The Music Business · Paul Lancaster Wiltshire
Speaking and advisory
Paul takes a small number of speaking engagements each year, alongside his role as founder and CEO of Songtradr. Topics span building and scaling companies, capital raising and acquisitions, music technology and rights, and the creative career itself.
Topics
Business and leadership
Preparing a Company for Investment
What investors are actually underwriting, how to protect shareholder value through a raise, and the work that should happen long before the first meeting. Drawn from raising US$220 million across Series A to F.
Mergers and Acquisitions: The Part Nobody Plans For
Ten acquisitions in, it is rarely the financial or technical work that decides whether a deal creates value. It is people, culture and integration. What accrues value, what quietly destroys it, and what to settle before signing.
Music, Technology and the Future of Rights
Where music rights, data and infrastructure are heading, why the systems underneath the industry struggle at global scale, and what that means for anyone building on top of them.
Making Records
Three decades of music production. Craft, collaboration, the producer's role, and what changes when the tools do. Best suited to masterclass and education settings.
Taking an Australian Company to the United States
What changes when you move from a small market to the largest one: capital, hiring, customers, structure, and the assumptions that stop working on arrival. Drawn from relocating to Los Angeles and building a US-headquartered company from an Australian start.
When the Founder Is the Risk
Most founder-led companies are destabilised from the inside long before anything external threatens them. Why the person who built it can become the greatest danger to it, what structural restraint looks like in practice, and why reducing his own access was one of the most important decisions he has made as a CEO.
Creative careers and the music industry
The Artist CEO
Why the first objective is not to get signed but to build something worth partnering with. Ownership, structure, and the five stages of a creative career run as a business.
AI and What It Can't Do
A view from inside both sides: a company built on music data and AI, and a platform built on direct human support for artists. What generative models change, what they cannot originate, and what becomes scarce when supply becomes infinite.
Agency Over Grievance
The industry has real structural problems. Why framing a career around them costs creators more than the problems do, and what changes when you stop.
Both Sides of the Glass
Twenty years making records, a decade building the infrastructure underneath them. What each side gets wrong about the other, and what it takes to work across both.
Nobody Understands Publishing
What happens to money in a system that cannot reliably match usage to ownership, and what every creator and rights holder should have in place before it matters.
How Music Licensing Actually Works
Who owns what, what a licence really costs, and why clearing music still takes weeks when it should take minutes. For brands, agencies, production teams and platforms that use music and want to stop getting it wrong.
Formats
- Keynote, 30 to 60 minutes
- Fireside conversation
- Panel moderation
- Workshop or masterclass for education settings
- Leadership or board session
- Remote and virtual sessions
Audiences
- Investor, founder and startup events
- Corporate development, M&A and leadership teams
- Technology and business conferences
- Music and creative industry conferences
- Universities, conservatoriums and music schools
- Company offsites and board sessions
Advisory
Paul occasionally takes on a small number of advisory engagements with organisations working across music, technology and rights. Availability is limited and subject to existing commitments. Enquiries are considered case by case.
Enquiries
Speaking and advisory enquiries:
paul@themusicbusiness.comPlease include the date, location, audience, format, and whether the event is commercial or educational.