Music Tectonics

How do you actually put a price on a music catalog in 2026?    In this panel from our recent Grow the TAM event, Billboard's Elizabeth Dilts Marshall sits down with three experts who each value catalogs from a completely different angle. Rob Frech of Raine Group has advised on catalog and M&A deals for Warner Music Group, Quality Control, and Downtown. Tom Sarig spent decades managing artists like...

What will the music business actually look like in 2030?  In this special panel from the Grow the TAM summit, Tatiana Cirisano, VP of Music Strategy at MIDiA Research, leads a wide-ranging conversation about the future of music monetization with three industry veterans: Liz Moody, partner and chair of the new media practice at Granderson Des Rochers; Mauhan Zonoozy, founder of Vinyl Bar in Shibuya...

In this episode, Dmitri and Eleanor walk through eight revenue multipliers reshaping the music business in 2026, including catalog valuation, revenue recovery, music licensing, and more.  This conversation sets up the theme for this year's Music Tectonics conference: "Rising Tide: Grow the Music, Grow the Value," exploring why music has massive cultural influence but a music industry that still la...

What if you could make music with anything around you? Fruit, water, human skin, or even the weight of objects on a kitchen scale? That's the question Playtronica has been answering for over a decade   This week on the podcast, Adam McHeffey sits down with co-founders Sasha Pas and Aglaya Demidenko to explore how they built one of the most creative and community-driven companies in music technolog...

What if the biggest opportunity in music monetization isn't streaming, social media, or live concerts? It's the $300 billion pro AV industry, and most musicians and music tech innovators have never thought about it. This week on the podcast, Graeme Harrison, vice president and general manager of Bluesound Professional , joins Dmitri to break down how commercial audio is reshaping the way brands us...

Remember when the best music recommendation you ever got didn't come from Spotify's algorithm, but from your coworker, your cousin, or a stranger in another country who loves the same obscure band you thought only you knew about? Eric West is the founder of Music League , a competitive music discovery platform with nearly 200,000 monthly active users across 160 countries. Players compete in themed...

Why are most brands still stuck licensing royalty-free tracks nobody recognizes while short-form content runs on music?  This week, we're sharing a conversation Jade Prieboy had at SXSW with Ferris Bseiso, founder of Cipher Music , breaking down how TikTok rewrote the economics of sync licensing, why major brands are getting hit with eight-figure copyright lawsuits over Instagram posts, and how Ci...

Emmanuel Zunz, the CEO and founder of ONErpm , has spent 16 years building one of the fastest-growing independent music companies in the world, across 40 territories, with a staff of over 500, and without a single round of outside investment. In this episode, he breaks down exactly how that happened. This week on the podcast, Emmanuel and Dmitri get into why the traditional definition of independe...

What does it actually look like to build a music career from the ground up as an artist in 2026?  This week Dmitri sits down with Aryyzona , a Brazillian-born, LA-based artist who has been posting videos on YouTube since 2009 and recently released her hyper pop EP Gacha World, complete with a custom video game.  With over a million YouTube subscribers and a devoted following across TikTok and Inst...

Most artists have no idea who their fans actually are. They know follower counts and streaming numbers, but they don't own the relationship, and according to Rob Sealy, that single problem is costing the music industry billions. Rob is the co-founder of OpenStage , a platform helping artists from emerging talent to global icons like Paul McCartney, Oasis, and Lana Del Rey reclaim their fan data an...

What if the most surprising thing happening in music right now isn't what AI is creating, but what fans are reaching for instead?  This week on Music Tectonics, we're bringing you highlights from the AlgoRhythms conference last month, where our team spent time on the ground talking to researchers and innovators about where the music industry is heading. First, Tristra NewYear Yeager sits down with...

What happens to music when everyone is only listening to what they made themselves?  In this episode, Jade Prieboy sits down with Adam Neely , composer, bassist, and YouTuber educator with over 1.8 million subscribers. They go deeper than the usual AI debate, exploring what we actually lose when music stops being something we share.  Adam draws a clear line between stem separation tools he genuine...

What if every fight over music technology throughout history has actually been the same fight, and we're just now facing a version of it we've never seen before? In this special episode, Dmitri shares a keynote he gave at the Algo Rhythms conference last month called "Is Music Making Up For Grabs?" Drawing on four hundred years of disruption in music, from the harpsichord to amplification, Dmitri...

