The Mood Music Model: A New Way to Make a Living in Music

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Sound Connections Podcast. Today I have the honor to have Niklas Brandberg in the studio.

Niklas Brantberg

Thank you. I like the pronunciation. Yeah, that was pretty good.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah, was it totally correct or yeah? Pretty good. It's, you know, it's I'm Danish, live in Norway. It's a Swedish name. It's actually Redstrom is Swedish as a name actually. But Nicholas, you're here because you are running something incredibly interesting. So OverTone Studios, Mute Music, a company that belongs to Epidemic Sound. And it's really interesting topic that I'm so much forward to dissecting today. But Nicholas, for the people who don't know you, who are you and what do you do?

Niklas Brantberg

Well, first of all, thanks for having me the podcast. Yeah, Niklas Brandtberg is my name. I run a mood music record label called Overtone Studios. I would say it's one of the biggest mood music record labels in the world. We're part of Epidemic Sound and I also have a background of more than a decade within Epidemic Sound as well. And then I'm also a failed musician, as we discussed earlier. So that's my biggest hobby. But at work I'm more of a business guy and then at home I'm an amateur music guy.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Amazing. So one of the things that's going to be really interesting about this call is a big, big sound, epidemic sound, over time studios that the whole ecosystem has from the music industry been under a lot of controversy the next many years. Merited or not, we'll sort of cover today. But me as an observer that's been studying music, music industry have always been very fascinated with that work because it has been incredibly disruptive to how you think about music, music streaming, music consumption. And that for me is really interesting because it is one of the players, you know, like Spotify that has basically changed a lot of things about how music economy works and how you approach it. So I'm happy to dissect your work and sort of the past decade of work in this space and try to understand it a lot better. And I'll try to take it from angles of both like, okay, what do you think about this that people say or me myself being, you know, In full honesty, I'm a big fan of what's happening at Epidemic Sound because I really love the way of looking at music in a different way. But we'll go into that. Overturn Studios that you're the CEO of, that has had a path of its own besides Epidemic Sound. Maybe you can walk us through that journey and also when you took over CEO, like what was happening with Overturn Studios?

Niklas Brantberg

Yeah, sure. So Overton was founded around eight years ago by a guy called Alex Papa Constantino, one of the longest last names I've ever heard. A half Greek guy who had a long history of music production working for JLo, Marc Anthony, and a lot of people in the Latin pop field. So he founded the company eight years ago. And that was when kind of mood music was just starting to brew a little bit on these streaming

Jakob Wredstrøm

Ha!

Niklas Brantberg

platforms. And he was quite early in on that and brought in his network and they started doing music and they saw it grow, it grew a lot. So it really grew organically in the first couple of years. And, you know, as he built that company that got bigger, a more, lot streams, a lot more music creators. And then a couple of years into that journey, then, Epidemic Sound got involved and acquired the company. And Alex is still the head of the music. Music and the artist roster at Overtone Studios. But when we then made that acquisition, I was part of Epidemic Sound. And then a couple of years later, I took the step over to head up the Overtone team as well. But, you know, in short, because not everyone knows what we talk about when we say mood music, but it's quite a broad term. So it's typically instrumental music. It's genre wise it could be anywhere from ambient, classical, jazz, lo-fi, lounge, deep house, etc. But the main purpose is to kind of soundtrack a mood, soundtrack a certain type of moment, soundtrack activities. And that's really like that's where we're experts. So we have hundreds of music creators and we kind of collaborate with them to create music. And then our role is to put that music out into the world and get it heard as much as possible so that we can, you know, make sure that our music creators can make a living doing this music. So we have a 50-50 royalty model where we pay out 50 % to music creators. It's been, yeah, it's been a successful model so far.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Mm-hmm.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Mm.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Mm.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Interesting. When operating music, and you would know this more than most, there's always this difficult dynamic between sentiment and actualities. And I think one of the biggest sentiment oppositions to music that I've met, especially when it's reached an incredible scale, has been the faceless assists. Because the whole underlying concept of music is that it's anonymous to some degree.

Niklas Brantberg

Mm-hmm.

Niklas Brantberg

Mm-hmm.

Jakob Wredstrøm

What have you experienced of sentiment opposition to the expansion of mute music? What have you experienced?

Niklas Brantberg

Yeah, I mean that's an interesting question and I think some of it is almost like legacy because a lot of people, a lot of music creators that got into making mood music were... kind of the personality almost that they thought how nice to be able to focus on the music and not focus as much as you need to do on building your own social media and personal branding and being out there doing interviews and things like that. So I think a lot of the people that got attracted to making the music had that kind of personality that they felt like I really want to focus on the craft and the sonics of it.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm.

Niklas Brantberg

So there's one angle there and I think that's and then the second angle is partly that I think the interest, at least initially the interest in the artist profile so to speak, you know, it's typically less than it is the interest in, you know, like a pop or, you know, rock or R &B type of artist. So those two combined has kind of led to, well, okay, well, it's kind of

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm.

Niklas Brantberg

became a bit faceless and a bit anonymous. With that said, I think the trend is definitely shifting and both the listeners want to understand more about the human behind the music and the stories behind it. So as it has grown now, people are thinking, okay, well, what else is there apart from the music? And then people are getting more interested. And I think the artists are also seeing that, well, you can actually build quite a big audience within these fields. It's not only like people streaming on a playlist and then they never want to or you know they don't have any interest in the actual tracks further than the playlist but I think more and more people are starting to save those tracks that they like to their own playlist and start following them. So I think it's the kind of trend is more going into the direction of artists wanting to showcase themselves more and we definitely promote that and talk to artists and say like you should spend a bit more time on the profiling and the story as well and I think the listeners want to hear more.

Jakob Wredstrøm

That makes sense. I definitely also myself sort of observed that sentiment that, you know, they're becoming more of personas. But I think one of the negative parts of this discussion has been arguably that mood music or functional music has been the winners of the pro rata distribution model. Like where payment of streams is distributed to amount of. Of consumption and not necessarily to the deliberate amount of listening from one user to an artist. And I think that's one of the things that have maybe made this extra controversial that there's a lot of high volume consumption of mute music that is then distributed because of pro rata model to in favor of these mass consumption functional music. What have you sort of seen in that discussion and what's sort of your perspective?

Niklas Brantberg

Mm-hmm.

Niklas Brantberg

Yeah, well, it's always tricky discussing all the different kind of distribution mechanisms because there's quite many different routes to take and there's been a lot of talk about the, I can't remember what they call it, the SoundCloud model now where they more distribute a of a person's individual

Jakob Wredstrøm

Mm.

Jakob Wredstrøm

think they call it Ossocentric

Niklas Brantberg

Exactly, So I think there's definitely different routes you can take there, but I think one thing to keep in mind is that... the kind of the listening behaviors have changed a lot and before it was very you know you went to the shop to buy a CD or to buy a vinyl record and then it's very the intent is very clear nowadays people actually don't always want to do that they want to go to a theme or category of music and get served something different. And if that's like, is that better or worse? Or should that be valued more or less? I think that's almost like a philosophical discussion in a sense. Yeah, exactly. But I think the growth of kind of this type, this type of music, I think it comes from this like

Jakob Wredstrøm

And that's the big issue in this.

Niklas Brantberg

abundance of choice so people don't always know exactly what they do want to... they get bombarded with content and they don't know exactly what they want at any given time so then it's much more... it's easier to kind of get direction and support in what you want to listen to and I'm a little bit like that myself like I'm a music nerd, I have a long list of tracks and artists that I want to check out the new releases that I really want to listen to but then

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm.

Niklas Brantberg

A lot of times when I go to my app it's like, man, I'm just gonna put on something that kinda serves my mood. So think the way, the behavior of how you interact with music has changed. And then I think it also makes sense to...

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm.

Niklas Brantberg

that the model of remuneration also kind of reflects that in some way.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm. Because it does have a lot of value. Know, personally in my life, I have ADHD and I recently sort of started medicine less than two years ago. And really the only soul for me without medicine has been the playlist, Peaceful Piano that I'm sure that Overtone Studio have had a lot of placements in. Because for me, that was my... weight or sort of waiting in something like that, that I could actually focus. And even today, you know, I've been lucky to have medicine, it really works for me, but I run a lot as we talked before this interview. And really the only way I can calm my mind is with that playlist. Like it's because my mind raises when it has space to do so. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, the problem is it always raises towards work. So the only way for me to actually have a run where I can just be present in the moment and think about running.

Niklas Brantberg

Mm-hmm.

Niklas Brantberg

Mm-hmm.

Niklas Brantberg

Mm-hmm.

Niklas Brantberg

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jakob Wredstrøm

is like functional music. Like it's the only solution I have. So I think there's also a lot of value to it. It of gets also lost in that discussion to some degree.

Niklas Brantberg

Yeah, absolutely. And I think the whole... more of a macro trend of like people's awareness of well-being, wellness and health. That obviously increased a lot in the last decade or two and people focusing more on sleep quality and sort of focus as you talked about and the meditation and yoga and things like that. People are really using music as a tool in their life. So in some ways it's becoming more than what it maybe was before. So I think it's definitely adding and that's why I also want to say that it's not only competing with other styles of music, it's also adding to people's lifestyle. They might still listen to a lot of the artist-centric music that they've been used to listening to, but this is like a new component, fulfilling a new need. So yeah, it's really interesting.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Makes sense. So I'm really curious about sort of your path into this. I sort of look through your LinkedIn, it looks like your early days was somewhat related to music while you were studying, went into consulting, then into Epidemic. But can you sort of tell me, how did you come into this world? What was the entry?

