Okay. Welcome, the Pershing Square Holdings annual event. We're gonna have a little different run of show today. We want it to be very respectful of Sir Lucian's time, so we're gonna start with a Q&A or a fireside chat with Lucian. Then our chair is gonna speak, and then whenever she thinks it's appropriate, she'll let me talk. Then you'll hear from Ryan Israel, you'll hear from Manning, another member of the investment team, then we'll have an open Q&A, which for me is the most fun part, other than the opportunity to interview Lucian. I'm not gonna waste time with the introduction of Lucian, other than to say one thing. There are very few executives that take on the status of what I would call an icon of an industry.
You think of people like Walt Disney or Steve Jobs at Apple. Really, Lucian is maybe one of only two icons I've had the opportunity to work with as an investor in a company. What I mean by that is he's not only built an amazing business and taken a lot of profits for the owners of the company over the last 30-odd years, but he's really led a transformation of an industry that's gone through a lot of volatility, cyclicality, technological change, and managed to always stay on top and actually keep the au...
When you're as dominant a company as Universal, the success of the industry is highly correlated with your success, and he's done a really amazing job for the music industry, for artists, a business that was sort of written off as dying, as recently as a little more than a decade ago. With that, invite Sir Lucian to the stage. We're gonna have a freewheeling discussion. I'll say, we're not gonna talk about Wall Street stuff. We're not gonna talk about next quarter, et cetera. Of course, we're in the quiet period, we needed a special exemption to have this conversation, we're gonna live stream this in the spirit of transparency. We're gonna stick to really about the music business and the history and Lucian. Please come up. Hi.
Let's start shortly after birth. It wasn't that much after birth that you got interested in music. How did that start?
My father had owned a record store and... or sorry that's my Americanism, a record shop as I'm in England now. He used to bring home... For my older brother, he'd bring home 78s, but for me it was you know, singles, basically. He had an incredibly... I was educated and brought up with an incredibly diverse sense of music, melody. He would play me everything from Ray Charles and Count Basie to Mozart, to Neil Diamond. He'd wake us all up blasting us with Neil Diamond. I remember I had my tonsils out when I was five, you know, he bought me a Beatles record. He bought me a Paul McCartney nylon string plastic guitar.
I think we all know, all of us who've got relatives or children, when you see. You know, as an adult now, when you see family members and children who are fascinated in something, whatever it is, taxidermy, motorcars, aviation, coding, my parents encouraged it. I suppose the biggest moment I remember was they bought me a Bush record player, which I just put the speakers on the floor. This was for a birth. I think I was about 12. Now I have my own record player.
My older brother for that birthday maybe I was 13, bought me, Don't Shoot Me I'm Only the Piano Player, the Elton John album. I just remember sitting cross-legged on my floor, obsessed with it, playing. You know, I studied everything from the music publisher through the musicians, the cutting engineer, I was obsessed. That album, that music, Daniel, Crocodile Rock's on that album. You know, it just changed my life. I was, you know, from around 13 to 16, completely just obsessed with music and genres and styles and completely open. You know, I go from... I love marches, the Radetzky March to Elvis. I suppose looking back on it, three years later, the punk scene arrived.
I'd gone from 14 to 16, and we lived in central London, we lived in Swiss Cottage. I was two bus stops, GBP 0.10 , whatever it was, ride away from Oxford Street and The Marquee and the 100 Club, and I fell into it and I was obsessed with it. I saw all of the famous bands of that era. Where I was geographically, demographically, I was looking back on it all conspired to actually work for me. I'm now 16, 17, completely engrossed in the scene. I started to meet musicians. I started to help them load their gear into the transit vans. I knew how to tune a guitar. I was amongst at that part of my life and my development, I was amongst my people.
I could always connect with inventors and creative people, and I loved ideas, and I loved listening to them. I've always been conscious of the significance of scenes and genres. Looking back on my career, it's how they've merged and morphed into technology. You know, my first main proper job, I was a talent scout. You know, in fact, my first job, I used to go and get the assistants the sandwiches, which I hated so much. I realized if I screwed up the order, then they wouldn't ask me again. I used to, I used to stand in line and put peanut butter when they want a banana or whatever. I'm still a talent scout now fundamentally.
