YouSaid · the spoken record

Golnar Khosrowshahi

lines on the record: 82
first: 2023-10-31
most recent: 2023-10-31
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I can't comment on somebody else's business. What I can say is that we take a conservative approach as far as how we value these catalogs. We look for compelling data around growth. Some things may be subject to growth and some things may not. And we tailor that to the assets that we're looking to buy. We take into account our cost of capital, which keep in mind we did business for 13, 14 years with zero cost of capital to today's cost of capital. That's a very different environment to operate in. I mean, we had no cost of capital for that long.”
2023-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI is on a collision course with the music industry. Reservoir's Golnar Khosrowshahi thinks there’s a way through it · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have some competitors in this world, everyone has a billion dollars, as you said. The big one was called hypnosis, which just this week is in a moment of bizarre controversy And because it is a British company, the British press is covering it. They're having the time of their lives covering this controversy. We'll link to some of the stories. But basically, they wanted to sell some of their catalog to another part of the fund. They had to take some offers. Nobody bit. So they made the sale. And their shareholders are like, no, this is a disaster. The founder might leave. You could take that as evidence of owning these catalogs does not deliver the returns that it costs to build them. What do you see this as evidence of?”
2023-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI is on a collision course with the music industry. Reservoir's Golnar Khosrowshahi thinks there’s a way through it · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we don't really look at it that way. We look at a rate at which cash flows will be generated over time. We have certain periods where there's a plateau. You see spikes every so often as it relates to something like the Kingsman event or some kind of big film sink event. And then we sort of smoothed that out over time. So that's really how we look at it. And something like that is really in a mature state and so it has plateaued.”
2023-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI is on a collision course with the music industry. Reservoir's Golnar Khosrowshahi thinks there’s a way through it · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do you chart that on a curve? The relevance will continue, but the instant hit of nostalgia that makes you buy a Google home will decline for the younger audience, so the value of the song by song will decline.”
2023-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI is on a collision course with the music industry. Reservoir's Golnar Khosrowshahi thinks there’s a way through it · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a film that was catering to probably in 18 to 54 demographic. I mean, wide demographic. So again, people might be listening to that music and not knowing the history behind it, but it's a great song with a great melody and great lyrics. And so I think that relevance will continue.”
2023-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI is on a collision course with the music industry. Reservoir's Golnar Khosrowshahi thinks there’s a way through it · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think about that a lot. Because I have 221 year olds, right? So are they going to be listening? Do they even know what this song is? Where I have come to is that a great song is a great song and great lyrics are great lyrics. So next generation may not know John Denver, may not know his story, may not know this song. If Google is taking this song and putting it in a commercial and launching Google Home during the Super Bowl with this song, an instrumental version, no lyrics. Feel that it's going to continue to have staying power and relevance. There were several different iterations of this song in The Kingsman, I think maybe five different iterations.”
2023-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI is on a collision course with the music industry. Reservoir's Golnar Khosrowshahi thinks there’s a way through it · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The value of the catalog over time, you described it as the private equity guys think of it as an annuity. I know that you care about them as deeply cherished pieces of art. If you describe a catalog as an annuity, we're going to buy all of John Denver's catalog. Is now going to generate returns at some rate for some amount of time. At some point, the fan base is getting older, maybe spending less money, maybe harder to advertise to, and you've got younger fans who need to be initiated into John Denver's music, but they're on TikTok and they're flooded with a bunch of knee music. Is there an expiration date on these annuities?”
2023-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI is on a collision course with the music industry. Reservoir's Golnar Khosrowshahi thinks there’s a way through it · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just don't I don't think so. I think that you have enough people in the music industry who are revered for their art doing these kinds of deals such that the stigma associated with doing the deals and hence selling out is maybe it hasn't disappeared, but it certainly has been reduced.”
2023-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI is on a collision course with the music industry. Reservoir's Golnar Khosrowshahi thinks there’s a way through it · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do you think the artists care about selling out anymore? Sorry, I'm a huge clash fan in their stories when they bought their first cars. They were in a moral crisis. And I just don't think the artists do that anymore.”
2023-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI is on a collision course with the music industry. Reservoir's Golnar Khosrowshahi thinks there’s a way through it · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And commodified that inside of that language switch is a commodification, exactly. It has economic meaning around it. At the same time, it's really also nice to see creators be recognized for their work in the long term. That's not heartbreaking. Like that's great to see that their art, their child has that kind of longevity.”
2023-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI is on a collision course with the music industry. Reservoir's Golnar Khosrowshahi thinks there’s a way through it · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is and there isn't. There's something heartbreaking in that something that someone considers their child, which is really how these bodies of work are thought of by their creators, is thought of as an asset. Has that label asset? So that's heartbreaking.”
2023-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI is on a collision course with the music industry. Reservoir's Golnar Khosrowshahi thinks there’s a way through it · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A bunch of rich guys want to buy some music catalog. I get that part of it. The thing you're describing, we're going to describe massively important cultural works as annuities, and those are going to be safe investments in trouble. Isn't that a little bit heartbreaking? Like to me, as somebody who's very much creative and you yourself are a musician, there's something heartbreaking about that, right?”
2023-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI is on a collision course with the music industry. Reservoir's Golnar Khosrowshahi thinks there’s a way through it · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then it becomes a pretty great investment thesis when you're operating in troubled macroeconomic times. And so I think that's the motivation there. It's also fun.”
2023-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI is on a collision course with the music industry. Reservoir's Golnar Khosrowshahi thinks there’s a way through it · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, we can get to that top line number, but the engine behind that is the song by song. Information and that song by song information can be organized by our top earners. So we can say, look, this many songs contribute to 80% of our revenue, and that's going to give us, you know, we paid X. That's now worthwhile. Here's our return. But it's still the engine behind it, it's song by song because you've got portfolios of songs where you have significantly more valuable songs in completely different genres. I think the investment thesis for a lot of private equity is that you are looking at uncorrelated assets that behave very much like annuities, that have dependable cash flows in an industry where the data around growth and monetization is becoming more and more compelling every single day. That's in Western markets coupled with compelling data in the emerging markets. So that's a pretty good investment thesis.”
2023-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI is on a collision course with the music industry. Reservoir's Golnar Khosrowshahi thinks there’s a way through it · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Like KKR and BlackRock and Blackstone, not the grill company, the huge hedge fund. We've had the CEO of Blackstone, the Grill Company. We're working on the hedge fund. But these are huge private equity funds. Just dumping money into these catalogs. They have a pretty shaky investment thesis. Like I can never quite figure out why they want to own Pinkfoyd's catalog or whatever. I can kind of understand your investment thesis because it seems like on a song by song level, you can evaluate, okay, here's the earning potential of this song. But in general, is there a model that you use that says, okay, we own 150,000 songs. We paid X dollars. We can expect Y return.”
2023-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI is on a collision course with the music industry. Reservoir's Golnar Khosrowshahi thinks there’s a way through it · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They have a different audience, different music, different genre. You know, it's all very different. So I think it's really important to look at song by song, especially because you're dealing with songwriters who have this range and who could do all kinds of work. And so the pitch is different. The pitch is different for every song, but the pitch is focused on film placements and it's focused on advertising placements. Digital licensing is super important for us. We were the first independent to actually do a direct deal with YouTube. That was back in 2014, I want to say. So we do things at a very granular level, but we can because we only represent 150,000 songs. It's the benefit of being nimble and independent and small.”
2023-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI is on a collision course with the music industry. Reservoir's Golnar Khosrowshahi thinks there’s a way through it · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“$150,000 on the publishing side, just over $30,000 on the recorded side. So, this is a little bit of a bigger theme in that we do everything on a song by song basis. We actually assess value on a song by song basis. A lot of people assess value on an income type basis. But if you look at somebody like Hans Zimmer, you're looking at a portfolio that dates back to driving Miss Daisy up until, you know, films from a few years ago. Very, very different films. You can't really look at these assets. You can't look at driving Miss Daisy and Kung Fu Panda as the same thing.”
2023-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI is on a collision course with the music industry. Reservoir's Golnar Khosrowshahi thinks there’s a way through it · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is a different strategy. I mean, I think I would rather say that the strategy is different for each song, right? Versus the songs”
2023-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI is on a collision course with the music industry. Reservoir's Golnar Khosrowshahi thinks there’s a way through it · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have quite a long list here. It's Joni Mitchell, John Denver, Dela Soul, Evanescence, Hans Zimmer. It's a pretty intense range. Some of these artists are pretty current and relevant. Some are older artists, quite frankly. Do you have different strategies for each of these catalogs? Like, you say, okay, we have the publishing right to a Cardi B song. Our songwriters wrote the Cardi B song. We can go out and license those for television or advertising or something like that. But then you've got an artist like Louis Prima. And I'm assuming that's a different strategy.”
2023-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI is on a collision course with the music industry. Reservoir's Golnar Khosrowshahi thinks there’s a way through it · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Every pitcher is different, and it really depends on where you are on your creative journey and where you are in your life. Are you 30 or are you 60? Are you wrapping things up? Or are you thinking about estate planning and legacy? Or are you looking at what your next portfolio looks like? So every deal is different. But I think the pitch from a bird's eye standpoint is we want to be your creative partner in your musical journey, whatever that means, that could be a go forward deal, that could be we're going to buy the back catalog and we're going to partner with you and enhance the value of this catalog. It really depends on who the client is because our goal is to be in business with people long term. And I think that if you cater to and satisfy people's needs and their objectives, then you can have a pretty good shot at staying in business with people.”
2023-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI is on a collision course with the music industry. Reservoir's Golnar Khosrowshahi thinks there’s a way through it · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is a really fascinating fracturing of the industry, in my mind. On the one hand, the discovery, marketing of new artists. The social platforms are just completely encroaching on that. And I hear from young artists, the labels don't even talk to me until I have so many followers. I have a person I went to college with literally got a record deal by buying followers on Twitter. And then that got him some attention. This is crazy. This is like a thing that has happened in the past. You're saying we're going to leave that aside. That seems like the big labels business. We're going to go find successful artists and help them get more from their existing catalogs, help them gracefully retire. What's the pitch there?”
2023-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI is on a collision course with the music industry. Reservoir's Golnar Khosrowshahi thinks there’s a way through it · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We look at buying these existing assets and what we can do from a value enhancement standpoint and what that translates to in the form of organic growth. That's what's really important to us. That's how we believe we're building long-term value for ourselves, for the artists, for the songwriters, regardless of who that rights holder, that other rights holder partner is that we have in the equation and every deal is different, that continued value enhancement is what's really important to us. And yes, you're right. We're not out there finding the next thing. That's a different business and I'm not sure how effectively a company our size with our risk profile or appetite for risk can compete with others in that area.”
2023-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI is on a collision course with the music industry. Reservoir's Golnar Khosrowshahi thinks there’s a way through it · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Been around for a while. What interests me the most is you have built the company through acquisition of really successful existing catalogs. Yes. I think a record label, I think of, I'm going to go discover an artist, we're going to pair them with a songwriter maybe. We're going to put them in a studio. We're going to go market the hell out of some hit singles. Oh, look, it's Justin Timberlake. We've done a thing. That was the 90s approach. That was basically the approach that I grew up in understanding the music industry. We discovered talent, we market talent, we create new talent. We burn them out. We find some new teenagers, and off we go again. That was the music industry. You're really focused on, okay, there's a bunch of catalogs that are really valuable, and we're going to acquire them, and then we're going to get value out of them. Is that a fair characterization that you're kind of on the other end of it? I think so. We never really got into the business with the intention of developing a frontline label that was going to develop artists like Justin Timberlake. That's an expensive proposition. We're slightly more...”
2023-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI is on a collision course with the music industry. Reservoir's Golnar Khosrowshahi thinks there’s a way through it · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On those masters, so you have a pretty broad base of copyright. We do. And it's been interesting in growing that business. We've had incredible opportunities come before us, the Tommy Boy opportunity was just amazing. And then what we did with it afterwards and with Dela Sol and the release of all that music was really a Pivotal point career wise personally and professionally. Yeah. When I say it's a new look kind of company, I recognize.”
2023-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI is on a collision course with the music industry. Reservoir's Golnar Khosrowshahi thinks there’s a way through it · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's a really, really important distinction versus the recorded music where you own that actual sound recording, that specific recording. When you own the publishing to a song like Take Me Home Country Roads, there are 500 covers of that song on streaming platforms. So you are monetizing that every time that copyright, those words, those notes are used, regardless of whether it's me or you or John Denver. Master Recording is only, we don't own the master recording rights to that song particularly, but it's that particular execution. So that's the distinction there. And then when you bought Chrysalis, you own the masters from Chrysalis.”
