Podcast: data in the Music Industry, with Bryan Calhoun

Bryan Calhoun is a veteran in the industry (working with well-known artists such as Kanye West, Drake, Dead Prez, and others) and has made it his mission to advocate for artists and help them receive fair compensation. As the former VP of SoundExchange, Bryan has used data to distribute digital performance royalties for sound recordings, and has a long track record of success.

In this episode of the Data Today Podcast with Dan Klein, Bryan shares his insights on how data can be used to help musicians know their worth and earn what they deserve.

Podcast transcript

Dan Klein: 

Hello, and welcome to Data Today, brought to you by Zühlke. I'm your host, Dan Klein, and I look after everything, data and AI at Zühlke. We're living in a world of opportunities, but to fully realize them, we have to reshape the way we innovate. We need to stop siloing data, ring fencing knowledge, and looking at traditional value chains. And that's what this podcast is about. We're taking a look at data outside the box to see how amazing individuals from disparate fields and industries are transforming the way they work with data, the challenges they are overcoming, and what we can all learn from them. 

Bryan Calhoun is a visionary in the music industry as a manager, promoter, and hip hop veteran. He's worked with some of the biggest names in music as well as some of the biggest labels and streaming services. Bryan is also at the absolute intersection of where music meets data. He was a pioneer in analytics and applying insights to link marketing, fan relations and promotions together. He's led the way in assuring artists get paid in an industry where recordkeeping was surprisingly patchy and has been a leading light in helping artists capitalize on their data to help them grow. Bryan and I go back a long way and first got to know each other through talking about streaming, music licensing and music piracy at a meeting organized by the original manager of Pink Floyd, Peter Jenner some years back. So I'm personally thrilled to have him on this podcast. 

I'm sorry, I think, was it in Norway? Did we first meet in Norway? Was that? 

 

Bryan Calhoun: 

Yeah, it was Norway. It was at Kristiansand in Norway. That was great though. That was a lot of fun. What year? That was like 2008, I think. 

 

Dan Klein: 

Yeah, something like that, wasn't it? 

 

Bryan Calhoun: 

Yeah, I haven't talked to Pete in a while, but he did a really great job of getting a bunch of smart thought leaders together to talk about how to solve some of the problems that the music industry faced, and to a large extent, still faces. 

 

Dan Klein: 

Well, I must admit you inspired me at the time because you were the only person that stood up with an Excel spreadsheet to explain what was going on. 

 

Bryan Calhoun: 

Right. Right. 

 

Dan Klein: 

Oh, there's a man on top of his data. Yes. 

 

Bryan Calhoun: 

Right. Yeah, it was funny because everybody kept talking about this idea of having an access to music charge, that it would just be an additional fee on your ISP bill, and there was all kinds of arguments about it. And remember at a high level it was just like, okay, whatever. You pay 50 bucks a month for internet access, maybe you should pay $60 a month and you can have access to every piece of recorded music ever created. And then there would have to be some entities that would figure out how to pay out the appropriate rights holders. And there was all this arguing about it, but I was just like, "Well, how much money are we talking about here?" And I was just like, "Well, let's just kind of try to make some educated guesses about it." And we launched that website where people could go in and plug in numbers and see what they thought it would mean, and that was really cool. 

What was really remarkable about, one of the things that was really interesting about that was the negative feedback from people. I don't think I was really prepared for how, I guess, angry people would be, even though we weren't even proposing that we had the answer. We were like, "Hey, plug in numbers, take a guess. What do you think this should be?" And that was essentially what we were trying to do. I remember specifically some dude wrote an article and called me a Nazi. I was like, "How am I a Nazi? What are you talking about? What ridiculous hyperbole." Just made no sense at all, but was just mad about the notion of change, really. And this is obviously before streaming was a thing. 

 

Dan Klein: 

But that's also the same time that, was it, Jack Wall, and I flew into New York to catch up with you and Warners, you took us off to some gig in Manhattan? Oh, that goes down with me. 

 

Bryan Calhoun: 

Oh, that was a Kanye show. 

 

Dan Klein: 

Yeah. 

 

Bryan Calhoun: 

Yeah, yeah. He was a client at the time. That was definitely an exciting time, working with the old Kanye. 

 

Dan Klein: 

So I'm curious, so because after you and I met, you went off to go off to SoundExchange and to look at how artists get paid. So how did you find your time at SoundExchange? Because that's all about the data, that's all about understanding what the playoffs are and how the artists get compensated, and I suspect the data was probably a bit of a mess, or am I wrong? 

