Michael Walker: Yeah. Alright. I'm excited to be here today with my new friend, Romain Vivien. So, Romain is the strategic leader at Believe—believe.com, which is like, talk about a slam dunk of a domain name. Believe.com, that's gotta be one of the best domain names to own ever. So, he oversees global music strategy and artist development.

He helps to enhance independent artists’ and labels’ careers in over 50 countries. He’s a music business worldwide veteran with over three decades of experience—that’s about as many years as I've been alive, so that's amazing.

Romain Vivien: Don’t mention it, please.

Michael: He also held roles at Virgin and EMI, serving as the Managing Director of Capitol. And he is an advocate for fairness in music. He is committed to building a healthier, more equitable music ecosystem that empowers artists through transparency and innovation, which is very needed, especially in the music industry. So, Romain, I really appreciate you taking the time to hop on the podcast today. I'm sure your schedule is extremely busy. Thank you for being here.

Romain: Sure. Thank you very much for having me.

Michael: Awesome. So, to kick things off, I’d love to hear just a little bit more about your story and how you’ve been working over the past 30 years to become one of the leaders at Believe.

Romain: Well, I don't think I could have done anything else but music to start with. It's a passion, and I discovered 30 years ago that I could turn that passion into a business, into a job. I discovered that music was not only about being able to play guitars, sing, or write songs, but also that it’s an industry.

And for artists to become who they are, where they are, to reach their audiences, and to build a career, they actually need people like us.

It's been quite a journey in almost 30 years because the market has been completely renewed and disrupted. The way to discover artists, produce music, and bring music to the fans has completely changed. Probably it’s one of the industries that has been the most disrupted in the past 20 years. But one thing has never changed—for me personally, and in general—it has always been about making the best music you can, exposing that music, and bringing it to the world and to audiences.

So, what we're trying to do at Believe is pretty simple in vision and meaning, but really complicated in reality when it comes to how we operate it. Basically, the mission is very simple: to bring the right level of services to any given artist or label around the world. To help them navigate the digital world, understand where the market’s going, understand how they should reach their audiences, how they should leverage data, how they should spend their money, etc. Again, we want them to make the best music they can.

So, we’ve built infrastructures and teams, starting in France and now in 50 countries, with people on the ground. Because there’s not a lot we can do if we don’t understand the markets, if we don’t understand the artist community, if we don’t build trust, if we don’t understand their needs. The first question I always ask an artist or label in a meeting is: Are you organized? What can you do? What can’t you do? What are you doing well? What do you think you can do better? Asking all those questions helps me understand how we can serve them.

Depending on those conversations, we connect them to the right team, the right level of services, the right contract, to build a relationship that makes sense for them and for us so we can grow together.

One thing I usually say is that we are entrepreneurs helping entrepreneurs. Because what has changed in our world is that those labels and artists are actually in charge of their destiny. They are entrepreneurs themselves. The rise of the independent artist community and the independent label is possible because suddenly people like us, along with DSPs and platforms such as YouTube and Spotify, can make the link between them and their audiences in a much more comprehensive, faster, direct, transparent, and—hopefully, this is what we try to do—respectful way. Connecting those artists and bringing their music to audiences.

That’s what we’re trying to do, day in and day out, for the past 20 years—because this is the 20th year of Believe. It’s been quite a long journey.

The good thing is that there’s never been as much interesting music everywhere in the world as there is today. Music travels much more today than it did 20 years ago, thanks to people like us, thanks to digital, thanks to audiences, platforms, and DSPs. That creates a lot of opportunities for a new generation of artists and a new tier of artists and labels. Before, it was really much about the Top 10, the Top 50, the Top 200, Billboard’s equivalent everywhere in the world. Now, there’s a new generation of artists below those big hits who can exist thanks to people like us and thanks to more direct relationships with platforms.

But the goal is to bring as many of them into the Top 200, the Top 10. That’s what we’re trying to do. So, it’s a mix and the right combination between understanding the markets and the needs of the artists, leveraging technology and our unique relationship with DSPs, and putting the right teams with the right expertise to serve artists and labels, to navigate, grow their businesses, and grow their audiences.

It’s not about selling music to start with. It’s about identifying the right audience, engaging conversations with that audience, and building an audience. If you do this well, ultimately, they’re going to consume your music. You’re going to sell your music, you’re going to sell concert tickets, you’re going to sell merchandise, and you’re going to develop your career.

