Sony E-Mail Hack Reveals Snapchat Trying to Launch Record Label

You’ve heard about the recent Sony email hacks — it is now revealed bythat Snapchat is trying to venture into the music business. Information retrieved reveals that Sony Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton was contacted by Snapchat co-founder Evan Spiegel in hopes to bring his mobile messaging company into the music provision market. Speigel however does not want to create a music service; rather, he plans to build a team of artist that he use the platform to promote in the same way a record label would. Earlier last month, Snapchat rejected a $3 billion acquisition deal from Facebook. Read the below email sent by Sony president of global digital business Dennis Kooker to Lynton.

Michael,
I was only able to see Evan for about 30 minutes yesterday but that was enough time for him to express his thoughts and leave us with some things to think about if there is going to a music play within Snapchat. He didn’t end up showing some of the developments in the platform that may benefit music but referenced them in the discussion. First, he thinks every music service in the market is sh*t and he wants to be a curator. He doesn’t want to build a music service but he would like to have a record label so he could focus on the artists that he wants to use the platform to promote. He also wants to participate in the upside that he will create by promoting them on the platform. He later backed off a bit from being a record label to maybe testing the concept first. Obviously he doesn’t understand some of the important nuances around the business about what rights a record label does and does not have.

I appreciate the introduction. I am going to go back to my team with some of these concepts and see if we can get creative in how we could get something to work here that is in the direction of Evan’s vision and get him more exposed to what we can bring to Snapchat. We have a lot of ideas of our own but I don’t think Evan will engage in our ideas until we try to move something forward that he wants to accomplish.

Please let me know if you want to discuss further

Nothing is confirmed by any of the parties but we’ll keep you updated.