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Foreign.
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I'm Dan Runcy and you're listening to Trapital and you're going to hear a breakdown on the global value of music. When a lot of people talk about how much music is actually worth, they tend to focus on one area, recorded music. But you also have to include publishing revenue from radio, performance, royalties and more. And when you do, you get a much more complete picture on how much this business is actually valued at. And according to the latest report from our friend of the pod, Will Page, who's the former chief economist at Spotify, the author of Pivot Music, is now worth $47.2 billion. That number is almost double from where it was 10 years ago. But where is that growth going to come from? Subscription growth and revenue has stalled in the most developed markets where the business makes most of its money. So all eyes are on the global south in the emerging markets. But there's an interesting thing happening in these emerging markets. If we take a step back from music and look at the economy more broadly, GDP is rising in a lot of these emerging markets. India has now surpassed Japan in its gdp, and countries like Mexico, Poland and Indonesia have continued to grow and have their economy strengthened as a result. But music revenues have not grown in the same way. Sure, some of that gap can be explained by the price of streaming worldwide. People already think that music streaming is underpriced in the Western countries, and that belief also translates to the emerging countries. But even if you compare subscription streaming revenue to the trends in growth for gdp, there's still a sizable gap. So what's really going on? How does that trend change over time? Will it change over time? In many ways, that gap is not too dissimilar from how music fits into the largest tech companies in the world. Companies like Apple and Amazon have continued to see their growth compound year after year after year, even though the growth in their music subscription streaming services has slowed down considerably. So how do we close that gap? How does music catch up to the GDP growth worldwide? Will it happen? To answer those questions, let's dig into the global value of music copyright. And why Bring on our friend, Will Page. Hope you enjoy this one as much as we did. Let's dive in. This episode of Trapital is brought to you by Beatbread, which helps you make smarter funding decisions. Compare your choices and connect with multiple funding platforms. You'll receive higher offers from leading distributors through beatbread's funding network. You can customize your deal terms and structure by choosing the best recruitment rate, deal length work to be included. And if you'd like to have an advance against your new music. Their tools help you avoid the pitfalls and understanding of the long run trade offs of any given deal from Beatbread or any other source. If you're not comparing your options, you can't make the best decisions. Understand your options and get even more choices with Beatbread. Go to beatbread.com or visit the link in our show notes to learn more. If you enjoy listening to Trapital and want to stay up on the latest about how technology is shaping our culture, then make sure you tap that Star button and tap that follow button so you can listen to us and get the latest episodes on Spotify, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast. All right, we're here with the author of Pivot, the economist from Edinburgh Will Page. Welcome back to the show.
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That's the best effort you've had at pronouncing my hometown name in four years of doing Trapital. You take the R, you triple them and you roll them deep. It's great to be back on Trapitol, Dan. Great to come out of my Batcave and come back onto Trapital to tell the industry how much it's worth.
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Hey, we'll get your hometown down one day. But one thing that we do get down is the global value of music copyright. You put in work to give people the complete picture of on how valuable music is. This is now your 10th year doing it.
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10 years gone, to quote Led Zeppelin. But it's 10 years of every October, November and cranking out these numbers, the work, the fantastic work from the ifpi, the Global Music Report that they do, the Czech Global Collections Report, the International Confederation of Music Publishers are busy with their own work. And then lastly, but not least, this time we've included the work of Midea. Mark Mulligan and his team, who are often on your show. They've done a fantastic effort trying to estimate music publishing, and that value is going to roll into the conversation we're about to have right now.
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B
My big takeaway is this. Your first report you did. The total value was $25 billion. You do this year's report $47.2 billion. So we've almost doubled the amount. On one hand, you can look at that and say, wow, look how far this industry has come. The 2000s were a rough period. The first part of the 2010s were as well. But the last decade has been arguably one of the strongest this industry has seen. But on the other hand, why hasn't this grown more what's your read on.
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It, you would be right to say why didn't it grow more? But let's just take stock. It took 10 years for 25 to double to 50. Is it going to take another 10 years for it to double to 100 or are we going to have some sort of Moore's law where we're going to double in five years $100 billion business, a 12 figure number that we could be discussing within the next decade. For, for all these incredible achievements there is an argument that we've been leaving money on the table. I hook it around the terms convergence and divergence. Are we seeing the emerging markets add to the global figure as much as they should be doing?
