How A Top Investor Sees the Music Industry Changing w/ Matt Pincus

24:49Do you think there's any possibility that we're in some sort of a bubble with catalogs? I was sort of Debbie Downer on the catalog market for a while. After I sold songs, we did all contemporary artists working with people for their future output. Yeah, not buying catalogs. And I didn't buy catalogs. And when I sold it, I was 45 and I had a successful publishing company. So I felt like the world kind of wanted me to raise money and buy catalogs. At that time, I could not get comfortable with it because, A, the prices were going up and up and up and the earnings are kind of capped. So you have to be careful to make sure that, you know, you don't try to make catalogs into something that they're not in terms of what you're able to do with them.

25:37Like, for example, 66 percent of the music publishing revenue base is regulated one way or another. the publisher can't actually move that many levers to create value. Yeah. And, you know, when you look at catalogs like, you know, the Bob Dylan catalog, you obviously understand why that traded at such a high price. But one of the things that people talked about at the time was Girl from the North Country, which was a Broadway play made from Dylan songs that was a big success. And so people started writing that into their valuations, like, Oh, stuff like that's going to happen. And I'm like, listen, I love Metallica.

26:11Like I grew up on those records. but there's not going to be Metallica the musical anytime soon. So you need to like - Case by case. Like not everyone can have a biopic. Not everyone can, like there's a Whitney Houston slot machine in Vegas now. Yeah. Like, you know, not everyone can do all of these different things to increase the value of their catalog. And so I was always a little bit skeptical. As somebody who's done the job, can you really move the earnings enough? But then I watched a couple of things happen. So, you know, the value went up. A bunch of us sort of assumed this has to pop and come down.

26:43Like it has to be like a tool at market phenomenon. Like the price is going to come down. But then I started over this summer. What if I took the other view? And I started thinking about film slate financing in the movie business. Okay. I'm not super familiar with that. Movies cost a lot of money. And so the studios don't have enough money to pay for all the movies they make as movies, the cost of movies have gone up. The studios don't have the money and can't get the money to do it. So they started letting investors pick up the risk on big Hollywood productions. Okay. And I'm not an expert, but, you know, I seem to remember this started sort of in the kind of early 2000s time.

27:24There was sort of a boomlet in this of like hedge funds. Like there was a guy called Ryan Kavanaugh at Relativity Media Film Company that would do these slate film financing projects. Steve Mnuchin, the Donald Trump secretary of the treasury, made a bunch of money. I think the firm was called Dune Capital. And, you know, in the original, in the early times I remember hearing about this, I didn't know much about it, but, you know, it seemed like it was people who were sort of wandering into it in a similar way that, you know, people wander into the music publishing catalog business. But now I think a majority is my guess of movies are slate financed now.

28:02It's become like a standard way that movie studios defray their risk. So I'm like, what if the same thing is happening in the music business? The financial markets are going to permanently finance music publishing transactions going forward. Does that change my point of view? In a couple ways, yes. And one is that, you know, you're going to need music people again now in this part of the world. If you've got a permanent demand for music copyright acquisitions and the capital necessary to do them, then you need the supply. What's been going on for the past couple of years has been, you know, Bob Dylan and Queen and, you know, Neil Young and, you know, the sort of big like, you know, all time Bruce Springsteen.

28:55And as this goes on, it's going to get increasingly more specialized. Like buying and selling catalogs will go to more specialized artists? Yeah, more niche. Yeah, more niche artists. Over time. Like the big artists, there's a finite number of Bruce Springsteens. Exactly. And the marquee stuff, you understand why it trades for, you know, it's kind of, and I used to say this at songs, like the biggest deals we ever did were the easiest ones to do. When we paid a big advance to somebody, we were sure, you know, it's the middle stuff that becomes where discernment is really important. That's interesting.

