Pacenotes: What BTS, K-Pop and Chance the Rapper Have in Common with Social Tokens

There is perhaps no bigger band on the planet today than BTS. The numbers are staggering — the band is believed to contribute more than $3.5 billion to South Korea’s economy annually.

BTS is signed to the record label Big Hit, which went public in a blockbuster listing in October. Fans of BTS and Big Hit’s other artists bid $50 billion in a flotation that was 1,000 times oversubscribed.

Big Hit’s founder, Bang Si-Hyuk is now a billionaire and among South Korea’s richest people. The secret sauce to all this success, many analysts say, is the fact that BTS has cultivated and harnessed a deeply loyal global fan base, who call themselves ARMY.

ARMY’s millions of members coordinate themselves to translate material, stream songs, buy tracks and merchanise and even pay for advertising in service of BTS, according to the New York Times. It’s this fandom that investors are buying when they buy Big Hit shares.

I wanted to explore the BTS and ARMY phenomenon with Tim Ingham, the founder and publisher of Music Business Worldwide, a key trade title read by executives across the industry. It’s a wide-ranging interview, so I wanted to highlight several deep insights from Tim:

• Emotion drives ownership, so fans like owning shares in Big Hit, because it gives them the psychological satisfaction of feeling ownership in their favourite band.
• Major artists are already experimenting with owning their own communities, and cutting out the major labels, with Chance the Rapper being the trailblazer here.
• Startups in the music industry are already building tools to let fans invest in artists directly, without a blockchain component.
• Think of artists getting equity in a record label the same way tech company employees get options in a startup.
• Major labels are not in a position to share equity with artists, but independent labels are already experimenting with this model.

Read the whole conversation with Tim below:

I thought we could start by talking about the Big Hit IPO because I think it gives us a window into this idea of the relationship between artists and fans getting financialized. So for starters, what do you think of the Big Hit IPO? You’ve written quite a bit about this at Music Business Worldwide.

Gosh, we could talk about this particular example all day. So one of the criticisms that the “Western” music companies might level at Big Hit and and other successful companies in the K-Pop world is that they seize more rights and more control of an artist’s destiny than even you know, the “worst” deal you would see in the pop industry in the United States. For example Big Hit openly talked about the fact that one of their great successes has been their ability to effectively use BTS as a brand without the band, without the band having any control over [the uses]. That’s why you end up with BTS avatars or cartoons in, you know, dishwasher powder commercials and so on. Big Hit have contractually obtained control to [BTS’] name and likeness and their music and on and on.

So on the one hand, because [this arrangement] seems to reduce the power of the artist to a degree that we don’t even see in any major label I can think of in in the US or Europe. But on the other hand, the Big Hit IPO has given an artist equity in a large-scale music company. Now to the best of my knowledge, in terms of the major labels, the major record companies and major publishers, which are all part of the same corporate structures — there’s three of them, Universal Music Group, Sony Music Group and Warner Music Group — to the best of my knowledge, artists have never been given any equity in those companies.

So that’s interesting, because, you know, we talk a lot on in the music industry about the power balance between rights holders, labels, and publishers and artists and songwriters, and how that works out. So it could be argued on the one hand, that Big Hit have taken more power than ever away from the artist, in the way that they create their music, in the way that their music is marketed, and in the way that their brands are exploited for commercial gain. But on the other hand, they have empowered the artists in a way that we don’t see in the Western industry, by giving them direct equity in the market-tested financial worth of the company they’re signed to.

There was a great piece in MBW about how Big Hit uses “indirect artist involvement” to spin off a lot of new products using the same intellectual property. Do you think the model of giving artists equity in record labels is something that firms in the US or Europe should be looking at?

The relationship that Big Hit has with BTS is something of an anomaly in the global blockbuster music industry. And that’s because from my perspective — and I don’t want to upset any fans here— Big Hit understands BTS, the audience so well, you could even argue they understand the audience better than BTS themselves. And there is no other example of that in the blockbuster music industry in the US or Europe right now. Universal Music Group or Republic Records don’t understand Taylor Swift’s fan base better than Taylor Swift does. Universal Music Group and Def Jam certainly don’t understand Kanye West’s fan base better than Kanye West does. So that leads to a different dynamic whereby the artist both contractually, but also practically, trusts in the corporate entity to promote and exploit their brand of music in a way that is natural and appealing to a huge fan base.

