Decoding Web3's Role in the Future of Music

Jakob Wredstrøm

For this next episode of Sound Connections, we're gonna have a conversation with Vicky Nauman. We're gonna talk about the future of what3 in the music industry. Vicky is the founder of Cross Border Works in Los Angeles, and she is an advisor and consultant for forward-thinking digital media and technology companies.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hi, Vicky, and welcome to Sound Connections. I'm very happy to have you here. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, it's a bit darker today than it only is in my room because it's getting a bit late now because it's early in your morning. But I'm so happy that you wanted to join. Vicky, I actually met you first time briefly four or five years ago because I was building a new technology, fintech platform within music that didn't... that didn't work out, but we tried. And I was, we have a common person we know that's called Josh Greenberg. And he said, you gotta talk with Vicki. She's the best in the business with what she does. And we had a small conversation. It was very clear to us, okay, she is way above our level, but I'm very happy to hear a few years later, still like have some connection with you. I've met you a few times since. But thank you, Vicki. Who are you? What do you do? Yeah, that's great. Thank you for. Thank you for connecting back to that. I do remember that. So I work in music tech. And I have my own company now, which is called Crossboard Works. And I sit in between music companies and tech companies. And for the most part, on the technology side, most of what I do falls into one of two categories. It's either a company at game, a platform has an idea and they, you know, tech company wants to then do something with music. They want to integrate music and bring music into their product. And so I helped them figure all of that out of like, how do we create a business model that marries music and their expectations with what you can do? How do we license it? What rights do you need? What are the right partners at the right stage? And so I helped you know, I help companies bring music to life. And I'm really focused, not so much on music, you know, entire music services, but more like all these adjacent industries of gaming and data and new platforms and new experiential tech, virtual worlds, web three, all of AI, all of that, and where the music business and these adjacent industries collide. And then the other kinds of

Jakob Wredstrøm

or strategy. And it's usually companies that say, we're at point A, and we want to be at point D. How do we get there? And it could be that they're going to buy another company. And I've worked on a number of different acquisitions where companies will say, you know, we're going to buy a distribution company and we understand some of it, but we don't understand all of it. I'll go in and make sense of, make sense of that company for the acquiring company. I've also worked on acquisitions where a company wants to buy someone else and then they want someone to look at the rights and to figure out if the rights are there. And there was one that I did last year that it was like, oh no, do not buy this, do not buy this company. They didn't do things right. You are going to inherit a problem. But the other aspect of my business, which is so interesting to me is that I came out of, I worked in radio for years. I then worked at one of the first legally licensed digital music companies, Real Networks had a joint venture back in like 23 years ago, which makes me sound super old, but it's the beginning of this. And then... And then I worked at Sonos, the Wi-Fi connected speaker system, and then 7Digital, and I started up their business and ran that, and they were a back-end music platform. So I have all this collection of knowledge that I have created over the last 23 years around licensing and APIs and rights and technology and integrations and hardware and software. And so, you know, a lot of this is just kind of a unique set of knowledge that I've had. And, you know, and I do a lot of work that many other people would not be willing to do. There are not that many people who want to do anything with music licensing, for instance, because it's so full of friction, it's complicated, you know, and you oftentimes, you know, don't succeed in the way that you want to succeed. It's tedious, but

Jakob Wredstrøm

I feel like I've built up all these great relationships with people at labels and publishers. And so one of the things that I decided when I started my own company in 2014 was that I was only going to work with companies that I personally believed in. And that has made such a huge difference to me because when I bring things to labels and publishers, they know that it's something that I believe in. Just that, oh, somebody paid me some money to bring this here. Wow. Yeah, because it is a very complex industry and like deep diving into what you do, I'm sort of like baffled, like that is some complex stuff. Like how do you navigate that? Are you a one person team? What do you work in teams? Like what's your primary thing? Well, I made a conscious decision that I don't want to hire a bunch of other consultants to do this because There's a number of reasons. The first and foremost is I want to do the work and I want to choose the companies that I'm working with and I want to learn. If I just become an administrator, then I'm farming all the interesting workout to other people. And so other people do things differently, but I just pull people in on projects. If you have a network of people who if I need support on some area where I don't feel like I'm an expert, I will pull them in. But for the most part, I would say probably 50% of everything that comes to me, I don't do. So I just have my own criteria of what I do, the kinds of companies I do and don't want to work with. And so I'm largely a solo entrepreneur and I love the autonomy of that. And then the teamwork, you know, I always have a desire to build and to work with teams and the teamwork really comes through the projects and the companies that I work with. So I get to be a part of all of their teams. That's great. When I hear you talking about your work, it's very evident there's a love for music there.

