Company
Cross Border Works
Cross Border Works, as described on the show by Vickie Nauman.
Episodes (2)
Vickie Nauman of Cross Border Works explains industry market fit, why music tech startups fail, and how founders can de-risk music for investors.
Vickie Nauman, founder of Cross Border Works, explains why streaming capped superfan spending and where Web3 can bring it back.
Questions these episodes answer
What is industry market fit?
Industry market fit is the fit between a startup's solution and what the music industry actually wants solved. It sits alongside product market fit and investor market fit, but is unique because of complex master and publishing rights, multiple stakeholders, and slow industry change.
Why do music tech startups struggle despite product market fit?
They often come from outside music and identify a problem without understanding the value chain. For example, they try to solve problems for artists, but artists do not always control their rights; labels and publishers must be involved. That mismatch signals a lack of industry market fit.
How should founders de-risk music for investors?
Founders must include a slide that shows a strategy, a team member who understands music rights, and a path to product market fit that does not require $50 million in advances. Investors fear lawsuits and label deals, so preemptively reducing that risk makes a deck investable.
Why do direct-to-fan startups fail?
They often target young artists who own their rights, but that assumption fails for established artists with fan bases and teams. Those artists have signed rights to labels and publishers, cannot release unreleased songs, and the solutions become red flags that show founders did not do their homework.
What opportunities does music have in gaming?
Gaming will not become a streaming-style licensing market because each game differs and music is a nice-to-have. However, artists can engage fans and monetize their presence in games by working with labels and publishers, taking a nuanced approach that fits each game's engagement model.
Why does Vickie Nauman think a thousand small companies will fix music rights and metadata instead of one big platform?
Nauman used to believe one big platform could fix music rights and metadata everywhere, but she changed her mind. She now expects a thousand small companies solving problems locally, market by market such as Belgium, Norway, Sweden or Denmark, to get further than one company trying to fix a hyper-local problem worldwide.
Why did a platform's major label deal turn out to be worthless?
Nauman describes a founder who spent 13 months negotiating a deal with a major label and agreed to give the label 65 percent, without realizing publishing is a separate copyright. She told him publishers would expect the same 65 percent, leaving the platform owing 130 percent and losing money on every transaction.
Why does Vickie Nauman warn founders against pitches to cut out the music industry middleman?
Nauman says she has heard this pitch for twenty years under different technologies, always claiming artists no longer need labels or publishers and that it will disrupt the whole music business. She says that promise has never matched how the industry actually works, so she steers founders away from chasing it.
How did streaming change how much superfans spend on music?
Nauman says people who used to buy ten CDs a month were spending $1,000 to $2,000 a year on music. Flat-rate streaming subscriptions cut that same superfan's spending to about $120 a year, which she says lopped off the top of the spending pyramid and removed their reason to spend more on fandom.
How does Vickie Nauman categorize the opportunities in Web3 for music?
Nauman sorts Web3 opportunities in music into three buckets: token-based fan communities, investment in music rights, and virtual, gaming-adjacent experiences. She says these will each evolve differently, with the biggest near-term potential in token-based communities and fan clubs replacing the earlier NFT cash-grab era.