And because of that, because of that dynamic, that’s why the WeVerse idea (Big Hit’s technology platform and app for its artists) works so well, because, you know, it’s a direct-to-fan platform. That is already more successful than any direct-to-fan initiative that the likes of Universal and Sony Music Group have set up so far. And again, that comes back to this symbiotic understanding and relationship directly between the fans and Big Hit themselves. The other hugely smart thing that Big Hit are doing there is they are building a digital communication and social platform to promote music long into the future, to an audience built off the back of BTS’ popularity, and they’re doing it without the need to turn to Facebook, or Google or Amazon or any other distribution and communications channel that you would arguably need to become a successful superstar in in the example of any other artists that comes to mind.

So, you know, there’s a lot heck of a lot of discussion around the Big Hit IPO: Whether or not this is a long term proposition. The fans of BTS were able to buy into BTS, you know, it’s almost like buying a T-shirt, but you’re not, you’re buying stock. And there’s a gamification element of that where the fans get to see whether the stock is going up or down, and they get into a discussion or they get to influence the share price—how exciting is that? Once upon a time it was only analysts and media like Music Business Worldwide that will be able to influence that share price. There’s always a thrill to the power that comes with that and now that power has been put in the hands of those fans.

The bearish point of view on the Big Hit IPO was that they are so reliant on BTS’ revenues right now. So WeVerse is the perfect example of how Bang (Bang Si-Hyuk, Big Hit’s founder) and Big Hit believe that they can build a fan universe into which they can see artists in the future. So this would be like Apple Corpsin the ‘60s, building a fan environment beyond any physical retail element and beyond any other record label that then allowed Apple Corps to seed other artists of the popularity of the Beatles that simply wasn’t possible at that time. It is possible now. And it’s a bit of an experiment taking place in public whether or not Big Hit can do it.

But again, you know, I have faith that they will be able to do it. Maybe not to the extent of BTS, but maybe they can have multiple acts that are half as popular as BTS. And the main reason for that is because they and Bang in particular understands the audience, arguably better than the artist does, and arguably better than anyone else in the industry does.

I was just reading this New York Times piece on the Big Hit IPO and they talked to a 22-year-old fan who will be buying shares for the first time ever, and they’re going to be Big Hit shares. This leads me to an earlier reading I did on football shares and fans, and the authors of that paper were remarking that fan-investors seem irrational because they hold the stock no matter what the result is.

I think it isn’t any less rational than Spice Girls superfans running out to watch the Spice Girls movie at the cinema and overpaying for Spice Girls crockery and overpaying for, you know, Spice Girls bedspreads and on and on. The difference with the stock is it’s the same with the football club idea, it gives you a a lasting feeling of ownership, of a granular ownership, of a tiny piece of something that you love.

The other element, of course, is the sort of confluence of circumstances where you have platforms that not only make it much easier for younger people and fans to legally invest in stocks and shares, like eToro is an obvious one, but they actually present themselves in a gamified way where you’re a “bronze” investor, and then you’re a “silver” investment, then a “gold” investor.

Then the other thing is, you think about the tech giants. Why do the likes of Google and Facebook give relatively senior employee stock on the day that they sign up and become part of the company? Well, obviously, part of that is because it keeps you tied to the company. So you know, it keeps you thinking like, well, there’s going to be an event. So Spotify is an obvious example: There’s going to be an IPO. And if I stay at this company, and hold on to my stock, I’m going to participate in that in some sense. And I’m going to enrich myself in some sense. So you’re probably less likely to leave the company. So there’s a sort of enforced loyalty there.

The other part of it is, in pandemic times, where it’s much harder, I think, for a top-down organization to convince individual employees and executives, that they’re part of the fabric of a global team; that they’re not individuals. What does them stock in the company make them feel? And again it’s about— it’s an emotional trick. It’s not just about the personal enrichment, it’s feeling like they own a little piece of the thing. It doesn’t matter that the C-suite is actually going to get 80% of the kickback when the event happens, it doesn’t matter. What matters is it makes you feel like you own a little piece of it and that makes you feel part of the team and in BTS’ case it makes you feel even more part of the ARMY.

