Disruptive Change is Coming to Music: Exploring the Fourth Phase [Keith Jopling]

In a new white paper “Music’s 3 Futures,” industry analyst Keith Jopling argues that disruptive change is coming to music. And no, these disruptions are not about AI music creation.

Jopling argues that digital music has already experienced three distinct phases of change:

1. Fear & loathing’ (Napster 1999-’04)
2. The era of unbundling’ (iTunes music store 2003-’09)
3. Music’s outright submission to tech (streaming and the hyper growth of Spotify (2010-’24)

Disruptive Change is Coming to Music: Exploring the Fourth Phase

The fourth phase is marked by a rise in the power of artists.

Signs are already everywhere: more artist ownership of rights, more distribution deals, more successful independent artists, greater choices for making and releasing music and a stronger voice in the industry.

We’re only at the start of the new artist centric phase and Jopling sees three areas where change will lead to a fundamentally different business.

1. Fintech solves Artist Funding – “Music labels have always held an iron grip on the acquisition of talent and the product of that talent, largely because they put up the money to fund it. Boy George famously said that record labels were “banks where the staff wear jeans”. This monopoly on content acquisition has been unassailable for the best part of a century. A number of alternative funding models have tried to unlock it, without success. Until now.
2. Music Marketing – “With artists now alternatively funded, they will spend on marketing services from providers of their choice. This means either from (their choice of) record label or from an artist services player, or a marketing agency. But the savvy option is to assemble a team of brilliant freelancers. They could also market themselves through self-serve tools (some with value add services) such as Toneden or un:hurd (or of course directly on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Google and YouTube).”
   • Promising marketing tech includes:
     • Match artist content with curator/influencer/outlet, targeting addressable fans more effectively
     • Enable pollination of CRM from content drops
     • Enable direct commerce from communities
     • Provide artists with ROI & attribution data on activity & content
     • Horizontally scale (and commercialise) previously promotional
3. Commerce & Consumption – “Spotify’s hyper growth came from the era of curated playlists. Curation trumped ‘discovery mode 1.0’ and big, branded playlists took off, effectively replacing (poor old) radio. But tech firms are nothing if not relentless. Spotify pressed on with hyper-personalisation. The algorithm took over and discovery mode 2.0 began to do its job, enabling Spotify to get into a comfort zone with music i.e. let users be their own editors.”
   • “But fans want context. People value the human touch. The increasing homogenisation and super-efficiency of streaming services makes them high-functioning utilities (if only our water and electricity companies could be this good). It’s all fine as far as it goes, but music fans want something special and artists need more income, so the opportunity is for new services and curators to fill the gap.”

“These ‘3 futures’ will bring specific opportunities and threats, winners and losers,” concludes Jopling

Read and download a pdf of the full “Music’s 3 Futures” report free here.

Bruce Houghton is the Founder and Editor of Hypebot, a Senior Advisor at Bandsintown, President of the Skyline Artists Agency, and a Berklee College Of Music professor.