Guest
Ola Sars
Ola Sars is Founder at Soundtrack, as introduced on the show.
Episodes (1)
Ola Sars, founder of Soundtrack, explains why businesses pay fifty dollars for a music subscription and how the company started as a Spotify joint venture.
Questions these episodes answer
Why did Ola Sars build Soundtrack as a joint venture with Spotify first?
Sars wanted to test whether businesses would pay for a licensed background music subscription without first building an entire music licensing stack from scratch. Partnering with Spotify let him borrow its existing backend infrastructure while he focused on proving the business-to-business product itself, before later splitting off as a fully independent company.
How much more do businesses pay for music through Soundtrack than a regular consumer streaming subscription?
Sars says the global average revenue per consumer streaming subscription is below five dollars, while Soundtrack charges businesses fifty dollars a subscription. He calls this one of the few tangible examples in the industry of someone actually extracting more value from music rather than competing prices down further.
What does Ola Sars mean when he says the music industry needs more pie bakers than pie cutters?
Sars argues most companies in music try to grab a bigger slice of existing revenue rather than growing the total amount of money flowing into the industry. He says consumer streaming platforms like Spotify actually baked a bigger pie through subscriptions, and Soundtrack is trying to do the same by monetizing businesses that were not paying for music at all before.
How much of the global music streaming opportunity is still untapped?
Sars cites a Goldman Sachs estimate that global consumer music streaming has not even reached 20 percent penetration on smartphones as of 2025. He argues this means the digitization of the music industry that people have been predicting for two decades is still only in its early stages.