Michael Walker: YEAAAH! All right. I'm excited here today with my new friend, Helen Sartory. Helen is the Chief Revenue Officer at Beatport. She oversees DJ and producer brands, including Beatport, Plugin Boutique, and LoopCloud. She's a music tech innovator and former GM of The Rattle LA, incubating music tech startups and advising AI music search startup FeedForward.

She also brings expertise from a decade of investment banking at Greenhill & Co. and Lazard to her roles in the music industry. So she's in this cross-section between tech and music, and I'm excited to connect with her today to talk about the current landscape for indie musicians.

Right now, what are some of the pros and cons of being independent versus signing to a record label? And what are some of the platforms available to help indie artists be successful in today's age?

Helen, thank you so much for taking the time to be on the episode today.

Helen Sartory: Thank you so much for having me.

Michael: Absolutely. So, maybe to kick things off for anyone meeting you for the first time, could you share a little introduction to your story, how you came to join Beatport, and the main problem you see yourself addressing?

Helen: Sure. I'll go all the way back to when I was a kid. When I was 12, I decided I wanted to be a film score composer, and that was my dream. So I started down the route of a quite traditional classical music path for a long time.

I ended up studying music at a fairly old-fashioned university, thinking I was going to learn how to run a studio and compose modern music. But what I actually learned was how to write a song for a string quartet and a lot of things that aren’t so useful for being a modern musician.

So I pivoted on my way out of university, did a mini MBA, and ended up in investment banking, which was a whole other experience. But what it did do was introduce me to the tech startup world.

I was based in San Francisco for a few years, looking at early-stage, high-growth tech startups. Around that time, I also started getting asked to write music again. I was doing some writing for theater and short films, and I finally got around to learning how to use Ableton and produce electronic music—something I had never tackled before.

I really got the bug to get back into music when I was introduced to the music industry for the first time. Coming from a finance background, it made no sense to me whatsoever. I was seeing these record contracts that, if they were a mortgage, would be like taking out a mortgage, paying it back, and still not owning the house. It made no sense.

I wondered why anyone would sign these deals. Why couldn't we invest in musicians the same way we invest in tech startups—through equity-based investment that doesn’t involve taking copyright, creative control, or all the other things we load onto artists just because they're artists? We should be thinking of them more like founders of their own companies.

At the time, I had a small music project I was touring live, though I’ve mostly scrubbed it from the internet now because it wasn’t very high quality. But through that, I was introduced to a couple of guys who were starting The Rattle, which was designed as an incubator for independent artists and music tech startups.

The idea was to give artists education on different types of financial investment they could take if they didn’t want to go down the major label route. We opened a site in London, and then in 2019, I moved to LA to open a site in Silver Lake.

We built a great community of artists and tech startups working together—sharing knowledge, tools, and exploring different economic models outside the traditional music industry framework. Unfortunately, COVID impacted us heavily. Building this amazing community studio only to shut it down was tough.

But I stayed in LA for a couple more years, working remotely with emerging artists and startups to see if we could make music a viable career without relying on record labels.

In 2022, I moved back to the UK and got a call from Beatport. I had been out of dance music for a while, having gone cross-genre, but when I met with Rob, the CEO, and he explained their growth strategy, it was really interesting.

Some people might be familiar with the original Beatport, which started in 2004 as a download store where DJs get music. We still run that, and it's actually one of the only places where downloads are still growing every year. But we’ve added a lot since then.

We now have a DSP for streaming, the BeatSource catalog (which serves open-format DJs beyond EDM), and we run producer-focused companies like Plugin Boutique, LoopCloud, and Loopmasters, which are sample marketplaces.

We also operate a distribution company called AmpSuite and a demo submission tool called LabelRadar. So, Beatport has evolved into a group of several companies forming a vertical slice of the music industry, all focused on dance music. That was really exciting for me because I could see how everything plugged in together.

I joined about two and a half years ago to lead product strategy, and my role evolved from there. Now, as Chief Revenue Officer, my job is to make all the charts go up and to the right—that’s the joke.

That was a bit of a ramble, but that’s how I got to where I am today.

Michael: Awesome. That’s fantastic.

