Building the Next Generation of Music Infrastructure

Jakob Wredstrøm

Then I just need to check your upload speed. Are you in London right now or Sweden?

Bjorn Lindvall

No, I'm in London.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah. There we go.

Bjorn Lindvall

And we've got, I've got, you know, pretty high speed internet here, so it should be good.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yep, good, looks fine. Perfect. Well, then I will start in five seconds.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hey guys and welcome back to the Sound Connections Podcast. Today I have a guest on that I wanted to have on for I guess more than a year. Be on, welcome.

Bjorn Lindvall

Thank you very much. Glad to be on. Thanks for having me.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yes, Bjorn, you have had an incredible career in music and right now building something incredibly interesting. And we'll get into all of that, but in a very informal Scandinavian way as you are yourself. For the people who don't know you, who are you and what do you do?

Bjorn Lindvall

Yeah, so my name is Bjorn. I'm Swedish. Background now live in the UK, been here since 2006. So I guess that almost makes for a 20 year anniversary. I just passed it to be honest. Yeah, background, you know, went to school in Sweden, got a varied university kind of, you know, education kind of background, served some time in the armed forces as well, started out in finance. Then went into music and now hit.

Jakob Wredstrøm

That's a very brief explanation. I think where I first got to know you is not your current company. And, that was sort of co-founder of Hypnosis, which obviously was a pretty big turning point, at least in public perception about music and it's worth. And now you are building music infra, which we'll talk a lot about today and what you guys are trying to do. It's sort of a, I wouldn't call it a complicated topic, but you working on something that's not just, you know, the usual. So maybe let's start with talking a tiny bit about music and what you guys do.

Bjorn Lindvall

Yeah. So we are addressing and trying to solve the biggest problem in the music industry, which is a multi-billion dollar problem. And that is how to get creators and rights holders. And that includes publishers, labels, CMOs, PROs, writers and artists paid correctly and on time. Basically the music industry has grown up. Since the advent of streaming and digital downloads back in kind of 99. Effectively in kind of various modules and given that I think it's widely acknowledged that the music industry was relatively slow to adopt new formats and digital downloads and streaming. The industry has effectively built to meet current demands and the way they saw it rather than kind of perhaps looking forward a huge amount. And basically therefore there's a lot of infrastructure that is not necessarily built on modern foundations and by serendipity we set up the music infrastructure company and what it does is there's a hint in the name of back in 2023 in reality so All of our technology, the philosophy that we're building with is really based on the last few years. And I think if we are looking forward and thinking about the music industry supply chain, which really is what we're addressing, we need to think about it from first principles basis. So not necessarily solving an individual issue for an individual client today. But rather think about how should things work. And with the avalanche and the onslaught of this whole new paradigm, which is AI and gen AI music and all the permutations that come with that, I think the only thing that we could certainly say is the case is that we don't know what the music industry will look like over the next five and 10 years. And it's really...

Bjorn Lindvall

With that as a background that we've tried to think about how do you actually manage very, very large amounts of data? How do you deal with what might be new types of rights? So today, obviously you have the recorded music industry on the publishing side, you have mechanical performance and sync rights, and that's great. But In these various negotiations that are going on between rights holders and for instance, AI companies, we don't know today whether or not there will be a new rights types that emerge. And I think having the flexibility of meeting the industry demands and enable new points of monetization to function in a correct way and at the same time get rights holders, that's artists, writers, publishers and labels. Paid correctly and on time is really where we want to go and what we're thinking deeply and very long and hard about.

Jakob Wredstrøm

I reached out to you again when there was announced the partnership with Tune Global and you guys have been building, I wouldn't call it stealth mode, but stealthish for a while. And I'll follow that up with a cheeky question that obviously you know that you can answer because who you are, but you know, a third of all the entrepreneurs that I meet in music tech have this wet dream of, you know, trying to solve the problem that you're doing. Why in the world are you guys that wants to do it?

Bjorn Lindvall

So, did you say why?

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah, why are you able to do it in your belief?

