When everything becomes digital, the non-digital also has an interesting life. When I was young I was actually trying to become a pop star. I never really made it, but I was lucky and came third in a competition. I was able to record a record that well, by the way I think it took a month and then it was for sales in the local shop and that's it. But anyhow, I got the opportunity of actually working with a record Studio, and I've been thinking about what's happened to that Studio. It's actually still around, but it's not that known and it has a specific niche. So what it says is that every kind of actor is actually in a need of changing when the whole ecosystem is changing, and what kind of possibilities do actually exist to take if you don't want to fight hard and just try to stay on to your previous role? Well, if we look on the music industry, we could actually find some interesting benchmarks here, and a really interesting case is a company called T-Series which is a record label and a record label from India that started as late as 1983 far later than the old ones like EMI, Warner, Sony, and today they're actually the biggest actor on YouTube. They decided fairly early to head for YouTube. So that could have been a possible strategy for a record label to take. Well, what other kinds of roles can we see of interest in the new future landscape? Well, one interesting thing is if we look on a new company called Kobalt, it's a record label, but not really a record label, and the story of them evolving is something like this. In the old days, when you were a musician you wanted money for your songs, and it was given to you by the record labels because they were the ones that sold it to you. But that system was rather messy and it took quite a long time before you could, I mean, your song is sold in Japan, in Tokyo somebody buys your record at a record store, and it takes quite a long before you get the money for that record sold, and it's something that the record label historically didn't handle, and Kobalt decided fairly long ago to build a system for that. Small system helping you as an artist to keep track on all money that you actually earn. It was rather small role in the previous days simply because there were a few actors that you had to negotiate with. A couple of record stores and then everything was set so to speak. But today how does it look if you're a musician? Well, you could be played nearly everywhere in the digital space. So it's a lot of places where somebody's playing your music and maybe somebody needs to take control of that, needing an account for your micro money could be of interest, and that is actually the software that Kobalt has developed. Well, why did I call them a record label? Well actually, they could be the valid ones that invoice a Streaming Service for you. So if you're an artist and you decide to use them as a record label, you keep the rights for yourself and then you decide what kind of part of the rights you want to give to Kobalt, and of course the amount of money that they charge compared to what the record label did charge previously is far lower. So suddenly, keeping track of your money has become an important role from a rather weak role previously. What else could we find? Well, I don't know how you found music in the old days, but I read quite a lot these music journals like New Musical Express, Rolling Stone where somebody wrote a magazine about the artists you did follow, and I read that quite a long ago there was a young guy who was working in a record store, and he came up with the idea that maybe I should write a blog about music I listened to because I work in this record store and I listened to quite a lot of music every day. He started writing a small blog. He call it Pitchfork. Pitchfork today is an extremely important channel if you want to find reviews on music, and funny enough they bought up by Contrast which is a really big fashion magazine, and interesting enough they also run music events, physical music events like live concerts. So that guy from a position where he did listen quite lot of Music where probably everyone who was working in a record store previously did has developed into a new big news channel. Then how come it was not a record store that did that? How come it was not a record label that developed the accounting system that Cobalt have developed? By the way live music. Well, it's not dead. It's like when everything becomes digital the non-digital also has an interesting life. So live performance haven't changed. Well, it has changed, but it hasn't died because of Streaming. It's actually grown and the average price for a live concert is higher today compared to previously, but it's not the same kind of live concert. If you're an artist and tried to play the music the same way as you did in the previous recordings when you go live, it's not likely that you could charge anyone to come and see you, but if you really play it different when you do live, you could probably increase and that is something we can see. Quite a lot of years ago, a company decided actually to host the live events because some artists would really like to have a global tour and how could you manage that if you're an artist? Probably not even your manager is able to fix a concert in Stockholm, New York, Shanghai, Sao Paulo during a year. So instead, you contact the new company called Live Nation which has become extremely big of organizing live concerts, and actually they've merged with Ticket Master that you probably use if you want to buy a live concert ticket today. For a role that says that during this role, the previously held together system were record labels were doing nearly everything has been unbundled, meaning cut up in pieces and the pieces today are organized by different actors. Particularly when it comes to roles that has grown in importance in the new ecosystem. So actually going back to what record labels did when this rabbit the digitalization entered the music industry, and they mainly worked in trying to defend their position, but ended up downsizing. There has been a lot of options, or what they could have done instead. But the only way to see this is to have the new picture of the new ecosystem and look on what kind of roles will be needed in the future and which role can we take?
