Michael Walker: All right, excited to be here today with my new friend, Alex Branson. Alex, let me give you a quick intro. He's a visionary leader at Beatport, driving innovative tools like AmpSuite and LabelRadar to empower artists, labels, and suppliers globally. He pioneered international growth at EMPIRE, built platforms like Warner Music's LevelMusic.com, and he's a trailblazer in music tech. He advises Facebook and co-founded the UK's first digital distribution company while shaping DSP agreements for AIM.

So today, I'm really excited to connect with him and talk a little bit more about what he's doing at Beatport with LabelRadar and Beatport Studio to help independent artists like yourself.

Alex, thank you so much for taking the time to be here today.

Alex Branson: That's okay. Trust me, everybody wishes I was called Richard Branson and had all of his private islands and...

Michael: I didn't even put that together, but that must've been a subliminal slip that happened.

Alex: That's quite all right. My brother's actually called Richard, and one of my favorite things to do in business meetings, if he calls me, is just to hang up. It's a real power play. It's fabulous.

Michael: I'm sure you have a lot of fun with that. Richard Branson—people never get confused.

Well, Alex, maybe to get started, for anyone meeting you or connecting with you for the first time, could you share just a quick introduction to yourself and how you got started at Beatport?

Alex: Sure. Yes. I've been doing this a long time. I started working in the music industry in the late '90s, so that is a while ago, it feels. I've had an interesting career, mostly on the record side, but also on the song side with publishing.

Technology has been a large part of it, and I think I ended up at Beatport partly because the current CEO is a chap called Rob McDaniels, who is the founder of a company called InGrooves. He brought me into that company, and we spent nearly a decade together building it. That's now called Virgin Music Group, so if you're not familiar, you probably know Virgin. It was acquired by Universal.

At some point, Rob became CEO of Beatport, and he brought me in to help run the M&A process for LabelRadar and AmpSuite. I definitely can't take credit for the brilliance of those two platforms, but I'm enjoying developing them from their original foundation.

We completed the transactions, and he asked me to come in and run them. They basically are the centerpieces for a division of the company that I currently run.

Michael: Cool. Man, mergers and acquisitions—that's a world I would love to understand better. It seems like you start getting into some real big-boy business kind of territory when you're talking about mergers and acquisitions.

Alex: It does feel very grown-up. The sums of money are not normal to most people. And yeah, there's a lot of risk, a lot riding on it.

But it's such a practiced art now that you really step through a process. It's not that you can't make mistakes—of course, you can—but you're quite thorough. The process of due diligence allows for that.

So yeah, I enjoy doing them, I have to say. I've done a few now, and it's something I learned on the job, not something I learned at school or in some sort of banking career. So yeah, it's fun.

Michael: Cool. Yeah. I wonder, in terms of a music artist's career, what the closest thing to mergers and acquisitions would be in their journey. I guess if they had their catalog acquired or if there were major record label deals.

Alex: Yeah, that's it. I had a friend of mine just sell a catalog. He created a children's music brand and catalog and sold that to one of the majors for a decent sum of money—enough to buy himself an Aston Martin. So, yeah, I think he learned a lot through that process because he's not from that world, and he brought in an advisor. That's the sort of work that I have done in the past.

Michael: Awesome. Well, one thing I'd love to pick your brain about is just the current scope of the music industry for independent artists. With your background in music and working with so many artists, I'm sure you've started to see some similarities in terms of common challenges, mistakes, or issues. From your perspective, what are some of the biggest challenges artists are facing right now? And maybe part of the seed reason you started doing what you're doing with Beatport?

