State Champ Radio music investors
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Last week, GoldState Music founder and managing partner Charles Goldstuck gathered his investors along with a collection of music’s most brilliant minds for “Conversations in Music,” a three-day conference about the future of the business.
Goldstuck has been convening exclusive thought-leadership meetings for decades in his many roles: he’s the founder of The Sanctuary at Albany, a state-of-the-art recording studio and music academy in the Bahamas; the executive chairman of TouchTunes Interactive Networks, and a major-label veteran who ran business operations for BMG’s music labels and co-founded J Records with Clive Davis, building it into the RCA Music Group.
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But the South African philanthropist said that this year’s event — which he hosted at the luxurious Pier Sixty-Six resort in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida — marked his first event of such scale and urgency, reflecting the speed at which industry dynamics are changing.
Each expert-moderated conversation was packed with insight, and reflected Goldstuck’s own keen interest in the intersection of AI and music — he is currently funding the AI & African Music initiative at his alma mater, Witz University in Johannesburg, to empower creatives to use AI to preserve, teach or co-create African musical traditions and sounds, and recently published a paper arguing that music companies ought to negotiate deals with AI companies to set precedent before courts and lawmakers weigh in.
Among the conference highlights: Water & Music’s AI analyst and music producer Yung Spielberg demonstrated how to make songs using Suno. MIT professors showcased the cutting-edge music technology their top students are building. DAYA, a GoldState artist who shot to fame with her feature on Chainsmokers’ “Don’t Let Me Down,” revealed how she’s navigating the modern industry and shared her new music. Dr. Tamay Aykut, founder and CEO of Sureel, broke down the possibilities for how to determine which rights holders should get credit for music produced with AI models trained on their works.
We asked Goldstuck for his five top takeaways from the invite-only affair – here’s what he pointed to.
Publishers are gaining leverage. The deal between Kobalt and ElevenLabs establishes a 50-50 split between publishers and recorded-music rights holders, a big improvement from streaming and sales, which have paid out lower rates to publishers. This sets a new precedent for future generative AI licensing deals, with publishers now in a position to secure stronger economic outcomes as the landscape evolves. Industry surveys estimate that more than half of younger creators already use AI tools in their workflows, suggesting that generative AI could make songwriters more productive.
Laurent Hubert (Left), CEO of Kobalt Music, Mary Megan Peer (Center), CEO of peermusic, and Kristin Robinson (Right), Senior Correspondent at Billboard – at the GoldState Conversations in Music Conference
Courtesy of GoldState Conversations in Music Conference
Music catalog deal volume is at a record high. Buyers include both established music companies and financial investors. There have been no significant defaults or financial problems across these transactions in recent years, fueling the highest level of investor confidence seen in the sector since the Napster era. The market is competitive, but investors are employing more sophisticated knowledge and due diligence thanks to increased transparency from the digital music ecosystem. And yet, there are only two major players in the catalog valuation space. Is there room for more?
The indies are rising. Independent music companies claim nearly half the global market share and the majority of new releases in 2025. Improved creator tools, the proliferation of distribution options, and the ease of accessing audiences across more than 700 digital and social platforms worldwide are powering the expansion of independent distributors like Symphonic Distribution, Too Lost, Create Music Group, and Empire, all of whom are posting double-digit annual growth. Financing for independent creators is getting more sophisticated too, with leading distro platforms now offering artists advances based on real-time consumption data.
Ghazi Shami (Left), Founder and CEO of EMPIRE, and Priyanka Khimani (Right), Founding Partner of Khimani & Associates – at the GoldState Conversations in Music Conference
Courtesy of GoldState Conversations in Music Conference
Investing in China and India is about to get easier. Historically, Western artists and rightsholders lacked clarity on Chinese consumption, but Luminate’s new licensing partnership with Tencent Music promises new transparency from the world’s fifth-largest music market. Luminate is also ramping up its Indian market data coverage, as Billboard launches in India.
AI detection and attribution technologies will be key. Only a handful of formal licenses have been announced for generative AI platforms and music, but commercial and licensing momentum is building. Landmark agreements include those between Kobalt and ElevenLabs, Merlin and ElevenLabs, and the Universal Music Group with Udio. As Goldstuck wrote in his paper, Past Precedent, Future Proof: Towards a New Commercial and Legal Framework for AI-Generated Music, generative AI platforms and rightsholders should move towards collaboration through negotiated settlements, not litigation, so as to pave the way for a more standardized commercial licensing regime for AI-generated music. Accurate detection will help monitor the use of tracks for training, while new attribution systems will be critical for properly crediting and compensating rights holders and creators for outputs. Platforms like Deezer, which offers detection, and Sureel, which specializes in attribution, are showing early promise in moving the industry towards proactive AI music tracing and licensing, but widespread adoption will require a lot more work.
