In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen - Warner Music Group CEO: Industry Evolution, Artist Development, and Digital Disruption

Episode Date: April 16, 2025

With all the technology available, why do artists still need record labels? Join Nicolai Tangen in conversation with Robert Kyncl, CEO of Warner Music Group, as they explore the transformation of music business. They discuss Kyncl's journey from Czechoslovakia to leading Netflix, YouTube, and now Warner Music, the streaming revolution, and how record labels discover and develop artists today. Kyncl shares insights on balancing creative and business priorities, the impact of AI on music, the value of iconic catalogs, and the future of live performances. He also reveals personal leadership lessons and his approach to driving innovation in an industry constantly disrupted by technology. Tune in!In Good Company is hosted by Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management. New full episodes every Wednesday, and don't miss our Highlight episodes every Friday.The production team for this episode includes Isabelle Karlsson and PLAN-B's Niklas Figenschau Johansen, Sebastian Langvik-Hansen and Pål Huuse. Background research was conducted by Isabelle Karlsson.Watch the episode on YouTube: Norges Bank Investment Management - YouTubeWant to learn more about the fund? The fund | Norges Bank Investment Management (nbim.no)Follow Nicolai Tangen on LinkedIn: Nicolai Tangen | LinkedInFollow NBIM on LinkedIn: Norges Bank Investment Management: Administrator for bedriftsside | LinkedInFollow NBIM on Instagram: Explore Norges Bank Investment Management on Instagram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi everybody and welcome to In Good Company. I'm Nicolai Tangjian, the CEO of the Norwegian Southern Wealth Fund. And today I'm in really good company with Robert Kinsel, the CEO of Warner Music Group, one of the world's largest record labels. Now, they have incredible artists, including my favorite Coldplay, Ed Sheeran, Dua Lipa, and even the Norwegian legends, A-ha. All right. Very good. Robert, what a pleasure to have you on. Same here. Thank. Very good. Robert, what a pleasure to have you on. Same here. Thank you so much.

Now we need to kind of kick off with, uh, with your beginning. You were born in, uh, Czechia and so how does your background shape you as the leader you are today? So actually, you know, when I was born and grew up, it was Czechoslovakia, the country rebranded three times in my lifetime. It tells you something about change that I'm probably used to. But the way it shaped me was interesting. My parents, my mom was a teacher, my dad was a doctor, you know, in a socialist communist

society, not earning much, but the values they instilled in my sister and I actually apply in the capitalist world and the United States. For instance, to always value education, because education is something nobody can take away from you. When you go through something like nationalization in Czechoslovakia, people are used to losing their possessions, but you cannot lose your education. So our parents were really focused on that. Or, you know, my dad would say, whenever I was a competitive athlete, cross-country skier, and whenever I would fail somehow, my equipment failed, et cetera, my dad would be like, oh, that's great.

Nobody's gonna remember the fact that your bindings failed, but everybody's going to remember your ranking. And it was one of those wake-up calls to me early on that excuses don't really matter because those are forgotten, even if they're good ones, and that it's only the results that matter. I have to say, if you were a really good cross-country disc, or you moved to the wrong country, you should have moved to Norway, right?

I know, I know. There are a lot of Norwegians who were kicking our butt. Absolutely. But you were also interested in music from early on, right? You played a couple of instruments. Yeah, very much. You know, there's a saying that every Czech is a musician. And there are deep classical music roots in the country. And my sister played the piano, I played cello. And then after

playing cello for about three years, I then played Spanish guitar. And my teacher actually is wonderful. He was a blind teacher who was a skier as well. So I was his teacher. And I was his guide for skiing and and he was teaching me this wonderful art and it was a great long relationship. And by the way, I just reconnected with him about six months ago, which was incredible. That's good. Now you've been doing incredible work at HBO, Netflix, and YouTube before you stepped in as a CEO of Warner Music Group. So just take us through the journey here.

I started like many others in a windowless mail room in a talent agency, stapling pictures together with resumes which got mailed to casting agents. Those were my humble beginnings until I got promoted to an assistant. I was pretty much doing this for the first three years of my career. Then early on, I joined the mutual fund company, which was a movie co-financing company early on in the 90s. And that's what I learned, how to value content, how it's paid for and how it's distributed. From there, I went to HBO. It was at its height,

Sex and the City, Sopranos, etc. And I worked on the international side, launching territories, HBO, India, HBO Korea, and then then I did a about three years stint in a VC funded startup in the year 2000. That was like a risky move, right from high flying HBO to completely unknown company on the internet, which was just slow, you know, right as the bust happened, right in March 2000, the dot com bus. And, but, you know, our company, we were working through it. And within three years, I ended up at Netflix, which at that

time had roughly 500,000 subscribers. And I was, you know, DVD by mail. And then 2005 started to focus on streaming, because we knew at some point, we wanted to transition the business and disrupt our own disruption. And so I started to work on that built up the team and you know, the rest is history. And then in 2010, I was recruited to Google and join YouTube and help basically grow it into what it is today. And you know, at that time, it was roughly 450 million dollars in revenue. It was small, it was very messy, sued by lots of different people.

