Trapital Summit
EMPIRE is not for sale, said company founder/CEO Ghazi at the Trapital Summit on Thursday (Oct. 3) in Hollywood.
While appearing on a panel titled “The Rise of Independent Music” at the inaugural edition of the conference, Trapital founder Dan Runcie played a short game of over/under with Ghazi, asking the EMPIRE head how many calls he’d recently received about selling the label/distributor.
“You run a music company that has done well from a business perspective and many companies that are your peers in this space are being acquired, they are selling, they are raising money,” Runcie said, adding that EMPIRE is an attractive company to acquire at the moment. He then asked Ghazi if he had received over or under four phone calls in the last 12 months poking around to see if he would sell or allow investment.
“I haven’t gotten any phone calls,” Ghazi said sternly to the audience. “Because everybody knows I’m not for sale. Period. I am dead serious. I am living my purpose. There’s no price on that.”
The declaration comes as independent music distributors like Stem, Downtown, ONErpm and Believe have begun fundraising and exploring acquisitions from major music companies and other investors. Earlier this year, Warner Music Group looked into acquiring Believe (talks between the two ultimately fizzled out) and later hired Goldman Sachs banker Michael Ryan-Southern to lead its search to buy a distributor.
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While EMPIRE would be an ideal acquisition target for the majors or private equity, Ghazi said that’s not an option.
“I’m one of the very few people that I don’t give a s— about money. I care about money that I can share with other people within the livelihood that I get to create,” Ghazi said at the one-day conference. “I used to tell people when I started EMPIRE, ‘I want to be the Robin Hood of the music business.’ And I think that I’ve stuck to my principles. People will always poke around and it never gets to me.”
Ghazi explained that he has brushed off any inquiries that have come his way and has tried to keep his eye on the prize. “We’re helping thousands of people. We’ve created micro-economies all across this planet we call Earth and, for me, there’s nothing more special than that,” he added.
The EMPIRE CEO’s declaration comes as client Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” continues its No. 1 streak on the Billboard Hot 100 with 12 weeks at the summit to date.
“Did you ever think that one of the biggest songs you would have would be a country song?” Runcie asked during the conversation.
“I didn’t think it wouldn’t be,” Ghazi responded. The CEO went on to explain that about five years ago, EMPIRE set out to find stars and that in every genre they explored — including hip-hop, country and Afro music — they found someone special. “A lot of it just has to do with having the right taste, your thumb on the pulse and approaching the culture with understanding what they’re trying to do,” he said.
From CDs to streaming to AI, new technology has had an outsized impact on the music industry for decades — and Venice Music founder/CEO Troy Carter predicts the next big technological shift will come in the form of synthetic artists.
At a panel titled “The Future of Streaming” at the inaugural Trapital Summit in Hollywood on Thursday (Oct. 3), Carter said he does not believe audiences will be able to tell the difference between physical artists and their holographic images in the coming years — and that those lifelike holograms represent the next big revenue generator in music.
To illustrate his point, Carter highlighted what Industrial Light & Magic created for the ABBA Voyage holographic concerts in London. “In terms of live experience, it’s a combination of artificial intelligence and high-end holographic imaging that seems real. The audience won’t be able to tell the difference,” said Carter. “When you go to whatever streaming service, you won’t be able to tell whether that is a human artist or a synthetic artist. When you go to see them live, you won’t be able to tell if it is a human artist or synthetic artist. And the audience won’t care.”
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The bold prediction from the former Spotify executive stemmed from Trapital founder and moderator Dan Runcie’s question about what will replace streaming in the music consumption hierarchy as the technology reaches its saturation point.
While Carter stated that the ascension of synthetic artists will take away from “the purity that our industry thrives on…the genie is out of the bottle and the audience doesn’t care,” he said. “They’re going to gravitate towards it and it’s going to be hugely competitive with what legacy music is today.”
The use of synthetic artists, Carter believes, will be beneficial to both human artists and the wider industry due to its scale. By employing them, he said, “you could do [live experiences and recorded music] in every language. You could do it in all parts of the world. Then there are ways for real artists to be able to use that technology to be able to scale their businesses, as well.”
The discussion followed Carter’s thoughts earlier in the panel on where the music industry needs to be placing its energy now that, in his words, the trend of signing artists from TikTok is “starting to crumble.”
“Everybody chased what was hot on TikTok. We gave the keys to TikTok,” said Carter. “Everybody bet on ephemeral artists for the most part and ephemeral songs on TikTok and that’s starting to crumble now. We got to get to a point where it’s, ‘Okay, let’s bet on the art. Let’s bet on the artist. Let’s bet on development and really put strategy around that.’ The people who can do that are going to build billion-dollar brands with artists.”
According to Carter, the music industry can best use new technologies to its advantage by striking true partnerships with the companies that create it.
“In order for this to work, you need partners in this ecosystem whose incentives are aligned with our industry,” he said. “Me going inside of Spotify, Lyor [Cohen] going inside of YouTube, Jimmy [Iovine] and Larry [Jackson] going inside of Apple, it was people who were actually internally helping to align the interest [of music and technology] and being able to explain why [the music] is important. Some great things came out of that, in terms of building real partnerships. We have to hold all partners who are coming into our industry, who we’re giving content to, accountable for that.”
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