Maria Garrido CMO of Deezer: Insights on Leadership, Music, and Purpose (MDE591)

Who am I? That's a very existential question. Who am I? I am a hyperactive queenager. I'll call myself that. I like that term for middle-aged women these days who have an insatiable curiosity and who are eager to always be in a state of learning something new.

Yes.

You know what? I think I'm one of the oldest, if not the oldest woman in the company, but mentally I'm probably much springier than some of the kids running around this building. Yeah, it's definitely about staying culturally relevant, you know. And I think in any industry you work in, when you're in marketing, I really believe you have to stay somewhat humble because the user or the customer should be at the core of what it is that you're trying to achieve that eventually does deliver business results. And it's no different if you're working in a tech app music business versus selling toothpaste, as far as I'm concerned.

So, in this industry, in the digital streaming platform industry, the number one box you have to tick is that you're credible in music. Before we get to any functional or emotional connection you might have with your actual customer, it's like, do you really know music? And that occupies a lot of our team's time, at least from the marketing. The tech teams, that's not their area, but we, especially on social media, have to show that we're always in the know on what's happening in music, what's happening in culture, you know, what latest artist, what are they up to, when their new album is coming out. Early access to things is always a special bonus for our customers. But if I don't know what's happening in music, I'm not credible as a tech app because this is the space, this is the universe I play in. That's the first thing I think that you have to do. So, it's always being on top of culture at every level. Today, we were bantering with one of our competitors on Instagram, and we were using Gen Z language that most of my executive committee had no idea. It's like, what does this mean? I'm like, exactly, you're not the audience. The people on our Instagram are younger people, so we have to speak in a language that's relevant to them. So, cultural relevance is super important. Music credibility is important. And then, like in many other industries, it's about what's in it for me as the customer. What do I get out of it? You know, is your product easy to use? That's the functional aspect. And then emotionally, do I feel connected to a larger community of music fans? Do I get to see, you know, do I get access to music on my favorite artist before anybody else does? Like, what is the bonus for me as a customer? And it's the same for us as it is for Spotify or Apple Music or anyone else who plays in the space. So, I think that understanding the drivers of engagement from your customers or how you're going to recruit new customers are the same for all of us. You know, music, you know me. You personalize the app, I get access to everything I want and need, it's easy to use, and it makes me feel cool and part of a big music community.

Okay, so here's where some interesting habits about people's behavior comes into play. So, most people will make the majority of their musical memory archive between the ages of 18 and 24, maybe even 16 to 24, right? If you think about what's on your playlist or your favorite tracks, there's a lot of music you listened to when you were young. Pink Floyd, Grateful Dead. Exactly. Yeah, that's when you use that moment to sort of express yourself and your coming of age. So, a lot of discovery on music streaming platforms is driven by younger generations. It doesn't mean that someone like me or you isn't looking at new music on our apps, but most of the engine behind discovery of new music is happening with younger generations. And there, of course, the labels and the artists we work with, their interest is that these young people will get to see what they have to offer, right? So, the algorithms in the products, depending on how much discovery you do, will do different things. We have a feature in the product called Flow, which is our most popular feature. I think it's like 38% of people use it on a daily basis. And that feature, basically, you go in and you say, 'I'm in the mood to go for a run,' or 'I want relaxation music.' And it will mix your favorite tracks with new songs in similar, let's call them musical universes that you might be interested in listening to. And for people like you and me, that's how we discover new music. And if you don't like it, you skip it, and the algorithm learns that you're actually not interested in that piece of music, that artist, that genre. And what we've done this year is you can actually move that spectrum. Like, I want to do more discovery and less of my favorites. I want to do, I don't want to listen to reggaeton. Like, I am not a big fan of reggaeton. Maybe because I understand what they're saying in Spanish, but I really am not a fan. So, I can say I don't want these genres, and today I'm in the mood for more discovery. So, pitch me new music, and don't just feed me my own stuff. Which lets the customer a bit control the algorithm. And that is our most popular feature.

