledge and love of PDM. He’s actually getting approached by other… by people trying to place songs on to his playlist. He’s making himself a voice of authority. He’s making himself a trusted voice.

It’s a lot of digging and it’s targeting one or two lists that you think that you can get it on there and use all your other social marketing to try and drive up the plays. Point people towards that playlist.

Alan Cross: I think it’s absolutely fascinating that we have moved from the poignancy of algorithmic playlist creation back to human curation. The human element is so important because people want to know that it’s not a computer picking their music because computers don’t know anything about music. Sure, with respect, apologies towards the music genome project, it’s still best to have a real human being with tastes and gut that will tell me that this matters.

Paul Tuch: And, you trust that person?

Alan Cross:  Yes. Trusted filters.

Paul Tuch:  That… is… it’s so important.

Amy Terrill: Prem, you have a question?

Speaker 7: Yeah, hi. My names Prem Gill and I’m from Creative BC and the BC Music Fund. I have two-ish questions. First, the question about the urban radio stations was really interesting because yesterday there were a couple of women from Washington State, one was from the FCC and she said, I can’t remember the number but it was something like, “Over 1,000 urban owned, African-American owned radio stations in the states and through consolidation there’s now forty or thirty.” Amongst 320 million people a very sad number I think and we’ve seen something like Tidal come along that’s trying to promote a specific genre of music to a specific demographic. And, we’ve seen consolidation in Canada as well, when you say there’s one guy at Channel Radio who’s programming, picking song and they go out to seven radio stations, I guess. What is the impact of that, especially on the independent music labels, like the smaller ones, not the Warners or the Sonys? How do those other guys fit in?

And then, one thing that I’ve heard a lot from people from those smaller music labels is that when they do get programmed into a Spotify playlist, and I listen to these kinds of playlists all the time, “I’m going for a run but I really want a cheeseburger” or whatever it is, but you don’t remember the artist, you know? Because you’re just doing something. The “I’m have friends over for dinner and I’m making Japanese food” playlist, that it’s great because I’m listening to all kinds of music but I’m not connecting to necessarily who the artist is.

I think these questions are king of related but I just wanted to put that out there.

Alan Cross: Yeah that’s a real problem. I find myself having to pick up my phone and see what my Sonos is playing for me because, “Hey, I really like this. I have no idea who it is or where it’s from.” This is the problem with streaming, you rarely or… it becomes more difficult to establish a relationship with whatever music that you’re listening to. It’s just part of a vibe.

Paul Tuch: Except at least you have the ability to take a look at your phone and see the artist, whereas a radio they may not back announce the name of the song or the artist, so at least there’s that going for it.

Steve Kane: Yeah. It’s always been a problem. At least now you can figure out… or look at your phone if you have the RDS display. As far as the independents and trying to get on those playlists, I’ll go back to Mr. Cross’ comments from many years ago, “It’s hard to get on the radio. It’s where the best end up.” Strumbellas are having a moment, and they have worked their asses off.

Paul Tuch: Number one U.S. this week.

Steve Kane: Number one U.S. This is a band that built it from…

Alan Cross: Lindsay, Ontario.

Amy Terrill: My hometown, sorry. I still live there.

Steve Kane: Again, you can go back a couple years to Bedouin Soundclash. We were working that record, distributing it on behalf of our friends at STOMP, a fantastic label out of Montreal and when we first heard it we thought, “That could probably fit on radio. We could probably take a run at it.” The truth be told they got in a Zeller’s commercial for patio furniture because the song felt so summery. And I hand it to… That was an independent label who looked at a wall in front of them, which was the monolith of radio at that time, and figured a way to go under that wall, over that wall, around that wall. The commercial hits, starts to sell on iTunes and retailers are getting requests for it and I think at the time Edge went on their first jump. Yeah, again, it ain’t easy for any song to get on the radio, no matter what label you’re on.

