Matthew Hawn - Audio Networker
Matthew Hawn is Chief Product Officer at Audio Network. They’re an online production music library focusing on high quality music recordings by significant artists, making licences available for all kinds of uses - from major productions and broadcast to modest YouTube videos.
Matthew’s journey has taken him from making the internet understandable to a general readership before it was even the World Wide Web - to dragging major record labels kicking and screaming into the digital era. He’s been at ground zero for the digital music revolution pretty much wherever that’s taken place.
AI Transcription
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
music, fm, sony, people, company, run, world, group, exciting, archiving, called, licence, catalogue, ended, san francisco, digital, magazine, macworld, record, spotify
SPEAKERS
Matthew Hawn, Andrew Dubber
Andrew Dubber
Hi, I’m Dubber. I’m the Director of Music Tech Fest, and this is the MTF podcast. I first met Matthew Hawn when we were both speaking at a digital music industry event in London about 10 years ago. I say we were both speaking, he was speaking and I would have been had I not suddenly developed laryngitis and become completely incapable of making any sound whatsoever. All the same. Somehow, I managed to make myself sufficiently understood at the time, enough for us to stay in touch and eventually become good friends, which we are today. Back in those days, Matthew was the head of all things digital at Sony Music, but before and since he’s had a colourful, diverse and critically influential series of roles at a number of organisations. These days, he’s head of product for audio network in London. That’s still the case and I double checked earlier today, just to be sure things move pretty fast. Between the recording of this podcast episode a couple of months back and you getting to hear it today. Audio network was sold to entertainment, one for a reported 200 and 15 million US dollars. Here’s Matthew Hawn, storyteller, digital music pioneer and audio networker. Matthew Hawn, thanks so much for joining us today. Good morning. Good morning. I’m so your Chief Product officer at audio network. Let’s start with audio network. What’s the network?
Matthew Hawn
We are a music company that makes music for film television advertising. And increasingly, just all the places you find digital video, which is pretty much everywhere now.
Andrew Dubber
Right? Right. And you commission the music?
Matthew Hawn
Yeah, we commission, record, mix, the whole thing is super high quality. We we are considered some music publisher. In some ways. We we find the composers and artists out there and then we bring them together. We’re one of Abbey roads, largest customers, we tend to do at a very high quality, full orchestras. You know, the real deal.
Andrew Dubber
Right? Fantastic. And so I can let’s talk about your journey there. Because that’s for me, that’s really the interesting bit. Let’s start right at the beginning. What is the child Matthew Hawn running around? Is it about technology is about music is about what was driving you.
Matthew Hawn
So I was a literature major to start I mean, I’m just not technology or music really where I started was I wanted to be a journalist is probably the strongest one. I was definitely after the, the literary journalist era of you know, the Tom Wolfes and the Hunter S. Thompson, maybe with less drugs, right? At that time when I was young man, and then I didn’t say yeah, I didn’t say none. But you know, you got to be careful with that. But it was definitely a time in which I was interested in in storytelling and telling a story in a very literary way. So it’s a big reader. But growing up in San Francisco, you couldn’t avoid the technology. I grew up in the Bay Area in San Francisco. And I went to University of Santa Cruz, UC Santa Cruz,
Andrew Dubber
what your parents did and how did
Matthew Hawn
that affect my parents? We’re both were both professionals, but they were the first in their, in their, in their generation to go to college. So my dad ran hospitals in the Air Force and my mom was a medical technologist. She was a haematologist. So science was both their backgrounds.
Andrew Dubber
Okay. And you rebelled by getting to books,
Matthew Hawn
you know, they would No, they weren’t. I mean, there was never a negative thing. I was never like, you should go do this thing was always just where we ended up, you know, and I was a huge reader. So I was alone. I was an internal kid. So read a lot of my own and and that kind of led to reading pretty much everything. Literature, books, magazines, all thing.
Andrew Dubber
Yeah. And of course, San Francisco is not just a technology town. It’s a music town.