Okay, there's a lot of interesting things happening there. So, a couple of interesting statistics for you. So, I think 80% of the people who listen to Bob Marley are under the age of 35. Which means they weren't around when Bob Marley was a well-known artist. The movie Bohemian Rhapsody was an aha moment for a lot of people in this industry because it made Queen discoverable and fresh and brand new to a new generation of users. If you and I were talking earlier, you know, we collected music, we collected vinyls, we collected tapes, we collected CDs, and that's what you had at home. The fact that today the average teenager has 100 million tracks available to them at the touch of a finger on their mobile phone means that people like Elton John, Sting can come back and be rediscovered to a new generation of artists. So, that's why you see things like Elton John doing duets with Dua Lipa, who's popular as a pop singer in the kids' realm. It is opening the spectrum that all music is accessible to everyone. So, there's no reason why bands like the Grateful Dead can't be relevant to a new generation who doesn't have a dusty old vinyl at home.

Of course. We all think our generation was the best one. But I think it's much more fluid. I think the kids today have grown up in a world, and this has its good things and its massive bad things, of content overload. But if you think about, if I think about my youth, right? I didn't, my parents were foreign, so that helped, but my friends didn't see movies in Korean. Or did they listen to music in languages they don't speak, right? Today my 17-year-old son will listen to rap in languages he doesn't speak. He'll go see movies in Japanese and Korean and Turkish and doesn't hesitate that that's a different language or a different culture. There's much more openness to all kinds of content that comes from different parts of the world, and that has translated into music too. And artists have caught on. You have a lot of artists who are mixing genres. You can find songs that have five different genres of music in one track in one three-minute track. And the kids are totally open to that way of working. So I don't think they're looking at the music, the Grateful Dead is like, oh those guys actually really know how to play a guitar.

Yeah, that's a good question. I think let's go back to the origins of this industry and then we'll get to the response to your question. So, these, the people who founded Spotify and Deezer and all of these music apps were pirates. They were young guys who had an idea of democratizing access to music to the entire world and they went out and they were faster than governments and faster than the music industry and they basically gave access to all the music in the world to anybody who wanted it. I remember Napster. Right, exactly. The Napsters of the world, right? And then, what happened? That an industry that was highly profitable, you know, think about like it's a bit like a VC model, you know, 30 years ago a big music label would launch 10 artists, they invest in 10 artists, one of them would make it pretty big and they would cover the cost of the other nine they spent it, okay? Today, that's not very possible. In fact, because there's so much content out there, they have to launch 20 artists for one to do decently well, and who knows if they cover their costs? I don't have their numbers, but they were doing pretty well with CDs, DSPs came in, digital streaming platforms, and said, 'Guess what? Music is free for everybody. It's a free-for-all.' And their business went boom, and then they got their act together, they came back, they lobbied governments about rights, because it's true, artists need to be paid, producers, songwriters, composers, sound engineers need to be paid, and the pendulum swung in the other direction. So, it made every DSP highly unprofitable because of all the money that they generate in revenue, there's quite a big chunk of that that has to go to pay the rights of all of the music labels and all of the artists who were on the platform. That makes it difficult for these businesses to financially survive. So, every single one of these companies, whether it be a Spotify, a Deezer, is in a course correction mode. Like, how do we optimize costs? How do we get the ROI as efficient as possible on our marketing spend, on our product development, on our technology innovations in a way that we can make our business profitable? Because the way it's set up today, it no longer is. And they've created their own problem because they commoditized the music industry, the music access of customers. Where we used to pay $14.99 to buy an album, today you pay $12.99, $11.99, $10.99, or if you're still a student offer, even less than that, and you have 100 million tracks available to you on a daily basis. There is a monthly fee. That's a monthly fee, the subscription, and that gives you access to everything, whereas $14.99 before was one album. One album. So, the economic model just literally like was, it's not even disruption, it's a nuclear bomb in the industry. So, a lot of artists are like, 'Okay, well, how am I going to make a living now, right? I used to sell albums.' I do live events.' Live events is a big generator of income for them, but the split now, their pie chart is like, 'I do merch, I do brand partnerships.' They have to be much more polyvalent, you would say in French, than they used to be to be able to generate income for themselves at the level they did before.

Thank you, mentor. That's it. I don't always manage it well. I'm going to be really honest. I'm not superhuman. I'm very efficient about my time. It's not always easy to prioritize. That's what makes it difficult, mentor, I think. I sleep well at night. That's important. Like, I have to sleep. My business in Spain, Teranum Wellness, which is an 18th-century manor that is in wellness retreats, is my weekend job. I have a team that I trust that's doing a fantastic job there. In fact, our greatest pride and joy is in the 2 years we've been open, we've gotten nothing but five-star reviews from the customers that we've, and that for me is super important and that is a purpose project that is so deep in my heart that I will, I believe wholeheartedly in what we're doing there. But that's my weekend job. So, Saturday mornings and Sunday mornings I, you know, pay the bills and do the things and follow up on the things that my team in Spain needs. I have started to show up at my wellness business as a retreater myself because I need the break. Right. Message to everyone else, by the way. I mean, yes. I need the break. We all need to take breaks. The board roles are, I think my, I'm so curious that sometimes it's to my detriment. You know, I'm like, 'Oh, this is really interesting. I'll chase that.' And then next thing I know, like I have so many things on my plate, I don't know how to juggle it. So, it's not an easy situation to find yourself in. But, the board roles are interesting, especially at this point in my career, because I feel like I can contribute, but I also learn from the people sitting around the table a lot. And that for me is necessary. It's like air. If I'm not learning, I'm not breathing.

Yeah. So, I was giving a talk last week to a bunch of young women and I talked about the support structure you need to be resilient, the confidence you need to be resilient, and I redefined confidence for them. I said confidence isn't about saying I know how to do everything and I'm amazing at everything. It's also about knowing and accepting what you're weak at and not beating yourself up about it. Come on. Like, let's just stop posturing. Everybody's not good at everything. Like, and I really believe, mentor, there's power in that vulnerability. If I can sit with my team at Deezer and say, 'Guys, I really suck at this and I need your help.' It already just establishes a layer of trust with my team that is just priceless and makes us contribute and work better together. My job isn't to know everything. My job is to know what I don't know, what I know, what I don't know, and where to go for help to fill in the gaps that I have.

That's a great question, and that isn't always easy, mentor, but I have to take a deep breath when I go into those kinds of be like, like a couple of 10 minutes of deep breaths before I go in, and I've had to teach myself to not be the good student and respond, but to go, you know what, I don't have that information, I'll get back to you. You know, because I know there's no way I can have every single figure in my head. I'd be making it up if I did that, you know? So, I have to, it's very, it's like you're holding back a dam. It's not very easy to do. And I think experience, I think we put too much weight on these situations. You know, they're individual situations. The sum of the parts is not, has nothing to do with that individual situation. So, I try to take a bit of distance from that moment of discomfort where instead of becoming defensive, because that's so obvious. That's so, it's actually better for me to go, 'You know what? I actually don't know, but I know where to get the information and I'll get back to you,' you know?

About fifteen years ago I started going on wellness retreats for my own sanity. I'm a single mom with three boys. I left a very abusive relationship that has kept me busy in court for many, many years. I had a very demanding job, and I thought I was going to do everything and pull off everything. I didn't have a nervous breakdown, but I came pretty close multiple times. And my instinct wasn't that I'm not paying enough attention to my kids, my employees, my team, my friends, but that I needed to start paying a little bit of attention to myself. So I booked myself on a wellness retreat on a whim, and it gave me permission to pause, which I'm very bad at. I've never been diagnosed as hyperactive, but it's difficult for me to slow down in every aspect of my life because I have an endless to-do list that just keeps going. Whatever I scratch off, new things get added below.

So I started doing the retreats. I have always gone by myself. If I was on business trips in Singapore, I'd tack on a four-day retreat in Indonesia for the weekend. Anything I could figure out to give myself a bit of time to exist as a human being — not as a mom, not as a boss, not as a friend, but as a woman and a human being. And they were so beneficial to me over the years that I sort of started cherry-picking what I liked about each one, and I thought, someday when I retire, I would love to build a business that does for other people what this has done for me.