Michael: Hmm. Good stuff. Awesome. So it sounds like what you’re saying is that never before has it been easier for an artist to directly connect with their fans because of tools like the internet and the distribution channels that are available. What used to be gatekeepers with just a few channels—now it’s possible to connect directly with fans.

And what you focus on primarily is helping empower independent artists and labels to reach their fans directly and streamline that connection. There’s more transparency now than there ever has been as well.

I’m curious—from your experience, you’ve been doing this for 30 years now, which is incredible. You must be doing something well, because you don’t stick around for 30 years unless you have strong roots and you’re willing to adapt and grow.

So, from your perspective, having witnessed quite a few of these different waves and revolutions where things evolved in the music industry in particular, what are some of the biggest challenges of this current era that you see right now? Especially compared to previous challenges? What are some of the challenges you think are always fundamental versus unique challenges arising in the era we’re in right now?

Romain: I think probably the first one is to emerge because that’s pretty much the other side of the same coin of what I was just describing. Beforehand, very few artists had the chance to be signed, the chance to go on TV, the chance to be played on radio. Very few.

Right now, a lot more have access to these audiences. And if you look at the numbers and the stats, there’s never been as many artists making a living out of their music as in 2024, which was even more than in 2023, more in 2022, and this is continuing. So this is a good thing.

What does that mean as well? And that’s the other side. There’s never been as much content—so many artists, so much music, so many songs being distributed to the platforms every single day. And I think the challenge, as before, is to find the right artists, to find the right talent, and to find the right way to actually help them surface, to cut through the noise, and to reach an audience.

For me, again, it has to start with music, because marketing and promotion and audience connection are great, but they’re only going to work if you have something to propose—something that will touch and reach people and communities and audiences. So it has to start with good songs, good storytelling, good positioning.

Because don’t get me wrong, being an artist is complicated. You have to produce your song. You have to find your audiences. You have to have something to say. You have to live the life of an artist, which is very difficult. It’s a particular job. So it’s about talent, and it’s about being focused on what you want to be as an artist and what you want to achieve as an artist.

I think the challenge is there. It’s to understand who the artist is behind the songs, or through the songs, so that we can build the right storytelling, the right approach, and the right campaign to bring that music to audiences. You can start very, very small, that’s not the point here. But if you don’t have something to say, and if you don’t understand how it works within that world—which is global, because digital is global, because DSPs have cut the boundaries from one country to another—again, music is traveling faster than ever.

We see genres of music popping up in some regions coming from the other side of the globe. We’ve seen that with K-Pop. We are currently seeing that a lot within Believe with Punjabi music from South India that is resonating in Canada and North America because of the diaspora there, and the new generations of artists that are actually recording Punjabi music and reaching audiences as well.

So, I think this is definitely the number one challenge. The second challenge for me is that you need to have the right partners to help you understand that world. It gives a lot more opportunity than before, but it’s a much more complicated world. You have to understand how TikTok works, which is very different from Spotify, which is very different from YouTube. You have to understand the mechanisms. You have to understand how to reach the audiences. What type of content do you want to publish? What type of content do you want to distribute? At what pace?

And you have to look at the signals, analyzing the data. That’s our job. We don’t ask the artist to do this, but we are here to analyze the data and say, “Hey, something’s happening here on that track, we need to push. Something’s happening in this country, you need to spend more time there, or you need to build a show there. You need to connect with your fans locally, as opposed to only online.” Both are very complementary.

So, it’s really about navigating into that world and being able to push when it matters, to go to the next step. Because artist development is the most complicated part of our job. A lot of artists have hits. Some of them will transform into album sales. But how many of them will build a career?

This is what we’re talking about here. Building a career is the goal. And this is what we are here for—the journey with the artists, starting from whatever level they start, but helping them to go to the next one, to reach a more faithful, engaged, local, regional, then global audience. This is also, I think, the challenge.

The good thing again here is that I think we have a much stronger view of what’s happening. Because before, we didn’t know who was buying CDs at HMV or at Target, or at Virgin Records. We didn’t know. Now we know much more about who those people are, how they are discovering music, sharing music, consuming music, liking music. We have a lot of insight, we have a lot of data. And it’s also about how we leverage this—how we take all those insights and that knowledge to better understand again how we connect the artist’s artistic proposition, or who he is, to an audience.

So yeah, those are, I think, the challenges.