Alan Cross: I’ll tell you what also happened, it was… the members of the band went to one of our personalities and made friends. That personality was part of the music meeting and he would come in week after week, “You gotta check out this Bedouin Soundclash, you got to check out this band called USS, you got to check out this band called Alexisonfire.” He became an evangelist inside the system and all three acts ended up on the radio and are viable acts for Radio-Canada.

Amy Terrill: We’re almost out of time.

Speaker 7: I have a question if that’s okay?

Amy Terrill: Excellent, of course.

Speaker 7: I’m Jared Goldberg, one of the producers of the Discoverability Summit here. I’m also a huge music fan as you guys know as well. How are covers playing in to the mix of generating money for labels and artists now? There’s so much covers, as we see on YouTube, of random people doing covers and it gets millions of plays. One of my favorite playlists is on Spotify which is “Acoustic Covers”. I hear amazing songs, like “Teardrop” by Massive Attack I heard an amazing acoustic cover that I listen to fall asleep to every night now and I’m huge into acoustic covers now. That’s a playlist that I listen to almost every day. How is that coming in to play? Little people are in their car with their camera at the front and a cover is getting a million streams of a Drake track.

Alan Cross: Now this is Metallica by the way, and there’s a guy putting out ukulele versions of Metallica songs covers. They’re fantastic.  He’s got one out this week that’s called [inaudible 01:10:12], complete with the solo.

Steve Kane: Well, it is a thing and actually, it’s okay, you may be better able to answer this. On the publisher side, YouTube is the Wild West and that’s one of the issues. That’s the value back issue, are you prepared to have a content I.D. system that will make sure that all creators are being remunerated? And when you see these covers… Again, I’ll separate Spotify and the streamers from YouTube because they do have a system in place and they are properly licensed and they are paying their dues. YouTube is a different case and that’s something that my friends in the publishing business are facing now. How do you make sure that your writers are being properly compensated? Because some of those cover versions, off YouTube in particular, are runaway successes.

Now the interesting thing about covers as well, Jared, is, again, they’ve become calling cards. As we plan out a lot of our campaigns in introducing a new artist, we encourage them, “Hey, why don’t we throw out… let’s put together a couple of covers and we’ll give them to the streamers and make sure that they’re available.” Scott Helman, again, you look at him, twenty-year-old, he looks about fifteen. He was fifteen when I met him and he looked about twelve. He had an opportunity to take part in a covers album, it was spearheaded by a British company and it was hits of the 80’s or songs of the 80’s. And Scott chose Tom Waits’ “Jockey Full of Bourbon”.

Paul Tuch: It wasn’t really a hit.

Steve Kane: It wasn’t a hit but it also helped us differentiate him from the other nineteen-year-olds out there. I adore Shawn Mendes.  I think he’s fantastic. I don’t see Shawn covering “Jockey Full of Bourbon’’. But, when you look at… Shawn Mendes with his Vine covers, covers gave him a career. It gave him a platform to launch off of.

Alan Cross: Look at how much Taylor Swift benefited.

Paul Tuch: Walk Off The Earth.

Alan Cross: Drake. I mean these memes become huge and they become advertisements for the original material.

Paul Tuch: When these covers hit and they get a lot of listeners or views, it promotes the original song. And when you look at every time when American Idol is on and they’re covering a song, we’ll always see a big spike on the original version of the song. So in that respect it’s helping the originals as well.

Speaker 7: You talked about covers on Spotify, they have so many versions [inaudible 1:13:33].

Steve Kane: Have you heard that, now we won’t let this turn in to a music deep conversation but, Ryan Adams did an entire cover of Taylor Swift’s 1989 record.

Alan Cross: Sounds nothing like the original.

Steve Kane: Sounds nothing like it and you realize how well constructed some of those songs are.

Alan Cross: Yep.

Amy Terrill: This has been a great conversation. I want to thank the audience for their attention. I want to thank all our panelists, Paul, Steve and Alan. I understand this has been recorded so I imagine you can watch your favorite moments again and again. Thanks a lot.

Paul Tuch: Get those YouTube view up.

Steve Kane: Thank you very much, Amy. Thank you for keeping us under control.