I built the business plan and I knew I wanted to do it in Galicia in the northwest coast of Spain. My family is from there. I wanted to contribute to that community, and all the boxes checked out. I had a lot of data available to me because I run the insights and analytics teams. The tourism numbers check out, the projections on Spain, the wellness is exploding. Rationally speaking, this actually makes sense. It's not just my passion project. I built a beautiful little plan, stuck it in a drawer and said, when I retire someday from the rat race of the corporate world, I'll do this.

And COVID hit, and the only trip I was taking was to see my elderly parents in Galicia. So I was like, okay, I'm just going to start familiarizing myself with the real estate. What's out here? I don't even know if what I'm looking for exists. Really casually I walked into the fourth property I visited, and I was with my oldest son. Ten minutes in I went, I have to do this now. I always make this joke that I've never fallen in love with a man like I've fallen in love with that house. It was instant. The property owns a mountain spring. There was the sound of fresh running water overlooking the ocean surrounded by a eucalyptus forest. The space gave you permission to pause. It was feeding my soul. I said, this is it. I can't wait till I retire. So I purchased the property, hired some interior designers to gut the place, and we opened in the summer of 2022.

And I don't come from the hospitality business. I don't know anything about the luxury hospitality business. And I don't know anything about running a hotel. But I was so convinced of the purpose behind this project. I hired only female entrepreneurs to help me — female interior designers, female website designers, brand designers. The woman who helped me conceptualize the menu was a female-founded business.

I really focus on that. I said the day we turn a profit I will give 10% of the profits to provide wellness retreats for women who are survivors of domestic violence for free. And everything is locally sourced. There were so many ESG elements that were important to me. They were difficult to put in place, and I spent many, many hours in my room by myself behind my computer screen. You go from a corporate world with a big team and social interaction into the entrepreneur world which is very lonely at the beginning and along the way. Very lonely.

But we started the business and so many of my theories have been debunked on what I thought I was building, but in such a fabulous way. I thought my client is going to be a middle-aged woman like me who's burning out and needs a break. And suddenly I see men showing up. I'm like, what's going on here? More men, elderly people showing up. Eighty-year-olds who are retired, who have the time and the disposable income and have never done a yoga class but they're super curious.

We hired a PR agency. Lots of controversy. You need to hire supermodels to come in and be Instagram influencers. I'm like, no, that's not what I'm doing here. This is a place for anyone who's interested in wellness. It doesn't matter where they are in their journey. We are going to be accessible. We're not judgmental. If you don't want to get up and do yoga at 8:30, we don't care. Sleep in.

At the end of the day, what I see happening is people cry when they leave us on Sunday because we have the kindest team I think of any retreat or wellness center in the world. They are here to pamper you, to not judge you, to let you do your journey. Everybody who's coming to retreats is not there by accident. The startup founders that show up from Boston and Tel Aviv, who've never shut their computer in twenty years, are not there by accident. The man who's been widowed after forty years of marriage and hasn't left the house in three months and his sister buys him a retreat, is not there by accident. So in essence, we are collectively hugging our clients. We are giving them a collective hug and allowing them just to be. And every time I see somebody leave crying, all of the headaches of spending my weekends paying bills and trying to figure out how I'm going to fund it, and all of the work is absolutely 100% worth it.

I would like it because I'm impatient. Because I would like to go faster. Right now it's completely self-funded. So I manage everything both on my side and living in Paris and the property of the business in Spain. I am interested in angel investors for the simple sake of acceleration. Because I would like us to go faster.

That's — I call them, we call them the kindness tribe at Taranau. And we very early on noticed that a lot of guests were saying things like, I've come here as a guest and I leave as a friend. Which was for us the ultimate compliment. So my hotel manager and his partner host the retreats. They actually do all of the activities. It's as if you're in their home. They do all of the activities with our clients and they foster the community aspect of what we're doing. The woman who cleans our property, who we call the shadow of perfection because she doesn't like to be seen — there are two great blogs on our website that you should look at that are called The Kindness Tribe, and I highlight every single member of our team. She loves that she was there when that house was a ruin fifteen years before I bought it. She came with the deal. When I bought the property, I had to keep Rona as an employee. She loves that property more than I will ever love that house and takes care of it like it's her own child and is literally a shadow of perfection. She wants to make sure everything is perfect in the room for our customer because it's a reflection of her own talent and the skills she brings to the team. So she owns it. To be honest, she knows where everything is way better than I do. If the electricity drops out, she knows where the fuse box is, she knows everything.