2023-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI is on a collision course with the music industry. Reservoir's Golnar Khosrowshahi thinks there’s a way through it · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We started as a publisher and we built the business from there, acquiring rights. It really wasn't until a few years in that we bought some very small recorded music catalog, Philly Groove, and then it really wasn't until we acquired Chryslerish Records in 2019 that we got into the label business. So our business really is focused on publishing, and we are looking at sort of revenues that are 70-30 publishing versus recorded. For the listener publishing is songwriting. Songwriting. We own copyrights. We own the intellectual property. We own the words and the music.”
2023-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI is on a collision course with the music industry. Reservoir's Golnar Khosrowshahi thinks there’s a way through it · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Five years from now. And there's quite a lot going on in the music industry right now. The whole industry is restructuring itself. There's AI to talk about distribution on the internet seems to be changing. Marketing seems to be changing. It's a lot. But let's start at the very beginning. What is Reservoir Media and why did you start it? You're characterizing us as the new look, but here we are a precocious teenager at 16 years old.”
2023-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI is on a collision course with the music industry. Reservoir's Golnar Khosrowshahi thinks there’s a way through it · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You are the CEO and founder of Reservoir Media. Welcome to Decoder. Thank you so much for having me. I am really excited to talk to you. Reservoir Media is kind of like a new look, music label. It's newer than sort of the big giants that are floating around. You have a different approach to the business model. And as I was just saying to you, I really think that whatever happens to the music industry happens to every other kind of creative industry five years later. I've been saying this since we started the verge. And so I'm always trying to figure out what is going on in music right now because then I see him like a genius when it happens to TV or”
2023-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI is on a collision course with the music industry. Reservoir's Golnar Khosrowshahi thinks there’s a way through it · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Golnar is herself a musician. She obviously cares about music a lot, and she's clearly given a lot of thought to what happens next. So this was a great conversation. Okay, Golnar calls for Shahi, CEO of Reservoir Media. Here we go.”
2023-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI is on a collision course with the music industry. Reservoir's Golnar Khosrowshahi thinks there’s a way through it · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Seem to have a billion dollars to spend on songs. And you'll hear us talk about a company called Hypnosis, which spent a ton of money building a giant catalog, but now has very unhappy shareholders after that catalog wasn't worth what they were promised. Of course, Gulnar and I also talked about AI and training AI systems. A lot of record labels are very unhappy that their copyrighted work is being used to train generative AI tools, and a lot of artists are even more unhappy that their voices are being used by AI systems. Golnar has some surprising thoughts here, and one very instructive example she brought into share. It'll definitely make you think about who should be making money on what and when. If you're a decoder listener, you know that I love thinking about the music industry. Whatever technology does to music, it does to everything else five years later. So paying attention to music is the best way I know to get ahead of the curve. I also just love music.”
2023-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI is on a collision course with the music industry. Reservoir's Golnar Khosrowshahi thinks there’s a way through it · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Reservoir thinks of those individual songs as assets, and after acquiring them, the company sets about monetizing those assets in various ways. This is a copyright-based business in an age where copyright is under a lot of pressure. There are the familiar issues on social platforms like TikTok and YouTube, and now there are new existential issues created by generative AI tools. You've all heard of Fake Drake. Fake Drake is going to upend copyright law one way or another. And it's the music industry that traditionally leads the charge in pushing back. Gulnar founded Reservoir in 2007, so she's been in this game for a long time, and she's seen a lot of tech-related change come and go. But now there are huge companies and hedge funds pouring tons of money into the same catalog based business model, sometimes with disastrous results. You'll hear Golnar say all of her competitors.”
2023-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI is on a collision course with the music industry. Reservoir's Golnar Khosrowshahi thinks there’s a way through it · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nehli Patel, editor in chief of the Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Gulnar Kosrashahi, the founder and CEO of Reservoir Media, a newer record label that I think looks a lot like the future of the music industry. You might not have heard of Reservoir, but you've definitely heard of the artists it works with. Everyone from Aha to John Denver to evanescence and Joni Mitchell and even legendary film composer Hans Zimmer. What makes Reservoir different is that Golnar built the company through acquisitions. You might think of a traditional record label as sending people out into Die Fars to find new talent and then break new artists, but Reservoir doesn't do any of that. It buys catalogs of existing hit songs from established artists. Reservoir owns the songwriting copyrights to about 150,000 songs, and another 30,000 copyrights and master recordings. As Golnar explains,”
2023-10-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · AI is on a collision course with the music industry. Reservoir's Golnar Khosrowshahi thinks there’s a way through it · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT