Bold Predictions: The Future for Songwriters and Creators

(upbeat music) I'm Dan Runcy, welcome to "Trapital." Where it's that time of year, our "Trapital Summit" is right around the corner, two months from now. So we got some exciting updates for you, plus a new segment that we're doing themed with our summit to build some a momentum called "Bold Predictions" where you hear from some of the executives that'll be in the room and hearing some of their insights on where the industry is headed. But first, here's a few things that you should know if you don't already know about our summit. This is our third annual summit that we're doing for "Trapital," because this is the room where the most valuable conversations happen in music, media, and entertainment. They don't happen on stages with four to five people on a panel. They happen in rooms like this. We will be live on Tuesday, September 15th at the Sunset Room Hollywood in Los Angeles. So if you haven't already registered, make sure you do that. What are you waiting for? There's a link in our show notes that you can tap. The early bird pricing ends on July 15th, which is less than a week from today. So if you do wanna save a couple hundred bucks on your ticket, make sure you do that. And again, for those that have already been to our summit, you know what it is. Our summit is a day for deep conversations and relationship building with the sharpest minds in the game. No fluff, no filler, only the big ideas for the future. And at this year's summit, you'll hear from Steve Boom, who is the VP of audio, Twitch, and games at Amazon. Steve launched Amazon Music and now oversees Amazon's Music, podcast, audiobooks, live streaming, and more. You'll also hear from Larry Mistel, the founder and CEO of Primary Wave. Larry has grown Primary Wave into be one of the leading companies investing in music rights with stakes and catalogs from Whitney Houston, Prince, the notorious B.I.G. and more. They call Primary Wave the home of legends for a reason. You'll also hear from Aaron Teague, who is the executive vice president of product management at Disney. Aaron is also the subject of a Harvard Business School case study from her work when she worked at YouTube where she led a successful bid for the NFL Sunday ticket package. And you'll also hear from my guy, Kevon Stage. Kev is a comedian and actor who has built a loyal audience through social media with millions of followers across platforms. And he has turned that audience into deals with platforms like 2B and BET, and a nationwide tour force comedy. And he continues to take his stage to the next level. And you'll also hear from Sung Cho, who is the founder and CEO of Shark Metric. Shark Metric was launched in 2016 and Sung and his team have built Shark Metric into one of the most important data and analytics platforms in the industry. And it is used consistently to turn audience and artists into insightful signal. And Shark Metric will also be releasing a report in conjunction with our summit that we're very excited about. And that's just a few teasers. We have a more, more speakers and more exciting announcements to share about our summit. So I can't wait to tell you more about it. And again, our summit is about depth, not breadth, and we can't wait to welcome the founders and executives and investors who will join us in L.A. in two months. This year's Strap Battle Summit would not be possible without the sponsorship partners that have made it happen. Thank you to our Gold Partners, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group, our Silver Partners, Symponic Distribution and Dream Street in our Bronze Partners, like SoundCloud, Morgan Stanley's Global Sports and Entertainment Team, Splice, Shots Hour Capital, Music Match, Milk and Honey, Reed Smith, C-Sack, Bank of California, Video, Luminate, 68 Capital and Epidemic Sound. You'll hear from their executives, founders and investors as well in the room because again, these are the leaders that are pushing the industry forward. This is not the event to miss. The early word pricing does end on July 15th. So again, if you don't already have your ticket, make sure you get it, save a few bucks. And if you've already registered, can't wait to see you in L.A. For this year's summit, I had a new idea. I wanted to switch things up. I wanted to bring our bold prediction segment to life. Last year, Tatiana Sierra-Sano and I came together on stage and we read your bold predictions that you sent us ahead of time and shared our thoughts on them where we thought things were going one way or another. But this year, we wanted to switch it up where we wanted to hear directly from the executives that are leading our sponsorship partners, have them share a few bold predictions with us and we can discuss them on-trap it all leading up to the summit. So in today's episode, you'll hear from Lucas Keller, who is the president and co-founder of Milk and Honey. And you'll also hear from Maurice Slade, who is the head of music at SoundCloud. Each of them shared their bold predictions. So let's kick it off. First, you'll hear from Lucas, then you'll hear from Maurice. All right, we are here with Lucas Keller from Milk and Honey, who is joining us for our bold prediction segment leading up to our Trapital Summit. Lucas, welcome to the show. - Thanks for having me now, appreciate it. I'm bummed though, you're not gonna be with us in person at the actual summit though. - I know, it's like my European summer vacation is later than normal. - Well, no, we appreciate you being part of this, your support and being part of this segment as well. So as you know, coming in hot with a bold prediction for where things are going and music, media or entertainment. So Lucas, what do you got? - Yeah, so I mean, there's a lot of things I think of that. I think being a voice, a big voice for songwriters and record producers, mixers, et cetera. The worst thing that's coming for the songwriter is not AI. I think that the worst thing against the American songwriter is what I just call the Frankenstein pop record. Pop records have 10 plus songwriters and producers. Now I'm seeing records that have three to five producers on them, you know, 20 plus songwriters. Sometimes we look at a big hit and we say, oh look, it's the most published record of the year and nobody made any money. I think that is what's coming for, you know, for writers. It's more so than the AI situation. And if we don't change how the ANR community and the artist managers interface with the writers and producers and if writers and producers don't put their foot down about this item, it's gonna be not a real business. 