We went through a couple chefs before we found one that had the attitude that we wanted — to just embrace our clients in that kind vibe that we were looking for. All of the other people are people that come in from externally. Our masseuse is unbelievable. She's a body healer more than anything else. Yoga teachers, we've been through a few, I have to say, before we found one that knows how to handle somebody who knows how to do a downward dog or stand on their head standing next to an eighty-year-old who's never done a yoga class in their life. We need people who are open and embracing of different people, different backgrounds, different journeys. Some of them have been bumpy. We haven't hit it straight out of the gate, but we've slowly figured it out. We have a woman who does sound healing who's amazing and just gives off this unbelievable vibe.

But it takes time to get there and it's still a little bit of trial and error. Sometimes you can go through the interview and it's great and then when you've got the person on the property and we're rushing because we have a stack of journalists coming in for a PR event and they start treating the rest of the staff poorly, that's where I draw the line. If we're trying to do kindness, you can't treat each other like this.

I approve all of the hires. I was heavily involved in the beginning of the team. But I do approve all of the hires. Not everyone on my team knows my own personal story. I have to tell you the funny story. When I first bought the property, I sat down the woman who is what we call la ama de llaves, the keeper of the keys. And I explained that the house is being used as a big beautiful Airbnb for big Madrid families that come for the summer and rent it out as a luxury property villa. And I said, we're going to do something different now here. I will never forget the conversation. She looked at me like I was nuts. Who is this half Galician woman coming in here to tell me we're going to serve gastronomic vegetarian food, that we're going to do wellness. All of the neighbors in the village were thrilled because wellness is quiet so they were no longer going to have big parties. But she looked at me like I was nuts and she said, what do you mean? But Spaniards aren't going to come? I'm like, well, it's not likely. Our guests will probably be British and Irish and Northern European because this wellness idea is much more advanced. And she was very upset.

I was just there two weeks ago and she said, we had some Spanish guests. And she goes, oh God, please bring the foreigners back. I couldn't stop laughing. Now she's drinking the punch more than I drink the punch. And she puts — every day when we have clients, the day they come in, we cut fresh wildflowers from our own gardens or from the woods, from the eucalyptus forest in the mountains. And she's in charge of making sure that everyone has their own unique bouquet in the room. She cares more about the ESG things than I do, which I appreciate, because then I give her space to tell my hotel manager, you know what, the compost bin needs to be bigger because we're not recycling and composting as much as we should. I give her every space to go tell my chef, you know what, instead of buying the basil you bought today, there's some sitting in the herb garden. You can just pick it there. I give her space because I know that's the area where she's going to push my mission.

My director is the guy that knows how to deliver service and he's so obsessed with our five-star rating on Google that he's scared to death if somebody ever gives us four. So I don't need to push him. That's what he created. He created that five-star rating. I had a vision, but he implemented it. And those actual experiences of our guests are his responsibility and his talent and his contribution, not mine.

Oh, yes. Yes, a hundred percent. So as I was doing retreats around the world, I started cherry-picking what I liked about each one, but I said there has to be something they don't expect. And there is. And we're not going to talk about it here because I'm not going to give it away. But absolutely on Saturday night after dinner, we make everybody get up and we take them away to something. And I won't say what it is, and it is always the highlight of our retreat, which is something they do not expect.

So they can follow us on Instagram at Taranau Wellness. Taranau is t-e-r-a-n-a-u, which means terra, which is earth, and anam is soul in Celtic. So it's the link of earth and soul. We really believe in the power of nature to help heal people in our business.

