This is a guest post by Golan Shakéd, Chairman at music licensing company Lickd. He writes about the need for the music industry to engage with new social media platforms that use music in a different way, in order to engage with creators and generate income in a new way – “as contributors rather than as gatekeepers.”
With the expectation that by 2025 more than 85% of American marketers will spend money on influencers, and the growing numbers of individuals making a living from content creation will increase, it’s time for the music labels and social media platforms to take the creator economy more seriously.
As an industry, we’ve not yet successfully strategized on social media music rights in any meaningful way. Combining the launch of new platforms such as TikTok, with increasing interest and activations in the metaverse, music labels and publishers are needing to look at new and alternative ways to authentically engage with both creators and their fans.
If you look at a platform like Decentraland for example, which actively encourages and incentivises its global network of users to operate and own a shared virtual world, it presents a number of challenges but, in equal measure, multiple opportunities for brands.
Community, control and creators
To start with, there is a real sense of community – a community that engages both on and off platform, through Decentraland, and through other channels such as Discord. This is huge for industries where community is central to their growth and success – artists and their fans, games companies and their players for instance. Creating branded experiences targeted at communities either through events, creating bespoke worlds or even selling physical products all offer new ways to engage.
Secondly, control lies in the hands of the creator rather than the platform owner or the ecosystem. This in itself is both a positive step forward and a potential threat. On the one hand it is putting the power back in the hands of the creators but on the other it is forcing certain sectors, such as the music industry, to look at the barriers that are stifling innovation and question whether the so called ‘walled gardens’ remain the right approach in driving digital transformation.
But platforms such as Decentraland are just one area which the music industry could learn from and capitalise upon. Other tools that have the potential to empower creators and their fans come in the form of existing micro licencing models. Given today’s landscape, the music industry must assess whether those models are still fit for purpose or whether there are alternative solutions that offer greater advantages to both creators and the industry as a whole.
UGC and monetisation
There are a host of smaller tech companies in the music space which are both pioneering and deploying technologies that act as enablers for creators. Lickd’s proprietary Vouch software is a good example of this – a solution that clears copyright claims when there is a license in place, ensuring that creators can monetize their content and enrich the much-loved user generated content on their social media platforms.
Importantly, it gives creators choice. By integrating micro-licensing tools and offering both mass distribution and user generated content, a creator can opt for what works for them. For the rest of the industry, it’s about being more open minded – it’s about giving creators autonomy, decentralising content and allowing them to licence music in a fair way from day one – it’s also about recognising that, by changing the rules of engagement, it increases the potential for overall industry growth.
In short, the industry now needs to insert itself into these new worlds as contributors rather than as gatekeepers. It may take a few iterations until we get this absolutely right, but we shouldn’t let that stop us from starting now.
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