The Annual Music Biz Conference will take place in Atlanta for the FIRST TIME in 2025, gathering more than 2,100 global music professionals in a vital music hub city for four days of educational & networking opportunities to help inform the industry’s trajectory forward. This month, we’re kicking off a special series of interviews with Atlanta-based music & entertainment executives to learn why it is the PERFECT place to bring our Annual Conference and all the things that make Atlanta’s music industry so special. Up first, we’ll hear from Tobago Bonito from local record store DBS Sounds & founder of the F.A.M.S. (Forever a Music Store) Coalition!

The past decade has seen a vast uptick in the importance of the music publishing sector. Publishing rights now account for roughly 30-40% of rightsholder revenue, thanks in part to both the adoption of consistent digital revenue streams and major investments from the financial sector that have bolstered the value of music catalogs. In our first podcast of 2025, we talk to Reservoir Media President & COO, Rell Lafargue about the evolution of the music publishing sector, what changes in the industry as a whole have contributed to publishing’s importance, what the future may hold, and much more!

2024 was yet another transformative year for the music industry, bolstered by the widespread embrace of AI integration, challenges to the cornerstone that DSPs have become, and maturing integrations in gaming & VR. In our final conversation of 2024, we speak with Vickie Nauman of CrossBorderWorks about how as music consumption becomes more passive, more interactive experiences enabled by exciting new tech may define the music industry in the year to come!

With the ever-changing landscape of the music industry, as well as new expectations from today’s artists, it’s time for us to check in on how the management field has evolved to meet the needs of today’s music makers. In our latest podcast, we talk to 10 and 8 Management’s Nicholas Mishko about what managers can do to best support their artists in the 2020s, when artists should enlist a manager & for what reasons, what new tech & revenue streams managers need to be aware of, advice for those looking to break into management, and beyond!

The misuse of generative AI tech has already tested the status quo of music distribution & streaming, with DSPs being flooded with thousands of fraudulent tracks meant to siphon royalties away from rightful artists & rightsholders. AI:OK is a new initiative which takes a multi-pronged approach to ensuring that the music industry is ethical in its use of AI. In our latest podcast, we talk to AI:OK founder & CEO, Dr. Martin Clancy about the initiative’s origins and goals, as well as the immediate outlook on AI’s impact on our industry.

Research divisions within music companies often operate to advance the products & services they offer. In the case of Deezer’s most recent research on identifying & tagging songs, it may improve the ways our business fights against bad actors. This month, we talked to Deezer's Head of Research Romain Hennequin about his team’s origins, its most recent paper which delves into how self-supervised learning (SSL) may help accurately identify AI-generated tracks uploaded to streaming services, and much more!

#iVoted is a non-partisan, non-profit organization that hosts concerts on election nights & during early voting periods to help drive voter registration & turnout. After hosting the largest digital concert in history during the 2020 Presidential Election, which data from MIT touts as bolstering voter turnout by an estimated 7%, #iVoted is gearing up for a series of events leading up to and on Election Night 2024. The org’s Founder & CEO, Emily White, joins us on the podcast to talk about how it has evolved since 2018, how her music industry background informs how #iVoted operates, the ways it uses data to most effectively plan events in target areas, and much more!

Following up on her op-ed for our Keeping Tempo series, we’re thrilled to have Jessica Vaughn of Head Bitch Music on our latest episode of The Future of What! In this interview, Vaughn discusses the ways our industry has evolved (both for better and worse) in its support of women & marginalized communities, how her industry origins as an artist influenced her to pursue an executive career and institute change from the inside, her current roles in the sync/custom music space, and much more!

Since the digitization of the music business began, new tech applications and methods of consumption have helped to redefine how our industry operates. In recent years, the highest profile changes have been the implementation of AI algorithms and the rapid adoption of music consumption through short-form video platforms. We spoke with Miquido’s Chief AI Officer, Jerzy Biernacki about the benefits of AI applications on personalized music experiences like curated playlists & song recommendations, and how music trends on TikTok are changing how labels search for & market new talent!

Ray Bush founded The Music Royalty Co. (MRC) in 2014 after identifying opportunities to modernize royalty calculations in the face of music data’s exponential explosion as streaming began to take off. A decade later and the company has remained an expert in complex royalty calculations for labels, publishers and distributors, while also evolving to meet the accountancy needs of music companies. In our latest podcast, we speak to Bush about the company’s first decade, how the global music industry has financially grown in that same time, the impact of having a dedicated royalty service, and much more!