The other thing, maybe to complete the answer, is that I see a lot of opportunity because we see the emergence of local artists much more. Beforehand, it was very much about global stars traveling the world and reaching global audiences. Now it’s about local artists and local scenes that are providing the diversity of music as well. It’s not only about pop anymore.

It’s about dance and electronic. It’s about metal. It’s about classical. It’s about Punjabi in India. It’s about K-Pop. It’s about country in the U.S. It’s also about having those genres and local scenes and artists reach their local audiences, and then become more global, which digital helps. But again, it’s all about emerging from that ocean of content, because ultimately, you don’t build a career if you don’t connect to the fans and if you don’t have something special compared to other artists.

So this is what we’re trying to do, and this is how we are trying to help the artist navigate.

Michael: Awesome. Yeah, there’s so much good stuff there. So it sounds like what you’re saying is that it starts with the core of the music and the song. Because if you don’t have a product, something that’s special or valuable, then that’s the foundation of the business model of connecting with the fans.

That’s always been at the core—30 years ago, 20, 10, and now. The product is still key. And it’s always been about connecting it with the right people. It’s just that the methods for connecting the music with the people have evolved.

Now the channels have opened up. You can use the internet, but that leads to another challenge where there’s so much music, it can be more challenging to cut through the noise and connect with the right people. So when you’re working with a campaign, really it’s about identifying: what is it about this music that’s unique, that’s special? Who’s the audience that’s going to resonate most with it? How do we build that connection?

Romain: Exactly. Because ultimately, the song or an album or a video or a live performance for an artist is the door of entry for a fan or for an audience to connect with the artist. So it's all about the content. Very often I say content is king because if you don't have content, there's no way you can connect with the audience, and you need to entertain that conversation and keep that conversation alive. So it's about feeding the audiences with the right content at the right time, with the right format, on the right platforms. But with a story to tell, it needs to mean something.

Marketing is only an accelerator. Marketing accelerates your reach, but if you don't build some sort of an organic audience with an artistic proposition, and you only push the button of the marketing, then there's lots of chances that you're gonna push with no impact. So you need to build the organic relationship with the audiences.

Also, what has changed a lot is that before, you needed a producer, you needed to go on media, you needed to go on stage, and to have your records in the shops. There were a lot of intermediaries. Now, with the social networks and with that world, artists connect with their fans instantly. Through social networks, they can have conversations with their fans directly. They post directly on their Instagram, on their YouTube channels, or on their TikTok channel, whatever it may be, but they connect to their fans. So I think this is also a very powerful way for the fans to feel that they are special and to feel that they have a specific connection with the artist.

Before media needed to make the decision to host an artist on a TV show or on a radio show, or to enter a song into a playlist. We still need to do this because the new playlists are the Spotify playlists and Apple Music playlists. But nevertheless, you can subscribe to your favorite artist on their Spotify profile or on their YouTube channel, Instagram account, or TikTok account. Before, you couldn't do this.

So I think building that relationship is very important. You need to have the right balance between a lot of content and not too much. You also need to make sure you do that at the right pace, and that really depends on which artist you are dealing with.

We have the two biggest hip hop artists in France, probably of the last decades, with us. One is Jul, the other is PNL. Jul is probably the most prolific artist ever seen in the music industry. We're talking almost 30 albums in 10 years. Nobody has done that. Probably if the Beatles didn't split, they would have done that, because they did 10 albums in 10 years—so one album a year—but Jul releases two to three, sometimes four albums a year. So the strategy here is to feed the audiences a lot, to keep them engaged, and to keep them excited.

PNL is the other way around. PNL are super rare. It's one album every four years. No interview, no media, no collaboration. So they create a huge awareness, a huge desire for new music. Every time they release something, it makes an impact. Those are completely different strategies. There's no good or bad, and actually both of those different strategies work super well because they're multi-platinum sellers. But it's a different approach, and it's also part of who they are, what type of story they want to build, and how they want to connect with their fans.

So our job is also to understand who the artist is and how we should connect them to the fans in a way that is very close to who they are, because the fans know. There's not a lot you can hide from fans anymore because of social networks. This is also a big difference. So you need to be consistent. Even if sometimes the story you build is a character that's not who you are in real life, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that the character connects to the fans.