29:28And so I think now you've got a lot of demand on the buy side. And in order to find stuff that's big enough for these people to be interested in buying, it's again going to have to be a little bit like the mortgage business. Like there are people who package up properties and then sell them to larger investors. I think we're going to have to see that kind of thing happen in the music business. But also on the side of making the copyrights work in the market, you're going to need people who understand how to make music more valuable. And when you're dealing with – if you look at somebody at the Taylor Swift level, for example, she's like a general interest global phenomenon.

30:12Yes. You're going to handle that like a little bit like you handle like the Marvel franchise in the movie business. I mean, she's like a huge, you know, touch reach is huge. When you start getting into like the mid tail, you have to understand the music. If you do it well, I think it could be permanent value. So that's what I'm saying. Like I was Debbie Downer. Like this is going to go bust. This is crazy. It doesn't make any sense. And then I started saying, but wait a minute. like people that are smarter than me have figured out that this is something that they want to do yeah and so what if it is permanent then how do you do it this summer prime video takes you back before legally blonde before law school and into the world of elle woods in high school set in 1995 this gemini vegetarian knows exactly who she is until her family moves from bel-air to seattle Packed with iconic fashion, 90s nostalgia, and a throwback soundtrack, Elle proves one thing.

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31:48There's going to be a supply issue. I want to move on to another area of change that I have really seen, and that's somewhat related. Because the three major music companies, since the start of 2024, have been undergoing a lot of restructuring, which involves a lot of layoffs. And also they're kind of changing what kind of team members they're investing in. Radio and press and these kind of departments are seeing a lot of losses during this restructuring, but they're also bulking up in other areas like digital marketing or A &R. And I'm wondering, do you think, in your opinion, that this move by the major music companies to do all this restructuring starting in 2024 and continuing to now, do you think that this is just them playing catch up with the digital age?

32:34Or are they seeing something in their crystal ball that most of us on the outside might not have noticed about the way the music industry is changing? I wish we all had a crystal ball in the music business. I think part of the issue with the music business is that there is no crystal ball. We don't. What you're kind of looking for is 51 % confidence. So it's not 50-50, it's 51%. I think that's what you're shooting for other than crystal ball. But there are a lot of smart people in the major label system. And, you know, broadly speaking, I think there's kind of two people, two paths in the music business.

33:08There's a up through the building where you, you know, get a job as a coordinator, then a director, VP, senior VP, EVP, and then you run the company up through the major label system. And then there's people who feed on what's available in the wild, all the independent people. I was sort of more in that camp for most of my career. So in terms of what the sort of boardroom decisions inside the major labels are, it's not my power alley. But, you know, the major labels are tankers, big ships. The market is moving quickly. They always do catch up. Sometimes there's a lag between what's going on in the market and what the major music companies are providing to the market.

33:53The reason why my company Songs was successful is because the music publishing business at the time we started was making big records for Celine Dion. They would hire a studio for a year and put the biggest writers in the world to make a big record for a big pop star. And the world was moving in the direction of singles, not albums, 13 writers on a song, rappers guesting on a pop record where the two artists didn't even know each other. and we were young and had nothing to lose. And so we did that. We created a business for that market. You could move fast. And we had it to ourselves for a little while.

34:35And so we went from publishing stuff that fell off the back of a truck to having 5 % of the U.S. radio play market in a 10-year period of time. And then the majors all figured it out and they put in charge of their companies, the A &R people that instead of - People from songs. Well, that was later, but they made the A &R people the CEOs of the companies to great effect. Okay. And it became harder for us to compete. There's a reason why I sold the business. It became harder for us to compete because they caught up. And so sometimes there's a lag, but they always figure it out. And I think right now you're seeing a normalization of the streaming market in a way where it was growth, growth, growth, growth, growth.

35:26Now there's still growth, plenty of growth, but it's decelerating. And they're starting to look at the future now and plan and plus two or the three of them are public. So, you know, they have shareholder pressure and they're trying to build a durable business over a long period of time. And it makes sense that they would start to move the cost structure of their business in ways to address that. But there's also been some interesting moves on the creative side of the business. I mean, I think Atlantic hiring Elliot was really interesting response to the market and where the market is going. The way you framed it, like the promotion people, radio people are taking hits and publicity people are taking hits.

