Sony Music boss Rob Stringer: ‘We want the artist to be paid’

London’s Soho, reflects Sony Music boss Rob Stringer, has changed since his days as a cub A&R man spending boozy afternoons in now vanished bars and clubs.

We are meeting at Dean Street Townhouse, a restaurant opened by his friend and Soho House founder Nick Jones. It serves the sort of posh pub grub priced to slip under expenses limits for people who want to spend more time gossiping than thinking about their food orders.

Stringer remembers holding court with bands such as the Manic Street Preachers in the nearby, and similarly louche, Groucho Club during the often unsteady pomp of Cool Britannia in the 1990s. But his rock ’n’ roll days, like the old Soho, are long gone. We quickly establish that beers will not feature on today’s expenses, and Cokes are duly ordered.

The clubby West End restaurant proves a relaxed setting for a discussion of what is “a pretty intense chapter” for the industry, according to the British music boss, dressed today in a simple black jumper and looking younger than his 61 years.

Stringer heads up Sony’s music division, one of the most profitable for the Japanese group, thanks to artists including Harry Styles, Adele and Beyoncé and licensing successes such as Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill”, made popular again thanks to the TV show Stranger Things.

It’s not rocket science. Spotify, Apple and Amazon have made the music business the most wealthy it’s been in 25 years

The music industry is going through another boom period, with streaming services giving artists the chance to reach billions of listeners globally, creating overnight stars and viral sensations. “It’s not rocket science. Spotify, Apple and Amazon have made the music business the most wealthy it’s been in 25 years.”

But AI is now the increasingly strident background noise to any conversation about music, either as a threat from the bots ripping up and ripping off millions of copyrighted songs or as an essential tool for creating art. Stringer, who has seen off challenges from Napster and illegal streaming, and helped tame Spotify and YouTube in his 40-year career, sees AI as heralding one of the most testing periods yet.

With platforms such as TikTok also in a stand-off with record labels over use of their music, and private equity muscling in on rights ownership, who pays for the product is at the front of his mind.

The FT is more than happy to pay this bill, I say, though Stringer proves to be a cheap date. As a Brit mainly living in the US — and still without a hint of any tell-tale transatlantic twang — he misses simple food from home.

He knows this menu well, and normally chooses the mince and potatoes. Despite initially promising to choose a more expensive starter, he begins with a dish of butter lettuce — another of the cheapest options on the menu. I counter this by opting for some of the most expensive: scallops to start, and then the monkfish curry.

Although claiming to miss such home comforts, Stringer is actually often in the UK: not just to catch up with his friends among the bands he has helped over the years but also as part-owner of his beloved Luton Town Football Club.

Just days before we meet, his two worlds blended publicly at Luton’s ground, with his friend Harry Styles, the former One Direction band member who signed with Sony’s Columbia as a solo star in 2016, drawing more cameras than the action on the pitch.

“It was the first time Harry had been seen out for six months,” laughs Stringer, who clearly relished introducing Styles to some of the retired footballers in a stadium far less glitzy than those normally played by the superstar. “No security, no fuss. Cultures colliding, I love it.”

Alongside Styles — “grown up beautiful[ly]”, Stringer says proudly, before adding ominously, “could have been different” — was Ezra Koenig, the lead singer of Vampire Weekend, an arty, outsider band from the same New York scene that helped cement Stringer’s reputation after he left the “hangover” from Britpop in the noughties to head up Columbia.

The pair of musicians neatly reflect the two sides of Stringer’s musical career — the supremely popular with some art-school cool, brought together with his eye on what will sell.

He learnt much of the commercial side of the business in the area around where we’re lunching, at CBS Records in the 1980s, but he had approached the industry first as a fan, thanks to an unusually ambitious local music club owner in his home town of Aylesbury.

In 1976, when Stringer turned 14, punk was his “sweet spot”. “I saw The Clash, The Jam, but the New York New Wave groups had the biggest influence . . . Talking Heads, the Ramones, Blondie, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.”

David Bowie first played Ziggy Stardust at the Aylesbury club. Decades later, Stringer worked on Bowie’s final album, Blackstar, and helped pay for his friend’s statue in the town’s Market Square.