Jakob Wredstrøm

So what's your relationship with music? Did you grow up as a musician or what's your intro there? Oh my gosh, music is such a huge part of my life. And I was a musician, I mean, as a kid, I played the piano, I played the bass clarinet, but I'm not good. And I mean, I had some skills, but it isn't ever anything that I ever... considered doing as a career. And during the pandemic, I bought a Yamaha keyboard and I still have my sheet music from playing piano when I was younger. And so I've been trying to relearn, I've been trying to relearn Bach and a lot of these pieces. And it is really hard. And my brain remembers what they sound like, but my fingers, it's like, oh, I trip over myself all the time, but it's... but I feel like it is a, you know, is a fan. I still remember when I was a kid, the first time I went to a great independent record store by a university where I grew up and I walked in and I just thought, oh, I've been buying my records at the mall. I'm gonna come here all the time. I love it. You know, immediately felt like I found my people. And so music is, you know, I just love I love music, I go see a lot of shows, I love rock music, I love electronic music. I mean, I have a pretty wide taste. But I feel like music is just the central part of my life. And I always know that there's a risk sometimes when you're working in the sausage factory and you see how things are made that sometimes it can sour. your appetite for it and I've always tried to really kind of separate out the music that I love as a fan versus the roll your sleeves up kind of dirty work that I have to do in the business and try not to let those two things get too commingled. No, it makes sense. I could definitely see that, especially when you work in the level you do, I think you probably see a lot of stuff. Yeah.

Jakob Wredstrøm

And just to comment on your love for music, normally I'm rather passive on Facebook, but I really do enjoy looking at your Facebook posts because there's so like this content here and there and just enjoying yourself so it's very cool. So what I think is really cool about you is that you are very cutting edge with what you want to do in the music industry and especially the last couple of years I've been following your commentaries on Web3. And that's sort of like the focus we're gonna have today. It's gonna be about Web3, the opportunities, the challenges and what we can do about it. So can you explain to me, what is Web3 and what is it to the music industry? Yeah, well, Web3 right now is in the midst of lots and lots of change. And I would put things, you know, kind of frame it out as largely built on decentralized technologies using blockchain. And that opens up on top of decentralized tech, a new suite of the way of ways that artists and fans can engage, the way music can be monetized, the way that experiences can be customized. And I would put it into kind of three big buckets. One is token-based communities. We had a big burst around NFTs for a couple of years. There was a lot of opportunism. I think a lot of that when it was kind of perceived by music fans as cash grabs. And so a lot of people are kind of backing off of this now, but I think what is emerging is a new kind of fan club and a different way for fans and artists to engage, to have communication, to kind of create a digital community. And I've been following a handful of companies like, you know, Armand Van Buren has a really interesting community going on. There's also a project at The Orchard with a virtual metal band called Shredders. And so they're very much an experimental mode, but clearly everything is really evolved away from one-off NFT purchases for music and toward

Jakob Wredstrøm

communities and some ways around fan engagement. The second big category, I think, is back end and different ways for fans to invest and invest in music and music rights and engage with services that are either audience where people can listen and get rewards, or it could be royal where people are investing and getting little. you know, shares of songs. And then the third is more experiential, which is metaverse, virtual worlds. And the best example of what we have now in that category is Roblox, and they are not necessarily a, they're not decentralized. They have a centralized platform, but we have Decentraland, Sandbox, and a number of others that are in the building process. But... But these are really virtual worlds where artists can express themselves, they can engage with fans. But gaming is a huge, huge part of that segment of Web3. And because when you're in a virtual world or you're in some sort of metaverse environment, you're going to be with friends. It's social, it's real time. Games are a big part of this and then music is this layer on top. So I think with all of these technologies and all of these experiences, we had a big burst of activity in 2020 through mid 2022. And a few things that are happening is I get questions from labels and publishers all the time saying, did what three happen and I just missed it? Is the metaverse over? And I feel like, well, no, you didn't miss anything, but companies are building infrastructure, you know, these token based economies that are kind of evolving out of NFTs, they're, you know, like the user experience was pretty bad for those first couple of years, you know, you had to buy crypto, put it in a metamask account, you know, then attach your mask account to different platforms and then buy, and then where are your NFTs and