So I think they’re using psychological rewards that have been tried and tested in the corporate world. They’re just applying them to fandom and I think it’s very, very smart and the fact that BTS superfans are buying stock also proves the medium-term value of that stock to institutional investors who are also investing. So there’s there’s a sort of a circular dynamic. It’s a benefit to the standing of BTS and their popularity; a benefit to Big Hit; a benefit to the fans and a benefit to institutional investors. So it’s just perfectly balanced.

And the moment it isn’t perfectly balanced is the moment that those fans, their belief in and love of BTS starts to wane. People that were buying Spice Girls and overpaying for Spice Girls crockery and bedspreads when they were 13 are not paying over the odds for Spice Girls crockery or bedspreads when they’re 35 unless they’re doing so ironically for a birthday party. But you know, I mean that’s the danger. That’s the big issue that Big Hit has to overcome. It’s effectively the growing up and and the additional — I don’t want to be patronising, but certainly with the young fans of BTS— the additional complications that come with adult life. You just don’t have the time or the headspace to apply as much love to an entity that isn’t in your immediate surroundings in your immediate family or in your immediate professional life. So you know, they’ve got to overcome those things. But I do think it’s incredibly clever way to give fans that psychological feeling of granular ownership.

On the point of stock ownership, Bang made a big point about giving some of his shares to BTS band members. He’s a billionaire now and one of the richest people in South Korea, and the BTS members got, I think, eight figures. Obviously it’s a smart strategic move, but is there something we can extrapolate from that for creator models at large?

Well, this is what’s unique. Big Hit’s biggest vulnerability, the idea that it’s over reliant on BTS, is also the biggest strength in the company being able to do that. Let’s say [Universal Music Group’s] five biggest selling artists of the last quarter, a hypothetical example would be Taylor Swift, Drake, a couple of catalogue artists, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and, you know, a classical artist from Australia that I’ve never heard of. Even if Universal Music Group IPOed, which its current parent Vivendi is planning to do in 2022, how could you possibly decide between those five artists, let alone the thousands of artists that are bringing in revenue every single day from streaming consumption into that company that are generating those revenues? So it was a unique case that Big Hit was able to to bring BTS into the IPO in the way that Bang did.

And then you start to get into the discussion of did he give them enough? Yeah, as you point out, he’s a billionaire. You know, [BTS members] shared about $50 million or so depending on the currency conversion. I suppose Bang’s answer to that might be, he didn’t have to give them anything. They are obviously under a holistic and wide ranging and fairly stringent contractual terms with Big Hit, we can see that in the commercial behaviour of the company. So, you know, the fact that he chose to give them close enough to $10 million each out of the IPO… it is crumbs off the table, but they’re very tasty crumbs. So it’s a debate that could rage for days.

From one perspective, the company owes everything to the artist. The artist is everything and the artist’s brand is everything. Eighty percent of everything Big Hit’s ever achieved commercially, will come from the BTS engine and the faces and actions and output of those boys. On the other hand, Big Hit has provably engineered a huge amount of that. You just have to look at “Dynamite” which I believe is BTS’ biggest global hit, certainly the biggest English-language global hit. I’m sorry to say I might get in trouble with this with the ARMY but it’s just a fact, unless they want to change it on Wikipedia. [Dynamite] wasn’t written by a single member of BTS and it wasn’t produced by a single member of BTS, it was actually written and produced by two fairly unknown songwriters who have been plucked by Big Hit, because they’ve obviously found they’ve got the correct ingredients to create a smash that works globally and works in the US. And lo and behold, they got that calculation absolutely right.

They didn’t turn to the biggest songwriters and producers working in the States, they didn’t go to Murda Beatz or some super cool hip-hop producers in America in order to engineer BTS’ music for the US audience. Big Hit demonstrated its artistic understanding of what would make give BTS the biggest chance of having a blockbuster global hit. And it’s that kind of knowledge, that kind of expertise, that kind of intrinsic, very detailed planning, that has led to BTS being the superstars in the first place.

So again, it’s a debate that can rage all day, you know, who really has led to be this hugely lucrative company? Is it the artist? Or is it the the genius of Bang? I think there’s a fair case to be made that a lot of it is down to the genius of Bang.

K-Pop is known for its very intensive drilling of artists from the time they audition until they get on stage years later. But how different is this system from the English-language pop music industry where you had studios, you had A&R people from record labels, all grooming talent in a certain way?