And Eric Schmidt told me, figure out how you stop them from sending us paper, and instead we send them paper, meaning money. Commercialize, you know, fix the relationships, commercialize it, and build a business. And we did that along with lots of other people. Why did you transition into the music industry? When you have two sort of hockey sticks like this,

you know, two big disruptive forces scaling, it doesn't really get any bigger than that, right? Netflix or YouTube, it doesn't get any bigger. So you have to actually set your sights on something smaller and more focused. So I chose music because I love music. We spoke about that. I think music has this incredible power of being absolutely ubiquitous. Everybody in the world has some kind of relationship with music. And everybody has a soundtrack to

their life. Music is like a timestamp. Basically, you know, there's a bunch of time stamps throughout your life. And, you know, I have this favorite saying that art decorates walls, but music decorates time. And I think that's very powerful. And because of that, music goes through ups and downs in the industry, but it's resilient and gets through all the downs. And I think it's incredibly interesting to work in a company, transitioning company from one thing that it has been to something new that it will be. And I just find that intellectually stimulating and it's fun to work on that. It's amazing when you have a reunions and you put on the music, you play it at the time. I mean, my, you are just back there, you know?

Yeah, exactly. No, but it invokes emotions, you play it at the time. I mean, my, you are just back there, you know? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. No, but it invokes emotions, right? That's what happens. What do you listen to now? Well, obviously I listen to all of our artists before their music is released, sort of like an internal system for that.

So I do all of it, and it's kind of fun to do that, right? And then kind of try to imagine how that's going to do and then kind of look how it's doing. So I like playing that game with myself. And what is your predictive power? It's not so great. And why do you think that is? Because I haven't really applied any system to it.

I'm just doing purely by a feel. And I think what you have to do is you have to have some kind of a method to the madness. You have to figure out some patterns that you follow and then eventually you start narrowing your scope a little bit and you get better at it. And I noticed that lots of folks who work here, say in A&R, they have different approaches to finding artists, selecting artists, thinking about hits, etc. But they have a system. And I think that's very, very important to have your system because it just allows you to progress

and get better. And so I don't have it myself yet. I just kind of do it for fun on the side. Now I asked Daniel Ek, the founder of Spotify, what he thought I should ask you. And so he had a question here. I've asked a lot of people, you see. So his question is, what's been the biggest cultural adjustment you have to make going from a technology company first, like YouTube, to a creative company, like one of Music Group? I think there are two. I'll name two. The first one is I think there is this unfair assumption that everybody in the digital world has of, let's say, content companies

that they don't like technology. When you come into a company like Warner Music, And when you come into a company, like Warner Music, the, when you realize that all employees want it, they all have it in their personal lives. They have their banking apps, they have their private chauffeur apps, whatever it is, they're living their life online, like very, very well. But they may not have it in their professional life, not because they don't want it,

it just hasn't been built for them and hasn't been made available, but they want it. And I think there's just been this, my assumption was like, yeah, people don't want it. They actually do. So we've been working really hard to obviously fix that and provide as many of these tools as possible. So that's one. So it was a very pleasant surprise. And I would say the other is culturally, the organizations in most media companies are set up in very distributed manners with lots

of different P&Ls and lots of different infrastructures. And in today's world, they can function like global companies can function in much, much simpler setup. So I think, but that doesn't, that has to come with cultural change, right? It cannot happen on its own. But I think that's a, that's a, an important cultural difference, let's say from technology companies or from, you know, a whole bunch of companies in other industries, which have come up with a simpler organizational design. Robert, there seems to be so many ways the music industry is changing just now, right? It's changing in so many different dimensions. What do you think are the main changes we are seeing just now?

Or the most important ones? So one, obviously, there's one big change which I obviously was part of, which is the market position of distribution. Yeah. Right? The music companies were the ones who got you distributed in a physical format, right? That was lots of inventory issues and shelf space issues and all of that to get sorted out. And today it's in digital distribution, it's simpler and anyone can publish.

