Music Moneyball x Musonomics: Who wins after the catalog gold rush?

(upbeat music) - Welcome to Musics, a podcast about the business of the music business from the economics on up. - And you're also listening to music money balls, standard innovations podcast for music, cast-log investors looking under the hood at how the market works and where values created. So today we're doing something a little new. This is the first collaboration between our two podcasts and we're putting the conversation out to both of our audiences. From Musonomics listeners, Tom is the CEO and co-founder of Standard Innovation. It's a British data consultancy that helps music rights investors, the world over, build the data infrastructure that they need to deploy capital faster and operate their portfolios at scale and they make their music money ball podcast. - Larry, I have to say I'm absolutely enchanted by your voice and absolutely privileged to be doing this podcast with you. - Ah, cut it out. - And I would love nothing more to introduce you to our audience. So Larry is the professor of music business at NYU and director of the Sony Institute there and has spent years studying the economics and structure of how the music industry works and is changing the Musonomics podcast long-out dates, music money balls, so it's an absolute privilege to be doing this with you today. And today we are going to be looking at what is or what we expect to happen after the cast-log gold rushing recent times. We've seen a lot of acquisition, there's lots of new money, lots of new entrance coming into the market and we're going to try and draw some comparisons with other sectors. But before we do that, Barry, why don't we have a bit of a discussion around where the market stands today, what all of this latest activity in terms of people entering the market, merges and acquisitions happening, means for the cast-log investment space. - So let's just accept that the shift in music consumption recorded music consumption from the physical media to permanent downloads to streaming really changed the way that music consumption happens in most every territory around the world and that that shifting consumption to streaming also changed the economics for the way that recorded music is not only consumed, but also monetized. It has also changed the long tail, if you will. And it has also changed the shape of decay curves that happen and here I'm talking about the revenue decay curve that occurs historically in recorded music and really any hit oriented business, which is the period after initial release and the peak of consumption through to the decay and revenue over a period of typically in recorded music five to seven or so years after which the revenue performance of that song or that album achieves kind of a steady state of predictable consumption and revenue performance and it is really that predictability that has dramatically changed the way that investors and in particular institutional investors think about music as an asset class utterly driven by the streaming boom in a way that really enabled institutional investors that were not plowing a large bucket of capital into the music business, into our industry really over this last five, six, seven years or so. - It's fair to say that they do enjoy in a new as a revenue stream. - Indeed, so for much of that first phase, I think of that as the time when hypnosis had come to town and when not only hypnosis but also round hill had begun acquiring many, many music catalogs along with a relatively small number of other institutionally backed copyright acquisition platforms and I mentioned round hill and hypnosis in particular because at the time they were all, they were also operating public funds and in other words, these were listed royalty funds that the public could invest in and the traded on major exchanges. Today though, there is far more capital in the business. There are many, many, many more buyers and in fact, the number of visible catalog investors has more than doubled since only 2020 and just this year, music IP has become an even more active M&A platform this year than it has been over the last several years and just by way of example, we have Concord BMG coming together in a $7 billion deal. We have distro kid, the independent distribution platform trading for around $2 billion in valuation driven by CVC, the private equity firm cobalt, one and a half billion dollar acquisition by primary wave, the closing of downtown, $775 million acquisition and a virgin part of UMG and also a curve royalty systems the spin out from downtown and revelator by one or music group all producing strong evidence on the strength of the music M&A space just in the first bit of this year and in fact, just in the first quarter of this year, catalog fund racing has already surpassed full year, 2024 levels and so there's that. So what's important here I think is the shape of activity from acquiring individual catalogs and in some cases songs towards much larger platform and company consolidation in other words, we are shifting from an era of acquisition of almost any kind of music rights by many of the competing platforms now towards a zone where scale and operational excellence is likely to rule that day and of course, we point to primary wave and cobalt and recognition the successor to the hypnosis platform and Sony along with their financing partner GIC in Singapore and Concord BMG as evidence of that shift. - It's fair to say there has been a lot of activity and by and large, that is a very positive sign when people are acquiring other businesses in the sector typically backed by debt. That means at some stage they've had to persuade a third party entity that there's going to be significant growth not just to cover the interest rebayments but also significant further payments on the principal too. You have to prove out that