That’s a good question. So, for starters, you’re right to question whether there’s similarities that can be seen in the US industry. I mean, you only need to look at the Jacksons or the Michael Jackson story, to see how an artist was groomed—although I would choose a different word for Michael Jackson, probably! You can see how an artist was put through their paces from a very early age, until they graduated to the point of being this sort of multi-instrumentalist, multi-talented, prepared performer. You could look at the Jacksons and the Jackson Five and suggest that you know, ultimately, that was a dog-eat-dog breeding ground. The best of them were always going to become the big global superstar. And so that element of competition, intense heated competition, that you see in the K-Pop world existed in the example I’m giving you.

I think it’s fair to say that that hothouse of music and artists to become performers doesn’t happen half as much anymore, if at all, in the US and Europe. And so it’s like, the K-Pop world with its hothousing of young talent and ultimately allowing only those who are the best of the best to graduate— that seems to be mirroring a different era of the Western music industry. Now, your record labels in the US and UK and elsewhere will typically come to an artist far later in their career. They’ll come to an artist when they’ve already demonstrated a following. And they have already built something of a sustainable career as an independent artist in the first place.

The dark side that is spoken about of the K-Pop hot-housing of talent is, those that don’t make it, those that dedicate their teenage years to becoming the best of the best, and they miss out by 0.01% of talent or ability or dedication that is required to make it to an act like BTS. And there I think you can see a comparison more to sports.

I was going to say that sports has a huge funnel built over decades to identify and groom young talent. So it strikes me that the US music industry is doing the equivalent of waiting for a talented striker to walk off the street and into the first team at the age of 18, versus investing in a youth academy and training kids from the age of seven.

Yes, that is true. And I think BTS may change all of this. Part of this is a long and widely held belief in the US record industry that in order to capture the authenticity, you need to forge your own path in the first place. And you know, the the over-romanticised anecdotal story, the narrative of a struggling teenage artists — look at Taylor Swift — plays Nashville bars to bored old men who don’t recognise her genius, and keeps on going, and the sweat and the endurance and the self-belief and the self-esteem that was required to get the big break and sign the cheque and became a superstar. You know, there’s a reason that narrative exists. Versions of it still do happen.

But, you know, who is more anachronistic? Is it the Big Hit model, that as I say, you can draw parallels to some of the unpleasantness that surrounded artists like the Jacksons? Or is it the US, the Western record industry, model whereby as you point out, you’re not only leaving it up to chance that you’re going to find a triple-A superstar blockbuster artist that’s going to commercially benefit your company, you’re also reducing the commercial leverage you have when you come to do the deal. If you wait for someone to become a star in Nashville bars, and on Spotify and YouTube, and they’ve got 20,000 followers on Spotify, and they can already play a sold-out 500 person show, when you come in to do a deal with them, you’re not going to be able to crank up the terms that really weigh in your favour. They’re probably already making a decent amount of money.

Last question about the IPO. Do you a systematic programme of stock options in record labels for artists is a viable thing?

I don’t think it’s an option for the big public market story in the record industry. Right now, there’s two of those going on. One of them is Warner Music Group floated in June on the NASDAQ. And Warner Music Group, effectively runs a large global record company in a large global music publisher. If you’re invested in that you’re investing purely in music rights. Universal Music Group is owned by a publicly traded company, Vivendi. But Vivendi says they’re going to spin out Universal to their own IPO in 2022. So again, you’ll be able to invest directly in the rights. And Sony is obviously owned by Sony Corp. In Japan, which does all sorts of things, including electronics and gaming. So I don’t think it makes sense for those companies because of the sheer breadth and depth of their frontline artists, roster, but also their catalogue repertoire. At what point do you decide what the Beatles get versus what Drake gets versus what Taylor Swift gets?

With smaller companies, and we’ve got loads of those in the US, in the UK, and Europe and elsewhere, if you look at the independent record label, Dirty Hit, they signed the band The 1975. They are now a festival headliner and had a number one album in America. And they signed them at a time when none of the other labels were interested in The 1975. They didn’t look like a particularly huge commercial prospect by any degree. And if you check Dirty Hits’ filings on Companies House in the UK, you will see that The 1975 members all have shares in the company. And with the way that the industry is going, the rise of independent artists is one of the big stories in the music industry right no.

Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of independent artists are eating up market-share from and listening hours from the major record companies. The majors are losing their leverage in terms of streaming consumption. That’s one story. But the other story is how far can an artist go independently? Well, Chance the Rapper was a really important narrative in the music industry because he didn’t sign with any label. He … created his own entity, Chance the Rapper, LLC for recorded music royalties, created his own entity for merchandise sales, created his own entity for live touring income. And that was all run by his manager.