Niklas Brantberg

Sure. Yeah, I mean, as I mentioned, I always loved music. I used to play in a bunch of bands and stuff in university. Always, you know, got paid in cash and beer, but never did anything serious with it and never like recorded and released stuff. But I studied business. I worked for an early music startup actually when I was studying and we... We were just three people and we got a hands on the Spotify beta product before it was released. And then we saw that and we're like, okay, well we're screwed. So we dropped that venture quite early on. And then I kind of followed the herd from business school to a management consultancy firm where I worked in a ton of interesting industries. But you did six week here, eight weeks there. It was jumping around, learned a lot, but I didn't really see that. I was like, okay, this is what I wanna do.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah.

Niklas Brantberg

And I wanted to move, partly closer to music, but also wanted to move to a place where I could kind of be part of a journey and kind of build something, which that intrigued me. So I actually sent a cold email to the Epidemic Sound CEO, Oskar Höglund. He actually, I read an article and he also had a background, same business school and same consultancy firm. So I was like, ah, this is meant to be. So I sent an email and we had lunch and ended up joining Epidemic Sound quite early on when they were around 10 people or so. So they just kind of got started, their first couple of big clients, but still very early on. And yeah, I spent... four or five years on the commercial side of Epidemic Sound, kind of helping them build up sales teams and build up partnerships around the world and kind of open up offices in Europe and in the US so that we can kind of bring the Epidemic Sound product out to clients, which was like production companies and broadcasters and brands and things like that. And then... After four or five years, I got the chance to move over from the commercial side over to the music side. So then I spent around four or five years again as chief of music at Epidemic being responsible for the whole artist roster and you know... signing new artists and working with the artists to create music for the Epidemic Sound catalog. And also kind of distributing and marketing that music partly to listeners, but mainly to video creators, which is the kind of the clients of Epidemic Sound.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Mm. Yeah, that's interesting. You know, especially that effort towards sort of video and the synchronization world has been quite disruptive because traditionally speaking, the primary motive for synchronization was that it was existing songs out and you would buy those songs or you would custom make it for project. Epidemic Sound came in and basically created like its whole universe of low barrier of entry and low cost ways of getting high quality music, which really, you know, the first

Niklas Brantberg

Mm-hmm.

Jakob Wredstrøm

perception I have epidemic sound and it's sort of disruption. So that was that like basically not crushing the market of that, but definitely changing how people need to think about the unique economics of producing music in that field. Could you walk me through what happened at that point and sort of what was going on?

Niklas Brantberg

Yeah, so the foundation of it is coming from the founders of Epidemics. So one group was Oscar that I just mentioned, the CEO, and he was coming from the TV production industry and working with broadcasters. And he felt like dealing with music was kind of a... a low point of those projects. Like, it's so cumbersome with the music, both writes and finding the right stuff. And he was like, it shouldn't be like that. Music should be the most fun part of the project. But it was kind of the opposite. So they were just feeling that problem. And then he got together with a couple people from the music side of things that were seeing another problem, which was that there's so many talented music producers that just couldn't really make a living in music. So they were trying to figure out a way of kind of solving both these two problems. Kind of at once. And then they came up with the kind of Epilemic Sound model, which is, know, in very short is that they pay upfront for the music, acquire the full rights of the music, and it's outside of the collecting society world. So Epilemic Sound will be the only stakeholder kind of that has any right to the music. So they pay upfront to the music creator, they get more of a predictable type of lifestyle. And predictable income. And Epidemic Sound is then the only stakeholder that licenses music to the users, so they can be very flexible in terms of giving global rights, all platforms, and just making sure that there's no problems with the music on that then. So the idea came more from solving that issue. But once they started building that catalog for it, they saw that, as you mentioned,

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm.

Niklas Brantberg

there's a lot of value in actually listening to the users and the clients and understanding what do they need from the music and what do they need from a catalog. So I think a lot of the value nowadays is kind of not only in the kind of the rights model, a lot of it is like having a tailored catalog of music for your video productions. And that's partly then what's

Jakob Wredstrøm

Mm.

Niklas Brantberg

styles of music, how is the music... and not only kind of genre wise but also like the dynamics of the music is the music, is there lot of stuff happening in the music that you can use in your productions to create emotion and to enhance emotion. And also making sure the music is discoverable so that you can find what you need because that's a huge problem. Epidemic Sounds catalogues, 50,000 tracks, a lot of the other production music libraries have hundreds of thousands

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Mm.

Niklas Brantberg

of tracks so it's really like you know trying to find the needle in a haystack and what you're looking for so you need to have proper metadata and the proper technology to assist the users so they can find what they need

Jakob Wredstrøm

in. I think one really interesting thing about this talk is, you know, growing up in Denmark music industry and being somewhat connected to the Norwegian music industry as well. Like if you would say, talk about a business model where a company would operate outside of collection society, that would be blasphemy. Like, because that is the sentiment in many countries. But we had a pre-talk about this where I think it's incredibly interesting to talk about Sweden, culturally speaking, because Sweden, at least in my perception, has a...

Niklas Brantberg

You

Jakob Wredstrøm

different cultural association to music when it comes to its value or capitalism or commercialization. Where, as I see it, Sweden has a more like, is an industry, like this is a commercial powerhouse, at least it's become that. More so than other territories. And Swedes, when I work with Swedes, act differently when it comes to rock music. And maybe a tiny bit more disregard of the cultural norms of how to think about music. What's your take on this? How do you read that situation?

Niklas Brantberg

That was an interesting take that I haven't thought that much about in the past. First of all, I do want to say something about the whole kind of blasphemy of working in this way. And one thing that I think often gets lost is that people when talk about the sounds like, they buy the rights so the creators don't see any of the upside. So I want to be clear with that, we, Epidemic Sound buys the rights to the music, but they also pay 15 royalties on streaming revenues and they have this soundtrack bonus which is very similar to a royalty in the music industry because if the music gets used a lot by users they get additional payments so they really have their artist friendly model but it's just outside of the system so they can be flexible and in many ways better than the regular system but with that said that's something like I feel passionate about

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm.

Jakob Wredstrøm

I know that for a fact, but it does get lost in translation when there's these coverages. And the music industry is not always the most nuanced, and people seem to get quite heated about stuff. So yes, even though that's true, just because you're doing something different where it's easy to perceive it as something different, that's the angle that most people take. But yeah, but I totally agree.

Niklas Brantberg

Yeah.

Niklas Brantberg

Yeah, exactly.

Niklas Brantberg

Yeah, but other than that, or just kind of moving to the bulk of your question, I think there's this kind of combination of... Obviously, kind of the Swedish music wonder of a lot of bands and artists and producers becoming really successful during the 70s, 80s, 90s. So a lot of people kind of saw success in the music industry, both cultural and commercial. I think that was a big part of the kind of then music tech companies that were kind of founded in Sweden, like Spotify, SoundCloud, Epidemic Sound, and others as well. So I think people were seeing this, that it's possible to combine both cultural and commercial success. And I think having role models, in whatever you do yourself, but also in the business world, I think that's super important. So think that probably plays a big part of it.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah, and you know Well, not everyone might know is like Sweden just in traditional music is one of the largest music exporters in the world. I think they're number four or something like that. But per capita, like it's by far the most successful music country in the world by far. So, so there is a totally different economy around music when it comes to success. Like one of the things is Scandinavian where I see a clear difference because we live in this very socialist democratic countries is oftentimes with art, there's a lot of public funding. There's a lot of like stipends and assist development. But in Sweden, very differently from Denmark and Norway, there's a lot of professional songwriting schools. There's a lot of professional arts schools, and the stipends are not really easy to get. It's not like a subsidized industry to some degree. This is an actual commercial career. There's a lot of competition to get into. Isn't that true? That's how Sweden does it.

Niklas Brantberg

Yeah, I would say so. I'm not so much into like the stipend world, obviously there's... Yeah, exactly. Maybe that's right. But I know there's... when there's talk about Swedish music, a lot of it kind of gets credited to like having...

Jakob Wredstrøm

That's my point.

Niklas Brantberg

municipalities had really like strong music education for children, know, long time ago, which is still true, but I think that kind of definitely fueled something and that probably helped a lot with like the early success. But then I think that early success really fueled a lot of the later, you know, it started with like, know, ABBA and the Roxette and everything and then the whole Max Martin and the Sheiron Studios, that whole network. I think, yeah. Not only like the early success, also those people succeeding then had a pretty, had like a network. Network approach to it where it was like it wasn't only Dennis Pop and only Max Martin that were kind of benefiting from their success. They brought in a lot of other producers and a lot of they brought in interns who can kind of work in the studio and then that intern you know got a billboard number one you know 10 years later and things like that. So there's a lot of like that kind of network approach to it which I think was very important.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Mm.

Niklas Brantberg

Yeah, and then I think... The view now is that yeah, a music business is that's like a viable career, either as a creator, because there's lot of people making a living in music, or such as me being a failed creator, but I can still kind of work quite close to my passion. And there's a lot of, there's some bigger music tech companies in Sweden, as the ones I mentioned, but there's a lot of startups as well, trying things out and you

Jakob Wredstrøm

in

Niklas Brantberg

lot of them fail, but some succeed. And I think there's a good community around it. Yeah, I think that's...