Bjorn Lindvall

Well, I think that first of all, it is an intractable and very hard problem to solve where many, many attempts have been made in the past in various different guises. And I think it really starts with kind of my view on what the team needs to be because as you know, any startup really, you, especially when you start up, it's really all about the team. It's really all about, you know, can you execute? You have an alignment on vision and what you want to do and crucially in the music industry as well, how you want to do it. So basically what I think really is needed in order to be successful in this space. And ultimately, I suppose why I think we will be successful is really you need a combination of three things. So A, you need engineers and engineering capability from large global tech. If you think of the Googles, the Metas, the Spotify, they've all their engineers have all been dealing with vast, vast amounts of data and building in a flexible way to meet whatever their underlying companies demands are. So world-class engineering. And therefore we have taken all of our engineers from those kind of backgrounds, right? The second one really is that in order to, and I think this is a key differentiator, in order to build something that is useful for the industry, you have to have a deep appreciation and understanding for what the current music industry actually looks like. And that is down to very, very granular points. The only way you'll get a full appreciation for that is by having people on the team who've been working in the industry for a very, very long period of time. So if we take people who run operations for us, traditional start out in at the Harry Fox agency 25 years ago and have been building their own careers up by dealing with the most granular.

Bjorn Lindvall

Myopic topics in the industry. And I think with that comes an understanding for all of the various different pitfalls that you might go into. And really, you know, in order for us both to get credibility and also to build products that are truly useful, I think you need to have a deep understanding for that. Think that's probably been a lot of startups that I've certainly met who wants to revolutionize the music industry and

Jakob Wredstrøm

Mm.

Bjorn Lindvall

Build a blue box and then try and sell that blue box to the various industry participants and it never works, right? So we need to build with the industry and for the industry and having a deep understanding of the supply chain then is absolutely crucial. So that was the second point. The third point, which is very relevant to the music industry as well is that you do need to have, you know, trust. With the industry and its various individual operators. Because there's been so many permutations of companies and individuals trying to solve this problem. And I think in many times, industry has been, dare I say, missolved on various different solutions that might work. What, as the third point here goes towards We all individually, at least in the leadership team, have had relatively long careers and mine is probably the shortest, know, dating back to 2017 in music. And therefore have very established and long worked on networks that stretches across the industry. So it's really top-class engineers, deep understanding of the current supply chain in the industry. And then connective tissue with the various operators in the industry, if that makes sense.

Jakob Wredstrøm

No, it makes perfect sense. Very Swedish, well done of you to explain that way. Obviously, that ambition requires a good deal of capital. Solving such a big problem does not result in amazing profits immediately and probably would take a good while. How have you got out preaching this to investors?

Bjorn Lindvall

Well, I mean, this is a lesson that I learnt at Hypnosis, which really was my first foray into the music industry. Prior to that, I worked in finance for my sense. I'm a reformed banker. And, you know, when we tried to get Hypnosis off the ground back in 2017, I think the first round of kind of investor meetings encompassed about 140 meetings.

Jakob Wredstrøm

You

Bjorn Lindvall

And most people rejected us out of hand. Now, those meetings were held in 2017. And as we all know, 2016 was the first year when streaming contributed a billion dollars to the music industry. So there was very little faith in what we wanted to do. And when we came back to the market in the spring of 2018 and had another 140 meetings,

Jakob Wredstrøm

Mm.

Bjorn Lindvall

We had to repeat the very, very fundamental basics of what the music industry looks like and how it functions. And that's really something that I have kind of taken with me into music in for as well as a lesson. It is a deep and a complex industry, and therefore you need to repeat it in a very, very simple way and a simple way that people can understand. And now taking that into music in from really what we are trying to. Paint a picture of is that of in reality, and this is one of the uncomfortable truths that people don't really want to talk that much about, is that we have an industry supply chain which is incredibly disjointed and very inefficient, incredibly inefficient. And explaining that to investors in a simple and clear way, now we did go to Rain. Capital and one of the individuals that Fred Davis, who is obviously very well known in the industry, not only because we knew that he in his own right had a deep understanding and a very, very long history in the music industry, but also because we knew that if we managed to get Rain on board, that would be a stamp of approval. So yes, you do need Capital. So we raised our first round of funding in November 2023. That basically made it possible for us to go and build some foundational infrastructure, build up databases, hiring the individuals that we needed to get us to where we are today. And then in August of 2025, we raised another lot of capital. And then interestingly, our lead investor then was a London-based fintech firm called Middle Game Ventures. And what they are seeing is the same thing, which is making a supply chain and more efficient does take time. And it actually has significant parallels with, with finance and working in the finance industry. And why is, why am I saying that? Because in finance, you obviously have regulators, right? You have the bank of England, you have the financial conduct authority and they impose frameworks on you.

