Music businesses have become increasingly specialised.
And for good reason.
There are people who understand publishing deeply.
People who understand distribution and DSPs.
People who understand rights and contracts.
People who understand YouTube.
People who understand sync.
People who understand audiences and marketing.
People who understand data.
People who understand technology.
People who understand international markets.
People who understand the financial side of the business.
Put all of that expertise together and a modern music company can be incredibly capable.
But there is a question I have been thinking about lately.
Who understands how all of it fits together?
Everyone May Be Right
Imagine an older song in a catalogue suddenly starts getting traction in another country.
The streaming team notices the numbers moving.
The marketing team sees people using the song on social media.
Someone in publishing knows there is an ownership issue that still needs to be resolved in that territory.
The sync team thinks the song could work for a brand opportunity.
Finance looks at its historical performance and does not yet see a strong case for significant investment.
Nobody is necessarily wrong.
In fact, everyone may be absolutely right from where they are sitting.
But the real opportunity is not sitting entirely with any one of them.
It is somewhere between them.
And that is where things become interesting.
Expertise Naturally Creates Silos
As businesses grow, specialisation is necessary.
You cannot expect the same person to understand copyright law, audience behaviour, platform economics, metadata, international licensing, technology and finance equally well.
So expertise gets distributed across different people and teams.
That is how organisations become more capable.
But it can also create an unintended problem.
People naturally become very good at seeing the business through the part they understand best.
The publishing person sees a publishing issue.
Marketing sees an audience opportunity.
Finance sees the economics.
Legal sees the risk.
Technology sees a systems problem.
Each view may be correct.
But none of them, by itself, is the whole picture.
An organisation can know a great deal collectively and still struggle to connect what it knows.
Music Makes This Particularly Interesting
A song does not really care how a company is organised.
It can be a recording, a composition, a piece of intellectual property, a cultural moment and a commercial opportunity at the same time.
Something happening on one platform can create value somewhere completely different.
A social trend can increase streams.
Those streams can reveal an audience in a new territory.
That audience can create touring or partnership opportunities.
A film placement can revive an old song.
That renewed attention can create new licensing possibilities.
A rights problem can prevent several of those opportunities from moving forward.
From the song’s point of view, all of this is connected.
Inside a company, however, those things may belong to completely different teams.
That’s the gap I find interesting.
The business is organised into functions. The opportunity often isn’t.
Sometimes Nobody Owns The Intersection
Most organisations are reasonably clear about who owns what.
Publishing has a team.
Marketing has a team.
Distribution has a team.
Finance has a team.
Legal has a team.
Technology has a team.
But who owns the space between them?
Suppose something interesting is happening with a catalogue track.
It is not big enough yet to become a major marketing priority.
It is not primarily a publishing issue.
It is not a sync opportunity yet.
It does not justify significant investment based purely on current revenue.
But when you put four or five small signals together, there may be something worth exploring.
Who is responsible for putting those signals together?
Sometimes the answer is obvious.
Sometimes it isn’t.
And opportunities do not always arrive neatly labelled for the department that should handle them.
More Information Does Not Automatically Solve This
We now have access to more information about music than ever before.
We can see where listeners are coming from.
What they are listening to.
How songs are travelling.
Where engagement is changing.
Which platforms are creating discovery.
Technology and AI will make it even easier to analyse all of this.
But the challenge is not simply having more information.
It is connecting different pieces of information that may sit with different people.
A streaming spike means one thing.
A change in audience geography means something else.
A rights issue means something else.
A sync enquiry means something else.
Sometimes the real insight only appears when someone looks at all four together.
That is difficult to achieve when each piece of information lives inside a different function.
This Isn’t About Finding Someone Who Knows Everything
I don’t think the answer is to find one person who understands every part of the modern music business.
That person probably does not exist.
And as the business becomes more complex, expecting them to exist becomes even less realistic.
The more useful question is whether the organisation itself is capable of joining the dots.
Can information move across functions?
Can people recognise when something happening in their area matters to somebody elsewhere?
Can a commercial opportunity be looked at from several perspectives before it is dismissed or pursued?
Can leadership see enough of the whole picture to know which questions need to be asked?
Because sometimes the problem isn’t that the expertise is missing.
The expertise is all there. It just isn’t meeting in the same place.
Who Sees The Whole Picture?
I think this question will become more important as the music business becomes more complex.
More platforms.
More territories.
More rights.
More data.
More technologies.
More ways for music to create value.
Specialisation will become even more necessary.
But so will the ability to connect specialised knowledge.
Perhaps one of the most important capabilities of a modern music business will not be knowing everything.
It will be knowing how different things relate to each other.
Because the next opportunity may not belong entirely to marketing, publishing, distribution, sync, technology or finance.
It may be sitting somewhere between all of them.
And if everyone is looking only at their part of the business,
who is looking at the whole?
Written by:
Amit Dubey
Founder, Beat Street Music & Publishing | Music Business Strategist
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