As record companies and music publishers, I can only assume you are already looking what will await you for next Fall. SaaS solutions for the music industry have been a recurrent topic these last few years, and even more so for these last few months considering the need for the music business to adapt to fully virtual events, releases strategies and livestream. The trend regarding label services is slowly becoming the center of attention.
Music professionals have been resilient, showing again how the capacity of our sector to adapt quickly. Music tech is a core solution here. It might be time to take a step back and look at what label services will look like in the near future. These softwares will undoubtedly help our music professionals with optimization, organization and thinking ahead. So let’s answer the burning question: what will SaaS solution mean in the near future for the music industry?
How are SaaS solutions doing during the sanitary crisis?
First off, we did talk about SaaS solutions and their impact on music industry, but this time we want to look forward. How did SaaS solutions were included in the strategies set up during lockdown? And more specifically, what was the place given to label services during that period of time?
Let’s take out of the way all the classical difficulties we’ve been continuously hearing about: live music is still in a huge drought, listening habits have been changing, sync deals were held off and releases were low during lockdown. Now that business is slowly picking up (at least in certain parts of the world), we can expect some new trends. But as a major part of the music business is still happening online, deals are obviously impacted for the long term.
Reprtoir is a SaaS solution created by the licensing company Rendez-Vous Digital, so we’ve accustomed to this. Navigating the digital music business is getting difficult: differentiating rights management in each country, on different platforms, with different datasets… We could go on. But the main idea is here: how could we expect music professionals and artists to know how to deal with every part of the music industry, understand every single part of the business and also be unbeatable on creation? This is why artist and label services are important and will continue to grow, and they mainly are supported by SaaS solutions.
Music industry softwares market trends
If a lot of analysts are giving the independent artists sector a lot of credit for the few years to come, it will depend on how music will be distributed, published and how easy it will be done. This is why The Raine Group is actually very invested (financially) in artist and label services. Even though the predictions were made before the pandemic, it still makes a lot of sense, considering online releases are going to support (in their limited way) creation and artists.
This was said again during the Midem Digital Edition back in beginning of June. Incidentally, a focus on artist and label services started this year and will be extended for the next physical edition in 2021. Reprtoir was a sponsor of the main online conference regarding artist and label services by Fred Davis (The Raine Group), Justin Kalifowitz (Downtown Music), Kerry Trainor (SoundCloud) and Juliana Koranteng (music business journalist). Among other things, Fred Davis summed it up well:
“This area we’re talking about [artist and label services] is absolutely the fastest growing segment in the entire music industry. It was nothing two or three years ago and you’re correct this year it will be as we estimate a $2 billion sector by 10% of the entire music industry growing at a 35-40% year over year” - Fred Davis, The Raine Group
We couldn’t agree more.
What does label services mean for music professionals?
Then what does it mean for music professionals? There has been a lot of movements in the publishing sector lately, especially from Downtown Music. The independent sector’s landscape is slowly changing with that main actor gathering CD Baby, FUGA, Downtown Publishing or even AdRev. A lots is coming together to facilitate production, distribution and publishing. Artists and label services have their Everest.
This means more interactions between Tech and Music. These services will grow rapidly as many releases will happen, in a new context appealing to different strategies to get noticed. Between royalties management, metadata verifications, playlists and releases on different distribution platforms, a lot of aspects of the music business have to be taken care of at the same time.
This is what drove Reprtoir’s evolution. A SaaS solution made by and for music professionals, following the trends we just evoked. Our solutions were thought to help our users to
- manage their catalog online with a CMS made for music metadata and works: Catalog Management Solution
- manage their playlists sent to professionals with realtime tracking: Music Sharing Solution
- manage their releases directly from their own workspace with tailor-made bulk packages for the different platforms: Release Builder
- manage their royalties and analytics in only one platform: Royalty Accounting Solution
Try out the solution right now and see if it fits your needs to optimize catalog and works management, eases file sharing with music professionals and how much time you can save!