Looking for ideas, looking for people, looking for sounds, looking for technologies, and that. As a talent scout, you have to be incredibly open-minded because it's about. You know, whenever there's been any disruption in music or sound or even technology, the someone, somewhere or something in the incumbency is petrified about it. I've never been scared of change. Yeah, long. Simple question, long answer.
Sure. You know, I think in every career, there's sort of a few key moments. What was your first, if you will, break where you saw actually you can make a living in the business?
Well, another bit of bad luck which we turned into good luck, or I did. I was knocked over on my bicycle when I was 13, the guy who was in the truck ran off, so it was hit-and-run . My father tracked him down, hired a lawyer, and basically I got GBP 4,000 compensation, which in those days.
Real money.
...was, you know, yeah. Moving forward to when I was around 18, I used that money. In fact, half of it I gave to my father to buy a car, and the rest of it I used to fund. I bought a tiny little Mini just to run around in, so I could go and see more bands. I fell into a studio scene with recording engineers. Well, they weren't really recording engineers. They were the guys that used to put the two-inch tape on the multi-tracks. Really, they were the guys that the rest of the musicians would order the pizzas with. Really, they were the pizza boys. But they had the keys to the studios.
In those days, there were no digital cameras and so on and so on. It was a sort of a burglar alarm and a big monkey lock. I got into a scene with these guys, the very junior guys, tape operators. This is. We'd source bands, find bands, connections, networks, relationships. They would go into the studios. They'd have the keys. We'd lift the gear into the studio with this band that we wanted to demo and to record, and we were sort of big players now because we had access to studio time. In those days, if you had access to studio time, you were God, right? You look at where the technology is now, 40, 45 years later, it's incomparable. No one could record then.
That was one of the higher barriers to entry that existed. On a recording desk, there's dozens, hundreds of settings and EQs and faders and so on and so on. We just, with tape and crayons, mark where the session had been the night before, and we'd record and get out by 5:00 A.M. before the cleaners came, and no one knew. One of the bands got some interest from Island Records, which is obviously now part of our group. I went down, and now I was. Punk bands, you know, everybody was signing punk. It's like hip hop to a certain extent, 20, 30 years ago. I was now manager of a recording producer. I hadn't got a clue.
I was on 10% of nothing. I went down, and I negotiated a production deal for this. This guy asked for GBP 4,000, and they gave it to me. Now I had GBP 400 and fell into more studios, more people. I don't know if any of you remember, there was a song by Johnny Mathis called "Never Too Late," and the two guys that wrote that were Australian, and that was number one in 1978. I started managing them, and they wanted to progress from being songwriters, come to London and be recording artists, you know, stars. We did more demos. I used the money. This is the time with the bicycle accident.
I used the money to fund myself as their manager, producer, what-whatever you call it. I took myself around Europe, and I'd made licensing deals for those tracks with individual companies. It was number one in Monte Carlo on Polydor Records, which of course, I, you know, 20 years later I ended up running one of them. The next phase is an industry organization. I don't think it exists anymore. It was called MIDEM. It's the equivalent of MIPCOM or Cannes Film Festival. I went down there. I flew down there, and I slept on someone's floor. I don't know if you've ever been 18 and been down at a conference like that. The drinks are incredibly expensive, and I don't drink alcohol anyway. I would...
You'd have to get to the bar early because by midnight there'd be literally 800 people in there at the Martinez down on the in Cannes. I would buy myself, I think it was FRF 7 , a squeezed lemon juice, and I'd use tap water from an old Pernod bottle that they had on the bar just to make myself look like I permanently had something drink. I wouldn't move from the bar. You know, there's dozens of people over, let's say, from 6:00 P.M. till midnight coming in and, you know, "Hi, what do you do? What have you got? You got anything for sale?" Have I got anything to buy? I built up a tiny miniature network. I flogged a couple of these tracks.