Alex: Yeah, sure. I always think about this as, remember the time before the internet. I think access is a wonderful thing. It's democratized the ability to have a career. It wasn't really like that before. It was a very tight group at the top of that pyramid that made their way through. I think that, therefore, the challenges of fandom haven't changed. There are only so many hours in the day for a music fan to listen to music. Of course, access allows you to listen to a much more varied amount of music. So, whilst it's improved on one side, I don't know that it's become easier for everybody to have a successful career in music. That competition element is still there. Because of that, there are lots of fun and innovative bits of technology out there to help rise above the noise. I've listened to a few of your episodes, and it often gets talked about— that ability to stand out amongst the vast amount of music going onto the platforms, trying to reach the ears of a fan base.

Personally, I think there are a few different ways that you can kind of make your way through. I ran a podcast for a while, and I had this phrase on there that I used to talk about, which was, "The only thing that's really important is the artist, the fan, and the music that they make. Everything else is either improving that relationship or getting in the way." I think that's the same for both sides. If you think about it from a fan's point of view, there are so many different ways that you can kind of indulge yourself in music. For the artist, they've got to go find these people on all of those multiple platforms. And that's really the current challenge.

I guess to bring it into the Beatport frame—if you're not familiar with Beatport, it's a 20-year-old download store, really providing high-quality audio files to the DJ community for that period of time. Today, it's much more than that, which is where I get involved. My goal is to make sure that there is a continuous supply of good-quality music to the store. As we just talked about, that whole world has become a bit more democratized than it ever was before. Dance music, by nature, is electronic music. Therefore, anyone with a MacBook computer, theoretically, can make good-quality dance music. You don't have the same restrictions that you do, perhaps, with audio capture on a microphone for a drum kit or something like that in a studio where you need a bit more time and effort to get the actual recording down. There’s just a lot—there's a lot, a lot of music.

We have a couple of other businesses in the producer community: Loopmasters, Loopcloud, which are sample libraries, things that you can integrate into your DAW, and then Plugin Boutique, which is the plugins side of it. I really pick up the story when the music comes out of the studio. As a musician, Michael, you know what it's like—what do you do? In dance music, there are typically two paths. You want to start with trying to get signed to one of the large independent dance labels—like Defected, Toolroom, Monstercat, etc. There's a bunch of them. But that's quite hard unless you know somebody there. So, one of the products that we bought was a company called LabelRadar. Shout out to Derek and Ed, who were the founders there and who work with me still today. It's a brilliant platform to solve one of the hardest things, I think, that the industry has created for itself, which is demo submission.

Just anecdotally, when I worked at Sony in the '90s, these demos would turn up in jiffy bags, sometimes a mini disc, sometimes a CD, etc. They would go into the post room, and the post room would deliver them around to all the different offices. The ones that landed at, you know, incredible labels—like the dance label I worked for—would just go on someone's desk and, quite honestly, they would go straight in the bin. This was the age-old problem. There just isn't that level of capacity to listen to everything. Also, the other problem with that model of physically sending a demo is that there's no consistency in what you receive. I've just mentioned the different formats, but also information like: Who is this artist? What's their story? Why are they sending it to you? Is this something you should spend your time listening to? LabelRadar has standardized all of that. So, in the parlance of the internet, an artist has a profile, with all the links out to Instagram and all the other things that you typically have these days. From a label's point of view, they're looking at something in an environment that's standardized, familiar to a certain degree, because they're all looking for the same sorts of things—these A&R folks. We also encourage a more fluid approach to listening to music.

The artist selects the 20 seconds that they think best represents the track. When the A&R person gets to listen to it— I mean, Defected gets something like a thousand demos sent to them a week. It's impossible to listen to all of that, right? So, they now have this sort of playlist-style environment on their side, on the label side, so they can listen through these 20-second clips while they're perhaps answering emails or doing something else. It’s a very easy way for them to get through it all. If they like it, obviously, they can stop and then listen to the whole track. They can also go and look at the artist profile, and that's when they start to dig. That’s when they really start to engage with it.