Bjorn Lindvall

Therefore, if let's say you were going to build a new stockbroker, you have to have very significant infrastructure built up before you can launch. Now, and that is because you're handling stocks and shares and you're handling money and they need to end up in the right place at the right time. And for the music industry, we don't have regulators per se, but we do have licensing agreements. And licensing agreements serves effectively as the regulation of the music industry. It's also why it's relatively slow for anyone to get into the space, especially if you want to do something on the supply chain, because everyone is tied up in a variety of different licensing and longer term kind of agreements. So any investor coming into the space needs to understand that is the case and that it will take time to win over. Clients, especially if you're looking at kind of larger enterprise clients. So that's kind of my summary of it, if that makes sense. And that's why you need significant amounts of capital. And that's why you need backers, investors who truly understand that things will take time.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Great, that works again. I'll just carry on from where you left it. That makes a whole lot of sense. If you want to go by industry sentiment and sort of popular opinion, one of the broad narratives that there is that big investors don't understand music and it's too small of a market. There's plenty of these arguments. What would be your primary argument why this would bring potentially a good return on investment for your owners?

Bjorn Lindvall

So I think the market in reality is quite large. It's a question of what is it really that you're going after, right? So we are seeing, we take specifically where we've been focused a lot, you know, in the, the inception of the company, the publishing supply chain, the cost, let's say for a US publisher to bring back You know, a thousand dollars earned on that publishing catalog, let's say at on Spotify in Spain is very large indeed. We very rarely see transaction costs and I'll come to explain what transaction costs involve below 20%. So, and when it comes to international, it's larger than that. So.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Really?

Bjorn Lindvall

Let's say that you're a US publisher, your catalog earns a thousand bucks on Spotify in Spain. So very often you need to have as a US publisher, a sub publisher in Spain, the sub publisher then needs to be affiliated to let's say SIGAI or Unison. They very often don't run their own back offices, but have, you know, a service firm that does that. And on every step of the way, when you load your catalog, into the next layer. So from the US publisher to the sub publishers, sub publishers to SIGAI, SIGAI to the back office and back office to Spotify. Given that we are in the main and so I'm getting a little bit technical here, working with CWR formats, which is an old file format and it very often breaks. I don't think we've ingested a single CWR file that has not had issues with it. We reasonably estimate that there's probably a 5 % loss of information. And to be specific, for instance, that can be something as simple as column width. So we set it up, or CWR was set up in a world where you had two, three writers, four maybe on a song. Whereas today you might very well have five, six, seven, eight, nine. And the column width just simply breaks. There are other... Portions, which kind of is down to pure formatting of the files. So in every instance, when you transmit those files, there are always some kind of problem with it. Then the back office provider to the PRO then has to go and match that because of the CCID DSR process, which is something we can come back to lately. And that matching is always imperfect, not because the back office provider isn't doing a good job. It's just because of how metadata and how the infrastructure around those databases and matching services are set up. And then of course, each of these actors have to survive somehow and that comes with fees going back. So if you take into account data loss going in and fees going back out, you very naturally end up with very high transaction costs, right?

Bjorn Lindvall

And that is one of the things that we are trying to solve and work with the industry to find a more efficient way of going about

Jakob Wredstrøm

Mm.

Jakob Wredstrøm

So if you want to describe sort of your very boring startup language, like your serviceable, attainable market, is like 20 % of the publishing fees is like sort of how you, again, very roughly would argue that or?