this market's gonna grow otherwise you're not gonna be able to raise that type of money. So activity unless it's a very distressed market like this is typically a really good sign of a healthy market, of a growing market. But there are some consequences. Obviously the structure of the market starts to change. So you start to create more larger players with more kind of a higher platform to jump from more capital to invest. And I think that one of the big questions that a lot of people are asking is, gosh, with all of this activity, is it going to be incredibly difficult to compete now with these people who have huge outsized budgets compared to the vast majority? And what does actually mean for us as catalog investors or people coming into the space, is there opportunity still how are we going to survive, how are we going to compete? And I think we're gonna come onto that and a bit more through the lens of a case study in a Jason industry that we'll talk about. But before we do that, I think it would make sense for us to. rewind a little bit. And when we're talking about these now major platforms to help understand actually how what we would refer to as the majors in the music industry came about, why that's important, and then we're going to overlay that onto an adjacent industry, the TV and film industry, which will come to another little bit. So Larry, why don't you give us a bit of a posseed history of the majors and how they became majors? Fair enough, I mean, they were not hatched, fully formed, looking remotely like the companies that they are today. And in fact, the majors looking back over, well over a century of recorded music is the story of independent, risk-taking entrepreneurs who were music people who built significant businesses often in overlooked parts of the music industry and genres of music and territories where music was popping off around the planet, built something really great and eventually sold to a bigger player. And although we could go back, you know, 120 years, I often think about really the era of the 1960s and '70s is really when this really you know came together. And when we think about the great music entrepreneurs of that era, we think about Ahmed Erdogan at Atlantic Records and Jack Holtzman at Electra, Chris Blackwell at Island Records, Barry Gordy at Motown, Herbert and Jerry Moss at A&M Records. And in later years, before the turn of the century, Clive Calder, of course at Zamba. And they built great companies, they had massive hits as independent companies. And they all sold at different times for different reasons, whether that had to do with succession planning or the need for deeper capital requirements, whether there were new competitive pressures for them or changes in distribution. And I think about changes in distribution as really being a primary driver, as the fact is in the 1960s, it was really CBS records under Clive Davis first, Goddard Liebertson and then Clive Davis in the 1960s, who really put the CBS branch distribution system, of course, CBS being the forerunner of today's Sony music in place where there was warehousing and logistics and distribution infrastructure in each market, in each city that was able to sell directly to retailers, in a way there, where they could get synergy out of coordinating national marketing campaigns, manage physical inventory in those days of physical record sales from vinyl through CDs in the 1980s and beyond. The ability to roll out hit records fast through their control of manufacturing facilities, the leverage that they had with retailers and the ability to extract higher margins. By the late 1960s though, in particular from 1967 to 1970, we had Steve Ross at Kinney Systems, who had already acquired the record company associated with the Warner Brothers studio, Warner Brothers Records, who went on to acquire first Atlantic records from Amit Erdogan and then Electra from Jack Holtzman, and having learned from what had already happened at CBS Records, Warner under Steve Ross was able to combine distribution and form Wea, Warner Electric Atlantic by 1971, and extract value from having built shared infrastructure that allowed, in this case, each label to maintain its own A&R presence while benefiting from the sales and warehousing and logistics and international expansion that they were able to extract from the core, and for artists, the benefit was their ability to be able to sign with a company that offered culturally distinct A&R while benefiting from major distribution. So really significant vertical integration we're talking about there. Up and down the supply chain, hey, we can just do a much better job because we own various parts of the supply chain, whereas other people have to rely on what is actually pretty complex stuff at the time? Massive vertical integration, in fact, and if you think about it, if you were an independent company and that you were dealing with independent distribution across many, many, many regional and local markets in the US and around the world, if you think about it, in the physical era in particular, when you were dealing with, in some cases, large multi-door retailers, and in other cases, you were dealing through other intermediaries to other places that also sold records even if music sales wasn't their primary business. If you were a retailer, who were you going to pay first? The major company that was likely to deliver all of the hits that were going to end up on your end cap displays next month and next quarter, or the independent company who may or may not have anything. And so, it became hard to just collect the money that you were owed from the independent distribution platforms that existed if you were an independent company. And so, really, there was tremendous leverage in becoming part of a major distribution play in those years. And I mean, there's an obvious parallel that we can draw