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When we look at a company like Apple for instance, there's been a lot of discussion about the value that Apple has had since Tim Cook has been there. This is now a company that goes back and forth on whether it's the most valuable company of the world and it's grown a lot more than double it's the past decade. And that's just one example. There's a few of those. And it does seem that music operates a bit differently than macroeconomics overall. And sure some people can look at the price that streaming service charges and could it be higher, but I feel like there's more to it than that.
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Yeah, you mentioned Apple. Think about that. Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft and more recently Google are worth more than $3.46 trillion each, which is the value of the FTSE stock market. Bringing it back to music, is that the way that macroeconomics is playing out is not the same rhythm to what music economics is playing out. It's interesting to note that this year as we speak this month the GDP of India has overtaken Japan. Isn't that fascinating? Dan Trapital's not been around for a long time but if I come on your first show and said that, you'd have laughed me out of the studio. India doesn't overtake Japan in a very short space of time. Yes it has now. It's got more people and we'll come to GDP per capita in a second. But just take stock. The laws of macroeconomics. Poor countries catch up with rich ones. They have a cost competitive advantage. They can have economics of specialization. The GDP of India is now bigger than Japan. We've had a changing of the guard. That's macroeconomics in music. Economics is different. And I actually last time I came on Trapital was talking about some work I did on America. Just to repeat the big finding there if you go back to 2011, when Spotify launched in the United States, the global music industry was $15 billion. Back then, 15, that's recorded music. America made up just short of a quarter of that $15 billion business. Roll forward to 2024, and it now makes up around about 40% of a $30 billion business. Back then, the pie was a lot smaller, and America's share was a lot smaller. So today, the pie is a lot bigger, and America's share of that pie is an awful lot bigger Indeed. It's a 40% bigger share of an 80% bigger pie. No rational economist would have predicted that to have happened, but it has. When you read the Wall street analyst reports or those valuation models that people do for buying and selling catalogs, I'm a bit worried that some of it is leaning into macroeconomics. But clearly we're on a different beat here. Something different is happening in our world than is happening over in that world.
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Us being able to monetize music in the US We've gotten better at that in the past decade. But it's the other countries in the world that haven't been able to do that. India, for example, where you have the charity report that does compare. Sure, the GDP in India has exceeded Japan, but if you look at the music revenue in India versus Japan, it's nowhere close. And it doesn't look like those lines are gonna converge anytime soon.
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There was a major label executive who, when I took that stat to her, she said, would you think that would ever happen in music, like, ever, that India would overtake Japan? I think currently the Japanese music industry is seven, seven and a half times the size of India's. That's interesting. That's common sense. The twist here is I think that gap could widen. There's $2 billion of found money to be established in Japan if they can get this right. Whereas India is actually stuttering. Whether that's YouTube shorts, the inability to get conversion to work, a whole ton of reasons. The money in India is not growing like it should do. And that's a clear parting of the waves in terms of macroeconomic performance. India is actually at risk of falling behind Japan even in 2025. So, yeah, it's just to stress these are two different sides of a very different street.
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How does music compare to video streaming, Netflix or other services like that?
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Netflix is interesting because I joined Netflix during House of cards season three, and I think the starting price was 799, whereas music has raised price by a couple of DOL. You know, your lunch at your local deli here in Britain costs 12 pounds, 50. That's more than all Welsh music. Offline, ad free and on demand for a month. But you gotta remember, we pay for one streaming service. We pay for multiple video streaming services. So I'm paying for Netflix, I'm paying for Amazon Prime, I'm paying for Apple TV, and I'm paying £158 for my BBC license fee. The eyeballs are making serious coin. The ear holes are making shackles. And that for me is a. An interesting development.
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Just.
