Spiro Arkoudis
Spiro is standing with some buildings behind him. He has short spiky brown hair, has fair skin and is wearing a grey top with a blue jacket over the top.
VMDO Spotlight is a new series highlighting and connecting homegrown and global music industry experts in the form of interview-style articles.
In June 2023, VMDO had the pleasure of interviewing Spiro Arkoudis, the Chief Revenue Officer of Tuned Global, a Melbourne-born startup whose mission is to provide B2B music streaming services for brands, which has expanded into international markets.
In this conversation, Spiro shares insight into his personal and professional journey, from entering the music industry out of school, to working with labels, international companies such as Musiwave, Microsoft, and Samsung, and how technology is continually informing the growth of the music landscape.
What’s your story – how long have you worked in the industry? What’s your background and journey to where you are now?
I started in the music industry by accident around 30 years ago. I landed a job straight out of high school at Festival Records, it was one of Australia's biggest independent record companies at the time, and had been since the 50’s. There’s a lineage to Festival Records that goes back to Johnny O’Keefe and even Rupert Murdoch… I didn’t aspire to work at a record label straight out of school, but a friend of my brother’s got me a warehouse job so I could make some extra cash straight out of school. This set the scene. I worked in their warehouse fulfilling retail orders for physical products such as CD’s, Vinyl and cassettes. The warehouse was full of wonderful hard working people and as a young kid I was exposed to the inner workings of a traditional record label of the golden era. After a couple of years in the warehouse I had already built up good networks within Festival, and eventually scored a job with the Production Department upstairs. This involved managing CD replication orders, CD artwork printing, CD & vinyl importation from overseas label partners, ultimately making sure the company was well stocked to fulfill retail order needs throughout Australia and New Zealand. This department exposed me to a lot of the international record labels at the time and various genres from Classic Rock, Punk, Jazz to Frank Zappa, and I stayed in this role until 2005, when Warner Music Group acquired Festival Mushroom Records (Festival & Mushroom merged forces along the journey path above mentioned).
This also happened around the time & rise of the new digital music formats thanks to the iPhone and iTunes, MP3 downloads and ringtones etc. Right after the Warner Music acquisition, I moved on from Festival Records and jumped into a new role with an innovative French music tech company, called Musiwave (a leading Paris based B2B service provider which had opened an office in Australia). This was the peak of the ringtone boom days, and Musiwave was the first music tech company at the time to strike direct licensing agreements with all the major labels internationally for those wildly popular tru-tone ringtones (eventually sold via large global telcos to their pundits around the world).
So I was kind of catapulted into the ringtone & MP3 music business boom and rode that out for a couple of years, managing major accounts such as Vodafone Australia & New Zealand (music services). Then, in 2007, out of nowhere, Microsoft acquired Musiwave. Talk about a wild ride starting from an indie record label warehouse, to working for a French music tech startup with multiple trips to Paris, and then somehow ended up working alongside software engineers at Microsoft’s Sydney HQ at a time when its leader Steve Ballmer was famously known for going absolutely nuts on stage at Microsoft town halls! Musiwave’s content delivery backend platform became the new content delivery backend to the Xbox Music service which was linked to the Xbox console interface. That was the primary catalyst for the Musiwave acquisition.
I spent another few years at Microsoft traversing its large and complex corporate structure and processes (good learning curve), trying forever to stay aligned and engaged with multiple business stakeholders, while continually trying to figure out the music relationship piece across different Microsoft product groups (Zune, Windows Phones, XBox, etc).
After multiple music pivot strategies at Microsoft, I got itchy feet, and after speaking with my music networks externally, I got a hot lead about a music role going at Samsung Electronics Australia (mobile division). The music streaming format was becoming a key content focus in their battle with Apple iPhones and iTunes, especially as the Samsung Galaxy range grew in popularity competing with the iPhone directly at that time. This was also a pre-Spotify and Apple Music era in Australia, the music streaming space was still evolving here with a few aspiring US players and these early streaming services jostled for positioning. Samsung launched its Samsung Music Hub streaming service around 2012, and then the Samsung Milk Music in 2015, and I essentially was the product lead for both services. It’s also where I met Tuned Global, who were already the ones providing their turnkey streaming solutions to Samsung for the Music Hub product across multiple devices..