So the idea of a “record label“ kind of went by the wayside. It was a merch company, and it was a touring promotions company, but it was all run by the central figure who was very close to the artist. And in that respect, in that particular example, Chance the Rapper owned the companies, Pat Corcoran ran the companies. He was effectively CEO of various businesses for Chance the Rapper. So Chance the Rapper owned 100%, if not a majority stake, in the businesses that were building him up.

The story then is, could the next Chance the Rapper come along and become Adele or indeed become BTS, at which point your Bang character is, effectively a strategist and administrator being paid a minority percentage of profit, the majority of which goes to the artists? So it turns the Big Hit model on its head. What is the ambition of that kind of company? Will it ever be able to scale to the point that they IPO? No, definitely not. But could there be 50 of them around the world with artists, you know, getting the majority ownership stake in the vehicles that see the monetization of their output and their brand? Certainly, that’s already happening.

So that’s that’s an interesting sort of third part of the narrative. If your ambition isn’t to IPO, if your ambition isn’t to become a billionaire, off institutional investor money, if your ambition is just to become a global star and own the majority of your revenue sources while working with independent partners, it’s an option. The major record companies would argue if you want to be a global star, you still need us and indeed, it’s interesting that Big Hit signed a licencing deal with Columbia Records in America because they know that they need Columbia Records on board to get BTS on US radio, but yeah, this is the story of artists taking ownership of their businesses, the story of management companies or what were once management companies effectively growing into being a record label, a merchandise company, and a touring company all in one. And the artists having a stake in that, if not a majority stake in that, that’s already happening. You can see it with with an example like Dirty Hit. And you can you can see it with an example like Chance the Rapper, which sadly ended in the in the manager and artist splitting.

It seems the Chance the Rapper model is where fans have a key part to play, in raising capital and generating cash flows. I read a very interesting piece from you about a company called Corite that lets fans invest in artists. Can you tell us more about this model?

The Corite model isn’t new. As I wrote previously, you know, it’s been tried in the CD era with Sellaright. And that company ultimately went bust. But it’s never been done in the way that Corite are doing it in the streaming era. When you look at the huge positives of what we were discussing before, in terms of the fan investment, the feeling of ownership, the fact that BTS does brilliantly well, and when Big Hit does brilliantly well and breaks the next artists to follow in the footsteps of BTS, the fan base is going to feel good about it and not resentful about it. That kind of psychological investment, as I talked about before, is something that definitely will be interesting for the the US industry, the European industry and beyond.

And then you’ve got this other trend happening with the independent artists. How do you get the benefit of the Big Hit IPO in terms of fans making what they feel is personal investment into an artist’s career? But also, how do you marry that with the trend of independent artists doing it themselves, with the help of a management structure around them that can also handle records, royalty income, merchandise, touring, and other ancillary incomes? Well, one solution to that may be for the fans to invest money in the artist at the start, you know, imagine if you had invested in BTS at the start of Big Hit, or indeed Big Hit wasn’t there, if you invested in BTS—you’d probably get rich off that.

But even without the feeling of getting rich, you get the gamification. You get this kind of fantasy football… this feeling of playing a game with something that you love, feeling like you’re somehow more involved than just standing back and watching it or listening to it. And then the other great challenge, of course, as you pointed out for independent artists, if you want to get from being you know, someone with 10,000 followers on Spotify and playing a room to 200 fans to being Chance the Rapper or indeed, Adele, you need capital to do that. So where does the average Joe or Jane get their $2.5 million to build their brand? Well, maybe they get it from the fans, and maybe the fans getting the warm, fuzzy feeling that they get right now by investing into BTS on the stock market. But also maybe they you know, maybe they get a financial kickback down the road.

The Corite model is particularly interesting because the fans don’t get any ownership over copyright, which is very important. The fans get to invest in the royalty stream of streaming income, but the artists retains ownership of their copyrights. And the reason that’s important is because if they went to a record label, and took money off a record label, in many examples, they would certainly need to give up some short-term ownership of their copyrights, by which I mean, you know, a 10-year, 20-year licence of their copyrights to the record company. With fan investment, I think fans will happily invest in something they love. And know that that investment isn’t going to get them a return. Like what what other market ecosystem in the world do you find that dynamic? So that’s where this gets really interesting, I think, and what you might see happening in the next few years.