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah, if you, know, what I think is really interesting, there's like two things I find this really interesting beyond what we just talked about is at least as an outsider perceive, there was like a professional music mafia style in, Sweden. Like one of, one of our owners in my company, Amputee Ventures is also a Swedish tech founder. And we sort of talk, quite, quite often and he's, doesn't talk much about, his journey per se, but like when I've sort of figured out who has invested in this company from like, who, like these guys, like in the network of these sort of musicians, producers, investors, tech guys seems to be like, we'll call it closely knit, but there's a fairly good sort of overlay between these where.

Niklas Brantberg

Hmm

Jakob Wredstrøm

I work a lot with MusicTech Europe and there's a big disconnect between the music industry and the tech industry and investors. In Sweden it seems because there has been this continuous success in the whole ecosystem through like 40, 50 years, there is a better connectivity between those layers. Does that make sense? Does that how I see it as an outsider?

Niklas Brantberg

No, I think that makes sense and I mean I think the whole Spotify story is a good testament to it, you know where they saw these problems in the music industry and then they paired that with just a great network of really tech savvy people. And there's a lot of engineers in Sweden as well and a lot of technically skilled people as well. Kind of combining these two worlds, that's what really kind of created, or part of what created Spotify's success. Yeah, I haven't, I mean, being within the Swedish community, I don't reflect that much about how is it in other markets, but like, it's definitely, we were actually at the Epidemic Sound, there was a long discussion in the early days, like, are we a music company or are we a tech company? Which was one of those like lunch discussions. And it kind of also framed a lot of how we were thinking about it. But obviously we're both and

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah, and you.

Jakob Wredstrøm

No, makes sense.

Niklas Brantberg

think that's important to recognize because just having been really strong on the music side and not leveraging the technology advancements when it comes to, as I mentioned, music discovery and things like that, which is so important. Think Ebb and Sound wouldn't have succeeded unless they had that technological side and paired with it. And same goes for Spotify.

Jakob Wredstrøm

There was this very interesting case in the media last year when it comes to sort of financial success of mood music and creators and composers where some of the top copyright earners in the world was anonymous Swedish music composers. Like there was, to your point with Epidemic Sound and sort of splits and royalty and streaming and such, it's really interesting to have the discussion last couple of years like, okay, you know, besides the sort of controversy, a made up controversy, call it what you want, there is composers and artists that is faceless in a different way, that is making a significant living on this music. If a composer does well in mood music, how would you compare that to? Like, what is the financial reality of successful composer in this space?

Niklas Brantberg

Well, I think the music industry is interesting in that sense because like the success metrics can be so different. Know, is it, know, a lot of times people say like, well, how many people are coming to your gigs? Maybe that could be one big success factor. Or like how much coverage are you getting in the media? It's also like a traditional success factor. And for moon music, that doesn't really make sense.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm.

Niklas Brantberg

So for us, yeah, it's more driven by... by kind of how many people are actually hearing your music. And that's partly then streams on the streaming platforms, also, you know, could be, mood music is not only kind of playlists on stream platforms, it's also like, you know, background music in physical environments, or it's being part of fitness apps, you know, when you're doing yoga, meditation, or doing workout, things like that. So the sets metrics there is a little bit more connected to the distribution. Many times the music gets heard and if things work well then that also has a direct correlation with how well they could make a living. So I think I mean thinking about Epidemic Sound numbers, I know we were saying that they might be slightly updated now, but I think it's north or between 60 and 70 thousand dollars a year is the average income for music, Epidemic Sound music creator and some of them earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. And it's quite, yeah, we're kind of it's quite similar for Overton Studios as well. So like. It's definitely a lot higher kind of earnings potential, you know, comparing to kind of music industry as a whole. So I think like...

Jakob Wredstrøm

Mm.

Niklas Brantberg

Only looking at the traditional metrics of how you're successful in the music industry. I think that's not really enough. If you're an aspiring musician, you should also think about these adjacent industries like mood music, music for sync, things like that, because there's definitely... There's a lot of revenue in those segments of the market. And if you want to make a living in music, think it's good to consider all your different options. But then again, you also need to pair it with what you're good at. So we see a lot of times people who want to get into mood music or sync music, because, oh, I see there's a lot of money in it. I want to get into it. But that seldom works because the ones who are successful

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm.

Niklas Brantberg

Are the ones who are very passionate about this type of music and are like nerding out and those are the ones who are successful in doing it rather than the ones who might you know produce pop music and then say well I want to make an extra income I go to this field and do that with my left hand behind my back but it's usually the ones who are very passionate about it to succeed but there's definitely

Jakob Wredstrøm

Mm.

Niklas Brantberg

A lot of potential in making a living in music within both sync and mood music. And I think that's very exciting. And we had this...

Jakob Wredstrøm

Mm.

