The music industry doesn’t have a streaming problem. It has a customer ownership problem.

MBW Views is a series of op-eds from eminent music industry people… with something to say. The following MBW op/ed comes from Sammy Andrews. Below, she argues that Bill Ackman may be right about Universal Music Group – and still be wrong about the universe it sits within…

Pershing Square‘s proposed $64 billion bid for UMG rested on a familiar assumption: streaming keeps growing, pricing improves, and operating leverage does the rest. That is not an unreasonable position. Recorded music revenues are still rising. On the surface, the model is working.

But growth is not the same thing as structural health. And the structure is where the value is leaking.

The recorded music industry has spent a decade optimizing for access over ownership. It built a system that is very good at monetizing listening and very bad at monetizing belief. A passive listener and a deeply committed fan still collapse into broadly the same commercial outcome inside a subscription model.

The person who streams occasionally and the person who would spend ten times more, given the right product, are treated as the same customer… until they leave the platform and spend their money somewhere else.

That is not a discovery problem. It is not a pricing problem. It is a failure to build a system that captures the full value of fan behavior. And it wasn’t accidental. The record industry didn’t lose control of the fan relationship. It traded it.

Streaming saved the business when it was a survival move, made from a position of weakness, and it worked. The industry stabilized. Revenues recovered. Growth returned.

But you could argue that the terms of that rescue were set during a crisis, and they have not been meaningfully renegotiated since. For predictable revenue, global scale, equity stakes, reduced piracy risk, labels and rightsholders accepted opacity in exchange. Contra deals, limited visibility into recommendation systems, limited control over data, limited ability to follow the customer from discovery to transaction. None of it stopped the top line rising, so none of it was forced to change.

That context matters. The industry is no longer in crisis. It is still growing. And it is now negotiating from a position it did not hold 20 years ago. The question is whether it uses that position, or continues operating on broad terms that were set when it had no leverage at all.

The music rights industry tends to think in revenue streams. The platforms think in customer journeys. That gap is where the value moved, and where it has stayed.

“The industry thinks in revenue streams. The platforms think in customer journeys. That gap is where the value moved, and where it has stayed.”

Streaming royalties are still mostly paid pro-rata and not by what individual subscribers actually listen to. A superfan generating 40 hours of monthly listening to one artist is worth almost the same to that artist’s royalty share as someone who streams casually. Their intensity is economically diluted. The system rewards share of volume, not depth of connection.

And the pool itself is under pressure: tens of thousands of AI-generated tracks are now being uploaded to streaming platforms daily, hollowing out the royalty pool from below while the system’s structural distortions compress it from above. Volume is getting cheaper. Attention is getting thinner. That trade now looks different. Because the monetization gap is no longer theoretical. It is visible in how the system actually works.

Labels (and increasingly managers) fund discovery through marketing and social spend. Platforms monetize that discovery through advertising. Labels (and ultimately their artists) then pay again to reach those same fans inside streaming platforms via promotional tools. Fans convert – if they convert at all – outside the platform, through ticketing or commerce. And many platforms take a cut of that transaction too, in affiliate payments.

The same money is being taxed at every stage. The same fan is being resold multiple times. The industry is effectively paying rent on its own demand. That loop is not a flaw in the system. It is the system.

The smart artist teams are investing in CRM and community, but that doesn’t change the poor infrastructure where their entire global fanbase consumes their work.

Spotify‘s promotional suite monetizes the platform’s knowledge of fan intent by selling targeted access back to the labels and artists who created those fans. Spotify also reported facilitating more than $1 billion in ticket sales cumulatively to date.

The links embedded in artist pages are affiliate links, carrying platform identifiers that earn commission on each sale. The platforms have already built the fan conversion layer in places, but it is worlds away from working properly.

YouTube operates much the same arrangement on the same inventory and now sits upstream of a generative model in Lyria that is already being deployed across consumer and enterprise products. The same system that hosts music is now capable of producing it, informed by the behavioral data it has accumulated over a decade. And many rights-holders are paying Amazon – arguably one of the most effective conversion platforms ever built, which also has all our listening data – to sell your own vinyl back to your own audience.

At the same time, labels are paying cash for the social discovery that feeds the whole system — into platforms that generate tens of billions in advertising revenue from music audiences the industry created and cannot own. TikTok alone is forecast to generate $34.8 billion in global ad revenue in 2026, with 75% of users reporting they discover new music there.

Music streaming continues to grow. But a smaller share of the value created by fandom ends up with the people who create it. This is displacement, not collapse.

Now that funnel is under political pressure, and not just theoretically. Australia became the first country in the world to enact a full social media ban for under-16s. By January 2026, more than 4.7 million accounts had been deactivated.

France is advancing legislation to block under-15s, Spain is proposing similar restrictions. And at EU level, coordinated age verification and minimum age thresholds are under active discussion. The UK is exploring access limits and curfews under the Online Safety Act.

The specifics vary, but the commercial implication is consistent: the top of the discovery funnel is narrowing. The age cohort being restricted is precisely the one the industry depends on for early-stage fan development – the 12-16 window where genre identity forms, artist loyalty takes root, and lifetime listening habits are established.

Friction at that stage does not just reduce reach, it delays the entire pipeline. The direction of travel is clear: less access, more friction, less scale. The industry built its growth model on rented land. Regulators are now questioning the landlord.

AI sharpens all of this further. The risk is not that AI replaces artists. It is that it makes passive listening cheaper, more abundant, and more interchangeable. As supply increases, the value of functional listening decreases. What becomes more valuable is what AI cannot replicate: trust, identity, attachment, fandom.

The industry has spent a decade building a system structurally under-equipped to monetize exactly that. That is the uncomfortable truth. The current system benefits the platforms most. It also benefits the largest rightsholders enough that the urgency to rebuild it has never quite matched the rhetoric.

The superfan conversation is once again where this becomes most obvious. Superfans aren’t rare; what’s rare is infrastructure that allows them to spend and convert properly.

Gaming is often cited as the model here, and there are genuine parallels: the highest-value users are not averaged out, they are designed for, with identity, status, and progression driving disproportionate revenue from a small percentage of players.

But the analogy has limits that matter. Games monetize whale spending because the product is interactive and the status goods are visible within a shared environment. Your Fortnite skin is a social signal. Your Spotify library, for most people, is not.

While social in places, music consumption is largely private, and the mechanics of visible status and progression do not transfer one-to-one. That does not mean the principle is wrong, it means the implementation has to be different.

Music’s version of this will not look like loot boxes or battle passes. It will look like access, proximity, and identity: things fans already pay for in fragmented, inefficient ways through live shows, merch drops, fan clubs, meet-and-greets, and limited pressings. The infrastructure gap is not in demand, it is in aggregation.

Tencent Music illustrates part of what is possible: more than 20 million users paying materially above the base subscription for enhanced access, interaction, and status. But it also illustrates the difficulty. That model grew out of a specific cultural infrastructure – digital tipping through virtual gifting, a consumer norm around micropayments and parasocial spending that has no direct equivalent in the West.

Chinese users were already trained to spend on social status within digital platforms before music streaming arrived. The Western market does not have that foundation. The behavior exists, fans will overspend for the right product (hello ticket pricing), but the cultural plumbing around micropayments, status-driven digital spending, and in-app social signaling is far less developed.

Building it will require more than bolting a “superfan tier” onto an existing subscription product. It will require designing new products that create and surface the social value of fandom in ways that feel native, not imported.

The industry has tried to fix this before. In the early digital era, every major built its own storefront, its own walled garden. They all failed – not because the technology was wrong, but because fans do not have loyalty to a major label. They never did.

The brand that matters, the one people follow across platforms and pay a premium for, is the artist. Any infrastructure that does not center that relationship will repeat the same mistake.

Which brings us to the industry’s dreaded c-word: Collaboration. Not between labels and platforms – that conversation has been had to death and produced very little. The collaboration that actually matters is with the people closest to the fan: artists, managers, promoters. But “collaborate more” is not a strategy, it is a sentiment. So what does the infrastructure actually look like?

“The industry is not short of superfans. It never has been. It is short of the infrastructure and the will to treat them as customers.”

The answer is not to out-own the platforms. It is to build something with the people who hold the audience’s trust that the platforms cannot replicate. That means labels have to stop treating the fan relationship as something to be seized and start treating it as something to be earned jointly, with the artists and teams who create and sustain the connection in the first place.

It also means being precise about what needs to change at platform level. Royalty reform is one lever. Data access and portability is another. Transparency around recommendation, promotion and affiliate economics is a third. These are not interchangeable asks. They require different pressure and different conversations.

The industry is not short of superfans. It never has been. It is short of the infrastructure and the will to treat them as customers.

Fandom is the only part of this business that is not interchangeable. Everything else is becoming software. The platforms understand that.

The economics will resolve this either way. The only question is who they resolve it for, and at what cost.