Company
VoiceSwap
VoiceSwap, as described on the show by Michael Pelczynski.
Episodes (1)
Michael Pelczynski of VoiceSwap, formerly of SoundCloud, explains the user-centric royalty model, the Lil Uzi Vert fan stat, and AI voice licensing.
Questions these episodes answer
What is the user-centric royalty model Michael Pelczynski built at SoundCloud?
Pelczynski built a licensing model that pays each artist based on how the specific people who listen to them spend their subscription money, run in parallel with the industry-standard pro-rata model, where all listener spending in a market is pooled and split by overall market share. About 130,000 artists chose to move their license over to it.
What did the Lil Uzi Vert example show about superfans?
SoundCloud's data showed that just 6.5% of Lil Uzi Vert's total monthly audience made up 72% of his payout once income was calculated under the user-centric model instead of pro-rata. Pelczynski says that kind of concentration reveals an artist's true fans, information a pro-rata payout system never surfaces on its own.
Why does counting plays fail to measure real music fandom?
Pelczynski argues the industry mostly measures fandom by counting streams and plays, a purely quantitative approach that misses why someone is actually listening. He says SoundCloud paired its listening data with a dedicated audience research team that talked directly to real listeners, since the qualitative context behind a play is where the actual signal of fandom lives.
How is AI voice licensing creating new intellectual property for artists?
Pelczynski says voice-likeness technology at VoiceSwap gives an artist's own voice, its timbre, personality and tone, commercial value it never had on its own before, separate from the copyright in any specific recording. He distinguishes an inspirational fan who just listens from an aspirational fan who wants to sound like the artist, which is the group voice licensing is built for.
What is commercial FOMO in the music streaming business?
Pelczynski coined commercial FOMO to describe the pressure that built once 130,000 artists had already moved to SoundCloud's user-centric payout model and gained access to detailed fan data, leaving major rights holders who stayed on the old model without that same access. He says creating that visible gap helped push slower-moving labels to adopt the new model.