French Insider Podcast Ep. 20
Growing Your Business in America: The Story of Qobuz and Its Growth in Music Streaming with Dan Mackta
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Listen to the original podcast released February 27, 2023 here:
https://www.sheppard.com/multimedia-460
In this episode of French Insider, Dan Mackta, Managing Director at Qobuz, joins Sheppard Mullin attorney Alex Akhavan to discuss the history and growth of Qobuz, a high-quality audio commercial music streaming and downloading service founded in France, including its successful expansion into the U.S. market, what sets Qobuz apart from its competitors, and fundamental differences in the U.S. and French approach to IP.
Guests:
About Dan Mackta
Dan Mackta joined Qobuz in 2018 after spending decades on the label and artist side of the music business. As Managing Director, he oversees the French streaming service's operations in the United States, the United Kingdom and Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, and the Nordics. Dan is responsible for every aspect of the business in those markets, leading a U.S.-based team and overseeing operations, music, marketing, business development and more.
About Alex Akhavan
Alex Akhavan is an associate in the Entertainment, Technology and Advertising Practice Group in Sheppard Mullin’s Century City office, where he also leads the firm’s Disney Television Animation and Amazon Studios’ unscripted teams and serves as the point of contact for the firm’s pro bono client, the Los Angeles Opera.
Alex represents producers, studios, media companies and networks in connection with entertainment productions throughout the United States and around the world. In addition to regularly negotiating development and production agreements on behalf of Disney, Amazon, and Univision, he has advised Gaumont International Television (El Presidente) on clearance and production matters and served as production counsel to Campanario Entertainment for Selena: The Series on Netflix.
Transcript:
Alex Akhavan:
Hi everyone, I'm Alex Akhavan, I'm in Sheppard Mullin's Entertainment Group, and today I'll be speaking with Dan Mackta. Dan is the managing director of Qobuz, overseeing the USA, the UK, Ireland, Australian, New Zealand, and Nordic operations. Qobuz is a high quality audio, commercial music streaming and downloading service which was founded in France and has successfully now expanded into the US streaming market. Dan, welcome to the show.
Dan Mackta:
You got it.
Alex Akhavan:
Would you like to maybe describe a little bit about the company and how it started?
Dan Mackta:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's a 15 year old company, actually started by a couple of musicians and music lovers as a music download store. You remember before streaming, downloading was the primary way people consumed digital music. And it was specializing in high quality audio and classical music from the beginning and evolved over the years into what it is today, we still actually have the download store, which is a significant business for us because high-end audiophiles actually still purchase music files and keep them on music servers and the mainstream services don't offer it in the quality that we do.
So we still have the original business, but we evolved into a streaming service that is similar to other music services people are familiar with, but it's the best possible audio quality and it is a full array of editorial and written content and digital booklets and deep dives into genres that are not really mainstream. I mean, Classical music, jazz, rock today, even is considered a bit left of the center. So it's a sort of boutique premium music service. It's in 25 countries now and it's still based in Paris, but I'm overseeing operations in about eight countries and have a small team in New York to do that.
Alex Akhavan:
Wow, that's really exciting. So the angle essentially is high quality audio really what sets Qobuz apart from the other streaming platforms that one might have heard of.
Dan Mackta:
Yeah, yeah. Well that's sort of the first piece of it. And then it's an effort to surround the music with context and like I said, written articles, annotated playlists, all kinds of material that helps you discover more music, deeper engagement with music. It's not just about putting on playlist for jogging, which you can do, but whereas mainstream streaming has gone towards kind of a lean back experience, hit a button and hopefully it knows you better than you know yourself and it'll give you music, our service is a little bit more akin to an old school record store where you walk in and it's a familiar experience and you know the guy behind the counter and there's a rack in the front with an array of new albums recommended by the people who run the store. It's in a variety of genres, it's not that revolutionary, but in modern streaming it's really not the norm. The first thing you see when you open up Qobuz is new albums in a variety of genres, a lot of jazz and classical and soundtracks and cool electronic and music that is not necessarily the stuff that is, well, I guess what we call top 40 pop.
Although we have all that, we have it all in the catalog. We've got a hundred million tracks. We have all the major labels fully licensed, and everything that they put out is available. But in terms of the editorial slant and what we feature on that rack in the front of the store is driven by the fact that our audience is older and more into eclectic genres and looking for quality choices and quality sound. Hey, I just came up with a great new tagline for us.
Alex Akhavan:
Yeah, I love that. So basically any genre, so maybe slightly more refined, consumer based, but who are really into the music or really want to do more than just have the AI decide what your next song should be, but covering all genres, including a little bit of pop, but classical and... everything basically.
Dan Mackta:
Yeah, absolutely. Our listeners are all over the place geographically and genre wise. There's plenty of people who love hip hop and listen to nothing but hip hop on Qobuz, but it's part of an array of really cool music that's available. It's an incredible time to be a music fan because not only is there so much great music being made, but you don't have to make any compromises in the sound quality to be able to hear it in your home, in your car on the go. It's more easily accessible and available than it's ever been. So it's exciting for me to be a part of it. I've always been in the music business, but personally working on the label and artist management side of things.
Alex Akhavan:
I wanted to ask, what was your path here? How did you start out in this and how did you end up at Qobuz?
Dan Mackta:
Well circuitous, I, like I said, been in the record side of the business for decades, without aging myself too much, but started at independent labels and doing a radio promotion actually back in the day was my first path into doing stuff and then into marketing, and ended up at Jive Records, which was just at that point being kind of ingested into Sony music. So it was Jive Records and RCA as a marketing guy, VP of marketing. And from there, there's always a lot of turnover and changes. And one day I was no longer working at the major label and then I did more marketing stuff in the music business, working for independent labels and doing my own consulting and was eager after... When you're in the record business, you're always pushing, always pitching, you're only as good as your last hit is unfortunately what they say.
So when you've got a hit, you're on top of the world and when you don't have a hit, you are on your knees with your hands out begging. So I knew that maybe there was something to this streaming thing that was driving the business and that maybe there would be a place for me where I was kind of spreading my risk across all of recorded music instead of living or dying by whether I had something successful in my bag that week. The position that has been really for me, the most exciting and fun and satisfying that I've ever had.
Alex Akhavan:
That's great.
Dan Mackta:
Yeah, it was wild, but I didn't really know much about the company. When I saw what they were doing, I got excited and like I said, was able to get this job and we put together a small team in New York. My main job is make sure that we can make the service as good as it can be and get people to sign up and keep them. It's no small task, but it's a really cool niche service. Not everybody cares enough to pay an extra dollar or two for their music. A lot of people just want to get whatever they can for free. Free music's good enough. It's okay if that's 99% of the market, we're a small French company in comparison to these other guys, and if we could get to 1% of the market, we would be living in giant houses in the French countryside, come over, come have some wine with me.
Alex Akhavan:
That sounds great.
Dan Mackta:
In some ways, a more modest, realistic business model that's definitely a boutique, but it is a real business and it's been growing.
Alex Akhavan:
Yes. So maybe talk a little bit about its success in France, how it got to the point where they decided to open in the US and then we can get into a little bit of what that's been like, but I guess how they succeed in France and what drove the decision to expand internationally and eventually through the US?
Dan Mackta:
Right. Well, the company was taken over by a gentleman named Denis Thébaud I think it was five years ago or seven years ago. I started five years ago, so it had to be more than that, but he was a strong believer in the high streaming proposition and drove that aggressively. And I think it may have only been in France or France and a few other countries. And the really one path to growth as a streaming business, to customer acquisition is to open new territories. It's just always been part of the strategy. Opening the US was a controversial move because it's a huge country and so competitive and so different and so far away from France. But we did it and it's been successful as planned or more so considering that we're still here and still growing it. But at this point, it's almost equivalent to France, if not some months more than France, some months just behind in terms of new customers and revenue.
I guess it's expected, because the US is such a big country, that's the hope anyway, is that we'll be able to keep on growing here without investing crazy unlimited amounts of money, which we haven't had to because we have this boutique niche product that folks who buy their music gear in the fancy local Hi-Fi stores that still exist or in the special section at Best Buy, where they have the listening rooms. The people who already are in the Hi-Fi market all know about us and a word of mouth has really started to grow. And a lot of the professionals in the business use and recommend Qobuz. We were just helping Rick Rubin troubleshoot his system because he uses Qobuz, top mastering engineers and recording engineers all use it because they trust the sound quality. So with that kind of word of mouth, thankfully we're able to keep growing it without having to spend crazy amounts of money on consumer marketing.