15 years ago, there were 4,000 working songwriters in Nashville and now there's like well under 1,000. This changed from being a job, obviously, where you could have track nine on an album and make good money on mechanical royalties. It became a playlist in singles driven business. We've been living in that economy for a while now, but now in the business of, I have songs that stream, streaming that, you know, kind of saved the record industry. I think ultimately has had a negative effect on publishing. Now you have writers that are getting a 120th of a song. And I think it's gonna destroy that whole business and make it a vanity business. So that's something I'm deeply concerned about. - So for context, we're talking about, for instance, a song like Beyoncé's Alien Superstar having dozens of songwriters on that particular one song and that being a reflection of sampling and just multiple collaborators and that being a very common thing in today's pop music. - Yeah, it's like someone said to me once, it's like, out of all the writers, plus the samples, plus the lawsuits and nobody has any money, you know? Yeah, songs like that, you just go down New Music Friday. You see it happening more and more. And one of the things that's tough for my managers just just happened the other day. It was a song that we had three writers on it. It was written months ago. The Thursday afternoon, like Thursday afternoon of Elk and Hadi's a rough one because Thursday afternoon, one of the managers will get a call. Hey, you know, we got to talk publishing splits on this record that's coming out tonight. As if there's been nothing else to do, you know, until the Thursday afternoon. So I do think some of it is devious and kind of strategic from a time in perspective. But, you know, now all of a sudden, it's like, oh, we put these other, this is these other eight writers and these two producers that touch the record. I believe there's an every writer and producer deserves to have tracking on the whole life of the song. So when it was passed to another writer, or passed to another producer, this happens, by the way. Someone will say, hey, I want this producer because they do this specific thing. We try to be, you know, we try to be good citizens on that when people ask for consent. But largely what's happening is people show up with your song, the 33% of, is a bunch of new writers and now you have six percent of it. And it totally changes the economics, obviously. We have to push back a lot of it. It's a real problem for the writer community. Every time a writer agrees to that, it like sets the whole community back. - Do you think that this is a challenge across genres? Or is this predominantly a pop and hip hop challenge? - Started in hip hop. And I don't know if it's because five years ago, R&B pop was such a big part of pop. You know, hip hop was such a big part of pop. Like it started in hip hop and, you know, and now it's largely a big pop thing as well, you know. You don't see it in Nashville as much because I think their respect for the songwriter is just a different, totally different dynamic. But you're seeing it in pop music. It really started for me and our people. For whatever reason, the majors have allowed executives to have a lot of car vass, which I never understand. A guy that worked at Atlantic Records can have like a side company at Warner Chappell or a few of them. working at Columbia, you could have like a side company at Saudi music publishing, right? Then all of a sudden, it's like, oh, the guy put his like three writers on that are signed to his publishing company. It is so much kind of self-dealing and funneling money out of companies that I don't know how it's ever allowed, but it's something that I've just kind of detached, you know, and the way that this can change is just for writers and producers to push back and not allow to have them. The problem is for a lot of writers, the big song doesn't come around often, and they don't want to be demonized for being the person putting their foot down on an item on the song, that maybe the other writers are willing to go along with, and that's the bigger problem people have been talking about for a while is that writers aren't always unified, which is a problem, so you know. I feel like on the countryside of things, I would assume that, okay, that's a genre that's maybe less impacted, but to the point that you made earlier, if there's a decrease in terms of the songwriters who are employed in Nashville, then that's clearly still impacting things there. Yeah, it's absolutely impacting, you know, all parts of the business and all the genres. And I think the Nashville thing was also to be born out of piracy and then streaming. That's kind of been a long road to get there. This is something that can change. If writers are all willing to push back on the labels for doing this, you could really see this change. So anything is one of the things that happened to us the other day is one of the writers that showed up on the song for a big artist was the manager. Some of the craziness that we see, and so I think that's one of the things that our clients trust with being a milk and honey is that we will enforce their rights on this stuff. You know, hard to be the bad guy on that, but I think that's, that is really what the many things that people are relying on their manager to do in this space. Think about the AI point that you made. This being a bigger