Here is some stuff I did in March 2023…

UD is this week presenting Industry Takeover 2023, a series of great events at its Talent House base in Stratford. I’ll be there tomorrow morning to talk about making money from music rights. Ahead of that, I did an interview with Team UD about CMU’s work supporting the various ITO programmes, which you can read here.

This week I am heading back to Ljubljana for the magnificent MENT, where I will be delivering one of those speed briefings all about the ‘Diversifying Digital Market’. Will I mention Web3 and NFTs? Will the metaverse come up? Will it be all “AI this” and “AI that”? Or are those just a load of irrelevant buzzwords? Come along to find out! It’s part of the Runda Takeover strand on Thursday.

The IFPI published its annual ‘Global Music Report’ yesterday, which has all the customary stats about the global recorded music market, as well as providing some insight on the key concerns and lobbying objectives of the major record companies. With that in mind, I used my report on it as an excuse to write a very brief history of record industry lobbying since the start of the big shift to digital (in something a traditional CMU style). Because, you know, that sounded like fun. Read the stats and history lesson here.

Nearly back in the UK, just having a brief stop off at Schiphol. It was a successful trip to Austin. By which I mainly mean, I managed to find a snow globe. Technically it’s a Texas snow globe, but it has Austin written on it too, and according to official Snow Globe Rules, that definitely counts. To everyone I managed to catch up with at SXSW, it was great to see you. To everyone I failed to catch up with, apologies. Let’s catch up at The Great Escape instead. Because my plans to catch up with people at TGE definitely always work!

Still in Austin. Started yesterday at Rainey Street and then it rained. Coincidence? Also watched an interesting discussion about music and AI and copyright and all that jazz. It doubled up as a launch for what they are calling the Human Artistry Campaign – this is my write up on all that in the CMU Daily – I forgot to take a photo of the session, so here’s an AI-generated image of “Austin in the rain” instead.

My SXSW shenanigans today mainly involve checking out a panel on the economics of streaming debate – and then taking part in a session focusing on one specific aspect of that debate: rights metadata and the challenges in getting songwriters paid. My panel – ‘Fix The Leaky Pipes!’ – is at 4pm. Ahead of all that I’ve expanded and updated the CMU Timeline on the UK Parliament’s big old streaming inquiry and all the discussions and projects that have followed. It curates all of CMU’s editorial coverage along with plenty of useful links and resources. You can access it here.

What I learned on my first day at SXSW. The news business needs more transparency. That sounds familiar! Digital platforms should be more transparent about what they’re doing with your data and who is paying to push content into your feed. News organisations should be more transparent about their editorial processes, fact-checking operations, content technologies and what they are doing with each journalist’s work behind the scenes. Hey, if you’re looking for someone with experience negotiating transparency codes, I have a suggestion!

I’m off to Austin tomorrow, probably ought to pack some things, I think that’s how it works. If you’re also heading to SXSW, I’m talking about how to get songwriters paid when their songs are streamed on Tuesday at 4pm in the Conference Centre. Plus, I’m still scheduling in meetings, and am interested in chatting to anyone doing stuff around rights data, rights or royalty management, digital licensing, or – you know – interesting stuff. Drop me an email, let’s see if we can make it work!

This month I’ll be talking about the digital music business at SXSW in Austin, the ECSA Creators Conference in Brussels and MENT in Ljubljana. So if all the companies and organisations on this diagram could NOT change their logos any time soon, so I don’t have to amend my slides last minute, that would be great! If you’re attending any of those events, do come and say hello.