How long have you been at Tuned Global for now? What's your role now, and is that the same role you started in or have you had a few different roles there?
It's going to be eight years this year. I've had a few roles along the way. My first role at Tuned Global was a Senior Business Development Manager, before shifting to Vice President of Asia for a few years as Asia became an early key market for the business. Today, and for the last few years I'm the Chief Revenue Officer at Tuned Global. Basically this role oversees the Sales and Marketing functions, making sure we're hitting our sales goals, sales targets, positioning the company narrative, implementing sales strategies, and fostering partnerships to maintain a healthy revenue pipeline in the business.
Tell us about Tuned Global, how and where did it start, and what is it that Tuned Global does?
Tuned Global started around 2011, founded by its current Managing Director and Tech Founder, Con Raso, based in Victoria. Its early days started off as a CD replication company, but soon after, as digital music and music streaming services started to appear overseas and generate disruptive industry noises, the business strategy pivoted into a B2B role, and the narrative shifted towards turnkey streaming app solutions, content delivery services and full API suite as a service. Tuned also forged strong relationships with the leading music rights holders along this journey. As previously mentioned, I met with the Tuned Global team when they were my main service provider during the Samsung Mobile in Australia (Samsung Music Hub). The relationship kicked off from there. Tuned Global particularly forged strong business relationships with the EMI Records and Universal Music Group digital business teams, which led to delivering some of the first music streaming services in Australia with the likes JB HiFi Now, AAPT Music, Blackberry, Samsung and others.
On Tuned's B2B product side, there’s three core products that Tuned Global provides to the market, all utilizing a serverless fully cloud based system. Firstly there’s the robust music backend content delivery platform currently housing close to 110M music assets. Meaning, if someone needed to feed licensed commercial music, audio or even videos into an app or existing platform, Tuned offers the backend platform under a SaaS license model.
Secondly, for clients needing a turnkey native app solution in iOS or Android, similar to a music service that looks and feels like Spotify or Apple Music, etc, Tuned Global also offers this as a white labeled SaaS solution. As Tuned Global’s B2B apps have been developed and maintained for many years now, clients take advantage of licensing our apps as a stable and quick to market solution. They also get all new feature upgrades as part of the license. Our apps are used by many different clients across the globe from startups and all the way to Enterprise clients.
Lastly, our other key service is our large full API suite. Everything that you can do within Tuned’s applications (features and functionalities) is also available as an API service that can be fully integrated with either clients own products or services. They can achieve this outcome more cost effectively and faster deployment than trying to develop it all from scratch.
Today our B2B client verticals range from OEM’s, Telcos, Fitness Companies, Airlines, Music Services, Kids Sector, Med-Tech, Wellbeing space, Sports brands, Web3 and Gaming as examples.
What are your international teams like? Where around the world do you have teams and what are their sizes and functions?
We found as the business scaled up, it was hard to manage everything wholly within Australia, especially if your services are fast expanding into international markets. So over a period of time now, we've now established a growing headcount of about 10+ people across Europe. We have a UK business team based in London, an R&D and product team in Sweden, a Marketing team in France and also presence in the US market as well in regards to Sales and Business Development. The core functions of these teams are Business Development, Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, Tech Pre-Sales, R&D, including AI.
Tuned’s HQ remains located in Victoria and acts as the epi-center of the business across Sales, Engineering and Operations. We also have app development support out of Southeast Asia as well.
What are your views on flexible working practices? Does Tuned Global have flexible working and if so, how does it benefit the company?
Good question as our industry is definitely not a nine to five industry! I’ve found that when you’re truly starting to scale across International markets, also managing teams and clients in multiple time zones, you have to adapt to a structured time management system that embeds flexibility and downtime amongst the busy long days, to ensure teams work more efficiently. So this means allowing our teams to define their desired working schedule, dependent on team functions, ensuring the best outcomes for the team and clients across the markets and time zones.
I regularly jump on many early morning calls, often 6am AEST to cater for the US East Coast as an example, and then perhaps late night calls with the European team or Asia based clients, I often need to schedule in pockets of downtime to take a break. This could be for a couple of hours during the day. You could almost call it shift work. You need this flexibility to remain productive and not find yourself burning out or burning the teams out too.
Some team members choose to work from home, others work from a desired location and every week the team at least gets together in the HQ office face to face once a week. It’s a good balance, and the team chose this as a preference so it was supported throughout the business.
You mentioned Tuned Global's been going for about 10 years now. Do you still consider Tuned Global a startup?
I do actually, because we still have that startup mindset, ethos and mantra in the way we operate culturally as a business. We never really sit still, we're always moving onto the next project, keeping an eye or market trends, challenging ourselves or the status quo if needed, questioning our own strategies to see if the data or results stack up, & learning from failures along the way. As the business scales up, teams expand, you're essentially still growing, pivoting, adapting, so I would consider that still being in startup mode.
Startup success seems to require fast growth, however, a portfolio career is very common in the music industry. People in the industry may not have the luxury to quit their day jobs to focus on startups - with that in mind, do you think portfolio careers are compatible with music startups?
It is a tricky one, because if let’s say you’ve raised some money and have a music startup business in play, chances are this activity will consume most of your day and nights especially in the early days and of course the other side here is on the investment side. Personal funding, VC seed round funding etc. So juggling a portfolio career could possibly cannibalize precious time and effort needed to stay fully focused on your music startup vision. But, it can also be a tough industry to sustain a full time career, depending on which side of the music industry fence you’re sitting on. Examples I mean, are you a musician? Record Label? Distributor, Music tech-oriented product? All these aspects alone would probably dictate whether a portfolio career path is essential or not. So there’s a few variables here to consider.
Do you have any thoughts or experiences you can share that might help music startup founders/entrepreneurs on their journey?
Sometimes it's easy to kind of give up or let negative experiences bring your energy and focus levels down. You're not always gonna get the great outcomes you want, but let the whole experience be a learning curve as you continue your path forward. You’ll learn to deal with experiences or situations that you simply can’t study or prepare for at times, so absorb as much as you can along the way and step back occasionally and understand the key learnings when situations arise, and continue to grow from there.
Another thing about the music industry itself, is the power of good networking skills, as strong and productive relationships cannot be underestimated in the music industry. It is KEY to continually grow strong networks, and a strong matrix network around you that can help you grow your business goals and vision. At times you might find that the key to your growing success is coming from your trusted networks and that’s my own experiences from a Business Development and Sales standpoint.
Also, keep it real, don’t be fake (you’ll be found out), and talk to as many other influential music related entrepreneurs about their own experiences along the way. This is especially important if you’re looking to raise money via VC’s etc, look at their own portfolio and speak to their CEOs.
Lastly, don't be heavily influenced by FOMO in the industry, don’t get caught up in too much hype, plot your own course, do your own research, and continue to build those strong networks. Keep innovating, you’ve got to keep innovating on whatever your product or USP vision is in the market, keep chipping away.
Along the way if you feel your strategy or product isn’t going as planned & you may need to pivot, make sure you pivot quickly.
What are your thoughts on AI in music currently, and the future of AI in music?
The AI side is very interesting at the moment. The reality is though, that AI isn't really new in the music industry, it’s been part of the music tech space for a few years now to be honest. When you break it down into context, there are actually many various forms of AI to call out here. For example, there's adaptive AI, generative AI, descriptive AI, and these forms of AI are already contributing to the music business ecosystem in one way or another. The generative AI song creation side made some real AI headlines in the press recently, and it’s understandable . But AI can also be used to provide a slick recommendation engine on major streaming services, or AI can be used to add even more advanced descriptive tags in metadata, and AI can be used to harness deep user data analytics. At Tuned Global for the moment, we are using AI tools to boost user engagement and stickiness in our clients’ B2B streaming services.
If you go on most of the leading music streaming services today, you’re already engaging with AI. For example, when you're listening to a track on the service and then provided with a recommendation of which tracks you might like similar to that track or genre, that’s the AI algorithm already doing its thing. It's analyzing your behavior and musical tastes and now looking to provide you a personalised experience. So if you're a company or brand or even companies like Tuned Global, we're looking at AI and how it helps us, because if it's helping us, it's gonna help our clients too which is most important and that in itself helps the whole music ecosystem.