Niklas Brantberg

Kind after work event a couple of weeks ago, we invited all our music creators to a studio here in Stockholm. And it's just very inspiring to hear these stories about music creators saying, you know, now I can finally quit my day job and focus on music. I've like, I've been in the industry for 10 or 20 years and I've always had to have a day job and then I do music at night during the weekends. But now I can do music all day long. And that's like, that's super inspiring for us to hear. And that's kind of, you know, one of the purposes

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm.

Niklas Brantberg

Of why these companies were founded.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah. And one of the interesting things about the model in general, is, besides just a normal day job is this sort of element of recurring revenue. Obviously you need to stay relevant and keep on composing, but it's not just like, produce one, you get one. It can have a snowball effect, but it could also take some time to build up a catalog that actually makes you money. One thing that I'm getting tired of asking in general, but stays even more relevant for Overtone Studios is the question of AI.

Niklas Brantberg

Mm-hmm.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Like as AI is becoming better and better, like, you know, even just two days ago, I was with my son playing with the new version five from Suno. And it's getting so good that, you know, like what's going to be the future of quality and creation is the big question. And, you know, what a lot of people have been pointing to for a couple of years, which I haven't really seen in practice yet is the functional type of music, the mute music and how that's going to be completely exchanged by AI. But I haven't seen the size of that yet, at least from an academic perspective. Like what is your perception of AI music and how it's going to disrupt the financial potential of music?

Niklas Brantberg

Yeah. I mean, it's, yeah, I agree. It's a question that you're kind of tired of because it's constant discussion, but it's obviously very relevant to discuss. I mean, we see AI as, or our vision for what AI could be in the music industry is that it should be a tool and not something to replace human creators. So if used in the right way, I think it could be a very powerful tool. For a human creator to get better at doing their craft. When talking about a tool like Suno, for example, I think that can be used in a way which I think is super uninspiring, where you write the prompt and click generate and you're done. But I think it can be used in a quite interesting way where you can test, or you can use it in so many different ways. You can test out ideas, you can come in with a very early demo or something and see like, how would this sound if I do it like this? Okay, and then that creates more ideas and then you go back into your studio environment and do something different Or you know, can obviously play around with it and create things that are it can be novel as well And you can use that novel sound To create something new So there's definitely and in the same way you can you can become more efficient in producing music in the same way as like, you know all the time all the like new dog

Niklas Brantberg

And the new plugins that are coming that are making it easier to tune vocals or whatever. There's all of this parallel there.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah. Let's imagine for a second that we're sort of two years from now, because obviously there's a lot of legal safeguards right now. It's, you know, practically speaking, it's really difficult to generate a track on Suno and upload it to Spotify or, you know, whatever, because there's a lot of protective methods. There's like sort of like almost like watermarking, you know, audio that distribution companies sort of detect. So right now it's difficult to... have AI come into the market and have a fully commercial function. There's a lot of boundaries, but right now with a lot of legal lawsuits and changes in markets and settlements, these sort of legal boundaries might change slowly. Assuming theoretically that music created by AI can have similar quality of human-created music, what do you think is gonna happen to that sort of macro level financial environment?

Niklas Brantberg

Mm-hmm.

Niklas Brantberg

Yeah, well, million dollar question, obviously. Tough to answer, but I think... assuming that you meant what you mentioned and I think that's quite big assumptions also because obviously we're kind of you know we're strong believers in that if you're building AI tech you need to make you need to make sure to license training material and you need to like remunerate artists fairly and things like that so we're strong believers in all those things and hope that kind of you know regulation and all the businesses doing it will kind of

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah.

Niklas Brantberg

Will function in that way in the future. So given that, I still believe that kind of the human artistry will be noticeable within the music. And I still believe that there will be a value of having... the human element as part of the music. And I think also that's necessary for it to not become just like a circular reference of saying, okay, well, this is the peaceful piano sound. We're just gonna do a peaceful piano sound over and over again. You have been a fan of Pistol Piano for a long time. That sound, if you listen to it very casually, you probably won't notice a huge difference now compared to five years ago. But if you listen to it a lot, that sound has actually changed quite a lot. There's different sonical elements and different... kind of melodic changes as well and I think that kind of trends in music I think will be driven by taste and driven by kind of curation and taste and I don't think that kind of moving to full AI world will kind of solve that so I think AI can be good at... almost like copying things, but I think if we want to have some kind of a forward movement in things and then kind of see trends, and I think humans always want that, they don't want the exact same thing all the time, I think that the human element will be key. Yeah.

Jakob Wredstrøm

That's interesting. And I definitely see it from an argument of a four-leaning company like yourself, like Overton Studios, where you sort of creating trends and sort of not lacking behind. You know, there's a big part of the music industry that might not be you guys that are... basically copying music, which is still a creative led to some degree where I don't think the same argument would stand. And then obviously there's the catalog, right? Because, know, everything you do is not just new movements. It's a rich cat back catalog that also serves its own right and purpose that very much could be copied. So I think that's the interesting thing.

