YouTube Premium adding Peacock from NBCUniversal is another signal that YouTube is moving beyond its origins as an advertising platform and the perception of being a social platform where artists, creators, and users simply publish content. It is becoming one of the largest and most important entertainment platforms in the world.
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George Karalexis is an entrepreneur & media executive specializing in marketing, business & corporate strategy, organizational structure, & tactical team building. 15+ years of multi-vertical leadership & cross-functional execution in entertainment, advertising, and social impact.
Unlike competitors that spend billions acquiring exclusive rights to rent audiences, YouTube has built its position through long-term partnership and product evolution. Instead of competing in rights auctions, it has worked with existing cultural properties to expand distribution and improve the underlying live streaming product.
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The streaming giant is critical for legacy catalogs, but it's plagued by unofficial uploads and poor-quality bootlegs. Here's how to cut through the noise.
Read MoreThe most important lesson of the year was structural. The industry continues to confuse distribution with leverage and visibility with value. Optimizing for fleeting moments instead of building repeatable systems produces unstable business models and short-lived outcomes. Technology alone does not fix this. Judgment without systems does not scale. Over the course of the year, it became clear that progress follows when decision-making is consistent and reinforced by systems designed to support it.
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Recently, I heard an executive from a major music company repeatedly refer to artists as creators. While that is true, they are not the same, and it got me thinking about why we make that distinction, my own perspective on music and the business around it, and how we choose to run our company.
Read MoreThe recent clash between Universal Music Group (UMG) and YouTube creator Rick Beato is a perfect example. It highlights how intellectual property frameworks, built for a physical world, are colliding with a digital ecosystem defined by platform ubiquity, creator empowerment, and cultural liquidity.
Read MoreThe Punk Rock and DIY principles have guided every major decision in my career and remain unchanged, whether the stage is a garage, a venue, or a global business.
Read MoreFor the past two decades, media companies have scaled by leaning on compute. More data, more servers, more spend. Infrastructure became a blunt instrument: powerful, but inefficient. As digital catalogs balloon and rights complexity deepens, this approach is reaching a breaking point.
Read MoreThe music industry's engagement with AI-generated music has transformed at an accelerated pace this past year. Initial defensive postures, marked by lawsuits and vocal advocacy for artists' rights, have given way to a more strategic, collaborative paradigm.
Read MoreAI has not disrupted the creative process — it has revealed its true nature. To future-proof the creative economy, we must stop fighting the mechanics of creativity and start building systems that reward it at scale.
Read MoreOver the past decade, democratized music distribution has enabled millions of creators to reach global audiences without the traditional barriers of label systems or physical infrastructure.
Read MoreWhen YouTube quietly released its free AI music generator last week, the announcement was framed as a simple upgrade for creators: a way to produce copyright-free background tracks for their videos.
Read MoreMost companies get this hire wrong because they don’t actually understand what marketing is. It’s not one job—it’s at least three.
Read MoreYouTube has reached an all-time high, commanding 11.6% of total streaming viewership. That’s a staggering share when you consider the sheer volume of content being consumed globally—more than one in ten minutes of streamed content happens on YouTube.
Read MoreEvery music release follows a strategy—whether you designed it deliberately or fell into it by default. If you find yourself constantly asking, “What do we do now?” or scrambling to adjust your approach mid-campaign, it’s a clear sign that the strategy wasn’t solid to begin with.
Read MoreNegotiation is often treated like a game where one side wins, and the other loses. But the reality is, the best deals aren’t about beating the other side—they’re about making sure both parties can actually work together.
Read MoreTechnology is just a tool. It's only meaningful when it changes behavior.
Read MorePricing in the music industry isn’t determined by the effort put into creating a song, the cost of production, or how much the artist values their work. Instead, it’s dictated by the listener’s perception of value and their ability to pay.
Read MoreAI isn’t just making music creation faster—it’s reshaping how content is made, distributed, and valued. The industry is splitting between mass-produced, AI-driven content and high-value, human-crafted work—artists, managers, and labels must decide which side they’re on.
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