Jakob Wredstrøm

very far from being a mainstream experience. It was very much a niche, you know, enthusiast type of experience. So almost all the companies that are still operating in this space are doing things like, you know, letting people transact in credit and debit, creating wallets in the background, having a more traditional e-commerce flow, you know, in different ways to engage with people that are marrying up what we know now with these different underlying technologies. And on the metaverse side, there are quite a few companies that are building infrastructure. And what I think many people missed in the potential of Web3 and these decentralized tech is that if you think of the early days of digital, like going back 20 years, we didn't have smartphones with storage. We didn't have Wi-Fi everywhere. We didn't have AWS. We didn't have ubiquitous connections that would enable rich media to be streamed in your home or on the go. And so that was all infrastructure that took years to build. And with decentralized technologies, it's kind of the same thing, where all of that infrastructure is being built right now, and it's just going to take time. And so I think the user experiences and the values of what this tech can provide in our world to artists and labels and publishers and fans is still yet to be seen. But I think that what will likely happen is we will have all these hybrids of kind of

Jakob Wredstrøm

kind of blending into the things that we know now about fan clubs or new releases or touring and bringing things to life that will not be just for the Web3 enthusiasts, but that will enable across our existing businesses. Yeah, that's really interesting. One of the things that I heard you say is like it's something that's developing and will take some time to mature. One of the questions I'm asking on behalf of myself and the podcast is the complexity of the space right now. We work in Capella and with a company Mintix within blockchain. And we're doing something very practical. We're doing NFT ticketing. And it's sort of easy to understand for me. I'm not a technologist. I'm a very practical person. But for me, I can understand that concept. But for the more advanced stuff you're talking about, that is super advanced. Like how is that What's the opportunities for entrepreneurs? Is it accessible yet, or is it only reserved to like very, let's call it established founders with good connections that's access to capital? Is there a place for, let's call it, semi-experienced founders to go into this space right now? What's your opinion about it? Well, I think that because we're kind of at an infrastructure stage, It's a little murky to me because I think that, you know, some of the things that have lit up opportunities for entrepreneurs and for smaller companies in our current economy is knowing what are all the tools that they can draw upon, who are the big platforms, you know, do you want to build for Roblox? Do you want to build for Facebook? Do you want to? build something standalone, you can leverage AWS, you can use iOS and Android transactions. There's so many things that you can draw upon and that's still a little bit unclear right now with Web3 of who are the infrastructure companies? And it doesn't make sense for every single company to build every single part of a tech, of a decentralized tech stack vertically.

Jakob Wredstrøm

And so we don't quite see where that's going to play out. But I watch companies like financial institutions, and they're still all building in blockchain and their permissions, so they're closed blockchains, but they are still experimenting with all of this. And so I think it's going to take a while. for us to get there. And we did have a lot of companies that popped up during the pandemic that were small, that were trying to do things with NFTs, building on different blockchains. And, you know, this is, you know, some people became really cynical about it, but in my view, it's just part of the natural process. And if you look, you know, if you look back in time, the early days of... music experiences, and then things like live streaming and on-demand streaming and all of these different technologies that came, there's always a burst of activity. And then there's a settling and lots of failure and those many companies fall away, but then there will be a few that emerge and that are here to stay. And you know, and this is, it's hard to imagine now. you know, I remember when Amazon, I lived in Seattle in the 90s and until 2007. And I remember when Amazon was this little company, you know, and it was like, they want to sell books online. And that, you know, there were many, many other retailers that were trying to do that at the time. And we're trying to sell, you know, books and media. And there were, you know, as you know, you can you can love or hate Amazon, but They were one, they were a really good example of a company that came out of the ashes of many other companies that were in the same, at exactly the same phase and then they grew. But I'm, but one of the things that I feel is different about Web3 is because the technology is decentralized and that I think it may open up some opportunities in music where it isn't necessarily always about scale. It can be.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Much more about a small group of fans that are highly engaged and that they can monetize something for an artist at a level that's meaningful without having to be a part of an enormous global platform. That's really practical and interesting thing you're saying. I remember you had a talk I was attending where you talked about the top of the pyramid about having these fans having access to spend more money on their fandom. Could you elaborate a bit on that point? Yeah, absolutely. And we have to go back to kind of the early days of setting the 9.99 streaming price, which is now bumping up, which is great. But in the days when most music was pirated, and this is like pre-2010, before 2010. Most of the music was still, there was some economy around buying downloads, but most everything was still being pirated. And so there was a, every single conference that we would go to, we would sit around the room, say, how are we ever going to get people to pay for music again? And what came out of a lot of these conversations was, We have to, when Spotify and there was an early service here, Rhapsody, these streaming services, the jukebox in the sky, there's this value proposition of giving people everything that they want, but you don't have to download it to your device. It's cloud-based and there were all sorts of statistics that we reviewed, like the average person spent... like they bought two CDs a year and they listened to the radio. And so that was what the average consumer was. You know, I was definitely in, you know, in a category where, you know, I was spending way more than that on records every month. And so what we did is when the streaming services started, it's like, okay, if you're, if you're buying two CDs a year, you're spending maybe $30, 30 or $40.

Jakob Wredstrøm

On music. So spending $120 for a subscription service that's $10 a month is a stretch. But the value is so good that you can get everything that's ever been created that price point was really viewed as a way to get the mainstream consumers off of P2P, file sharing and into paid services. But what we did in the process is that top of the pyramid people like and people who spent way more than me who were buying 10 CDs a month, they got the best deal in the world. So they went from spending $1,000 or $2,000 a year on music and recorded music to spending only $120. And then because we gave them everything, we really removed the need for people to spend on fandom and to spend on artists and to spend on music. We kind of lopped off the top of the pyramid. And that's where I feel the Web3 Promise is really, really interesting because it opens up ways and reasons for people to express their fandom. They can be a part of a token community. They can buy virtual merch. They can engage. They can get

Jakob Wredstrøm

You know, experiences and communities and, um, fan groups that we just haven't been able to capture. Um, and so most, you know, most of that discretionary spending is now going to live music and concerts. And I also spend a lot of money on going to concerts. It's like, it's like medicine, you know, I, I need it. And, um, But I think that if we can get this back out of the live space and get it back to things that are experiential in a digital world and that are fan-based, I feel like we have a chance to recapture that part of the pyramid that is missing. That's really interesting. And I think that also really addresses more niche artists and people who really, again, as you said, it's not necessarily about scale. And I think that's really important for the internal dynamics of the industry and just the opportunities of artists that are not necessarily mass scaled. I think just really important thing. I love that aspect and I'm very excited about that as a young entrepreneur, like venturing into the music industry at this time. Time I am, I just turned 30 and I believe like the best is definitely yet to come. Like you know, the next 30 years for me is going to be really, really interesting. I think it is.

Jakob Wredstrøm

We're on the cusp of another really, really big change. And it's a combination of the technologies and what they can enable. But it's also a combination of so many artists are now choosing a different path where maybe they will sign with a label, but do an admin deal or they're gonna stay independent. And so they can... they can have so much more control over their own destiny. And a lot of the things that are, a lot of the things that are going to be coming out in the next 10, 20, 30 years are very, very artist-centric. So it isn't so much about licensing a full catalog of songs to a gaming platform or an experiential platform. No, that problem has been solved. with on-demand streaming of giving users access to sound recordings. But the next big wave is really about artists and it's about artists engaging with fans. It's about artists, you know, in, you know, immersing themselves in their fans, in virtual worlds and experiences and games. And this is, this is, I think, going to be a really exciting, highly creative era. that were on the cusp of. Yeah, and that's the general sentiment I'm also feeling in the industry. We had an episode with Rasmus Rex about the user centric model and not because that's gonna be game changing per se, but it just really represents a sentiment of what's going on in the industry and the companies that are like Spotify, they're in between. If you two, I just wanna go a bit back into entrepreneurship. So- I'm really interested in what our listeners can do about Web3. Before we talk about specific advice of maybe what they could venture into, if you can give that sort of advice, could you tell me what do you believe are the biggest challenges right now? What are the things that are premature so we sort of can set some frames from what are the opportunities? And of course, this is not an actual statement, but like your opinions, general opinions about