36:09but A &R and digital marketing are attracting resources. I'm like, that's interesting. I mean, interesting, creative things will come from that. The one thing that I do think from having been on the talent side of the business as a publisher, and also we had a record label called Records that was run by Barry Wise. So I've been kind of on both sides of it. But one of the things that people always say is like, what does your label do for you? What The fact is, like, records need champions and artists need champions. That's what record companies do, in my opinion, is they believe in you. Yeah. They front the cost for your creative vision, not knowing if it's going to work out.

36:52Yeah. I mean, they take a risk. That's true. But they also believe in you. Yeah. And by extension, sort of tell the world what they think is good. Yeah. It's just they increasingly have less levers to pull and less gatekeepers they can contact on your behalf. So which means they just have to get they have to figure out how to do it now. Yeah. So I think it's digital marketing now. Yeah. Like if the gatekeeper is not a person, it might be the algorithm on TikTok. Yeah, that that's true. But I also think that that, you know, there's times when the music business all works in concert and things work well.

37:30And then there's times when things become dissonant because of format shifts or consumption shifts in the market. and I think where, you know, TikTok was a big one, big impact to the market. And it was a little bit like, you know, the TV business with reality TV, like NBC used to make very expensive sitcoms on Thursday nights and that was their business. And then all of a sudden, look over here, we can make a show with no actors, no unions, no script and do whatever we want. Just send a bunch of people do an island and sell to the same advertisers. Isn't this great? And so they just started doing that over and over and over again.

38:11And then the reality numbers, the unscripted numbers started leveling off and they had to get back to making shows again. But it was the cable people that were focusing on doing that, not the networks. And now most of the great TV is made by different people. So things shift around a little bit. And I think in the music business, it's usually the independents that figure it out first. So now we're in a moment where repertoire was super reactive and stuff was getting signed from TikTok virality very quickly. And sign it and put it out. Yeah, like 2019 to 2023. It was like a gold rush, really. And it became kind of like, you know, a data-driven business.

38:58And now I think in the past like couple, three years, you're starting to see story records happen, you know, around artists, not just track by track, but around artists' stories. You know, there's been some really good ones in the past three, four, five years. And the independents are the first people who figure out how to tell a story in a new way. And then now the majors are doing it. So you've been through so many different changes in the music business, you've been through a lot of the phases where people thought that the sky was falling. Like we were talking about earlier with like Napster around the time or just a few years before you founded Songs.

39:33And then after Napster was the big bad wolf, then, you know, came YouTube. And then after that, people were really scared about moving over to streaming. And you've managed to survive all that and still get to have a very good view of this music business. I'm wondering, do you think that the age that we're entering into AI would probably be the next candidate to be the big bad wolf that people are scared of? Do you think that we'll still weather that storm? The AI thing is funny. I live through crypto. Every pitch is a crypto pitch. I never did anything in that part of the world. 21? And that was a little bit like I was looking at it and going, you know, the music business, the history of the music business is getting hundreds of thousands to millions of people to do something simultaneously for like a few bucks that's like the history of the music business like go to sell at a stadium you know or a nightclub you know sell a hundred thousand records like a bunch of people signed to listen to a hit on the radio get a you know hundreds of thousands of millions of people to do something simultaneously for a little bit of money.

40:41The crypto thing was like 1 ,200 people paying$10 ,000 for a song to hang up on their wall like it was fine art. That's not the music business to me. There was never an MVP in the crypto market. As theoretically interesting as it was, there was never a minimum viable product, a killer product that got out there in the world that worked. I feel like AI is closer, but where's the product that's really going to get kids to do shit? It's coming. Yeah. I mean, could it not be Suno or Udeo? You can kind of see the implication of it's really interesting. Like the thing I like the most about it right now, musicians like to fuck with things.

