Warner Music UK commercial SVP talks streaming, retail and industry trends

Linda Walker, Warner Music UK’s new SVP commercial, speaks to Headliner about the current state of the music market, the company’s ongoing expansion and the enduring importance of physical music in a streaming world.

In her new role, Walker, who has been with Warner Music UK since 1990, will head up all aspects of the company’s commercial relationships with digital services and physical retailers, including those in the independent sector. She will also oversee the activity of the company’s Research and Analysis Department, run by Nick Allum, VP, commercial and analytics, UK and Europe, which handles the gathering and assimilating of data for strategic purposes.

Her promotion follows the departure of Derek Allen, who last year decided to step down from the business after almost 10 years with Warner Music UK.

Commenting on her appointment, Warner Music UK CEO, Tony Harlow, said: “Linda is a prized member of the Warner Music family, and I’m glad that we can recognise her long-term contribution in this way. Linda joined the music industry when only a handful of women were working in commercial teams, which makes her achievements even more impressive. She continues to bring determination, passion, and business acumen to everything she does, including her role as co-chair of our Women of Warner employee resource group. While Linda has already had a hand in changing our company culture for the better, I can’t wait to add her voice, passion, and wisdom to our UK senior management team so that we can bring about positive change even faster.”

Here, Walker discusses her plans for the business and the biggest challenges and opportunities facing the market.

Congratulations on your new role. How excited are you to be stepping into this role?

I’m incredibly excited. I’ve been at Warner for such a long time, and it seems quite surreal to think that when I started, I was a junior sales rep; I would never have thought in a million years I’d end up in this position. I’m very lucky to have inherited an amazing team who are incredibly enthusiastic and full of experience. We have a really nice mix of youth and experience, so we have a lot of opportunities and exciting times ahead. The release schedule is looking great, but it’s about how we as a team maximise every single opportunity we have and how we take the incredible music the labels are bestowing upon us and treat it with the care and attention it needs.

How beneficial will your experience with the company be in this role?

Although the way in which we bring music to market has changed hugely in time, at the end of the day, we want to get our music into as many people’s ears as possible. Back when I started it was very much about how many orders can you get in, how many of this CD or piece of vinyl or cassette can I ship. And you’d put that out into the market and hope people enjoyed it and that the sales figures were good. Obviously, that’s very different now that we live in a streaming world, but that grounding of commercial acumen and how you go from sales to streams and getting your music to as many people as possible, the core of that is still the same.

How much has the job of managing the commercial department of a company like Warner changed since the streaming boom? And how vital are the more traditional sales channels today, such as physical product and physical record stores?

Again, when I started, it was an out and out sales role, whereas now there is still an element of sales, but it’s more of a pitching plugging role for the commercial managers and directors. But the two go hand-in-hand. A really good sales person and a good negotiator with really strong commercial acumen can turn themselves into an incredible plugger, pitcher and promoter, which is what you need to be now. One of the biggest changes is data. We’ve gone from a time where you put a piece of music into the market, and you didn’t know how many people listened to it or if they were listening to it in their car or at home or sharing it with other people. Now we have this wealth of data, which can be a blessing and a curse because it is only good to you if you know how to read it and how to use it. That’s very much part of what our team does as well.

But at the same time, with the physical market, it wouldn’t have been that long ago that people were sounding the death bell of physical music and saying we wouldn’t be talking about this anymore. But here we are and it’s still a very important part of our business. If you look at the number one albums from last year and those week-one sales figures, a huge portion of those sales came from physical music, so it’s massively important. And as someone whose first job in music was working in an independent record store, I’ve never underestimated the power of a good indie. Culturally, having record stores, having indies, having HMV and physical shops people can go and browse in is really important. The high street would be a very sad place if we didn’t have record stores.

Are you surprised at how well the physical market has held up?

It’s encouraging in as much as I love the idea that there is still a collectability about music; that owning a piece of music makes people feel more connected to the artist. Obviously, vinyl has played a huge part in that. And there are people who gift CDs, that market is still there to a degree. Especially at Christmas, with releases from the likes of Adele, Ed Sheeran and ABBA. They will always drive up physical numbers.

Warner has undergone significant expansion over the past year, with offices opening in new territories and numerous partnerships with smaller labels and companies dealing in styles and genres outside of the mainstream music scene. How important is it for the company to keep growing its footprint and exploring more niche areas of music?

Incredibly important. One of the great benefits of the streaming world is you have access to music from all over the world and people are being exposed to genres, styles and artists that would have been difficult to find in a pre-streaming market. I think that’s quite special.

One of the things Warner really prides itself on is that we have companies and offices all over the world, and when we come together to promote a particular artist, we can look at how we are able to do that across multiple territories. That’s something really special. We have that global network. The idea that someone can be sitting in their bedroom in London and listening to the top performing tracks in Nigeria in an instant is really very cool and we want to be part of that, not just watching from afar. And there are so many different ways we can work with artists from different markets, so having experts on the ground in those territories is really important.

What are the biggest challenges facing the market in 2022?

It’s really around the fact there are lots of things people can spend their time and money on aside from music, so you are competing for attention with many different options. And even within the partners themselves you are competing for people’s time – are they going to listen to a podcast or a brand new album that you’ve just put out? That’s always been one of the key challenges – how do we make sure everything we are doing amplifies the music we are putting out and the artists we are working with?

My team works closely with the labels to strategise how we do that. Sometime there is a misconception that we just put tracks out there, try to get a few playlists and hope that people like it. There is so much more to it than that. It’s about the groundwork we put in with artists, with the music they are putting out together in partnership with the labels before we even go to market with a track or an album. There is so much that goes on behind the scenes that people don’t see, and the day we drop that track or album is a step, but we’ve had a long walk to get to that step, and there is a long way still to go once we’ve released it. The whole life cycle of the music we put out now is so different. That’s where the data becomes so important as well.

And what are the biggest opportunities in the market?

I keep coming back to this point about how powerful music is. It reflects culture, it can have a political element, it can make you feel better when you are down, it just speaks to so many different things. I think the biggest opportunities are in really understanding why people want music, how they listen to it and how we can tap into that. And it’s a fast-moving industry. We would never have been talking about TikTok that long ago and now it’s become a massive and important part of what we do. Who knows what the next iteration of that may be? How are people discovering artists? It may not be through the channels we are used to. That’s where the opportunities are and that’s why it’s such an exciting industry to be a part of. It continues to move and evolve, and with anything that moves and evolves there are always opportunities. You just have to be in the right place to make the most of them.

You can read our interview with Atlantic Records UK EVP Austin Daboh, in which he opens up on how he has “seen the guts of every label” here.