So I think this is a super exciting time. There's never been as many independent artists reaching an audience, making a career, making a living out of their music. But there are still a lot of challenges ahead of us. It's about keeping that opportunity for the independent scene to be able to continue to develop themselves. And I think this is the mission that we have. It's always gonna be about helping independent artists, independent labels, diversity, and local artists—from Thailand to Mexico, from Germany to Brazil, from New Zealand to Africa—to connect with their fans and help them to reach their audiences, make the best music possible, and leave the rest with us.

Michael: Hmm. Awesome. So good. What I'm hearing you say is that fundamentally, the core of this is helping artists connect with their fans and build communities, and the relationship is the most important thing. And artists are different. They have different expressions. The way they show up, the way they put their music out, might be completely different. One might put it out regularly versus less regularly. But the most important thing is building that synergy between the artist, the music, and their fans.

I thought one interesting part that you've come back to a few times is the importance of the story and the narrative, being able to communicate and share it so that there's a point behind the artist's movement, their community, and their music. I'd love to hear you share a little bit more about that. For a lot of artists, especially like the community here who might be a bit earlier on in developing their artist identity, they might be wondering: What is my story? Do I have a unique story? What is it? How can I share it? How can I create a bigger mission or movement behind my music?

Could you share a little bit more? When you're working with an artist, and you're trying to—maybe they're like a block of ice—and you're trying to chip away and get to that story that is who they are, but also compelling, how do you usually start?

Romain: Listening. Listening to their music and to what they have to say. I think you learn a lot from an artist about who they are, why they are an artist, why they want to say something in their album, in their project. Spending a lot of time with them. Most of the time the person that knows best what to do is the artist himself. That's what I love about them, and why I love working with artists for 30 years.

Because being an artist is one of a kind. There's not a lot of jobs like this, maybe being an actor or other roles in the cultural industries. But being an artist is exposing yourself, taking risks, taking bets, offering yourself to audiences. Being on stage in front of 10 people or 80,000 people in a stadium is taking a risk. It's about connecting with the audience, but also giving access to who you are.

So the more time I spend with artists, the more I understand who they are. I'm also a big believer—and it's not necessarily the case in every music genre—that songwriting is very important. Listening to what the artist has to say. You have a lot of answers in their songs. Even if it's a love song—there are millions of love songs—you always tell the same story in a different way. It tells a lot about who you are.

Then it's about understanding their ambition. We represent a lot of artists. Some of them are on TuneCore. We acquired TuneCore back in 2015. They are very self-released, DIY artists. Some of them are not completely professional. They are smaller artists and they don’t necessarily make a living out of their music, so they may have a second job. But still it's about their creativity and trying to connect what they do to audiences.

So the more you understand who they are, what they write about, and what their goals are, the better you can help them. We've been conducting some surveys and studies to better know our artists. The first thing is: Do you really want to be professional, or is this something you do on the side? If they're professional, the next question is: How can we help you? And understanding who they are and how we can help goes back to what I said earlier—understanding what they can do, what they can't do, and what their needs are.

Some of them need help being connected with other artists to produce music. Others need to understand how to build their social networks. Some need to find ways to connect with media. Some need help navigating content, uploading, videos, etc. So you need to understand their needs, understand who they are, and depending on this, identify the first audiences you want to connect them with.

To connect with that audience, you have multiple access points. Before, it was a few radio stations, a few TV shows. Right now, there are hundreds of ways. You can create a social network that reaches people in a few weeks, in a few months. It's really about this.

And who do you want to tell your audience you are? Because it's about the music, but it's also about what you stand for. I think audiences connect with bands not only because of their music but also because of what they stand for. You fall in love with reggae because it's cool to dance to, but also because of the Rastafari culture. You go along with jazz because jazz is, for me, with classical music, the most complicated, demanding music in the world. The skills to play jazz or improvise—which is a big part of jazz—are immense. Those artists work a lot.

Hip hop and punk music are genres that started in the street because those artists had something to say. They had something to say about what was happening in society, politics, the economy, relationships, injustice, etc. Punk music and hip hop music are music movements, but also representations of a generation—representing what's happening in the world, in a city, in a country, or in a community.

If you understand this well, you can connect them to the same community. There's a good chance that people who have gone through the same kind of experience as the artist—not in their artist life but in their personal life—will connect with the music because what the artist is saying, they have lived too.

So how do we make that happen? Spending time with the artist is super important for me, and after 30 years, I'm still learning every day.