Matthew Hawn
Well, yeah, no, I, you know, the thing was, when you left when I left Santa Cruz, thinking I was gonna be a journalist. there really weren’t a lot of choices in San Francisco magazine was I mean, they were just there was sunset magazine, which is a magazine of the West as they describe it, which is mostly how to plant succulents in your garden and in and I make a redwood deck,
Andrew Dubber
that’s kinda what they did in the magazine, and you ain’t gonna bust that, right
Matthew Hawn
That was not my world that was, but there was also Macworld magazine. Right? And it’s also the time that wired was coming into being in Boing Boing, right Boing Boing wired in might magazine, were all across the street from Macworld magazine. When are we talking? This sort of a 9293? Okay, yeah. And so this so the technology companies are, magazines are still thing, right? We’re the internet’s not a thing. And I so I joined I ended up joining Macworld, after doing some stuff for Wired early on. I ended up doing macro heartbeat as an editorial assistant, which I thought this is brilliant, I get to do a paid job that In I started writing for them. And I ended up writing most of the internet stuff that they did, right so because it was starting no one really thought it was exciting. The editor in chief famously said to me, you know, this is really going to be just a niche, right? It’s like it’s gonna be CB radio. This isn’t gonna go anywhere. I disagreed from an early on. I saw the value of that. And so I wrote a column for macro for a couple of years called net smart. Probably the first column in a magazine for macro that was about the internet, wrote one of the first reviews of Netscape mosaic when it came out FTP protocols all the exciting how many stars Did you give it? I you know, I actually gave mosaic like three or four stars. And mostly because of this the potential here is amazing, right? I mean, this is this is 1000 flowers blooming and the ability to publish yourself and personally, I actually thought personal pages was going to be at that was gonna be the thing I thought was most interesting. Justin Hall was out there doing his own. You know, probably the first blog was Justin in that early time. So the first couple of pages go up and people’s personal pages come online media companies weren’t there. It was still an academics world and you know, the whole World Wide Web Consortium and,
Andrew Dubber
and the Wild West metaphor.
Matthew Hawn
Oh, yeah, we were, you know, we at Macworld, I eventually ended up making Macworld online, my friend Suzanne and I founded Macworld online. So we did the first online magazine racing wired to be first online with a magazine. Our first advertiser was Adobe, who bought out the entire run for you know, six months of advertising, a little banner would run across the top. You know, and we did some early audio stuff, too, right? We got a we got a chance to use the real audio plugin, it was us in the White House, who had the first beta of that the White House, got it, we got it. And I ended up putting up about a 45 minute audio clip of survivor research laboratories that are group in San Francisco who basically, you know, make machines that battle each other and make noise and it just sounded like, you know, two garbage trucks fucking basically. So it sounded like there was like a huge, huge mess. So you want on the desk? Yes, sir. But that but that’s what it was, um, and Mark Pauline, who is, you know, local San Francisco guy and I had a conversation about it, we we put it online and you know, I think maybe 500 people listened to that early audio clip and, you know, it was early. That’s That’s
Andrew Dubber
really interesting. I had no idea that Mike Pauline was involved in that cuz he’s so influential in the industrial sector,
Matthew Hawn
the SRO was his baby, and it was all over San Francisco, you know, you you go under a bridge and Mark was, you know, setting up as machines and, and having, you know, getting in trouble with the police and
Andrew Dubber
robots made out of dead rabbits and
Matthew Hawn
all kinds of use it was but it was a fun time. And Macworld didn’t even Michael didn’t stop me from doing that, because
Andrew Dubber
they really didn’t know because it doesn’t kind of count.
Matthew Hawn
Oh, no, it was not. I mean, Suzanne Suzanne had been, she was the editor of Macworld and Suzanne was a punk writer from in burn music and interesting music. And she lived with Jello Biafra, from the Dead Kennedys. And so we were very much the alternative wing of the the group there was another guy, Thomas Galecki, who is PC World. He was the publisher, PC World. And that was very much more corporate. But the macro guys were all like, we had five people they had, like, 50 or something, we’ll see
Andrew Dubber
what the prototypes have on a PC. I’m a Mac. Well, we
Matthew Hawn
were totally we were totally the opposite of like, you know, what are our main programming guy had like purple hair, and it was Yeah, it was definitely the punk version of the of the Mac group was a pretty well established group. Mac was very profitable at that time, right? It was kind of just before we start losing the the max influence at that point, but
Andrew Dubber
Yeah, wow. And but you didn’t stay there?
Matthew Hawn
No, I Suzanne, Suzanne and I both left together, we, um, she went to MSNBC, as the editor of a TV show, or the web editor, I think is what they called her for a TV show called the site, which was a primetime television show ran from eight to nine o’clock, every weeknight on msnbc when msnbc launched, right. So we were the web and television, we had a website, we had a TV show. And our host was the excellent Soledad O’Brien, who’s now you know, has gone through CNN, and she now does her own thing online, but she was our host. And we had one of the world’s first virtual characters. It was a 3d animated character that I named called dev null, which was a total inside nerd joke. Yeah. And dev was our coastcare to interact with silhouette. And it took a Silicon Graphics workstation, the size of this coffee table, right to run. The time it was a puppeteer running, right, a person who actually did puppeteer stuff to make it work because there’s a kind of a Max Headroom,
Andrew Dubber
yeah,
Matthew Hawn
very much very much he would talk and we were projected to get the green screen and still interact in real time with this puppet. And it was actually voiced by Leo Laporte was the Leo who’s done a tonne of podcasting early tech podcast guy in, in in was a big part of the network when it launched. And Leo is the voice of depth No.
Andrew Dubber
And how did you get into the music side of things?
Matthew Hawn
So right around 98, after kind of doing this stuff in tech space, and I was enjoying it, I really was liking it. It was fun. It was exciting. The money started coming West, right. And all of a sudden, the you got to really this is the Yahoo was the big group at the time. Google was just coming up. It was you could tell the money was coming out, right? All the newspapers were putting offices out in Silicon Valley, and they were all there to cover the money. They were financial reporters, very few people covering the cultural side of it, right. And I thought this isn’t really what I want to be and I suffered a pretty big breakup and a romantic ending of sorts, and went to law to live in New York. And when I went to New York, my friend Peter, who was Universal Music said, I need someone to come help us figure out what university I was going to do about their digital music strategy. Would you like to do that? Yeah. And the time when I was at MSNBC I was really the music gaming and cultural with what’s happening with the Arts and Technology was my was my beat. And so the idea of actually getting my hands on on the actual industry that was that was always so interested in that always been a huge music fan was really exciting. And I came in as a senior director of I don’t know, digital transformation or something ridiculous title that meant nothing, but basically sent me out looking for where universe was keeping all its masters. And where were the artwork was and where was, where was all the video how we’re going to digitise this and turn it into a real product. Yeah,
Andrew Dubber
because they The first step is making that stuff into digital content.
Matthew Hawn
And you know, then we all, we all know how much it’s how sexy metadata is. But how do you describe all this stuff? Right? As soon as you’re moving into digital, how do you describe it? And this is even presearch problems. But we all came to learn that the hardest thing was going to be the data about all this stuff. Like where How do you find it? How do you find the music? That’s that’s out there. But we at first we had to get it and digitise it so we could have something to sell as a product was the the
Andrew Dubber
kind of the ownership, who has the rights to these things of significance? Well,
Matthew Hawn
as always, I mean, it’s kind of you know, who has the rights to do this, the record labels will tell you that they own the recording masters, and they do that that’s the that’s the deal they have. But you know, you also know that there’s been, you know, decades and decades of battles over those masters, right, who has the copy who has the, and they were horrible stewards. I mean, I’ll just be blunt, the universal was a horrible steward of its of its archives, right, I found photographs of, you know, most original photographs of Motown artists, you know, holding up a desk and shoved under a folder, you know, on a desk, desk leg up, you know, it was crazy. We found Jimi Hendrix master tapes in a vault with water dripping into it in London, I mean, just get a classic stuff like that, just and because they had these, they made copies of them. And they put them in, you know, the place that they do all the mastering and the Emil Berliner Studios for for in Europe. And but you know, most these places of the Studios in New York, Sony was better than universal. They had a better sense of archiving the universal data, which is where I went after universal, right. But none of these companies really thought too much about how they were storing this stuff. archival stuff was not their goal, right? They were trying to get stuff out
Andrew Dubber
true. But type two case
Matthew Hawn
totally ended. Especially I mean, we had one of the places we had was a room where we had four ovens where we would bake tapes, because there was this, you know, this thing about in the mid 70s, to 80s, there was a certain type of scotch tape that they were recording on. And it would separate the emulation, the magnets would separate and the only way to bring it back was to literally heat it up to like 100, and, you know, 10 Fahrenheit or something like that, and would stabilise the tape long enough to get a transfer. So in the recording studios is a whole row of ovens where they were baking tapes to try to recover, you know, the 24 tracks that they’d had,
Andrew Dubber
right, there’s another catastrophic batch of Ampex 456 in the 90s, as well,
Matthew Hawn
totally, it’s exactly there’s just a bunch of that kind of stuff. And you And so that kind of archiving thing, which wasn’t really my world, to be honest with you. I mean, I was it was exciting to do this, because I was travelling around figured out we were going to do and we ended up doing something a lot low tech, except because the cost of the archive, which I some points it looked in order to recover all this, it’s, you know, 20 million plus dollars to do this. And they had Boston Consulting Group come in. So yeah, that sounds about right, and nod sagely at us. And we ended up going to actually just sending all the CDs to a place in Seattle and said, rip these and we’ll get started. And we’ll work on the archiving separately. But in order to get started in digital, we need to just get going. So we literally sent our entire catalogue over the top, you know, 10,000 albums, to a CD ripping place where students were ripping them just like you would have done for your own home thing. It good quality and got all the metadata, right. But it was really to get started so we can figure out what’s going on show show. And
Andrew Dubber
is that what took you to London.
Matthew Hawn
So he was going back and forth a lot. I mean, I was you know, I was on planes all the time from New York to London. And then I came back come just before 911 happened, and I was going to quit, I was actually done with this what I was doing for them. And Matt Carpenter, who was at Sony at the time said, Do you want to come and work on this other thing? Which is not we got all this stuff, digitised? How do we distribute it? How do we work with partners? And I have a problem in Europe because the we seem to fix it. And would you go there? And I was gonna go to Ido. Actually, Ido had asked me to come and be a product idea to work on media stuff. And I thought that sounds good. But London sounds better. So it’d be a good place to go. And so I went there to run digital distribution for Sony for Europe and Asia. And so from there, we work with all the probably four or 500 different partners. And we went from Revit that’s kind of the explosion period right for music at the time. I wouldn’t say it was anything we were doing brilliantly that made us that rich, but we went from a couple hundred thousand dollars in digital revenues to more than a quarter of a billion in 2008 when I left.
Andrew Dubber
You were pretty knowledgeable about music when you got there though. I mean, this is something that’s sort of been a thread all the way along
Matthew Hawn
Yeah, so I’m I’m a huge music nerd and watch and record stores I grew up around music back when I was wanting to write music was always the thing I cared about. It was always really important to me but and discovery is one of my favourite things I have you find something new, I’ve always been interested in that that concept. And so going to work for a record company and getting my hands on the archive, and then the history was phenomenal. My favourite group of the record labels, both places was the, the catalogue teams, right. The catalogue teams are the ones who reissue and remaster and they know what they’ve got. The frontline guys are like, you know, it’s like Groundhog Day, it’s always the same thing. They just run through hits and bright and shiny, and then they lose their memory and they go away again, but the institutional memory of record labels of the catalogue groups, right, and they are amazing. They’re just a great, great people.
Andrew Dubber
Right? And so what was your role in Sony, in terms of, you know, sort of the day to day,
Matthew Hawn
so it was an operational? I think it was a VP of digital operations. I think we’re some of that point. I’ve got some, you know, ridiculous title to give. But it was digital business was the was the group there. And it was in conflict, to be honest with you with the physical distribution, guys, who were, you know, kind of the mobsters you’d expect them to be? I mean, it was, it was a very rough and tumble place where you, you know, it was about how many units of vinyl you shipped, right, that was the point. And the way we measure our business was very different than we did digitally. So as that world is falling off and dying. I’m in the fast moving shiny group. And my suggestions are not really some fairly senior at that time there their list, I get to go to the meetings and then, but I make suggestions. I don’t like to hear like we should digitise the whole catalogue and put it on Napster because it’s like radio, and like, you know, that was a, and I got not invited back to certain meetings after that, right?
Andrew Dubber
Because I see you, again, being somewhat countercultural in that corporate environment where
Matthew Hawn
it was, it was harder with Sony than it was I mean, it was nice, because we were building something fast. And there was a lot of money happening quickly. Um, and and once we built the team out, and it was about 45 50 people who did the operational thing, but was working with small partners, right? You know, we worked early on with last FM, where I ended up going later. We work with Spotify, we work with Vodafone, we were working with all these new companies, who and to try to figure out how we were going to make good music to their customers, right and our customers, but we were still treating it like a distribution method, right? We’re, we’re gonna ship units to them, and then we’re gonna sell them to cut we’re not actually doing direct to consumer sales, which is what I asked you before I left Sony i was i was in charge of direct to consumer at Sony, where we built out a, a way for Beyonce to sell you stuff directly and Bruce Springsteen to sell t shirts and Christina Aguilera to sell perfume, which we did, right? Yes, it was always a bit of a new thing. And but at some point, after eight years at Sony is like, I can’t do this anymore. There’s a little red dot in front of my desk. I’m like, What is that? Oh, it’s where I’ve been banging my head for the last eight years, right? When it’s not going fast enough. This is not fun anymore,
Andrew Dubber
right? Because around that same time, I was pumping my fist on tables and saying the record companies are getting it all wrong. How I mean, that’s obviously a simplistic view of the world. But But that was the effect how much of that was institutionalised? And how many people like you were there?
Matthew Hawn
There was a you know, there was always a number of people in the companies who were smart and cared about music, right? I mean, you always there was a whole lot in the middle that were dead wood, let’s be honest. I mean, you could have considered me dead wood from a different angle. Right? I there was a lot of people that right. But it was also a bunch of people who loved music, there was these people didn’t start because they wanted to, you know, be bankers. And as, as the corporate labels kind of came in, there was a roll up during the time I was there, you know, polygram gets acquired. We go from like, a bunch of indies to a bunch of majors, and then the major start buying up the indie. So it’s, it’s getting really corporate on this time. Yeah. And see, but you still have some great people, you know, some real music heads. And they’re mostly in places like the archives and the catalogue group. And, and they’re struggling, they’re trying to figure this out. So I have a lot of sympathy for that group, because I don’t think any of them went out of their way to stop people. There were certainly a lot of banker types at the top. And I could name half the heads of those labels. And you and those are the guys I do think with the bad guys in this. They were really protecting the industry from moving because they were making a lot of money the way they were doing it. Yeah, it was peak, you know, I joined in the peak peak period, right? 40 million in revenues. Just as Napster hip happens, you know, and you see it hit that iceberg. And you’re like, Okay, we’re going down, but there’s still people rearranging deck chairs, right? It’s they’re like, Oh, we can we need to move this over here? Because it’s going to be fine. Like, no, no, we’re sinking now. And it’s gonna sink. And we all need to get into boats. And we got to figure who gets in the boats, and it’s the artists who should get in the boats first, please. Yeah, you know, and but we didn’t do that. You know, we threw a lot of people under the bus during that period.
Andrew Dubber
Well, and and then last FM.
Matthew Hawn
So last FM was I you know, I looked at the company that I was working with across Europe. And it was exciting because I get to work with a lot of them, right? We were talking to people who are doing really cool things. I’m like, I’m on the wrong side of the table. I’m negotiating with these guys. And I’m trying to figure out how to get them the music. And we did a great job of that we were we were very efficient. But the truth was, there was like five or six companies that were really worth working with. And last FM was top of my list because they were really a discovery in an indie play hire player and
Andrew Dubber
well, you said you were interested in discovery and they seem
Matthew Hawn
to be doing pretty well. They were the they were the top of this and that time the idea of collaborative filtering and the algorithmic Location of stuff was combined with a human right. I mean, their algorithms were were always based on human need, right? Yeah, it wasn’t based on a here’s one guy telling you what this is gonna look for. It’s based on what what are your friends looking at? What are your collaboration? You know, if you and I both like the same piece of music shots without this Yeah, there’s gonna be an overlap. There’s gonna be a good Venn diagram. And they were the best at that right at the time, right echo nest pre Spotify, all that stuff.
Andrew Dubber
Yeah, absolutely. So that social paradigm for for music recommendation was the only thing at the time. And the way that I talked about it was the only thing that could tell you that if you like Prince, you might also like Joni Mitchell. So no other algorithm is gonna win, they wouldn’t have made those connections. And they were also
Matthew Hawn
you know, they were ready to model to write which I was, which appealed to me, right, the idea that you didn’t need to own music was really interesting. I mean, I had a Spotify that the 2004, they really combined scrobbling, which was the technology that built the data to do this, met the radio concept. And, you know, there’s a lot of hype about Pandora, but I think it was mostly gives to the American company and their whole genome approach was theoretically novel. But what last FM was doing in the data scientists at last FM were
Andrew Dubber
world class. Yeah, I gotta say the reason I like prints is not because it’s got to make our intro and it’s got a high male vocal, and, you know, it’s an A major key, which seemed to be Pandora’s answer to everything,
Matthew Hawn
then the genome was I mean, I’m not gonna talk shit about the genome, it’s, it was a great idea that made a lot of sense. But they were really looking at about a million tracks. You know, last FM’s database held 100 and 20 million, I mean, bigger than any record company’s catalogue, we knew not only what was being released, but we knew what you were playing. And as soon as one person played it, we had a database, right? So you know, it was stuff that wasn’t released. It was everything it was, it was really the deepest and some still deeper than what Spotify has now. Right? There was just a wider range. He’s
Andrew Dubber
got that. Last FM still does. Right. Okay, so that’s still proprietary up. So
Matthew Hawn
yes, and no. So what was exciting for me at the time, outside of last FM, the only other place that was really holding on to this kind of music was MusicBrainz, Robert Kaye’s nonprofit, and I sit on the board of it still to this day, because, and they have a bunch of small projects. And they’re used by all the big guys, you know, they don’t always like to admit that they use that data. But Roberts been collecting release data in a way to essentially create the metadata of the internet that way, and it’s wide, right? His His goal is to be like the Internet Archive. Right? Right. Okay. So he’s got that goal. They need a little more support to do that. But I think it’s a great way they’ve got a product called listening brains, which I think is very much like what last FM was doing. And yeah, it was an interesting time. I think last FM didn’t know what it had. Which is why I left eventually, CBS acquires last FM and I’m like, I’m out now this is not going to be the
Andrew Dubber
right because my next question was going to be what happened at last FM because it kind of
Matthew Hawn
will. So I I joined there, just to CBS has acquired that thing. And some of the founders are done them point and you kind of moving moving from a founder to a running a company differently was, so they hired me as the head of product for there. And I was excited about the job, I’m like, this is gonna be great, this is gonna be fun. And for a while CBS did leave us alone. And then they didn’t, right. And then at that point, they started to roll it up into some of their of their properties. And we get moved out of radio, which is where it was into interactive. And let’s just say the interactive guys, and I didn’t get along very well. So I lasted about it the other six months thereafter that happened. But um, I never quite convinced them. The most important thing here was the data, right, the data and the listening profiles and to be the connective tissue across services. And to have a single profile. I still keep my last FM profile running. I mean, it’s Spotify still scrambles, it still tells me what I’ve been listening to. It’s like Fitbit for music. I mean, you can always get that music through. And Spotify does have that and the echo nest guys really took the last FM playbook and ran with it. And credit to them. They were smart guys, Brian and Paul Amir. And that crew was all really, really smart. And so their acquisition of you know hundred people. Last FM had a data team of maybe eight to 10. So the size that we’ve we’re the punching above our weight so much that period, the DS for programming and AI knowledge and machine learning knowledge was from that group has all gone to it’s gone to Apple, it’s gone to Expedia, it’s gone to Netflix, it’s gone everywhere. But CBS never knew what they had.
Andrew Dubber
And you went kind of sideways from there.
Matthew Hawn
Yeah, let’s see what I do after that. I wait after that I took a year off actually instead, what do I want to do and I work for interactive gaming company called sensible object to built a interactive physical game that was like reverse Jenga, you built the tower and it created a world on a tablet. And when the tablet when the tower falls over, the game ends. I worked for the BBC on their music app that they were building. This has now become their word and music app. It’s a little like NPR one. It’s a kind of a podcasting and music app they have like with Chris Kimber, who’s a fantastic guy there. And then went to Samsung, which was another odd sideways run. It was that was a wider thing. It was no longer just music. It was film, music, games, everything. And I lasted a year there fascinating year. Learning about Samsung and how that culture work, but ultimately realising I was going to be ineffective there.
Andrew Dubber
Right, right. So so where have you, I guess ended up?
Matthew Hawn
If so that Yeah, I didn’t, I didn’t actually know what I was going to do next I thought, well, this is weird. I don’t want me to do and so I was looking around for companies, maybe I’ll jump out of music and I love music. But maybe it’s time to jump ship and do something new. And then a recruiter came in said, Look, I’ve got this company, and they’re a b2b company. And I want you to go talk to them, because they’re, they they sell music for film and television. And they’re, they’re on like, I’ve never heard of them. But you should talk to them. And I went to Abbey Road to meet the founder, Andrew Sonics, who was in the chief executive officer was a guy called Chris Blake’s in at the time. And I found out they’ve been around for 17 years, they’ve been making music. And the first thing that really struck me was their artists and their composers were all making really, really good money because sync is a interesting problem. And what they’ve done is they’ve solved the sync problem, right? I mean, in a lot of ways the Production Music is used, you need for everything you need, not just the main track for the for the for the intro of a television show, but everything else, although the music that goes with it. And they just started with a really basic concept of being super simple the licence owning the recording, right? And the publishing right one place, which are usually kept separate in the music industry. Yeah, so if you want to licence Radiohead, you have to go to talk to the recording label, the Parlophone EMI group. But you’d also have to talk to radio radio, its publishers, which were often a different group, right? They were Warner at the time. So you’ve now got two different people who both don’t really want to work together. And it’s just making it hard to licence music. So they made it simple made it really inexpensive. But then they the smart thing was that publishing right? When it gets recorded, when it gets done on television, it gets broadcast, that royalty rates the same as radio heads, right? So it’s not theirs. Those are statutory rights. And so by having it simple, and making easy to licence, and making it really fast meant that they quickly became a dominant player in the music space, particularly in Europe. And how does this differ from something like kpm. And those kind of music libraries that APM or killer tracks or Sony are all owned by a major right? So most of the extreme is owned by Sony, I think killer tracks is I forget the brag for how they break down exactly. But they’re all broken down by they’ve been associated with the majors. And what they generally do is they keep them separate, right? They like, Oh, I don’t want any more artists and go anywhere near the Production Music Group. Right. And we’ll have this other stuff. And it’s largely generic, and it’s some of them are quite well recorded. But essentially, it’s clipart. Right? It’s clipart music, right? Yeah, these places. And that’s really true of the low end to the epidemic sounds and the premium beat these are all companies are doing really basic. It’s fine. It works great, but it’s not. It’s not made by an artist who cares, what what they’re doing. And so we went out and got people who’ve just scored films and advertisements in games, and we found these folks and said, we’re going to you’re going to record something for us, we’re going to put it online, it’s going to get used, you know, 11 offices around the world. We’re going to sell this to TV and film and advertising groups. But we want you to make the music that you make right and submit for film and television, but it is it’s the single worst thing first music company.
Andrew Dubber
Yeah, it’s really interesting because one of the things when I first came across audio network, I went Hang on a second I recognise some of these names. And and from jazz and from electronic music and yeah, I
Matthew Hawn
mean, Tim garland is a mazing jazz musician and he’s been around for and he’s done you know, several albums for us, right? We have you know, we have Johnny Lloyd, who’s in the mystery jets is one of our indie anything he’s done a tonne of Britpop guitar based music. That’s great. You know, we were DJ, Radio One DJ, it’s just people like to make stuff for us because it’s, most of these guys don’t just stop with one record they make for the record company, they’re always making music. Sure. And not everything is designed to go on and be used to, you know, they make an instrumental version and cut down versions for us. It’s designed to be used in production, which is quite a fun job right? You know, you see where Trent Reznor has gone with Atticus Ross making, it’s not the same as his Nine Inch Nails music, right? But you can do that, right? musicians are, can work in both areas. And when they find they can do that with us, they get really excited and they like to sign with us. We’re not exclusive, we don’t require you to sign your life away and sign your rights what you do sign the rights to us to represent you in, in the in the Masters, right? These are the masters belong to the other network group. But you always keep your publishing and that publishing split is 50 50. So it’s really quite clear, which is not what you get when you go to most publishers is a 50 50 split.
Andrew Dubber
Looking back over this journey from where you’ve ended up. Does this make sense as a narrative in retrospect,
Matthew Hawn
you know, I think it does in the sense that I’m what’s exciting to me about this group now is it’s one thing to make film and television. But it’s also exciting to watch what’s happening with the internet again, and the democratisation of media, right? More sitting across from each other right now in a room, and you’ve got amazing equipment here that would not have been available to you 10 years ago. And and the way to get it out to people is just so for me, making music for creators is the next real excitement. I mean, it’s great. We’ve done it for the 510 thousand production companies out there, you already know, but it’s the next 20,000 production companies you don’t know that I’m excited by right. The Francis Ford Coppola famously said, you know, he’s the next Coppola is a, you know, a 14 year old girl in Des Moines you don’t know yet that’s in she’s gonna make this because she’s gonna have all these tools right Robert Rodriguez who’s here in Austin, you know, famously, his book Rebel Without a crew is all about how do you make media for no money and how do you become you know, and you can do that with the internet and you can do that with with the music we’ve created. So I’m excited to see what people do with the music, making it accessible, making them orange, it doesn’t make sense to me that it’s unnatural.
Andrew Dubber
And it sounds like the stuff that you got excited about Mosaic, jack and
Matthew Hawn
Sam, you know, I wrote a column for for macro back in 94, called, um, I think was let 1000 flowers bloom, it was about personal pages, right? It was about blogging. We didn’t call blogging them, but it was like, you want a voice, right? You want to say something to the world, this is a phenomenal way to get it out there. And it’s, you know, freedom, freedom of the press belongs to those who own one. And we all own one now. Right? Right. So we have the ability to reach a lot of people now and with the distribution tools we have. And this just makes music democratic as well, because not everyone can make a you know, a beautifully scored soundtrack with 120 piece orchestra in Abbey Road, right? Sure. But you can now as a creator get access to that music on our catalogue for you know, $10 will licence it for you globally worldwide. Right? Right. That to me is very exciting, right? That means more people can use what we do. Now, if you’re a high end Corporation who’s doing this? We’re going to charge you more than that. Yeah, but you know, you as an individual, we should be able to do that. Does that
Andrew Dubber
make you an optimistic person? Like I’m incredibly optimistic.
Matthew Hawn
Despite my I like to think of myself as a pragmatic optimist, right? You have to actually get shit done. In the end, he makes you have to make compromises. But you have to think, how do I get it done instead of just holding my my ideals to an unreasonable standard?
Andrew Dubber
What’s next? Do you think? For you?
Matthew Hawn
It’s a good? You know, it’s a good question. We’re at an interesting point with the company, right? I mean, it’s been 17 years of this company, we’ve turned a corner, we’ve got a lot of new executive talent and a great new marketing person who’s come on who’s really starting to make the stories behind the music pop. If you went to the website, today, you’ll start to see that right, you’ll start to see that the story is behind the music is becoming important to us. And it’s not the case, when you look at production companies, we’ve got a great new salesperson who’s come in. So I’m excited about the next five years for this company. I’m hoping that I want to stay in it. You know, we’ve got some exciting things coming with.
Andrew Dubber
Well, you’re a storyteller. So there’s a place for you clearly,
Matthew Hawn
it’s easy, and it’s fun. And it’s a fun place to be. And as a product guy, I mean, I know I you know, I made the switch from being the guy who looked in the vaults for things to building stuff now and I got a taste of a last FM and I don’t think we’re done making things here getting ways for people to get that music is exciting for me. So we’ve done a plugin for Premiere Pro, so you can find our music within the editing software that pretty much anyone can use, right? You know, and I’m excited by some of the generative music things that are coming in, in the space where you can take a piece of music and turn it and shape it into what you need it to be. I view that as a collaborative tool, not a replacement tool. There’s a lot of people saying robots are going to write our music. I think that’s like saying synthesisers are going to destroy music, right? It’s just not true. It’s just a new tool. It’s a new element.
Andrew Dubber
Absolutely. Matthew, thanks very much for your time today. Thank you. That’s Matthew Hawn, head of product for audio network, which was recently acquired by entertainment one, and that’s the MTF podcast. By now. You should know what to do subscribe, share, like rate review, say nice things about it on social media. And while you do that, we’ll go and prepare the next one seems like a fair deal. Also, we’re going to be in Croatia this week for MTF Pula, we’ve partnered with info bit one of Europe’s fastest growing software unicorns, where we’re going to be hosting the MTF labs with a bunch of high level expert mtfs. And a selection of Infobip’s brilliant engineers and thinkers. More on that across all our channels where music tech fest on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and now our slash music tech fest on Reddit. We’ll catch you there and back here next week. In the meantime, have a great one talk soon. Cheers.