 

Bryan Calhoun: 

Yeah, no, you're a hundred percent right. So for context, SoundExchange is a performing rights organization in the United States that collects and distributes non interactive digital performance royalties to sound recording copyright owners and featured performers. So what that means in layman's terms, if you own a master recording or you are, so you're a record label, or you perform on it, so you sing a song or you play instruments on a recording, and that recording gets played on a digital radio station in the United States like Pandora or SiriusXM or one of the terrestrial radio stations that also simulcasts a digital signal, they are required to pay the performer and the sound recording, copyright owner. SoundExchange administers the statutory license to make sure that those folks get paid. And so SoundExchange would collect money and reports of use, which are a little bit more complicated than just a simple playlist. 

It's got additional data there so that the appropriate people can get paid out. But basically SoundExchange takes all that input, all that information, and then pays out hundreds of thousands of artists, I don't know, at least tens of thousands, maybe in the hundreds of thousands of individual rights owners. But it was a huge job in, I was there from 2008 to 2012, and it was at a time of really high growth for the company because the money was starting to become significant. And because it was crazy because it was a statutory license, so the services had to pay, but lots of artists especially didn't know that they were entitled to receive that money. So we were sitting on millions and millions of dollars. 

And one of my mandates for the team, one of the teams that I managed was to go get the artist to register so that we could pay them. And so I felt it's cool because there's still people that I come across from time to time now that remember me as the guy that got them a whole bunch of money. So like, "Oh man. Yeah." I ran into a comedian actually not too long ago who I talked to, he was like, "Man, I don't know if you remember me, but I was working at SoundExchange." "Oh yeah, you got me paid. Yeah." So anyway, it's good to be remembered like that. 

But yeah, the second part of your question was, it was about the data, man, it was really challenging because the data was the company would ask for and required a certain level of information in order to be able to make the payouts properly, but it doesn't mean that everything would always come in really clean. There was a lot of work that had to be done to clean it. In fact, that was actually one of the teams that I built was the data management group. And we basically had, there was some sort of data scrubbing that you could do using technology, but there was some stuff that you really needed and it needed some human intervention. We had to get some extra office space, and there was a team of people in there that was literally just manually scrubbing just so many rows and rows and rows of data. It was crazy. 

 

Dan Klein: 

So Bryan, when you and I have spoken about this before, what's your pub trivia? You've got a trivia question on this, haven't you? What's your trivia question? 

 

Bryan Calhoun: 

Yeah, so one of the things to set it up a little bit is that people would submit, or services would submit playlists or their reports of use that had artists' names and they were required to present the artist's name and the song title, and I think the label, definitely the artist's name and the song title. And sometimes the data would come in and the names would be misspelled or people would think they were spelling it correctly and they would spell it wrong or whatever. But one that I used to use when I would speak at panels to illustrate how difficult it could be, would be to ask about the band INXS. How many different spellings of INXS do you think we had in our system? 

 

Dan Klein: 

I'm going to say, come on, it's only got four letters in it, so surely it's like 20, I don't know. 

 

Bryan Calhoun: 

It was 117. 117 different spellings in the system that we had at the time. There was spaces, periods, dashes, live, parentheses, like this is so many different. It was crazy the number of variations that we had in that. And yeah, I remember that specifically because I used to take that with me and use it when I was speaking at conferences. 

 

Dan Klein: 

So Bryan, you're kind of making master data management sexy. 

 

Bryan Calhoun: 

I don't know if I'm making it sexy, but it's definitely something that needs to- 

 

Dan Klein: 

It needs to happen. It needs to happen. But hey, you've managed to get Kanye West and INXS into the same sentence as sorting out your data. Come on. I mean, how do you do it? 

 

Bryan Calhoun: 

That's funny. I don't know. So I guess it's just been fortunate for my career that I've had the opportunity to be around some pretty cool stuff, man. Yeah, it's wild because, and I tell artists, and there's a lot of different levels of thinking about data. Some of it's about ensuring that you get the appropriate credit, so that you can get paid, but then there's also data that you need in order to be able to do effective marketing. Those are the general big buckets that I think about. So yeah, you want to make sure that you spell your artist's name properly and consistently all the time. I mean, I see artist misspelled their own names or I'm going to change it this time. And I'm like, don't do that. You're going to make it harder for you to get paid. You got to pick something and go with it and do something that's unique. If you're John and you made a song called I Love You, good luck getting paid. 

 

Dan Klein: 

It's hard to believe an industry as monolithic and, well, frankly, famously greedy as music could have been so lax with its record keeping, but it was, and still is a huge issue. Bad data is an issue in every field, but the complicated web of rights, royalties, recordings, production, CD sales, streams, radio plays, makes the music industry particularly badly siloed, almost to the point of being Byzantine. And hey, if artists aren't getting paid, it means more money in the pot for someone else. So there isn't always an appetite to change either. It's an extreme example, but something I see a lot in other fields. Protecting and siloing your data from your peers, even if it's for your own benefit, can have negative consequences on the field as a whole. 

