Music

While sitting with the Roc Nation team at the label’s headquarters in Midtown, Manhattan, Roc Nation’s Distribution President Krystian Santini says the company’s groundbreaking new Dashboard came together after Jay-Z personally called a meeting last year.

“Jay-Z himself took us into an all-staff meeting and said, ‘We’re here to hand over the keys. It took us 25 years; we want the next person to take 10,’” Santini tells Billboard. “So we’re essentially handing over all the tools as best as we can to give artists that edge because, what we’ve seen, everything has opened up. Yet there are still haves and have-nots. There’s no blueprint to get to a certain point of viability where things get easier. There’s a lot of people spending a lot of money and not finding any traction.”

Roc Nation’s new distribution system — which came together as part of the label’s merger with Equity Distribution last year — went live on Monday (Nov. 17). The “labor of love,” as Santini puts it, is an unbelievably detailed eye in the sky for any and every up-and-coming artist.

Santini and his team take me through each module of the Dashboard, demonstrating how artists now have every available statistic at their fingertips — down to what emojis people use when talking about them and where people most stream their music. One artist we look at had big success overseas, with an overwhelming majority of people being exposed to their music while playing video games like NBA 2K. The system shows the approximate age range and gender of the artist’s most active listeners, along with other streaming data and social media analytics at the push of a button. Most importantly, the artist maintains complete ownership of their masters, and accrues 85% of earnings. Payments are automatically sent to the artist’s bank accounts and/or PayPal.

The real kicker? This whole system is completely free to use. Roc Nation has billed this as a means to inspire artists to take distribution entirely into their own hands, with the label, of course, keeping an eye on the platform’s most successful artists — providing obvious incentive for up-and-coming talent.

“With all these tools built in, we can incentivize and pluck artists,” Santini explains. “It was part of opening up the net so people have more of an opportunity to work with us. Some artists dream about coming to Roc Nation, but there aren’t many ways to get to us. This democratizes that access to us.”

Below, Santini delves deeper into what makes Roc Nation’s new Dashboard so unique and why the music landscape is shifting more into an independent direction than ever before.

Overall, there seems to be a bigger conversation happening about artist distribution and a lot of different companies making their own distro platforms. Why do you think this conversation is so important to have right now? From your perspective at Roc Nation, what are you seeing?

Not to just bag on the label system all the time, but it’s failing a lot of artists. We’ve gotten to the point where it’s failing viable artists in continuing to sustain things. From Jay’s perspective, I don’t know [if] he thought there was that support in the major label systems. You can find an interview with him from ’97 where he was already talking bad about Def Jam. So I think he’s always been incredulous about that type of support. Owning one of the most successful management companies gives you the ability to see what the Big Three are doing in any case.

So at a certain point, internally, we were like: distribution. That’s it; that’s the forward-thinking thing. So we’re trying to make it easier for people to access those elements and then create a lane so if someone’s doing well, we reach out to them and add those elements there. Again, in a more helpful fashion rather than just being competitive. Help them build their brand at Roc Nation. Jay saw that labels were out of vogue, and what’s in vogue is to build your own thing. Like Curren$y — he can operate how he wants to when he feels like it. That’s the ideal, hopeful outcome for this: that an artist just has their career their way.

There is an unbelievable amount of information provided here. How do you obtain access to all of that?

We pay for a lot of data. We’re paying for a lot of access to a lot of data and making data digestible but also not scary. People look at data and get overwhelmed; it’s how can we take everything, put it into one place, and then you can move.

So this is completely free for any artist who wants to sign up? How are you making money to pay for all this data and all these tools?

It’s an investment. Whoever uploads with us, there’s a profit [option] should they make money. So we just intend on having viable artists on the platform and fronting the costs for a large user base. It’s not gated. Starting Monday, anybody can sign up. We only make money when they make money. Everyone else is charging an upfront subscription fee or buy-release fee. An artist can upload as much as they want, as often as they want, and we actually encourage it. Not to call out competitors, but they’ll do like, “It’s free, but only with these DSPs.”

That’s why I’m asking how you guys are making money — because your competitors have fees and subscription options. How can you afford for it to be completely free?

We’re eating the front costs for sure, but we wouldn’t do this if we didn’t think it was viable. It’s 1,000% viable. Once you have a certain user base, you have the artists that make money, but we know how to make money. So maybe other people, they have to go the other way and, you know, charge everybody 10 bucks a month because that’s the only way they know how to do this. Once we have people in, we’re not gonna attempt to upsell them. We’re going to try and just build a viable platform, an ecosystem, and from there — I think we have proof of concept. There’s no more gatekeepers. We wanna offer everything to the artist.

Tell me more about that competition brewing in this distribution space. How do you intend to stand out?

I think we just benefit from a unique company where we have a unique appeal that our competitors don’t quite have. It is a competition, but I look at it like golf. If our game is refined, it doesn’t matter what anybody else does. For the other ones, it begs the question of what happens when you’re successful? It still leads to the same path, back to the major labels. So I think because our appeal is unique, any competition that we’ll have will be offset by the fact that people are coming to us for a specific reason that they would only go to AWAL for it.

Will you accept AI artists on your platform? How will you filter who signs up for the Dashboard?

We do quality control [on] every submission that comes through, so we are on the lookout for abuse of AI, but the problem is the stores themselves haven’t set a solid policy for us to follow. So we’re keeping our eyes on accounts. From a values perspective as a company, we definitely don’t want to fuel what’s happening with the AI artist creation and them entering into the same exact marketplace. But just in my opinion, I don’t wanna release AI tracks, I don’t. It’s certainly not a company mandate, but for me, we have very much stayed away from it, and we haven’t even thought about signing with or working with anybody that uses AI, much less a total AI artist.

What does the future of Roc Nation look like with this system in play? How does this change music?

We expand. I think we’ve expanded where people were likely to see us as a brand. Maybe in some spaces, we would have hoped we’d be in certain genres or subcultures focused on it, but we intend on being everywhere… I see the middle class of the music industry growing. That doesn’t exist currently. That’s not a thing; that’s not even a cool thing that people aspire to be. But there’s gonna be a whole crop of artists that make a living from this. That class is growing exponentially. It’s happening now.

Check out a video explaining the new Dashboard below.