Suzy Ryoo, Co-Founder and President of distributor Venice Music, has entrepreneurship, innovation, and philanthropy running through her veins.
The child of Korean immigrants, Ryoo watched her parents build a life in Los Angeles from scratch in their early 30s while raising two young children.
After years of working odd jobs, they built a successful business together, supplying Korean and Asian immigrants looking to start restaurants with consultation services — first locally, then nationally.
“My parents are a true inspiration,” says Ryoo. “When they arrived in the States, they just had to figure it out and essentially sacrifice their whole livelihoods to make a better path for me and my younger brother.
“They accomplished their version of the American Dream by surviving and being successful. I have an overwhelming sense of gratitude and responsibility to honor that.”
That drive to succeed, and to serve the underserved, has clearly powered Ryoo’s career. She began as a financial analyst at The Salter Group before moving into advertising, where she brokered pilot deals between startups and brands.
She later backed early-stage entrepreneurs through Venice founder Troy Carter’s Atom Factory, worked with The Prince Estate, and now helps independent artists with limited resources through Q&A, which owns Venice Music.
At Venice, Ryoo and Carter are taking that mission one step further with the latest iteration of Co-Manager, a software platform with management and marketing tools for artists without teams to progress in their careers.
The tool marks the latest evolution of Venice, which launched in 2021 after Carter and Ryoo sold J. Erving’s Human Re-Sources to Sony Music.
Here, Ryoo talks to us about Co-Manager, AI and the music business, her career journey, lessons learned, and much more besides.
You’ve been at Q&A for just over seven years. What structural problems in the music industry have you been most motivated to try and fix during that time? do you feel that’s been realized, and what’s next in that evolution?
We debuted Venice Music in 2021, and the mission has always been to support artists as entrepreneurs at a time when the fastest-growing segment in the music industry was around independence.
This was coming off the back of Troy being inside Spotify for two years [where he was Global Head of Creator Services] before the company went public, where he saw how artists are supported at different levels of the industry and recognized a gap.
“With the tools available to us in AI and LLMs, we are able to deeply understand and personalize strategies, results, and execution for artists.”
He saw a white space in the support for the exponential amount of artists who were using the new tools that allowed them to grow their audience, develop their craft and music, and an opportunity to support those who are going for being independent longer.
That’s been the mission of the business. What we’re excited about now is that with the tools available to us in AI and LLMs, we are able to deeply understand and personalize strategies, results, and execution for artists and their teams in a way that just was not possible before.
You recently started beta testing an AI-powered feature called Co-Manager, which is described as a software-enabled music manager. It was first introduced in 2024. Can you tell us more about that?
The 2024 version was an early iteration, and we’re in private beta on a more robust and execution-oriented iteration. It is a more fully fledged, built-out platform compared to the earlier version.
It’s built for artists without managers. It deeply understands an artist’s workflow and how they would like to grow their music. It then does the work for them in several key areas, like reaching out to the right connections in the playlist ecosystems, the production ecosystems, content creators, and potential collaborators.
“We’re in private beta on a more robust and execution oriented iteration.”
The aim is to expand the capacity of an artist that is expected to not only develop their sound, craft, and music to a level that is undeniable, but is also expected to develop their creative voice, world, visuals, narrative, storytelling, and branding to a degree that captures the attention and hearts of a growing and global audience. That is very hard to do.
How can we make that more accessible so that artists can get further on their own, like they have actual team members? That is what the Co-Manager platform is meant to do for them. We’re seeing some really exciting developments, artists loving using the platform and coming back.
You mentioned that the tool will help artists build connections, which is one of the most important things a manager can do, especially in an industry like music, which is so much about relationships. Are we talking about connections to key decision makers or generic email addresses?
It’s all still in development, but I would say both. Yes, it’s entirely helpful for a manager of an artist to reach out to [someone with whom they’ve built] a 10-year relationship, an individual who controls a certain platform or playlist, but it doesn’t guarantee anything. There are many other outlets and ecosystems out there that are accessible to artists at all stages.
We’re never going to replace a human manager. But the reality is that if there are 20,000 managers who are actively working with one to 10 clients, that’s just not enough management support on behalf of the millions of artists. So how can we bridge that gap and effectively identify and nurture connections that aren’t necessarily what you’re talking about, which is the old industry of connections that have worked together for decades.
“Talent comes from anywhere and everywhere.”