41:30And you like sampling in the 90s, Like they were kids with, you give them a sampler, they have their parents record collection. And next thing you know, they're making crazy music by fucking with their parents record collection in this crazy new machine. It's like, you can't stop that. And the most interesting thing that I'm seeing with the Gen AI business is how people in the studio are using it. So that is totally there. Like you're in the studio, you're trying to figure out like, I like this like horn line, but like, what if it was sung by Elephant? and you can make that happen like in two seconds.

42:07That's all good news. I'm talking about the consumer application. When we first saw Gen AI start to rise up, I heard a lot of people say that like the pitch for their company is that now everyone can make music. But does everybody really want to make music like that bad? That was my question. I don't know if my mom really needs to do that. I think there's lots and lots of people who want to make music. Like one of my main holdings is Splice. We have a very large addressable market of users that are aspirational producers or artists. I mean, there are tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people globally that want to do that.

42:47So Splice is a subscription business where you can get all of the sounds you need to make records in a digital environment. So loops, beats, samples, instrument sounds, one shots, vocal lines. And it's increasingly become a workflow business now. So we just launched a product called Instrument where you can record an instrument in its context, like think like, you know, a piano in a concert hall and then play that back on any MIDI control device. um so it's they they give you access to the world sounds in your creation um and then now increasingly help you figure out how to make music in on the platform by doing that it's big business it's like over 100 million in revenue over 600 000 subscribers yeah every producer you've ever met has a user i mean we're we're in in you know probably over 50 percent of the hot 100 the top 100 songs use some splice content.

43:55There have been songs like Sabrina Carpenter, Espresso that uses a recognizable sample from our library. So this is a big business that's scaling even bigger. So I think there are lots and lots of people who are aspiring musicians and are trying to do better, trying to make a song for themselves, trying to make one that'll impress their friends, trying to make one that'll impress people that they don't know, try to make money trying to make one that's worthy of people buying it like all the way on up to trying to play stadiums what i'm not so convinced of is that it can be gamified to a general consumer base that is not aspirational but is using it to you know it's my you know boyfriend's birthday yeah so i'm gonna make a special song like i don't think that's the killer application of ai yeah Yeah, it's like it's fun for a minute.

44:51You get on one of these applications that can do these things and you generate a few songs for your friend's birthday or to be like, LOL, isn't it funny that I can do this now? But those people tend to not become paying subscribers. To me, I haven't seen the consumer application, like the consumption application. That's like the killer use of this technology yet. It's common. You can see it. But like the fake Drake thing, like it got everybody's like, look at what the computer can do. But like, was it a good song? Like really at the end of the day, I think we're waiting for that. And the very smart technology people like the team at Splice who have a lot of experience doing this in a bunch of different technologies, you know, like the people that Suno's bringing into their business and starting to build out are going to figure it out.

45:42But I'm not sure that we yet know what the true format shift of that is going to be. Is it going to be allowing people, fans, to have more interpolation capabilities to the stuff that they already love, for example? So like remixing a song you already know and love? Yeah, or being more involved in it. Okay. Or is it going to be, you know, there's been some interesting stories recently about fully synthetic artists that have reactive songs. Mm-hmm. Sanya Monet. We'll see. We'll see. My gut tells me that it's got, it'll get there, but we haven't seen the real, like, that's the thing that's going to make this whole thing crack.

46:23Also, one of the things that I always come back to when I think about generative AI, I do think it's going to be a disruptive force in this business. And I think it's part of all the things that we're talking about, about how the music industry is starting to shift. But it's really more of a revolution or a change on the music creation side rather than the music consumption side. This is what I'm saying. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So like I was saying earlier, just to clarify my own point, that yes, Napster was very disruptive, but it was disruptive in the way that we consume music and listen to it and buy it or not buying it.

