Team Talk is Music Ally’s weekly interview series, where our marketing experts speak to music industry teams about their latest work, best practices, and smart strategies. You can find the archive here.
Royalties and metadata firm Salt has been building its business steadily – and recently raised funding from a host of big names, including Bjórn Ulvaeus, Dave Stewart, Quincy Jones, and Dan Kurtz. Salt has also signed deals to provide services with the likes of Dutch collecting society BumaStemra and the US-based Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC).
Former Mint, ICE, and EMI Music Publishing executive Alberto Garcia recently joined Salt as its SVP for Europe and Africa. He spoke to Music Ally’s Amy Lilley about how Salt is expanding into various African countries, how building infrastructure where there was none before is liberating, and the opportunities that these African countries have in their grasp.
Amy Lilley: What does your role at Salt involve?
Alberto Garcia: We are a B2B company – so basically my role is to try to expand our portfolio of customers and also to educate potential customers about what Salt offers – and to support the rightsholders. The great thing about Salt is that it offers a very wide range of services to rightsholders. What we offer is back-office services, it’s a cloud-based scale technology. There’s a lot of buzzwords! But basically we are very modern technology that has been built for the needs of today.
We don’t do licensing. We take care of all the processing. So we take all the reports and then we process “online” – for instance, Spotify and Apple Music – and “offline” – radio or TV or live music. We have very flexible, transparent and accurate technology.
Amy Lilley: What are some of the key strategies Salt is implementing to expand its presence in Africa?
Alberto Garcia: What we’re doing in Africa is not different to what we’re doing in Europe or another region of the world. For an author society, rebuilding their technology can be very expensive. So one thing that we offer to author societies is for them to use our system to process data – and they can focus more on the members’ services. There’s a lot of opportunities in Africa with that.
I see many similar issues in Africa that you can find in Europe in the US or even Latin America. Of course there are differences and peculiarities, as with any region in the world, but also we see exactly the same things. We see that you need to get the right metadata. You need to get the right system to run the process and you need to get paid for your work.
We signed an agreement with Trace to support them in the Democratic Republic of Congo. To build a new entity in a country is great – you can sit with people and decide how to do it without a legacy [system in place] to have to build on.
Amy Lilley: What is exciting to you about building new systems and technology in places where there are no existing systems to have to build around or into?
Alberto Garcia: I work in a company where nobody tells me “oh, we always did this in this way.” And the point is to see things from different angles, and also I’m working with people from around the world, so I think it’s good to be fresh.The company’s new but that doesn’t mean that it would be better than an old one. I really like that we can talk with different rightsholders and they each have a completely different approach.
Amy Lilley: Can you tell us a bit about your background and how you ended up working at Salt?
Alberto Garcia: Do you know what is the reason behind the name “Salt”? It’s about how the Romans paid in salt: that’s the reason why it’s now called “salary”. So the reason behind the company being called this is because it’s about the salary of the creator.
So, I had a label in Uruguay for 15 years, then I sold the label and I moved to Europe. Before my label, I studied cinema and photography, so even in the very beginning, I was very engaged with the creative community and with artists – and I helped them to develop a career. Then I wanted to learn more about copyright and I really liked that and learned a lot.
I saw [the industry change] from recording on tape to Pro Tools, and from physical distribution and thousands of CDs in a storage place to today’s system. I’m very happy that today there is the capacity for independent artists [to do it themselves].