threat to songwriters than AI itself, because that's a pretty bold claim, but this is bold predictions. So why do you think that it's an even bigger threat than AI because I think a lot of people may hear that and say, okay, well, the composition, the lyrics and all of the things that are just being input into these LLMs in these platforms, why is this a bigger threat than AI right now for songwriters? There's a theory that the deals with the AI companies are like, it's like a standoff for the majors to make the best deal for themselves. It's like self-dealing and somehow that'll trickle, trickle down to the artist, but I think that's like a conspiracy that I think is like half true. I think for our, you're in my generation, like we have to point to Napster as the worst moment on the timeline of like teaching a generation of people that art is free. And I think we spent a long time recovering and then had this prosperous last like decade and change was streaming, but I think, you know, from here, it's like, yeah, AI could be like like a worse cliff than Napster was. I have to believe from just seeing the attribution models and seeing kind of how these deals are being negotiated, I have to believe that actually AI will actually create more value for the original copyrights. I think my point is, it doesn't matter if the AI stuff happens or, you know, it gives good or bad if you ended up owning 3% of a song, right, that it's going to draw out to you should find. So, you know, I think this business is still about owning a meaningful piece of IP. Writers should have 20% plus unsongs, generally. I'm not a believer that having songwriters would take the scorn a light bulb. Like, I don't believe that we need this many people on a song to make it a hit. Going back to the AI conversation, I just believe that the tech is good enough. And I get a lot of really smart friends that don't believe it. They don't think it's there yet. You always have to look at technology as, you know, today is the worst it'll ever be. And then speaking of owning the underlying copyright itself, I have to assume that and silver lining of this is that if the current future of the songwriting business does have its question marks in its threats for sure, then does that increase the value of the copyright for songwriters that already exist that you invest in through milk and honey and that other firms are raising billions of dollars to invest in those songwriting copyrights that have already been out there for music rights and catalog. Yeah, we've, I think when we started this company, we were not even up to, we just wanted to get records on the radio and have hits, but, you know, for the amount of catalog sales we've done, you know, in the last five, six years, even the negative effects streaming has had a publishing in my opinion, the long-term asset value of publishing is tremendous. I used to look at it when we have copyright infringement lawsuits and I'd see a guy settle and lose 10% of his song and I'd think about, gosh, you know, we start selling catalogs. What is that worth on, you know, 16, 18 times, right? And, you know, I still have just tremendous belief in music copyright. So, you know, old and new, we've sold a lot of old stuff, a lot of newer stuff and I just think it's so important that writers only reel enough piece of those songs and as come on May with AI and other things, it's we have to believe like there's, you know, a little trust in the majors and there's a bigger problem for people above you if it doesn't work out. I think that ultimately the attribution stuff will, will work out. I've just seen a lot of it and then I've been a believer in it. So if we check back in in a few years from now, what will have to be true in order for your bold prediction to, to come to light? If you check in in a few years, I think we'll have needed to see a group of writers on, big enough songs, put their foot down and, you know, and I think, you know, I think make a big enough deal around this culture of managers and A&R people that are doing this and cut a bad behavior. It's funny because it happens in the shadows, right? It's niche and it's hard to enforce across a, you know, a large group of people and it seems like when it happens, maybe it's not a big deal, but obviously like for a songwriter, this is all they have, right? It's like they're, they're master points and they're publishing. And so I think, you know, you know, a few years, what we would need to see is a handful of big enough instances, and you know, this happened a few years ago, right? Songwriters were starting to speak out about artists that took publishing just for no reason, right? Which I think was something that Carl Tom Parker started with Elvis, you know, years ago. You saw that. So I think there'd have to be some type of movement, which, which I'm, I'm hoping we'll, you know, everybody that does what I do and or is in the publishing business, everybody knows about this. And a lot of people are upset about it, but they have to be thinking of movement and writers that'll put their foot down. And I think it could change, but I, but I think it's important. And if you look at all the great artists, you and I grew up on that, none of them have less than 10% on anything. True. Very true. Well, Lucas, we'll definitely have to check back in on this one. But I appreciate you coming on, share the vote prediction and kicking us off with this series again, bombed you won't be there with us in person, but we know you'll be there in spirit. I'll be there next year. Oh, thank you. Appreciate it. I'll hold you to that. Thanks, Lucas. We'll talk soon. Thank you again to Lucas. You'll now hear from SoundCloud's head of music, Maurice Slate. All right. We have another bold prediction segment leading up to our trap little summit. And we are joined by the one and only Maurice Slate from SoundCloud. Welcome to the show. What's up, man? I'm glad to be here. Obviously, you know, I'm a fan and I listen to you all the time, so I'm happy to be on the show. Well, I appreciate