Here you go guys! The last report of the year is an interview special, where we pick the brains of senior industry executives, artists, lawyers and investors on the key themes of this year, and what they mean for 2017. Rob Wells: “Without sounding like a smug ba**ard, it kinda vindicates a lot of what […]
“Without sounding like a smug bastard, it kinda vindicates a lot of what we did in the early days in pioneering some of these deals…”
Rob Wells, former president of Universal Music Group’s global digital business, is casting his eye over 2016 – and specifically the upturn in recorded-music industry revenues that has been driven by streaming subscriptions.
“Back then, we had two issues: one was fighting the piracy problem, and two was the dominance of Apple’s iTunes music store. We studied the pirate services long and hard to understand what it was that consumers were gravitating towards: first, it was free and second – equally important – was they had everything,” he says.
“There was always an inevitability, once subscription reached network effect and got scale, that it was always going to drive the revenue and the traffic.”
A plastic cow sits on a desk in an Old Street office. “I press this,” said the co-founder of the biggest UK music/tech disaster in living memory, hitting the synthetic […]
Former Universal Music digital boss Rob Wells has returned to gainful employment, taking up a post with music-focused social network Crowdmix as global chief commercial officer and CEO, Americas.
It will see him heading up North American operations for the startup, which is planning to launch its app in early 2016.
“The way I see it, there’s a number of hurdles. Firstly, you’ve got to start collecting the information, then you’ve got to collate and make sense of it. Then you need a team of people that can actually interpret what the findings are. And then you need another set of people to tell you what to do about it.”
Rob Wells is talking about the music industry’s approach to big data – a science that’s been exciting music execs for several years now, but which still has a lot of potential to be tapped by labels, artists and managers.
“There’s a lot of chatter about data, and how it can inform your marketing efforts and provide you with ROI and give you more insight and blah blah blah. It’s another thing to put it into executional use.”
Big changes are afoot in UMG’s digital business, with news yesterday that its president of global digital business Rob Wells is leaving the company. Wells has been at Universal since […]
Yes, “Live Music 2.0” is a horrible phrase that’s best left well alone. But global agency GroupM’s entertainment and sports division’s new report about the interaction between brands and live […]
British digital music startup MusicQubed is looking to raise another £20m in investment as it prepares to expand its business to the US and Latin America. That’s according to the […]
Universal Music Group has announced that its digital boss Rob Wells will now serve on its executive board too.
An open letter, signed by 125 music artists has criticised Pandora’s campaign to cut its royalty payments in blunt terms.
Universal Music Group’s Francis Keeling is moving up in the world: he’s just been named as the label’s global head of digital business, a promotion from his existing role as VP of digital at Universal Music Group International.
Universal Music Group’s digital boss Rob Wells has been talking to CNET about the impact of new digital music services, fending off suggestions that they may cannibalise existing sales of downloads.