“Youth culture has affected what I do, and affected my understanding of what counts as taste, and what counts as commercial,” he says.

Stringer — perhaps given his A&R background — has a reputation for being on the side of the artist. He is acutely aware of the tug of war between commercial needs and artistic desires, but argues that looking after the artist will normally benefit Sony too. “My judgment is still based on whether I think we’ve got good music,” he says.

He continues to read the charts every day, even if now it is the streaming charts that count the most. “I like that in the Apple Music streaming charts in the US today we’ve got the top four. Two in Spotify’s top five. I like that. That makes me happy. That’s the same as when I was 20.”

Tucking into his bowl of lettuce — while I demolish my scallops in a couple of mouthfuls — Stringer is adamant that his job is not about chasing quick hits, even in the age of online streaming, when a young artist can become an overnight global superstar. Stringer recalls the internal pressure on him to drop the Manic Street Preachers.

Their third album, a snarl of socialist punk rock provocatively called The Holy Bible that was released in 1994, was a “commercial disaster”, he says. But their next album sold millions. “That’s the fine line I work on. This is a tough business. This is a street-level business. I’ve mixed street-level hustle with an intellectual strategy.”

Stringer was also by then hustling his way through the ranks at Sony, becoming chair of Sony Music UK in 2001 before moving to Columbia in the US in 2006.

Challenged by shrinking CD sales and online piracy, Sony had merged with BMG Music, then owned by Germany’s Bertelsmann, in 2004, leaving the two management teams almost immediately in conflict. High-profile departures led to what some music executives saw as a power struggle between Barry Weiss and Stringer, who headed the two main divisions at RCA/Jive and Columbia/Epic respectively. Weiss left for rival Universal in 2011, and Stringer took over from Doug Morris as boss of the group in 2017.

Stringer admits to some difficult years following the merger — but he sees the deal as a necessity, given that neither company was strong enough to be the second biggest after Universal. “It was tough — and physically visible as tough for half a decade.”

His brother, Sir Howard Stringer, has always been influential. “He brought me to America in the ’70s when England was in black-and-white. America was in colour.” Howard, 20 years his senior, was also formerly Sony Corporation’s chair and chief executive, but Stringer rejects the inevitable suggestions of nepotism.

“It’s not really a nepo-brother thing. He had nothing to do with me going to America [in 2006] — he was shocked. I got appointed by Bertelsmann. And he’d left when I got appointed to run the whole company.”

Top-level artists put music out, and there are AI derivations immediately. Do we take those down? We absolutely do

Away from the boardroom discord, Stringer had arrived in New York at the right time. Music was changing again and this time with a sensibility that an Englishman could understand — arty, punky and dancey. Bands such as MGMT, Passion Pit, Foster The People, LCD Soundsystem and Vampire Weekend were signed to his label.

Pre-smartphones, bands were given the space and time to make mistakes and develop their trade. Stringer worries that artists now face too much scrutiny too early through social media, coupled with the impact of instant fame that normally follows a quick streaming hit.

“Someone can have half a hit and they are straight on the second stage of a festival,” he grimaces.

“It’s come full circle, as it’s almost like that replaces those packages of the ’60s where someone did their hit and then got lost. It’s hard to be different. I’m a firm believer in letting culture breathe.”

Stringer’s mince arrives. This is definitely not the sort of dish served in fancy foraged food restaurants, but literally a shallow bowl of plain minced meat, served with potatoes.

He declares it excellent, and as I push around my slightly oversweet curry, I reflect that he has always moved with musical tastes, even if they are not always his own.

In the US, he says, hip-hop culture is the dominant force — but now expanding through “beautifully complex and referenced” ways into new sub-genres.

“I’m super-fortunate to work with Tyler, the Creator, or SZA,” he says. “Their alchemy is incredible. I’m much more interested in that than trying to resurrect a brand of music that I might have listened to when I was 14 years old. What excites me is people using music as a fantastic all-you-can-eat buffet to find a new thing.”

