At a moment when the broader music industry is working to figure out direct-to-fan monetization, independent infrastructure and community building, electronic music is a sector that’s already been doing all of this for decades.

“I think electronic music shows the way, in so many ways, that the rest of the music industry isn’t spending enough time looking at,” Fluet said. “There’s so much more that the music industry could and should be learning.”

Fluet made the case that the superstar DJ model — an artist showing up with a USB, playing to thousands of people, collecting ticket revenue and building a devoted fanbase with minimal traditional industry infrastructure — is essentially the direct monetization blueprint the broader industry is now trying to replicate. “It’s a $15 billion scene, up 7%,” Fluet noted of the global dance industry’s 2025 valuation, “and it has always been about that direct monetization.”

He also argued that electronic music is better positioned than most genres for what comes next. Its catalogs are younger on average — a 2005 average age versus 1990 for other genres — meaning there’s more room for growth. And while AI poses real disruption risks to recorded music broadly, the club, the DJ and the live scene create what Fluet called “a moat” around electronic music’s core value. “Once these technologies are [widespread], the opportunities to monetize are protected and the downside is mitigated,” he said.

His conclusion: “What works in the clubs today will tend to reach the rest of the business tomorrow.”

For a long time, being independent in the music industry was understood as either being signed to a major label or not. That definition, Fluet argued, is increasingly obsolete.

“Independence isn’t a size,” he said. “It’s really about who controls your rights, who controls your data, and who controls your fans.” He argued that the real test of all three comes down to a single question: “Who owns the rights? Who sees the data? Can you leave?”

“If you can’t take your rights and data with you,” Fluet continued, “you are just another rental model.”

He argued that this distinction matters more than ever as the infrastructure of the music industry consolidates around a handful of major players. He also observed that something interesting is happening on the independent side, noting that when the European Commission approved UMG’s purchase of Downtown this past February, it required the sale of Curve, the royalty platform used by many of the independents. Merlin and Jaimy Capital subsequently bought it together this past August.

Fluet sees this as a significant shift. “Independents have moved from negotiating together to owning together,” he said. This is a meaningful evolution for what was essentially a licensing body “turning much more into that kind of rights engine.”

Fluet argued that managers — long seen as being in the “commission business” or the “babysitting business” — are emerging as something more consequential: custodians of artist trust in a market that increasingly runs on consent.

“In an AI market built on consent, the manager is often the one who gives it,” Fluet said. His point was that as voice and likeness become standalone assets — he cited Lionel Richie as one artist who has moved to trademark his own voice — the person who controls consent controls the license. And in most cases, that person is the manager, who is often an artist’s closest and most trusted business associate.

This thinking potentially reframes what management companies are actually worth. As an example, Fluet noted that a generation ago, people said that in terms of advertising agencies, all the value “goes up and down in the elevator” — meaning it walks out with people leaving nothing behind.

Fluet has heard similar sentiments about management but believes this view is increasingly incorrect. “If trust is the scarcest asset in the AI market,” he asked, “could managers be holding a lot of that?”

Fluet noted that Live Nation reported a record 49 million fans in a single quarter this year and sold more than 143 million tickets by mid-July. And yet, he argued, the industry is seemingly indifferent to what that activity could tell them about their most valuable asset: the fan.

“I think that ticketing data and fan data has the opportunity to become the most valuable data set in music, ” he said, noting there’s more data the business could be harvesting. When someone buys a concert ticket, Fluet noted as an example, there are often four or five people involved in that transaction — friends or family members who will use one of those tickets — but typically only one buyer is registered. “That’s a huge gap I find venues quite uninterested in for some reason,” Fluet said.

His conclusion is that ticketing and fan data have the opportunity to become the most valuable data sets in music. To illustrate how far behind music is on this topic compared to other industries he offered an example: “I work with a car company that has twenty people measuring how sound sounds when doors shut because it’s one key reason people buy cars,” he said. “There’s a whole buying journey — which member of family has to come into it? Is it safe? Is it fast?”

“Are we looking at fan bases? Are we looking at consumers? Are we segmenting them in this way?” he continued. “I’m not seeing it. I’m seeing lots of streaming activity but actually wanting to understand the fan? Not so much.”