Pollstar Live!’s Future Of Streaming & Live Panel: Cuban, Geiger, Lynch, Troberman & Greenstein

Michael Guilbert – Pollstar Live!
Marc Geiger hosted a panel on the future of (live) music consumption

Pollstar Live! tackled the future of music consumption in a high-profile panel including Marc Geiger (WME), Scott Greenstein (Sirius XM), Gayle Troberman (iHeartMedia), Mark Cuban (Dallas Mavericks) and Roger Lynch (Pandora). Geiger, who has been hosting Pollstar Live! panels for some time now, opened by capturing the spirit of optimism that was a theme at this year’s Pollstar Live!, the first under the auspices of OVG: “It is a new day. I’m thrilled to be up here with these people,” in reference to his fellow panelists.

He started by asking each panelist about their opinion on how big the music market could get. While none of the speakers wanted to pick a number, they all agreed that the market would “dwarf where we are now,” to use the words of Cuban. One reason it is was hard to estimate the music market’s future potential, according to the Mavs owner, was the fact that music is now everywhere, and distributed through all sorts of devices, even ones that don’t have an obvious connection to music. For Greenstein, the future was all about curation, precisely because music is now everywhere, which made it hard for people to find what they wanted.

Said Troberman: “We are at an inflection point. We’ve been living in a visually driven medium, and what’s happening is we’re moving into a voice-driven era, when I can just say what I want, listen to anything, anytime, anywhere on a range of devices. I think we’re going to see massive shakeups in listening behavior when it’s fully in control of the consumers.”

At this point, Amazon, Facebook, Google and the rest are all trying to figure out how to know what a user wants before they even know it themselves, and they use all sorts of data points to figure this out – data that may have nothing to do with music, such as location and time of day. In this regard, Cuban believes “Amazon’s got the edge, Google is lost, and Facebook is trying to figure out what their role is in music altogether.”

For Lynch, personalization will be the big driver of consumption, changing the way audio services communicate from one-to-many to one-to-one. He added that companies wouldn’t just deliver music, but all forms of audio, including podcasts. And comedy, as Greenstein pointed out. “Comedy is very similar to music in the sense that it is a live experience as well as it can be curated, and that has just never been done before. Even now it is hard to find all the comedy you want in an organized way on the internet,” he said.

The Sirius XM president and chief content officer wasn’t as euphoric about data as some of the other panelists. Collecting vast amounts of data was fair enough, but one also had to work out what to do with it. “I don’t think it’s a bullseye yet,” he said.

The panel then touched upon the connected car and the opportunities it opened up for streaming services. Said Greenstein: “The car is still going to be a vital center for music listening, it always has been. It has a certain limitation, so far, called driving,“ which was his way of saying that cars were still limited in terms of interactivity and delivering video content.

Pandora, which considers digital audio advertising one of its core strengths, wants to be in the car, because it is after the $16 billion advertising market for FM radio. Troberman believes that the more digital the listening experience in the car gets, the more possibilities it will create for advertising, because it could be connected across all digital platforms. “How do we deliver the right consumers anywhere,“ she wanted to know, adding: “How we as an industry come together to enable the right intersection of data and technology is going to be transformative eventually. And I think the ad revenue is what’s going to force us all into change.”

Michael Guilbert – Pollstar Live!
The future of live music & streaming

She brought up an interesting statistic, according to which “the vast majority of mobile usage is over WiFi still. That’s happening at work and at home, at very non-mobile locations. But people are buying the advertising, thinking I’m mobile and on the go. And people are targeting me that way. [But] if I can target you in the car, and you are closer to certain types of behaviors, actions and purchases, that inventory will become more and more valuable. And you’ve got focused attention in the cars today, which tends to work well.”

Geiger pointed out that, to date, there has been very little interaction between the concert industry and the digital services. He therefore wanted to get each panelist’s take on in-app contextual concert information and ticket buying.

Lynch talked about Pandora’s artist marketing platform AMP, which allows artists to record a personalized message announcing their next gigs for their Pandora followers and geo-target that message so it only reaches people in the vicinity. To date, some 1.6 billion messages have been sent out by artists in that fashion, amounting to “many tens of millions of dollars worth of media.” Pandora’s algorithm also works out who else, apart from the artist’s fans, might be interested in checking out the artist’s concert, because their listening habits show a similar taste.

Sirius XM works with a number of models to push live events to listeners, from traditional ones such as having artists promoting their tour on a radio show and pushing that information out in an email blast, to mentioning codes on the program that grant access to concert tickets, which Sirius has been doing in collaboration with Live Nation. Greenstein considered this a win-win, as people not only end up buying tickets for a concert but also listen more intensely to the radio program, so they don’t miss the mentioning of the code.

Cuban recalled that “when I first got to the Mavs, everybody thought they were selling basketball. We don’t sell basketball, we sell experiences. And I think music’s the same way. A lot of times we make the mistake of thinking people go to concerts to listen to music. No one goes to concerts to listen to music, it’s the worst possible way to listen to your favorite artist. You’re hearing the guy next to you screaming: “Born In The USA.”

“You don’t go to listen to music, you go for the experience, you go to have fun, you go because you want to scream, you want to have a drink, whatever it is. We lose track of the fact that we don’t ever talk about the experience when we try to sell concerts, and I think that’s a huge failure of the music industry.“

Geiger didn’t entirely agree, and brought up festivals as good examples for the music industry knowing how to sell an experience, before moving on to the next topic: IPOs, and how important they were these days. The panel was in agreement that going public wasn’t as important as it once was, when companies made the move to secure finances, visibility and branding.

Lynch remarked that the market had become risk-averse, pointing out that private companies today raised so much money, they didn’t need an IPO for that any more. Some entrepreneurs simply sell their company at a point that would usually have been a good time to go public. For Greenstein, an IPO was and still is a “litmus test for a business model.”

Geiger closed with audience questions, one of which tackled the lifting of net neutrality and its implications for each panelist’s business. Lynch pointed out that video services were more affected by it, as they dealt with larger file sizes. The entire panel, however, agreed that any smart internet provider wouldn’t get in the way of consumers, even if the veil [on net neutrality] had been lifted. After all, the change in legislation wasn’t at all welcomed by the wider internet community.