Music industry leader Sophie Jones talks AI, politics, defensive comms and inclusivity at the BRITs
The Chief Strategy Officer of the BPI shares how time spent with politicians and record label bosses has influenced her comms philosophy
The mission of my Delete Delete Engage podcast is to supercharge comms in the workplace by learning from some of the best communicators on the planet. A couple of weeks after each podcast episode goes live, I sum up some of the key moments from the conversation.
Sophie Jones is Chief Strategy Officer at the British Phonographic Industry - the trade body representing over 500 UK record labels including Universal Music UK, Sony Music Entertainment UK and Warner Music UK.
Together, the BPI’s members account for 85% of all music sold in the United Kingdom.
Sophie joined the BPI in 2020 as Director of Public Affairs and has also enjoyed a stint as interim CEO. Prior to that, Sophie has also been Director of Corporate Affairs at Channel 4, Controller of Public Affairs at ITV and Director of Public Affairs at ITN.
Here’s a link to my podcast chat with Sophie
On how her public affairs background and time spent with politicians has influenced her comms approach.
Sophie studied French in college and is a big champion of the value of languages in comms because they enable you to express yourself in different ways and have a greater understanding of the way different cultures approach communications.
She relates this to her professional life where she’s had to communicate to different audiences who have very different styles of communication. For example, Sophie talks about the need to flex communication styles depending on whether she’s talking to a politician, journalist or a BPI member.
Sophie believes her public affairs background and her experience of communicating to politicians has helped her develop a style that combines storytelling that is rooted in hard evidence. In other words, tapping into emotions but also demonstrating that what you’re saying is true.
On her experience comms firefighting at Channel 4 and the BPI.
Sophie says that, during the 12 years that she was with Channel 4, a lot of her time was spent battling the Government’s plans to privatise the broadcaster. She said this was one example of where the comms strategy of marrying emotive storytelling with strong evidence proved to be so valuable. Channel 4’s narrative focused on the negative effects of privatisation not just in the short term, but for years to come.
Since leaving Channel 4 for the BPI, Sophie has spent the past three years in the music industry taking part in drawn out debates around the economics of music streaming and what AI will mean in terms of disruption.
Sophie thinks that, for trade organisations like the BPI, successful communications is as much about stopping things happening that could be detrimental to the music industry as it is about making things happen.
On her day to day comms challenges
Sophie says that although the BPI, with around 40 employees, is a lot smaller than her previous employers Channel 4 and ITV, the number of stakeholders the BPI has to deal with with is comparable.
Internally, she says that the challenges are just the same; ensuring that people know the strategic direction of the organisation and what the people they’re working alongside are doing and the role each of you is playing in working towards that strategy.
She thinks siloes exist in big and small organisations and breaking those down with communications is vital and will be key focus in her role as Chief Strategy Officer.
She says hybrid working is also a challenge. The BPI has offices in the heart of Soho but doesn’t have the desk space to accommodate everyone so there’s a need to keep everyone in the loop without being able to speak to them in the office.
Sophie says that the BPI is looking at how it can bring the company as a whole together more often, asking staff what they want and having debates about size of office versus enjoying a prime location.
On the importance of targeted communications when your members include both the country’s largest and smallest record labels.
Sophe says that, aside from getting the regularity of comms right without overwhelming people, one of the biggest challenges is ensuring comms are relevant to all of them, when they’ve got very different needs.
For example, for the bigger record labels, Sophie says that Brexit threw up some challenges, but it was mostly business as usual because these businesses had the infrastructure and resources to be able to deal with the necessary changes.
But for a small business that’s reliant on shipping vinyl around Europe and they’re hit with a mountain of administrative paperwork, that’s a really big barrier to business.
The BPI needs to decide how much time it needs to focus on the issues relevant to the smaller labels alongside the macro issues such as the pandemic and the debate around the streaming economy.
Sophie thinks that the bigger companies tend to be more engaged in the big policy and business debates of the time and the thinking can be very two-way.
On her views on the recent crisis engulfing the CBI after a series of misconduct allegations.
Sophie said that the BPI is a member of the CBI, but paused the membership when the misconduct allegations involving the then CEO came to light.
Her view is that the CBI has a valuable role to play in representing the voice of business to government and deserves the opportunity to show how it can put things right and its comms should be sharply focused on that, what is going to change and how they’re going to be held to account for that change. She thinks that this is partly about communicating specific actions and partly about communicating around culture change.
On the challenges and opportunities that generative AI presents to the music industry.
Sophie believes that the music industry is still feeling its way with AI and understanding what it will mean to us and is looking at it from the perspective of what AI can do for us rather than to us while also considering the big risks it will present.
On the risk side, she thinks that one of the questions should be what is AI training on?
If AI is training on an original creator's music, Sophie believes it should recognise and recompense the artist.
However, because AI is getting ever more sophisticated about how it learns, she thinks this may soon be a case of “chasing butterflies”.
She says that the onus should fall on the AI developers to keep records so the industry can keep a handle on how it’s being used.
There’s also the question of generative AI content, short tracks flooding the market that are competing with human beings and sharing in the same royalty pool. She says there’s also a question then of whether consumers know what they’re listening to and who created it, which brings in the risk of artist imitations and deep fakes.
On the positive side, she says AI can be used as an assistance tool in composition, where AI assists the creative process in happening more efficiently and brilliantly and thinks some may argue that the music industry has been late to the party with this.
Sophie suggests that this may include taking on the really tedious tasks in the recording studio or the writing process. She references Pet Shop Boys’ lead singer Neil Tennant who recently talked about AI helping with writer's block, stimulating ideas that writers can then run with.
Sophie says that the music industry has been adapting to new technologies for years, from ways of recording to synthesisers and the ability to sample, but it’s always been with a view that human creativity is at the heart of it. Sophie says that the BPI has signed a music industry initiative called the Human Artistry campaign which endorses this philosophy.
On the impact of streaming on the music business.
Having come into the music industry at the start of the pandemic, Sophie said her initial perception was that the industry had been hit phenomenally hard with the loss of live events and the advent of digital. She says that after the initial damage caused by (piracy streaming sites) like Napster and The Pirate Bay, digital has now found its way with platforms that want to invest in and support music legally.
Streaming has also removed the barrier to entry. In the ‘physical’ days, artists could only get their music released with the backing of a label or distributor, whereas streaming has removed that and now anybody can record and release a track for very little.
Sophie says that Spotify recently announced that they have 100,000 new tracks added to the platform every day, but says only a tiny percentage of those will make it.
At the more professional end of the market, artists are now doing very well by hitting thresholds of tens of millions of streams a year, which Sophie says is the level artists need to be aiming for to achieve some sort of commercial success.
On preparing for the BRITs, the UK’s biggest music awards event
Sophie says that the work that the BPI team does for the BRITs is almost never ending.
“The event is so massive, you come out of one show and you’re immediately thinking about what you’re going to do next year.”
She says that the big communications challenge this year was around the categories and the decision made a couple of years ago to go to a single, gender neutral Artist of the Year award. She says that last year was great because loads of big female artists like Adele were releasing music (Adele won), whereas this year very few female artists made it onto the shortlist because fewer had released music.
Sophie says this threw up communications debates that have led to a big deep dive into all of the things that sit behind the BRIT awards, such as how the awards categories are defined, how eligibility is structured and how voting is managed.
Ultimately, she says, the BPI’s aim is for the awards to be the best celebration of British music success it can be but also diverse and inclusive and welcome everybody that deserves to be there.