Jakob Wredstrøm

What to stay away from because it's premature and end up big challenges. Well, I think it's a great, it's a really, really great way of thinking about it because there are, one of the areas that I think is kind of a danger zone is with blockchain, there have been this whole slew of companies and individuals who say, It's perfect. Artists are gonna cut out the middleman and it's just gonna be artists and fans and nobody needs anybody else. And we're going to disrupt the entire music business. And what they don't realize is there's, there's been like 20 years, every time there's a new technology, this is what people thought about digital was, oh, nobody needs a label anymore. Nobody needs publisher. It's all going to be artists and fans. And it really isn't the way that the industry works. And so I think that if anyone who is listening is thinking, I wanna use blockchain and I wanna disrupt the music industry, number one, I would say, music industry operates in, it's a huge web and we have a handful like three enormous companies that control the vast majority of the business. So you are not going to disrupt them. don't think that you're going to go and disrupt universal music. It's not going to happen. But what you could do is if you want to be disruptive, then you kind of go to the edges of the industry and you find the independent artists who may be anywhere from a hobbyist to a global superstar. And you think about what does that artist need who has already made a decision to have a little bit more independence and freedom about the choices that they can make in their careers. You can build for them. And that can be very disruptive in a positive way. And then, you know, related to all of this is rights and metadata and licensing. And there is a, you know, there's an enormous problem that we have globally around knowing who owns what and how to pay them.

Jakob Wredstrøm

We have lots and lots of complexity. There's local PROs in every country, and then there's CMOs that sit across countries in different repertoires. We have labels and publishers, territory rights. And this is an enormous data and human problem. And so if you're looking at kind of going into that space and trying to solve some of those problems. We definitely need a lot of entrepreneurs, but we also need entrepreneurs. When I first started wrapping my head around all of these problems with data and licensing and ownership and matching sound recordings to publishing, at first I thought, oh, it's going to need to be a huge company. Then comes it. solves all of this. And then my position on that is evolved. Now I don't believe that anymore because I think what we need is like a thousand small companies building for scale that are solving things locally, that can solve in Belgium, that can solve in Norway, that can solve in Sweden and Denmark, and then get things right in your home country and then see if you can expand that out a little bit. because the rights and the metadata problems, they occur everywhere, but there are human issues and really, really hyper local problems that need to be solved in every single market. Yeah, I've thought a lot about this space. And Tracey, is there any opportunities and stuff that I can figure out? But it's just like, I'm just struck by how complex it is and the bureaucracy, like I had a... few talks with one of our common friends, Dan from copyright Delta, and it's really interesting how they're approaching the problem of having this system they're doing, but also it's just incredibly complex. It's just like I'm very fascinated how they think and how they work, but it's also even though it's an opportunity and I think what you're saying about doing it on a local national level, that really sparks my interest because that's the first time I've heard it and that makes a lot of sense. But again, it is super complex.

Jakob Wredstrøm

The problems and issues within that realm. Well, it is. And there are there. There's never ending like moths to a flame of people who come from outside of the industry. They come in and they say, what? You guys can't have clean metadata and you can't match sound recordings to underlying compositions. You guys, this industry is really stupid. I'm just going to come in and fix it. And what they don't realize is that. That problem in particular, which is a good example, is resulting in hundreds of millions, if not billion, of dollars every year of money that can't be matched between sound recordings and publishing, and that money gets settled and paid out to the biggest rights holders when you don't claim it and when you can't match it. And so, there's a disincentive to fix the problem. If you're a major publisher or a major rights holder and you're making, or an entity that's operating in this space and you have a couple hundred million dollars that you're going to receive and not have to pay out to anyone, why would you wanna fix the problem? Yeah. Yeah, and it's so complex. One of the things you said that I think a lot about is, people from the outside trying to solve the music industry problems. Not because I meet a lot of those people, but it's very evident for me how complex just the dynamics and how we speak and how we work together in the music industry. We recently hired a general manager for Capella Entertainment who does not come from music industry and having meetings on meetings talking about contracts and business models where it's like, I know it doesn't make sense, but let me tell you how it works. And that's like a continuous talk we have. Because like... There's some complex stuff that has gone on in the music industry that's really hard to translate into other industries and how they understand them. Exactly. Well, and like a great example is with Web3. There were all of these new technologists who came into the business and they were like, great, you know, we want to do NFTs with artists. And so they very quickly realized, oh, you can't actually do an NFT with an artist because artists assigned to a label.

