Building a Platform that Pays Millions to Music Creators | HOMIE Ep. 4 w/ Trevor Hinesley

Welcome to the podcast, man. Thanks for having me on. Trevor Hinesley. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for helping our music industry evolve. So this is the homie podcast. So now you're officially a homie. Love it. So appreciate that. Yeah, of course. So Trevor Hinesley, you are the. CTO of Soundstripe and also the founder of FilePass correct? Yep. And you started out as a rock guitarist and audio engineer and got into tech along the way, or I guess you've been into tech for quite a while. Sure. And you started leaning more in that direction and now as the CTO of Soundstripe and co founder also you guys are one of the fastest growing companies in Tennessee, one of the fastest growing privately held companies in the U. S. You've now issued millions of sync licenses and helped creators make [00:01:00] millions of dollars from their music. It's amazing, man. So that's why I brought you on. You are definitely doing the thing and helping push the industry forward. So on behalf of all the creators and The people that, benefit from forward thinking people like yourself I appreciate that. Thank you, man. Yeah, it has certainly been a journey and what you're talking about, though. Like the most rewarding part, honestly, is just getting to see people's lives actually impacted by it. Is super cool, but yeah, it's been a bunch of twists and turns and I think I've had a bit of an interesting experience having been you know directly Really on both sides of the industry now. As an artist, you know I was on a Subsidiary of a major label so I got to experience all of what that means I didn't even realize that. Yeah. Yeah, you were doing the artist thing first. Yes. Yep. Okay. And, funny enough, the whole time I toured, I worked in software, like that was what was paying the bills, because music certainly wasn't at the time. It was very very tough, to make a living. But I did. I got to [00:02:00] experience it from both sides, because I went from that to owning a business where we buy copyrights. So we wind up owning it, very similar to a label and a publisher. On paper, technically we are a music label and a publisher. It's been interesting. We've learned a lot, and I've gotten to see it from both sides of the table. But also having been an artist, it's let me bring into it maybe some of my scars from the artist side. And trying to do it in a way that is a win while still creating a viable business and you know trying to Make things happen. So yeah, it's been a really fun interesting and Hard at times but really rewarding experience for sure. That's amazing So for the listeners who may not be familiar with soundstripe Let's give them the sort of elevator pitch of what you guys do. Sure and why it's different than, the companies that, that went before you. Yes. Love this question because frankly at the time we were really just trying to scratch our own itch. From the business side, we didn't put a ton of thought out of the gate [00:03:00] into what's going to be our moat or what is our differentiator and all these things. But we also knew that Nothing existed at the time like what we wanted to create, which was, we were having a hard time making a living in music, both of my co founders and I they were, like all three of us came from the industry, we were touring and session musicians, we all had pain points and battle scars and stuff from that and all had a tough time making a living. My business partners actually one of them was a rock guitar player, he was in that scene with me as well, which, we never crossed paths until we met about what is now Soundstripe, funny enough, but he was a rock guitar player. The other one his name is Travis. It was Micah and Travis are my two co founders and me and Micah always joke that Travis is the real musician of us three because he played fiddle for George Strait, Willie Nelson and so we were just jumping off of half stacks and trying to act like we were rock stars. bUt no they both had the same experience. Micah toured in the rock world for [00:04:00] 10 years. He was in a bus, he did the thing at the level that on the outside is, looks very glamorous, and sure, in some ways it is like, each stage of a touring career has its own pros and cons, but at the same time if I remember the story Micah wound up essentially driving tour buses instead he stopped playing guitar, matter of fact, he just moved seats, so That he wound up driving the band's bus that he was in and just stopped playing guitar because the day rate for the bus driver was more than the guitar. Dang. Yeah, that's the reality of it. That's such a, yeah. And I remember the same thing. We would pay our drivers like twice what we were making individually, because that was the only way you could get someone to Supply and demand. Absolutely, man. It's a, it's a free market like that. Yeah, They were doing the same thing Travis, same situation. He eventually wound up driving buses. So they were both gone on the weekend all the time driving buses. But that was their flavor of it. And then mine was, I had to build software to pay the bills because we, actual [00:05:00] anecdotal, but a real story. The biggest show I've ever played in my life was at the Georgia Dome, which. I don't think it's there anymore in Atlanta, but It was like 38, 000 people, and I made 50. That was my paycheck. Wow. Yeah uh, sorry, I had a 20, 25 per diem or something. 