Music is the most universally shared human experience on the planet. It soundtracks every moment that matters, crosses borders that politics cannot, and generates emotional responses that no other art form can replicate at scale. And yet, measured as a global industry, music punches dramatically below its cultural weight, dwarfed by sectors it inspires, underlies, and outlasts. Why? And what happens next?

In this keynote, Dmitri Vietze, founder of Rock Paper Scissors and organizer of Music Tectonics, makes the case that digital music has matured to exactly the point where the most significant value creation is still ahead of us. Drawing on the story of how Hipgnosis transformed song catalogs from undervalued assets into a new institutional asset class, he argues that music is full of similar inflection points right now. AI licensing, direct-to-fan revenue, superfan subscription models, and premium interactive formats are not incremental improvements. They are entirely new surfaces on which music's value can land, with earning potential that remains almost entirely uncaptured.

The music industry's scale problem is not a demand problem. Billions of people love music and spend hours with it every day. It is a structural problem, rooted in a platform era built on arbitrage that transferred value out of the music economy rather than growing it. That model is ending. A new one is emerging in which growing the music market is more profitable than extracting from it. When artists, labels, publishers, and tech companies pull in the same direction, entirely new revenue categories become possible.

The arbitrage era is ending. The growth era is where the real money is.