Dave Goldberg on music Music

Water and Music are doing a great job marrying web3 to the music industry and creating a large community of musicians, executives, tech heads ad fans in order to create the next music movement. It is not easy to solve the multiple issues that a behemoth, never-ending, moving industry faces.

The music industry is one that has never ceased to have a need(s) for revamping and improvement. It is interesting to see that Goldberg, and I am sure many others, had the vision for a better future back then. Today, we are still grappling with ways to allocate more resources to music creators and incentivize fans but is not an easy task.

He understood that physical distribution was going away, that digital license strategies needed to change. He shared his view back then that Pandora should be incentivized to build a subscription business, Spotify to enter the radio space, new entrants to have an advantage in the beginning, and much more international access to digital content. The... See more

He did not mention as he was not able to witness the power of the algorithms in the music business, thanks to these platforms being able to gather organize and analyze data to the point of being able to learn what sounds and lyrics were desired by who, in what locations and when.

He foresaw the strategy of testing on new releases consumers before added money is spent to ensure that it isn’t wasted. In short, the new release business was to become like an independent label. Publishing and recorded music A&R should be combined to ensure that all recorded music releases had a combined publishing deal and that you can captu... See more

According to Goldberg, the record company needed to act like a music publisher for new releases- putting up very little money but not trying to hold artists for long contract periods or to keep as much of the revenue. Advances would be $50k with a 40% revenue share after the advance. Losses in new releases are generally driven by expensive fixed he... See more

This is way before the music scene that we see today and the podcast industry that has added huge revenues to audio streaming platforms. Catalogs were the main source of income for these streaming platforms and for labels, while new releases were adding more to losses on the balance sheets than gains.

He shared on this memo that a digital-only recorded music company will be a much more profitable one after one-off restructuring costs. It will have lower revenue and higher margins. Its revenue will be very stable and grow with the overall digital music market growth. It will be a much more valuable company with its revenue base solidly coming fro... See more

David Bruce Goldberg (October 2, 1967 – May 1, 2015) was an American management consultant and businessman. He was the founder of LAUNCH Media and the CEO of SurveyMonkey. He was married to Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook.