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Sam primarily covers entertainment and media for dot.LA. Previously he was Marjorie Deane Fellow at The Economist, where he wrote for the business and finance sections of the print edition. He has also worked at the XPRIZE Foundation, U.S. Government Accountability Office, KCRW, and MLB Advanced Media (now Disney Streaming Services). He holds an MBA from UCLA Anderson, an MPP from UCLA Luskin and a BA in History from University of Michigan. Email him at samblake@dot.LA and find him on Twitter @hisamblake
Troy Carter, 48, knows the modern music business well. The Philadelphian-turned-Angeleno has managed Lady Gaga, John Legend and Eve, and formerly led creator services at Spotify. Carter, who also oversees the entertainment assets of the late artist Prince, has been an advocate for artists and called for greater artist-ownership of their copyrights.
In early 2019, Carter launched Q&A with longtime collaborators Suzy Ryoo and J. Erving. The music-tech company aims to help artists and labels navigate everything from royalty payments to creating hit music through a combination of services and software. One of its first moves was to merge with Erving's Human Re Sources, a distribution and label services company that Sony acquired this December. But its most-watched move is a tech spin on talent management, including a new product that uses music enthusiasts and AI to test whether songs can become hits.
Earlier this month, the company launched Venice Innovation Labs, a division that's developing the predictive software, along with another product to help record labels distribute music, manage their artist roster and keep track of financial splits and payments. It counts Grammy-nominated Ant Clemons and Baby Rose among its early clients.
Carter has been an active early-stage tech investor through his angel fund, AF Square, which has invested in Spotify, Dropbox and Uber, along with L.A.-based PlayVS, FazeClan, Blavity and Thrive Market.
dot.LA caught up with Carter to talk about the future of the music industry and how technology is continuing to shift its balance of power.
What do you see as the main problems facing the music industry?
Artists have more options now than they've had in the past because of technology and capital sources. Before, the types of deals were limited, because it was essentially one capital source: record labels. That's no longer the case. Technology has created lower barriers to entry. Artists can release music on their own and they can start building buzz. If I was starting a label today, I would be looking at: how do I future-proof my label before I get disrupted by other models? Even if labels got a perpetual piece of the revenue stream, if the ownership and control of those rights went back to the artist as the label recouped or reached a profit, that's a model that could work.
Why do you consider that as a model for labels to future-proof themselves?
Otherwise, if the choice becomes I (as an artist) have to give up 80% of my upside in exchange for a $250,000 advance, and that ties me into three to five albums, which is probably eight or nine years of my life – maybe that $250,000 isn't worth it if this (alternative) capital source over here is much less restrictive and gives me the freedom to make different types of decisions. That becomes the differentiating factor.
How are you beta-testing songs?
A label traditionally looks at post-release analytics, which isn't that helpful after you've already invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into a song or project. This is about pre-release analytics, to inform you whether or not you should invest into that particular song or project. In a software business, there's a lot of A/B testing; you're figuring out what works and what doesn't work. And you're investing in things that work, and killing products or features or things that don't work.
The music industry has been such a gut-driven business. If you're in a studio, you like a song, it goes to the record label, everybody gets excited, and you put it out onto digital service providers (e.g. Spotify, Apple Music). But if you find out that fans aren't reacting as much as you thought they would , yet you've already invested in the music video, you already invested in the lyric video, you spent money on photo shoots for the artwork – that's a significant investment.
So when you're A/B testing a song pre-release, how do you assess its viability?
You have real listeners on one side that are giving you real feedback. We know a lot about those listeners and their listening habits. They're giving feedback on the specific songs, whether it's through sentiment analysis, through actual rankings of the songs themselves. It's not coming from just software; it's coming from a combination of software and listeners as well.
How do you identify that initial pool of listeners?
We really did a good job of curating. I think it's over 1,000 sign-ups at this point, and a waitlist as well. We won't give away our secret sauce, but we got a great group of music listeners on the other side. For the cohorts that are in right now, the focus is primarily around pop and hip-hop. And the idea is then to spread it out from there.
So you'll sort of re-curate the cohort as the supply-side evolves?
Exactly. It's not even re-curate as much as it is bringing on. If we decide, you know, country music is the next vertical, it's making sure that we go out and recruit there. If it's classical music – the listeners are specific to the genre.
How do you balance software with human intuition in order to gauge the strength of an artist or a song?
I don't believe software will replace humans in terms of finding great artists. I think (with software) you can identify what people are reacting to and it can give you information on the types of things that people are reacting to. But, in terms of being able to identify who a star is, before there's any data available, that's what great entrepreneurs like Berry Gordy (founder of Motown) or Jimmy Iovine, or people who've started these fantastic labels over the years do.
