A Conversation with Matt Mason - Vice President of Marketing at BitTorrent

The delicate relationship between the digital sphere and the music industry has been a two-sided affair so far. While illegal file-sharing and digital piracy have caused a severe decline in record sales for labels for over a decade, the internet has also brought along a vast palette of opportunity for the struggling music business. Matt Mason, Vice President of Marketing at BitTorrent, argues that today things are looking brighter than ever — especially for the recording artists themselves. Thanks to the arrival of various digital services and strategies, musicians today are exposed to a high number of ways and methods to manage their careers more efficiently and creatively.

BitTorrent itself is looking to enter a new era as well. Although the company isn’t directly involved in illegal downloading, the open-source BitTorrent protocol is used by piracy websites, which has led many to wrongly blame BitTorrent Inc. With the arrival of its newest products, Sync and Bundle, the software maker intends to distance itself from its shadow of digital piracy. While the former is a service that syncs digital files across devices, the latter service enables musicians, filmmakers, and authors to release much larger amounts of their work digitally than they could in a single download on Amazon.com (AMZN) or in Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes Store. We spoke to Mason about the versatile symbiosis between the internet and the music industry, BitTorrent’s current role in the market, as well as the bright prospects for recording artists these days.

How do you evaluate the rise of streaming music services?
We’ve seen a fantastic amount of innovation in the music industry — especially in the last five years. It was really tough for awhile in this business. A lot of people just had no idea what the business model was going forward. It really took people awhile to figure out how to react to the emergence of the digital landscape. It really took people awhile and I think that is one big reason why piracy played such a big part of the early days of music on the internet. It was the only option. Thankfully, things are changing and we have so many great ways for consumers to find music legally on the internet now. The streaming services have definitely been at the forefront of that — whether it be YouTube, Rdio, Spotify or Pandora. Streaming has basically become this important piece of how music is consumed today. The only negative aspect about that is while it might work great for consumers, it is not really clear if this is a fully developed business model for recording artists. You start various artists such as Thom Yorke, David Byrne or many others come out speaking against streaming. Services clearly don’t make enough money for an artist.

Where do you see BitTorrent in this market structure?
Our type on the internet is, there is not going to be a one size fits all-take business model for music on the internet the way there was with Tower Records in the ’80s in the real world. On the internet there is a different business model for every single piece of digital content. We understand our role in this world. We don’t want to build platforms as points of centralization where we can control how you speak to your fans or act as some kind of middleman. Our technology is about doing the opposite. It’s about connecting people directly to each other without any central point of interference from us.

Is this the main role of BitTorrent’s new product Bundle?
Absolutely. It made so much sense for us to build a product such as Bundle where the bundle puts the artist directly in connection with their fans. Artists can set the price of how fans either download or stream content from a Bundle. Although the product is still in a very early stage, its road map for the coming year is: streaming and pay-gates inside Bundles. All of these different ways that artists will be able to interact with fans should be up to the artists themselves or the owner of the bundle where the content sells, because they understand better than anybody the right way to connect with their fans. It is also worth pointing out that we don’t own any of the collected data. It is all owned by the artist. If you offer a mixtape and fans have to type in their emails to get the mixtape, for instance, we won’t have a look at them. These go all to the artist. Our job basically is to be a layer between artist and fan and get all potential elements that could be between out of the way. Make ourselves invisible and let fans and artists connect with each other as efficiently as possible.

As we all know, the music industry has been in the midst of a crisis for a number of years. Do you see the drop in record sales as some sort of necessary evil in order to reach better, brighter times?
This is an interesting thought. I think it didn’t have to go as long as it did. People have been talking for years about all the different ways to distribute content on the internet. It took really a long time for the industry to get comfortable with the internet itself. The first reaction to the MP3 was more than negative. The record labels wanted to outlaw MP3s and MP3 players because they were convinced these were tools for piracy, technologies that were only going hurt them but we’ve seen that that’s not true. We really sympathize with that at BitTorrent because we are in the same boat right now. This is the best way to distribute content and people are scared of it because they don’t understand it, but it is the best way to distribute content on the internet. It’s a shame when people are risk-averse and don’t want to experiment with new technologies but we’ve always been that way as a society. If you go back when Edison invented the record player, live musicians thought that record players would kill the live music business. It is worth remembering that, at one time, the record business was something the musicians regarded as a scary piracy tool. If you look back at the history of media, it’s always been like that. Same thing is true for the film industry. It takes awhile for people to get their arms around new technologies and fully understand how they can use them to create value. In the music industry, we are now seeing (independent) record labels and artists starting to figure out how to deal with it and starting to see return on their investments. I think the future is really bright. We went through a rough patch in the industry but things are looking really, really great. Anybody who doesn’t think so is not looking at the numbers. Digital downloads are trending upwards. We might not be at the 1998-level of CD sales yet, but it’s getting close.

Would you recommend to pursue a career as a recording artist or creative individual nowadays?
There’s never been a better time to be a young, creative individual. There are so many ways to reach people. There are so many ways to get people excited about your work. The great news now is, you don’t have to wait until you recorded your first album to start talking to people. As long as you have some content and some idea of who you are and your story, you can start putting it out there and start interacting with people. What’s great about music now is, your band can really work the way a startup works in a sense that you can release some content — be it one song or even a piece of artwork — and see if people react to it and see if people respond to it. If you do, you are on the right track and if they don’t respond the way you want them to, you’ll get some feedback that helps you to develop your idea and aesthetic and what you’re trying to say.

Where’s the difference between today’s career structure for a recording artist and the one they had during the golden ’90s?
My friend Bob Moczydlowsky, who’s the head of music at Twitter, has made a really interesting point: “Don’t record an album until you got a 1,000 fans.” This basically means, you can start building a fan base before you have an actual album out. And this is not the way the music industry used to work. You can start smaller and grow with your fan base. You can grow a fan base and grow creatively without necessarily having used the old tools or infrastructure that existed. The good news is, when you grow big, this infrastructure and all of its tools are still there. The major labels and their ecosystem is still there. There will always be this kind of mass arena-level music industry. We still have massive artists today like Lady Gaga for instance, that are still doing what the music industry’s been doing — at a rock star level. There’s this growing middle class — very independent, very distributed music industry that doesn’t necessarily show up when you read all these reports on the health of the music industry. These usually only focus on what the three major labels are doing. They may not reflect every single music startup worldwide or every single artist that is doing something differently because they can now.

What are the biggest circumstances today’s artists face nowadays?
Digital marketing. They struggle with turning an interested viewer on the internet into a connected fan. However, the music industry is getting really smart about that really quickly. So many kids that grow up today have that almost innate knowledge and understanding how you do things online. Look at some of the artists that have broken through in the last few years. Odd Future came up. A$AP Rocky came up. Their story was out there way before their first single was. You knew stuff about them. You knew what they looked like. You followed them on Twitter, Tumblr or Instagram. You’ve seen something they made or shocked somewhere before they made their first album, before they even were doing live shows. I love the way Odd Future do the pop-up stores when they tour, really taking on this different type of business model of a streetwear brand to help to monetize their music — to me one of the most inspiring things I’ve seen in the last few years. There’s so many different ways to think about making money from your creative work. If making music is at the heart of what you do now, you’re probably also making videos, still photography or merchandise of some kind. All of these things are valid and they’re part of what you do. The good news is, there’s no limit to what you can do and how you can get it out there or what you make. Fans won’t punish you for being creative, they will reward you for it.

Photography: Sunil Kansara