Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…That's right, yes. Taylor has cut this just un-freaking-believable deal. Taylor is quick to point out, well, actually, the bigger part of the negotiation for me was this thing that I negotiated that involves all other artists benefiting from my contract. What does that mean? This is where we have to take a quick trip down memory lane. Think back to 2008. If you lived in the UK, you could use Spotify, I think maybe Germany. If you lived in the US, you couldn't. It's this young emerging thing. It's got about 2 million users in the UK. Brush metal is in vogue. It kind of looks like dark iTunes. Spotify really, really needs the labels to play ball. What are they going to do? Go SoundCloud's route and list a bunch of indie music on there? Daniel Ek has a specific vision for mainstream music listening happening in a streaming way. The three big labels and some indie labels, collectively together, get offered the opportunity to buy Spotify shares at an extremely favorable price. Whatever the basis is, it's trivially low, and they own 18% of the company. Huge amount. They're as big as a VC or bigger than any VC on the cap table. They're incentivized to play ball for the foreseeable future and make this asset go up. They, from what I can tell, made a balance sheet investment, so it comes out of the shareholders' coffers. Fast forward to today, Universal Music Group is estimated to own about 3.5%. Wow.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.