Our job is to be able to give them tools to help them run those companies and make smarter decisions. Is it this song, or is it that song? Is it this piece of artwork, or is it that piece of artwork? So I don't think it replaces the intuition, and I don't think it replaces the creativity. I think it just helps inform decision-making after they've made those intuitive decisions.
How do you think a young Berry Gordy would be different if he operated today?
The only difference would be the musical tastes would have changed. But in terms of the core principles of what he would be looking for in an artist, they wouldn't change. That's the difference with Berry Gordy and with real artist-development executives.
You have some executives (now) that basically will look at "what's the velocity of this artist on TikTok or SoundCloud, or YouTube," and that's how they spot talent. Not to say anything's wrong with that, but it's a different approach when there's no data, and you just see, "okay, this person has an incredible voice, and a quality that lights up the room when they walk in; I can help shape this person to be a superstar." It's a different quality that a person like Berry Gordy has, making decisions in the absence of data.
Isn't adding data taking out the very qualities in artist-development executives that you celebrate?
My job, with software, is: Can I help them choose which song they should release first? And what that reaction would be around that song. Can I help them deliver that content from A to Z seamlessly? Can I help them with their project management software as they're going through each step in that creative process? So it's not to replace the creative process, it's to organize the creative process.
A recent article by a past colleague of yours at Spotify, Will Page (former Spotify chief economist), suggested that we've hit 'peak streaming' in some markets. Is that right?
Music is the soundtrack to people's lives. I don't know if we're ever going to hit a peak, in terms of the way people engage with music. If anything, people are going to engage with music even more because you have more television shows which sync music now. When you look at the amount of content on TV, you look at the amount of games, the amount of short-form video that's being made, you look at TikTok videos – I think engagement is going to continue to grow. It's too early to be able to say whether we've hit peak or not. We went through a really interesting year, where a lot of behaviors changed, and we need to see what normalization is going to look like. We can probably answer that question better a year from now.
Looking forward, what do you think the role of livestreaming and livestreamed concerts becomes?
We're at the very, very, very beginning of what we're going to see in the livestreaming space – specifically around AR and VR. The live concert experience is limited to who can be in a room. And there's only a small percentage of really great seats in the house. Right now you're capped at a capacity, plus the amount of wear and tear on artists to do 150, 200 tour dates throughout the year, and the level of expense that comes with that as well; we can figure out much better experiences. Not to say it's going to replace it, but I think it's going to be very complementary and I think we're at the very, very, very beginning stages right now.
When do you think live events return?
I think in the U.S., we'll see that this summer we'll be back up and running with live. Probably not at full capacity, but I think by the end of 2021, we'll be back full-capacity.
What's ahead for Q&A and Venice?
We have things coming down the pipeline that we're excited about. But our thing is: Can we become the operating system for the music industry? If you look at what our workflow looks like right now, people are still sending music in Dropbox and Box, or WeTransfer; lyrics are written in people's notes on their phone or on Google Docs or on texts; you may have something on your email at the label but somebody else may have something else on their email. There's no central source of truth when you're managing a project. So the way we're looking at it is, for creative projects and labels, can we become the central source of truth?
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
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Sam Blake primarily covers media and entertainment for dot.LA. Find him on Twitter @hisamblake and email him at samblake@dot.LA
Sam primarily covers entertainment and media for dot.LA. Previously he was Marjorie Deane Fellow at The Economist, where he wrote for the business and finance sections of the print edition. He has also worked at the XPRIZE Foundation, U.S. Government Accountability Office, KCRW, and MLB Advanced Media (now Disney Streaming Services). He holds an MBA from UCLA Anderson, an MPP from UCLA Luskin and a BA in History from University of Michigan. Email him at samblake@dot.LA and find him on Twitter @hisamblake
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.
According to a Forbes report last April, both the viewership and dollars behind women’s sports at a collegiate and professional level are growing.
In 2022, the first 32 games of the NCAA tournament had record attendance levels, breaking records set back in 2004, and largely driven by the new and rapidly growing women’s NCAA tournament. WNBA openers this year saw a 21% spike in attendance, with some teams including the LA Sparks reporting triple-digit ticket sales growth, about 121% over 2022’s total. In 2023, the average size of an LA Sparks crowd swelled to 10,396 people, up from 4,701 people.
Women make up half the population, but “also 50% of the folks that are walking into the stadium at Dodger Stadium, or your NFL fans are just about 50% women,” noted Erin Storck, a panelist and senior analyst at Los Angeles-based Elysian Park Ventures.
