PUNCHING BELOW OUR WEIGHT: How The Music Industry Can Grow Into Its Cultural Worth

Music is the most universally shared human experience on the planet. 

It soundtracks every moment that matters: birth, grief, protest, celebration, falling in love, falling apart. It crosses borders that politics cannot. It shapes identity, drives culture, and generates emotional responses that no other art form can reliably 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? 

In this keynote, Dmitri Vietze, music industry strategist, founder of Rock Paper Scissors, organizer of the conference Music Tectonics, and one of the most original thinkers about music's place in the broader cultural economy, makes the case that the industry's scale problem is not a market problem. It is a coordination problem. A perception problem. And, most importantly, a solvable problem. 

Drawing on years of work at the intersection of music, media, and brand culture, Vietze maps the structural habits, fragmented incentives, and collective blind spots that keep the industry smaller than it deserves to be and articulates what becomes possible when artists, companies, platforms, and advocates choose to row in the same direction. 

A keynote designed to reframe how everyone in the room thinks about the value of what they do and the size of the opportunity they are collectively sitting on.