there between Cobalt and Primary Wave, isn't there? Okay, well, let's do some vertical integration and get some economies of efficiency and specialization. Absolutely. And there are some extraordinary competitive advantages that are in place at both Cobalt and Primary Wave today, maybe more on those companies later on this episode. But there are some very distinct advantages that each of those companies brings to that new platform. Yeah, super interesting. Carry on, Mary. Right. In the sum, having fewer bigger players really changed what everybody else in the market was able to do then in the 1960s and 1970s through the CD boom beginning in the 1980s. Even through the Napster and peer-to-peer of file trading disruption that started around the turn of the century and beyond, through the download era and now into the streaming-dominated music discovery and consumption universe that we are in today. But Tom, what analogs exist in adjacent industries that we have heard of or are familiar with from which we can learn some lessons? Yeah, I think when we started talking about the content for this episode and trying to distill down all of the activity and what that actually means for people in the market and what tangible things that they can take away or consider. Obviously, looking back to the music industry is really important to understand how it got to its shape and I think there's really significant lessons that can be learned from what's happened historically in the music industry. But just to give a bit of breadth to our opinion on point of view, we thought it would be valuable to see if we could find another example in a comparable industry where they've also had pretty seismic shifts and to see where people have used that opportunity to use the consolidation and found the vacuum behind that to be a bit more agile, to be a bit more innovative and find a way to actually start to out-compete with some of the big guys. And we looked at a whole bunch of different places and, you know, if you look at kind of a by and large mid-market PE, you'll see these aggregation plays and then you'll see some innovation coming up behind within investment in technology. But I think one of the ones that really caught our eye was actually in a very adjacent industry and the TV and film industry. And the more that you look at the two, you understand the kind of power dynamics are pretty similar. You understand that they've gone through a pretty similar challenge over the past 20 years. And actually it's created some pretty similar looking opportunities there too. So just to give everybody a bit of a sense of what we're talking about. Now if you look at the concentration of power in the TV and film industry, the big guys, the Disney's, the Warner's, the discoveries, you know, in North America, I think they own about 80% of North American box office, which is massive, very obvious comparison to the music industry. And probably if you want to go back 20 years, you know, we might well be interested in TV and film consumption, but I'm certainly no expert in the industry. But if we go back, I think 20 years, then you've got a pretty clear story arc that is very, very similar to what we've seen in music. So 2008, financial crisis, people have less money in their pockets. They're not going to this cinema as much, but they're also kind of interested in escapism. They have to justify the increasing cost. They have to justify the increasing percentage of their kind of disposable income. What are they going to go and see? They want to be really kind of blown away out of this world stuff. And it's at the time when the big movie theaters or the, you know, big movie studios are at their peak. They're doing really well. You know, they've got a fantastic business model where they can afford to pay these huge blockbusters. And they've also got secondary markets with kind of DVD distribution. And then the ongoing TV networks through cable and everything else that actually it's pretty diverse as a channel. And it means that they can afford to take bigger bets on these big budget movies. And for the low ones that are necessarily so successful at the box office, they've got a steady stream of revenue that comes in off the back of it. So that's roughly what the market looked like then. And then they've also seen kind of at the same time a bit of a dip in what would be traditional icon led movies. So the big movie star names that they would traditionally use to put, you know, effectively almost guarantee the success of their movies. And I think it was around 2010 when you got the likes of oblivion with Tom Cruz and after us with Will Smith. They just didn't really do very well. And then simultaneously we've got a growing global market. So, you know, Americana is growing globally. Obviously massive content distribution coming out of North America. It's being consumed by China huge markets. There's a lot of growth there. But there's also the understanding that intricate dialogue doesn't typically translate that well. But what does is, you know, big flashy explosion, yeah, explosions CGI good versus evil can't go wrong. And you know what, they were absolutely right. I think in 2012, Dark Knight and Avengers did about $2.5 billion globally. Absolutely massive films, huge franchises and surprise, surprise. The studios are like, well, we're going to back this stuff. We've owned the IP, the stars are fading. We can't even put Tom Cruz in a movie and guarantee it's going to be a success anymore. Let's turn to Spider-Man. So what do they do? They make hundreds of thousands of Spider-Man movies. Some of them are very good. And at the same time, we've got Spielberg and Lucas standing up on stage saying, I got a minute. These big guys will only ever finance superhero blockbusters now. And you've got all of these amazing kind of Ota directors, Sophia Coppola, people like this. They