The brilliant thing that the guys did—though obviously any of that could be done fairly easily—was that they understood that the artist was sending it to a label because they know who the label is, and they're a fan. They're probably buying the records from, you know, Toolroom or whoever—Hospital Records or whatever. So, the label shouldn’t ignore them. That's a good fan relationship to have there. Also, you might find, you know, the next track for your label, but it’s also not just about the tracks, it's the artists themselves. Labels like Hosp’s Records and Defected develop artists. They're not just picking up tracks and putting them out. So that’s really their use case for it.

Every time they listen to a piece of music, it’s communicated straight back to the artist. So the artist doesn’t have that offline version of sending the jiffy bag out the door and never hearing anything ever again. This way, you know that those labels have actually heard you, and their action from there is either to get in contact and say, "Great, let’s look at signing the record," or they can also do other things. They can add the artist to what we call a "watch list." So, from the artist’s point of view, they’ve been heard by the label that they’re a fan of. They’ve potentially been added to this watch list, and the label has had to do nothing other than click two buttons in that process.

We now have this platform that has simplified the whole process. If you think about what’s happened at that point, a relationship has been made between the artist and the label, and from there, you can build upon that, right? Any good relationship never starts as just one thing; it normally develops. We now have most of the big remix competitions running through the platform, because that’s the other thing the label can do. They can host a remix competition.

Remix competitions are a fantastic way of testing out your skills as a producer because you get the stem pack as part of the process. You get new sounds, new things to play with. You obviously have the recording as a sort of benchmark reference file to think about: What would I do to improve, change, enhance, take it in a new direction, or whatever it might be? And for the label, this is fantastic, right? Because they get a chance to crowdsource repertoire, get to know artists in a different way—like how creative are they, how fast can they react to these competitions that can be, you know, posted with a short window to receive demos.

So, we’ve built a very healthy environment between labels and artists.

The other thing we just added was something called Artist Network. We have a quarter of a million artists on the platform, and three and a half thousand record labels on the other side. This is all dance music, pretty much. There’s very little of other genres in there, and the labels are verified. We have regular communication with them. The artists now can communicate between each other and collaborate. They can mark themselves as open in a sort of similar way that you might do on a social network. It's created a really healthy environment. Artists can leave reviews about the labels. So, if there’s a label that’s the "it" label, you know, people who didn’t have a good experience with them can say that. It's a very trustful, but also transparent environment.

So that’s LabelRadar.

Do you want me to carry on explaining some of the other things that we do?

Michael: I mean, I would love to, and at the end, there's a lot to unpack with what you just shared. It sounds amazing. And so, just to sort of recap, one thing that you shared that I thought was really interesting was you started with talking about how so much of the music industry is really about that connection between the artist and the family—the two most important people in that relationship. Everything else is sort of designed to either facilitate and help those connections or to break them. It's either getting in the way.

It just kind of struck me that it sounds like what you're describing right now, that you're a part of now with LabelRadar, is kind of like that, but for record labels and artists. You're connecting record labels and artists, and the function has helped is to help those two parties come together in a way that previously the communication was very poor. It was hard to know, like, "Have they seen my music?" The communication wasn’t there, but now, because of this platform, you've been able to build a real community between those networks, and that sounds awesome. That was really cool.

Alex: Yeah. And I've just remembered your original question, which I promise I will try and answer. You know, if you think about, we started saying, or I started saying, about the kind of challenges for an artist—how do you get heard? Yeah. It's very, very difficult to rise above the noise. But the record labels, especially in dance music, are very practiced at knowing how to take a record to market.

They also have, typically, alongside their label brands, a community that they can take your artist brand into. And that access to that community is how you build a fan base around an artist as well. So, the labels are very important. They're incredibly important to Beatport and its success in general.

LabelRadar, I think, has been a huge success for them. They’ve felt very supported in a world where, of course, we all know that independent artists can just access Spotify by going to a TuneCore or similar type of platform. So, the world is changing all around us all the time, and everybody’s just sort of adapting.