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Yeah, we spotted that five, six years ago. We talked about it in past capitals, but the gap seems to be widening. Concert ticket pricing is also relevant. You look at how large Western acts price themselves in India, price themselves in Indonesia. I developed my own page, comparative pricing Effect, which was to look at countries which are succeeding. Take a successful country for conversion, for streaming, for subscription revenues, and translate that price back to countries which are failing and to understand what. Whether there's a price differential there so we can look outside of our world for indicators.
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Well, what's your take on China then? Because I know that was a big part of the report and the analysis there.
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I always like to stress that the United nations currently has 196 flags outside it. 196. Our international music yearbooks. And streaming companies like Luminate probably capture a quarter of them around about 50 or 60. And we have concepts like Mina, which could be anything between 18 and 23, countries as diverse as Morocco and Yemen lumped together to give an aggregate number. We have Luminate trying to catch Africa, but I think currently it's just South Africa and maybe Nigeria is in there. So not to be critical in any way, this is a hard business to measure, but the more that we capture, the more that I calculate we go to China. It's an interesting one. It's a big beast. It's the fifth biggest music market in the world, soon to be third. It's going to overtake the UK and Germany. And if you look at streaming, it's already second in the world as well. Now, the IFPI has a page on China. It has a section dedicated to China, and it has China at something around about 1.4, $1.5 billion. I would argue a further 15%. Not out of that 1.5 billion, but on top of that 1.5 billion. 15% needs to be given to publishing. So then when I go through this process in my Batcave, I look at the publishing side of the fence and I don't see China Listed everywhere. Now, just some rough math says something short of quarter billion dollars is missing from my figure. The more that we calculate, the more that I can capture. And that's really, really crucial, too. Have a think about this. Where does sink revenue sit in China? Both label side, there's a row in the IFPI yearbook to tell you what it's worth, but also in the publishing side, where we're staring into the unknown. From my understanding, in China, you've got a lot of upfront deals, minimum guarantees, which probably throw the sync money into the package with it. So there is a sync business. It is being captured in value. We just don't categorize it. So you've got a dual problem there in China, which is A, we're not capturing the publishing component correctly, and B, we're probably not categorizing the sink component correctly either. The more that we calculate, the more that we capture. And hopefully we can have yearbooks 10 years from now which have got 196 chapters in there, not just 50.
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It does feel, though, that with China specifically, even if we captured each of these accurately, there still would be a gap, especially relative to China's gdp, compared to China's music revenue itself. The GDP and the willingness to spend for other forms of commerce is clearly there. So is it something about music itself as the product? Is it something about how these products are being positioned? Like, how does that gap actually close? Or does this just perpetuate?
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Yeah, we could just do a little role play here when we're talking about the incredible feat of India overtaking Japan. And I'm allowed to say it on an American podcast, the day that China overtakes us in GDP terms. Not saying that's going to happen, but let's imagine it did. What position would a Chinese music country be relative to America's? And we probably see a similar gap to Japan and India's. If I can quote Jim Griffin for a quick second, he always made a valuable point back in the dark days of piracy, which is it's voluntary to pay for music. Why is that happening? It's voluntary to pay for music. Dan Runcy could not pay for music from now to the rest of the end of his life and still carry on enjoying it, it is voluntary to pay. When music is in a business where it's voluntary to pay and we grow our revenues through subscription, that's one clear, obvious hurdle you've got to get across before the wheels can really begin to turn.
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And the point being that in those countries, specifically India, China, they're still in that 2000s era of the voluntary aspect and making it something that is either more mandatory, whether they're paying through their subscriptions or they're paying through advertising dollars by their viewing habits.
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Absolutely. And then just to paraphrase, in many of these countries, the word copyright stands for the right to copy. That is piracy is still a thing as well.
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Another interesting continent and region of the world is Africa. A lot of the major record labels and others have spent resources and time in West Africa, Kenya, Rwanda, Northern Africa, Morocco. But you show in your report as well that gap continues to persist in Africa. Unlike India or unlike China, the GDP itself hasn't had the same rapid growth in the same way. So what's your take on what's happening there and why Africa may be even more distinct than in India or China?
