Rian Liebenberg: Why I joined Kobalt
Almost nine months into his tenure as Kobalt’s Chief Technology Officer, Rian Liebenberg, looks back over his motivation to join the business and why he chose to lead Kobalt into a new era of technology development.
I’ve had the great privilege to work in many interesting companies and industries over the past 2+ decades. With experience comes a realisation of what is important. Spoiler alert: it’s never about the amount of money you make, or the size of the team, or the title, or how popular/sexy the brand is. It basically boils down to 4 things that I need in any role I commit myself to.
They’re not rank ordered and are mutually inclusive:
1/ be passionate about the potential impact your products and services can have on society at large
2/ work and surround oneself with intellectually curious and smart folks
3/ continue learning and developing at a personal level
4/ rapidly build and grow teams — and a business — at a global scale
Let’s break these down into more detail in the context of Kobalt.
Be passionate about your impact
Kobalt’s mission is to bring trust, transparency and technology to the music industry. This is a noble mission focused on empowering creators in today’s digital age. Creators in this context are artists, songwriters, and anyone involved in creating and distributing music to listeners and fans.
We all love music. Some more than others, but music forms a very strong and personal bond with each and every one of us. There are songs that stay with us for a lifetime and are deeply embedded in our memories — moments of joy, of sadness, of longing and of celebrating. While the music and the artists/writers/producers that create these songs we cherish are very personal to us, we tend to be unaware about how artists go about creating music and how these creators get rewarded.
As technology continues to disrupt every part of our lives and becomes increasingly entrenched in everything we do, music’s daily presence in our lives continues to change as well. It’s no longer restricted to the radio when we happen to wake up in the morning or drive to work, or the album we think about listening to when we sit down to dinner at night. Thanks to the power of the internet, smartphones and wearables, we now have instant access to not only to our favourite artists, their songs, and the albums we love, but unlimited access to a wide variety of music that we can explore at any given time of the day and on a variety of different devices. As technology continues it’s rapid evolution, we’re also no longer constrained by the familiar. We can discover a range of different artists we may never have had the pleasure to encounter before, and quicker than ever. As I write this, I asked Google Assistant to “play saxophone jazz” and in a matter of seconds, I got “My Girl, Smooth Saxophone Jazz” playing — a track I would never have dreamed of searching for or browsing through a catalogue.
This is all wonderful, but have we stopped for a second to think how the creators who wrote and performed the music get rewarded? If you want to get a glimpse of how obscure and corrupt the industry is, you should spend ~80 minutes of your life and watch the documentary “Searching for Sugar Man” a story about a 70’s US artist called Rodriguez who became a huge hit in South Africa but never got paid. Nor did he know of his own success. Times may have changed a lot, and undoubtedly someone like Rodriguez would have greater awareness of his success in a far-flung country, but the sad reality is that there are still quite a lot of deliberate hurdles put in place by record labels, publishers and societies that prevent artists and songwriters from getting paid for their work. The result? We all get deprived of the great talent that forms part of the story of our lives.
Kobalt is the only company in the world built precisely to address this issue — to bring transparency and fairness into an industry famed for obscurity and secrecy. We are what you might describe as “a disruptor.” One only has to look at the illustrious list of artists and writers on Kobalt’s roster to realise that they are succeeding in their mission. If big name artists don’t do it for you, look at their astronomical growth in terms of music publisher market share. In 2018 Kobalt rose to a steadily placed #2 in US Music Publisher market share, behind Sony, who had acquired EMI earlier that year to be #1.
Kobalt is replicating its established success in Music Publishing now in the Recordings business. We’re rapidly building out our recordings business (AWAL) to identify, grow and establish the next generation of artists. AWAL has already seen early success with artists such as Lauv, Rex Orange County, R3hab and Tom Misch. The goal? To establish a solid “middle class” of artists who can earn enough from their craft to make a living. The Recordings industry is set to grow to ~$80bn by 2030, and at the heart of this is the dramatic change in how consumers discover and engage with artists and their work. CD/Record sales (both physical and digital) are tumbling, while streaming is growing exponentially. The effect of this means a greater ability to discover and engage on a single recordings level instead of committing to an entire album.