But being signed to a label, I think, is helpful to rise above the noise. The other thing that we do, and is typical of dance music, is that you start that way typically—you know, music comes out of the studio, you go to a record label, who then puts some records out, you build a bit of a brand and a bit of a buzz, and maybe if you're a DJ as well, you get some gigs off the back of that, etc.

And there's always a point where you get better at your craft, and you make better music, and there's always a point where there’s just too much for other labels to handle, or maybe you want to try a different style. That’s pretty typical. The idea of having multiple monikers in dance music as a producer is very, very common.

So, there’s often a point where an artist will get to where they think, “You know what? I'm going to set my own label up. I’m doing these club nights, and I’ve got this kind of brand. So, I’m going to do a little label. I’ve got some friends who also produce.” And then you’re a business, a business plan, right?

You know, first, it’s like, “Well, how did that happen?” I was, at one point, just happy in my sort of bedroom studio making beats, and now I’m running a company? Did I mean to do that?

And that bit’s often, I think, a thing that catches artists out when they do that, because all of a sudden it’s a very different set of disciplines you’ve got to learn. It’s not just about making music and promoting it and marketing music. Yeah, that's a whole thing in itself. But if you're then involving others, even if they’re your friends, you should have a contract. You should agree on who did what.

So the AmSuite platform, which is the other sort of routine, if you like, is everything you need. It starts with a contract. Contract information is in the database. The contract goes out to the artist. The artist gets their own dashboard. All of the transparency is there from the feedback from DJs.

DJs' feedback goes all the way back down to the artist. If the label wants, it’s got trend reports, and all of your eventual royalty statements go in there as well, and that's very low lift for the label because they don’t really have to do too much. You know, once they've done the contract and the sales start coming in, whether it's from digital or physical or whatever it might be, they just load those statements up into the platform, and it creates all the artist-level royalty statements.

Same for publishing, same for naming rights. And what we try and do is help these typically artist-run labels become a publisher. Yeah, you should, you know, don’t leave that money on the table because if you do, you can't reinvest it back into either your own artistic endeavors or the company that you started.

So, these are the sorts of things that we're trying to do at Beatport to just make the lives of anyone that's serious about this easier. So, yes, that’s what we’re trying to do.

Michael: Awesome. Really cool. Yeah, so it sounds like, with LabelRadar, you've helped to improve communication between record labels and artists and be able to sync them up in a world that was getting really messy and kind of hard to communicate. Also, you're helping to organize the business side of things as well for record labels and artists so that they can spend more time being creative and focusing on their music and not lose sight of the important business work as well.

Alex: Yep. That's exactly it.

Michael: Now, I would love to kind of zoom out a little bit, and whenever I have an opportunity to connect with someone like yourself that has a lot more perspective and experience than I have in the music industry, and the history of it... Also, right now we're sort of in a crazy, revolutionary time where a lot of things are changing with generative AI and independence as well. So, yeah, I'm curious just to hear your perspective on what's happening right now in the market as it relates to independent artists and generative AI. Where do you think that it's headed? If someone's listening to this right now that's an indie artist or an independent record label, might be watching this right now and they're kind of wanting to swim along with the wave that's cresting, do you have any thoughts about where things are headed?