can barely get a movie sign. I mean, even Spielberg and Lucas was saying, hey, we really struggled to get our movie finance. Like, what wall is going on? And just that that kind of peak of power, we start to see the streamers coming in and where historically there would have been distribution platforms. Obviously Netflix was kind of DVDs in the post to begin with. They actually started to create their own content. And I think there's a bit of a recognition that hang on a minute that these guys are the competition. You know, we're giving them all of our content and they're the competition. And now they need to start doing something about it. So a lot of aggregation happens, a lot of consolidation. Disney 71 billion acquisition of Fox in 2017. That's a big number. Warner Discovery, huge merger. And a lot of these mergers are really kind of financed by debt. So what are you going to do to carry on servicing that debt to make sure that you're going to be able to justify the acquisition and everything else. Go back to what you know, which is big budget, big superhero movies, rinse and repeat. And I think for everybody else out there that's kind of, oh, crikey, we've got Amazon, we've got Netflix, we've got these massive, huge titans of companies, studios now. How on earth are we going to compete with those? Again, pretty comparable. There's lots of kind of analog that you could draw between music and the kind of aggregation of power in the TV and film industry. And in the backdrop of that, there's one specific example that we really want to talk about, which was A24. So A24 for people who don't know them, started out as distribution only. But now they produce very distinct films, they're behind everything everywhere. I think all at the same time as it calls, all at once. Moonlight, Marti Supreme, recently. And they, you know, in this backdrop of these mega-trons of studios, they understood that, hey, you know, we can actually do something different here. We can be very attractive to these people who have amazing stories, who, you know, have it slightly different lens through which they want to create a movie. And we can kind of ponder to them, we can give them what they need. And we can find a point of difference to the, to the big guys. And I think that that's probably the most important story that really flows through this whole thing is, yes, when there are big superpowers at work in any given industry, that doesn't mean that they're totally indestructible. What it tends to mean is they'll produce content or products or whatever it is for the middle of the bell curve. And that typically means that the rest of the market is pretty underserved. And if you look just, you know, Larry, you're an economist, I guess, at heart. And I think if you look at just general market dynamics, you would expect typically in a free market, a theoretical free market, then you'd have lots of different players. So I think lots of different parts of the economy of the marketplace. And that just wasn't happening here. And I think that that probably hasn't quite happened as much recently in the, the music industry as well. And people start to pay attention to that. They start to understand that actually the significant opportunity in 824 just did a really good job at that. So first of all, they started welcoming in these very credible names. And they were solely distributing for them. So Sophia Coppola and people like this. And then in 2013, they did, they had their first big commercial release with spring breakers. I haven't actually seen that movie, but I certainly remember a lot of the marketing campaigns around it. And they really started to leverage influence driven campaigns, social media. They were taking a very different approach, much lower budget to what the big studios are doing. And they kind of proved out that it actually works. That was their first proof point to say, hey guys, we can take a gorillas approach to marketing. We can back really strong content and we can make it work. And then they also given that they didn't have the same legacy of supply chains, relationships and everything else understood that the stream is probably the direction to go. So they started to create relationships with them. And well, one of the earliest kind of people to build a relationship and a commercial one at that in 2013 with Amazon Prime. And from there, they started to build their own content. You know, now they had a distribution channel. They started to build their own content. They were using that point of difference that they'd created understanding where they could win against their competitors. And they were employing that to really amazing success, I think in 2017, they created Moonlight, got an Oscar for that, showed, hey, if you stick to your knitting and really understand the market and what they need and understand the consumer, you will be able to find your place, you will be able to compete in the market. And they just continue to lean into this street culture. I think anybody who followed the marty supreme. that go to market over the past 12, 18 months to see Timothy Chalamet appearing on Zoom calls and wearing their hoodies and all of this stuff. Like that's just totally different to what you would expect. Certainly if you're running another superhero movie and they just lent in hard, so hard in fact that they created their own streetwear brand, which turned into a multi million pound dollar profit business. So tens of millions of dollars of profit they're making from streetwear, which of course is not at all their core competence. But a real reaffirmation that if you know what you're doing can be brave, you can find adjacencies in the market and go and nail them. You'll easily out compete the big guys there. And the one thing that I also came across once we're doing some research on them, which was the most striking example of and