75 for the day, but meanwhile, software pays that an hour. It's a totally different ballgame. And that was the only way I was able to do what I loved. And again, from the outside in, it would have looked like we were at a different financial level than that. But all the money was going into us trying to build the brand of the band. Like we were reinvesting it and also we were signed. We didn't have a, in my opinion, a big bad label story by any means, but we were on a 360 deal and that's tough to recoup, so they had spent a bunch of money on us. We had to pay it back. It was all this, you know. Uh, so anyway back to your question about what. What is Soundstripe? Basically, we we sell music to everybody from fledgling creators, like hobbyist YouTubers, all the way up to Fortune [00:06:00] 500s, we have large industry names you would know, brands that we serve as well, so we have a catalog of music that we buy, and we own the sound recording and the composition, so we own 100 percent of the rights on it, but we do it where we buy the copyrights up front, and then We essentially split the back end royalties on performance, so they get the songwriter's share, they wrote the song, right? So even though we own and control the rights, that lets us sync it out at high volume to places but they still get a check in the mailbox if it does well and it gets put on an ad or whatever on broadcast. When we started though, and the reason we were trying to scratch our own itch, as I said, is that as a creator, a YouTuber, a podcaster, whatever. This was late 2015. YouTube was like, TikTok wasn't really on the scene yet. I think it was still it wasn't even TikTok yet. Like ByteDance hadn't acquired them and all that stuff. But YouTube was huge. And Everyone was experiencing the pain points as a creator of content ID you'd upload something and then it would flag it and pull it [00:07:00] down Like everybody was going through that But there was no there was honestly not a great option for high output creators, right? If you're doing a video a month, you could go buy a stock music track for a hundred bucks or whatever But if you're doing like daily content Or like you're doing live streams for eight hours, you'd never be able to afford all the music you would need for something like that because each song is a sync. So we were like, Hey, what if we just put together essentially an all you can eat Netflix style subscription for high output creators? And also have the quality be really good because we felt like even the kind of one time purchase stock industry, companies like Musicbed had done a great job of flipping the image of like stock or quote unquote royalty free music. It's not actually royalty free. That's what people call it. Yeah. But performance royalties are federally regulated. So if it goes on broadcast, someone's getting paid, anyway, that's no one, they don't have to pay the royalty up front, which is why it's called that. So anyway, stock music though they had done a [00:08:00] great job of changing the image of that. But there was like, even companies that were doing it really well were expensive. They weren't set up on a subscription basis to where, basically you were still restricted in how you create content and how much of it you did. So we were, bedroom producers. We had a bunch of friends that were everything from bedroom producers to Grammy winners. But they were all freelancers, spending a lot of time getting their work. And we were like, Hey, what if you could make a supplemental income that was a little more consistent or stable, or at least let you do what you love to do instead of waiting tables. Like many of our friends, when they're home, that's what they're doing, and so that's what we did. We started Soundstripe originally we just built it from the ground up and before we could afford to buy copyrights, we were just like sharing in the revenue that the company was making. Then when we got to the point where we're like, okay, we can actually buy copyrights, which would give us the ability to get the music we need, right? We'd be able to actually go out and commission stuff that we knew our customers wanted and that had the exact format we needed it in and it was the [00:09:00] exact time we need, duration or whatever. So that's what we did. We started as like a subscription, all you can eat royalty free company. And then eventually, like I said, on paper kind of became a record label and a publishing entity. Yeah, probably. If you're looking at the number of titles in the catalog, probably a pretty big record label, technically, right? Yes. Yeah, we even we we now have a much more substantial catalog than we did early on. We were buying a lot of music for the first couple years we started acquiring catalogs. But now, we're around 10, 000 songs. And I think we're still bringing in a good bit of music weekly, but it's not to the volume it was early, because we were, like, we didn't have any. We needed to fill it out, right? So yeah, even to this day, we're acquiring more music every month than most labels do in a year, for sure. Yeah. Yeah, that's crazy. Yeah. So like walk me through the process of, going and acquiring [00:10:00] these songs. So at first