Alex: Yes, many, many thoughts. I don't think we quite have enough tape in the machine for it, but at the moment there is a heightened awareness of this new ability to make a lot of music very, very quickly. There's a lot of pushback from the industry about it. And I've been around for long enough to have seen this sort of trend before when new technology comes in. I lived through the conversion from physical to digital, for example, and Napster, and all of a sudden, music was available on the internet. The industry's reaction to that was, "Let's shut it down," right? This can't exist. This is not healthy for our business. I'm not saying that that's exactly what AI is. I think it's a very different type of thing, but you can see a lot of the narrative that happens, uh, in the press is, "AI music is bad." That sort of generalization is incredibly dangerous because you start to oversimplify it and also alienate people that are genuinely trying to do something innovative and interesting, taking music creation forward. So, I think, as a distributor, it's part of what we do, for example, and we have a responsibility to the likes of Spotify and Deezer, um, and of course Beatport, and we don't want that sort of prompt-led "make me a track that sounds like Calvin Harris and Sasha," right? Whatever the prompt is that you've put in, and then you just get a track. To me, I think to pretty much everybody, that's not creative. It's also not something that can be protected under copyright at the moment, um, because there was no human curation or creation in that, and so you can't attach IP to it. So, as a consequence, you can't really own it if you didn't actually create it. Right? So that's kind of one of the biggest problems. So we are currently testing some technology to identify music that is coming out of the about eight different main services that create AI-generated music. And it's not to say that—I’d certainly not to say—In fact, we've made a public statement alongside major record companies that we don't think this technology is uninteresting. It absolutely is likely to be part of the future creation of music. If you think about it, at the moment, our LoopCloud product, that's probably one of the best on the market. But it still means that when you're in your DAW, you're having to go through libraries to find that snare hit, right? That you've heard in a track that, you know, you'd love in your own record. You can now probably use an AI tool to go and create that snare hit. So I think that will improve the creation of music. It will be an evolution. It won't happen overnight, but I think it will probably happen fairly rapidly. Similar for plugins, you know, if there's a particular sound that you like out there, you can go and make it. But again, I think in the creation flow, that ability to create something new is the reason why artists make music. If you're only going to then rely on AI tools just to kind of do all the heavy lifting for you, then I don't see that being a long-lasting thing for why an artist would bother to be an artist. I don't think that's anything other than, you know, what is typically called streamlining. We are just making stuff to go out into the world. And so, uh, so I think that the technology is really interesting, and I think it's already been, um, implemented quite well in certain areas. We've obviously got this other problem, but I think that there's enough pushback collectively, and the general consensus, I think, in the industry is that we don't just want, um, this sort of prompt-based, 100% music, no real human interaction involved. There's obviously all that other stuff. The new U.S. Act—the TRAIN Act—is all about identifying where these platforms, um, used your, um, intellectual property to train the model. Um, and we've been looking at, you know, what does it mean to potentially, you know, license and have continuing royalties through to the original rights holders by helping to train some of these models. But that flow has to kind of exist in the same way as if you licensed a sample to, you know, a record. Yeah, it might be a buyout that you do, but there might also be a bit of songwriting, right? If it was a significant enough sample, um, and you might negotiate part of that publishing as well as ongoing royalties from the sale and exploitation of the recording. So, again, to me, this is just we're at this early juncture. It'll take a while. It'll settle down. There'll be some regulation. We'll agree on what we're supposed to be doing, we'll go back to normal, and then the next thing will come. So it's, you know, with all these things, I always hear that thing of, "Well, that's it for the music industry, that's done." Like, come on, that's just not true. In fact, at my graduation, I was one of the first years to do a, um, music industry management degree. And Morris Oberstein, who used to run CBS Records, did the, did the kind of like speech, I suppose, and he'd lived through sort of Amstrad cassettes, you know, copying, CD copying, MP3s, you know, and he said every time somebody said the music industry's done for, at this point, it's like, still here, still going. It's fine. Back growing.

Michael: That's super helpful to hear. Yeah, it does seem like history has a tendency to sort of repeat itself, or at the very least, like there are patterns that tend to reemerge. So it's always helpful to hear, "Oh yeah, this is a similar song and dance that we've heard before." It had that kind of context coming into it. It sounds like what you're saying is that there are certain use cases of generative AI, for example, that everyone kind of feels on the same page about. If you just click a button but there's no actual creativity or expression or something that happens through it, then it feels like it's missing the point or losing a sense of the purpose of music in the first place. But these are also amazing tools that can really streamline the ability for us to express ourselves, as long as we're using them as tools instead of just using them to replace ourselves entirely. And also, you shared that it's probably not wise to resist or try to just kill it. It's a natural tendency that we like, "Oh, this kind of gets in the way of what we're used to, and it's going to affect our business." But if we try to cut it away, then generally, that doesn't tend to work out in the long term. It's better to embrace these tools and figure out how to ethically use them.