Bjorn Lindvall

Well, mean, if I can borrow kind of an analogy from my friend Mark MacCuriatis, who I ran hypnosis with, he has for a very, very long time, as long as I've known him, said, American Express, Visa and MasterCard managed to process transactions around the world instantaneously for a fee of about 3%. So the question is more, Is there anything really, if you think about it from first principles basis that prevents the music industry from doing the same thing today? The short answer is obviously yes, there's a huge amount of hindrances and obstacles around that, principally down to how the supply chain looks today. But fundamentally, there are actually no hindrances to doing that, right? It is just about implementing a more efficient supply chain and crucially here than obviously getting everyone on board with having that. People are guarding a lot of their own interests. There is a significant amount of skepticism about anyone being able to build a very efficient operating system. And that's really where our kind of focus sits. So if you take it that a significant portion of the at source earnings in the publishing industry, for instance, then has a loss of anywhere between, call it high teens to 50 % and you should take that down to 3 % or there about, if not 3%, it's 5 % or 7%, there will always be fees, Then yes, your TAM gets very significant indeed.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm. Makes a whole lot of sense. I would imagine a lot of the naysayers and pessimists listening to this podcast would also be like, yeah, but like the bureaucracy and the partnerships you need to do, like it's so cumbersome, like how are you ever going to do that? How would you, how would you answer that?

Bjorn Lindvall

I mean, again, it's all thinking about the problems that the industry has from first principles basis. So whilst I need to tread a little bit carefully here about, you when it comes to our own strategy and kind of tactical concerns, right? Think about where does monetization of music happen, right? Clearly there's an analog piece to that.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Sure. Yeah.

Bjorn Lindvall

Which the PROs are handling in each of the countries. Think there are various initiatives going on around that and that will become more efficient over time. But on the digital side, really it's around being able for the digital platforms and as a DSP is kind of a catch all phrase here, that could be a gaming company. It could be a straight up. Streaming company like a Spotify and anything in between, think of a UUGC or AI, whatever it has to be. Now it's in their interest to, and this may be somewhat controversial to say, but I think it is in their interest to get creators rights holders paid appropriately and correctly. Every conversation I have with DSPs, the intent is always there. But there is a significant frustration around what the supply chain looks like. Now, with the advent of the MLC, so the Mechanical Licensing Collective in the US, I think to a certain extent, the gates have been blown off its kind of traditional hinges. And they obviously established a large kind of open and public kind of database, which anyone can deal with, even though it is complicated to deal with because... It's about 400 gigabytes worth of data on a weekly basis. So you naturally need to have scaled systems to deal with that. But that really has opened up, I think, a willingness to share data in a very different way to what it was even when we set up hypnosis. Really, The background to music, for what set up out of frustrations that we saw at Hypnosis. So when we bought, you know, 155 catalogs over two and a half years, which was a wild and crazy ride, very fun to be in indeed. We experienced the significant issues in understanding who was going to pay us and where and when. And the only thing that we knew was that there was a very significant difference between

Bjorn Lindvall

The net royalties, which is what we based all of our underwriting on and which is what everyone bases their underwriting on, and the gross royalties that the catalogs actually generated at the source of monetization. And I think the MLC has been a major force for good, though everything is, you know, nothing is ever perfect, but they have really opened up the willingness to have conversations about how things should work. And to have some practical implications around how you use data and what you use data for. I think the conversations that we're having is really all around using data in a scaled way for the benefit of the rights holders and the platform. And it's really framing it in that way and saying that with data being more publicly available. With allowing service providers like us to use the data in a slightly broader way than perhaps might traditionally have been acceptable, the rights holders will eventually end up making more money. And that's really what we are certainly here to focus on, and that is working with the industry from the inside.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm.

Bjorn Lindvall

Winning traditional mandates and then suggesting incremental ways in which we can upgrade that supply chain. That is really probably what I would say to the naysayers. It's not a game of revolution. It's a game of evolution. And you have to bring people with you on that journey. Coming back to what I said around the team, that's really where the trust and longstanding networks really does have.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm.

Bjorn Lindvall

An impact because to a certain extent in some of the things that we are doing, you're asking people to trust us. And that trust very often comes from having had long standing relationship asset with individual actors. So with the head of digital licensing at publisher, A, B and C, right? They're saying, can do this. Look at the team, look at what we've built. How can we provide you with proof points so that we can incrementally start to build towards a better world for you?

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm.

Bjorn Lindvall

For your creators and for the platform to like.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm. In sort of a utopian world where you would really do well, it doesn't need to be utopian by the way, who would be the losers here?