46:58Same with Spotify. This is kind of a different thing. Yeah, it's more in the lineage of sampling and that sort of thing. Also, Napster provided something. It seems like the dark ages now, but they provided something that the record business couldn't give you. You had to buy a CD for 18 bucks to get the song you wanted. Oh, yeah. And then they gave you, you can get whatever you want for free. And not only the for free part, but the whatever you want part song by song. You know, Spotify came in and gave you the world's music for one price. That's stuff you really couldn't do before. I think the only place that AI so far has done that, like in a productized way, is in the creation side.

47:39where it gives people making music like, holy shit, like that works. I'm increasingly hearing professional songwriters and producers tell me that they have been playing around. Totally. And it's amazing to watch them do it because again, musicians like to fuck with things. For the most part, the most interesting use cases are when it helps get out of you, what's inside of you quicker, faster and better. That's to me the real power of it so far. The consumption side of it, it's kind of has an internet slop feature to it sometimes where you're like, do people really want to hear like functional music in a billion different ways?

48:19Like, I don't know if that's really going to capture the world's attention. And I'm curious as to what it is that's going to do that on the consumer side of it. And it's probably gated to the licensing agreements between the major music companies and the AI platforms. Yeah, so I wanted to talk a little bit about that and get your pulse on AI and how it might interact with the traditional music business in the near future. So the three major music companies, Sony, Universal, and Warner sued Suno and Udio, who are kind of two of the front runners in the AI startup or AI music startup space. They sued them for widespread copyright infringement.

48:59But more recently, Bloomberg and the Financial Times have both reported separately over the last few months that they're discussing a settlement and potentially nearing a settlement to license their works for training with Zuno and Udio. I'm wondering, do you think that that is a likely outcome here or do you foresee the majors going to the bitter end with this lawsuit? And whether whatever the discussions are between the majors and the AI companies is going to really result in this technology being out in the wild unrestricted, I'm very skeptical that that's the next place it's going to go. So the fact that they're cooperating and having some conversations between the two parties will lead to something.

49:41but is it going to be the unrestrained use of this technology in the wild? I would be shocked if that happens anytime soon. I think the sort of conventional wisdom point of view from the sort of been in this business for a while perspective is that it'll go down the path that's somewhat similar to what happened with YouTube, where YouTube came rolling into the music business in the 2006 timeframe, like uncapped, out in the wild, being used by a million people, no licenses. And through a combination of negotiation and litigation, there ended up being this painful sausage making process, which actually also had a very big technology component to it.

50:33So there was the licensing legal framework that was a combination of litigation and negotiation. But then there was the infrastructure of the YouTube CMS, the content management system. That was a big part of the technology was allowing copyright holders to control their own works on the platform. That was a big technology build. So it was a combination of those three things that turned the YouTube from the death of the music business, which everybody thought it was going to be in like the 2006-2007 timeframe, to like a third of the revenue base, something like that. Yeah. I don't know off the top of my head, but it's paying out a lot of money.

51:14But it's a real revenue base. It's not everything that maybe the music business, the copyright holders in 2007 thought it could be, but it's meaningful and it certainly hasn't hurt the growth rate of the music business. In fact, you could argue that it's been helpful. If I'm a betting person, I suspect that the AI thing will, the argument over AI will follow a similar path. How long that takes and how expensive it is, you don't know. The record companies are more prepared for it than they were in the YouTube time, but the technology companies are also more prepared for it. So we'll see how that happens.

51:54Irregardless, YouTube was a killer application that provided real value to its users from day one. So it was out of the bag day one. I just haven't seen that yet on the AI side. Again, more on the creation side. The music industry is still in its TikTok age, but it does feel like TikTok now for the music industry is a little bit different than it used to be. I like to think of it kind of in two time periods. The first time period would be like 2019 to 2023, where, you know, like I was saying before, it's like kind of a gold rush. There were all these people who were getting visibility on the platform that never had before.