So the role that we, the music companies played in distribution has decreased, obviously. There is still a role for it because it has to get pushed through supply chains into many different distribution points and there's complexity involved with that. But it's decreased versus the past. But in the world where anyone can publish, no one can be heard. The level of noise increases so much that it's really hard to succeed on your own on a repeated basis.

You can have like a one-off success, but if you want to do this as a career, you want to succeed, you want to build catalog, you want to build lots of value, it's a very, it's a difficult job. And for that, you need a team, and you need global infrastructure, which we have, you know, the large companies, you need global infrastructure all around the world, that helps you break through the clutter. And that becomes a combination of both

technology, because you need to collect lots of different data and know how to use it. And also creative prowess around each of the artists and what to do with their brand and with their art. So it's become much more sort of integrated business between technology and creative on the global scale. So with infrastructure that we can unleash everywhere. So I think our value has shifted, decreased on the distribution side and increased on breaking through the clutter.

What's the most important thing you add here as a record label? And then how does it change during the life cycle of an artist? Let's just start with the beginning. How do you find them and what do you add in the beginning? How do you find them and what do you add in the beginning? I'll give you... So we are one of the companies that actually has a great DNA and history in discovering artists very early, whether it was Ed Sheeran, Bruno Mars, Dua Lipa, Cardi B, Zach Ryan, Benson Boone, etc. It can go on. So artist development is very core to what we do. I sat down with, you know, when I started, every time I ran into an artist, I would ask, you know, they would tell me, oh, you have some amazing people in your company. It's awesome. I was like, yeah, tell me who. And they would give me the names immediately.

I just stepped up an email and emailed that person. And so many times they're like mid level executives. And so I was like, Hey, I'd like to meet you. So I would meet with them. So so there was this one and our exec that that I met with. And I was asking her the same question, how do you find artists? How do you find somebody that you believe in that you think is going to develop in the superstar? And she was telling me, I look for their connection with the audience before I even listen to their voice. And I was thinking, Oh, it's interesting. How do you do that? You look at the likes

online or like, how do you discern comments? It's like, no, I'm watching the audience. I was like, what do you mean? And like, and life, life is like, no, I go to the shows. I was like, what do you mean? And like, in the last year, it's like, no, I go to the shows. I was like, and you know, this is a very young executive, by the way, like, you know, in 20s. And I was like, Well, but I thought that's what the older A&R guys for doing. It was like, well, I do that, too. I was like, and how does that work? He's like, well, I watched the audience. And if the audience is an emotional connection to the artist, that is priceless. And

it's and it's it's amazing. And if it's there, by the way, the connection is either there, there is priceless. And it's amazing. And if it's there, and by the way, the connection is either their misty eyes or crying or their shrieking or their laughing. And if it's there, then we work with them on the art and develop their voice and just like develop the artist skill set. And the connection is there. And now we have something that we can really build a long lasting career lasting career. I was like, interesting. And she's like, and you know, what's important that if it's a female, that that audience is teen girls, because

they're the earliest adopters, you know, and Shakira and Beyonce, etc. And, and if it's boys, it's even more important. So it's basically, you know, I just described to you a system that NR executive has to find artists early and build them into stars. And philosophically, what is it that creates that connection? It could be their attitude, it could be their lyrics, the topics that they care about.

I think it's deeply personal, but it's like, it's gonna be there. And it's what makes them unique. And, but the thing that's interesting is like what I just described to you, it's not that you can like force this on another in our executive, right? People have different systems, I'm giving you one, but it's like this is a young person who's very, very successful. And, and And then has discovered artists and has a system. Can that connectivity be learned, you think? Can an artist learn to connect? I think people try over time.

I think it probably can be, but it's easier to learn. Like if you have it, it's easier to obviously develop your art than learn the connectivity. But I think it comes with probably increased focus, you know, to learn that connectivity. But you know, this is all like the beginning, the nucleus of it, right? But then what we have to do is figure out, okay, how do we grow the artist audience and not go into big concert venues immediately that will be half empty, but instead grow them gradually and build up a group of fans that will be with them forever. You just need to build a core

from which everything grows. Let's say now I have my guitar, I'm playing in Camden Town, in some kind of bar, Robert Künstl comes in, it's just like, hey, look at that guy, Nikolaj, he's got great rapport with the audience. So you come to me and, but just what you do with me the next couple of years, you know, how do you build it? It all depends, like, obviously what you need specifically, right, which also varies. Because sometimes artists are also songwriters, so they write their own music. You know, Bruno Mars was an example of that. He was an excellent songwriter. And that's how he started. And then and then he started to sing his music.