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Yeah, the Africa story is truly heartbreaking when you view it from macroeconomic data. It's just been left behind. And we're going to introduce a term here. Economists like to wave their arms around in the air. And this term is built for that. It's called a crocodile smile. And basically, if you think about how crocodiles yawning smile works, one line of the jawline stays flat and the other one goes up and to the right. And the rest of the world is going up and to the right. India's overtaken Japan. GDP per head of population in Indonesia is booming out of its skin. Mexico is on fire. Africa's just been left behind. It's a bit of a mess, but I have been involved in something to try and unravel that mess. That's with the Music Economy Development Initiative, which has been headed up by Shane Shapiro. And we published a piece of work there saying that Africa needs train tracks before it can run trains. It needs copyright infrastructure before the copyright can truly be monetizable and we can get the wheels of their music industry beginning to turn. It needs collective management organizations, clean collective management organizations that are efficient, that are not fraught with corruption that we're seeing in South Africa just now. We need clear institutional frameworks which allow the train tracks that allow those trains to run. But have a think about this. Africa makes up 18% of the world's population, around about 3% of the world's gross domestic product, about half a percent of the world's value of music copyright. It's going to take train tracks before we can run trains to close that gap.
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It's interesting because you'll hear different companies in this industry that have had success there. The service audio Mac, the record label empire. But from a macro perspective, it's still been tough. I've talked to Mr. Easy. He's a Nigerian artist. He's fought to get publishing even recognized by governments as something that should be taken seriously. When you think more broadly about different infrastructure challenges that have existed. I know that Akon tried to have this Akon Lights Africa project and that didn't succeed for several reasons. And there's still Commonwealth ownership. We'd have to get into all of that today. But all of those things I think have been infrastructure challenges that have existed let's take a break for our chart metric stat of the week. YouTube Music recently made a big, big announcement about its standing with Billboard. The company announced that after January 16, 2026, YouTube data will no longer be delivered or factored into US Billboard charts. And that's because YouTube believes that all streams should be treated equally. This decision may lead to a decline on the Billboard charts for artists from Latin America. I think about Peso pluma who was YouTube's most viewed artist in the US in 2023. He is a poster child for the type of music that over indexes on YouTube. I also think about NBA YoungBoy. He was number two on that same list and his audience behavior has skewed towards the video, YouTube friendly videos, music and content much more than it does on radio. We'll have to see what 2026 brings, but that's my prediction. Let's get back to the episode.
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There's another artist which I'd love to see you get on Traptol, which is Ira Starr. I think when Trapital started she had yet to begin her recording career. Just to date how recent her success is. There was a headline in Musically, a wonderful publication this year which said Irish star celebrates 3 billion streams on Spotify. And I was like that's Drake level numbers for Ira Starr. You toss in everyone else. I think you're looking at a number closer to 6 billion streams for this artist which is four years into her recording career. But if you remember last year when we discussed this report, I showed that the value of Colombian artist streams in America. The J Balvins, the Shakiras, the Colombian artists that were breaking America was worth more than the entire Colombian music industry because of the higher per stream being captured in that richer country. Imagine the value of Irish stars exports to Northern Europe and North America relative to the value of the Nigerian music industry. Imagine the value of getting Nigerian artists exported abroad given they don't have the institutional framework at home. I made the point that there's four music exporters in the world. When journalists say to me, who's going to be the fifth? I say Nigeria. Why can't it be they don't have the train tracks. It's going to take a while before they can run their trains. But that doesn't stop them exporting and that's a crucial artist from that part of the world need to appreciate the value of music exports.
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You also make me think of Burna Boy, who is sold out certain stadiums in the us And Illuminate had shared some data in a recent report about Afrobeats streams, specifically in the New York Tri State area. And the value of those streams that he's able to capture there in one of the richest areas of the us, let alone the world.
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But let's go deep on that because Burna Boy's been in it for time. Irish star, I'll give her four years, maybe five, but she's gone from zero to 6 billion streams in the space of a presidential cycle. How many more Irish stars could we have in the next two or three years coming out of West Africa? That's a mouth watering prospect. But the economics kicks in when you think about the value they're going to make at home vis a vis the value they're going to make abroad when the rich money streams flow back into West Africa.
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B
Let's hit a few other countries that you tapped into to the report. So Brazil is providing a different lens on your term globalization, what that means for a country as large as Brazil. So let's dig into that.