kind of points of comparison between what we're seeing those who are acquiring music rights in the music industry doing is they made, they remastered a film from, which is a concert incidentally, by talking heads called Stop Making Sense. They remastered it into 4K to release it on IMAX and the release of their 4K version was more successful than the original by some margin. And I just thought, you know, if there's ever a great example of where you can take these historical assets, you can apply a slightly different way of thinking you can understand the mechanics of how the market interacts today. And you can leverage those channels, you know, UGC and everything else. You can really, you know, you can really stand out and there's really a play for many, many smaller participants. It's not just about the big guys. And I think invariably the big guys, they can't necessarily do these things because they've got huge budgets, huge revenue, huge piles of debt that they have to service. They need to do things that really move the needle and kind of our house-ish films is just not gonna do that for them. And I think the biggest message that I would take away from that comparison is just play to your strengths and don't be scared of theirs because they invariably will be playing in a different pond. What looks like lunch for them is very different to what looks like lunch for you and just embrace that like understand where you can be agile, understand where you can move quickly, understand where you can be more creative and that will typically be the path to success, I think. And yeah, I don't think we could have found really a closer analogue between the two markets and I would certainly recommend that anybody who's investing and proactively managing assets in music rights goes and spends a bit more time looking at A24, they've just done an absolute killer job and such a fascinating thing to learn about as well. - Well done Tom. And not so closely related to music, but as you were just talking about A24, I was thinking about the new forms of live in person entertainment built around old films and in some cases very old films. And here I'm thinking about the incredible new production of the Wizard of Oz at the Sphere, which is just astonishing, it is truly, for me, one of the all time greatest entertainment productions I've ever seen, it was just stunning. And as I understand it, they are about to give a similar treatment to Rocky Horror, which should be out sometime next year and maybe more germane to music. And I know that you had them recently on Music Moneyball is what pop house is doing in particular with Abba, with their investment, with Kiss and with what I just read about yesterday, their investment in Iron Maiden and who knows where that will lead in terms of new forms of immersive live entertainment. - Yeah, I agree. And I think pop house and primary wave, they know the place, they really deal with the iconics and I think anybody, the smaller players or people who are looking to come into the market, would you stand there and say, we wanna go toe to toe with those guys because they're extremely well-catalyzed, they've got some amazing assets, they've got great stories around things that they've done, they've got a really strong success there to show, probably not, that's probably not where I'd wanna be competing, but again, if you look at the A24K study, actually there's so many other opportunities that there's so much of the market which isn't touched by those iconics, whether it be subsections of genres, whether it be foreign markets that aren't even Western European markets that are non-English speaking where by and large, their famous pop stars might not even be known outside of those countries, but in them are absolutely massive. I think just taking a step back and really asking yourself, where do we want to compete? How do we want to compete? How are we gonna differentiate? They're the important things and not to be concerned by necessarily what other people are doing or the level of capital that they have to deploy or the purchasing power or anything else, there's always opportunities to compete. You just have to find it. You have to find your niche, you have to find your specialism and if you can speak to those people and you can speak their language, then invariably you're gonna be able to compete. Fair enough. Of course, the basis for competition in music has changed dramatically in the streaming led digital era, right? Where it is not necessarily a form of permanent competitive advantage to own access to, well, manufacturing and physical distribution just by way of example. And in thinking of recent music examples, let's just talk about primary wave for just a second who are celebrating now 20 years in business, having executed, I think rather brilliantly, their focus on only acquiring legendary and iconic music IP, that's it. If it doesn't meet the test of legendary and iconic, they're not gonna do it. And so they're not investing in new frontline content. They're only working with well-known, well-loved, intellectual property on the one hand, but they are not just acquiring it and warehousing it. They, to their credit, have built incredible capability around creating new forms of IP that sit on top of their old IP that they either required straight up or cobbled together from multiple parties. And maybe the best example that we can think about when talking about primary wave is the Whitney Houston example where they acquired the underlying rights from a number of parties and then went out and build the Whitney movie on top of all of that, which did rather well. And of course, the slot machines. We could never, never not, of course, the slot machines. Right. You're absolutely right. And I think they, they are a primary example of picking your strategy, knowing your focus, sticking to your focus, and absolutely