Sean Glover, Artist Relations at Soundexchange - DMT @ SXSW 2013
Channel: Digital Music Trends
Date: 2013-03-21

Digital Music Trends at SXSW 2013 interviews Sean Glover, manager of artists relations at SoundExchange. We talk about what the organisation does, its recent expansion, satellite radio and internet radio, the Internet radio fairness act, getting artists to register and much more - detailed questions with timestamps below, just click on the time to jump to that question in the video. 

00:25 Let's have a quick overview of how Soundexchange works in case people weren't familiar with it
00:50 We talked about Soundexchange a lot on Digital Music Trends, first of all it's an incredible story of growth and managing that growth must have been a difficult job right? 
01:40 As a company did you have to expand/staff up a lot to cater for this growth? 
02:28 Pandora is one of the biggest contributors to SoundExchange alongside Sirius XM, the payments are growing every quarter (10 % increase between Q3 2012 and Q4 2012), how do you see this carrying on over the next couple of years? Any projections on growth and thoughts on additional services that may be coming along? 
03:15 Here at SXSW the main message is for you to try and get the word out that you exist and artists need to register. How big of a problem is for you to match the songs to the artist and make payments accordingly? 
04:00 Talking about your relationship to other organizations internationally that do a similar type of work to what you do, is it easy to work with them to make sure you can collect your rights and they can collect theirs? 
04:40 Looking at satellite radio there was an increase in the rates recently, how do you feel about that increase and do you think it was fair and would you like to see satellite radio pay more? 
05:55 Talking about online streaming there's a continuing debate on rates as satellite radio pays a lot less than what online streaming radios have to pay in the US. Last year there was a lot of controversy surrounding the Internet Radio Fairness act, most music organizations as well as Soundexchange and many artists were opposed to it and it didn't make it out of committee. Rumors are that this year something along those lines will come along again, are you prepared to counter it in the same way as last year? 
06:15 What's your relationship with the artists like and do you have any specific stories of people that have been overwhelmed with what you guys have done and didn't know they could get money through these channels? 
07:25 I was looking on the website at the list of the companies that are paying o SoundExchange in order to use music, we all know about Sirius XM and Pandora because they are the biggest ones but what makes up the bulk of the other contributors that pay for the license? 
8:40 Let's finish by talking about tracking, of course that's the biggest part of SoundExchange's job to track the plays as accurately as possible, what are the tools involved to do that and what's your mains source of information?