The idea of fairness and checking the data is something that's been a driving force in Bryan's long and incredible career. 

 

Bryan Calhoun: 

Yeah, it was interesting because it's easy to take for granted people and their access to hip hop and shows and that kind of thing. But if you go back into when I was in high school in the eighties and then college in the early nineties, the radio stations would have two to four hours of hip hop programming per week. And clubs wouldn't book hip hop acts because they were scared of these scary Black guys. They didn't want to have them come into their clubs. So it sort of opened up an opportunity. A couple of friends of mine and I, Jay and Alfred, we started putting together shows and we booked hip hop artists to come to Atlanta and Athens, Georgia, which is where we were students at the University of Georgia. And so we booked shows with Cypress Hill and Brand Nubian and Tupac and Fu-Schnickens and Digable Planets and Digital Underground, and we were like college students doing that. 

So that was really how I got into it. And from there started doing street promotions, and I was DJing and ultimately ended up getting a job doing A and R, which is Artists and Repertoire, which meant that I was working with artists for the label to help them get records delivered and was really largely the liaison to the label on behalf of the artist to help convey their artistic vision. And I was very, very actively involved in the marketing efforts as well for this group. And the first artist that I worked with was this group called Three 6 Mafia. It was kind of funny because the first record went gold, and I kind of was like, "Oh, this is easy. This is what's supposed to happen." And it's not that easy to just have a gold record. 

But it was a great learning experience and went on to work with the distribution company to help independent labels in and help them manage the process of releasing their music, which can be really challenging, especially for a small company when you're trying to, and again, this is in the days of physical distribution, so you're talking about the late nineties. There was a lot that you had to do in order to be able to manufacture and ship and make sure there was demand for product and all this kind of thing. And one of the things that I took into doing all this was being a finance major, I was not really scared of numbers, and a lot of my counterparts were, they avoided talking about numbers, and I leaned into it, and I was the nerd that would literally read the artist contract and go do the math. 

And I think, I was telling somebody this story just recently, the path that really put me on to being an artist advocate, which is in all my bios as I consider myself an artist advocate, was this moment when I had read Three 6 Mafia's contract and did the math on it, and I was like, "This does not make sense." I was like, "This just doesn't make sense." I was like, "Why is it that they make less money on the sale of a CD than they do on the sale of a cassette, when the manufacturing price is almost exactly the same, but the wholesale price is almost twice as much." The label literally makes twice as much money, but the artist makes less. And literally, they laughed about it, the executives laughed about it, and were like, "Oh, well, that's what their attorney agreed to." And I was like, "Well, didn't their attorney push back on some of these points?" And they were like, "He didn't know what he was doing. He did divorces and wills and didn't know. So anytime he questioned something, we just said, 'Oh, that's standard in the music business.'" 

And literally that moment sort of changed the course of my career trajectory, and I really just leaned into trying to support artists. And when you and I had met, it was, I had already worked at labels, I had been working with Kanye, and how I started working with Kanye is I had built software for independent labels to manage their finances, so these kinds of things wouldn't happen. And Kanye West was in GOOD Music, was one of my clients, and I've just really leaned into it and wrote a book and built software for independent musicians because I'm super passionate about helping them. Still am. 

 

Dan Klein: 

And to be fair, you're also on top of the data that's underpinning it all, aren't you? I mean, this is the crucial thing. 

 

Bryan Calhoun: 

Yeah, I think you have to be. 

 

Dan Klein: 

This idea of opening up and examining data to get a better deal for all may seem obvious, but it's a battle Bryan has been fighting his whole career, and actually whilst his focus has been on defending the artist, encouraging openness and data led change has brought huge benefits to all aspects of the industry. Frankly, knowing what's going on means the opportunities to engage fans and make more money open themselves up, which is great for everyone. That data has become particularly valuable and very much more available with the advent of streaming. 

So what's still to be done? What are the data challenges and opportunities keeping Bryan awake at night? 

 

Bryan Calhoun: 

I guess we say what keeps me up at night is how do I help empower artists so that more art is created and artists can support themselves? I mean, that's why I wrote my book, the Music Business Toolbox, and it's why I created the tools and the software, they're in the Music Business Toolbox to help musicians to guide them through the process, because I think when there are more artists who are educated about what to do, they will be more successful and they can create more art, and they don't have to sell shoes or sell used cars. 

 

Dan Klein: 

And where do you think the next five to 10 years is going to go in terms of the way the industry develops? 

 

Bryan Calhoun: 

That's a good question. Look, moving into streaming was a giant shift. There was really a notion that DSPs, that the streaming platforms were more of a marketing channel than a revenue center. That he makes some money from streaming, but it's not that much. You really need to start getting into the tens of millions of hundreds of millions of streams before the money starts to become really meaningful, which is another reason why putting out more and more music is a big thing too. And I think the lace that I've heard is that a hundred thousand new tracks are released every day, which is a crazy number, but there's a lot of competition. 