52:32And record labels were, you know, gobbling up all this talent, signing them right away to really good deals. But now we're kind of seeing the aftermath of that. All of the viral singles that happened in, you know, those early years of TikTok often didn't amount to that artist becoming a superstar. Yeah, no artist buy-in. It's about the reactive songs, but not necessarily the story around them. Yeah. And I mean, TikTok still is the platform that everyone goes to for digital marketing. And that's still the way that we're thinking about moving songs. I'm wondering, do you think there's any chance that we're coming to the end of the TikTok age in the music industry?

53:08I don't think it's like the death knell for, I mean, TikTok is a huge platform that like hundreds of millions of people use, you know, it'd be billions of people use it on a daily basis. So, but I do think that people figure out better ways to tell a story. As platforms age, people figure out how to use them more effectively. There are levers on TikTok that you didn't use to be able to pull that you can pull now. Like what? There's a lot of really interesting – talk about AI. There's a lot of really interesting businesses that are using platform information that they're jailbreaking out of user information that they can collect to do predictive analytics in terms of how to expose records to audience.

53:57So there's one, for example, called CoBrand. Oh, CoBrand is great. It's a really interesting business. Yeah. And they're using AI a really interesting way. in an agent sort of focused way to figure out how to match repertoire and audience worldwide by taking information from platforms like TikTok and analyzing it in more effective ways. The thing about TikTok that is sort of distinct from other platforms, I think, is that it's frequency. So radio was a slow melting ice cube before COVID. COVID pulled everybody out of their cars, the melt rate increased. So what the world loses when radio audience declines is the ability to turn a song or an artist on to millions of people with a switch.

54:47And that's a function, not only like, I'm going to display this for one listen, but they keep on playing a record till people figure out, oh my God, I love this, or I never want to hear this again. And that's like a process of a record finding its bottom. Like it gets displayed. And then some of them, when they're displayed, like a certain number of times take off like a rocket and other ones die. That's frequency. That's what promotion does. And when radio goes away, it's harder to display a record to people all at once. The gatekeeper function is gone. The thing about TikTok is because people are making so many videos around a song simultaneously, Obviously, people using the platform can hear a song like a thousand times all of a sudden, which does effectively the same thing that radio does.

55:36Yeah. So it's sort of that, like, how many plays does it take, like, till that nth play that makes a record ahead? There's this psychological phenomenon called the mere exposure effect, which I always cite whenever talking about music marketing, because basically what the psychological effect says is that the more times that you're exposed to anything, the more likely you are to report that you like it. And so that's kind of the idea. But not all records that are played for somebody turn out to hit. But that's a very important function in the history of the music business. And I feel like labels, digital marketing people, companies like Cobrand are figuring out how to promote using platforms more effectively.

56:21And so in the first instance, when it was like, oh, my God, what's this new play thing? They were just reacting to a phenomenon that was naturally occurring in the world. And now they're starting to say, wait a minute, like, how can we figure out where an audience is for an artist or a record? And how can we more effectively map that record to that audience, which is essentially record promotion? Yeah. And so that's and that's, again, like a function of the music business reacting to a format shift and saying, like, we have to do the job now that we've always done. Just do it in a new way. It doesn't happen overnight.

56:58One thing that I've been watching a lot as a reporter this year is, you know, the Trump administration. But, you know, he came to office in January. And since then, I've had a lot of experts in the music business tell me that they find his policies to be, like, quote, predictably unpredictable. From your vantage point as an investor in the music business, have you seen any of Trump's policies over the last year impact the music business? Well, Liberation Day was interesting. Okay. I had four transactions going the day before Liberation Day that were transformative for my companies. I have five businesses that I have sizable positions in.

57:39Four deals that were transformative for those companies. And they all went sideways on Liberation Day. And so I was like, and I'm not used to that for the reasons that we were talking about before. Like I'm used to like the music business is like this weird little scene of we do our own thing and the world doesn't really get around to us. And then all of a sudden I'm like, would me? Like what? Because and it's part of the financialization effect that, you know, it's because there are two public stocks out there that are major music companies. There's billions of dollars of debt and equity capital invested in the copyright business.