you. I appreciate SoundCloud. This is our bold prediction segment. You're coming in with your vision on where you see things going. You've obviously been not just at SoundCloud, but in this industry for a while, following all the trends. So where are we going? What's your bold prediction? One of my bold predictions or the bold prediction that I kind of don't think is that bold is that I think we're on the dawn of a new creator. A lot of creators before the way that they showed their fandom, they would create a playlist or even way before then they would burn a CDR for a girl that they liked and would give them the CDR to show their fandom or to express themselves. I would say now that music is so easy to create due to AI. I think that we're on the cusp of a new creator. I'll give you an example. For my birthday, my mom will send me a happy birthday song that was created on Zoom up. My mom has never created music in her life, and now she's technically a music creator. So there's that, and then I also think the ease of creating music or AI allowing artists to expand on their music gives them more time to do other things. So that's everything from creating merge, creating a clothing line, creating film, AI will free up time for them to do those other sorts of things. A lot of the bigger artists that are popping now when I met them earlier, I actually met them while they were trying to do other things. So one of them being Shabuzy, he was actually into making films. If he had the resources and the network, he probably would have been a filmmaker before he was an actual artist. So with that said, now that he has the tools of AI at his disposal, I could see him being a filmmaker. I could see him starting the clothing line. I could see him also, of course, making incredible music. We're on the dawn of new creators. this leisurely kind of fan/creator and then there's these true artists that are gonna open up different avenues that they couldn't before because they were so huddled and focused on music. They're gonna be world builders versus like album or single builders. I like how you separated those with the more casual and then the professional. I want to start with the casual one because you brought me back with the CDRs. People taking the 2001 summer love mix and send it that to their grad friend or wherever they were with. There we go. There you go. Right. But how do we recreate that same type of energy with Soono or UDO or any of these types of platforms, right? Because if I go and type in a prompt for a girl that I like, let's say, you know, 25 years ago, back when I was in high school, how do we recreate that feeling? Do you know what I mean? Back when I was 15, this wouldn't be my route of trying to get to a girl of creating a song on Soono, but I feel like if I were to go that route, I think it would be literally, you know, typing in. Hey, there's this girl named Jane that I like. She loves to play basketball, loves to go to the movies, loves to go to XYZ and create a song about it or talk about specific experiences that you may have had with said partner or person you're trying to talk to. Yeah, I think it was all in the prompting. There may be even like, hey, these are the top 10 songs that we listened to during the summer, you know, and can we remix those songs and put them and make one song out of those 10 songs that we had. I think there's going to be different ways for fans to tap into technically creating music, showing my taste, showing like the different styles of music that I like that I want to blend together possibly. There's going to be different ways to show it in the future as well, whether it's like remixing or creating a song, all types of ways. And on the professional side of things, you mentioned Shabuzie. I didn't even know that he was pursuing a career in film at some point, but what it made me think of is that part of the reason you probably pursued music to your point is that the entry barriers at the time 10 plus years ago were lower, right? Someone uploading their music to music distribution platform and being early on a streaming services. So much cheaper to do that than for him to make a film. Obviously, I think that's still true today. Granted, there's all these video creation tools now more than ever, but I think it's changed a lot in music where I think for let's say 10 years ago, music was seed as the channel that a lot of people could have used. People that actually love music, but also people that wanted to be famous or wanted to break through in some type of creative space. And to your point, what does that look like in the future as these other creative mediums now have lower entry barriers? That's funny that you say that because I talk about that all the time. One of the things I compare to is media in general, the kind of life cycle of it is like, it starts is really, really hard to do. And then it becomes really, really easy to do. And on the front of that, like an example would be writing like the first caveman had a stone tablet and he was just like beating away at it. And it took a long time because there's only a few rocks around you got to go find it, et cetera, et cetera leads to printing press to now to like literally you could prompt and you can create a whole movie. Pretty much script. When it starts off really, really hard, it's almost similar to becoming art. And then when it gets to the point to where it's really, really easy, it's almost becomes a form of just expression, expression, like me writing an email is not technically an art form is just me communicating. And based off of the way that I communicate, you can gather certain things about who I am as a person. That's going to be the same thing with music. It's like the way that I would create a song on one of these AI platforms or the way that I would remix a song or something like that. It's more showing my taste level and like things that I'm into and almost like branding myself versus almost like an art form. I still think there's going to like music will still be an art