Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…This was her sixth album and the last one she was under contract with Big Machine for. Taylor does all of Taylor's own stuff, but she doesn't have any issue with Big Machine per se. There's no bad blood there, but the industry is like, well, this is going to be a big moment. A Variety article from around the time comes out that lays out what they see as Taylor's four options for what to do going forward now that this deal is expiring. They note that probably the most important factor in her decision is going to be the master licenses certainly for future albums that she'll make. She's not going to take a 10% to 15% cut going forward, but they suggest, say people in the industry are saying, that Taylor is such a big star that depending on how things go with Big Machine in this negotiation, she might be able to renegotiate the past split on old albums that she's done if Big Machine is involved going forward. They say, there are probably four options here. One, Taylor actually genuinely could just ditch labels altogether and go run this whole thing herself. I think the bigger reason she and other people don't do this is if you do go this path, you essentially have to build a whole full stack company around yourself, and that takes a lot of time and energy. If you are an artist and the primary thing you do is create and make music, that's a distraction and time away from that. There's way more stuff involved in the back office of music than you can fathom. Of course, we need to make sure it gets on all the streaming services, but you also need to be in retail, even though there are not a lot of CDs sold. If you're Taylor Swift, your CDs are being sold. You need to be able to make CDs, you need to be able to make merch, you need to be able to handle all the inbound requests for people who want to use your music for certain things. You need to work with the rights organizations to go around to events who are illegally using your music, make sure that they're listening for that, and making sure there's a matching license, and if not, sending them the invoice for it. There's an unbelievable amount of things that if you go through the traditional value chain through the record labels that you get. The other big component that I failed to realize until reading—again, reading Donald Passman's book is just so enlightening. It's the venture deals of the music industry I think the best way to put it. If you're a retailer or if you're a streaming service, you can't really piss off one of the big three because their clout is to take everything away from you. Or even let's say you're a retailer—and these don't matter as much anymore, but let's say you're selling CDs—for the indie artist who dealt with you individually, they can be the last check that you pay. But you better make sure you're writing the checks to everybody who's on the label because they work as a group. You want to make sure that you're getting the right playlists on Spotify. There are all these ways where it's really helpful to be a part of something really big for negotiations. Maybe this is part of the unsaid point in this Variety article is that Taylor is really one of the few artists, maybe the only one who could do that. That second point that you're mentioning, I think, applies to almost every artist, but literally, she made Apple change their policies in 24 hours. So she could, but it's unlikely that she's going to decide to do that just because she's an artist, she wants to be an artist. Option number two that they lay out is she could sign with a different kind of major label ecosystem altogether. Remember, Big Machine, her label, is part of the Universal heritage and ecosystem. Taylor could jump to Warner Music Group, Sony, or one of the other big groups, and she already has the Sony relationship for songwriting. That's not unreasonable. Probably going to come down to just economics and who's willing to pay the most in that arena. Three, she could leave Big Machine but stay in the Universal ecosystem and sign with the parent label itself or one of the other sub-labels within Universal. Option four is she could stay with Big Machine. Now ultimately, as we all know, she chooses option three.…

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