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So one interesting thing with this report is you'll hear my voice, but you'll also hear the voices of four other experts offering countering views to my pessimistic economic interpretation of events. And Brazil is interesting because as we've discussed before, if you just hop onto the YouTube top artist charts for Brazil, the top 100 species this week, and I checked before I came on the mic, is entirely Brazilian artists all performing in Portuguese. No Swift, no Olivier Rodrigo and no K Pop Demon Hunters, which was dubbed into Portuguese. Everyone's performing in Loco Undertongue. That's bonkers. That makes you think that Brazil's its own little island that performs to itself and to no one else. But due to the sheer heft of Brazil, the streaming volumes, the population, the sheer energy for music in that country due to that weight, Brazilian streaming volumes, what you're now seeing is Brazilian albums getting to the top of Brazilian charts, then Getting to ranks 2, 4, 7 in global album charts. I Always stress to the triple audience. We're defining localization, real time. In the case of Brazil, we've got local artists cracking global charts by staying entirely local. We calculated the sheriff's dreams of these global chart topping albums and between 98.7 and 99.5% of them came from Brazil. If I quote Chris Falcaro, who runs Universal's Operation Virgin Records in Brazil, I remember seeing her really inspiring woman on stage talking about how she's getting more autonomy, how she's getting more budget, how she's getting more headcount, because whatever she's doing in Brazil seems to be working. So let's just carry on, make it work. International questions, let's think buyer and seller here. What does the international headquarters of those record labels, perhaps based in America, perhaps based in Europe, do about exporting their artists into Brazil, given Brazil ain't listening anymore? From price maker to price taker, let's flip it around. So how do Brazilian artists get overseas? Are you content with being a big fish in a big pool like Brazil or do you want to be a global fish in a global pool equally for an international record label? How do those other artists, perhaps in Mexico, perhaps in America, get into the Brazilian charts? You are beginning to see in Ronnie Meltz bin who's quoted in the pieces talking about this, he's taking popular Brazilian songs and having them being re recorded in Spanish. So there's globalization at work, right? I didn't know that last week. I know that this week. And that they're thinking how do I twist these song structures to get them outside of my borders? So Brazil's on the march. If that was a stock out by Brazil.
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B
Because you normally hear about the other way, right? You mentioned earlier about K pop demon hunters being dubbed over to Portuguese. Now you're having Portuguese songs being dubbed over to Spanish and other regions.
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And there's a footnote to that, which is AI can put Russian performance enhancing drugs into all of this in terms of overdubbing and translation abilities too. So keep in mind that development is there as well.
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B
You mentioned two countries that I want to go back to. You just mentioned Mexico and then earlier in Indonesia. So let's tap in there along with Poland in the report because similarly there was the crocodile smile dynamic happening in these countries. Rich people in these countries that can support their economy to support the GDP in a lot of ways. But there still is appetite for music given the amount of touring success that Bad Bunny and others have had in Mexico. Touring in live concert is not included in True traditional music revenue, but there's still a gap there. What's your take on that?
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I picked Poland, Indonesia, Mexico for a couple of reasons. One, Spotify and Streaming had been in market for a long time. We launched in Mexico in 2013. Poland was 2013, Indonesia was 2016. You've got a period of time there to work with. Second reason, their GDP per capita has been rocketing. Poland was up 80%, Mexico's up 40%, Indonesia up around about 30%. So that means these economies are booming both at the aggregate and at the individual level. These are great news stories to look at. I plotted as an index the performance of their GDP per capita and that if we go back to our crocodile smile as the upper jaw going up and to the right. And then guess what? I looked at label rpu. This involves a bit of calculation and you've got a lot of very well skilled data scientists listening to traptools. The way I did this was to take the monthly average label revenue annualized across the year, ripping out free tiers, ripping out trials, ripping out third parties. So it's a consistent metric of what consumers are willing to pay or even what consumers are being asked to pay, which gets us into the pricing debate. And I plot that as an index, just to reiterate, whereas the wealth per capita is up 80% in Poland, up 40% in Mexico, up 30% in Indonesia. The RP, just to keep this non technical for label income, was pretty much flat. Bingo. We've got ourselves a crocodile smile on our hands. Consumers are getting wealthier thanks to macroeconomics, but the music industry is not capturing that increasing wealth, it's capturing wealth. Let me be clear. We'll get into this. Prices are going up in most countries, sure. But what we are establishing in this work is that they're not capturing the increasing wealth. And speaking from a European perspective, I can just put some layman's language around this for the past 25 years from these sweeping generalizations. But we've had the Polish plumber leaving Poland to get work in Britain and doing very well by coming to Britain. Now those Polish plumbers are going back to Poland or the next generation are not bothering to come here. Ditto young professionals, ditto students. Because the Polish wealth per capita wealth per head has been going up so much they can make the numbers work back home. It's a real story. It's a story that matters to the business. And it's a story that suggests that music economics is not behaving like macroeconomics. And potentially we're leaving money on the table as a result.