So initially, maybe you may be a songwriter, and you're writing for other people. And then you try your own luck, right, with that. And it's like, you're deciding which ones you do, which ones you don't. Or it's a collaboration with somebody. So, so many times, it's also about not just about like perfecting your voice, but it's also about collaborating with the right people, whether it's songwriters that you work with or collaborations from, from singing perspective. So, so it all depends on who the artist is and what they need. There's tour support, right? Like helping them set up small tours that help them start building the nucleus of the super super fans, right? That will be with them. All of that work.

And, you know, there's a really great example with Teddy Swims, you know, one of our current stars who, you know, five years ago wasn't. And he has just done an incredible job with us to build up his core audience, he would travel to Europe, do small shows, and build it, you know, and you know, we do research, right, we look based on a lot of the data that we have, it's like where they should tour, what they should do, right, where the focus should be.

So it's like, it becomes a deep collaboration. How is it different when it's a long time established group, let's say Coldplay or, you know, one of these, what do they need help? What do they, why do they need help? Yeah, that's, I asked them the other day the same thing. How do you need help? And look, the, if you're an aspiring artist, I asked him the other day the same thing. How do you need help?

Look, if you're an aspiring artist, you want to become big and relevant. If you're a huge superstar or band like Coldplay, then you want to remain relevant. Of course, it's like you're at the top of the heap and you want to make sure that you stay there. And again, it's in the world that's increasingly noisy, right? And across all forms of media, but in music, it's very noisy, but across like everything, it's very hard. So, so you want to make sure that you're creating hits and that people around the world hear your new art. And, you know,

so we just had a new album with Coldplay in October and it was great success, but like, you know, all of just had a new album with Coldplay in October. And it was a great success. But like, you know, all of us were nervous, right? Then everybody worked extremely hard to make it succeed. Nobody sleeps on their lores, just because it's a it's Coldplay. It's actually, or that much more nervous because we want to really make sure that it delivers on its promise. And so so I think the you know, if you if you look at it today, no matter how much distribution has democratized, all the big stars are signed with large music companies.

And because it takes a village. It takes a village. Again, if you're looking for sustained and repeatable success, you're just looking for one-off thing, doesn't matter. The concert business seems to have changed and just become a bit grander in a way, right? So Adele built a hundred million dollar pop-up stadium, many artists do like 10 nights at Wembley. I mean, Taylor Swift, I guess it's a story in herself, but...

Yeah, Coldplay, massive tour. Absolutely. How should we read that? What is it a sign of? Well, I think initially there was a pent-up demand from COVID, right, obviously, but then it sustained. And I think in the world that's increasingly digital, people crave physical experiences. That's it. It's as simple as that.

And if music decorates your time, right? It's soundtrack to your life. When you have a couple of favorite bands or artists and they're playing in a venue near you, you go, right? Because it's like, you like the collective enjoyment. I think when you can enjoy, obviously a lot of people enjoy music by themselves, right? You're working out, biking, running, whatever, or even just at home working. But when people enjoy it the most is when they're sharing it together

with others. And usually they start moving, they start dancing, right? And it's just, it's like expression of joy. So, so I think, you know, live music is here with us to stay and we'll be, we'll continue to be very successful. Are you a good dancer? No, you should ask my wife. My wife is Dominican, which means she's an excellent dancer. And she will criticize me all the way till Sunday about my dance moves. How has the streaming concept changed what you do? Streaming is more efficient distribution.

I spoke about in the past when it was, whether it was LPs or CDs or tapes, there was a lot of inventory. So, you know that a lot of people who are in the inventory business, it's not that much fun, like there's some returns and breakage and all of that. So music is very fluid. It's perfectly aligned with the internet. It's very efficient distribution. And what it does is it reaches more people than before. And it allows people in a non-demand fashion, right? People could hear music before through radio, you're sitting in the taxi or the restaurant and you hear it. But in a way, in a personalized way that you can select what you want, and personalize it and have

your playlist, that is now accessible to a lot more people. So it has grown the business. And I think, you know, obviously, credit goes to Daniel for Daniel like for driving Spotify, you know, through the decades and building the business, as well driving Spotify, you know, through the decades and building the business as well as others, you know, what we did that YouTube and, and, you know, Apple and, and Amazon, etc. So there's a lot of a lot of subscribers around the world. But still, even today, we are lagging a spot subscription video on demand, which, you know, we shouldn't. Right. So you can imagine that there is still a lot more addressable audience for us to take.

