The Most Common Mistakes Tech Founders Make Walking Into Music

I’ve seen a lot of technology companies come into music believing they have found the answer to transforming an industry that, at first glance, looks like it has barely changed in decades. Fair enough, from the outside it can look that way.

There are plenty of things in music that could work better. The mistake is assuming that the reason they haven’t changed is because nobody in the industry has thought of it before.

Most ideas that arrive looking completely new have been seen before in one form or another. The technology might be different, or the business model, or simply the timing. But the underlying idea is rarely as new as the founder thinks it is.

Music is also a very small industry. Everybody knows everybody, or knows somebody who does and relationships and reputation carry an extraordinary amount of weight.

You don’t necessarily get the meeting because your product is brilliant. You get it because someone knows you, someone has recommended you, or you’ve built enough credibility that people want to hear what you have to say. And reputation can open doors quickly. It can also close them.

I’ve watched founders expect to get access to the people they want because they have built something they believe is important. I’ve also watched them expect music executives to fill in the gaps in a half-developed idea because those executives have the knowledge that would make it work. If you want to work in music, you need to understand how valuable the people who already work in music are.

I’ve seen this repeatedly through my work with technology companies at Firepit Tech, as Executive VP, WEA Europe and now through my consulting work. There is often a fair amount of ego involved too. Founders are understandably proud of what they have built, but that pride can become a problem when it turns into an assumption that the industry should adopt something simply because they have built it.

The industry has spent decades learning how to navigate an extraordinarily complicated business. Rights, licensing, territories, contracts, relationships, artists, managers, labels, publishers, DSPs, distributors, collecting societies and a huge number of commercial and creative dependencies all have to work together, and yet the way many of the major players operate is surprisingly simple. Music is subjective. It creates emotion, connection and culture. That part hasn’t changed, and it shouldn’t.

The business exists to support and amplify the creative work and technology should do the same. It isn’t the rockstar or the saviour of the music industry. It’s there to support something that already matters and ideally, make parts of it work better.

A lot of my work sits in that space between the technology company and the music industry. It’s often about working out what problem we are trying to solve, whether the opportunity is as good as it first appears, how the industry is likely to respond and what needs to happen to make the idea commercially useful.

The best technology companies I’ve worked with in music have understood that they are entering an existing ecosystem rather than arriving to build one from scratch. They spend time working out why things are done the way they are before deciding what to change, and they work with people who understand the industry to see where something could actually be better.

Some of the most interesting changes in music have come from people challenging established ways of working, not from protecting the status quo. But successful transformation rarely happens because one company arrives with the answer. It tends to happen because enough people across the ecosystem see the value and decide to get behind it.

In music, getting something off the ground usually means getting a lot of people comfortable with it. Artists, managers, labels, publishers, established technology companies, platforms, rights holders and plenty of others can all have a view on whether something gets adopted.

Even when something does work, there are usually multiple versions of the same idea, multiple companies working on it and a lot of iteration before it becomes meaningful at scale. That can be frustrating for founders used to moving quickly and controlling their own product environment, but it’s something to understand before you walk in.

The other mistake I see is expecting the industry to do the work for you. A founder has a product they think is brilliant. They get into a room with someone who has spent twenty years building relationships and understanding the business and implicitly or explicitly, expect that person to explain how to make the product successful. Why would they?

If you want the expertise of someone who understands music, that expertise has value. If you want the relationships that person has built over years, those relationships have value too. You can’t expect someone to hand over years of knowledge, context and relationships because you’ve built something you think is brilliant. There needs to be something in the relationship for them too.

Sometimes the most useful thing someone with deep industry experience can tell you is that the problem you’re trying to solve isn’t quite the problem you think it is.

There is a huge difference between arriving with “I’ve solved this, tell me how to sell it to your industry” and arriving with an inquisitive question about what you might be missing. The second leaves room for the person who knows the industry to contribute, rather than just validate what the founder has already decided.

Technology can help transform parts of the music industry. The companies that get furthest tend to be the ones willing to spend time understanding the industry they’re entering before deciding where their technology actually fits.