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B
So this crocodile smile here, you stripped it down to focus on arpu. Specifically, with what's coming from paid subscription revenue. How different would it be if we added advertising?
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It would be a lot more volatile from the start and it'd be, I guess, a lot lower as well. And I don't think the ad funded revenues from these countries are really going to move the needle. If these businesses are going to grow, it's going to be a subscription business that has to drive that growth. There's one other one which is not in the study, but I thought would be of interest to your audience is Turkey. Turkey's got a crazy macroeconomic situation. Talk about macroeconomics and music economics. Turkish macroeconomics are messed up. You've got currency depreciation, you've got runaway inflation, you've got government turmoil, all sorts of issues. Turkey today, I think Spotify is going in around about 99 Turkish lira. Netflix is moving up towards 400. So that makes Turkey's music product incredibly cheap. But for outsiders, investors, international record labels, the money coming out of Turkey pretty much worthless because of the currency situation as well. So again, you've got divergence. Again, you can look over your shoulder at Netflix and say, what are they getting so right that we seem to be getting so wrong?
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B
You are right in general that we will have to find other ways to monetize this to close that crocodile smile. One thing that you did talk about in the report is AI. You framed it in terms of whether or not this is something that is complementary, where it is going to be additive to the business, the artists, the consumers. Or is it going to be cannibalistic to those same groups?
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A
I think AI is almost passe. People have debated it to death. But I think there's two applications from the report which haven't been discussed to date, which we can air on trapital. The first is what my work allows you to do is ask a very theoretical question about fair division. Is it fair that a streaming service pays a record label a dollar and pays the publisher 31 cents? Of course that's not fair. It's not 5050 goes a counterargument. Well, the world isn't 5050 and the music industry isn't 50 50. There are reasons why it is a dollar to the label and 30 cents to the publisher. Is it fair that when the broadcaster here in the uk, like the BBC, pays for a song on radio, they pay the songwriter £90, they pay the artist only £60? Why don't we just make it 75 each? Well, that's not fair either. But there's reasons why it's not 50. 50. There's reasons because was the way that it was. To quote Chuck D, you know, you're already seeing publishers saying, I think Cobalt said landmark deal, 50, 50 parity between publishers on one side and labels on the other. Is that how these deals are going to work going forward? We can visit future editions of the report and see whether that's actually being played out with the broader context of the business around it. So I think that's a helpful contribution to discussion. And another thing to think about is the B2B market, predominantly publishers, the B2C market, predominantly record labels, and ask which side wins with AI I can see that it could be very damaging to the production music libraries, the music used in the elevators and hotel receptions. AI can knock that out. Whether it proceeds to actually damage more of the business, we'll have to wait and see. But I can see clearly there's a role for AI to displace that production music libraries. Now, if it did, that's going to hurt the publishers more than the labels. That's just a simple fact of life. So what I think the report allows you to do is to discuss AI with respect to asymmetries. The fact that its impact is going to be distinct and different from one side labels and artists to the other side publishers, CMOs and songwriters. I also think there's something else to be added here too around just not AI music, but what I call just focused music music to study to. Does a record label that's put all of its money into a brand new project which can't capture enough of the clock because of these focus Music playlists, is that fair? So I think there's distributional questions, fairness questions which come out of that type of genre, whether it's human or AI. But I just want to stress AI is well placed to compete for that clock too.