And that gap is even bigger outside United States, you know, and lots of development markets. So a lot more room to grow. Music is cheap, no? It's probably the best deal that consumers get in anything. It's definitely cheaper than X. Like if you think about it, it's cheaper than anything because it's been lagging inflation for a very long time.

Why is it so cheap? Because, and I don't mean it as a criticism, it's, you know, the industry post Napster and Kazaa and all the file sharing services was obviously on its knees. And then the streaming services came and drove growth. And pricing just remained the same from the time any of those services got established. Nobody has moved price up despite whatever inflation there may have been. But it was the right choice because that was the time to hunt,

hunt for new subscribers, right? And just focus on volume and focus on growth. And I think now we're entering the era where it's important to do both hunting in places where the penetration is very, very low and continue to do what we've done in the past. But then in territories which are where the penetration is high,

maybe not as high as SESFA yet, but then in territories which are where the penetration is high, maybe not as high as that's valid yet, but like high, then we also start harvesting on price, right, and increase in that. So, I think, you know, whatever worked in the past 15 years doesn't have to be applied exactly the same way for the next 15 years. And we just, you know, we just need to be a little bit more laser focused and audience segmented in our approaches. So when you say harvest, you mean increased prices slowly and carefully until just below

the point where they leave? Correct. Correct. Which of course nobody wants. We don't want that. The DSPs don't want it. But I think it's important to not have a one size fits all strategy, which is what we all had for 15 years, which was the right thing to drive growth. But now we've got

to have sort of two sizes. So let's say now the value of music to the consumer is 100. Where does the money end up? So what goes to the artist? What goes to you guys? What goes to streaming? It all depends on who the artist is. That's one of the things I learned. The company has grown, it's been around for many, many decades. There's catalogs and there's some of the you know the company has grown it's been around for many many decades and you know there's catalogs and there's new releases uh their distribution deals so the spectrum is really really wide i mean just think about it right we have we have deep deep catalogs from Fleetwood back to Joni Mitchell the Eagles David Bowie you got David Bowie right historic catalogs which is just incredible what happened. By the way, my younger daughter, like one of her favorite bands is Fleetwood Mac. She's 22 now. It's

been her favorite band since 19. And it's just incredible the power that IP has. Yeah, absolutely. Interestingly, one of the guys at AHA, Magnus Fuglholmen, he suggested I asked you about this. So kind of the pedigree artist, right? Yes. Where old songs are becoming new hits for new generations who they don't care when it was made or whatever, right? Yes. So on that topic, just what have contributed to this renewed interest? So I have to say, actually, since you're speaking of AHA, I grew up in a communist country,

closed borders, no freedom of choice for media or speech. There was very little imported music. AHA was one of the LPs that I got. I think I had like seven LPs when I was growing up. AHA was one of the LPs that I got. I think I had like seven LPs when I was growing up. Aha was one of them. And... So you know that Sonol always shines on TV. Yeah.

And it's like, it's, you know, it's like, so by the way, you know, when I said that art decorates walls and music, decorates time, for me Aha decorated my time. And like, I know exactly where I was, you know, in the eighties in Czechoslovakia and was, you know, in, you know, in the 80s and in, in Czechoslovakia, and the, you know, how it made me feel then. The renewal of interest comes in different ways. One, which is, you know,

we do these catalog license, licensing deals with all kinds of platforms. And then if it's an open platform, sometimes users just users for fun, take the music and they do something with it and attach it to a video and sometimes that takes off. By the way, that's that's how Fleetwood Mac took off and on TikTok. So it happens that way in a very, very organic way. Right. And this didn't used to be there. The other sort of more managed way that this happens is when current artists want to remake a song that was iconic, David Guetta is like a master at this, right? David Guetta is one of one of our artists, he's a famous DJ and producer. And he he just loves

to find, you know, just iconic songs and remake them. And he just remade Forever Young, right? With Ava Max and Alphabeal. And it's like suddenly the song is just charting everywhere. But by the way, I have to say that one of the most incredible stories over the last six to nine months has been Linkin Park. It's a band that released their first album with us in the year 2000. A few years ago, their lead

singer passed away, they went through replacing replacing him. The resurgence that they had last fall was like, unlike anything we've ever seen. The success of their new album was insane. The pre-sales were the highest in Warner's history. And their catalog just shot through the roof. And this is a band that's been with us for 25 years. And it's just, you know, nobody deserves success more than these guys.

