Sony Email Leak: Snapchat Reportedly Wanted to Start a Record Label

The Sony hack has been devastating for one of the biggest media conglomerates in the world and all its affiliated artists and companies. The latest leak details plans by Snapchat to start its own label as a joint venture with Sony. A leaked email from Snapchat CEO Michael Lynton reveals the company's plans to start a music platform of its own because "every music service in the market is s--t."

View the full email from Lynton below, via Billboard:

Michael,

I was only able to see Evan for about 30 minutes yesterday but that was enough time for him to express his thoughts and leave us with some things to think about if there is going to a music play within Snapchat. He didn't end up showing some of the developments in the platform that may benefit music but referenced them in the discussion. First, he thinks every music service in the market is s--t and he wants to be a curator. He doesn't want to build a music service but he would like to have a record label so he could focus on the artists that he wants to use the platform to promote. He also wants to participate in the upside that he will create by promoting them on the platform. He later backed off a bit from being a record label to maybe testing the concept first. Obviously he doesn't understand some of the important nuances around the business about what rights a record label does and does not have.

I appreciate the introduction. I am going to go back to my team with some of these concepts and see if we can get creative in how we could get something to work here that is in the direction of Evan's vision and get him more exposed to what we can bring to Snapchat. We have a lot of ideas of our own but I don't think Evan will engage in our ideas until we try to move something forward that he wants to accomplish.

Please let me know if you want to disc [sic]

Snapchat has been used to build "stories" for events, allowing users to contribute videos and pictures to a stream that other Snapchat users can view. Alesso, a producer/DJ, premiered the video for his single "Heroes" featuring Tove Lo via the platform, and many artists use Snapchat as another medium of connecting with their fans and giving a visual look-in at what they are doing at any moment. It is in the process of developing a "discover" section for advertising and distribution partnering, with media companies like BuzzFeed, Spotify, CNN, ESPN, Comedy Central and Vevo, via The Verge.

It will be interesting to see how this affects Snapchat's plans going forward now that its business strategy has been leaked to the public. The hackers claim to still have 100 terabytes of documents from Sony and have not even released one terabyte so far, via Business Insider. Sony and its partners are not out of the woods yet, not even close.

Tags

Sony, Snapchat, Record label