Charles Goldstuck (Left), Recording Artist Daya (Center), and David Conway (Right), President of Hard 8 Working Group and Daya’s Manager – at the GoldState Conversations in Music Conference
Courtesy of GoldState Conversations in Music Conference
Next week, Harbourview Equity founder and CEO Sherrese Clarke Soares brings her investors to Miami for another series of panel conversations, as the investor-conference circuit continues.
With the recent news of slowing streaming growth in the U.S. and declining global revenue growth in recorded music, one might think the trends could have a negative impact on the market for publishing and recorded music catalogs.
Think again. For a handful of reasons, industry insiders who spoke to Billboard don’t believe the slowdown will have much — if any — effect on the continually brisk business in music intellectual property rights. Subscription revenue, which accounted for roughly 66% of U.S. revenue and approximately 51% of global revenue in 2024, according to the RIAA and IFPI, respectively, will continue to grow in mature markets and elsewhere.
“I don’t think the numbers that we’ve seen are enough to make any [music investors] worry too much,” says MIDiA Research’s Mark Mulligan. “I know that a lot of these funds have seen our numbers, and our numbers are relatively cautious about the outlook. We’re not bearish, but we’re not bullish either.”
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Numerous people pointed to Goldman Sachs’ estimates — a closely watched music forecast that remains something of a gold standard in the business — that both global recorded music and publishing revenue will grow at approximately 8% annually through 2030. What’s more, equity analysts seem comfortable with Universal Music Group’s forecast of 8-10% subscription growth through 2028.
In mature markets, future growth will come from higher prices after more than a decade of unchanged subscription fees. “We’ve all gotten comfortable with getting music at what I believe to be a subsidized rate versus its value,” says Jeremy Tucker, founder/managing member of Raven Music Partners, an investor in music catalogs. That subsidy is an underpricing of music subscriptions in order to attract new customers and help platforms achieve scale. Now that there are 818 million global subscribers, according to MIDiA Research, labels and streaming services seem intent on getting more from each subscriber.
Many streaming services raised their prices in 2022 and 2023, and Spotify raised prices in a few markets in 2024. Major labels that have renewed their licensing agreements with Spotify suggested the deals allow for higher-priced superfan tiers. Additionally, Warner Music Group CEO Robert Kyncl said at a March 10 banking conference that “there’s quite strong evidence that there’s a lot of room to grow on pricing, especially in … mature markets.” All of this means there will be more value coming to rights holders, says Tucker, who looks at a lengthy time horizon, not any single year’s results, when considering potential gains. “We think there’s going to be growth over the medium to long term. But, in any given year, the actual growth is not something I’m too worried about.”
Additionally, people expect rights holders will extract more value from catalogs through better blocking and tackling. While companies focused on subscriber growth over the last 15 years, the next era will be marked by better execution, says a person in the music investment field. Artificial intelligence, this person says, can help rights owners expand the global reach of their music by creating versions in multiple foreign languages at little cost. AI can also make royalty collection more effective and cost-efficient. These wins may not have the appeal of, say, a biopic that boosts an artist’s catalog. But from a financial point of view, expanding a song’s reach and cutting costs serve the buyer’s core mission of improving the return on investment.
While U.S. growth slows, much of the world is growing quickly, and Western companies that focus on English-language repertoire face a “bleak” future as emerging markets outpace markets where English-language music is most popular, says Mulligan. As a result, companies that failed to invest a decade ago are playing catch-up in markets dominated by local music. “What they should have done is started signing loads of artists [in emerging markets] 10 to 15 years ago,” Mulligan says.
Still, there’s opportunity in emerging countries and their local repertoire. Subscription penetration rates — the ratio of subscribers to the country’s adult population — are a good proxy for a country’s potential, explains Mulligan. Developed markets like the U.S. and U.K. have penetration rates in the high 40 percent, according to MIDiA’s latest data. Elsewhere, lower penetration rates suggest subscription revenue will increase down the road and, as a result, the local music business infrastructure will grow over time. Poland’s subscription penetration rate, in contrast, is 17%, Brazil’s is 16% and China’s is 13%. Indonesia, the world’s fourth-most populous country, has a 1.8% penetration rate. India, the world’s second-largest country, has a penetration rate of just 1.3%.
Low penetration rates correspond with growth potential, as streaming platforms help fuel infrastructure growth and subscription adoption adds more value to the market. “You get this virtuous circle of influence,” Mulligan explains, “where if you establish the infrastructure to create an audience, that creates the virtuous circle of investment, where people start setting up labels, people start being able to have their careers as artists, they create more music, more of that music exports, and the impact on the global market increases. India is maybe a third of the way along in the journey, whereas Indonesia has not even got started.”
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