But it's just, it's incredible when that audience is there. It stays. It doesn't go away. And it just underscores the value of IP, despite whatever happens on the micro level. What are the challenges when it comes to copyright and the reuse and mashups of all the music? The challenges, they've always been there with the advent of social media. Right? And YouTube was the first one. I actually had the privilege of working on that early on. This is like what I referred to when Eric Schmidt said I figure out

how to stop them from sending us paper and we send them paper. And it's basically how do you track, you know, fragments of copyrights in other copyrighted material or in other videos or audio etc. and how do you apportion the money, you know, and what tools you give. And so early on at YouTube, we built something called Content ID that allowed us to do that, basically fingerprint the content. And then as people uploaded it to YouTube, we will then be able to sort of parse it out, and then have commercial relationships to give the copyright holders the

ability to either block it, or track it, or monetize it. And then there had to be a commercial split, obviously negotiated for that. And I think that's, you know, that's the same thing that will develop in the age of AI, because it's basically just UGC on steroids. And so it's just everything is faster, bigger. But I think we've laid down a really good framework, you know, more than 15 years ago, for how to do this. And you can learn from that.

What's the catalog you wish you had? More and more. There's so much. There are companies. I have all the catalogs you haven't got. Which one do you want to buy? It depends what the price is. What multiple are you charging? Average. Average. There's obviously iconic music like Michael Jackson, Queen. Again, I just named two where I also had the L piece behind the Iron Curtain in Czechoslovakia. So, it just kind of enforced that, but those two stuck with me along with AHA back then.

back then. It's, you know, I love, yeah, those two I would obviously get, unfortunately competition has them, but such is life. But we have some really amazing ones ourselves, which I'm tremendously proud of. The other one I'm really proud of is Tracy Chapman. It's just, you know, that one for me, it's the timestamps my college years here in the United States. So it's like different bands and different times. And it was so great to see her perform at the Grammys a year ago. And yeah, it's fun. Pink Floyd? Yeah, Pink Floyd as well.

That one for me would go to the 80s. It's kind of funny because we have a jingle on the podcast and we were thinking about having this money, right? But it was so expensive to have it that we made our own instead. We kind of touched on AI. Just how is it going to change your business? I don't think we know yet exactly. But we're very focused on it. I think there's two different ways that it can happen. One, just like for any other business

where you use it for efficiency. So it's like that's got nothing to do with music. It's just standard practices and sort of standardizing our workflows, so that you can then, you know, automate a lot of those and, and, you know, through application of AI. The other, which is music specific is for what we discussed, which is how do you track and attribute? Yeah. But the other is also creation, right? And there's obviously creative tools that exist today. There'll be more in the future, whether open source or closed source. And I think they'll ultimately have two separate two types of outputs, one, which is

what I would call more like background music, that it's not like associated with any artists, it's more like mood music. And I think AI will probably take a big chunk out of that. Because, you know, it will be easier to do it at larger scale, probably more, you know, better precision, etc. So I would say that may be an area of music that may be under attack. Pretty, that's pretty clear. The other is artist centric music. And that's when it's

when you say mood, when you say mood centric music, what is that like EB, Sundown, Lounge? I'm not thinking... Like when I listen to it, I have no idea who the artist is. It's more like I'm working and it's just something playing in the background, elevator music. You know, it's just... It doesn't have any clear artist association or voice. Sometimes it doesn't even have a voice, but sometimes, you know, it's just, it doesn't have any clear artist association. Yeah, always. Sometimes he doesn't even have a voice. But sometimes, you know, many times it does. But it's, it's not, it's not branded with any artist. And that's why

I'm using the words artist centric for the other bucket, which is like, you know, it's this, this is either a cheer and always substantially similar to a cheer. Right. Or Bruno Mars and do all Lipa, etc. And I think this type of content, well, we have to handle extremely carefully, because it's obviously people's identity and their livelihood, but like very importantly, their identity. And, and, and here, it needs to be very permission based, whether they want to be sort of duplicated or not, and whether it's their existing songs or completely new songs.

But this is the area where we're really focused a lot. And our work on this is since with three constituents, one, which is the platforms themselves, because that's where the content ends up. So how we treat that. The second is with the with the model companies. And the third one is with the government's sort of in this order. And that is something order of priority. Because obviously, with government, it's important to work on things like AI, and no fakes act, etc. But sometimes it takes a long time for it to actually come to fruition, right? It doesn't mean we don't do it, but we don't rely on it. So,

it's a multi-front work. Rob, let's change tack a bit. What's the corporate culture like at Warner Music Group? It's a kind of call it a 15, depending on our market cap is 15, 16, 17, $18 billion startup. Because you want to retain that as much as possible to have the entrepreneurial feeling. At the same time, we're a public company, which means lots of reporting and stability and visibility, etc. So I'm constantly sort of juggling these two feelings that I want to move fast and disrupt things fast as a startup. And at the same time, I got to operate within, within, you know, certain structures. I would say it's very entrepreneurial. And you kind of have to I think the best way to tackle it is then you need to decide as a leader,

which roles can be entrepreneurial and which ones need to be much more structured, right? Because that's really the way to manage, because you can't apply all the same to everybody. And I think that's a mistake. So that's what I'm feeling through and I feel my way through. And obviously the closer they are to frontline, to the artist, you want them to be entrepreneurial.