Storck added that in heterosexual households, women generally manage most of the family’s money, giving them huge purchasing power, a potential advantage for female-run leagues. “There's an untapped revenue opportunity,” she noted.
In the soccer world, Los Angeles-based women’s soccer team Angel City FC has put in the work to become a household name, not just in LA County but across the nation. At an LA Tech Week panel hosted by Athlete Strategies about investing in sports, Angel City head of strategy and chief of staff Kari Fleischauer said that years before launching the women’s National Women’s Soccer League team, Angel City FC was pounding the pavement letting people know about the excitement ladies soccer can bring. She noted community is key, and that fostering a sense of engagement and safety at the team’s home venue, BMO stadium (formerly Banc of California Stadium), is one reason fans keep coming back.
Adding free metro rides to BMO stadium and private rooms for nursing fans to breastfeed or fans on the spectrum to avoid sensory overload, were just some of the ways ACFC tried to include its community in the concept of its stadium, Fleischauer said. She noted, though, that roughly 46% of Angel City fans are “straight white dudes hanging out with their bros.”
“Particularly [on] the woman's side, I'd like to think we do a better job of making sure that there's spaces for everyone,” Fleischauer told the audience. “One thing we realize is accessibility is a huge thing.”
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.
L.A. Tech Week has brought venture capitalists, founders and entrepreneurs from around the world to the California coast. With so many tech nerds in one place, it's easy to laugh, joke and reminisce about the future of tech in SoCal.
Here's what people are saying about the fifth day of L.A. Tech Week on social:
#LATechWeek has been on 🔥🔥🔥. Yes the events are super cool at amazing venues. But, I’m blown away by the people. I’ve met so many founders building generative AI companies from the ground up. I’m so bullish on LA right now🥳. LA is for builders #longLA
Thanks @rpnickson 📸 pic.twitter.com/B6rT2jJYIs
— Dr. Kelly O'Brien (@Kvo2013) June 8, 2023
Successful LatinxVC Avanza Summit 2023 in LA! It’s been an amazing few days near the beach w great company. Thank you to our panelists & participants.
Huge thanks to our incredible sponsors SVB, Chavez Family Foundation, Annenberg Foundation, PledgeLA, Fenwick & West, Countsy! pic.twitter.com/oVuGIgFurk
— LatinxVC (@LatinxVCs) June 9, 2023
30+ gaming startups presented at the A16z Speedrun Demo Day in LA yesterday. Great thanks to the @a16zGames team for an awesome day of events! #LATechWeek pic.twitter.com/DKq8IFo5QZ
— Grace Zhou (@graceminzhou) June 9, 2023
📣🤩 What’s the buzz? It’s #LATechWeek from @TechstarsLA & @TechstarsHealth joint demo day with the #Techstar HC team where our @fyelabs founder/CEO Suvojit Ghosh mentored both cohorts! #TechStars demo day highlighted 12 amazing emerging #startups in #healthtech #innovation. 🩺 pic.twitter.com/0RXClCtfDQ
— FYELABS (@fyelabs) June 9, 2023
Another successful Coffee On Slauson in the books for #LATechWeek.
Special thanks to the good people at Pledge LA, SVB and @GundersonLaw for the ongoing support and the @findyourhilltop staff for providing the space, eats & vibes. ♻️ pic.twitter.com/51cMDoEn30
— Slauson & Co. (@SlausonAndCo) June 9, 2023
The perfect combo to start #LATechWeek Day 5: pastries, coffee, and great convos with industry founders ✨
Fireside chats with @enriquealle, @wp, and @robynpark pic.twitter.com/booYPdekVV
— Tech Week (@Techweek_) June 9, 2023
Of course @designerfund has the most amazing pastries at their event. #LATechWeek pic.twitter.com/PjyWlGTQI4
— Jesse Pickard (@jessepickard) June 9, 2023
My favorite event from @Techweek_ has to be "Modern Storytelling & Business Building." Hosted by @STHoward #LATechWeek pic.twitter.com/SV1eexMJ4k
— JonnyZeller (@JonnyZeller) June 9, 2023
And the finale of the night was courtesy of the one and only @zedd for an unforgettable end to the "City of Games" party! Hosted by @a16zGames and @100Thieves #LATechWeek pic.twitter.com/hliI9yLKse
— Tech Week (@Techweek_) June 9, 2023
Excited to be at the @a16zGames Speedrun Demo Day! Loved the energy and excitement from the companies that pitched there. It was also great to see @Tocelot and @ndrewlee at this amazing #LATechWeek event pic.twitter.com/NfLQO5lR27
— Andy Lee | andypwlee.bit (@andypwlee) June 9, 2023
Thank you to everyone who joined the Sony Venture Fund US team at #LATechWeek for our screening of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. Last summer, we started building a presence in LA. Today, it's exciting to host such an event with the @Sony family and the LA VC community. pic.twitter.com/wdDm6qtHdL
— Sony Innovation Fund (@Sony_Innov_Fund) June 9, 2023
Time to eat, connect and build while @remi_rodney provided the vibes. 🙏🏽#LATechWeek @BuildOnBase @developer_dao @WeAreRazorfish pic.twitter.com/QIPh1gjvoA
— Hola Metaverso-Blockchain & New Web Tech Events 🎪 (@holametaverso) June 9, 2023
@Lux_Capital at #LATechWeek advancing the impossible to inevitable, from..