Niklas Brantberg

Mm-hmm.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Obviously it's something to be discovered, but one thing that I really reflect on a lot, we have an interview with a professor that's sort of been working in the intersection between music and neuroscience and it's called Tom Fritz. So everyone can go check that out, that episode. But we discuss basically three elements of music consumption. And I'm not be butchering a lot of the interview right here, but what he said was basically that there's a cultural element to music. There's a, um, there's a association to music. And then there's the acoustical part of music. So basically acoustical part, uh, in theory, and probably also in practice already now, if you ask me in many regards can be completely exchanged by AI. Like there's, there is music is, you know, in the digital world is, is waves, it's series and ones like that could be copied. Then there's the communal thing. Like do we have a communal experience of music together? And then there's the association to the brand. But music,

Niklas Brantberg

Mm-hmm.

Niklas Brantberg

Mm-hmm.

Jakob Wredstrøm

It's not very strong on both the communal and the brand association. Is, know, primarily of acoustic value. So at least listen to Tom Fritz and his research. He argues that at least from an acoustic perspective and a practical understanding of that AI could most definitely, according to research, take the place of music without a face. But again, it's a long discussion, but it's also very unknown.

Niklas Brantberg

Mm-hmm.

Niklas Brantberg

Yeah, I mean, I agree on that aspect that, yeah, obviously being more, yeah, the brand having a lower value than the types of music brings it kind of more... at risk in that sense. But as I mentioned, think also the music industry is moving to a place where the kind of human behind the creations is becoming more in-stream to people. And I think kind of the AI wave, sorry.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah. Is that deliberate? Is that deliberate, the way? Like, you know, referencing to what we're talking about right now is that a deliberate strategy, for example, from Overtune Studios to put a face behind new music.

Niklas Brantberg

I think it's probably a little bit of both. Think also from the listener's end, it becomes more important from a listener's perspective. Because obviously the sentiment from the listener is a lot of the times that they want it to be a human-made track. Then given that, obviously both creators and labels like us feel like, okay, well then it makes sense for us to be clear.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah.

Niklas Brantberg

That it is, if that's the case. So partly that. And then I think, and this, you know...

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm.

Niklas Brantberg

Might be proven wrong by some experts here, but as like, I think the acoustical elements is also, can we also be kind of understated, like the complexity of mood music is often understated when you talk about acoustically. So there's like this notion of like, well, mood music, that's easy to make, know, put a pad and an easy piano melody and then you're done. But like the subtleties of are, you know, there's so many subtleties within music and sonically. To be honest, like myself, I've, you know, as like a hobby producer, obviously I've been dabbled around with these tools as well. And I find it much easier to make like a passable pop song than to make like a passable, peaceful piano track, to be honest. But obviously I might be a bit biased there in that opinion. So, so.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah, there's definitely a discussion that, you know, me being a music producer and audio engineer myself, like I have the capability of distinguishing, you know, making a distinct difference between like different types of music. But for example, my reality, again, going back to sort of how I use music is running and because it just has a good fit, I have this like headphones that I got with my watch that's like... Decent and I'm not listing it in any environment that would help me differentiate that sort of nuance and maybe 90 % of the people consuming music would have like similar ish Scenarios, but it's so interesting to sort of discuss but now when we are on the topic What is the future for you guys you as a CEO? Where do you want to take over to our studios in regard to? Let's call it the threat of AI or you know Or just in general where you want to be progressive a music company and still become relevant. Like where are you going?

Niklas Brantberg

Mm-hmm. Yep.

Niklas Brantberg

I would say that there's a couple of different directions or like dimensions you could say that we're working on. I think one would be... geographical. So mood music today is quite like Western sounding. It's because, you know, it's very like, you know, European, American. That's the bulk of our creators coming from it. And that's where the listening is the biggest of these styles of music. But we're seeing a lot of like...

Jakob Wredstrøm

Mm.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah, sure.

Niklas Brantberg

mood music that's influenced by kind of local music styles in different regions. lot coming from Asia and you know. South America and also Africa, Middle East, things like that. And I think that's just in its very early stages. And I think it's partly bringing kind of global or like, know, it's like regional influences to mood music and having that, I think that becomes interesting music to listen to for anyone, regardless of where they are, also the people in kind of the Western regions of the world. But then also kind of bring bringing mood music to platforms that are bigger in other parts of the world. For example, when we're discussing with streaming platforms in Asia, for them, mood music is not yet a big topic. like, we don't have that much playlists in these types of styles or genres. We're mostly promoting music that's big on social media.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah.

Niklas Brantberg

can sometimes be the response, but I believe that trend will come and then just a little bit later on the mood music trend because I think the value it adds to people's lives as we discussed earlier is like that's agnostic to where you're placed or where you're based. So I think there's a definitely geographic angle to it and that or geographic slash musical which is interesting. And then the other part I think

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm.