I mean, Chief Revenue Officer—that’s such an important role. For a business, revenue is like oxygen, the lifeblood. That’s fundamental to the service you’re providing.

It’s super interesting to hear your background—how you came from investment banking, looked at the industry, and thought, “What’s going on here?” Some of these deals seem wild compared to something like a mortgage.

With that perspective and what you know now from working with artists, how do you view the current landscape of the music industry in relation to independent artists and record labels?

Are we in for a reckoning with huge disruption, or how do you see the role of record labels evolving? Just curious to hear your thoughts, given your investment background.

Helen: Hmm. Big question.

I think about this every day, and it's constantly changing. We’re at an interesting period of transition in the music industry. Some aspects are really exciting. The accessibility for talented independent artists to break through is better than ever.

But at the same time, we've created a lot of problems. The floodgates have opened, allowing anyone with a music generator to flood the system with low-quality content. What was supposed to help high-quality DIY artists get discovered is now making it even harder.

Major labels are trying to protect their market share. Ideally, they would do this by growing the whole pie rather than just fighting over their slice, but that’s not always the direction these conversations take.

One positive shift is that we’re seeing fewer of those massive 360 deals that rarely benefit the artist. There's more flexibility now in the types of deals being negotiated.

However, major labels are doing far less artist development. You’re expected to arrive fully formed, and if you don’t have a hit within your first three releases, you’re out.

I wouldn’t say things are strictly better or worse. Some things have improved, while others have become more complicated. But one thing is clear—you no longer need a major label’s stamp of approval to succeed.

It’s still hard to make it as a purely DIY artist, but there are more middle-ground options. Small independent labels, one-person labels, distribution deals, and label services give artists flexibility to pay for what they need rather than everything a traditional label would offer.

So, is it easier to make it now than before? Probably not. In some ways, we’ve just made things more complex.

Not sure if that fully answered your question, but those are my thoughts.

Michael: Yeah, I think that's super helpful. So it sounds like in some ways, it feels like it's moved in the right direction for Indies and that it's more accessible than ever to be able to record, distribute your music, use the internet, and social media to put it out.

But on the same token, it's opened up the floodgates where there's more music than ever. It's easier to make music, which has led to a lot of saturation. It becomes harder to cut through. Record labels now are sort of expecting that you come in somewhat fully formed, and because of that, they do less of the initial artist development. You're kind of on your own, trying to figure out how to establish an identity that can cut through the noise and build that initial foundation.

Which might lead into a good next question. For the majority of indie artists who are here right now, who haven't signed to a record label and are kind of in that stage where maybe they're getting fully formed but haven't had a breakthrough yet in terms of a saturated market—do you have any recommendations, thoughts, or strategies they might consider to help them cut through?

Helen: Yeah, so in my last role, I worked a lot with DIY artists who were at that exact stage. They had a really interesting idea. We were quite selective in the incubator. We had to feel like there was something unique and authentic about an artist if we were going to invite them into the process.

But that by itself doesn't necessarily resonate, right? You've got to find your tribe. You've got to find a place where whatever you're selling, people want to buy. We were looking at interesting guerrilla tactics to try and get acts out there without necessarily having to compete in the major channels.

I think there's a misconception now that if you pay for playlisting, opt in for discovery mode, and do all these digital things to try and get your music in front of a lot of ears, then you'll have a result. What we experienced was that, yes, you could potentially generate a lot of streams that way, but that in itself doesn't really mean anything or pay your bills. It wasn't necessarily translating into, "Are people going to come see your show, buy your t-shirt, sign up for your newsletter?"—all the things you want from an engaged fan base.

Michael: The kind of thing that a chief revenue officer is like, "Hey guys, look, we're missing the point here."

Helen: That recurring revenue, yeah. So I'm not saying I don't advocate artists doing all those things, but I don't think by themselves that's a release plan.

Where we saw really interesting results was when artists were focusing much more on a small group of people—an engaged audience. It may really just be their local area, playing live regularly. I was amazed at how many artists I would meet who had, ostensibly, big streaming hits but had never done a live show because they've had this purely digital experience of blowing up.

It's a real big problem because you need to, in most genres, be able to fill that need for your fan base. Some of the artists we worked with would religiously play whenever they could in their local area, even if it was to 20 people, because they were getting that experience. And during the lockdown, we were able to translate that into a live stream experience because they were more comfortable with performing live.

We were doing things like, instead of making a music video, creating a video game that had the music playing in the background to test out this idea—if you get someone to listen to your song six times in a row, it's going to earworm its way into their head. One of the ways to do that is to play it while they're doing something else. So, creating an experience around the music that's more than just getting it into a playlist on Spotify, for example.

That was when we were launching artists in the middle of COVID and trying to think—what can you do digitally to stand out from the crowd?

But yeah, in terms of how we do it now with Beatport, it's kind of interesting because dance music has a slightly different structure. Essentially, what we do at Beatport is get music into the hands of DJs. If you think about the average stream on Spotify, it's more than likely going to someone in their car or at the gym. The average song on Beatport is being played out to a crowd. It's being curated by DJs.

I think people often forget that if they're making dance music—or, as we would call it, music that you dance to—because actually, they say 80% of music is music that you dance to, even if only 16% is technically dance music.

Making sure you have a solid plan for getting your music into the hands of DJs who will resonate with it and give you feedback is crucial because they are the power listeners. They're auditioning a thousand tracks a week to figure out what will resonate with their audiences.

So it's been really interesting making that move from a cross-genre job into a dance music-specific job because the routes in are so different. But it does mean that as an artist, you're able to launch with a much lower budget.

Most new dance outfits don't even have to make a music video. You just need decent cover art and very good mastering. But if you can get your music out there to DJs who resonate with it, they become your free promotion tool.

One of the things we do at Beatport is the Hype Charts. Separate from the main Beatport charts, we run a separate chart that labels can opt into. I don’t think you can as a DIY artist, but if you're a one-person label, you can. As long as you've earned less than, I think, $15,000 on the Beatport store, you're eligible for the Hype Charts.

That allows us to create visibility for really good, up-and-coming indie music in a place where it doesn’t necessarily have to compete with major label releases with big marketing budgets.

I think looking for places like that, where there’s a space created specifically for you and your type of music at your level, is key. When we have an audience of DJs specifically looking for that kind of music, it’s a great way to accelerate talent and get it to the next level.

Michael: Awesome. So what I'm hearing is that one of the biggest challenges artists struggle with is monetization because they're showing up in places where they’re paid a fraction of a penny per stream. And the people who are listening might just have it on in the background.

A listen isn’t necessarily equal to a listen from a DJ, where there’s actually an influence or market attached to it.

A question that I think might be helpful is related to the general mindset around revenue and money for artists.

I think, as artists, in many cases, we have a bit of a mindset block or resistance—or even fear—around the idea of making money or "selling out."

I’d love to hear your perspective. For any artist here who knows they need to make money and want to, but maybe feel a little embarrassed about it or don’t want to be seen that way, what would you say to help them shift their mindset around revenue generation?

Helen: I definitely resonate with that. I've had a lot of artists talk to me about this—this feeling of a slight disconnect, wondering, "Am I still a real artist if I want to make money and be successful?"

First, I’d say there’s room for every personality in artistry. You don’t have to think a certain way about anything—especially money—to be a good artist.

But I think there's a trope that hasn’t been helpful for the artist community—the idea that you’re somehow not authentic as an artist if you think about generating income.

The cynic in me thinks that’s because the people who benefit from you not caring about making money are usually the ones taking a cut of whatever deal you’re doing.

My approach has always been—you shouldn’t be in the music industry just to make money because, quite honestly, it’s not the best place to do that.

Michael: There are so many easier ways to make money. But if you're in the music industry and you're a talented artist, you should expect to reach a point where you can support yourself through it without needing to subsidize yourself through other means.

Helen: And you shouldn’t be embarrassed to have that as a goal.

There are also some really basic things a lot of artists forget they could be doing to make money.

I’m always the boring person at the table reminding people they need to register for publishing and collect their PROs money.

Especially in dance music, I advocate a lot for DJs to submit their setlists back to venues because otherwise, the artists who created that music don’t get paid properly.

Similarly, if you’re a DJ sharing moments from your set on social media, you should be IDing the track and crediting the artist. If you’re benefiting from that music in terms of social media engagement, the artist should get credit.

There are so many ways we could not only generate more money as an industry but also make sure that money is going back into the right hands.

Instead of making every up-and-coming artist hustle day and night to pay their bills, there are simple ways to fix this.

I also think there are creative ways to make money beyond streaming. If there’s something adjacent to your music career that brings you joy and generates income, explore that.

For example, there was an artist we worked with who was a great coach—super creative and loved helping others be creative. One of their main income streams became running creative writing camps—not just for musicians, but for anyone wanting to be more creative.

That became a really strong income stream, which they reinvested into their albums and music videos.

So they took a skill developed through being an artist and monetized it in a way that wasn’t reliant on Spotify streams or traditional income sources.

Michael: Totally makes sense. Yeah. So it sounds like what you're saying is, yeah, one path to consider as an artist is that you have your music, which is sort of a promotional tool to bring people into your community, but you can also think tangentially. So what are some things that are aligned with your music, like doing songwriting camps or creativity?

I don't know if there's a word that’s "creativity clinics," but I don't think that's an actual thing. But it has a nice ring to it.

Helen: Anyway, one of the ideas we were calling them—yeah, Creativity—

Michael: Creativity clinic. That's kind of nice. But the idea is that these things can be in alignment with your music and can generate revenue that allows you to support the music career and the music community.

I'm curious if you have any advice or ideas in terms of making money intrinsically with music. Obviously, the world has changed a lot in terms of music assets. We used to have cassettes and vinyls and CDs and digital downloads and streaming, and it seems like things have shifted in a way where the intrinsic value of the music itself, for a lot of people, isn't really the thing that is generating enough revenue to be sustainable.

And now we're relying on shows and live events and supplemental paths or different products or businesses to support the music. Maybe this is a bit of a curveball, but do you see any path towards NFTs? They had a moment in the sun, and then the bubble popped—for good reason. Like, GIFs of hamsters are not worth millions of dollars.

But do you see a path for intrinsic music assets to have value again? Or do you think that this is just the new world, and now we just need to focus more on music being a promotional asset? What are your thoughts in general?

Helen: So I get this question a lot, and maybe I'm an optimist or just too stubborn to agree to that second version of reality that you described—where music has no intrinsic value and is just used as a tool to get people into adjacent revenue streams.

Firstly, I think that's just really sad—to have devalued music to such an extent when it's such a core part of the human experience and not something we've done with almost any other art form. But also because there are structural people that really lose out in that situation.

If you're a songwriter but not an artist, and suddenly all of the revenue streams move to—or whatever the next thing is—for the most part, the songwriter, the publishing side, is cut out of those deals because it's too difficult. It's too difficult to put publishing onto the blockchain, partly because of the complexity of the economic framework that we've inherited from the music industry.

But I don't think people are trying hard enough to preserve value at all levels within musical assets. I think we—now we're getting into quite boring territory that I talk about a lot, but kind of—

Michael: I love this. I don't find this boring at all.

Helen: Well, you know, this is a lot of what we talk about in our metadata roundtables. But there's a known problem in royalty distribution because the metadata universe is so fragmented and inconsistent that at every kind of block of the—I'm not going to say "chain"—part of the supply chain, we're losing a little bit of money into the ether.

There's a big argument right now: Should we try and fix the whole back catalog and make it future-proof, figuring out how to divert all the right royalties to the right people? Or do we say, "Let's draw a line in the sand and try to fix everything in the future," which is a slightly easier job by putting it into smart contracts, simplifying it, or letting people do direct deals and cut out layers?

I think we have to do something. Because if we just carry on debating "Should we do A or B?" for another five years—which is how long I've been debating it, and people have been debating it much longer than that—in the interim, you lose an entire generation of artists that were not able to monetize, even though they were creating high-quality art.

I think music does have intrinsic value. I hope that it will always have intrinsic value.

But the idea that you celebrate music until you're famous enough to launch a perfume brand has been around for a long time. So we were kind of putting in the groundwork to destroy music's value way before Spotify came along.

I feel lucky to work at Beatport because we are one of the places where people still willingly pay money for music. And I think part of the reason is that we are giving people the opportunity to interact with that music or contextualize it in some way.