So there's a lot of positive attributes in relation to AI and I don't think it's going away anytime soon. AI is here to stay, the challenge is getting to know when and how AI impacts you. The reality in my opinion is the whole industry is going to learn to live with AI. It's happening right now, the headline stories are in the press everyday, but again it’s understandable that sectors of the music rights owners and parts of the music industry have concerns about how AI is used and mitigating rights infringements long-term.
What, if anything, do you think is the most overlooked opportunity in the music industry when it comes to AI currently? Anything you wished you saw more of at a ground-level?
I think that overall, the opportunity for the industry itself is to understand where can AI offer them the greatest value, is it content creation, data and analytics, better user engagement etc. This does mean that companies may need to embrace or introduce new AI teams within their organizations to keep up to speed with all the trends. Even at Tuned Global, we now have our own Head of AI based in Sweden.
At a ground level I feel we are the coal face at Tuned Global, so we are lucky enough to get a first glimpse of new tech trends and in the case of AI, we experience it firsthand and how it adds value to the ecosystem, and not detrimental in our side of things. The whole fake Drake episode (generative AI example) a couple of months ago, even though it was seen as hugely negative, was probably a good thing to happen in a certain way as it got people across the industry really talking about AI in the industry and its impacts across the music ecosystem.
You recently announced your first AI acquisition (Pacemaker) and a new partnership with Revelator to create one of the first bridges of Web2 and Web3. Can you tell us a bit about this decision? What was it about Pacemaker that stood out to you? How does it align with Tuned Global’s mission and vision?
First and foremost, for Tuned Global the Pacemaker acquisition was a technology based acquisition, with a view to sharpen our B2B services and product kit especially with an AI focus.As one of the world's great leading AI DJ applications which received a slew of Apple accolades, including an Apple Design Award, we really thought some of Pacemaker’s core AI features and SDK’s could add tremendous value to clients and services across markets and verticals.
Pacemaker had market-leading patented technologies in relation to seamless AI song transitions, a clever first-of-its-kind Radio DJ feature that allows users to become instant live content creators and radio hosts within a service, so we felt that would be a great extension of our B2B services. It goes back to engaging and providing positive experiences to the end users and adding value to the entire ecosystem.
Our vision and mission statement has always been to be the world's best B2B music services provider, and by adding value to our own tech ecosystem, in parallel, we are assisting our clients too by continually advancing our tool kits, which become available to them.
Your work with Revelator is being described as creating one of the first bridges with Web2 and Web3. Can you tell us a bit about that, the partnership, and what the bridge is?
Web2 today is, as an example here, our music streaming applications you currently find on phone devices. Most of our clients’ music streaming services powered by Tuned’s white-label music apps are a Web2 experience and product.
The goal was to enable better access to independent music by our clients and at the same time provide a better and more flexible system for artists, initially in emerging markets. That’s what we've done with the Revelator partnership. The system allows Independent artists to have to mint their music on chain. What does this mean? It means the artist uses the interface provided to upload their music, artwork and metadata and most importantly the royalty splits if there are multiple artists or collaborators. The royalties are minted on chain, but the assets remain protected and come into our supply chain via integration with Revelator. This means that the artist’s music can be streamed in traditional Web2 apps (like a phone application) just like people are used to doing. Importantly the payments for those streams are transparent and made on chain. Even more important for the artists, they are in control. If they want to sell either all or part of their royalties from that NFT they can do so on any open platform. We built the bridge!
The benefits for our clients are two fold. They can now actively support independent artists in their markets and pay them via a scalable and transparent system and they can provide their users with access to new and unique content. It really is a win-win!
We have worked hard in minimizing the risks of on chain transactions, particularly with some of the wild fluctuations you have seen in crypto recently. It’s important that artists have income security and that is why, with Revelator, we make all payments using a stable coin in USDC.
On chain transactions and smart contracts will be a way of life in the future. I think in most cases we won’t even notice this technology in our lives but it will provide, in my opinion, a fairer and transparent mechanism for creators and rights holders. We understand that we are at the start of that process and that the system will continue to change and evolve, but we also believe it offers so many clear benefits that now is the time for action.
Do you have plans to acquire more companies?
Who knows in the future? We're quite busy at the moment, we're happy with what we've achieved in the last couple of years. It remains to be seen whether we decide to acquire another company but if for whatever reason something raises our interest, anything is possible. Our current strategy for now is to keep growing our services business and continue scaling upwards.