You know, I was in Italy and Holland and France, as I said. Now I was in the record business. Now I was in the music business. I was a big player. But I was also working in my father's shop at the weekends. Which I didn't like, really. He had a payphone downstairs. You used to put GBP 0.02 in it, and it would go click, click. I'd gotten hold of a directory, and I used to go down during my lunch break or whenever there was no one in the shop and just sort of constantly call people trying to find a job.
If any of you or any of your relatives are in a similar situation, I got very lucky 'cause I'm probably the most stupid person in the world. 'Cause what you shouldn't be doing on a Friday afternoon at 1:15 is ring the chairman of CBS, 'cause he's not gonna be there. He's gonna be at lunch. I was lucky. I got the only chairman of the record company that was sitting there answering his own phone. He was sitting, apparently having a sandwich. I gave him my story, what I'd done, the acts I'd seen, God, that's what I said. This was all from a payphone, you know, and the money would run out, so I'd had to put another GBP 0.10 in it.
Click, click, click. I felt like such an idiot. There was something in me and his ability. He said, "Come,"... "Come in and see me, kid." I went in to see him. I assumed that this would be, that was it. I was sorted. I went in, I talked to him. We talked a lot about pedigree and instinct and hunch and so on. I was still living with my parents then. I went home in this rickety old car that I bought from the bicycle accident money. At the end of the meeting, I said to him, "Well, what do I do? Where do I start? What do you want me to do?" This was the Chairman of CBS Records.
I mean, he was like God. This is just in, obviously in London. He said, "Well, I think, I think you're good. I think you're talented." He says, "I don't... All the good people end up at CBS. I don't really care whether or not you're here in," I think he said, "six days, six months or six years." My heart sank. Went home, there was a note on the fridge when I got home probably 45 minutes later saying, "Could you call..." I remember the woman's name, Phyllis Morgan. Could I call her? She was from the HR, it was called personnel in those days, the personnel department of CBS Records. That was the beginning of... I joined CBS, I was a talent scout in the music publishing division.
I spent the first seven or eight years of my career in music publishing.
Music publishing, when did you start focusing your energies on the recorded music business? Was that at CBS or was that-?
No. I'd been offered a job in the A&R department of CBS, the same guy who'd introduced me to or I'd found through, in the phone box, he wouldn't let me move to the A&R department of CBS because he said, "You just." You know, he said that you can't just pillage from department to department. I was very, very upset by that because in those days and, you know, the cutting edge of the industry was, it was on the recording side. They're two very, very separate, incredibly imaginative and creative businesses. It was. I decided I had to move, basically. I was at CBS for three or four years.
I got a bigger, better job elsewhere, and then I was given the opportunity to go into a record company as the Director of A&R, which was, you know, the sort of the Holy Grail of creativity at that age. I think I was the youngest Director of A&R probably in the industry. I was about 25 by then. Quite old.
Explain the A&R business circa age 25?
Um-
Elton John would come in, he'd play a song on the piano.
Yeah. When I was, the first band that I'd signed when I was at CBS Music Publishing was The Psychedelic Furs. I graduated, and I'd made deals for when I was at RCA, I'd signed the Eurythmics. I'd made a deal for the Pet Shop Boys. They'd come in. Chris had come in and played me West End Girls, effectively a demo of West End Girls, and I was hypnotized by it. I remember driving around Leicester Square in my car, just playing it on repeat. In those days, you know, you could. The cassette would come out, and then you'd press a button and put it back in. I just.
I was obsessed with this, with this song. Whilst I was actually there, it wasn't a hit. They put it out, it didn't work. The version that you probably all know came out, I think, in 1985-ish, was a re-record, that went on to be number one worldwide. I mean, there's so many artists that I've signed over the years.
It was just your ear. That was it. Was there any data or you could?
No, there wasn't really data then. I mean, I ended up calling one of the. Many years later, probably.
Okay. let's accelerate a bit.
Data then was what sneakers you wore.
Yeah.
I mean, it was that rudimentary.
You rose through the ranks pretty quickly once you, I guess Polydor, and then take us fairly quickly to rising to the top of Universal, if you can?
Um-
Why did that happen?