There is also the AMRA Digital Society business, which is the only global digital collections society that enables artists and songwriters to get paid much faster, and up to 3–4x more than traditional means. AMRA does this by abstracting music companies away from the complexities of having to deal with many local entities (with different systems, formats, reporting schedules, etc.).
Surround yourself with diverse, curious people and always being learning
A noble mission is all good and well, but a key contributing factor to continuous growth and development of oneself in your chosen profession is the ability to surround yourself and work with diverse and intellectually curious individuals.
I’ve had the great privilege to work with many smart people, from early-stage entrepreneurs who built wildly successful businesses in the “web1.0” era, to some of the smartest minds who created Chrome, AdWords, AdSense, Hangouts, and the legendary infrastructure that powers Google, all the way to gaming pioneers and folks who have defied gravity in successfully growing online media businesses. I’ve learnt an incredible amount from the people I’ve worked with, and regardless of the industry, location or product, the constant factor that has shaped my professional life and enabled me to gain invaluable experience has been that I’ve always been surrounded by diverse and intellectually curious individuals.
At Kobalt, we benefit from a professionally diverse workforce — people with deep-rooted knowledge and experience of the music industry working alongside and collaborating with deep technical expertise to achieve our overall ambition. We are, after all, a technology-focused music company.
Build teams and a business at a global scale
Our Technology team is a diverse group — of background, experience and skills. As the industry and music consumption continue to grow at a rapid pace, we are scaling our team quickly to solve a myriad of new and interesting challenges. Growing teams brings its own set of non-trivial challenges, especially when growing product teams. They need to be multi-disciplined, and flexible in size to account for early stage experimentation and prototyping. Teams must also be nimble enough to quickly absorb additional members as products gain traction and related complexity increases.
With the rapid rate of change in technology and the skills product teams need to master, organisational frameworks need to accommodate for this. Dual track career ladders that encourage and promote deep technical expertise alongside people leadership are a proven and well understood approach in the leading Technology companies such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and IBM, who have all successfully scaled product organisations and maintained agility and speed in execution, in spite of the overall size of their product organisations. I was fortunate enough to witness the beauty of this approach during my time at Google, during a time where we went from ~1,000 engineers globally to ~20,000 engineers in 6 years!
Our technology stack is equally diverse. It ranges from modern, cloud-based technologies such as Scala, Spark, ElasticSearch, React, Node.js, etc all built on top of AWS (Airflow, Fargate, containers, etc), to more traditional technologies such as Java, and Oracle. Like most businesses that have been around >5 years, we carry the burden of some technical debt, which makes for an exciting time to join us, since proven products built on legacy technologies need re-imagining
We continue to seek innovative ways to evolve our technologies to meet the demands of an exponentially growing business in an exponentially growing industry. We are continuously exploring new(er) technologies, whether it be the effective use of AI (Machine Learning, NLP, or Music Information Retrieval), or rethinking the relationships of data between artists and songwriters to recordings using graph databases, or potentially Blockchain technologies. The need for continuous experimentation and utilisation of an ever-evolving technology landscape is critical for enabling Kobalt to remain at the core of digital music disruption.
While Kobalt is no longer classified as a “start-up” (i.e. brand new, and yet unproven) it’s most definitely a “scale-up.” We’re a business with a proven model that is rapidly scaling up and taking market share from the incumbents in both Publishing and Recordings, and in a unique position to capitalise from the exponential growth that the industry as a whole is currently experiencing. From a revenue perspective, our “start-up” Recordings business is growing almost 60% YOY, while our “established” Publishing business is growing at an industry high 16–20% YoY (where other established Publishers are growing 5–7%).
With this rapid growth comes interesting scale challenges. We need to continuously seek automated and scalable approaches to serve this growth, and continuously seek new opportunities to differentiate and disrupt the industry. There is a myriad of interesting and complex technical challenges to solve that remain core to our mission and make use of technology in smart, innovative ways.
Come help us build the music industry of tomorrow and remain true to our noble mission.
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Find out more about Kobalt and how we’re changing the music industry on our website.