So they can follow us on Instagram, they can go to our website at taranauwellness.com. We have retreats running most of the year. I don't know who thinks self-care is just a summer thing. You need to take care of yourself year-round. Next year we're doing a lot more. We realize there's a lot more interest in other kinds of retreats. We now do men's only retreats. The first ones sold out. Men's only retreats. We do menopause retreats. There's a lot of women who need to feel they're not alone in that process and get some basic tips on how they can help themselves. We're starting to do gastronomy retreats which are not about doing yoga. It's just about eating in Galicia. I don't know if people outside of Spain know, but Galicia is known for its seafood and its wine. In fact, I don't know if you know who Massimo Bottura is — the chef. I met him in New York a few months ago at an event and he told me, Galicia, the best seafood in the world. I said, exactly. So we do a seafood tour. People get to go on a boat and look at the mussel barges in the ocean and eat all-you-can-eat mussels. The village next door to us is known for its clams. So we go visit the people as they're clamming in the morning so they can explain what they do and they get to taste clams. We go on tapas tours of Santiago de Compostela. We take them very locally to something called the food ancho, which are these homes up in the mountains that only the locals know about where you walk in the secret door and it's all you can eat and all you can drink. So those are really popular, we're doing more and more of those next year as well as the holistic wellness.

Oh, good question. No, we have a kayaking club because we're at the end of the ocean bay and it starts to become a river when you go just a little bit up the road. So we have a kayaking club but as far as I know, I know paddle is very popular in Spain. But I'll look around, Minter. I'll let you know if there's any paddle.

Yeah, so I met them when I was working at Havas as the Chief Insights and Analytics Officer globally for the company. And I met Quilt very early on in their own story when I think they were five employees. The two founders and three employees based out of Singapore, and we were interested in them because they were using artificial intelligence and machine learning to do market research. And market research reported into me at Havas. And what I found fascinating about their approach is they're a very human company. There's a lot of kindness at Quilt. They're very obsessed with doing a lot of projects for NGOs, for the World Health Organization, for UNESCO. So there was an aspect of AI for good that I thought was quite interesting with them. And the scale of what I can do with them as a client at speed was so different from the traditional market research models that we use. And it is an industry that is absolutely ripe for disruption and has been for a long time.

Over the years I have very much stayed in contact with the Quilt team. I worked with them on several projects, advised them on a couple things. And now that the company is half based out of the US and half based in Singapore, they're much bigger now. Working for big clients all over the world. They've worked for McDonald's, they worked for Coca-Cola, they worked for LVMH in France. They worked a lot for Bel as well, the cheese company. So I have been on their advisory board, which is relatively new. We started a few months ago. So there's four or five of us and we sort of help them build their models and look at new tools they can create. I used them at Deezer on a couple of projects. We've done some very interesting work with them around fandom. And I think it's always — we're talking about the humility of the marketer at the beginning — we sometimes make some very big assumptions of what we think motivates people in their behaviors of media consumption. Based on me. You know, I know because I did it, but I'm not my average consumer. And we've done some really great work with them around fandom this year that has sort of broken the myths and the hypothesis that we all have around what we think the reasons behind why people are part of a fan community. It's not what we think it is at all. And I love that about them. There's always a light bulb moment when I do some work with them.

Yeah, of course. I think what they do so well is they can do market research at scale, but you can certainly bring it down to a local market. Like a couple weeks ago, I asked them — one of the other boards I sit on is a commercial real estate company, and they have an incubator where they look at new retail models and they invest in retail models to spread them all over their shopping malls. And I asked the team, what kind of insights are you using to inform those decisions? So if they're only financial, you might be missing out on trends. I don't know what's happened, but Krispy Kreme has showed up in France and there are queues a mile long to get a donut. So I said, how can you guys get on top of what's happening in France before it happens? So I asked Quilt to do some very small amount of work for them on understanding retail conversations and trends happening in France around fast food and quick service restaurants, QSRs, in France so that they could have a more informed decision on what they look into next for incubation.

Except for Taranau Wellness, the easiest place to find me is on LinkedIn. Just look my name up, you'll find me, and you can send me a message there. And then if it's related to Taranau, it's very easy. They can just write me at [email protected].