By Erich Schwartzel and Anne Steele

Kevin Mayer has held numerous top jobs in the media and entertainment industries -- three of them this year alone.

After rising in the ranks and orchestrating the streaming strategy at Walt Disney Co., he left the company in March after being passed over to succeed Robert Iger as chief executive. He landed at the short-video app TikTok in May, but departed that gig in August after President Trump pressured Bytedance Ltd., its Chinese owner, to offload the app's American operations.

Now, Mr. Mayer has joined Warner Music Group Corp.'s parent company, Access Industries, as an adviser, amid an extended growth spurt for the music business. Access also owns Deezer, a small music-streaming service based in France.

Mr. Mayer will focus on Access's media-related businesses -- including Warner Music -- and is charged with identifying new opportunities for the holding company, which is controlled by billionaire Len Blavatnik.

As a top-ranking executive at Disney, Mr. Mayer, 58 years old, steered several of the company's biggest acquisitions, including Pixar Entertainment, Marvel Entertainment and "Star Wars" producer Lucasfilm Ltd.

Music is a newcomer to his résumé.

"How central music has become to culture, more so maybe than ever, is really remarkable, and it's driven by these digital platforms," said Mr. Mayer. "It's a good place to have a business footprint right now. Really good."

In an interview this week with The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Mayer discussed the music business, streaming, China, consumer habits during Covid -- and switching careers amid a pandemic. His responses have been edited for clarity.

WSJ: TikTok has helped certain songs explode in popularity, via viral videos and dance challenges, but hasn't secured long-term licensing deals with all the major labels to ensure artists are paid for use of that music. How would you describe the relationship between TikTok and the music industry at this point? Who needs whom more?

Kevin Mayer: It's a very symbiotic relationship between the two. There are massive audiences on TikTok. Most of the videos on TikTok are related to or have music in them, and it's very central to the experience; so TikTok sure needs the music and, conversely, the music industry needs TikTok because that's where a substantial amount of new music, songs and acts are broken. It's just a massive and very vibrant audience funnel. Both sides benefit, and certainly TikTok is going to be an integral part of the music landscape for a long time.

WSJ: How important in general are these social-media platforms like TikTok for growth at companies like Warner Music, versus the traditional streamers like Spotify and Deezer?

Mr. Mayer: They're both pretty important. On the one hand, a lot of music discovery happens on the [social] platforms, and it's a brand-new manifestation of music and audience intersection. On the other hand, music subscription services are where you get to hear the whole songs, where you have your playlists, where you have access to the full length of songs in the order as you want to hear them. As important as TikTok is, Deezer and Spotify and Apple Music are also as important.

WSJ: When it comes to consumer behavior with streaming and entertainment consumption during the monthslong quarantine, what's temporary and what's permanent?

Mr. Mayer: The way that consumers access entertainment programming and sports programming has been altered for the better. Consumers have continued to be empowered to enjoy content when and where they want to, and I just don't see any reason fundamentally why that would shift. People want to go back into theaters -- whether it hits at the levels it once did, given that people can see movies in their own homes? I don't know the answer to that.

There are some things they're going to miss, like the communal theatrical experience...theme parks will come back, all the place-based entertainment where people like to be around other people, I can't imagine those not coming back.

WSJ: Do you think tensions between China and the U.S. will simmer down with a President Biden in office?

Mr. Mayer: That's a really good question, and I don't know the answer to it. I don't know the Democrats'-slash-Biden's feelings about these issues. When I was with Bytedance, we were dealing with the administration, which is the other side of the aisle.

Look, I'm hopeful. I would just say that when I was at Bytedance, the Chinese team were wonderful people. They're businesspeople and technologists just like the rest of us here in the West, and it's just very unfortunate that we had geopolitical tectonic plates that were shifting. I hope it eases up because there's a lot to do together, and they're two great economies, and we can all learn from each other and do a lot of business together. But we'll see.

WSJ: How many services -- music or entertainment -- do you think the average consumer wants to pay for?

Mr. Mayer: On the video side, anyway, each streaming service has their own specific and exclusive content, typically. So if you want "The Mandalorian," you have to subscribe to Disney+, if you want "Game of Thrones," you have to subscribe to HBO Max, et cetera. So it's not as if one subscription fulfills all your needs to watch videos and watch the programs you want. So that lends itself to multiple subscription outcomes.

On the music side, a little less so because most music services like Deezer and Spotify and Apple Music, by and large, have most of the same music. Not always, not every single track is on all the services. But by and large, the major labels and everything, they have most of the product, and it's not exclusively available, so you're more likely than not to have one, maybe two music services. But you'd have substantially more video services, I think.

WSJ: As someone with a lot of experience behind the scenes of streaming, what about consumer behavior has surprised you?

Mr. Mayer: A large sector of the population now defaults first to streaming before they default to watching regular channels. I would be surprised if that reverses back at any point. I think that shift has been rapid, and the thing that's surprising is the fact that Covid just accelerated what I thought was an underlying secular trend. I mean, certainly, that was happening, but as with many things, I think Covid accelerated it quite dramatically. At Disney, we worked hard at putting ourselves in a position to take advantage of that, and Access founder Len Blavatnik has, too.

WSJ: Are there general rules then, whether you are a streaming company or a music company, about how you have to produce things differently to respond to that shift?

Mr. Mayer: You get to see with much more precision feedback from the audience in terms of data. People call it data; it's really feedback, and in this two-way streaming modality, you actually get to see what works and what doesn't work. TikTok was brilliant at that. They could tell what any individual was liking and not liking by their simple use of the app in a very nuanced way without having to declare "I like this, " or "I don't like that." It just sensed by how you use it, and how long you draw on a certain thing, and things like that. So this implicit understanding of your preferences that you could get with streaming and with apps like TikTok is really a sea change.

It doesn't tell you what content to make, necessarily, but it does tell you what content to deliver to whom and at what time, and if you can do that more perfectly, you could get a really great experience going.

Write to Erich Schwartzel at erich.schwartzel@wsj.com and Anne Steele at Anne.Steele@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

11-11-20 1221ET