All right. I set up PolyGram Music in the crisis of piracy and the economic crisis of the 1980s. PolyGram, as was, in their wisdom, decided to sell Chappell Music, which was the world's largest music publishing company, for about GBP 80 million. It's worth several billion now, if not many billion. They had a holdback where they couldn't rebuild a music publishing business for 12 months after the sale. During that 12 months, the CD really started to take off, and there was a lot of light at the end of the tunnel. Bearing in mind that PolyGram was owned by Philips, so Philips is where, again, I understood the relationship between hardware and new technology and software.
By the way, Rick's my first investor ever. He's sitting on a table. You can sit on Sir Lucian's chair. There you go. Sorry.
Now I set up PolyGram Music. That was in 1986, and I stayed doing that, and I was asked to go in and be the Head of A&R of Polydor in 1992 or 1993. I made that jump. I was supposed to be doing that for about nine months or so. I was supposed to then move up to become Managing Director of Polydor. Unfortunately, I had a family tragedy, and I delayed that. I became Polydor Managing Director about three years later, about 1996. If you really want me to speed it up, I can do. I went from Polydor MD. Polydor was on its knees when I joined. It had two or three brands, products.
It was Lloyd Webber, who was brilliant, and is brilliant, and Van Morrison. It had no culture, it had no scenes, no categories, nothing. We put an entirely new team in there. We turned Polydor around. It ended up being the number one label in the U.K. probably about four years later. I was asked. I mean, there's lots of nuances in some of these moves, but I was asked to be Deputy Chairman of. We'd now become Universal, post-PolyGram Universal merger. I was asked to become Deputy Chairman of Universal, so I did that. I had all the record companies, classics and jazz, all the compilations, all of that reporting to me. I can't remember how much longer. Well, not that much longer after.
About a year, 18 months, I then became sole Chairman of Universal Music U.K., and I did that for four or five years, and then I was asked to be Chairman, and this is in around 2004, 2005, of Universal Music Group International, which is running all of the international global operations with the exception of the United States.
Let's jump to 2011.
Yeah. Yeah.
Music industry is in decline, fairly rapid decline from 2000.
Well, Yes, that's right. Yeah.
Two significant events happen. One, you acquire EMI, and two, Spotify is just beginning to seek to launch in the U.S., I think, or it's really early stages for Spotify. Take us there, and then we're gonna jump to the present.
Um, so in-
Obvious question is what gave you the confidence to make the largest acquisition in sort of music history at a time of industry decline?
I always saw 'cause I always believed I know, I know what music is, I know what it does, I know the significance in people's lives, that music has been around 1,000 years, and it'll be around for as long as the planet exists and whatever planet does exist. It's one of the reasons I'm so confident about the business, the company, how we monetize funnels, how we monetize all new technology that comes along, scenes that come along, the relationship between, you know, geographics, regions, different consumers, different audiences, different styles, tastes, beats, et cetera, et cetera. That's what I learned in that 5 or 6-year period when I ran the global company.
To your point, the marketplace was certainly in decline, and I remember I think it was EMI and Warners, they closed down a lot of operations, and I think they did a JV, 'cause there was nothing there. We had the scale, and I knew that continuing to invest in those local markets, local culture, local language, was important, even if we weren't making that much money, as long as it wasn't loss-making. Because we were at the beginning of what a telco world. You know, monotones were at the beginning.
I just felt confident that we could afford to do it and that we should do it, and that it would, as the market turned, and as consumers were able to listen to music in new ways, that we would be frankly, you know, ahead of the game, because we were still in, on the ground with people, with creative executives and infrastructure. We did a deal, it's probably around, I can't remember, 2005, 2006, with Nokia. They had a product called Comes With Music. We'd seen from around sort of 2001, when with iTunes and the iPod, we'd been disrupted enough with file sharing and piracy. It was file sharing was terrible.
We had no way of monetizing anything, any of the hardware. This comes back again to my experience where I'd seen the relationship between technology and hardware, as well as the scenes and the movements. We made this deal with Nokia, which was at the time, I think, you know, the number one telco in the world. We went to Holland, and we had a piece of the hardware. We had a fixed price of the hardware, the phone that slid like that.
The pioneering thing that there was with this product was that we had a piece of the hardware, but the bargain, so to speak, between us is that we would let them have to their consumer up to 3,000 songs stored on this phone. It was a phone for the first time that could store music unencumbered. There was no iTunes, there was no way of. It was the first all-that-you-could-eat subscription model.
I remember bringing it to, at the time, my bosses, in the U.S., and I had all the finance people and the bean counters pouring all over it and saying, "Well, what if it sells x number of phones and those people.
Stop buying records.
Well-
CDs.
It well, we they, CD was on what we now know was a terminal decline then, but we had about 90%-95% of our digital business in those days at that time on the download store. You know, when the iPod started, I don't think it did that well, and it was the download store. I remember being in Paris. We did a trade show there every year. I went over on the train to see him. I had lunch with him, and he showed me the download store. We were upstairs in his little room. It was like a scene from a Peter Sellers movie.
There's two of us in this tiny lift going up to his room and he showed me on his laptop.
Steve Jobs.
Yeah. It was a hallelujah moment because it was frictionless. What we learned from Nokia is that it wasn't frictionless. It was awful, because you had to log on to a website, and then you had to, like basically, some kind of code. If all of us remember the early days of the Internet, where travel agencies would say, you know, they were an Internet, an Internet company, and you'd, you'd send effectively an email through, and there'd be four people on the phone trying to book your flight. This was what that product was. It was so clunky. It was the beginning of the real relationship between the hardware and an all that you can eat model.
Of a different kind of pricing mechanism where we had to accept, we had to disrupt ourselves, and I had to bring the company with us, as well as the industry, frankly. It didn't matter if one person did, was able to download 3,000 songs on a phone. It wasn't actually $3,000 worth of revenue, because the song was $0.99 in those days or whatever. They were the early green shoots of what we now know as streaming, subscription, the access model, et cetera, et cetera. To bring it back to Spotify, as we know, Daniel founded it in Sweden. Comes to me, we were being obliterated by file sharing.
I'd spent my time in meetings at the time with Gordon Brown, Peter Mandelson, Angela Merkel, when she was just appointed in Germany, pleading our case. You know, we had bad law and this DMCA that wasn't protecting us in terms of usage, safe harbor, et cetera, et cetera. Again, a light bulb went off for me with Spotify, because at best, he could gain traction into a funnel in a subscription model, 'cause when we started, there was no subscribers. What I liked about it is it was ad funded, and it was virus free, legitimate, genuine licenses in terms of protecting our copyright and our IP. At worst, it was going to be anti- file- sharing.
We had a completely other game going on in terms of we did a lot of work with governments to make sure that with what was The Pirate Bay, another European company, ironically. I hope I'm allowed to talk about this. I just realized. Oh, God. We'll tell me it's in the past, I presume, so it's all right. We ended up. You know, the illegal file-sharing sites, illegal, were all being monetized by the major credit cards. We did an enormous campaign to work with the credit card companies so that they would stop monetizing so you could charge your illegal files onto a Visa or Mastercard. This is all part of this sort of journey to.
To the present
... to where we are today, which is it seems so obvious, it seems so easy. I remember again, going back to the CD, I can assure you, part of what we have to do is bring artists with us. We have to bring talent with us. They have to be confident in us. They have to trust us with these shifts in technology, as well as demographics. To the present, and I apologize if I sort of dart around. If you look at what we've done, where we work really focused specifically with Apple and Dolby with Spatial. I know that you've seen it. It's taken us 18 months to show, demonstrate, to show love to some of the talent community that this is actually the songs can sound different.
You can hear triangles and bells and kick drums on music in a different way. That's actually good. It's, you know, if past is prologue, which it is in some situations, it's exactly what I had to go through in 1985, 1986, 1987, which was when I had to convince our artists to record digitally because all the recording process was all analog, and analog is warm, and it's a bit fuzzy. Then we, digitally, it was incredibly crisp. You could hear plectrums, you could hear the horsehair on a violin string again. It was a change. Now, you know, we had a whole format where bringing the technology and bringing artists into it, we, I, you, completely take for granted. If you look at a stream now, if you look at an MP3 file, they're compressed.
you know, I'm fascinated in improving the quality of that sound. We've worked very well with Dolby. I mean, the investment, it was a substantial investment in terms of recording studios. You've seen some of it. It's a whole craft to it. That's another technological shift because the reality is, for all of us, there's always going to be some form of format fatigue. The relationship with the voice-activated with hardware, with Alexa, with obviously Amazon, Google, these are things.
What's interesting, if I can point out for a moment, is I would say technology was the enemy of the business from like, let's say 2000, about 2011, 2012.
Not for me, it wasn't.
At least financially, it destroyed the business. Really, the piracy did. The last decade, I would say technology has really been an enormous friend to the industry, right? The shift to streaming, you know, new formats.
You're right. It always has. You know, before all of me, us, when free-to-air radio came along, and big bands played, that was gonna be the end of the live audience. Every technological shift has always been. People don't like change, and has always concerned the incumbents, certainly those that were doing well. We've embraced that change. You know, I had huge battles internally at the time and probably even bigger battles in the U.S. In what we now know as the streaming subscription model, there are a lot of people who are protecting transactions. I couldn't allow that. I couldn't allow that.
Okay. If we take ourselves to the immediate present, there's also threats to the business. You know, AI, you know, ChatGPT can write a poem, so perhaps it can write lyrics, or certainly it can write lyrics.
Mm.
Is this a tool that artists will use to enhance the quality of their music, or is it a disruptive threat?
It's a very good question. I'm very aware of it. If you look at, I suppose synthesizers. When synthesizers came along, and you could play a polyphonic synthesizer and you could play with two hands the orchestral work of 40 musicians, there was panic there. I think if it sits alongside and within if there's a sound quality and it's an improvement, or can improve, or help individuals improve, but not detract from quality or authenticity, then fine. I'm open-minded about it. There was You know, look at the Moog, the Minimoog. You look at, I mean, all those records in the early 1980s, Human League and they were all made on something called a Fairlight.
You know, there's so many rock records that you've all listened to for many years where the snare sound is played on a keyboard. You wouldn't know that. There was one drummer made one sound. He was the drummer of Toto, and his name was Jeff Porcaro , and That sound was sampled and programmed into this Fairlight and That's that, you know. How many drummers do you think were absolutely petrified that just on a key, bang, bang, and so we've gotta be open-minded about it. I'm only really frankly interested in class and quality and whether or not it can actually help. It can help the creative process, so I'm open-minded about it.
One more technology question.
Yeah.
We'll get to the more human elements.
Yeah.
TikTok.
Mm.
Right? unbelievably explosive in terms of market share and participants and, you know, began as musical.ly, obviously enormously profitable business. A lot of that built off the backs of the music industry.
Yeah.
Apparently they're not paying their fair share. How does that get resolved over time?
There's so many of these movies I've seen before, Bill. You know, I mentioned various conversations that we had on digital legislation back in 1998, 1999 and 2000 in preparation for the millennium bang. You know, the industry, we, you know, we had the whole issue of DRM. That was a huge fight. People were gonna, you know, withdraw rights. That was digital rights management. I think that, I've got to be obviously careful what I say in terms of looking forward.
I see Will's shifting uneasily.
Yeah.
in his seat.
Yeah.
You've got a good question in front of you.
Yeah. I think that I'm confident. I like new funnels and our music, our genres, our demographics, you know, the disruption. You look up. You know, we're talking about Afrobeats. We're talking about the sounds and quality and the influence of Latin music. You look at J Balvin. You look at what's coming out of Korea at the moment. You know, biggest act was BTS. All of these things for me, all part of a big pattern that collide in terms of funnels, opportunity, the value of music and the relationship between all the data that we see now. I'll just give one little vignette, and again, our apologies, I'm sort of darting.
We had no real idea up until probably the last seven or eight years just how significant domestic repertoire was in Latin America. That was because of piracy and because of file sharing, because we had no data. There's no data to us on how many people were counterfeiting individual products, individual pieces of music, individual acts. The same with file sharing. When we legitimized and we had Apple, Amazon, YouTube, Spotify, obviously, we could see where this voracious appetite was. We thought that most of those markets were about English-speaking acts, you know, Queen, The Beatles, you know, the big superstar acts. Whereas actually what was going on underneath was that the new audience, the new market, the new consumers, they wanted new.