Jakob Wredstrøm

And so the artist doesn't have the rights to be able to do that, except maybe if it's a non-music and that's probably not what that artist's fans want. So there was one case that there was a company that went to a major label and negotiated a deal for an audio visual platform that was going to do NFTs. And then the major label said, go talk to Vicky and have her help you figure out publishing. So they came to me. And they're like, well, they said, I don't know why we're here. I don't know why. I don't. We already did a deal with the label. So I don't know why we have to talk to you. And I said, well, the, you know, each song has two copyrights. You know, there's the label and there's the publishing. And so you only have half. And they said, no, that's not right. No, we have it all. And I said, no, you really don't. You only have half of the copyright you need publishing. And he's like, well, what is publishing? So then I explained that's a composition. So when someone sings a song, the label owns the sound recording, the composition is underneath. So you have to license the composition. And then he said, well, we don't really want to do that. And I said, well, you don't have a choice because you're operating under copyright law and copyright law... will not, you know, you will be violating copyright law and you will get yourself into financial problems if you use the music without publishing. So then he's like, okay. And so then we get into the, you know, the kind of the, the layers and layers. And I said, what did you agree with the major label? And he's Avenue share. And I said, okay, how much are you giving the label? And he said, 65%. And I said, okay, so I have some bad news for you because this is audiovisual. So publishers are going to expect the same amount. So they're going to expect 65 percent. So now everything that you are trying to do is 130 percent. There's no money for you and you're losing 30 percent on every single transaction. And I, you know, I'm just watching the guy's expression and he's like, I don't know what you are talking about. And he's like, how could I have how could I have?

Jakob Wredstrøm

Gotten here without knowing this. And I said, well, how long have you been in negotiations with the major label? 13 months. Oh, wow. And nobody told you this. You said, well, they mentioned publishing, but I didn't understand it. And I said, okay, so you now have a deal that you can't do anything with. You can't move on it. So you need to go back to them and you need to tell them that you need to renegotiate it. And, you know, and that's such a good example of someone who spent 13 months of their life negotiating a deal. They came from outside of the industry. They didn't understand the way it works. They agreed to terms that they didn't really understand. Huge waste time and effort. And they're going to walk away for sure saying, I hate music. I hate the music business. It doesn't make sense to me. But it's also like, you know, you can't, you can't come into this business without either your eyes wide open and people who can help you help make sense of this. But you also like it's a long, you know, it takes a long time to do things in music and a lot of people come into it and they think it's something that they can be. fast and they're going to get in and get out and they're going to light something up and they don't need to build relationships and they all just burn, they just flame out and burn out and they're gone. And so I feel like the work that you're doing to try to create much more knowledge around entrepreneurship in the music business is so important because you can have a great idea in music. And it will fail not because it isn't a great idea, but it'll fail because you don't understand the layers and all the nuances of how the industry works. Well, thank you for saying that, but I totally agree. And I think the navigation part of it is one of the hardest thing. And yeah, like we're gonna have Turo on the podcast talking about network because he's a master networker, but like just that is one of the things you can't learn. Like you gotta know people in order to make things happen. And

Jakob Wredstrøm

I don't think there's other industries that are that multifaceted in the things you need to know in order just to do anything. Well, and I think the other nuance that most people miss is it's a relationship driven industry, but licensing is really transactional. You can't do licensing without having a relationship, but having a relationship doesn't mean that your licensing is going to be easy. It's still transactional. It's still really difficult. And so that's another thing that I think people think if they just go around and meet a bunch of people that a label or a publisher or an artist or someone will agree to work with them just because they know them or they like them. And that doesn't work either. And so, and I was working with a huge, huge hardware company. And they wanted to do something in music. And I said, okay, we need to go make the rounds and I need to introduce you to people and get them comfortable with you. And he said, I don't understand why we have to do that. We buy chips all the time and all we do is, we call people up and we negotiate a rate card and then we're done. And I said, well, it's all about relationships and whether they trust you and whether they want to work with you. And his face turned red and he said, you meet. He said, do you mean to tell me that they might not want to do a deal with the company because they don't like us? And I said, yeah. And he was furious. And I feel like it, it like pushed buttons of childhood or something. I mean, I was like, don't take it personally. This is not about you. This is just how the industry works. And they want to know that you're going to. do the right thing with their music and that you're going to execute as planned and that you understand copyrights and paying people and all of these things, but he was just furious. So I feel like it is not for the faint of heart, but the people in the industry are really lovely. I have such good relationships with people and got their own agenda.

