Ingrooves EVP and GM Amy Dietz has told Music Week that, even with all the means and technology available in 2019’s business, artists still need a team.
With the Music Week Tech Summit Together With O2 taking place in London today, this vast subject will be pushed up the agenda for music companies across the board, and proceedings kick off with a keynote discussion of the future of music distribution, one of the pillars of the business.
Dietz will be speaking alongside Amuse CEO & founder Diego Fariasm Kameil Sattar of FUGA, SoundCloud’s Josh Nicoll and Chris Manning of The Orchard.
Ahead of the discussion, Dietz, who’s been with Ingrooves since 2012, analysed the changing winds of the distribution sector.
“As much as the artists have more options than they’ve ever had previously, I’m hopeful for it to just create more and more real inspiration and creativity,” said Dietz.
Dietz said the perception in some quarters the industry that DIY culture among artists is overtaking traditional structures is misleading.
Artists need a way to get to market
Amy Dietz
“The bottom line is: they need a team. The concept that people are doing all of this completely on their own, I believe, is a red herring,” she said. “Artists need a way to get to market, they need somebody to make sure that their content is live. They could piecemeal it all together on their own, but regardless of the actual semantics of all of it, they still need people to do some of these things for them. I believe they should be as educated as possible around how all of the pieces work so they can be empowered to make decisions.”
Dietz stressed that it’s “important to keep the dialogue open about how technology is moving through the music industry”.
She said Ingrooves places significant emphasis on “understanding of the level of education for the people that we’re working with, whether that’s artists or labels”.
“The commentary in our building for a very long time has been, ‘What you did three months ago might not be what you’re doing three months from now,’” Dietz added.
“The challenge is to not throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are still some great things and best practices. ‘New is always better’ isn’t always the case.”
Follow the Music Week Tech Summit on musicweek.com and our Twitter page.
Subscribers can read the interview in full here. To subscribe and never miss a music biz story, click here.
FOLLOW 