Michael: Hmm. Awesome. Yeah. So what I'm hearing you say is that this part of it in particular is kind of like the art, where you can't really manufacture it in a way that is separate from the core of who they are and the situation that they're in. And so your approach is actually more to be a listener and to approach and let the artist be able to share who they are, and that ultimately will come from generational culture, who they are, how they were raised, the issues that are coming up for them. And that's probably where their music will come from as well.

And from that point on, it's really about connecting them with those pockets of people that can resonate with that similar culture or story. And so it's not so much something to try to invent as it is to look within and figure out what are those aspects of what you're expressing naturally that we can bring together with the right people who need to hear that message.

Cool. So yeah, I'm curious to hear your perspective. As someone that has been doing this for 30 years and you've seen things come and go, right now, because of the rise of digital networks and the ability for an artist to directly connect with their fans, I'm curious—we're getting at a little bit of theory now. So this is sort of like, this hasn't happened yet. This is where we're talking about predictions. Of course, people plan and God laughs—is that the phrase for it?

But from your perspective, what are some of the waves that are happening right now that you think are a unique opportunity for artists to pay attention to? What's happening to be able to swim along with it, try to catch the wave as it hits? I'm curious: where do you think the next five to ten years of the music industry is headed, and how someone that is an independent artist or an independent record label right now, that wants to be able to surf that wave, should focus?

Romain: It is a good question. I'm not sure I have the perfect answer to this. But I think ultimately it's always gonna be about being willing to be an artist, being capable, having talent, being capable of being creative, and understanding the world they're in. Because you can't be an artist today as you used to be 20 years ago, and probably in 10 to 20 years it's gonna be different as well in the way again to connect to your fans.

But one interesting thing is that again, I think the big wave that I see compared to two decades ago is the growth of the local scenes. If you look at the markets, most of the top 10 markets are actually, and the growth of those local markets are actually driven by local artists and by the local independent artist scenes and labels.

Why? Because suddenly having the opportunity to be distributed worldwide for less money and less risk than before, connecting to your fans directly, having access through people like us to a lot of knowledge on the market and marketing investment, funding, and things like that, opens a lot of doors for a lot of artists. So I think that wave is creating many more careers than before.

One of the challenges is, again, apart from cutting through the noise, the level of monetization for those local artists in some of the emerging markets is limited. If we look at how the market has evolved and grown over the years, it's almost always the same. It starts with the scene in the digital world. It starts with the level of equipment—with a phone, with a computer, and something to have access to the music. It's not about building a business that goes from free-to-paid subscription models, because this is where most of the value is.

And then it's about connecting to your audiences. That allows a lot of new scenes, new genres, and new artists to emerge. We're at the beginning in APAC of that because the level of penetration and the level of subscription is still very low, and those are not mature markets. Even in France this is not a mature market. We're talking barely 20 million subscriptions for almost 70 million people.

If I look at Africa, for example, Africa is by definition a music continent. There's a lot of music everywhere. Still, it's not monetizing. And still, there's no proper, well-organized collecting society when you are a writer, as you can find in the U.S. or Western Europe.

So I think one of the waves is to continue to help that ecosystem evolve, to begin to structure itself. And that's a lot of what we do, because when we open a country, we put people on the ground. Of course, we are here to find artists, to help them cut through the noise, reach directions, everything I just discussed. But we also help them understand the market and structure themselves and to understand how it works. Because it's different when you write your own song versus when you don’t write your own song.

And that's also why we bought Sentric. Three years ago we bought Sentric. It is now becoming our publishing arm, and we are trying to connect the writers to the artists as well, because not everyone can be a good songwriter. So sometimes they need songs or production from others. I think connecting the dots—because now the playing field is global—is also a way for more artists to embrace that career, for more artists to connect with more other artists, to produce more and better music, and for more local artists to connect with local fans and at some point be at the right level so they can become regional or global stars, reaching a more global audience.

So the wave is about this, and I think we have a responsibility as an industry. That's part of the challenge and the mission that we have: to help that ecosystem continue to grow, to continue to be more about local artists, and to continue to be a lot about diversity as well. I listen to a lot of music, and I think having dozens and dozens of various genres of music is priceless. That means something. So we need to make sure the industry we're building is going to be able to capture that and protect this.

We want the music to be as diverse as possible, and we want local artists to have a chance to emerge locally and then to emerge globally. And I think that's what I see. And again, if you take local scene access to the public, people like us that are providing distribution, funding, expertise, people to talk to, to navigate, and the digital platforms and the DSPs—which make the music much more affordable and much more accessible—then suddenly you have a fantastic equation that you didn't have before for all those artists to emerge.