Are fans investing in artists more like Kickstarter, or more like angel investing in tech startups?

I don’t really think it’s like either of those things. Because when you look at seed funding, and angel investing, you are normally looking at people or companies who are investing because they like spread betting, you know, they’re going to bet on 100 companies, and one of them’s going to be Uber so there’s a strategy there. And also with individuals, there’s probably a tax perk a lot of the time and being an angel investor, you’ve accumulated significant personal wealth, it’s sitting there, what’re you gonna do with it except to invest it into the next generation of entrepreneurs. And again, you know, hopefully get a kickback.

Kickstarter or Patreon seem more like shopping, or more about the utility?

Yes, there is part of that. Patreon is the example that is closest to this idea of fan investment. But for starters, you don’t have the chance of a return, you’re not watching a number go up or down, whether that’s streaming numbers, or whether it’s the Big Hit share price. Watching a number go up or down, that reflects the popularity and success with the thing that you believe in, and inded to put your money into. So you lose that part of the gamified experience.

And then the other thing, which, Corite espouses as a benefit of its model for artists, is, it’s never a good thing for artists to turn to their fans and say, I need your money. Fans don’t like that. They’re very often emotionally buying into someone they want to see as an icon, almost as a supernatural being, who is going to elevate their pedestrian existence. That’s why we all fall in love with with artists and superstars because they do something that lifts us up. And what Corite, I think, quite rightly, thinks is that when you’re an artist, you turn up on Patreon, or Kickstarter, or these other, you know, services where you can ask for money from fans, it feels a bit like the begging bowl. So you’re all of a sudden reducing yourself to the blues bar in a sort of termite-infested Middle America, a late-night bar, you know, you’ll go around with your hat.

There’s nothing wrong with that, by the way, some of those bands are fantastic, but you don’t want to be that if you want to become the next Lady Gaga, or the next Chance the Rapper—you don’t want to give that impression. So by turning to your fan and saying, hey, invest in me, you never know, you might get a return out of this, and you’re gonna have the joy of watching whether or not your bet is successful or not, that’s very different than saying, can I have some money because I need it to get to the next stage of my career. So that’s why I think it’s slightly different. It changes the narrative around the request for funding.

That is a fascinating dimension to the fan relationship. Lastly, have you given any thought to the role of cryptocurrencies in all of this?

The thing that obviously comes to mind with crypto is the platform agnostic nature of it … Spotify are obviously thinking about the role that cryptocurrency is going to play in the future of the music industry and also the crucial role that it’s going to play more importantly in the interaction between consumers and fans and artists on their service. There are also things around cryptocurrency where you can much more easily track your investment, you can track where your money’s gone, what the artist has done with it and what return you’re likely to get. So for those reasons, I think cryptocurrency is likely to play a role in this.

The difficulty is the scale of comfort around fans to use cryptocurrency. Once you get to the stage that the consumer is comfortable investing in cryptocurrency, then I do think that could be a game-changing element. This direct relationship between fan and artist. And again, if the fan can follow what their investment is used for, and where it ultimately led to, that only helps to amplify the warm, fuzzy psychological feelings that I was talking about before. Not only the idea that, hey, you might get return out of this down the line, but also, I am partly responsible for this thing happening to this [artist] who I love and who has changed my life. I mean, what better fan experience could you ask for?

I think you make an important point about the psychological dimension of fandom.

Yeah, I mean, the music industry is built on emotion. That is ultimately the asset that is monetizedhuman emotion. Music is the most instantaneous art form, because you don’t have to be educated in a certain field to or to a certain level, you don’t have to have an understanding of language even, to be moved by a song. That is unlike any other entertainment medium. If you think about movies, even cartoons—if you didn’t understand the reference points in Tom and Jerry, if you’re too young.

So what I’m trying to get to is, music can alter your emotional state, without you having any mental apparatus required to do it. And that’s what makes music magic. And that’s probably why we react to it as babies and probably why we react to it in in a deeper way, emotionally, in our adult lives than than any other medium. And ultimately, that is what drives the huge numbers of people consuming music on YouTube and Spotify. That’s what drives intense fan rivalries and intense fan psychological investments in artists, and that’s what drives a business. That’s what makes it go around.