And the closer, so the more right brain, the more entrepreneurial you want them to be. And the more left brain, the closer to the center of the company, the more structured. And then you can have like a global platform that unleashes the creative people. What are the challenges of having the left and the right brain in the same company? That's the fun of putting that together, because I don't think that you can have a successful company in our space that doesn't have both. It doesn't work, because if it's only right, it's going to be too small. It's not going to scale enough. And if it's going to be too small. It's not gonna scale enough. And if it's going to be only left,

it's gonna lose all the creativity and deal flow, et cetera. So you need to find how to bridge it together. And then you also realize that when people spend more time together, that they're not that different. I always used to say, you know, when I was working at YouTube is that engineers are like songwriters.

They both write software. It's just one is storytelling software and the other one is like utility software. One is code and the other one is notes. But they're writing something that's digitally disseminated throughout the world. And they kind of behave the same way. You know, star engineers are, you know, they can be peculiar just like star songwriters or artists. Have you adopted any kind of unconventional cultural practices? Do you have like concerts every Friday?

No, we don't. You know, I do all hands meetings, obviously, with the company, but that's not that unconventional. Well, you know, I do all hands meetings, obviously, with the company, but that's not that unconventional. Well, you know, what I do is with all of my reports, we do, you know, Friday, sort of, you know, quick one page of like, what have you, you know, what did you get done this week? What are some of the important things for next week? And what do you need from me? And so all of my reports do this on Friday. I read it over the weekend and I know what I'm going into next week, right? And maybe I realized, okay, I need to set up two meetings on this topic because you know, it came up through the documents. And it's a very efficient way to understand what's are the important things happening every week in the company, but also it gives people like it forces people to articulate their work. I read about another person in the US who is asking people to list five things they

did during the week. Yeah, I think he copied me. I think he must have done. What do you look for when you hire somebody? One is an open mind. I think it's extremely important because we live in a world full of uncertainty and actually increasing uncertainty, where visibility is limited. And you need people who know how to pivot on a dime if necessary,

and have very, very open mind to rethink things. I've always looked I always like disrupting right? Like if you look at it from my choices of employment, I always like disrupting, right? Like if you look at it from my choices of employment, I was always disrupting something. And so it's very hard for me to sit still and just kind of be part of something that doesn't change. Like I do that. So I like to hire people who have that in them

because that obviously makes my job easier too, right? And, you know, through having sort of lots of change makers. So change makers with a very open mind, because when you have an open mind, especially when you work in a company like ours, or any other large multinational company, you have to, you know, ultimately, you get to a matrix set up.

You can't have people who are too rigid about things, right? They gotta be flexible to work with each other, give up control, still demand performance, but it's okay to not have control and you can still succeed. And these are important traits. Do you disrupt your own colleagues? In what way do you mean? Well, I mean, you disrupt everything, left, right and center. Do you disrupt things internally in the group? They would probably say so. I actually work with our head of HR quite a lot,

because a lot of these things tie to what your HR processes are and how certain things are set up. And, and, and also, with our head of comms, because one of the things that I learned is that you can do what a you know, all the different things, but if people don't know it, if the message doesn't translate, if it doesn't resonate, you don't have people on board, ultimately doesn't work, right, then you don't accomplish anything. So having the collaboration around communications becomes much, much more strategic. How do you communicate internally? How do you get people to climb the mountains? So A, all hands meetings. And again, it's not just me, right? Obviously, I include other colleagues

from the leadership team. How often do you do them? We do it every six months. And we'll see. I didn't want to, in my previous job, we did it every quarter. I didn't want to overload it right away. A lot of things to do, lots of change.

