Inside Streaming: In Profile
Elena Segal, Global Senior Director of Music Publishing, Apple Music
Inside Streaming is a new series of profiles, articles, and insights into the world of music streaming and how it all works. In this installment, Graham Davies, President and CEO of DIMA, caught up with Elena Segal, Apple Music’s Global Senior Director of Music Publishing about being awarded with an Ivors Academy Honour in London during Ivors’ Week 2024.
Elena Segal and Graham Davies
GD: Elena, you recently received an Ivors Academy Honour [during Ivors Week 2024] in recognition of your exceptional contributions to the UK music industry. Congratulations! What are some of your career highlights and where does this award come?
ES: Thank you so much, Graham. It was quite a week!
There have been numerous highlights of my career, but certainly the most significant fall within my 18+ years at Apple. It might be hard to beat the launch of Apple Music in 110 countries on one day in June 2015. The structure of rights in compositions means that my small-but-mighty international legal team at the time were negotiating deals all around the globe in a tight timeframe, when no subscription streaming service had ever launched on anything close to that kind of scale before. The Apple Music Festival (originally the iTunes Festival), which ran in London for ten years, was also a highlight. For most of those years we had live shows every night for a month. And from 2009 we live-streamed those shows, well before Apple launched a streaming service, and before live-streaming became ubiquitous. That put us at the forefront of figuring out both the technology for global streaming, as well as the legal and cultural challenges around simulcasting live music on a worldwide scale. But what made it a highlight was getting to see the fruits of our labours in a much more personal way than we normally can, in the form of the pure joy and love-of-music of the audiences.
All that said, this award comes very high on the list of highlights. As songwriters will attest, what they do is very “behind the scenes”. And that can also be true for those of us working with songwriters and music publishers, getting licenses in place, making sure the money keeps flowing through to music publishers and PROs (and thereafter on to songwriters). Public recognition doesn’t come often or easily. In addition, the Ivors Academy is an organisation that is all about the songwriters. There is an integrity and authenticity to what they do, and the way they support their members, that makes acknowledgment by them particularly sweet.
GD: The Ivors Academy Honours revives the tradition of the Gold Badge Awards, which has a very illustrious list of past recipients such as legendary artists like Joan Armatrading CBE, Peter Gabriel, Bob Geldof KBE, as well as key industry executives. Who have been some of the people you have looked up to during your career?
ES: Well, the list of songwriters to whom I’ve looked up would be endless and would include everyone on the list you’ve just mentioned, as well as some current greats such as Raye, who uses her writing in such a powerful, honest and authentic way. Beyond that, I have been very lucky to have people take chances on me at certain stages of my career when they had no evidence that that chance would pay off. That includes Russ Frackman, a partner at my old law firm in LA who took me under his wing and had me work on some of the seminal music litigation of the day; the late Kevin Saul, who hired me to Apple as the first lawyer in Europe for iTunes when I was extremely junior for that role, and who really laid the groundwork for Apple Music with all the work he did on iTunes before I arrived at Apple; and Oliver Schusser, who asked me to establish the first Music Publishing team at Apple and who has supported me all the way. And outside of my own career, I was very honoured to have Golnar Khosrowshahi present me with my Ivors Academy Honour. She is someone who has forged her own path, as the only women ever to take a music company public, running a successful business with quiet dignity.
GD: You have worked at Apple from an early point in the launch and establishment of streaming. How important was Apple to this story?
ES: Apple’s role in streaming really pre-dates streaming, not least because music has always been at the heart of Apple’s DNA. The significance of iTunes in the digital music era is sometimes now overlooked. But, in the days of unlicensed download services such as (the original) Napster, Grokster, Kazaa and others, Apple was working on and launching a legitimate alternative and putting “a thousand songs in your pocket” with the iPod, really kickstarting the availability of legal music online. At the time, those unlicensed services were providing a very poor experience: you never knew what you were actually downloading, and whether or not it might be a virus. But it was free. The digital world of music was here to stay, and Apple found a way to provide added value for which people were willing to pay at a time when the music industry was hemorrhaging money because of the overwhelming piracy. And it was also a time when broadband speeds were not really good enough for streaming at any decent quality. iTunes was a stepping stone into streaming that should not be ignored or underestimated. And the global scale on which we launched Apple Music in 2015 was also possible because of the extensive work we had done, and music publishing-related relationships we had built, in the global rollout of iTunes.
GD: Your role means you work closely with songwriters and music publishers. How important has this been for your career and current role?
ES: To really understand the direction the Music Publishing team should take, and in order to properly represent the songwriter voice within Apple, it is essential to appreciate the songwriter experience. It took some time after arriving at Apple to understand the way money flows from us to music publishers, collecting societies and then on to songwriters. And there was a moment (a long time ago) when I realised that the money we were paying out was getting stuck in the system. It was through understanding the experience and priorities of all the different links in the music publishing chain that I came to understand that we needed to find a way to get that money flowing again. Many of the processes and systems that exist today arise from that realisation and the work that followed. Spending time with songwriters has given me a deep awareness of the challenges they face, and the desire to find a way to meet those challenges while fostering a healthy overall music ecosystem.
GD: Music streaming has been a significant growth story and is now the main means by which consumers and fans access music. What next for music streaming?
ES: Competition for people’s attention has never been greater, so it’s essential to consciously build upon the great success of the past several years. The good news is that never before have so many creators had access to such sophisticated tools for their craft, or had access to global distribution, in which Apple is proud to have played a significant role. So this is the time for streaming services to do what they do best: continue to innovate to bring the most compelling listening experiences to fans.
GD: Thanks Elena, and congratulations again on your award.
ES: Thank you so much, Graham.
