[This story was originally published in Music Week]
By
Emmanuel Legrand
 |
| Revelator's Bruno Guez |
On
January 1, 2000 after celebrating the New Year in Brazil with friends
on some remote beach, Bruno Guez went for a swim. As he was diving
into the water his head hit the sand. He noticed a sudden inability
to move and he started drowning. Fortunately for him, he managed to
hold his breath and his friends came to the rescue, noticing
something was not normal.
As
he laid on the beach, Guez knew something was awfully wrong. It took
five hours before an ambulance came -- it was New Year's Day, after
all -- and when he finally reached the emergency room at a local
hospital, he was diagnosed with a fractured fifth vertebrae, which
had squeeze his spinal cord. He eventually was operated but remained
paralysed from the neck down, but hopefully retained some mobility
with his left hand.
Overnight,
his life was shattered and he had to reinvent himself. He felt
something radical was needed and in 2007, after living for 20 years
in Los Angeles, he chose to move to Israel to build a new life, close
to his family, and a set up a new business from there.
Guez
was in Cannes in June for Midem to promote his royalty and data
management service Revelator. It was his first trip in a long time,
but one that had to be prepared like a military operation due to the
amount of logistical complications linked to his situation. And he
seemed to be enjoying every moment of it. "It feels good to
travel," he said during an interview at the Hotel Majestic,
where he was surrounded by his father and a group of people working
for him and attending to all his needs.
Being
paralysed has not altered his energy and his drive, on the contrary.
"I had to turn it into a competitive advantage," said Guez,
who has a long track record in the music industry. He was born in
Paris but after studies at UCLA, he set up in 1993 his own music
company, Quango Music Group, a trendsetting electronic music label,
which caught the attention of Island Records founder Chris Blackwell.
Guez eventually worked for Blackwell's companies Palm Pictures and
well as Island Outpost, a collection of seven properties in Jamaica
and The Bahamas. He has also been a radio host on KCRW, a public
broadcaster in Los Angeles. Between 2001 and 2004, after his
accident, he was the creative director of the Cirque du Soleil.
In
Israel, he continued to run his music company, and started to work on
tools that would allow him to manage rights in a more simple and
automated way. In 2012, he started a journey with Eli Krief and Yoni
Colb from Jerusalem-based software developer Quickode, leading to the
creation of Revelator, a cloud-based sales and marketing intelligence
platform for music professionals.
New management tools
"I
needed new tools to modernise my label," he explained. "I
met with these software developers and we started to develop tools
around copyright assets. Now, it takes me three clicks to do my
accounts, whether I have 10 or 10,000 artists. The solution, at the
start, was my solution; but I understood rapidly that I was creating
a solution for all rights owners."
Guez
said the changes were rendered necessary just by the sheer “explosion
of data that is crushing companies.” For him, the lack of ability
to process data is the main problem for most companies and rights
societies. “The explosion of data is challenging for any right
owner,” he explained.
Revelator,
he added, is set up to finds solutions of workflow to manage complex
data situations. “I did not want to manage the old way,” he
explains. Very quickly, Revelator developed a rights management
platform that was beta-tested with 1,000 Israeli
artists.
“Managing data is a good business,” he said. "So I
approached distributors like CD Baby to provide them with services.”
Today,
Revelator works with such platforms as Wix
Music, CD Baby, Faro Latino, Africori, and collective management
societies SAYCO in Columbia and ACUM in Israel. The platform
currently manages royalties accounts for 51,000
artist, with a catalogue of over 400,000 tracks via labels,
distributors and artist management. He has two major countries in his
sight, Brazil and Russia, where he sees a lot of potential in rights
management. He described his company as being at the intersection of
music and technology, but never losing sights of the task, which is
to provide efficient rights management tools.
“When
financial institutions can manage transaction in split seconds, I do
not see why we can’t apply the same vision to music,” he said. “I
believe we can now provide real time data and real time payment,
especially micro payments and mobile payments.”
Guez
said the system was as much a real time rights management service as
it was an analytics platform, which rights holders can also use for
marketing and strategic decisions. He continued, "We know what
comes in and can allow them [rights holders] to withdraw money
[accordingly]. For me, it is strategic to do that because it will
bring a new model based on real time data. We will start to do that
this year.”
Instant payment
Guez
added that with current technologies, “there is no reason why you
have to wait 60 days to get data and payment, and no need for
publishers to wait up to 20 months to get info from rights
societies.” The system allows users to manage millions of
data-points each months. Users of the services can enter all their
statements in the cloud-based service and also access a wide range of
analytics through a dashboard. Unlike other services, Guez said that
he built the system so that users can export all their data and take
it with them if they no longer wish to use the service.
Guez
said his service was not meant to compete with rights societies but
instead help them improve efficiencies. "Societies should
appreciate and embrace new technologies,” he said. “They should
not be afraid, because the better the services to members, the
happier they will be. Margins can be eroded but you can make up with
volume. In any case, we are going to better value services, with
lower margins, but a bigger pie. All societies should have the
capacity to build a good infrastructure. And if they can’t, we can
deliver that.”
He
added, “There is an old guard at societies that are blocking
progress to the detriment of their members. It is just a question of
time. The old guard will jump.” For Guez, if rights societies do
not improve their infrastructure, it will backfire. "The more
rights owners have access to information and tools, the more it will
generate questioning about the way societies operate. There is no
reason to take 12% and give noting in return. Societies do not invest
enough in infrastructure together and there is not enough
communication between their systems."
Guez
said he has structured the system to be accessible and open, through
its API. This approach is also reflected in the company's three
business models: software as a service, infrastructure as a service
and platform as a service.
Full transparency
“We are in an API economy,” he stated.
“We give our clients our infrastructure. Kobalt, the Orchard or
Believe cannot offer infrastructure as a service. They have built
their technology for themselves. You have to go through them. We do
not care. We see it more like an exchange platform.”
He
added, “If Kobalt cannot offer their API, they cannot be
transparent. Kobalt is an old world business model with a dashboard,
it is not a platform. I am not even sure they are a tech company.
When you approach music like a tech company, you are a platform and
you give your infrastructure and services for clients to do what they
want with it.”
Revelator
gets paid either through a fee for transactions or through a
subscription. “We leave 100% of royalties [to the clients], we are
paid by transaction or subs. It can be a monthly subscription of a
track-based pricing. If a client uses the interface, it pays a flat
fee on monthly basis. If the client uses the API, it is a transaction
model. Our next model will be on factoring, with daily real-time
payment, and we'll take transaction fee, a bit like Paypal.”
For
Guez, the digital revolution has just begun and rights management is
still in its infancy. “My dream is to move intellectual property
rights into financial assets and become a revenue-optmisation
technology,” he said. “Our thinking is different. I ran a label
for 20 years but I think of it from a tech perspective. I look at
things from a music perspective, but I am also tech savvy, so I come
from a different angle.”
[Since the story was published at the end of June, Revelator announced it has raised $2.5 million in Series A funding. The round was led
by Exigent Capital, with participation from Digital Currency Group and
Israeli early-stage fund Reinvent. Overall, Revelator has raised $5.5m since 2012.]