Alex Akhavan:
That's great. So what's your day-to-day like and how has that changed over the time you've been here? So when you first opened in the US what was it like and then what's it like today?
Dan Mackta:
Well, when we first opened and pre-launch, company was totally unknown in the United States, even in the music business, nobody had ever heard of it. The only people at the major labels who would've heard of it were the European licensing people who had made the deal allowing us to open, but it had not filtered down to anybody. So I spent most of my time talking to people who I knew at major and independent labels and doing a lot of outreach just to let them know what the company was. And that actually still continues to this day.
And when I get involved in markets that I have... I say I'm responsible for a markets, that's a big change because I started only responsible for the US but I've taken on more countries where we operate our service in English to align what we do. So it's the UK and the Nordics and Australia, some allied countries, for those. But just getting to know the music business, making sure the people at the labels and management companies and distributors know who we are because we need the entire ecosystem to help support us or be aware of us or at least not discriminate against us. So that's an ongoing thing that we're always pushing, is just, “hey, we're here, it's a real company”. We may not be doing millions of streams, but we've got dedicated listeners and listeners that otherwise probably wouldn't be streaming because our audience is older. A lot of these classical music listeners, they would be very confused as to what that had to do with being a classical music fan and how they would find a particular performance of a particular symphony by a particular composer. But if they were looking for a podcast or Joe Rogan, they'd find it right away. So we do have a lot of listeners who are the age of my mom who are listening to streaming for the first time and appreciate simplicity.
I see, here's the new album of Dvorak performed by XYZ soloist and boom, not a mysterious kind of thing for the older consumer who we serve because the mainstream services are really aimed at a much younger and mainstream audience. So it's cool, we've got this lane. And younger people are into it, people that are really into this sound quality or really dig the approach or the articles that we write, it's made a difference. So the biggest difference is now, it'll be five years this summer that I've been with the company and we launched the service in the US, four years ago this month.
Alex Akhavan:
Wow.
Dan Mackta:
Yeah, it's been crazy. Sometimes it seems like 40 years, sometimes it seems like 4 days. But the biggest difference is now all of that early networking and goodwill campaign paid off because I've got folks at record labels or management companies who I've known for years, who when they reach out to me say, thank you so much for turning me onto Qobuz, I don't know how I could live without it. I tell all my clients that they should be using it. I say that again, I love hearing that. Because it is nice to know that we've got a product that is not a strange unknown thing that we don't know if there's a market for, we know there's an audience for this, we know that they are fragmented and not always easy to reach or market to, but they are into what we're into, which is good music and lots of it and great sound quality, and it's finding its audience. So that's been a big difference.
The other big difference is that in my day-to-day, now, I'm involved in such a wide array, every day I'm layering in another thing, but also since we're continuing to do well, I'm hoping that our team will grow and we'll have more progressive go-getters on the team. I'm involved in things like discussions around music publishing, copyright payment issues with the US Copyright Office, I'm on calls with the registrar of copyrights representing Qobuz with the people who are the heads of government affairs and big lawyers from the other streaming services and Google and YouTube and me. I do that, and it's like having a front row seat to these historical... One day if you're in the music business, these things will be something you read about in history... And I'm in these meetings, so it's pretty cool. And so there's just lots of opportunities to learn and do and I take advantage of all of them.
Alex Akhavan:
Yeah, that sounds good. Well, it's a perfect transition to maybe getting into some of those, a little bit of the legal issues. I'm definitely curious as to what you've encountered, but maybe first we can talk a little bit about the business model. Where do you start? Do you reach out to artists? Do you reach out to labels? I know from talking before, it's a bit of both, but how do the deals look? In your first few months on the job who were you reaching out to? What was the goal of those conversations and how did they go?
Dan Mackta:
Well, thankfully, I'm not personally responsible for the label licensing and all of the major label deals were done before I started.
Alex Akhavan:
Oh, great.
Dan Mackta:
They were handled by the team in France. The major labels have European offices that handled these deals. And because the company was already in business for 10 years before we opened in the US, they've already had deals with a lot of independent labels and a lot of stuff was already done. What I found when I came in here was that there were some key independent labels that we did not have deals with because they had licensed their stuff out to other labels in Europe, so they just weren't needed when the company was only in Europe. So my role in it is generally to introduce the lawyer representing a label or distributor we don't have to the team in France that handles these deals.
They're pretty much that templated kind of streaming and download deal - in streaming music the prevailing model is the revshare based on streaming market share from each supplier for the total pool from all the subscriptions times X percentage. And it's a source of a lot of contention whether that's the best model or not, but it's imposed on us by the major labels so we can kind of take it or leave it, and everybody is basically on the same model. And on the download sales, it's more of a straight percentage. The download costs a dollar and we pay everybody. And so the challenge on my side is more looking... Qobuz does not have a free tier because we're a premium service, unlike some, there's no ads supported. We're not selling ads, letting you listen to music for free based on ads. It's a subscription model so everybody can get a one month free trial and then they pay a monthly subscription. Its, in the US, $12.99 a month right now. If you pay monthly. It's cheaper if you pay annually and so forth. But it's a product that we've got a good conversion rate on the free trials. It hovers between 40 and 50%. So we know that for those who are looking for a service like this, that it scratches an itch.
Alex Akhavan:
So it's all subscription, it's pretty much all customizable, you can create your own playlist. There might be ways to suggest other things as opposed to say a Pandora, which is like its pre-selected for you. So you can turn in and they're going to play a bunch of songs and maybe you can skip one or two, but this is more closer to, I guess, Apple Music, Spotify-
Dan Mackta:
Yeah, this is an all you can eat unlimited access to a hundred million tracks. We can make playlists.
Alex Akhavan:
Super high quality.
Dan Mackta:
Yeah, and everything is at least CD quality. And as much as we can get an even better than CD quality, 24 bit high res, we have, and it's presented with a lot of respect for the artists and those who make the music. The nice thing about it, especially for me coming from the music side, is that it's not a tech company trying to make a buck from music. It really is run by music lovers and it's a different take on it, and it's appealing to a small but mighty audience and a growing audience as sound quality and better listening becomes more and more accessible with equipment getting better and better and higher quality at more affordable price points for audio equipment. Definitely, even over the next year or two, you're going to see more and more stuff come out that's next level quality at prices that you would've thought you'd be getting some pretty low quality stuff.
Alex Akhavan:
So do you ever work directly with artists? Do you ever partner with them either simply to create music or license music, but maybe even more broadly to do even endorsements or promotions or things like that?
Dan Mackta:
Yeah, yeah, that's something that we've really been pushing since we opened in the US because that is our equivalent of influencer marketing, I would say. Artists, music creators are our influencers and they have a voice and have a platform. So we've done a variety of things in terms of commissioning original music, yes, we had Christian McBride, the jazz bassist go in and record session for us in the highest 24 bit 192K audio available. He'd never recorded in that high of audio quality, even in the studio. And we took the material that he and the group recorded, and it was released on Qobuz for streaming and download in that exact same quality. It was never compressed or never downgraded in any way in the process. So it was a great campaign and great music. And he himself is a big supporter of Qobuz, we have another campaign happening with him this year, more of an endorsement, artist ambassador campaign where he is doing a lot of video for us and social media and playlists and things like that.
We work with, obviously in France, they've been doing it much more and for a long time. And in the US it was a process of getting established and all the work that we did in the first couple of years to let the industry know what we were all about is paying off. We do events at music conferences like South by Southwest, we're going to have Qobuz sessions this year with about half a dozen really eclectic artists from around the world, recording stripped down live sessions in full high res audio for Qobuz with a small live audience as part of the South by Southwest Festival. That's going to be super, super interesting. It's all about music, so we're looking for opportunities all the time and things that we're able to do with our small size and small budget and niche audience. But for certain kinds of artists, it's a perfect fit and we can afford to work with them and feels right and they're really supportive of what we do. So it makes a difference.
Alex Akhavan:
So I guess when your... is the quality, would you say, it's even better when you've been able to commission the music and kind of be there with the original recording as opposed to when a label licenses an existing recording?
Dan Mackta:
Well, I can say that I personally was standing in the studio when they recorded it, and to me, it sounds even better listening in the headphones on Qobuz after it comes out. But it's a good marketing angle to be able to say, we had our hands on it all the way through, and it was never diluted and truly as it sounded in the studio. But at the same time, there are incredible recording engineers and people who work in labels doing restoration of old recordings and old tapes that they can bring back to life and digitize into high res from old analog tapes in such a way that's astounding. You'll think that the sax player is standing in the room with you.
Alex Akhavan:
Right there.
Dan Mackta:
So it's really fun listening. Old recordings, new recordings, and it's like drinking from a fire hose because there's just so much music no matter what you're interested in. So like I said, it's a great time to be a music fan.
Alex Akhavan:
That's great. So I want to talk a little bit about what legal issues you've faced or maybe calls you've been on or just general legal issues you've learned about through your time there. And then maybe we can talk a little bit about both legally and culturally, the differences with France. But yeah, to start, anything you guys have learned?
Dan Mackta:
Yeah, I mean, a few cup come to mind. First, as I previously mentioned, the potential issues with music publishing copyright. In fact, the Music Modernization Act of 2018, I guess, whatever year that came out, is what allowed us to open in the US. Or maybe we would've opened, but it really would've been an uphill battle because previous to that legislation, there was no protection from lawsuits for using the underlying rights to songs on streaming because the copyright laws didn't cover streaming. There was a hole in the laws. And so every major streaming service had been sued and settled with music publishers for untold millions. And Qobuz wasn't really interested in opening and then getting immediately sued for tens of millions of dollars, which was a distinct possibility. And the law was passed and Trump signed it. And I'm not sure how... I don't think they passed many laws during that administration, but the one that was passed actually changed the system, created a central government clearinghouse for these royalties and shielded the payers to these royalties, music services from lawsuits as long as they were reporting and paying.
The big problem before was if you didn't know who you were supposed to pay, it created a problem. Now you don't need to know who to pay. You just need to know what you played and send the money to the government clearing house called the Mechanical License and Collective and they're responsible for matching it with the correct party and paying it. And you can't be sued as long as you're complying with the letter of the law and sending the money and sending your report, you can't be sued. So long story short, that law was signed and the trepidation on the part of the French ownership, the company was lifted, no reason not to launch. We have blanket publishing clearance now under the US law. So that was the first major hurdle. And there was a lot of... I didn't know much about copyright law, but to try and understand exactly what was what and help the guys in the French team, but understand everything because some of this stuff seems pretty crazy.
Alex Akhavan:
Yeah, I mean, just for our listeners who might not know, one thing that I thought was fascinating about the music industry is that every song has two copyrights. You have the underlying composition and then the master recording. And when I first learned that, I realized how unique the music industry is, it's really its own world. And over a time we've had attempts to modernize it, the idea of mechanical royalties that basically is, every radio station's allowed to play whatever song they want, and there's a mechanism by which royalties are collected. But yeah, I think streaming was... Because when I studied all of this, it was years before the Music Modernization Act. So a lot of what we talk about would be how are we going to modernize this for a world of streaming platforms. Just because the industry's changed so much in the last... in the last 20 years, a lot, but even in the last few years, you see a lot of changes.
Dan Mackta:
In general with the label licensing, like I said, I don't really... Not that involved other than making introductions. And I'm very involved in the marketing and relationships once the deals are done.
Alex Akhavan:
What's interesting for me is, you're kind of pointing out the additional hurdles that come out in the US, which really interesting to hearing what you're saying. But what I'm curious to hear about is, so we work on a lot of film and TV in this IP world, not just culturally, but even legally, France and the US, there's some fundamentally different approaches. So for example, in France, they have “le droit moral” or moral rights where basically the artists, even if their work is sold, will still be able to influence. So when you handle from entertainment perspective in the US, you're more likely to say, okay, well you're selling this to me and you waive any moral rights. You can't really do that in France, it tends to be very artist friendly, almost to the point where the companies that want to get rights to things run into additional issues that protect the individual artists. Have you encountered any of that at all, or would you say that in the US it's more challenging or maybe less challenging to handle things like an artist rights to their song and things like that?
Dan Mackta:
Yeah. Well, I wouldn't say that that particular example is something I've dealt with. The differences do come up actually in marketing and advertising because in France there's very different privacy rules and EU in general, just a different approach. And in the US basically, you could do almost anything.
Alex Akhavan:
Yeah. What other maybe cultural or business differences do you see working not just US and France, but as opening a US branch essentially, of a French company as opposed to maybe the other way where it's an American company opening in France, what's it like?
Dan Mackta:
Well, there's certain things that come up early such as the difference in how employees are compensated in the US because there's such a greater social safety net in France or whatever, different traditions, different culture. Salaries are lower, salaries are lower in Paris than in New York, at least at Qobuz.
Alex Akhavan:
Interesting. And for example, healthcare is a totally different system here than in France, and we have all of that going on.
Dan Mackta:
Yeah, they're caught over there. They pay a lot more than we do in what they call the social charges in France. But the other differences I've found are just... Stylistically, it's almost “cliché”, but we seem to be more action and go-getter oriented, and they're much more thoughtful and analytical and philosophical. And I think both styles work well together. And we've found a detente in the action orientation, but definitely the French culture lends itself to taking some time and maybe let's have a bottle of wine and think this over before we-
Alex Akhavan:
Yeah, we're very much, time is money, get your coffee to go, get your lunch to go, get back to us.
Dan Mackta:
Yes. So that's different. But other differences in terms of the day-to-day operation of the business, we do find that just because so much of the culture and work culture... I'm not familiar with other workplaces, but there's a lot of social stuff and things that the company has to do for the employees and things that it tries to do. And I can see that the HR team is working hard on a lot of stuff for the French office. In the US we have none of that. I do bring in boxes of mixed snacks in the office, and then we do have water in the office, but it's again, a little bit different.
Alex Akhavan:
So as we getting close to the end of the time, I want to hear a bit about what lessons have you learned in the process? What advice would you give someone either who wants to work in your industry in the US or just help the French company open in the US? And then I also want to get your thoughts on the music industry as a whole. But yeah, first, what are your main takeaways from your experience at Qobuz?
Dan Mackta:
Well, like I was saying, the fact that I found the job on LinkedIn in the blind, just in my feed, really led me to the realization that you never know where an opportunity is going to come from. My philosophy has always been to be open on the side of taking the meeting as opposed to blowing somebody off or meeting a student looking for an informational interview, being a person open to the world. And that seems to have worked out pretty well for me. You just don't know where the next opportunity or connection is going to come from. That's what I tell people. And you got to put yourself out there to get opportunities. I tell my son, staying home playing video games is not going to make him a millionaire by the time he's 21, which is what he says he wants to do. Those are in incompatible, I think.
Alex Akhavan:
Totally.
Dan Mackta:
But the nice thing about working for a French company has been a nice blend of collaboration with the home office, but autonomy.
Alex Akhavan:
That's great.
Dan Mackta:
So it's a lot of responsibility, but thankfully we've managed it successfully up to this point. So there's not a lot of micromanagement from the team in France, but we do rely on a lot of the departments over there to help us execute. Like I said, it's a small team in the US, it's seven people right now, and the bulk of the back office stuff and music editorial and all the tech is all in France. So we do work super closely with them. And sometimes the time difference is a problem, but we make it work.
Alex Akhavan:
Yeah, that's great. And so just kind of zooming out a little bit again, and just the industry as a whole, it's gone through so much, like I said, in the last, I don't know, 20-30 years. In the 90s you were buying albums, if you wanted a song, you'd buy the whole album on a CD. And then we went through that whole phase where everyone was just downloading all the songs they wanted illegally and then eventually moved to that model of downloading, you can pay per song, which became the way the industry did it for a while. And now we're kind of officially in the middle, I guess, of the streaming era where no one buys individual songs anymore. They typically would rather spend anywhere from $15-$20 a month to have access to unlimited music. And this is Qobuz making that not only subscription, but also super high quality. So where do you see it going from here? Do you think we're going to stay in this world? Do you hear buzz about other radical changes to the industry? Or do you think we've settled now?
Dan Mackta:
What could be next? We'll get a chip implanted, the music will just stream right into your brain.
Alex Akhavan:
It'll just know this is the song you want to hear next.
Dan Mackta:
Yeah, that'll be cool. My whole life, at least from the beginning of the awareness of the internet, there was talk of the Celestial Jukebox and someday we'll be able to hear any song you want. And we got that, that's here. It seemed at some points, because of the music licensing and the entrenched interests, it could never happen. I thought it would never happen. Working at major labels and stuff I said they're never going to let that happen. But it happened and they ended up more successful beyond their wildest dreams in terms of the money that it generates in aggregate. But the thing for me is that it's still about the music itself, an art form that connects with people on an individual level and brings them together on a communal level. Music is wild as far as being an art form, that's also a super commercial, super capitalistic endeavor as well. So pretty unique as far as a medium, I guess if you had to boil it down, what is music? I mean a way... I don't even know, but I do know that there's no time at which people won't be listening to or doing something with music. It's just part of being human at this point. So I do feel some job security, which is nice.
Alex Akhavan:
Everyone will always want music.
Dan Mackta:
But it has also, as an industry, like you say, gone through multiple seismic changes in our lifetime. So who knows whatever's next, but the fundamentals, there's something you can hear, that people want to hear is not going to change. That's not much of insight, but...
Alex Akhavan:
No, I completely agree. I think...
Dan Mackta:
At least on that... Formats will come and go. Formats will come and go. You have stuff happening with spatial audio that is exciting to a lot of people. You have stuff with... I thought that rock band, like video games interactive playing music was going to be the killer next app. Or if you could be in virtual reality jamming with Hendrix, to me that could be a next thing. But also how much can you do that. And when I put on virtual reality goggles, I get seasick right away. So it's not for me.
Alex Akhavan:
Have you ever played Beat Saber?
Dan Mackta:
Yeah, I have. It's a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun
Alex Akhavan:
And there's new albums coming out all the time that you can buy. So I hear what you're saying, it's almost a new way of buying music all of a sudden, its now, oh you want-
Dan Mackta:
Interact with it, experience it in a different way, and pays along the way for access. So I think all of it is great. Any way that anyone can hustle and find a way to get paid for making music is... God bless them. It’s certainly tough, plenty of people along the way who could never make a dime from it. And it wasn't because they weren't any good. So it's really, like I said, a crazy art form/business that I've been lucky to be able to make a living from for all these years and now doing it, working for Qobuz and on the music service side is really great cause it's kind of like being in a big record store all the time.
Alex Akhavan:
That is great. So my last question for you, out of curiosity is, whenever you want to show off the audio quality of Qobuz, is there a particular song you would show someone or maybe a genre? I know you mentioned classical was kind of how you started. Is there any particular thing where you really show, wow, this is the difference between us and everybody else?
Dan Mackta:
I mean, there's a few, there's one track, it's an early fifties jazz recording from a tenor sax player named Illinois Jacquet, and it's an old school mono recording, it's just one mic or whatever, no compression. The song is Harlem Nocturne, if you've heard, you would recognize the melody. And when he plays this sax, you can hear the read, it is so realistic. This is where it's like the guy is standing in front of me and then the recording is 70 years old. So it's something like that, but you pick your demo material based on the audience. We've got lots of different playlists. One of the things on Qobuz that's really cool is since we work with so many great Hi-Fi audio manufacturers like Bowers & Wilkins or Cambridge Audio or... We have those guys curate playlists for us that their engineers put together with the tracks that they use to tune and test the hardware when they're manufacturing it. And we figure that's a cool way for someone to get their new equipment home and then dial into the playlist that the guys who designed the hardware used to tune it while manufacturing it. There's a lot of great sounding music across all genres.
Alex Akhavan:
Great, great. That's really, really exciting. I'm definitely going to... Tell me again what it's called, in that I can find that on the Qobuz site.
Dan Mackta:
It's the Hi-Fi Partners playlist area, so it's on the main page, discover of Qobuz. There's a tab under the playlist called Hi-Fi Partners and tons and tons of great audio tests material there.
Alex Akhavan:
Awesome. Awesome. Well, this was such a pleasure, thank you so much for joining. I think everyone's really excited to check that out and I wish you all the best of luck, excited to see the growth. I already have a vision of being at some music festival where someone's advertising for Qobuz.
Dan Mackta:
You're going to see it. In Finland we just sponsored their equivalent of the Grammys.
Alex Akhavan:
Oh, wow.
Dan Mackta:
In Helsinki last week. So we can do it there, it's a small market didn't cost very much, but coming soon, coming soon.
Alex Akhavan:
That's going to be great, really excited for that. Thank you so much again. It’s such a pleasure talking to you. And yeah, we'll have to not only get a drink, but maybe a drink and listen to some great music in the background next time we meet.
Dan Mackta:
Absolutely. Thank you, Alex. And thanks to everyone on your team for putting this together. Really appreciate it.
Speaker 1:
For more information, visit the Sheppard Mullin French Desk at sheppardfrenchdesk.com. This podcast is recorded monthly and is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music. This podcast is recorded monthly, and available on Spotify, Apple Podcast, Stitcher, and Amazon Music, as well as on our website, sheppardfrenchdesk.com. We want to help you, and welcome your feedback and suggestions of topics.
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