
I also make myself available to the entire music industry because I want to see it stay healthy and grow and become sustainable, so I work alongside managers, artists, publishers, record labels, booking agents. I work with creative services, but I make myself available to the entire company because I’m there to help. We have close to 70 people spread out around the world on my team, and I work in various areas of the company. Right now we have a team of six people across L.A., Nashville and London. Tiffany worked for both RedOne and Kanye and in publishing for Primary Wave, and she’s a former songwriter as well. So this was our way of planting some good-will seeds in the community. Certain things we’re not going to be able to fix overnight, but we can do a lot to help.
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The whole idea was to put our heads together and figure out how to build and contribute within the songwriting community.

My third hire when I came to Spotify was Tiffany Kumar, who came on as our global head of songwriter relations. It’s math - addition, subtraction and division, right? And at Spotify, what we’re trying to help with right now is multiplication - how do we grow the pie even more? But we don’t control how that pie is split.ĭoes your perspective on this come from your years of managing artists and the 360-degree view that comes with it?ĭefinitely. There’s one pie, and it’s figuring out how that pie gets divided up.
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There is no business without the song, just as there is no movie without the script. I think overall, and this isn’t specific to Spotify or any streaming service or any label… when you consider the overall value chain of the music industry and how important the songwriter is to the business - I think there needs to be another look at the value chain.

You said at the Music Biz conference last month that you feel streaming royalties are unfair. We’re doing 13 song camps around the world. We purposely didn’t announce because we wanted to see if it worked and if there were things we should tweak, but it went incredibly well. The idea is to help with the process and also to bring people who wouldn’t traditionally collaborate into the same room. We actually just finished one in London, just to pilot it, and it went pretty fantastic. Some will be subjective and some will be objective. Other awards will be about who had the biggest songs. Songwriters know who the greats are and who the up-and-coming songwriters are. We’re still working through the process, but the songwriting community will be involved in selecting who they are it’ll be a peer-based voting system, definitely democratized. We’ll have a more robust announcement around the awards, but there will be categories that put the spotlight around up-and-coming songwriters as well. How will the winners of the Secret Genius awards be chosen? Are they the most-streamed songs? When I came in, this was one of the areas that I was excited to focus on, so I’m glad that we’re finally able to get this off the ground. When the general public hears a song, they automatically associate it with the artist who sings it, so we thought Secret Genius was an appropriate name. The whole idea around Secret Genius was about these people behind the scenes who play such a big role in some of the most important moments of our lives. Songwriters have been greatly affected by the overall model shift in the business, but even in the past, for the most part it was only writers who were also artists who were celebrated. Is Secret Genius a way to try to address that? Many people feel that songwriters get the short end of the stick in the streaming model. On June 6, one year to the day after his move to Spotify was announced, Variety caught up with Carter as he was en route to LAX to catch yet another 11-hour flight to the company’s headquarters in Sweden - and he spoke at length not just about Secret Genius but also his first year at the company.

(Carter declined to discuss his work with the estate in this interview.) Londell McMillan and Charles Koppelman, have begun to play out in court. Earlier this year, he also took on the role of special music advisor to the Prince estate - a job that was steeped in controversy almost as soon as he’d arrived, as questions over some of the deals struck by his predecessors, L. Carter stopped managing artists when he took the Spotify job - although his companies continue to work in branding and investment - and he’s dedicated a large percentage of his considerable energy to his role at the streaming service, as the following interview shows.