Jakob Wredstrøm

But I'd much rather work with people who have an agenda than people who don't. And it's just a matter of understanding what everybody wants and then saying, can we make this happen? And sometimes you have to say no. Yeah. That's great, Vicky. I love talking with you. We sort of soon rounding off this podcast, I just have two questions left. Yeah. The question is, what is the future for Web3 for music? Practically, what is gonna happen? But how should we prepare ourselves for the future with NY3? I think that if we think about these three buckets of kind of token-based communities, investing in rights and kind of listening to music platforms and then deeply experiential, I think they're all going to evolve really differently. I think I believe that the token-based communities and fan clubs I think there's an enormous potential there. I think there's a really, really big potential there of different ways and better ways to engage with fans. And, you know, when you go outside of music, you see things like Starbucks hoarding their entire loyalty program to Web3. And it doesn't really change things from what the users are doing and what, you know, people are still buying coffee and getting their loyalty points. But underneath... Starbucks has this new sense of this, how they can manage and rank and share little benefits and rewards to people through this decentralized world. I think if you translate that to music and artists and fans, I think there's an incredible potential there. I think there's room for artists and fans to monetize directly. I think that there can be, that can be a great way to kind of release, you know, first listens, you know, tie in your tour dates, all of these things to this community. And so I definitely feel like that is an area that everyone should be looking at and thinking about community and fan engagement. And what have you got? And if you got an email list and you've got...

Jakob Wredstrøm

know, Facebook and Instagram and TikTok and all these algorithm, all these algorithmic, is there a subset of fans that you could pull from everywhere that are maybe your most engaged fans and get them into a tight community? And that's going to evolve a lot over the next few years. And then I think on the more experiential side, This is also something where I, you know, it's expensive right now to build in roadblocks, but I think the costs are going to come down. Motion capture is going to get, you know, less expensive, but I feel like, you know, if you, if you're a label or you're an artist and you, you're thinking like, what would this look like for me to do a concert to me, for me to engage with my fans in virtual worlds and to try to really think about. Think about ways that you can experiment with that and try some things out and learn firsthand what kind of virtual merchandise can you sell to people? And is it a platform like Roblox or is it games and gaming engines? But really thinking about those deeply experiential, those deeply experiential things that artists can do. to express themselves, present themselves as an avatar or in real life, but marrying some of those kinds of things to when you're touring and when you have a new release and kind of blending your web to the activities that you do all the time and then trying to add something more experiential into the mix. Wow, exciting. Well, we definitely got to talk some more at one point, probably very soon about all of this. But the most important question is, what's your future? What's going to happen in your consultancy the next couple of years? What's going to be your focus? Well, it's a lot of what I'm talking about with you. I mean, I'm really, really bullish about gaming, about experiential things, these fan clubs. And I think that when I...

Jakob Wredstrøm

When I look at everything that is going to be coming forth, it's artist-centric. So these artists can be signed, they can be independent, but it's about putting an artist in front of fans in new immersive environments and engaging those fans directly. And that's really exciting for me also on a licensing side because... If you know, we've gotten to the point now where we have what, like 100 million songs in Spotify and Apple music, you know, it's, it's to me, that is, it's phenomenal what on-advance streaming has done to trans to kind of, kind of transition the industry into this new economy. But, but it's not that interesting to think of like, okay, great. Now there's, you know, 10 more songs that are being released into a pool of, or a lake of 100 million. To me, that's just part of a machine and it's almost like a utility and it's awesome, but I don't really get that about it. But I do think, let's take those 10 songs and put them in a game or put them in a virtual world or release them and let fans remix as a part of a membership club. Those are the kinds of things that I think are really exciting and that are going to open up different revenue streams, but also different ways for fans to connect with artists. I love it. Well, Vicky, thank you so much for taking the time to be on Sound Connections and inspire founders and entrepreneurs and people curious into this space because, as you said, I believe it's a very important mission to inform and indicate this space. Thank you so much and thank you for taking the time and then I'll probably see you very soon. Exactly. Thanks for having me and keep up all the good work. Absolutely. Talk to you soon.