The Future of the Music Business

Rio Caraeff, the Chief Content Officer at Magic Leap, speaks with GLG about the future of music and how paid music downloads may not be the way forward.

Rio is Chief Content Officer at Magic Leap. In this role, he is responsible for development, operations and business management of Magic Leap’s cloud-based ecosystem and media network. Prior to this role, Rio served as President and Chief Executive Officer at Vevo, which he also founded, until January 2015. Vevo is the world’s largest all-premium music and video entertainment platform, and YouTube’s largest global partner (by revenue and streaming volume) for the past 5+ years. Under Rio’s leadership, Vevo grew into a nearly $400 million revenue business with 300 employees operating in 15 countries, and paid $1 billion in music programming royalties back to the music industry over a 5-year period. In addition, Rio helped develop a large scale off-YouTube network of owned and operated apps across Apple TV, Roku, Xbox, PlayStation, Samsung, Amazon Fire TV and iOS/Android, and build one of the largest all-premium online video advertising sales forces of 200+ people serving over 1100 global brand marketers.

Prior to founding Vevo, Rio was Executive Vice President of Digital at Universal Music Group, where he led strategy, licensing, investments, partnerships and new business development for the world’s largest music company, and drove in excess of $500 million in revenue per year through development and implementation of on-demand and subscription audio / video licenses with Google, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, and Amazon, to name a few. In his extensive background prior to Vevo and UMG, Rio worked in new technologies across all areas of entertainment, including film, television, music and games, for such companies as Sony Pictures Entertainment, Fabric (a firm he co-founded), Sony 550 Digital Media Ventures, Sony Music Entertainment and Capitol Records Group. Rio began his career as a software engineer, including a stint designing and developing many of the first websites on the Internet for Michael Jackson and The Beatles. He currently serves on the Board of Advisors at Vadio, Inc., and is an Advisor to Pandora, Vrse, Chosen and Kik Interactive, Inc.

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