nailing your focus. And I would say that that just applies to anybody, just because somebody else is also living in that market or in that pool doesn't mean you, you know, you can't find your own needs, you can't find your own area of specialization invariably through specialization, you get focus and true focus, you build the muscle around it to reinforce that specialization. And then you grow more quickly and, you know, I think a lot of people have this fear of leaving things on the table or, you know, saying no to deals. But really, if you look, you know, critically, the people who grow the fastest, who do the best in the long-term are those who really know who their consumers are. In this case, it's invariably the people who they, primary way, for example, want to do the deals with. They can speak to them, they know the challenges, they understand all of the complexities of managing estates, and they have a massive track record to say, hey, look, we've done it before, we can do it again. And this is just where we're at, where we live. And I think for the new people or the smaller catalogue investors, they can just find, you know, they can find a focus. They can find their own particular. niche of which there are so many, there's so much opportunity. And I think that's probably the most important messages that do tend to be vacuums left behind when these large consolidations happen. And even if it's that like vertically integrated play where primary wave might now be able to have slightly different economics or each deal, they're not going to be investing in the smaller catalogues, they're probably not interested in the iconics of France or whatever it is. But actually, you know, that's opportunity for other people to go after. Indeed. And to the consolidation theme that we were speaking about earlier, when we think about what cobalt brings to primary wave, which as we understand it is going to continue operating as a somewhat independent platform, although owned by primary wave, that cobalt, of course, has a fantastically successful independent recorded music distribution platform. And also digital rights administration, offering throughout much of the world, which together and when connected directly to primary waves offering, I think is going to be a fantastically strong competitor to the majors. And I think it will prove to have been a really productive business combination for primary waves investors in particular. Yeah, I think so. I think I think is a really smart bit of business and well done to both of them really because invariably it has to benefit both sides of any deal. So kind of given that and given the consolidation that we've been talking about, where in your points of view, and now we are getting into predicting the future, where do you think the opportunities are opening up now for investors who are either in the market or maybe started thinking about their fund 12 months ago and it's coming to fruition now and they're looking to set out their strategy and deploy capital. Where do you think that those opportunities lie for them? Right. So whether we're talking about operating platforms or copyright acquisition platforms specifically, there is the regional acquisition in particular in the global south and there are increased levels of competition now and interest in capital being deployed across Latin America in Middle East, North Africa. And I think about what the majors have announced as their initiatives in that territory and also companies like reservoir through their eventually with Paparabia in that part of the world in India, which is of course tantalizing for Western operators, but I think for cautiously difficult to operate inside of, but India I think holds great promise as well for the now emerging and really fully emerged non-Bollywood independent music that is coming out of that country and throughout really the rest of the global south and the Far East too. And besides looking at the territories though, many of the funds have been focused on acquiring rights to content that has already and really in some cases long ago achieved a steady state of revenue production where those initial revenue curves have fully decayed and to the point where, you know, we really understand very well what we can expect as a baseline of revenue production from those catalogs a year after year after year as they enter into, you know, evergreen music consumption. But we are also starting to see much more recent rights being acquired too. In other words, music catalogs that have not fully decayed yet. And so it's a little bit more risky and some have characterized the acquisition of those music catalogs as being sort of akin to catching a falling knife that if those rights can be acquired well could be extremely productive for those funds, you know, willing to take that risk. Yeah, of course, you see the obvious example. And I know we've referred to them a number of times on the podcast, certainly friends of the podcast too. And I think that they're doing an incredible job at exactly that. And, you know, their approach is very systematized. It's very data driven. And actually, their business model is rather socially different. But super interesting is to how aggressive that they can be with that insight and how much they back themselves to actually understand how, you know, front-line music is going to decay or not over time. What other opportunities are you seeing, Tom, besides the, you know, the regions and ventures that we've been discussing? I think Larry, I would always recommend, you know, first look on your doorstep and be creative to see what opportunities there are better. And the ones that you talked about, they are probably the big macro opportunities when you look at the big, big picture. But I think there's so much opportunity locally. And that, and again, kind of going back to that E24 case study, you know, they didn't feel the need to go and start in a foreign market, foreign language films or, you know, totally change their geographic distribution or anything like that. They just understood very, very well where they can compete where other people are no longer favoring what would have been historic opportunities. And I think that that tends to come out of the back of consolidation really, because when consolidation happens, those people need to move the needle because by and large, they're corporate going to beast and the end of the game is to make a profit and to grow that profit over time. And if you've got debt, then obviously that comes with it too. But that means that everything becomes quite relative. So, you know, if you're a billion dollar fund, then to grow, you need in absolute terms, just much, much bigger numbers. And that means some of the things that you used to find attractive, that you used to focus on, you just can't anymore. And that's the opportunity for other people who have different mechanics, who have different financial levers behind them, where they can actually go and do those things. And if they can talk to the audience, if they can find a new shift, they can explain their story, if they can use different techniques, if they can understand how media consumption engagement is changing, then there's really significant opportunity there. And I just think in any aggregation consolidation, there is always a vacuum left behind. And what tends to happen is the innovators, both in TV and film as we referenced. And also, as you referenced in your history of the music industry in the last 100 years, is the innovators tend to find those opportunities and they tend to film them. And then they tend to grow quickly. And after that, they either tend to be acquired, which is a good thing, because if you're going to raise third party capital, probably the first question they're going to ask you is, what's the exit strategy? So you've got a good story behind that. But then also, you know, it's just healthier for the industry. More capital turns to come in. People focus on it. When it's a bit more competitive, people are pushed to find different ways, be a bit more innovative. And I think that's just genuinely a really good thing. So I wouldn't be pushing people to go and explore what can be very risky, quite costly exposure in foreign markets, unless you already have distribution there or people on the ground or relationships is just take a step back. Look what's local. Look what's in front of you. Really understand your strategy. Really understand where you differentiate and how you win against a competition. And then just execute on that. And I think we've talked really two amazing examples. So primary wave and music. A24 in the TV and film industry. They pick their lane. They knew where they belong. They executed it. And they knew it was differentiated. And they've done a great job. Fair enough. And well done to you for having described it the way that you've did and into those companies for having just out executed almost everybody over this last 20 or so years. Yeah well Larry and the thank you for the conversation and the overview of the music industry and your point of view on where you think the future is going and the implications of consolidation and the detailed insight and now we have to do the strange thing of the quick fire round where both of us have to answer the question which I'm very much not used to. So I'm going to do the asking first and then you're going to ask me an old trauma best answer. Okay good are we going to both answer the same question. Yes. Okay. So I shall ask you first. So Larry if you could own one song what would it be and why? So this is an impossible question for me. It is. That's why I can first, Larry. I can give you three songs for different reasons and I have to say that it doesn't have to do so much with the revenue potential of the songs or the ability to exploit them in new markets through new forms of media or immersive entertainment that don't exist. It's just the way that they have landed for me for decades and the goose bumps that they continue to make me feel every time I hear them and the songs are in no particular order. Thunder Road from Bruce Springsteen. Great track. Roadrunner by Jonathan Richmond and the modern lovers and my my Boston Massachusetts upbringing may be showing there but yes Roadrunner is on the Mount Rushmore of songs that I would love to own and the third one is over the rainbow somewhere over the rainbow. Amazing. It's always nice to hear people's points of view and everybody takes a slightly different angle and I think it's also I think it gives an insight into what people enjoy musically in their backgrounds and everything else. In fact, even just saying over the rainbow is sort of gets me a little bit choked up. Yes. Well, quite. Over to you, Tom. What is it for you? So I was taken a little bit by surprise whenever reminded me I had to answer this question today but thankfully the answer for me comes comes quite easily. So and I shall explain why. This was the song that my wife walked down the aisle to and my eldest son is also named after the artist and it would be could you be loved by Bob Marley. And also obviously very topical given the conversation primary way. Indeed. And in a shout out to Chris Blackwell too. Exactly. Yes. It's just been a name dropping there. Well, Larry, this has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for agreeing to do this with us. And thank you so much for having us on musenomics. I'm so glad that we did this. I hope we get to do it again and not too distant future. You have made a big impact with music moneyball so far. And I look forward to seeing where your show goes as well as your company standard innovation. Well, we certainly shall. Larry, thank you so much. Thank you, Tom.