As a DJ, you might be buying your three high-quality audio files—not necessarily because you want to own them in the way that someone buys a Harry Styles vinyl, but because you want the ability to remix it, contextualize it, personalize it, and play it out to your audience.

It's all of these places where people want to interact that I think will continue to drive people to pay. I think it's difficult to get people to pay now just for a listening experience—unless they're a superfan. But in my realm, where people are more fans of genres and scenes rather than a specific artist, I think interactivity is much easier to monetize.

Michael: Super interesting. Yeah, it sounds like what you're saying is that there are certain aspects of music that have intrinsic value—like the interactivity of it—that present opportunities right now.

And that's what you're doing with Beatport: allowing more interaction with these musical assets.

And you don't want to live in a world where music has no intrinsic value, where it's just meant to prop up a perfume business.

Super interesting. The way I look at it is, the fact that you can buy the Mona Lisa for $800 million, but you've never been able to purchase Let It Be by The Beatles for more than $1, just makes me think that there's some sort of gap in value and ownership.

I think NFTs probably aren't the path, just because the term "NFT" is so jaded. But I actually think that music is one of those rare places where having some form of digital ownership could make a lot of sense.

It's interesting, too, thinking about what might happen with the future of music royalties and smart contracts. It sounds like you've been steeped in this conversation for five-plus years—around this old model of royalty collection that's very complicated and makes it hard to process payments, versus what the new model might be.

Obviously, it's a very complex issue, like opening a can of worms to transition or solve it. But where do you fall in terms of what the path might look like? If the world appointed you right now and said, "We're going to make a clean switch from where we currently are to moving forward," do you think we'd be better off going all in and making a clean cut from the old way? Or do you think we need a transition plan? You seem like you've put some serious thought into this.

Helen Sartory: I mean, I have put serious thought into it, but I’m always indefinitely the least educated person in the room when I have serious roundtable conversations about this, so I try to keep my ideas to myself.

I think a simplistic way to look at it is that it would be fairly easy for us to build a system that serves the single creator—like a bedroom producer. Maybe you're using AI to do your session vocals, maybe AI to mix and master, and essentially that finished product only has you and maybe one or two other collaborators.

That's fairly easy to put into the system, track, and get paid out correctly in most scenarios. Not all.

I think what's sad about everything moving in that direction is that you lose out on bands and collaboration.

There’s so much interesting music and artists that, by themselves, would never have made anything remarkable. It was only through collaboration with others that they really found a unique sound.

So I think we need to build a system that works for complex situations.

I don’t have the solution. I’ve spoken to many smart people about things like anonymous vaults on the blockchain to create verification chains. It’s a tough nut to crack.

It requires a level of collaboration and data sharing that the industry isn’t currently set up for. But I do feel like every year, we get a little bit closer.

Michael: Yeah. I mean, certainly, I don't know if you went back five or ten years ago and compared it to where we're at now, it would have been hard to predict the level of disruption and change with AI and things that are happening. So, who knows where we'll be five or ten years from now, but I'm with you.

I'm optimistic. If you look at most charts about quality of life and poverty—it doesn't feel like it because we're so aware of the news—but if you look at pretty much every meaningful chart, quality of life has gotten significantly better. But most of us feel like it's gotten worse than it was in the past for some reason. There's a term for it. But I'm also optimistic that things are continuing to get better and that with greater intelligence, we'll be able to solve some of these more complex issues and properly compensate everyone that was involved in the creative process.

Helen: For sure. And I think something you said earlier was quite interesting. You have a piece of art, and there's the ability to spend a lot of money on that art if you care about it. Within music, we've kind of just created this one price band for everybody. I personally—and I think most people I know—would be willing to spend a lot more on music each year if it was not capped by the service they were using.

Not to say that everybody in the world does. I remember the first time I met somebody who genuinely didn't care about music—it didn't move them in any way—and I was like, "Oh my God, you're like an alien." I couldn't even imagine my life without music.

I went through this thought exercise and started asking people, "How much would you pay to keep music in your life?" If you think about all the music you experience day to day—not just what's on your headphones, but walking through a shop and hearing something on the radio or seeing the credits to a movie—if you were to truly cut out every bit of music in your life, what do you think that would do to your mental health? And what would you pay to bring it back?