58:16And so the markets pay more attention to the music business than they did before. But obviously, Trump is like a volatility magnet. You never know what's going to happen. There's been all sorts of wild rumors that he could suspend copyright for AI training purposes in the name of national security. I've sort of asked around to people who I feel like know about policy and sort of presidential authority with respect to copyrights. I don't see any mechanic by which that could happen. So I think some of the more exotic like freak outs people are having, I'm not so sure. I'm kind of interested. You know, I come from the punk rock world.

58:56You used to play in hardcore bands. The golden era of punk rock music in the United States was Ronald Reagan time. And so you're ready for a punk resurgence. I think the Republican like authoritarian world is really good for angry music. And so I'm kind of like, you know, interested. and there's some evidence of that. I mean, you know, loud music is flying off the shelves. Tickets are selling like crazy. There's a bunch of great young bands that come from the hardcore world that all of a sudden are making things happen in the world. And so I'm like, I'm kind of as a fan and I'm curious, it's time.

59:39Man. Well, I could talk to you for hours. Thank you so much for sharing all of your insights. But before I let you go, let's end it with something a little more fun and lighthearted. I like to do this with everyone that comes on the record and it's called Make Me a Playlist. So I'm going to give you three prompts for songs that I want you to add to our playlist. So the first prompt is, what is a song you can no longer gatekeep? There's an artist called Odile that has a record called Miami and he's an LVRN artist. The record's a split record with Leon Thomas. And it's just a fucking great record.

1:00:19And like the world's kind of figuring it out in real time. Like give it another, you know, heartbeat and it's going to be everywhere. What is a favorite throwback of yours? A record by a band called The Chromags, which is a hardcore band that influenced a lot of us in a major way from the 1980s they have a song called we gotta know um and the first minute and 15 seconds of that song are just uniquely and absolutely flawless i i must admit god help you i don't i don't know yeah i'm not familiar and we'll see how it lands on you but for me that's a tried and i'll send you an email and be like oh with my full review of that song And lastly, what is a guilty pleasure for you?

1:01:08There's a rapper from Atlanta called Belly Gang Cushington. He has a record called Friend Do. It's the remix of it. I can't stop listening to it. It's not a polite record, let's say, but it's uniquely captivating in its own way. Like you want to hear it again kind of way. That's a good pick. Matt, thank you so much for coming to On The Record. It means a lot that you came. This was so much fun. Oh, well, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. Another special thank you again to Matt Pincus for coming on the show this week. Now let's throw it to our chart roundup for this week. After many weeks with K-pop Demon Hunters tracks dominating the top 10, it's now Taylor Swift's turn.

1:01:50Following the release of her new album, The Life of a Showgirl, she holds all 10 spots on the chart this week. So let's count it down. At number 10 is canceled.

1:02:04This week's number nine spot is Eldest Daughter. At number eight is Life of a Showgirl. Number seven is Actually Romantic. Coming in at number six is Wishlist. This week's number five is Wood.

1:02:30Number four is Father Figure.

1:02:36Coming in at number three is Elizabeth Taylor.

1:02:42Number two is Opalite.

1:02:47And finally, in its first week at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, it is The Fate of Ophelia by Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift has taken over the Hot 100 Top 10 this week, but Life of a Showgirl has done even more than that. This album has now sold 3.4 million physical and digital copies, according to Luminate, which means she now has the largest sales week for any album in its first week since Luminate first began tracking music data in 1991. The single week album sales record was previously held by the debut week of Adele's 25. Thanks so much for tuning in to this week's episode of On The Record, and another special thank you to this week's guest, Matt Pincus.

1:03:28If you enjoyed today's show, please give us a rating, a follow, a thumbs up. All of those things really help us to grow and reach new audiences. Again, I'm your host, Kristen Robinson, and tune in next week for even more industry insider knowledge. See you then.

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