Bjorn Lindvall

I think that the question is, there any losers, right? Because ultimately by decreasing the amount of lost money, there will be more money available for the rights holders and there'll be more music made available for the DSPs. Again, DSPs being kind of the catchall phrase. I think if anything, it might be people like DocuSign, right, who handles, you know, traditional, you know, signatures on PDFs. And it may also be, you know, people who are handling the manual parts of the system. But as we have seen with many evolutions of technology, I think it's less about who loses and it's more around, can you move individuals who are working on manual tasks today to working on higher value tasks. So I don't believe in a world where people per se lose out from a more efficient supply chain. I think it's all about refocusing some of the efforts that are going into what is today that disjointed and highly inefficient supply chain to, instance, provide more focus and attention to the individual writers or creators that are out there in the world and quite frankly moving PROs, publishers and labels to quite frankly having a lower OPX figure and a higher degree of revenue. That's really where this goes.

Jakob Wredstrøm

I do want to ask a question about sort of how and why you ended up in music. So having the first touch point with Merck and hypnosis is a rather significant first step. So I just want to understand like how did that come about? And I think it's relevant to also why you're persistent pursuing what you're doing now.

Bjorn Lindvall

Yeah, mean, you know, staying in the music industry obviously takes a certain degree of madness, right? But I was introduced to Mark back in the spring of 2017. When I had some outside conversations, for instance, with some of the large financial institutions that ended up backing hypnosis and asking why this hadn't been done before, I think I have to give Mark all of the credibility for that because he is obviously an individual who is steeped in music history and who knows the music industry incredibly well inside out. But there are many, many individuals, especially on the creative side of music, who don't necessarily have a natural interaction with kind of ops and finance. I think one of the reasons why we were successful in hypnosis was that there was an openness from Merck and from me as well to combine those two worlds. So my background leads me to having a, I think, a deep and fundamental understanding for how finance works and what is necessary in order for a corporate investor. Back to one of your points earlier. What is needed in order for someone to understand what it is that is being done in the music industry. And then for someone like Mark to have the conversations with the creatives, with the rights holders, which I could never have or certainly couldn't back then have. It's really, again, it's down to the team. It's a combination. We had an incredible roster of very talented individuals who joined us at Hypnosis as well. And so it's really kind of down to that. I think that's point of differentiation. Now, why I stayed in music after I left hypnosis, it was really looking at the issues that we'd had in collecting, I think metadata is one of them and understanding who got paid where and whatever else quite apart from my...

Bjorn Lindvall

Fundamental and very deep annoyance with letters of direction, which I passionately still today hate. I mean, I grew up in Sweden doing a huge amount of sports. I ended up being one of Sweden's top three decathletes when I was leaving secondary school. I then went and joined the Navy as a mine clearance diver. I think the mine clearance diving division in Sweden's motto is never give up. And that is something that's been ingrained on my mind. I don't easily give up. And, you know, that's probably something that's, I think, made me relatively well positioned for tackling an issue in the music industry that has been hard to solve because God knows that, you know, from time to time you despair and then you just have to pick yourself back up and go at it again. Right? So it's about never giving up. And I think for my sins, that's probably one of the reasons why I'm going at this game still.

Jakob Wredstrøm

That make a whole lot of sense and especially the madness part and I understand you sort of your motivation to why I stay in madness and sort of how that reflects your background but you coming from finance and I could only imagine you know ended up working with Merck you didn't have a slow career before that. It's still to some degree must feel like a big risk for what the alternative could be. Could you your time on? Like now Hypnosis in itself was, you know, quite impressive journey. In reality, hypnosis was my start of startup life. Like hypnosis was what I sort of got me started to think about this whole thing. So I do give you a lot of credit for that, you know, honesty. But staying in that when the alternatives is going to something maybe more lucrative and more comfortable or even sort of more guaranteed. What's your thought process around that?

Bjorn Lindvall

I mean, right at the beginning of Music Infra, I did have the opportunity to go and become the deputy CEO of a medium-sized European private equity business. And it really came down to a conversation here at home, where I asked my wife, we've been quite lucky in life.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm.