Protecting that same buffet of music from being feasted on by a proliferating number of tech companies seeking to train and develop AI-led music is now the biggest challenge for the industry.

The use of AI is challenging what is seen as “real” music too, but Stringer can see new artists embracing AI as a tool. Sony, he says, “will go right with them, because there will be amazing creativity”.

Sony Music is developing new collaborations between artists using AI, recently working with electronic music group The Orb and Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour to allow fans to use AI to remix music.

“The best music will be the most original use of AI. It won’t be a fake Drake singing a Nirvana song. It will be a 14-year-old kid [making] something that’s totally unique,” says Stringer. But almost in the same breath, he warns tech companies off the use of AI to create music based on existing artists and their music, highlighting the delicate dance that the music industry is facing in dealing with new technology.

Sony, like rival large labels, has not agreed to license music to train AI and is instead waging war to prevent its artists being ripped off. “Top-level artists put music out, and there are AI derivations immediately. Do we take those down? We absolutely do. We want the artist to be paid, and everybody compensated fairly.”

A version of this argument has been around since the early lawless days of sampling for hip-hop records. But the use of algorithms to spin together “100 million pieces of music” takes it to another level, he argues.

“This is like that a million times over. [They] are building something off the back of someone’s creativity,” he says. “If some giant corporation is going to take all their content and put it in the blender, artists have to be paid.”

The topic is complicated, he agrees, with artists sometimes championing new versions of their songs created online. One recent trend among younger listeners has involved speeded up versions of their tracks, which can boost the popularity of the original music.

This brings the possibility of difficult conversations with artists around the use of the Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok, in particular, which is now one of the main ways for his acts to reach a younger audience. TikTok gives an “astonishingly small” return compared with streaming partners such as YouTube, Stringer says.

Universal Music Group earlier this year pulled some of the world’s most popular musicians — including Taylor Swift — from TikTok after the companies failed to agree on licensing issues including artist compensation and AI.

Stringer does not rule out similar action to Universal’s, pointing out that he was behind the decision to pull Sony’s music from Resso, a music streaming service also owned by TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, after failing to agree to a new licensing agreement.

Do I like hedge funds talking about how they’re in the music space? I am cynical about what will happen

TikTok claims that use of music on the platform is promotional for the artist, he says, whereas he sees it as part of the group’s “profit centre, and therefore we should share in those profits”.

Perhaps fearing being seen as a Luddite label boss, he quickly adds that embracing new technology has always been important to the industry. Streaming, in particular, has meant a new lease of life for many artists in Sony’s back catalogue, as younger generations can more easily discover older music.

I remark about the sudden ubiquity of Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s decades-old “Murder on the Dancefloor” after it was used in a key scene in the recent hit movie Saltburn. It’s not a song overseen by Sony, but the label does have the rights to another in the film — MGMT’s “Time to Pretend” — which Stringer says has also gone “through the roof”.

These successes have shown the value of owning older music rights, which have become a sought-after asset for music rights investment companies such as the UK’s Hipgnosis and US private equity groups.

He has doubts over whether investment groups are the right owners, however, either in terms of looking after the artists or driving the value of the music. Record labels and streaming services have been criticised by artists for taking a large share of revenues, but Stringer says that they have the expertise to drive value for the artist.

“I put my money where my mouth is and put hundreds of millions of dollars back into the artist’s hands. We can make even more money because of our expertise. Do I like hedge funds talking about how they’re in the music space? I am cynical about what will happen.”

We have been talking for almost three hours — a session that could almost rival some of his afternoons as an A&R man — but now he needs to meet a radio broadcasting boss. As my jokes about new payola scandals are acknowledged politely, Stringer — a ferociously good networker — gets up to shake hands with friends on a nearby table as we leave.

I consider that, for the time being at least, AI cannot replace the human element that Stringer has fought to uphold in his decades in the industry: the need to find and work with an artist, to nurture talent, in order to create something new and special.

Stringer, too, is aware that he is part of the fight for what he sees as the future of the music industry. “These debates being played out in public will be important for generations to come.”

Daniel Thomas is the FT’s global media editor

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