And one of the things that's also interesting about DSPs, and this is one area where I've definitely seen this, and I'm really happy to see this continuing to evolve, is that the DSPs are creating more artist centric tools so that the artist can use them to further their careers in some way. And I was fortunate, Pandora was a client of mine, so I was doing some consulting work for them to help with the launch strategy for AMP, which was great, and something I'm definitely proud of. I think that they were probably the first DSP to build tools that were specifically designed for artists like that. 

 

Dan Klein: 

Yeah. So Bryan, I believe you're working with a music services provider to look at the data for all these artists. How's that coming on? 

 

Bryan Calhoun: 

Yeah, it's really interesting because we have been really looking at how to super serve the artist, the artist community with what they need. So one of the things that is fascinating is trying to help the artist figure out what they need versus what they think they need. And some of that relates back very specifically to the data, because there's vanity metrics and then there's metrics that are actually meaningful. 

So a vanity metric to me is how many followers you have, like that's cool. But what's much more important is what is your engagement and your ability to have sort of a direct connection or how well is a particular track performing rather than picking the single, for instance, what track from your album is going to be the one that you make a video for or whatever. Just let the people decide, look at the data and see how individual tracks perform. And then you can go back and make investments in it. Rather than it's like, "Hey, I'm going to put this out in a month or two months, and I'm going to go shoot a video for it, and I'm going to have this huge plan behind it." Put it out, see how it reacts, but let the people decide. 

 

Dan Klein: 

Yeah. It's interesting. You're talking about these vanity metrics. Have you got examples where somebody, let's say, has less followers than you might imagine, but has actually worked out a way of really engaging with them and therefore has better, let's call it the monetization metrics, but sort of less overt vanity metrics? 

 

Bryan Calhoun: 

So I was at this CD Baby conference. They have this conference called the DIY Musician Conference in Austin, Texas, and I was having lunch with this agency that I work with called Indiepreneur, and they run campaigns for musicians. And there was an artist that they had been working with, on average the tracks were getting like 10,000 streams. I mean, so a relatively small number, and they had one that was doing well. I think one had gone on to maybe do a million streams, but they effectively used these targeting methods to get direct connections with the fans, nurture those fans, had emails, cell phone numbers, and launched a merch campaign and did a hundred thousand dollars in revenue on merch. For a band, they had a few thousand followers, and then they ended up doing a hundred thousand dollars in revenue. That just blew me away. It just blew me away that they were able to get that kind of a response. It kind of goes to show that when you find the really passionate fans and they want to support you, it can really turn into something meaningful. 

 

Dan Klein: 

So there's going to be a lot of data that underpins that, I take it, so. How do you explain to the artists and even the labels that this matters, that this is the way to create direct fan engagement? How do you normally explain that? 

 

Bryan Calhoun: 

I don't really worry about explaining it to the labels. The labels are well financed and have smart people, big labels that is. They've got people to, they can figure it out. I mean, I'll have conversations with them for sure, but my conversations are mostly with the artists, and it really starts with, I don't want to try to force anybody to do anything. I feel like if you are able to have an artist do something that they want to do and get paid for it, that's the best type of thing. That's the best thing to get them to engage in. So trying to push them into doing an NFT collection just to be doing it isn't really the right thing because what I don't want, what I wouldn't want to do is damage the credibility of an artist that I was working with because we've seen a number of artists that have done things where they've ultimately been seen as taking advantage of their fans. And an artist brand and relationship with their fans is way more important than a few dollars that you could make on one NFT drop. 

 

Dan Klein: 

Bryan, look, thank you very much for your time today. 

 

Bryan Calhoun: 

Man, thank you so much. I appreciate it, man. It's always great talking with you, man. 

 

Dan Klein: 

Likewise. Likewise. 

Bryan is a perfect example of the opportunities that present themselves when you take the time to open up and really examine your data. His insights have created whole new revenue streams for artists and labels. His attempts to standardize data inputs, even for things as simple as how do you spell a band's name, has led to new insights, which can help artists stand out and importantly, get paid for it. There's still work to do, but Bryan's case just shows how important an influential data and insight led leadership can be. He's also a fantastic showcase for the enormous impact individual players can have, even against fairly monolithic industries. It's not been easy for him, but few things worth doing really are. 

Business ecosystems are not new. What is new is that they are becoming increasingly data empowered. To realize complex opportunities, we need innovation beyond boundaries, democratized information and close collaboration between diverse players. Collaborative data empowered borderless innovation is how we embrace a world of exponential change, and that's what this podcast is about. 

Thanks for listening to Data Today, brought to you by Zühlke.

Discover more episodes of Data Today with Dan Klein.