Last month, the ninth annual Mondo NYC music business conference was held October 15-18 at the Arlo Williamsburg Hotel and brought together attendees from all corners of the music business, including artists, major & indie label executives, managers & lawyers, music publishers, technology entrepreneurs, and educators, to discuss the current state of the music industry and meet fellow enthusiasts who are navigating the difficult to predict pathways to sustainable success in music now that the pandemic is over.
Mondo NYC was launched in 2016 by Bobby Haber and Joanne Abbot Green, who founded the legendary New York music festival CMJ Music Marathon, where I first saw and discovered many favorite musicians in what became an annual October ritual, before selling to new owners in 2012 who weren’t able to keep the festival going after 2015.
While Mondo has a handful of artist performance showcases at local venues (I saw local all-female brass and woodwinds nonet Brass Queens play a rousing set of New Orleans-style jazz, including covers of the buzzy breakthrough star Chappel Roan, at Brooklyn Bowl – photo by Osmany Cabrera), unlike the noon-to-wee hours’ showcases of CMJ (which has been replaced by the scrappy New Colossus Festival since 2019), Mondo’s focus is on the personalities behind the music industry sharing observations on what is working/not working in to get the music they believe into listeners’ ears.
Each day featured panels and fireside chats with an insider perspective from a diverse set of voices, at times moderated by beat journalists from Variety, Billboard, and Bloomberg, who shared stories of success and challenges in the continued shifting power dynamic between artists and songwriters utilizing transformational technology (almost every panel felt obliged to theorize about the impact of still nascent AI applications or defend not spending time on AI) to escape traditional marketing & distribution models once defined by the major labels that tended to exploit them.
While the panel discussions gave attendees ample food for thought, much of the buzz came from running into old friends and acquaintances in the corridors while switching between mostly-packed ballrooms or at sponsored meals (not as good as the previous year, confirmed by persistent feedbag feedback) and gregarious happy hours in the lobby & water tower bars, where canapés and cocktails unfurled candid conversations about the varied passions that keep people pursuing involvement with an industry that is often less glamorous behind the scenes.
I listened and I learned that it’s mostly the thrill of discovering that song that speaks exactly to a moment in time and gets us feeling in sync with our world so much that we want to ensure as many people as possible know about this musical cure for the soul (and upon breaking this hit, knowing that managers, distributors, labels, and sync supervisors will fiercely negotiate percentage splits for every possible revenue stream).
I wasn’t able to attend every panel, but here are some insights from what I observed at Mondo NYC 2024:
Larry Miller, Director of NYU Steinhardt Music Business Program, interviewed new Napster CEO Jon Vlassopulous about the winding path of the once notorious P2P freeware piracy platform into a legitimate streaming brand, going through multiple owners (including a stint with Best Buy merging it with Rhapsody) until it was purchased by a consortium of Web3 oriented investors, who brought in Vlassopulous because of his experience as global head of music for online game creation platform Roblox, where he introduced virtual concerts attended by tens of millions of users and virtual merchandise AKA “verch” with artists including Twenty One Pilots, Lil Nas X, and Zara Larsson. The new vision of Napster integrates the social (connecting fans in local communities to each other and artists), the creative commerce community (e.g. Patreon), and traditional streaming with playlist import.
Miller also chatted with Bob Valentine, CEO of Concord Music Group, about consolidating the world’s largest indie music catalog by building trust with artists in promising stewardship of their lifetime’s work, which includes still culturally relevant music from an ever-present era of nostalgia (e.g. the short-lived Creedence Clearwater Revival becomes more valuable as John Fogerty continues to tour and play CCR songs), which is of great interest to institutional investors looking for predictable recurring revenue royalties for 40-to-50 years. He also pointed out that the growth of streaming helped standardize recording rights into financial asset class by allowing finance companies to separate music company operations from their recording assets, which had previously been understood mostly by film companies (as when Village Roadshow owned Concord) and the macroeconomics of consistently low interest rates aided catalog-purchasing-funds like Hipgnosis go on a £1 billion buying spree.
Another rising catalog investment fund is Goldstate Music, founded by Charles Goldstuck, formerly COO of BMG, then CEO of digital jukebox company TouchTunes, who co-founded artist development company HitCo with producer/label veteran L.A. Reid before selling its catalog to Concord in 2022. Music acquisitions lawyer Michael Poster of Michelman & Robinson talked with Goldstuck and Goldstate Creative Ambassador singer/rapper/wellness advocate Mike Posner about bringing an artist’s perspective into making investment decisions. While Goldstate isn’t investing in new music creation, some catalog artists have collaborated on new tracks at legendary Alabama recording studio Muscle Shoals.
Poster also led the Catalog Shopping panel as part of Mondo’s Continuing Legal Education sessions, covering red flag purchasing concerns following the ongoing Diddy scandal legal fallout, with renewed interest in Harvey Weinstein/R. Kelly morals clauses as due diligence of for past and ongoing behavior during the contract. Lexi Todd, VP at independent publisher and talent management firm Primary Wave Music, where artists remain minority partners when they sell their catalogs, talked about addressing the troubling aspects of owning the Whitney Houston catalog by following family wishes to focus on the lasting power of her voice rather than her dark demise, which led to the Norwegian DJ Kygo’s remix of her original recording of Steve Winwood’s “Higher Love” and a MAC cosmetics line.
Kristin Robinson of Billboard moderated The State of Indie Music Publishing panel, which included contemplation of the controversial Spotify premium tier bundling of audiobooks for a lower mechanical royalty rate to songwriters and how to deal with royalties from the AI-powered Hook app for non-technical remixing or TikTok teases by artists for works in progress before publishers have finalized split contracts. Andrew Bergman, CEO of Downtown Music pointed out that the music industry is being reshaped by the songwriting boom in Nashville, with songwriters using the publishing platform Songtrust for self-service, and because songs are the essential building block of the music industry, it’s fair to give recording points to them, but it will depend on the leverage of individual artists.
Laurent Hubert, CEO of Kobalt Music, championed the “service over ownership” model while acknowledging that songwriters are underpaid (one issue is improperly credited covers on Spotify/YouTube), with a long-term fix being to lobby for structural changes in rights. Rell Lafarge, COO of Reservoir, which had a 97% ownership model of mostly classic rock (including John Denver) before pursuing new music (AKA “frontline”), including songwriters for Sabrina Carpenter and SZA, noted that songwriters are addressing inequities by request day fees for work on songs, as well as producer fees.
Robinson also delved into the latest digital music-making tools with the Aspiring Artist Tech Stack panel, exploring how technology is transforming how artists are producing music and referencing her articles about the recent $10mm lawsuit to combat AI songs being uploaded to streaming platforms with bot farms fraudulently increasing play counts and the anonymous AI song released in response to Drake/Kendrick Lamar beef to ask questions including where should generative AI music live and whether AI “crate digging” is a new form of sampling. Alejandro Koretzky, Head of AI for online collaborative producer platform Splice) explained that while push-button AI creation can generate a good first demo of a song, stand-alone AI iteration beyond a first draft remains challenging, and most users are more interested in AI features that augment the sonic boundaries of their music creation, which is about creative control, not AI-generated songs. Jordan Pettinato, Director of Business Development at SoundCloud, warned that music creation through AI text prompts is novel but superficial, and eliminates the creative journey of making choices, but that artists regularly upload stems and beats from released recordings on SoundCloud to encourage remixing, so AI remixes are inevitable, which will necessitate better content identification for attribution & licensing royalties. Srivatsav Pyda, Head of Music Technology at Hook, described his company’s mission as providing a plugin to insert randomness into generative music, built for people who aren’t looking to compose original music, but like to express themselves through music by making personal versions of songs they love. Antony Demekhin, CEO and Co-Founder of ethical AI music creation platform Tuney confirmed that as a musician, he is conditioned to hate generative AI models, which are only good for novelty songs, but that Tuney users are uploading sung melodies to hear how they sound as instrumentation components, in line with using AI tools to automate sections of the creative workflow.
Artist and songwriter perspectives were also important voices at Mondo. It was heartwarming to hear traditional country music star Randy Travis, with his wife Mary Travis, recount to Recording Industry Association of America CEO Mitch Glazier how he has rebuilt his career after nearly dying from a stroke in 2013 that left him unable to sing, taking on a producer role with his legacy by organizing tours with his band featuring James Dupré as a guest singer to reprise his vocal style and using an AI-adjusted performance by Dupré to re-create his voice for his otherwise non-AI 2024 single release “Where That Came From.”
NYC-born songwriter Sam Hollander told his compelling story about how failing to break through when his teenage band landed a record deal drove him to become a helpful collaborative songwriter for others, which led to Brill Building legend Carole King appreciating his lyric writing and inviting him to co-write with her and a subsequent career of working on songs and recordings with a diverse client list that includes Panic! At The Disco, Fitz and the Tantrums, Weezer, Ringo Starr, Billy Idol, Jewel, and Gym Class Heroes.
Whether you have been part of the music industry for decades or are looking to break in, I recommend attending Mondo NYC for a comprehensive snapshot of the key drivers of the modern music industry and a chance to build relationships with the people who factor in fans getting to hear the music they crave. Mondo NYC tickets for October 14-17, 2025 are on sale now.