That's one of the reasons why we see this explosion of different genres coming from different countries that's moving all around the world. It's very exciting. I mean, you know, 'cause we operate in 200 countries. You know, we have our wholly owned businesses in around 70, 75. We're on the ground. We've got these networks. We have access to all these funnels. You know, when we talk about streaming and our business model, it's not just the four or five big players. You know, we literally license to hundreds of other companies locally on the ground in the Middle East, in India, all over the world.
It's exciting because we've got the scale, we've got the networks, we've got the creative people, we've been around, we continue to invest. you know, it can't be... We can take advantage, I believe, of the... There can't just be a few superstar acts that cater to 8 billion people.
Managing a global business, how can you both be helping sign Billie Eilish and managing Afrobeats and BTS? Explain the culture of Universal. You know, it seems to be an interesting combination of, you know, a lot of control by the guy running the show, but enormous amount of autonomy at the labels in terms of how the business is designed.
Yeah.
How do you motivate people? How do you run such a large business effectively?
It's obviously, you know, if you ask, I suppose, anyone that question, they'd say, great people. We attract and keep industry leaders. We're very decentralized. We're incredibly decentralized. We have multiple label system within countries, they've all got their own ability. You know, it's about culture. You know, I didn't sign Billie Eilish, you know, Interscope signed Billie Eilish. I brought the people in that make Interscope as great as it is. I hope that our culture of invention keeps entrepreneurs in the company, and that they culturally, they want to be with us, and they want to continue to do what they do. It's the same applies really everywhere else. You know, we're...
We have to be an organization of great characters, and they all have to count. Everybody who works for me has to count. They have to be able to count, and they have to be able to say no.
When I think of the spectrum of people that you deal with, even over the course of the day.
Mm-hmm
... could be a prime minister, could be regulators.
That's why I've got my suit on.
Yes. it could be a, you know, this enormous spectrum between Billie Eilish and Drake and Lil Baby and, you know, make your list of artists. maybe and then you deal with the likes of people like me.
Oh, how lucky.
How do you manage, you know, just. Also you're dealing with people with, you know, pretty strong perceptions of self. How do you do that effectively and make everyone feel good leaving the room and make deals and, you know, dealing with the CEO of Apple and Daniel Ek and negotiating and, how is that done? We need some advice. Last question.
Is that a personal question about me?
Yes.
I'm just me.
We need a little bit of the IP. What's the secret sauce, you know? Tell us a key success factor.
I'm probably fortunate enough to be completely, you know, miswired and cross-brained. It's the relationship between left and right brain. I can be as... You know, I panic when I have to take an aspirin. I've never drunk alcohol. I can be... I can have fun with talent, with artists, and I can connect with them. I always have done, and I always will be able to. That's... I love characters, I love people that think for themselves, I love backing people. My mother was a chartered accountant, and as what I said earlier, you know, I can say no, and I can count. It's difficult to talk about oneself, but, you know, it's quite unusual.
That's exactly what I want in all my senior executives, and that's what the culture of the company is. You know, to just talk about costs and P&L and how well run we run the business and so on and so on, that is of absolutely no interest to the artist community whatsoever. They wanna know that they're gonna be backed, covered, invested in. Investment comes in two forms, not only in terms of the risk, but also the capital to actually execute the work, to market it, to create short-form content, to make videos, to... You know, we spent over the years, you know, the ability with server farms and the ability for us to inject... Everything's taking, you know, investment and CapEx and so on.
They're not interested in that. It's in the same way that, you know, if you go upstairs and you have a meal here in the restaurant, you expect that the chicken is from, is from a good farm, and that you're not gonna get salmonella from it, and that when you walk into the elevator, you're not gonna fall down and break your neck. There are certain things that come, that from a cultural point of view are expected of us. It's our duty, it's our responsibility to the creative community, but also to the hardware and the technology businesses as well, and that's what we stand for.
I just wanna thank you. We've been a shareholder for only about 16 months, something like this.
Mm-hmm.
We have a billion reasons to thank you.
Sir.