Top Music Lawyer Talks AI, Independence & Radiohead’s Lesson

At a moment when the broader music industry is working to figure out direct-to-fan monetization, independent infrastructure and community building, electronic music is a sector that’s already been doing all of this for decades.

“I think electronic music shows the way, in so many ways, that the rest of the music industry isn’t spending enough time looking at,” Fluet said. “There’s so much more that the music industry could and should be learning.”

Fluet made the case that the superstar DJ model — an artist showing up with a USB, playing to thousands of people, collecting ticket revenue and building a devoted fanbase with minimal traditional industry infrastructure — is essentially the direct monetization blueprint the broader industry is now trying to replicate. “It’s a $15 billion scene, up 7%,” Fluet noted of the global dance industry’s 2025 valuation, “and it has always been about that direct monetization.”

He also argued that electronic music is better positioned than most genres for what comes next. Its catalogs are younger on average — a 2005 average age versus 1990 for other genres — meaning there’s more room for growth. And while AI poses real disruption risks to recorded music broadly, the club, the DJ and the live scene create what Fluet called “a moat” around electronic music’s core value. “Once these technologies are [widespread], the opportunities to monetize are protected and the downside is mitigated,” he said.

His conclusion: “What works in the clubs today will tend to reach the rest of the business tomorrow.”

For a long time, being independent in the music industry was understood as either being signed to a major label or not. That definition, Fluet argued, is increasingly obsolete.

“Independence isn’t a size,” he said. “It’s really about who controls your rights, who controls your data, and who controls your fans.” He argued that the real test of all three comes down to a single question: “Who owns the rights? Who sees the data? Can you leave?”

“If you can’t take your rights and data with you,” Fluet continued, “you are just another rental model.”

He argued that this distinction matters more than ever as the infrastructure of the music industry consolidates around a handful of major players. He also observed that something interesting is happening on the independent side, noting that when the European Commission approved UMG’s purchase of Downtown this past February, it required the sale of Curve, the royalty platform used by many of the independents. Merlin and Jaimy Capital subsequently bought it together this past August.

Fluet sees this as a significant shift. “Independents have moved from negotiating together to owning together,” he said. This is a meaningful evolution for what was essentially a licensing body “turning much more into that kind of rights engine.”

Fluet argued that managers — long seen, as he said, as being in the “commission business” or the “babysitting business” — are emerging as something more consequential: the custodians of artist trust in a market that increasingly runs on consent.

“In an AI market built on consent, the manager is often the one who gives it,” Fluet said. His point was that as voice and likeness become standalone assets — he cited Lionel Richie as one artist who has moved to trademark his own voice — the person who controls consent controls the license. And in most cases, that person is the manager, who is often an artist’s closest and most trusted business associate.

This thinking potentially reframes what management companies are actually worth. As an example, Fluet noted that a generation ago, people said that in terms of advertising agencies, all the value “goes up and down in the elevator” — meaning it walks out the door with the people, leaving nothing behind.

Fluet has heard the same said about management, but he thinks that view is increasingly wrong. “If trust is the scarcest asset in the AI market,” he asked, “could managers be holding a lot of that?”

Fluet noted that Live Nation reported a record 49 million fans in a single quarter this year and sold more than 143 million tickets by mid-July. And yet, he argued, the industry is seemingly indifferent to what that activity could tell them about their most valuable asset: the fan.

“I think that ticketing data and fan data has the opportunity to become the most valuable data set in music,” he said, noting that there’s more data the business could be harvesting. When someone buys a concert ticket, Fluet noted as an example, there are often four, five or six people in that transaction — the friends, family members and partners who will use one of the tickets being purchased — but the industry typically only registers one buyer. “That’s a huge gap that I find venues to be quite uninterested in for some reason,” Fluet said.

His conclusion is that ticketing and fan data have the opportunity to become the most valuable data sets in music. To illustrate how far behind music is on this, he offered a comparison. “I work with a car company that has 20 people that measure the sound that a door makes when it shuts, because that’s one of the key reasons people will buy a car,” he said. “There’s a whole buying journey — which member of the family has to come into it? Is it safe? Is it fast? That’s what [the auto industry goes] into.

“Are we looking at fan bases? Are we looking at consumers? Are we segmenting them in this way?” he continued. “I’m not seeing it. I’m seeing lots of streaming activity, lots of consumption. But actually wanting to understand the fan? Not so much.”

For years, a defining move in the music industry has been buying catalogs — acquiring the rights to songs and collecting the royalties they generated. That’s still happening, but Fluet argued that there’s been a shift in the deals that matter most right now.

“Owning songs is no longer the same as running them or optimizing them,” Fluet said. The acquisitions that are actually defining this moment aren’t just catalog plays — they’re infrastructure plays. This year alone, that’s meant Downtown Music Holdings going to UMG for $700 million plus, Kobalt selling to Primary Wave and DistroKid being acquired by CVC Capital Partners.

“These are systems as well as just catalogs,” said Fluet, referring to the software, data infrastructure and royalty tracking machinery that sits underneath the music and manages how value flows through it. With Primary Wave’s acquisition of Kobalt, for example, they’re not just getting more rights — they’re getting what Fluet calls “a rights engine.”

“Typically they were out there buying catalogs, buying rights, buying estates,” he said. “They’re realizing that having that engine — the railway tracks of that value — is absolutely essential.”

He continued that companies that were once dismissed as plumbing — the boring infrastructure underneath the glitzy music business — are now being recognized as carriers of significant value in their own right. “Scale in the music industry used to mean just songs,” Fluet said. “Now it means actually understanding and owning those pipes that go underneath it.”

The implications are significant. “Whoever controls the data controls the deal, and value is going to increasingly follow proof,” he said. In other words, the rights engine now matters as much as the rights themselves, with Fluet arguing that the companies that understood this earliest are the ones now making the most consequential moves.