LET’S TALK ABOUT THE UK SINGLES CHART. SINCE MINISTRY OF SOUND WAS BOUGHT BY SONY, INDEPENDENT TOP 40 SINGLES ARE ALMOST NON-EXISTENT… EXCEPT FOR DITTO. WHAT’S GOING ON THERE?
More people, especially in the hip-hop world, aren’t signing deals. Young Bane goes through Disturbing London, who went through us [before a recently-signed Parlophone JV]. Dave’s done really well; AJ Tracey’s done really well.
Every country is very different. When I go to the Philippines, artists aren’t really allowed to say they’re on a label, not being independent is very unfashionable. But in Australia, it’s the opposite – being on a label is still a huge thing for artists.
In the UK, all the artists coming through now understand what’s gone before them and that they don’t need to sign a deal; you can keep your rights and get a similar level of service. There’s a particularly big awareness about that amongst the grime and hip-hop artists here. They tend to be very business-savvy.
DO YOU LIKE HEARING DANIEL EK SAY HE WANTS TO BREAK DOWN THE GATEKEEPERS OF THE MUSIC BUSINESS?
[Laughs] Funnily enough, maybe not – if he means us! I don’t think Daniel Ek wants to do 3,000 support tickets every day because someone’s metadata’s wrong. I don’t think anyone understands how hard distribution and services is – how labour-intensive it is to do it properly.
THAT’S A BIG TOPIC: WHEN WILL SPOTIFY, APPLE OR ANYONE ‘DO A SOUNDCLOUD’ AND ALLOW ARTISTS TO UPLOAD DIRECT. SPOTIFY TALKS A LOT AT THE MINUTE ABOUT A ‘TWO-SIDED MARKETPLACE’ AND THAT SOUNDS LIKE SOUNDCLOUD TO ME. IS THAT A THREAT TO YOU?
It is and it isn’t. So long as you want to be on all the services and get a level of expertise across all of them, as well as things like radio and press, you will always need a [third-party] partner.
We manually listen to every single piece of music that comes through our door. Long-term, we feel like we’re a record label moving with the times, and that means staying ahead of what’s going on.
THAT INCLUDES BLOCKCHAIN, IN WHICH YOU’VE INVESTED. WHAT’S HAPPENING THERE?
I was in the Philippines doing a launch in September last year, and obviously I’d read about blockchain a lot before then. Jonathan Ong, a really successful Filipino music producer who’d been investing in bitcoin in 2013 for $80 and had bought a bunch of houses [with the proceeds], sat me down for two days and explained the whole thing to me.
I called my brother and just said to him, ‘Listen man, we have to do something about this otherwise we’re absolutely screwed – it could take away what we do when everything becomes decentralised.’ So then we started thinking, How can we add to what’s going on – how can we make the landscape better by using blockchain?
IN WHAT WAY COULD BLOCKCHAIN CHANGE EVERYTHING?
If Spotify wanted to do instant automated payments to artists via the blockchain, they could. I’m sure they’re designing things using blockchain now.
Music will be completely decentralised. It will remove any middle-men, thereby benefitting the artists by increasing their revenue share. This is exactly what Ditto aims to accomplish. Blockchain will revolutionise the music industry and we want to be a part of that innovation.
If you go to a country like Brazil today, it’s a well-known fact that people don’t really get paid via radio play. It’s rather endemic – the money goes back to people who shouldn’t get it. Even in the UK, there’s an issue around the amount of [public performance] money which goes back to the majors because it doesn’t get claimed by the rightful owners.
Due to the nature of the blockchain, tracking data and information becomes much easier. There is zero tolerance for human error. It’s completely accurate.
With blockchain, every transaction a song goes through, from the time it gets uploaded will be recorded on an open ledger – it’s completely transparent. It means no one can cook the books. Traditionally this is something major labels fear, but transparency is something we have always championed. We believe in artists’ rights to fair compensation.
Also, I’m excited by the idea of token-ising artists. I think over the next year you’ll see artists becoming their own tokens; and people directly investing into an artist as they would buy into an ICO (Initial Coin Offering). We want to help artists do that.
This will bring artists and their followers even closer together and that would not be possible without blockchain’s smart contract capabilities.
WHAT DOES THAT MEAN IN REAL TERMS?
Imagine if Ed Sheeran was token-ised at the start of his career; you saw him at a gig and you bought his tokens like you would a CD. The value of that token would probably be up about 10,000% now. If you find an artist you like, and you put £100 in, then they get to an Ed Sheeran level, you’re going to be rich.
With that model comes the possibility that more people will be interested to go to gigs again, and more people will be interested in discovering new artists. It’s a long-term play. We’ve partnered with EdenChain who do more of a permission-based blockchain. They’re in South Korea and we really like the team. We’ve made quite a big investment in them and we’re going to be working with them in the future.
IT’S GOING TO DEMOCRATISE A&R INVESTMENT FOR EVERYONE?
Exactly.
WHAT DOES GOOD A&R MEAN TO YOU?
Good A&R means being first on everything, spending 99% of your time in the studio or at gigs. It’s not enough to follow data, you need to be there way before that. We listen to every single piece of music that comes through Ditto before it even gets on Spotify.
And if something sounds really good the rest of the office will listen to it and we’ll discuss it. But most of our music still comes from managers and people who are recommending to us.
WHAT’S YOUR AMBITION FOR THE FUTURE OF DITTO?
About 18 months ago, we thought, let’s make a play to properly take on the major labels around the world. It sounded ridiculous because we only had three offices at that time. But over the last 12 months we’ve shown we can be a threat to what the major labels are doing with their [‘indie’] distribution arms; in the Philippines, we have literally 90% of the biggest bands on our books with a brilliant A&R guy, Jinno Minna.
What we’ve done recently in the UK, building out the team with proper radio and PR support for artists, in addition to the streaming support – that’s what we want to do now in the different territories. We’re going to start going after the biggest artists in the world.
All the majors fret about market share, but we’re not interested in that game – we just want to know who’s got the next Adele coming through. That’s where we can compete. We want to be the best, not the biggest, music company in the world. And I really believe that’s what we can become.
Originally posted on MUSICBUSINESSWORLDWIDE.COM