So I don't think we are at the end of the wave. I think we're at the beginning of the wave. And every data point and number that we are looking at is showing us that there's a lot of growth ahead of us. We're just at the beginning of it. Because there's a lot of people still not connected to the digital world, not having a subscription on Apple, YouTube, or Spotify. I think those DSPs are still at the beginning also—on the subscription model, on making more value for the music.

If you compare the audio DSP world to the audiovisual DSP world—let's compare Spotify to Netflix, for example. Well, Netflix has been super smart in playing with the price of the subscriptions, in having tiers and stuff. And they're bringing a lot more value to it because the subscription is higher. So I think there's also a responsibility coming from us and coming from the DSPs to bring more value, or explain that music has real value.

And if we do this, that's going to mean more value that we can reinvest in the artist, in the creation, in making music, in making good albums, in developing those artists. So I think it's a very virtuous circle. And we are trying to participate in this, and I think we do pretty well.

We grew very fast over the past 20 years. When I joined Believe 17 years ago, we were 10. Now we are 2,000-plus. We were in one country, now we're in 50. We have tremendous results on local and global stars.

One example: two years ago we started to work with a small label in Spain with an artist called Iñigo Quintero. He had made three songs with his guitar and his keyboard in his bedroom—bedroom producer, bedroom artist. A year and a half later he was number one on Spotify worldwide. I don't think it could have happened in the old world.

What happened here is that we spent a lot of time understanding how we can grow those audiences, how we can bring that music, investing at the right time on the right services in the right countries, looking at the data: “Hey, this is starting to happen in Spain, then in LatAm, then in France, then in Germany, then in Holland,” and suddenly it became global.

So those success stories are possible because you understand what's happening and you connect that music to the fans. We're only at the beginning of this. We're going to see more independent artists making a living from their music, becoming global stars. We are going to see more genres of music coming from various places in the world, traveling, and reaching audiences beyond their own countries.

And I think we’re going to find new ways to expose artists. If you think about it, TikTok was not even a real thing for music 5, 6, 7 years ago. In that timeframe, it became very important to connect with fans and then transform into streams, into audiences.

Is there going to be a next TikTok? I don’t know yet. But I think we are still at the beginning of understanding everything that we can do. But it's always going to be about making good music.

So I think that's what I foresee, and that's really the mission that we have.

Michael: Ah, super exciting. What a time to be alive in the midst of this revolution with the music industry, the internet, and social media. And now, I mean, we didn’t even have a chance to go deep on AI and some of this new generative intelligence. But Romain, man, it’s been great connecting with you, and I really appreciate you coming on here live to share your perspective over the past 30 years working with artists.

In terms of artists who are listening to this right now, or record labels, or folks who are interested in connecting more with Believe or diving deeper—where can they go to connect more?

Romain: Where can you go?

Michael: Yeah, if someone is listening to the podcast right now and they want to check out Believe or connect.

Romain: Sure. Yeah, of course. Well, they should go on believe.com and then they’ll be redirected to their own country. They can find us there, and they can also see who the labels are that we work with so they can connect with those labels as well.

Also, a very good way to start is to go on TuneCore. It’s a very simple way to start distributing your music, having access to data. We look at those data every day, and at some point, if they do well, they’ll receive a call from us with the key questions: How can we help you more? How can we help you become a bigger artist and reach more people with your music? So I think it’s a good starting point.

Michael: Hmm. Awesome. Man, I just can’t believe.com is such a great domain.

Romain: Yes. Believe it or not, but I think it’s a great name. Very simple, very direct. I agree. Yeah, but thank you very much.

Michael: Yeah, thank you. And, you know, I just want to say, one thing I really appreciate about this conversation—and I think this is probably due in part to the 30-plus years that you’ve been doing this—is it seems clear how important listening and connecting are. I think everyone listening to this as an artist can take away value from this behavior of focusing on the roots: connecting, understanding, and listening.

It seems like that’s part of the reason you’ve been able to build such a great root system to help these artists thrive—because you really care about listening, understanding, and asking questions, getting to know them. I think that’s something all of us can learn from, especially when it comes to building relationships. For an artist with their fans, for example—having conversations, connecting with them, listening, seeing how they can serve.

So yeah, thanks for doing what you do, and I’m looking forward to connecting more.

Romain: Thank you very much.