Going Global 2026 just added 16 speakers from Planetary Group, Believe, and Warner Music to its Auckland summit. If you sell music-tech, distribution, or artist services, that speaker list is a prospect list. These are the people who sign distribution deals and scout new talent.
The conference runs in Auckland. The speaker roster is public. The companies are named. That's enough to build a targeted outbound sequence before the event sells out or your competitors notice.
Why this speaker list matters more than the conference agenda
Most conference content is theatre. Panels get recorded, posted to YouTube, and forgotten. The value isn't in what gets said on stage. It's in who's in the room and what they're authorised to sign.
Planetary Group, Believe, and Warner Music aren't sending junior staff to Auckland for the weather. They're sending people with mandates. Distribution leads. A&R scouts. Partnership managers. The kind of roles where a well-timed email before the event gets you a coffee meeting, and a coffee meeting gets you a conversation about terms.
What makes this particular list worth working is the structural gap it exposes. Major-label and distributor representation in a secondary market like New Zealand is thin by design — regional teams are small, travel budgets are scrutinised, and the people who do attend are usually the same names year after year. That scarcity cuts both ways. It means fewer doors, but it also means the people who show up carry disproportionate decision weight. A distribution lead covering ANZ isn't just attending; they're the person your pitch has to survive before it reaches anyone in Sydney or London.
There's a process layer here too. Speaker commitments are made months out, which means calendars are locked and travel is booked before the public agenda drops. By the time the schedule is live, the useful window for pre-event outreach is already narrowing. The speakers are confirmed; the question is whether you've confirmed them as contacts.
We've written before about extracting attendee lists from Australian conferences. The same logic applies here. Speaker lists are easier to work than attendee lists because the names are already public. You're not guessing who's coming. You're targeting the people who've already committed to being there.
The three companies and what they're actually looking for
Planetary Group operates in artist services and distribution. They work with independent artists and labels who need infrastructure without signing away rights. If you're building tools for independent musicians or small labels, they're a potential channel partner.
Believe is one of the largest independent music companies globally. They acquire and distribute. They're actively looking at catalogues, labels, and technology that helps them serve artists better. If you've built something that solves a problem their portfolio companies have, that's a conversation worth having.
Warner Music is a major. They don't move fast, but when they do, the deals are significant. They're at Going Global because they're scouting. Whether that's talent, technology, or partnerships depends on who you talk to. The speaker list tells you who to talk to.
Here's what we'd do with this list:
- Pull the 16 speaker names and titles from the Going Global site
- Match each name to their LinkedIn and company email pattern
- Segment by function: A&R, distribution, partnerships, technology
- Write a one-paragraph email that references their specific remit, not the conference
- Send 10-14 days before the event, follow up 3 days before
The email shouldn't mention Going Global. They know they're going. What they don't know is why they should care about you. Lead with the problem you solve for their portfolio or their pipeline, not with the fact that you'll both be in Auckland.
What doesn't work when targeting conference speakers
We've tested this. The emails that get replies are specific. The ones that get ignored are generic.
"I saw you're speaking at Going Global and would love to connect" gets deleted. It's the cold email equivalent of a LinkedIn connection request with no note. It signals you're working a list, not solving a problem. The speaker knows they were added to a spreadsheet the moment the agenda went live, and the email confirms it.
What works is referencing something concrete about their role. If someone at Believe runs distribution for Southeast Asia, your email should mention Southeast Asia. If someone at Warner handles sync licensing, your email should mention sync licensing. The conference is the timing mechanism, not the hook.
There's a second failure mode worth naming: treating the speaker as a buyer when they're often a practitioner. A distribution lead at Believe doesn't sign off on tooling budgets the way a founder does. They influence, they refer, they sometimes pilot. If your email assumes purchasing authority they don't have, you've misread the org chart before you've written a single line. The same applies to Warner's sync team, where deal flow runs through legal and licensing committees rather than a single decision-maker.
We've written about vendor math and time savings claims before. The same scepticism applies here. Don't tell them you'll save them 20 hours a week. Tell them you solve a specific problem they have, and let them do the math.
The pattern across both mistakes is the same: you're optimising for volume when the room rewards precision. Sixteen speakers is a small enough list to research properly. That's the advantage. Use it.
How to build the sequence without burning the list
You have 16 names. That's not a volume play. It's a precision play. Every email should be written as if it's the only one you're sending that day.
Start with the people whose remit most closely matches what you sell. If you're a distribution platform, start with distribution leads. If you're a royalty-tracking tool, start with finance or operations. Don't blast all 16 on day one.
Send in batches of four or five. Personalise each one. Reference something specific about their company or their role. Keep it under 150 words. Ask for a 15-minute call, not a demo.
If you don't hear back, follow up once. Three days before the event is a good time. The subject line can reference the conference. The body should still be about them, not you.
The reason batching matters is deliverability, not etiquette. Sixteen cold emails sent from the same domain within an hour look like a campaign to every filter between you and the inbox. Spread across a week, from a warmed domain, with replies coming back at different times, the same sixteen emails look like normal business correspondence. That distinction decides whether your message reaches a human at all.
Segment by what each person actually controls. A Believe regional lead and a Warner Music operations director sit in different approval chains, even when they share a job title. Write to the constraint each one owns: catalogue ingestion, royalty reconciliation, territory reporting, playlist placement. One relevant sentence about their remit outperforms three about your product.
Track replies, not opens. Opens are noise once Apple Mail Privacy Protection pre-fetches images. A reply, a forwarded email, or a calendar accept is the only signal worth acting on. If two of your first five respond, adjust the next batch toward whatever they engaged with. If none do, the problem is the list, not the copy.
We've written about building prospect playbooks for conferences before. The structure is the same. The names change. The discipline doesn't.
What we'd do next
Pull the speaker list today. Build the sequence this week. Send the first batch 10 days before the event. If you're using MiraReach, the inbox scoring and meeting brief features are built for exactly this kind of targeted outreach. You can see how MiraReach handles this and decide if it fits your workflow.
The sequencing matters more than the volume. A 16-speaker addition to a summit like Going Global isn't just a bigger list — it's a signal about which parts of the industry are consolidating around the event. Planetary Group, Believe, and Warner Music each sit at a different point in the distribution and rights chain, so the speakers they send will likely reflect different priorities: catalog strategy, artist services, regional licensing. That distinction should shape how you segment your outreach. A single generic message to all 16 will read as exactly what it is.
Work the list in tiers instead:
- Tier one — speakers whose remit overlaps directly with what you sell. Personalize the first line around their panel topic, not their title.
- Tier two — speakers from the same companies but adjacent functions. Reference the tier-one contact only if you've already had a reply.
- Tier three — everyone else. Lower effort, lower expectation, still worth the send.
Timing is the other lever. Ten days out is early enough that calendars haven't locked, but late enough that the event is concrete in their mind. A follow-up three days before the summit catches the people who ignored the first email and are now actively planning their week.
Conferences are expensive. Flights to Auckland aren't cheap. But the speaker list is free. Use it before someone else does.
— Mira