Bjorn Lindvall

And we have the opportunity to make choices. And yes, that job, the other job would have afforded a kind of a very different type of existence, but it also would have come with the shackles of going back into kind of big corporate life in a very financially minded kind of setting. And I actually gave her the choice and said, look, you know, it's really up to you. Like, how do you think, you know, that we should lead our lives from here on in? And after some thinking time, she said, well, I think you'd be happier trying to run a startup and doing the zero to one again. And so we took a joint decision that was what I was going to do. And yes, I'm sure that life could have been more comfortable or different in many different ways. But I think, you know, when I'm

Jakob Wredstrøm

Wow.

Bjorn Lindvall

Sitting here at the beginning of 2026 and I see a team that's grown from kind of a very small kind of a few guys in the room with some form of ideas around how to solve this issue to having as we did second week of January, the offsite kickoff in Miami with the team where we now have pods of people and we have a phenomenal set of extremely high caliber colleagues. All working towards a common goal and something that I have been part of setting up. Mean, that in its own right is a very significant reward. It is also because I think that, you know, we are genuinely on our way to solving something that is very, very meaningful for individual creators and writers in the music industry. And I genuinely think that we can make the industry a better place. And a place where even non-mega artists can actually make a living. But I do think that requires looking at the startup scene and ways in which creators can earn money today in a slightly different way. And bringing it back to the music infrastructure company, having infrastructure which they can then plug into. You know, when I went to ADE in Amsterdam in, I think it was October last year, for the first time in the past probably three years or so, I saw a significant amount, a much higher number than I've ever seen before of what I would call viable music tech companies. So there's one company which is revolutionizing the way in which live music is being monetized. There is kind of a new streaming service out there which is non-algorithmic and kind of pays money out in a different way to artists. And you still have the same underlying issue which is you have a desperate view of publishing rights and who has those rights and they need to get reported to.

Bjorn Lindvall

But so long as we are flexible on the front end of handling, think of it as consumption data from the monetization point in the music industry. And so long as we work with the system, so with the publishers, with the PROs, with the creators, with the writers, then we can make the way in which creators and rights holders earn money.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Mm.

Bjorn Lindvall

Much more interesting and more efficient and that's really one of the things that kind of spurs me on and drives me in the everyday life here at Music Enforcer.

Jakob Wredstrøm

I'm going to ask you a question that's sort of slightly outside the topic today, but you sort of touching point on yourself and I do have a huge self-interest, so I'll take the egotistic opportunity. Could you comment on how you perceive the startup landscape in music? Sort of the strengths, the weaknesses, and I'm sure a lot of startups contact you for an idea of you also wanting to invest in them. So you must have seen a lot of different angles here.

Bjorn Lindvall

Yeah, I think generally speaking, it's super tough, right? It's really, really tough. Think Music Tech UK, for instance, issued an investment report kind of last year, which highlighted precisely that, right? It is very, very difficult. If you are a creative and you've worked in the music industry and you have an idea around setting up kind of a new tech company, again, being able to kind of, you know, find the investors and then explain it to them, which is a non-music industry way of explaining it, is genuinely really hard, especially if you haven't done it before. I'm trying to engage with, for instance, making a white paper that we have written in order to explain to, for instance, investors the way in which the music industry works more accessible. That is something that I think is a significant challenge. It is also, you know, what is challenging for a lot of people is taking a step back from just solving that individual problem and explaining that in terms of TAM and having a viable route to getting to the earnings. I think it's also very challenging with the current infrastructure and the licensing agreements that are in place across the entire industry to get access to songs, literally, if that is what you want to use. And finding your way around, you know, signing licensing agreements with the relevant kind of bodies that are out there, that is a massive challenge as well. So I'd say it is super tough. And because the investment side of life is very tough, And you often needing a period of time to build up your company before you can properly monetize it. That makes it effectively twice as hard, right? Because if you don't express the TAM correctly and your company's route to finding that TAM, then it's harder for investors to believe you and to give you the adequate amount of capital that will allow you

Bjorn Lindvall

To bridge from initial idea through to a point where it is viable and where you see the traction that you need.

Jakob Wredstrøm

You're talking about something very interesting and I'll tie it into music and for it because now it is relevant. You talked about white papers describing the case for the investors, basically educating them to some degree. The due diligence they need to perform are often very difficult for many different reasons. One thing is of course, domain expertise. But another thing is it's really difficult to do due diligence on this industry. There's a lot of lacking information, I would also to some degree say a lot of information out there is maybe not trustworthy. How do you go about creating a credible case where the underlying data academics or mathematics to some degree is missing?