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B
Right. Because if AI does, inevitably, and I do believe it will compete with a lot of that focus Music, the lo fi girl type of music, frankly, that's a lot of the music itself that the record labels have had challenges with and they haven't specifically called out lofi girl, but you've heard it in the memos that the leaders of the major record label groups have discussed and talk about. So if a lot of the disruption, frankly ends up being towards that type of music, as opposed to the top 0.1% of artists that the major record label Groups represent. What does the pushback look like? The lobbying efforts or the advocacy for the lo fi girl type of focus Music or even the production music isn't quite as loud, but there is still a business there that people are running to serve that audience, to serve that. So I just wonder how that's going to shape. Because so much of the discussion about what is fair and unfair from AI has been coming from the people that represent the record labels that rely on the 0.1% of artists.
- [31:48]
A
Yeah. At this point, I want to quote the late, great David Safir, a big inspiration in my life that we tragically lost him last year, which still leaves me devastated. But I remember during a really heated debate about this, a Musically conference in London in January one year, he just broke into the debate and said, for heaven's sake, people, we haven't even decided who we're defining fairness for. Is it the creator, the platform, or the consumer? And last time I heard somebody say the consumer is wrong. They deserve to fail. So you can imagine all these different perspectives coming into what to do about that issue. But it's important to bucket those views to creative views, platform views and consumer views. And the consumer chooses to give you 12 bucks a month so they can focus on their exams. Who am I to disagree? It's a tricky one, but I just want to make sure as you try and thread the needle and have a balanced debate here, you consider the views of all sides.
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B
We covered a lot of the big themes that you have here, and I'm sure there's things that you probably saw that you were either waiting for or you either said, okay, we're going to need to put this take on the back burner. We'll see what this looks like once the global value of music copyright cross process 50 billion, which you expect it likely will next year. If you had to predict. What do you think some of the big themes are and will be from next year?
- [33:03]
A
I'm excited by the inclusion of more markets with respect to this study. The fact that Luminate is desperately trying to measure streams in Africa, the fact that the MLC is going to join CISAC next year, bringing a billion dollars into the CZEC Global Collections Report. That's interesting for me with respect to this work, the. The fact that the IFPI are desperately trying to understand the MENA region and break that out. So we understand the potential of Saudi Arabia and Morocco and these countries which are incredibly young population, all using itunes, all hooked on YouTube, there's potential to grow there as well. I go back to that mantra of the more that we measure, the more that we calculate. And what excites me with respect to this one month exercise is the fact that we're going to be measuring more, which means I get to calculate more. What I didn't expect to see was it happening also goddamn late in the year. Usually we get this work done by the end of November and now we're running the clock down to the end of the year. We've just managed to get it out before Christmas. So I'd love to be able to do this sooner rather than later next year as well.
- [34:04]
B
We'll keep tabs on that. But Will, thank you as always. This was fun and it was good to be able to dig into what's happening globally because if this industry really wants to grow, this is what we have to do.
- [34:14]
A
And number one on the agenda for next year is to present this work and what surrounds it at a trap summit in Los Angeles in 2026.
- [34:23]
B
Hey, you know where to find us. We'll keep those conversations going. As always, Will, thank you. As always, thank you, Dan.
- [34:30]
A
Thank you, TRAP Tool.
- [34:32]
B
And that is a wrap. Thank you again to Will Page for joining us. If you want to read Will's full report, tap the link in our show show notes and you will go directly to the full breakdown on Will's website. Thank you to our audio and video producers as well, G and Eric, for everything that you do to help make this show possible. Thank you to our sponsors and most importantly, thank you for listening. If there's one person you know that would really enjoy trapital, whether it's this episode with Will Page or any of the episodes that we have on the show, send them a link to this episode, the podcast in general that helps trapital reach the right people. Word of mouth is still the best way to grow. And if you've already done that and if you have a few more moments, then leave a review. Tap the star button, make sure that you're following the show. Rate the show that helps. Make sure that trapital reaches the right people and that the algorithm does its thing. Thank you again. Talk to you next time.