As an Australian-based company that predominantly does business internationally, what are the benefits of being headquartered in Victoria? What was the decision behind this?
The company was founded by Melburnians, and it is still Headquartered out of Melbourne from the founding. But it's a good point because Australia generally geographically, especially from a US market lens, it’s always been a hot test market for western trends on the entertainment side. If we look at some music examples, when Pandora radio expanded outside of the US market, they came to Australia first outside the US. When Spotify launched one of their new radio product solutions, they tested the waters in Australia first. We recently saw TikTok trialling some new things by excluding commercial music from the main platform for a period of time to gauge reactions, again first tested in Australia.
I think we are a great country where a lot of international players want to break things and test things. So that creates a lot of opportunity, and so for us, the view was to always keep operations centralised in Victoria.
Victoria has always been synonymous for its great music scene including the home of labels such as Mushroom & Liberation Records. Being in Victoria, we’ve also benefited greatly via assistive programs with the likes of Global Victoria and Austrade in terms of taking advantage of their services to Victorian bred companies like Tuned Global.
What are Tuned Global's biggest markets that you're working in at the moment?
Quite a few markets today actually, the US, Europe, MENA and Asia are all equally active markets for Tuned. Each one of these markets has a different range of B2B clients in terms of industries and verticals. In the US our clients range from the likes of Lululemon, Gabb Wireless, all the way to Delta Airlines. Asia is a strong market for Tuned, and specifically in Southeast Asia. In Japan we work closely with Line Music, which is the second biggest music streaming service in Japan and a big domestic player and part of the large Line Messenger family. In Thailand we work with a very large telco called TrueID and also the largest media conglomerate in the market, being GMM GRAMMY.
In Europe and MENA we have clients such as gaming company Reactional Music, MediMusic, Sewasew, Rehegoo all the way to Egypt working with the largest telco in that market which is Etisalat.
Earlier, we touched on music startups and that kind of the culture of working in a startup. What are your thoughts on the investment landscape in Australia?
From what I've seen personally in the last five years, there's investment opportunities out there, but what I see and hear is that investors today in the current economic climate are looking for more profitability versus just revenue-building exercises. A couple of years ago it was mainly based on building up revenue, but today in a spooked-tech-crash kind of environment, they're looking for real profitability and sustainability as a safer bet.
Some of our learnings and advice is that if you're going to find someone to raise capital with, you need a really good investor partner onboard. If you’ve identified a particular VC, investor for example, try to speak to the CEOs of companies that they're also investing in. Find out a bit about who they are. Are they hands-on as investors? Are they hands-off? What was the overall experience like to date? Do some homework. On Tuned’s side we’ve been very fortunate to work with Exto Partners and Artesian Capital.
What’s next for you & Tuned Global?
On the business side, we're on a mission to keep innovating and growing our footprint across new markets. We strongly believe that as we scale up the business and grow the teams across markets, we’re readily geared for a lot more opportunities. I see continual growth in our company, especially diversifying our service offerings, and forging new strategic alliances overseas to maximize our reach. So excited to also announce new partnerships soon.
Personally, I always try to challenge myself but trying to learn about all the new things arriving in our industry, where’s the opportunities, where’s the dangers, do I make sense of it all? If not, do I need to learn more? Professional development is really important so I try to make the effort to partake in online training courses when I can squeeze it in! I’m really enjoying my time as Tuned Global and I’m excited about the future potential for our business. I’m also keen to meet more like minded individuals in our space and also share some of my own professional experiences with young entrepreneurs in Australia
Who from the Australian and international music industry would you like to be connected with?
I like engaging with like-minded people in the same field, people who love tech innovation and are passionate about the music tech industry. There are so many different parts of the music ecosystem, but they all interact in different ways and it’s always good to join the dots. I think technology's moving so fast in this industry that I'm not sure the industry as a whole, be it in Australia or Internationally, even from a music rights perspective, truly understands what's going on out there on the tech side and the underlying impact.
For instance, I'd love to see more music tech innovation groups or clusters formed in the Australian marketplace. If anyone wants to understand more of the tech side that I’ve been involved with over the years, drop me a line!