Bjorn Lindvall

In reality, it kind of comes down to a lot of in-person reference calls. That's where, certainly in all of the cases that I've been involved in, that's where it effectively lands. You have to, I mean, in our latest round of funding, even though we're on the way, we already have kind of a body of... written text that we can supply people with, still the FAQ or the responses to due diligence questions in our case ran at like 40 pages. And that is answering specific questions about specific parts of the supply chain and how certain things work, right? And then... Effectively, each and every one of those questions were then reference checked by either investors who had some form of experience in the industry or by music professionals. I think one thing that we have to give the investor community credit for is that even if they speak to incumbents who perhaps have not reached the goals that they set out to reach. Investors always take an unduly pessimistic approach effectively as an opportunity. So they tend to see through that. I think tech investors, certainly early stage tech investors, are very, very accustomed to having issues that people proclaim as impossible to solve. That is effectively what they're investing for, right? That is what they want to see a path through. And so I think it's down to individual reference calls and then pairing that up with, there a team that I believe in here?

Jakob Wredstrøm

That's so interesting and now this sort of goes into nerdy territory. Like I'm just touching the surface of my own career. I just finished, well, half a year ago, second graduate masters in music business with, I just spent two years studying music tech financing, which I think is incredibly interesting and end up doing an academic piece on it, which was. Decent, I guess. But my whole conclusion about that is there is really nothing I can base this on, like almost nothing. And what is there is, I don't want to call it BS, it borderlines that. So how do you build up this academic body? And it sort of sounds like to some degree you've built up your own semi-academic body that is cross-referenced and sort of reliable, but you need to do it yourself because you can't really base it on much. Is that how I understand it correctly?

Bjorn Lindvall

Yeah, I wouldn't call any of the work that we're doing academic, right? It's far less rigorous than that. But yes, you do have to work on it. I think what's helped me here is, of course, the journey with hypnosis, where ultimately I did north of 500 investor meetings. And there are certain common threads that come back through that.

Jakob Wredstrøm

No,

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm.

Bjorn Lindvall

And one of them is effectively putting yourself in the shoes of being a primary school teacher, right? It's drawing diagrams that are colorful and simplistic. It is about abstracting your own thesis for what you are going to do in the music tech space to a generalized view that an investor can take a view on.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm.

Bjorn Lindvall

So I think being good at bringing your own music industry thesis back up to a generalized level is key for anyone who would like to raise capital running a music tech startup. And then when it comes down to, if you get to the point where an investor is actually doing due diligence, what they want to do is connect that generalized thesis, as mentioned, to individual references from people who have been active in the space for a long period of time.

Jakob Wredstrøm

The reason why we took this talk up today is because you announced a partnership with Tune Global, which with my limited knowledge is somewhat the first steps of least the outward appearance of commercialization. Could you try to break down for us what the deal is and how it works and how it's benefiting you in the long term?

Bjorn Lindvall

Yeah, sure. Mean, Tune Global, great company. We love them. What they do, they do a number of different things, but they effectively run white labeled DSPs for a number of different telcos and other things. And another part of what they do is that they provide label copy. So information about recorded music catalogs, which, know, a DSP, again, it's an all encompassing term. And in this case, Reaction or Music. So Reaction or who's a client of ours, they do music that reacts to in-game environments. And in order for them to have to know which recordings and what music they can use, they need effectively two sets of information. So they need the recordings that are covered by the licensing agreements that they have signed with labels. And then they need the corresponding publishing data. And Tune Global is providing the list of recordings that are cleared under the label agreements that Reactional has. That then needs to be paired up with the publishing catalogs in order to create effectively what is the cleared list of songs that they can then use. So Tune has over many years built up a repository where they have that list of label copy and they provide us with that. We match that with the underlying first party publishing data and provide that back to Reactionals so that they know what it is that they can use. And then the step after that really is that we then get consumption data back from Reactionals or from any DSP really. And match that up with the songs that were cleared for users in the first place, run that through a deal engine, by territory, by deal, whatever it is that corresponds to the underlying licensing agreements and then pay out on the basis of that. I think Tune Global as much as we are providing an essential part of the underlying infrastructure, that's also where Tune Global sits. They provide an essential part of the underlying infrastructure in order to be able to operationalize music.