..defense primes partnering with cutting edge defense tech startups, to..
..hardware x LLMs improving mental health.
From the rich and diverse LA ecosystem stems generational companies: pic.twitter.com/v5S5r8JtbU
— Shahin Farshchi (@Farshchi) June 9, 2023
LA Tech Week has been a blast! Met some amazing creators, founders and investors from all over the world! #LATechWeek pic.twitter.com/AAh9JFELhe
— Chris Germano (@netslayer) June 9, 2023
Had such a blast at LA Tech Week and hosting events for @brexHQ
Top highlights were collabing with @pulley on an Emerging Managers / Founder mixer at the @poplco House, rooftop event in Venice, creator panel with @thechangj & proper Korean food with in KTown.
Exhausted is an… pic.twitter.com/mGQnSYGPdg
— Τyler Robinson (@TyyRob3) June 9, 2023
Did you have fun at @sophiaamoruso’s launch party for @trustfundvc? #LATechWeek pic.twitter.com/gbrbXRQ9Xx
— Kay (@KaySnels) June 9, 2023
y00tilty in every city with @KaylaLor3n & @cryptochrisg813.
Welcome to the LA @y00tsNFT fam! #LATechWeek #3XP week. pic.twitter.com/6wWKlsTacx
— VanG0xH (@CryptoVanGoghs) June 9, 2023
Really enjoyed #LATechWeek. Here are some observations I made 👇
— s.personal.ai (Suman Kanuganti) (@SumanPersonalAI) June 9, 2023
Thank you @TheKofiAmpadu for including me in #demoday with the latest @a16ztxo cohort! It was a real full circle moment to witness the brilliance of both @ChrisLyons & @ZMuse_ & #PledgeLA very own. She’s why we’re #LongLA 🚀💕 #LAtechweek pic.twitter.com/itkKXMxQRb
— Qiana Qiana! (@Q_i_a_n_a) June 9, 2023
@upfrontvc Gaming Founders Podcast #iLOVELA #LATechWeek @Techweek_ @KatiaAmeri @mucker @fikavc @bonfire_vc @TenOne10 @WatertowerGroup @ganasvc @IAmRobRyan @john_at_stonks @eva_ho @dereknorton pic.twitter.com/LCbaGXCoW7
— Sean Goldfaden (@seangoldfaden) June 9, 2023
Hosts Kevin Zhang, Partner at @upfrontvc, and Eden Chen, CEO of @pragmaplatform, interviewed two special guests from @raidbaseinc Stephen Lim, Co-Founder & Product Director, and Trevor Romleski, Co-Founder & Game Director. 🎙 #LATechWeek pic.twitter.com/hxHEAoELZ6
— Tech Week (@Techweek_) June 9, 2023
Kicking off @a16zGames @100Thieves City of Games party at #LATechWeek 🔥🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/zQcZedG15f
— Jon Lai (@Tocelot) June 9, 2023
Yesterday at @socinnovation I got to have this AWESOME conversation with @iamwill — musician, producer, technology entrepreneur, and Founder & CEO of https://t.co/D60y1e2JOu #LATechWeek pic.twitter.com/KBxK6rXyTG
— Anna Barber (@annawbarber) June 9, 2023
I absolutely love this game. Proud moment for the team @investwithatlas. #LATechWeek pic.twitter.com/fPZvKXU7TC
— Tobias Francis (@TobiasFrancis) June 9, 2023
Had a blast at LA Tech Week this year with @brexHQ
From hosting & moderating my first creator panel featuring @BlakeMichael14, to a fun rooftop night in Venice, and to attending some amazing events such as Watertower’s emerging manager panel and a VC/founder tennis tournament pic.twitter.com/udjfmLHE0L
— Jonathan Chang (@thechangj) June 8, 2023
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.
At Lowercarbon Capital’s LA Tech Week event Thursday, the synergy between the region’s aerospace industry and greentech startups was clear.