Alex: That's it. Exactly that. Yeah. And again, those of us who have been around for long enough know that. That's why you're seeing people trying to work with it rather than against it. But yeah, it's unfortunate for some of the companies that are trying to do something really good and positive with AI training models because they run into that narrative of, "Well, it's AI music." Then it's a no. Again, I think we've gotten faster and better at resolving that sort of problem. But yeah, it's going to be around for a little while, that negativity toward it. But it'll settle down. I'm not worried.

Michael: Yeah, that totally makes sense. And I guess, like to the point that you brought up earlier in terms of challenges, it does sort of make that problem even worse from a certain extent, like the amount of music available online and how easy it is to put it out. It's like a double-edged sword. So you could say, like, the marketing or the ability to cut through the noise or what you're doing in terms of helping connect creators with teams that can help them cut through the noise becomes more and more important in that world.

Alex: I think the only slight caveat to that is that we've... I think the pandemic was a big, big sort of teacher to us about this. Music isn't always the same thing. It doesn't have to be a big studio album or a stadium band. There's all this functional music, and it's now been sort of defined like that in the agreements with the likes of Spotify and, you know, study beats and things to do something else. I think that has a legitimate place in the world, right? You don't want to be distracted. And I do wonder whether... and people have been talking about this, and we're kind of most of the way there really on the sort of two-tiered model of, you know, frontline commercial artist-driven music and then that more functional music. I'm quite supportive of the idea of different rates for that. Why not, right? If somebody wants it, why would you say don't do it? So, I think AI probably will make those production libraries more accessible, fatter, and bigger and all the rest of it. Maybe it'll be better. I don't know. But, yeah, I don't think it replaces an artist being in the world, talking to human beings, playing shows, and connecting with real human beings. AI can't do that.

Michael: Yeah, that's a great point. Yeah, kind of distinguishing between functional music that's sort of like in the background or maybe it's made to support a soundtrack potentially, but it's not about the originality or the actual song at that point. The important thing isn't about artist-driven music. But that type of music could be generated automatically because its purpose isn't to build the community around it. Whereas the other kind of music, the artist-driven music, is about building a connection and building a community. The best part about it isn't like you go to a room by yourself and listen to robots and sit by yourself and feel sad, or dance by yourself. It's like you go and you're surrounded by humans, and you connect. It's the community. That shared essence is what makes it.

Alex: That literally cannot be replaced by text prompt-based music generation. So again, when people worry about these things, don't worry about it because you've got to understand it in the context of what it all really means. Yeah, it might be slightly eating your lunch in terms of the share of the royalty, but the industry will figure that out. They're already doing it. So just have faith in, you know, if you're doing something that people enjoy and people want, then you're good.

Michael: Hmm. Yeah, that's a great point. Yeah, if you just focus on providing value and serving the need to bring people together, then yeah, this tends to autocorrect itself. Awesome. Well, Alex, man, it's been fun connecting and talking a little bit about the state of the music industry right now and what's changing, what hasn't changed, the patterns that have come up, and the platforms that you're helping to grow to be able to help connect artists with their fans and artists with their record labels. So thank you for taking the time to be here today. And for anyone who is listening to this right now, who's interested in exploring the platforms more, what would be the best place to go to dive deeper?

Alex: For Beatport, just head to beatport.com. And if you look at the footer, all of the links to the different platforms that we are running are all there. So you can find links to all of those.

Michael: Awesome. Yeah, then like always, we'll put all the links in the show notes for easy access. And Alex, thanks again for being on the podcast today.

Alex: You're very welcome.

Michael: Yeah.