Bjorn Lindvall

For any platform that wants to monetize it.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah, it's a globally is an incredibly interesting company. We've had gone on twice and several of his team on before. So that also really caught my attention and it makes a whole lot of sense. Beyond, we sort of about to round up the interview and thank you so much for being generous and open. If you were to succeed with this pursuit, I don't know what timeline that would be. Let's just say 10 years. How? would you imagine that things look like in the music industry? How would it be different?

Bjorn Lindvall

I think you as a music tech company or a wellness company or a gaming company will be able to have access to music that you can use in your relevant application in a ready and easy to get format. And that in its own right will increase the time. For all of the rights holders, be that on the label side, on the publishing side, on the performing rights side, and ultimately for the creators. All of the rights holders will be able to get paid on a monthly, on a weekly basis with the relevant analytics and knowledge of where the music has been used, how it's been used, and for what it has been used. And ultimately that decreases friction. In the music industry in its own right. And it's quite frankly makes copyrights and music in its own rights more valuable. And that's really what we're striving for.

Jakob Wredstrøm

That's incredibly interesting. Do have a few follow up questions, so I won't let you leave right away. Is this a winner takes all market? Like, do you guys need to be the essential infrastructure in order for this to work?

Bjorn Lindvall

I don't think it's a winner takes all. Think there is probably room for a few. But back to some of your points around raising capital, you do need a decent amount of capital to build deep infrastructure. And from a pure financial point of view, you can make the economics for using something like music infra more interesting the more... part is that we can amortize that capital expenditure over. So there will probably be a number of actors, but given the scale of the infrastructure that you have to build, I think it's going to be hard for it to be as fragmented as it probably is today.

Jakob Wredstrøm

So in other words, appetite from investors, informed investors would probably go down as more players enter the space and take market share.

Bjorn Lindvall

If you're looking at the infrastructure space, yes. But as I said previously, if you look at the front end for how music is monetized, for how you're helping fans, for how you're helping individual creators, as probably as the ability to use music in more settings go up, then I think there will be more opportunities for viable music tech companies to be created, survive and thrive.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Before founders listened to this podcast, could you imagine opportunities of building companies on top of your company?

Bjorn Lindvall

Absolutely. You know, and we, that is, that is part of the conversation that we are having on an everyday basis. It is really, because when you're a founder, you are constrained by the resources that you have both time and money wise. And if there's anything that I would like to say to founders, it would probably be around, think about what it is that delights your customer. And spend the time and the focus on building that unique proposition rather than thinking about the underlying infrastructure. What I'm saying is obviously somewhat self-serving here, but it's also part of the general thesis here, right? So if you have someone like us who have spent a large amount of time and capital building the foundational infrastructure, should you go about, and for instance, and this was the conversation we had literally yesterday with someone, a CWR or publishing data ingestion machine and data warehouse, when we know, I know full well how much resource that takes, or should you just rent it from someone, right? So focusing on what it is that is your central view on how to delight your customers, how to... pick up those customers, how to make the user experience of those customers delightful, that's probably where I would focus. And for us, that is other companies and we provide infrastructure, right? If you're thinking about, you know, the company that I mentioned about live, that is really around how do fans engage with live concerts, for instance. So rather than kind of thinking about what does my reporting infrastructure look like? Do I have all the publishing information? Do I have all the label copy? That's a gigantic undertaking in its own right. So yeah, think about the limited resource you have and use those to delight your customers.

Jakob Wredstrøm

This is a incredibly interesting talk. It has been today and obviously you are tackling such a big problem that I'm sure you'll have a lot of industry, I want to call it resistance, but you know, it will take time before people believe you at scale. I think, you know, there's many pursuits in the past that has failed. You've also argued your case why you guys might be the ones to potentially go about and solving this. But I love the... complete reasoning and all the answers. Really appreciate that. Beyond, it's been a pleasure. I really like to talk and thank you so much for today.

Bjorn Lindvall

Thank you ever so much for inviting me onto the podcast. It's been a blast. All right.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Thanks. Cool. Just stopping the