The event sponsored by Lowercarbon, Climate Draft (and the defunct Silicon Valley Bank’s Climate Technology & Sustainability team) brought together a handful of local startups in Hawthorne not far from LAX, and many of the companies shared DNA with arguably the region’s most famous tech resident: SpaceX.
Here’s a look at the greentech startups that pitched during the Tech Week event, and how they think what they’re building could help solve the climate crisis.
Arbor: Based in El Segundo, this year-old startup is working to convert organic waste into energy and fresh water. At the same time, it also uses biomass carbon removal and storage to remove carbon from the atmosphere and sequester it in an attempt to avoid further damaging the earth’s ozone layer. At the Tech Week event Thursday, Arbor CEO Brad Hartwig told a stunned crowd that Arbor aims to remove about five billion tons of organic waste from landfills and turn that into about 6 PWh, or a quarter of the global electricity need, each year. Hartwig is an alumni of SpaceX; he was a manufacturing engineer on the Crew Dragon engines from 2016-2018 and later a flight test engineer at Kitty Hawk.
Antora: Sunnyvale-based Antora Energy was founded in 2017, making it one of the oldest companies on the pitching block during the event. Backed by investors including the National Science Foundation and Los Angeles-based Overture VC, Antora has raised roughly $57 million to date, most recently a $50 million round last February. Chief operating officer Justin Briggs said Antora’s goal is to modernize and popularize thermal energy storage using ultra-hot carbon. Massive heated carbon blocks can give off thermal energy, which Antora’s proprietary batteries then absorb and store as energy. It’s an ambitious goal, but one the world needs at scale to green its energy footprint. According to Briggs, “the biggest challenge is how can we turn back variable intermittent renewable electricity into something that's reliable and on demand, so we can use it to provide energy to everything we need.”
Arc: Hosting the panel was Arc, an electric boating company that’s gained surprising momentum, moving from design to delivering its first e-boats in just two years of existence. Founded in 2021, the company’s already 70 employees strong and has already sold some of its first e-boats to customers willing to pay the luxury price tag, CTO Ryan Cook said Thursday. Cook said that to meet the power needs of a battery-powered speedboat, the Arc team designed the vehicle around the battery pack with the goal of it being competitive with gas boats when compared to range and cost of gas. But on the pricing side, it’s not cheap. Arc’s flagship vessel, the Arc One is expected to cost roughly $300,000. During the panel, Cook compared the boat to being “like an early Tesla Roadster.” To date Arc Boats has raised just over $35 million, according to PitchBook, from investors including Kevin Durant, Will Smith and Sean “Diddy” Combs.
Clarity Technology: Carbon removal startup Clarity is based in LA and was founded by Yale graduate and CEO Glen Meyerowitz last year. Clarity is working to make “gigaton solutions for gigaton problems.” Their aim? To remove up to 2,000 billion pounds of carbon from the atmosphere through direct air capture, a process which uses massive fans to move chemicals that capture CO2. But the challenge, Meyerowitz noted in his speech, is doing this at scale in a way that makes an actual dent in the planet’s emissions while also efficiently using the electricity needed to do so. Meyerowitz spent nearly five years working as an engineer for SpaceX in Texas, and added he’s looking to transfer those learnings into Clarity.
Parallel Systems: Based in Downtown LA’s Arts District, this startup is building zero-emission rail vehicles that are capable of long-haul journeys otherwise done by a trucking company. The estimated $700 billion trucking industry, Parallel Systems CEO Matt Soule said, is ripe for an overhaul and could benefit from moving some of its goods off-road to electric railcars. According to Soule, Parallel’s electric battery-powered rail vehicles use 25% of the energy a semi truck uses, and at a competitive cost. Funded in part by a February 2022 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, Parallel Systems has raised about $57 million to date. Its most recent venture funding round was a $49 million Series A led by Santa Monica-based VC Anthos Capital. Local VCs including Riot Ventures and Santa Monica-based Embark Ventures are also backers of Parallel.
Terra Talent: Unlike the rest of the startups pitching at the Tech Week event, Terra Talent was focused on building teams rather than technology. Founder Dolly Singh worked at SpaceX, Oculus and Citadel as a headhunter, and now runs Terra, a talent and advisory firm that helps companies recruit top talent in the greentech space. But, she said, she’s concerned that all the work these startups are doing won’t matter unless we very quickly turn around the current trendlines. “Earth will shake us off like and she will do just fine in 10,000 years,” she said. “It’s our way of living, everything we love is actually here on earth… there’s nothing I love on Mars,” adding that she’s hopeful the startups that pitched during the event will be instrumental in making sure the planet stays habitable for a little while longer.
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.