'Everybody Wins': Exponential Music Sees Joel Edmondson Rethinking The Music Industry's Financial Infrastructure

The 2025 edition of SXSW Sydney is bringing with it the official launch of Exponential Music, a nascent "foresight lab designing financial infrastructure for the music industry of tomorrow."

Founded by Joel Edmondson (who has spent many years in the music industry, having served as CEO of QMusic and is currently CEO of the Venue Management Association and an advisor to startup community platform CAST), the official launch of Exponential takes place within his Everybody Wins: How To Build A Trillion-Dollar Music Economy talk at SXSW Sydney on Thursday, October 16th, presenting itself a practical pathway to building collective abundance and a more sustainable industry.

As Edmondson tells The Music, the core goal behind Exponential is centred around "creating a movement towards a more integrated, interconnected way of the music industry doing business" – an infrastructure which ultimately sees everyone win.

"I come from ten years of running big cross-industry initiatives, and a big realisation for me in doing that is that we can do all the conferences, workshops, lobbying and all the things that industry associations do, but at the end of the day, none of that is fundamentally changing the economic and financial system in which we're all working," he continues.

"There's a lot of talented, driven, well-meaning tech entrepreneurs trying to develop solutions to myriad problems in the industry, but they're all siloed solutions, and what we have is a system that's not working.

"So Exponential Music is really about trying to design the new system in a way where everyone from Live Nation through to the busker on the street could potentially be better off."

The launch of Exponential Music and this new system ultimately looks to help shift the global music industry move toward a new era of prosperity which is founded on connection, trust, and shared abundance.

“We are poor because we are poorly coordinated,” Edmondson explained. “The historical failure of the global industry to foresee tech disruption and build shared infrastructure to protect its collective interests has left it vulnerable to platforms that extract more value than they create. 

"The pie is shrinking for us all as a result. It’s time we designed new collectively-owned ecosystems that regenerate the music industry – where everyone can contribute to and benefit from collective abundance."

As Edmondson explains, the need for a new system rather than individual fixes to a broken one, the lack of an inspiring vision of what the future can be, and the realisation of the large scale of social and technological change are all points of inspiration for Exponential Music's launch.

"We haven't even been able to adapt to the likes of Spotify over the past 15, 20 years," he explains. "We are not good at adapting and part of adapting is about being able to imagine what the future might be like and having something to gravitate towards. So I'm trying to fill a leadership vacuum, but in a way where it is based on a technical solution that can lead in a concrete way towards everyone being better off.

"Ultimately, you can propose a new system, but if you can't convince everyone that they're going to be better off than they were, then it won't be adopted – it's just a concept."

The flagship project of Exponential Music, The Perfect Circle, is noted as aiming to transform music from a fragmented, extractive industry into an integrated, regenerative ecosystem. 

Almost by definition, it's a difficult concept to explain to those without an in-depth knowledge of high-level technological concepts. However, The Perfect Circle is described as a "blockchain-based financial architecture most easily understood as 'The Bank of Music.'"

Its architecture utilises stablecoins, digital identity, and programmable finance to unite rights, contracts, payments, banking, and investment into one transparent ecosystem. An example of what Edmondson calls "Regenerative Networks," the system seeks to incentivise cooperation and reinvestment while simultaneously supporting the competitive ambitions of individual stakeholders.

"This is about creating a unified system of money and data for the music industry globally as a way of incentivising everyone collaborating together," Edmondson explains. "It's called The Perfect Circle because if you think of industry at the moment, it is what is called a zero-sum game.

"That means we're all fragmented in our own little bubbles, we're all competing, and no one is looking after the big picture. What happens over time is that the ecosystem as a whole breaks down, and that's what we are living through at the moment. 

"The Perfect Circle is called that because it's trying to create a virtuous circle between everyone in the industry," he explains. "The idea is that by everyone using this one system, everyone gets something that they don't currently have, and that creates collaboration that then looks after the totality."

Though he admits it's a difficult concept to grasp, Edmondson notes that each aspect of the industry will find different uses and benefits depending on their needs.

"For the artist, what it will mean is a system in which you are not only paid when you are contracted to be paid because all the payments in this blockchain system are automated, but also because investors can trust the data in the system," he explains. "That means that artists will be able to access investment in a way that they haven't been able to before. Yeah. 

"The story that I would be telling the industry is that at the moment, unless you are a major international company, you are very vulnerable because you are taking all of the risk on your own.

"But the way the system would work is much more about shared financial risk and creating opportunities for the industry to access money that they can't in the current system."

News of Exponential Music's launch also comes just weeks after the minting of Australia's first regulated stablecoin (that is, 'digital dollars' which live on the blockchain), AUDM. This regulation, and the continued governmental regulation of digital currencies around the world, are an example of why the likes of Exponential Music has the potential to make waves in a coming era of financial innovation.

“The digitisation of music was the first major wave of industry disruption, but it's far from the end,” Edmondson explains. “Now we are entering the age of programmable money. Stablecoins give us the ability to reprogram how value flows through the music ecosystem — and this time, the industry can own the rails and keep the benefits. 

"We believe that networked financial infrastructure can drive exponential growth of the global music economy.

“If we miss this opportunity to take ownership of our shared destiny by designing our preferred future, others will take advantage of our division, for their own benefit," he added.

Edmondson will deliver his Everybody Wins: How To Build A Trillion-Dollar Music Economy talk at SXSW Sydney on Thursday, October 16th, while Exponential Music will outline the conceptual, technical and governance framework for The Perfect Circle in its Exponential Music Whitepaper 1 in early 2026.