What happens when a beat-selling side hustle accidentally becomes a social media phenomenon?  In this episode, music producer and content creator Hunna G  ( @hunnagbeats ) joins Dmitri to talk about building "Take a Seat, Rap on the Beat," a series now sitting at over 150 million views and more than a million followers.  Hunna G covers the origin story, the most memorable guests (like 2 Chainz and...

This week, Dmitri is joined by Dom McLennon, artist producer, and creative strategist from Hartford, Connecticut. Best known as a lead vocalist and assistant producer for BROCKHAMPTON, Dom also runs COURTVISION , a creative agency connecting artists and brands across gaming, education and community.    We cover a lot of ground on this one, from treating music technology as a sandbox, to bringing m...

What happens to an artist's reputation the moment they admit they used AI? Does admitting how they used AI make a difference? New research suggests the stakes are higher than most realize, and the answer is far from simple.  This week on the podcast, Dr. Joel Carnevale, assistant professor of Management at Florida International University, joins Dmitri to break down the findings from his recent ar...

Everyone's talking about the AI boom in music, but is the industry's infrastructure actually ready for it? Bjorn Lindvall, CEO and co-founder of  MusicInfra , has spent his career at the intersection of music rights and finance, first as co-founder and COO of Hipgnosis Songs, where he helped build a multi-billion dollar catalog acquisition business, and now building the infrastructure to fix one o...

Is gaming really the next frontier for music, or is that just wishful thinking?  In this episode, Dmitri sits down with Jenn Garcia, co-founder and CEO of Metamoki , the mobile gaming studio behind Mob Wars and Wiz Khalifa's Weed Farm. With nearly two decades of experience in mobile gaming, social gaming, and community building, Jenn brings a fresh outside perspective on where the music industry i...

What happens to a rock band's legacy when the touring stops forever?  When Pophouse acquired the KISS catalog, brand, name, image, and likeness rights, they didn't just buy music. They bought the blueprint for keeping one of rock's most iconic bands alive indefinitely through digital avatars, biometric data, and AI-driven live experiences. This deal, built on the success of ABBA Voyage and develop...

Most founders think about building. Fewer think carefully about selling. In this episode, Dmitri talks with Phil Barry, the founder of music rights and licensing platform Blokur , about what he learned from nearly a decade of building and ultimately selling his company to Music Reports in 2024. Phil opens up about the early challenges of finding product-market fit, the long relationship-building t...

Where does AI stand in the music industry as we move through 2026? In this conversation, Dmitri talks with Mike Pelczynski, Chief Strategy and Impact Officer at Voice-Swap , about the evolution from fear to curiosity around AI in music, and why building ethical AI systems from the ground up creates long-term value.  Mike shares about how his work architecting fan-powered royalties at SoundCloud co...

For Part 2 of our NAMM 2026 recap, we explore how music creators are building sustainable careers outside of the traditional music industry model. As streaming revenue continues to fail musicians and CD sales decline, artists are pioneering new paths through direct-to-fan experiences and developing products instead of traditional merchandise.  One great example of this shift is Tarun Nayar from Mo...

For the next two weeks we'll be talking about all things NAMM and getting into some of the exciting innovations we spotted on the show floor, along with some trends that we noticed this year, starting with AI's inflection point in the music industry. Last year, the conversation around AI was tense with creators expressing fear over being replaced by AI. This year, we saw more AI tools designed to...

What happens when AI starts reflecting an artist's voice back to them? This week, Dmitri talks with artist, songwriter, and producer Blanco Brown. Blanco first broke through with the viral hit "The Git Up," becoming a defining voice of the intersection of country and hip hop, also known as "country trap."  Last year, an AI generated artist called Breaking Rust released a song called "Walk My Walk,...

This week, Dmitri chats with Russell Wedelich, the President and CTO of Eventide Audio . Eventide has been shaping Eventide has been shaping recorded music since 1971, and Russell has used his background in both electrical engineering and musical engineering to help create products like the Space Stomp box, H9000, Physion, and Temperance reverb just to name a few.  They talk about Eventide's histo...