Mark Williamson is the CEO and Co-Founder of The ROSTR group, which has grown into a multifaceted music industry platform. The flagship product is ROSTR, a comprehensive music industry directory for management, agency, label, and publisher information.

After Williamson spent several years at Spotify building the Artist Services team, he often had trouble finding contact information, which only expanded as the streaming era has seen millions more artists come on the market.

“The world was changing from needing to know a dozen people in New York and LA, and you pretty much can get to anyone. To a world where there is no chance you could know everyone, let alone the new kids on the block, the LATAM artists, the artists coming out of Asia and Africa,” Williamson says.

After years of pulling teeth and combating “that’s the way it’s always been done” thinking, ROSTR has become a universal hub for data in addition to growing its portfolio of products: 

The second product ROSTR launched was Jobs by ROSTR, a music industry job board. Then they opened Stack, which brings professionals to the branches of the music industry not covered within the main ROSTR database. Users can go to Stack to find books, podcasts, publicists, marketing agencies, and over 35,000 different listings of music industry resources. Recently, ROSTR has also expanded into editorial via the newsletter New Industry Friday and the news platform New Industry Focus.

Read on to learn ROSTR’s mission for their fleet of products, how their aggregation strategy has shifted over the years, and trends they’ve seen within their own data.

What is your goal for uniting all the elements of ROSTR behind a singular brand?

We build products that make it easier to do your job in the music industry. We're focused on professionals. It's stuff that loads of people think is boring. You're never gonna have somebody who says their dream is to build B2B directory software for the music industry. That's why this stuff hasn't been done well. I'm not trying to build a platform for the 40 million artists. Our focus is on professionals. 

I can't say it enough. Those products are all about encouraging people to give us data, which makes those products better for our customers.  Send us data so we have it, so that other people get access to it, so that everyone can work together in a more seamless way. 

Some of the coolest feedback I've ever had from ROSTR is, “I didn't know anyone in the business, but I had this great artist, and I've been able to use ROSTR to find all these people. I've been able to build a business.” 

How do you source all this data and signings as they happen?

We knew that the challenge was always going to be getting the data. This data isn’t super available. So at the beginning, I had this vision. This is going to be a LinkedIn-style platform, and people are going to update it themselves. We shifted to a Trojan horse strategy at first because it quickly became clear that the music industry's pretty slow to adopt new technologies. 

The database for our first version of the product was based on what's available online. We found a bunch of information on Facebook About pages. Anyone remember those? I'd been building a list in between leaving Spotify.

We launched with 15,000 artists in the database 100% put in by us, with some percentage of coverage across management, label, and agency. Some people started giving us corrections, and that started creeping down. We have bots that monitor websites and the news and tell us about changes.

Fast forward to today. We've gone from 100% research-based data to less than 25%. The other 75% now comes directly from stakeholders: agencies, management companies, labels, and artists. They tell us about the data, precisely because ROSTR has become a place where it has value for your data to be current.

One major agency partner told me, “Over my dead body, you're never getting our data,” and they're now one of our biggest customers.

How did you flip things around in that regard?

It took a long time to get there. Probably the smartest things we did were socials and content. The first of those was the Coachella poster that we do every year. That was the catalyst for us realizing it's not enough to have a valuable platform. You've got to incentivize the industry. Now every week our Instagram has 10-plus pieces of content: 12 of the hottest signings this week, the trending companies, or the hottest jobs.

Those do a number of things. They communicate with our customers in other places. Like on socials, where people spend a lot of time. But they also create incentives because people want to be featured on them. We're not getting paid for these things. They're based on data, and so they want to make sure we have the data. In the last seven days, we've added 120 new companies to the platform.

This is all about, “Come give us your information.” It makes the product better. We promote the information in a curated way, which means more people find out about it, which means more people add data, and we create what is a very intentional flywheel that ultimately results in more data, which means a better product. That benefits everybody. 

As you’ve accrued more data on ROSTR, have you noticed any interesting trends?

In the mid-2010s, we'd seen a few management companies start growing quite significantly. Most companies manage 10-15 artists. A couple went up to 25-30. Then a lot of those situations didn't work out. Only a couple of those artists were paying the bills.

But when we did the first management report in 2019, there was one company way out front. Red Light worked 330 artists. They had been an anomaly for years. The next biggest company had 70 artists, and then there were three or four with over 20 artists. If you look at it today, you have multiple companies with over 100 artists, where there weren't even a dozen over 20 when we first did it.

So, we're seeing a couple of things here. One, there are a lot more artists, and there are a lot more artists making significant amounts of money. Two, companies now have access to financing to build big rosters. But then, within that, they seem to be much more sustainable than they used to be, because these artists are actually doing much more decent business than they were in the past. 

Another thing that's happening is the emergence of a quasi-major group of major management companies. Still very far from the scale and concentration of the major labels or the major agencies, but there are a few mega companies where a lot of the biggest artists in the world are consistently upstreaming to. 

Red Light, Full Stop, Good World, Sal & Co, Three Six Zero. In our last management report, which was a couple of years ago now, these companies were way out from the rest of the field. And so you're seeing this emergence of management powerhouses, which we've never really seen before at that scale.

As well as, in response to that, the emergence of the power boutique, which are very intentionally staying at 10 to 15 artists, but all of them are superstars. These companies, like Crush and Tap, aren't going for mass scale, but a good percentage of their rosters are printing really good revenue each year.