I was wondering if you could comment on his maybe biggest strengths and weaknesses.

In terms of weaknesses, like I said, I always got the sense that there was a conservative nature that he was kind of instilling on the rest of the company by not looking to adopt AI into the operational strategy and not seeing the opportunity there from a business standpoint. While everybody in tech was mandating employees to start using AI and would have to showcase their new uses of AI in their workflows on performance reviews, Universal was saying nobody's allowed to use it. Being ahead of analytics, they wouldn't even let me use it. That struck me as crazy and inefficient. It speaks to a broader lack of innovative culture, I think.

Since you talked about the company's culture, I was wondering if you could expand a little bit on that. Since you worked at Sony, how would you contrast UMG's culture with Sony's?

At Universal, Lucian really encourages internal competition; I think he thinks that makes everybody try harder. I don't get it. Having come from Sony, they built a structure where there is the same imprint label system competing to some degree, but many departments on the on-roster side, the people dealing with artists already signed, come together regularly. I mean weekly, multiple times a week, with the central organization function: the central finance teams, business affairs teams, marketing teams, analytics teams. They all share best practices, new insights, and strategies that have worked or haven't worked. They share recaps of album campaigns that were successful and specific strategies they deployed there; somebody at RCA who released an album with an artist and had success can share that, so Columbia Records can say, "That's a good new strategy. We can take that and apply it to our upcoming Harry Styles release." Nothing like that is happening at Universal. That always stood out to me as odd.