Host: David, I thought that we had resolved this question. Streaming was terrible in the early days of streaming, but now we're getting somewhere with it. And artists are really embracing it, even Taylor Swift now.
David Israelite: It is. I mean, the music industry has experienced growth the last few years, mostly because of streaming services. We really have become a streaming industry in everything but name. I think the economics still haven't been worked out properly so that songwriters and artists are getting a fair share. But the growth in streaming is definitely saving the industry.
Host: How much more of a share do artists and songwriters need to get, David? And how far are you down the track of persuading the streamers to make that happen?
David Israelite: Well, we're a ways away. The problem for songwriters is, unfortunately, they're not in a free market. They don't get to negotiate the value of their songs with these services. It's regulated by the federal government. But I think it will improve in the near future. And I'm just excited to see so many companies invest in the music business by wanting to enter the streaming market.
Host: Well, there are two ways to look at it, right? I mean, Tidal entering-- nobody wants to embrace Tidal in the beginning. None of the artists were that interested because it wasn't doing so well, because Spotify, Pandora, all these other services had already taken market share. Now, the artists are signing exclusively to a particular streaming service. Down the road, that could be really, really bad for the artists that aren't big names, no?
David Israelite: Well, I think you're going to see a lot less of the exclusives on one particular streaming service. And in fact, even the Jay-Z album, a lot was made about it being exclusively on Tidal. But I think that's only for a week. I think the trend is that you're going to start seeing this music on all the services.
And it's great that you have so many large companies want to be in this space. I mean, three of the five largest companies in the world, Apple, Amazon, and Google, operate music streaming services. And then you have other companies like Spotify, like Pandora, like Tidal, and so we don't mind lots of competition. What seems to be the most important part of this is that consumers are embracing the idea of paid streaming. And if that's done in a high enough volume, then the decline of the sales models isn't really going to be the problem that people thought it was because there's going to be growth opportunities with paid streaming models.
Host: Before paid streaming models, David, took off in the way that they have, and whilst we witnessed the decline of physical music sales, live events sort of stepped up, didn't they? And artists were getting more money from those. Is that something that we still see happening? And what's the share of their incomes that comes from that side of the business at the moment?
David Israelite: Very much so. For an artist, the live performance revenue is a significant part of the equation. Unfortunately, for many songwriters, they don't perform live. And so that's not an income source for them. And so I'm very happy to see the growth in the streaming, and in particular, the paid streaming model because there's a huge difference between services like YouTube and the Spotify free service, in terms of the economics versus the services where the consumer actually pays.