Usually, the numbers were pretty high because that is a sad world where there's no music in it at all. But we haven't created a system that allows people who really care and connect with music to pay for it. We've just said it's kind of one-size-fits-all.

I think what we're seeing now is more of a stratification of different fan experiences. Beatport is a niche DSP, so we have a much smaller catalog. We only have about 12 million songs in our catalog, but people pay more for that than they pay for Spotify because they're looking for a different type of active, lean-in experience.

The more we can recognize that not everyone in the world wants to invest the same amount into music—yes, there are people (strange people, in my opinion) who don't care about it at all and want it to be free—but I think there's a pretty big category of people for whom it's really important, and they would invest in it. Those are the people we need to find.

Michael: Absolutely. That's a great point.

Bringing it back to the Mona Lisa—most people wouldn't spend $800 million to collect a piece of art. And you can even argue that it's very subjective. Who's to say that this is worth $800 million? Its historical significance? We've decided that we value this thing enough that it's worth it.

Hypothetically, if there was verification for music assets—if there was a one-of-one copy of Let It Be by The Beatles—I wonder how much that would sell for. In the world of the ultimate Beatles fan-slash-investor, to own a one-of-one... Hypothetically, if they also could potentially resell it in the marketplace, I wonder what that would go for.

Helen: Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting thought exercise. You're getting into the Wu-Tang Clan, Martin Shkreli kind of thought experiment.

I've never followed the ownership value conversation quite as closely because I've always thought of music as more of a sharing exercise and a communal thing rather than something you put on your wall and tell your friends about. But there are people who enjoy that—who go for ownership.

We've done a couple of NFT experiments at Beatport, and it's interesting. The first phase of people that came through were really only about financial investment. They would buy something because there was some hope that, in the future, it would appreciate in value and they could sell it for more. There wasn't really a connection to the underlying asset.

But the second experiment we did was with Disclosure, where they were selling a thousand unique variants of a song—so you would have a one-of-one. That really did cross over from pure financial investors into collectors, and that was an interesting experiment.

But yeah, it's still a hard sell on NFTs unless you've got some kind of ongoing value—when it becomes more like a virtual fan club, where you have something that unlocks perks over your period of ownership.

I think there's definitely more to explore in the NFT conversation. We were talking about rebranding them, right? We're going to start calling them digital collectibles because it was less of a radioactive term than NFT.

Michael: Oh man, the term "radioactive" has significance for me. I won't go down a rabbit hole explaining why, but it's funny that they use that word.

Helen, this has been a great conversation. Thank you for coming on here and sharing your experience and insights as it relates to your background, investments, and revenue, as well as coming into the music industry to help independent artists cut through the noise.

Could you share a little bit about—if someone's listening to us right now and they're interested in checking out Beatport—who would be the ideal candidate to join the platform? And what's the best place for them to go to sign up?

Helen: Sure. We have a bunch of resources available for up-and-coming artists and small labels.

One is the Hype Program I mentioned, which is our place on the store for smaller artists and labels. We also have a partnership with DistroKid and TuneCore, so if you are fully DIY and want to be on the Beatport store, you can distribute to us directly.

We also run something called Beatport Next, which is an annual accelerator program for 12 up-and-coming artists we find exciting. We give them extra promo support, and often, they are invited to play at some of our events like IMS in Ibiza. We really see if a year of working intensively with us can get them to the next level.

I would check out all of those initiatives. I think I also shared with you a link to a webinar we have, which explains exactly how to get your music in front of the curators to get it featured on the store.

All of our curators are human. We don't use algorithmic curation. So if you want to get featured on the store, it's got to go through human ears.

The Beatport store is designed for indie content. We do have major label content, but it's a small minority. Everything we do is set up to bring visibility to smaller artists, smaller teams, and smaller labels because DJs are looking for music that's just a little bit away from the mainstream.

So, check out Beatport.

Michael: Super cool. As always, we'll put the links in the show notes for easy access. Helen, thank you again for being on the show today.

Helen: Thank you so much for having me.

Michael: Yeah.