Niklas Brantberg

I that's more, the first one here was more for like mood music in general, would say. And the second one's, you know, I guess more for Overtone Studios in specific, that I think we still have a lot of work in kind of our music to new platforms. Not only like the streaming platforms, but making sure that our music can be heard in different places on... different types of apps related to fitness or workout or physical environments and things like that. So we were kind of born a company as being just on streaming platforms, but obviously music can be consumed in so many different ways. So we want to bring ourselves or bring our creators and catalog into different places.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm.

Jakob Wredstrøm

I have a sort of left to center question before we sort of will close up the interview and it's been incredibly interesting to talk to you today is we, lot of our listeners are founders and sort of innovators in this space. And I often talk with founders that, ultimately oftentimes has the purpose of being acquired. Now you're running a company that has been acquired. So what's the financial functional purpose of such a company when you have an owner? What is your responsibility towards your owner? What is it that you need to achieve as a CEO?

Niklas Brantberg

Yeah, that's a good question and actually not a question I don't get that often, actually. So it's interesting. But I mean, first of all, one thing that I think is interesting, I want to mention this, but because I mentioned Alex, our founder, who's now heading up to our music team. I'm quite because he did that journey. He was the founder of a company. It got acquired and that was now almost four years ago, I think. And I'm just very happy that he is still so passionate engaged and wants to continue on his initial mission. So I think if you are a founder looking to get acquired, I would also think a little bit past the acquisition. Do you want to get acquired by a company that you believe in their mission as well? Are they complementary? Are the synergies? Do you get excited about the people at the company that's acquiring you? Because I think that's been a of a success story. We're very happy that Alex is so passionate about the music and wants to run it. But then me as kind of coming into as a CEO role there, it's definitely... I think it's, you get the little bit of best of both worlds in one way because we run autonomously. But I have a board similar to a regular company. That board is then, since we're owned by Epidemic, is then consisting of people from founders and top management team at Epidemic. So I take kind of guidance from them as a board similar to a regular company. But I guess the difference is from a regular company is that my board is actually also working in the same building. So I don't always need to wait for our quarterly board meetings to get input on something. I can actually have a bit more closer interaction with the people, the senior people that are kind of my advisors. so I think I can't.

Niklas Brantberg

I really like having that setup where I feel I have trust from the board to run the company in the way me and the team see fit. But I get support and get guidance and I get a sounding board from Epinemoc Sound Team.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm. But again, back to the very specific question. it like profitability that fiends into the whole ecosystem? what is your purpose then?

Niklas Brantberg

Well, there's definitely like a, obviously in all companies there's a financial component of it. But Overton Studios is also, you could say, a complementary to Epidemic Sound for a couple of different reasons. One is that, and this is a lot of the reason why there was an acquisition because when I was chief of music at Epidemic, we were doing, know, mostly doing music tailored for sync to be used in video productions. And then we saw some music was working

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Mm.

Niklas Brantberg

really well over the streaming platforms. So we were doing a little bit of that. But we were seeing these other companies that were focusing on doing that, we're doing it better because they were 100 % focusing on it. So then when once we acquired Overtone, that kind of enabled Epidemic to focus 100 % on doing music for sync. we could kind of, okay, well, Overtone, you got this stuff covered, Epidemic can focus on this. And that kind of, I think, allowed both companies

Jakob Wredstrøm

Mm-hmm.

Niklas Brantberg

companies to be better at what they do. So that's one part of it. Second part of it is, think, having different rights models as well. So, so Epidemic Sound being outside of the collecting society world, some creators who are not willing or able to exit their societies are then kind of blocked off from working from Epidemic Sound, which is a shame. But then we have Overton Studios who has a different rights or like a regular label

Jakob Wredstrøm

Mm.

Niklas Brantberg

model, or label and publishing model, could say. So we can work with those types of creators. having, yeah, so kind of complementary, both in terms of focus and in terms of rights model, and that allows us to work with more music creators.

Jakob Wredstrøm

These are okay.

Jakob Wredstrøm

I love that description, like, you know, having a separate entity that allows you to focus fully on the pursuit of different way of running a business, but still being completely aligned with what you actually do. So the model differentiates the way the rights differentiates, but the overall pursuit of music in that sense is the same. That makes a whole lot of sense. Thank you. That was a great answer, by the way.

Niklas Brantberg

Sure.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Nicholas, thank you so much for your time. It's been a pleasure. I learned a lot from this and I know that a lot of people who listening to this will also learn a lot because it's a space that's not covered that much. And to the points of much of our conversation has also been filled with misunderstandings and misrepresentations. And why that is a different talk, but it has been. So I think it's very important that we get to talk about this in a sober way and really understand. what is happening here. And Nicholas, thank you so much for your time. It was a pleasure.

Niklas Brantberg

Great, thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Great, just stopping the recording.