But now we're doing it every six months. But it brings the company together, which is important. The thing that I do every week on Friday is I publish basically what I read this week on the Slack channel. So it's not spamming the whole company. It's only people who want to follow that. And which is quite a lot. But it's I find it helpful, because I read a lot of news, whether it's political news, or entertainment news, or business news, and just every day, at least an hour of that. So I basically collect not everything that I've read, but basically a bunch

of notable stories. And then I share them. What kind of things do you read? and then I share them. What kind of things do you read? I mean, there's a headlines newsletter that I get from one person that gives me like probably 100 headlines every single day on different important topics. So that's like my most succinct way to absorb everything that's happening in the world right now. What is it called? It's his name is Abe Burns. I'll forget. I'll get it back to you. I'll get back to you on that. And but it's extremely useful. And, and then, you know, I read Wall Street

Journal, you know, all of the publication Bloomberg, FG, New York Times, etc. So I read all of those. Then I go through Apple News, because then you open a whole bunch of other one, it goes beyond business, right. So it's more into like journal life, etc. And then I have lots of different newsletters that I subscribe to, like strategic, etc. cetera, Ben Thompson, you know, and just read all of that. On topics that have nothing to do with Warner, right? But just to be generally smarter.

If you were to distill it down, what is driving you each day? When you work with amazing creative force, you know, artists and songwriters, and for me, the favorite part of my job is meeting them. When you work with amazing creative force, you know, artists and songwriters, and for me, the favorite part of my job is meeting them. When you when you work with them, what drives you is that you want to figure out the best way that we can help them unleash their art on the world. And that's kind of fun.

Because when you see that happening, and when you see the blue flame, then getting bigger, and you know, until it's like really flaming. It's incredible. And in order to do that, you have to not sit still and disrupt the company itself, right? Because industry is changing. And that's also cool. So it's like for me, it's the constant evolution and the ability to shape things for the future.

Again, it's disruption. In one word, it's disruption. Because I think through disruption, you find opportunity. It makes you stronger, smarter, and you can't be afraid of it. I just don't like to sit still. This job allows me to do that. When you have to sit still, how do you relax? I don't really, by reading news.

But I like watching TV a lot, actually. That's like my favorite way to completely disconnect. I'm, yeah, voracious watcher of movies and TV shows. And a lot of podcasts. Such as? White Lotus, Lioness. I love a lot of stuff that's on Paramount Plus, all the Taylor Sheridan shows, Yellowstone,

and so I love that. Gilded H on HBO was fun, but obviously White Lotus is great. And you know, Black Mirror on Netflix, amazing. Drops of God on Apple TV+. Incredible show. There's just so much. The new look on Apple, incredible. So there's just so much great stuff to watch. And so that's a way for me to completely disconnect. We have tens of thousands of young listeners to this podcast. What's your advice to them?

What is it that you have told your two daughters? Sort of the same thing that my dad told me, which was, you know, nobody will remember the reasons why you failed. They'll just remember your ranking or whatever the result is. You know, just focus on driving results and always, always do stay two steps ahead of your boss. That's I learned it from one of my first jobs 30 years ago, I was an assistant where my boss told me, be two steps ahead of me and you'll be a winner. And, you know, of course, there's two steps means like, you know, there's a tree of decisions, but it literally stays with me to this day. That's how I think about things because it allows you to iterate very quickly with people when things are thought out a little bit more.

And it doesn't have to be precise. How do you stay two steps ahead of your boss? Anticipation. You anticipate what is the next question after you've answered the first one. And you've answered it this way or that way. And then so like you got maybe four scenarios, but like you just kind of think it through. So you prepare it. And because of that, you kind of have much more dynamic conversation

versus oh, I have to get back to you on this and that like you progress and you make faster progress. So I think that's really, really important. It stayed with me. Honestly, I learned that in my late 20s and it stayed with me to this day. And you know, the I say this to my daughter, this might not sound that nice, but when you say I'm doing my best,

if the result isn't good, it means there's no more upside from you. So, you know, you should think about that before you say that, that you're doing your best. And, you know, so it's, there are a few things like this. And, and I think the, you know, the immigrant mentality in me is, I always felt, because I have an accent, there was an accent, also, like, it probably holds me back somehow. So I have to do more, you know, you know, I don't have connections, I was like, I have

to do more than the Americans in order to get the same. When you do that, somehow it stays with you and then you always just end up doing more, always. I think it's good to outrun the other people. Robert, all I can say is that it doesn't sound like your immigrant accent has held you back too much. It's been incredible talking to you. What a fun company.

What an incredible world. And big thanks for coloring our times with this incredible music and for making life so much fun. Thank you. We're really proud of the company. We love what we do. And we're disrupting ourselves and working on providing much, you know, even much greater value to artists and songwriters and users all around the world and being good partners to our distribution partners.