form in that way. There's going to be incredible artists making incredible music that's futuristic and pushing the boundaries of artistic expression. But then there's also going to be this world where it's literally people using music as self expressing in a brand to like show off who they are as a person. So there's going to be two avenues. That second avenue kind of exists now, but I think it's just going to expand. It's going to be bigger down the road. It also makes me think of the stance that a lot of music creators and producers have right now where on one hand, you have someone like Timberland that's leading all the way in to AI, whether it's platforms, he's invested in him, doing music videos with AI artists. And then on the other side, you have producers like Jack Antonov that are like, I want nothing to do with this. This is not what I want to be involved with as a producer. And I think there's probably people in both of those camps and that's clearly a spectrum. But even that does show that yes, there are different ways that people can succeed, different ways that people can kind of go about this. Do you have any thoughts on where you think that divide will go? Yeah, I think it's funny because I used to be on the side of anti AI. So I went through that whole entire journey of like, I only respect true artists that go in the, go in the lab and spend 24 hours on one track and one song like that. I went through that whole line of thinking. And then over time, as you see the technology advancing, as you start to actually play with it and use it as you start to hear it coming from other artists. And sometimes you can't even, you get confused on whether it's AI or not. It's gotten to the point to where I just had to somewhat accept it. But I feel like if an artist is in the lab and they've created a full song and they just need a vocal sample or something like a synth to add to a song, but they produce the entire thing. Um, I don't think that's stilling away from the artistic integrity of what someone is making. The argument almost seems to me similar to Metallica and Napster back in the day. Like I think it's one of those things that as soon as I saw Napster, I was, I was like, this is the future, whether I like it or not as a kid. Like when I saw it, I was like, this is the future at the end of the day, whether people like it or not, AI is coming. It's, it's at our doorstep is either you get on or get left to sit there and argue whether an artist is a true artist based off of how they use AI. I think that argument is going to get old fast. And I know that because I went through that journey of being the person who was hating on AI in the beginning. And now I'm gotten to a place where I'm fully accepting it. And I think everyone has to go to that journey. I think everybody has to be patient and allow people to go through that journey. So what was it that changed for you along that journey? Was there a particular moment that you remember that made you go from one camp to the other? It was a conversation we were having at SoundCloud. And one of the folks in the meeting was raised a question and it was like, what's the difference between someone going to Suno or Yudio and getting a synth in what's the difference between DJ premiere or Kanye West sampling, you know, Otis Redding. And then I got it right away because that is in my playing field. It's like communicated to me perfectly. I would say that's probably the closest like pivotal moment I've had. But it was more of a like a gradual step to getting to that point. But that was probably the most pivotal moment I had with that with AI. Right. That makes sense. If that's time that frees you up to either improve the underlying music that you're creating or to do other stuff, increase in multi-hyphenates, which is part of your bold prediction as well, that being a bad thing is hard to hard to challenge. It's just going to take time. Obviously, this is a huge fork in the row moment for the world in general. Everyone's not going to come to the same conclusion at once. Or ever. And I think it's just going to take take some time. The one thing that I'm scared of is that with these incredible tools, they're just going to make things that fit the algorithm. The tools are set up to help them do that. But the thing that I'm super excited about is that kidness, like in his mom's basement, 13 years old, fooling around with the tool. That's going to make some incredible new sound of music or mash up a bunch of things that we love and create something new that wouldn't be able to be created if we didn't have these tools. That's the thing that I'm excited about that. And that's also the reason why I work at SoundCloud because more than likely that kid is going to come through our pipelines. And we're in search of that kid 24/7. That's probably the thing that I'm most excited about is that 13 year old kid in his mom's basement, playing around with these tools. But more and so appreciate you coming on. This is fun. Awesome. Thank you. Have a good and we'll see you at the summit. Absolutely. I'll be there. I'm excited. No, it's going to be a good time. And that is a wrap. Thank you to Lucas and Maurice for joining us. Thank you to the folks on our team, G Eric and Rwana for everything you do to help make travel possible. And most importantly, thank you for taking the time out of your day to listen. If there's one person you know that you think should be attending the Trapital Summit, or would really enjoy listening to Trapital, send them a link to this episode where the mouth is still the best way to grow. You can also send them a link to the summit if you know that you're going to be there and you think that they should be coming as well. And if you're listening to this episode or you're not already subscribed, what are you waiting for? Tap that follow button on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, wherever you get your podcast to make sure that you get the next Trapital episode. 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