Talent comes from anywhere and everywhere and can start from scratch. Whether it’s through TikTok or Instagram, talent can be discovered in a heartbeat, overnight. Then it’s about consistency and the relentlessness of the artists, the team behind them, and the collaborators to get things going. We’re going to try to understand an artist deeply and then offer potential connections across the spectrum of the functional departments of music, if you will, where there could be mutual interest.
It doesn’t mean that we’re going to be successful every time. But if we can be successful once, twice, or in a consistent manner for an artist to uncover a young producer, songwriter, content creator, a budding user-generated playlist curator, that will be an invaluable resource to artists who might be spending hours searching online for the right photographer, for example.
They can get referrals and ask other creative collaborators and friends, but if they could also have the help of a platform that deeply understands them and can search far and wide and offer up a relevant potential connection, that can be massively meaningful for artists, especially those without the readily available support of team members.
What’s your perspective on AI’s use in the music business generally, and what do you make of the numerous copyright lawsuits that are ongoing against services using music without permission to train AI models?
It feels really unfortunate, but it also feels undeniable: the cat is out of the bag. From our perspective, we’re asking how we can use artificial intelligence to help and support artists on the management, marketing and promotion of their music. I don’t think we’re going to be active in supporting artists using tools to create music using artificial intelligence.
That said, the reality is that in all areas of the industry, at the highest levels of producers, people making samples, laying down tracks, songwriters, the majority of people are testing and using these tools and so they’re going to quickly proliferate.
What we can do is promote transparency and self-identification when AI is used to make music. Spotify is beta testing a tool that can help credit when AI has been used and it feels inevitable that these markers are going to have to be identified as the legality and copyright situation gets worked through.
Your relationship with Troy Carter has been a big part of your career. Tell us the story of how you met.
I met Troy while working at an advertising agency with a focus on emerging platforms and technologies. Our clients were brands who spent hundreds of millions of dollars on media. One of my main clients was Warner Bros. Pictures, so I got an amazing opportunity to meet early startups like Uber, Warby Parker, and Snapchat.
Troy has always been a student of his interests and he was in love with music, technology and entrepreneurs. He heard about my team and asked for a meeting, and in that meeting, we discovered each other. After a couple of one-on-one meetings, he asked me to join him as a venture partner to help support the companies and founders he’d invested in, as well as make new investments together.
What did you first bond over?
We got deep quickly on legacy, mission, purpose, family and impact. The thread that combined us together was this ocean of gratitude of being from a place or from a background where we had to rise to the occasion, despite the challenges. For the past 11 years, the through line has been being passionate about and working on behalf of entrepreneurs and artists and artists really being entrepreneurs.
What have you learned from Troy?
I’ve seen him start from scratch multiple times over and that’s the quality I admire the most: him being ahead of the curve and being willing to bet the farm. He is able to stay true to himself, quiet the noise and go incredibly deep on subjects, industries, interests and people he cares about and believes in. He’s able to do that with an unwavering confidence and commitment.
I feel lucky to be one of the people included in that and this mission around supporting artists’ independence, enabling independence to be an option for artists for longer and legacy for artists as entrepreneurs.
That has such a worthwhile and valuable long-term impact on the industry. I’m grateful that someone with as much experience and success as Troy can see that opportunity and white space and almost commit himself entirely.
Can you pinpoint the biggest lessons you’ve learned across your career generally?
One thing that has stayed with me throughout my career has been to have a great memory. Whether you’re on your first internship, a rising executive or you’re at the top of the game, having a good memory is going to pay itself forward in multiples. People tell themselves, ‘I have such a bad memory, I can barely remember anyone’s names, faces or what happened yesterday’ and telling yourself that is going to perpetuate the problem. Training yourself to have an excellent memory is probably one of the best things you could do for the longevity of not only your career, but also your relationships.
Something I’ve learned from Troy is to narrow the aperture and apply deep focus to the areas of your life that you’re passionate about or committed to. That could be something to do with yourself and your personal development — health, longevity and exercise is a deep commitment of mine — but also, deep focus around your most important personal and professional relationships.
Everyone is busy and trying to move forward in their busy lives but if you deeply care about something, a person, a cause, a business effort, how do you apply deep focus to it in a way that is deeply felt by the recipient on the other side? That’s a personal lesson I’m still living through.
You’re still involved in the startup world as a partner of Cross Culture Ventures. What are the most exciting technological developments on the horizon you’re seeing for music at the moment?
The most exciting development technologically is going to be the advent of personal AI and how it is going to impact our daily workflows and help take us further in tasks and research execution in an agentic way.
Whether you are an artist, an executive, or a producer, personalization and execution in AI is definitely going to be the most game-changing development in terms of extended capacity and time back to do other things.
Female-founding teams in the US and Europe typically receive just 2% of VC funding annually and that stat has remained largely stagnant for years. Can you see any ways to improve it?
We have just gone through a decade where there have been dozens, if not hundreds, of female-founded companies reaching hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and creating billions of dollars of enterprise value. The biggest way for there to be more of those are for those companies and founders to continue to grow and exit, as well as investing in companies that are getting started now.
“Troy was a real early advocate for investing in entrepreneurs and he helped the music business and executives learn how to invest.”
Troy was a real early advocate for investing in entrepreneurs and he helped the music business and executives learn how to invest. Something I learned from Troy is it doesn’t matter if you’re a man, a woman or what your background is. A suggestion I would have for the music industry, whether its artists or executives, is to start investing in and learning about how to support the causes they believe in and the business problems they want to see changed.
Where founders have an unfair advantage in the markets or business problems they’re tackling, what you have to evaluate is their ability to see a white space and run through walls to solve problems and iterate. The best way to learn is by doing and the best way to create change is by jumping in and making an effort.
How do you see the relationship between the independent music sector and the traditional major music business evolving in the coming years?
The lines blurring will continue to accelerate. That’s for a number of reasons, from private equity and institutional capital backing and buying decades of catalog, providing fresh capital into the ecosystem, to the major labels and holding companies seeing the acceleration of growth in the independent space and the leverage that artists now have to demand independence and license deals.
“Whether you’re within a major label system or structurally without, there’s a huge opportunity for both artists and executives to command and chart their own path.”
Whether you’re within a major label system or structurally without, there’s a huge opportunity for both artists and executives to command and chart their own path, more so than in previous years, that’s for sure.
We’ve seen brilliant artists and their teams hold on to their independence and build catalog, both on the master and publishing side. That builds cash flow businesses that allow them to choose to participate in a major label ecosystem in a different way or just continue to build a house for themselves. It doesn’t seem like that was a true possibility even 10 years ago.
Is the current music streaming model sustainable for emerging artists? Would you like to see any changes in that area?
I would love to see changes in the pricing of the music streaming model. The reality is that the 1,000 stream threshold [the number of streams a track must reach in any prior 12-month period to generate recorded royalties on Spotify] is helpful in a world where most of the songs on platforms are unplayed and yet there are many songs that, by other methods, are reaching the masses and therefore impacting the pool.
“I would love to see changes in the pricing of the music streaming model.”
Even though the streaming model has been massively helpful for the rise of music again, overall, it does seem broken to the point where artists are forced to nurture and create new revenue streams outside of streaming.
Would you like to see any other structural changes that would make it more possible for the artists you serve at Venice to have sustainable careers?
It would be amazing to see more initiative, investment and effort from platforms and companies to support a fund to fuel the education and development of artists with minimal resources.
“It would be amazing to see more initiative, investment and effort from platforms and companies to support a fund to fuel the education and development of artists with minimal resources.”
The give-back seems sparse. I salute any efforts and programs but with record profits and the amount of eyeballs, influence and glamor the industry has, it would be incredible to see even more give back to artists.
Final question: if you could go back to the beginning of your career and tell yourself one thing, what would it be?
To be unafraid to make life-changing decisions and go for the things you’re afraid of earlier. To move cities, to change jobs, to take risks. I think I did all those things, but I could have done more. I would tell myself to be unafraid to learn new things and of things that you don’t know.
Something that I really think about is how to develop the muscle of being undeniable. I’ve always tried to be that in different arcs of my career and at the same time, it’s a forever chase because there’s always something to improve.
“Small habits and routines can act as pressure release valves for when you’re going through a hard time or don’t know how to move forward.”
It means understanding your role, purpose, deliverables, requests, and then over-delivering. You don’t just wake up being undeniable. You have to work at it every day, personally and professionally. If you’re undeniable, then you will never not have a job.
That said, life goes through its ebbs and flows, you can have a fast rise and a quick fall. You might get fired, break up with a personal or professional relationship, or your parents might get sick. Where does being undeniable play into those very real challenges? Something I’ve also thought a lot about is how you take baby steps to get back up.
For me, that has been running a mile every day. Whether I have a flight to catch, I’m sick, or just don’t feel like it, one mile is a daily minimum and I’ve just passed 1,000 days. Small habits and routines can act as pressure release valves for when you’re going through a hard time or don’t know how to move forward.
Virgin Music Group is the global independent music division of Universal Music Group, which brings together UMG’s label and artist service businesses including Virgin and Ingrooves.Music Business Worldwide