this stuff was basically like hard drive hits that were sitting in all your buddies. Yep. And you're like, Hey, let's get them all out. Let's do something. That's exactly right. So I, You probably didn't have to pay a lot for them up front, right? Or I guess at first you weren't paying up. That's right. Yeah. Right there. You were doing rev share and then you got to where you were able to offer some up front. And I'm curious about a couple of things, how did you price that stuff out because it's a little different, than your traditional label kind of model. And then at what point did you guys move to the model of, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but y'all have salaried employees now that are just cranking out stuff all day. Just walk me through the transition of valuing, and then reevaluating your cost structure and all of that to move into that model, [00:11:00] because I think that's really cool. I can't remember if it was you or one of the other co founders that. That first told me that a lot of y'all's people were on salary and I was like wow, that's really good So they can buy a house, right? Yeah, that's pretty neat. Yeah and that has happened. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's it's a great question. So we do and look even throughout we're at a stage now where We have gone through Like basically we have Staffed what we call senior composers so they're essentially like people who are really good at multiple genres and can tackle whatever we need, right? So they're on staff and they do things, everything from if we need a genre or a type of music that we don't have anyone on the roster at the moment that does it. They can figure it out and they've had a track record of doing that, or they can bring in the right people to do it and executive produce it and, or they can, and these Some of our staff composers like we have at least one who's like platinum selling so like we these are people who [00:12:00] Proven careers and we have staffed mix engineers as well. So like our uh, um grammy winning So it's just like a lot of talent on the even on the staff side But because of that we built out It's like a two part answer to the question is, yes, we have staffed people, but we also work on a contract basis with artists all over the world. And it's like a, we have a bit of like a rotation we do, right? Because the catalog, frankly, doesn't need 500 songs from the same artist because no matter how many different genres you do it's always going to have your imprint on it, right? Everyone has their flair of whatever. You can tell, yeah. And same even with maybe it's like a vocalist, right? Someone's voice is always going to sound like their voice. So we have to balance that because our customers, frankly, like we'll start to say something if they're like, I'm hearing the same voice on all these songs. So it's real things we have to figure out. And we try to navigate that with our artists transparently, so we do Yeah, we have a contract basis that we work with some artists, [00:13:00] and sometimes we have a really particular need, and we want to commission an album from them, real simple, so we just, we work out like a per track fee, and then we negotiate that back and forth, figure it out, and then they go out and do their thing, right? So you just ask them specifically to, you give them very specific sort of brief on what exactly you want from them. And this is carved out from whatever else they have going on as an artist. Yes, so we have worked with artists that have existing record deals. One artist in particular that I'm thinking of had a record deal in Europe, and we just had their label do a carve out for the stuff they were doing with us, as long as it was under a different moniker. Same talent, just different name, right? Yeah. And it's a win for the artist. Absolutely. Absolutely. Cause any, honestly, they have full autonomy over if they're writing a song and they're like, this is my next hit. Just don't sell it to us you can do that, we're not, the difference between us and like a songwriting deal, and this was key we did not want to be in a situation where an artist [00:14:00] is in Bali with a friend of theirs and they write a song at 2am and we own it. That's like a typical songwriting or publishing deal, right? We wanted to offer some autonomy there, right? But the idea too would be, we also wanted it to be like when artists start seeing those quarterly checks come in, maybe it could be a hit, but maybe , they don't have the infrastructure to make it a hit right now, right? And. I'm a big fan of you never want to sit on your hit for three to five years. Just put it out, move on, and make the next one, right? So if they decide they want to sell it to us, maybe we could make more money on that for them via back end or something. And a lot of our artists too are like they may be in the band or background singers for huge top 40 artists, right? But when they're in the bus traveling somewhere, they could sit there and play video games or they could pump out a track and make a living, on top of their living. And that's really what we set it up to operate as. So the music acquisition side is that it was hard drive songs [00:15:00] to start with that we were just sharing the revenue in, but it also got to a point where we had a ton of data on what people are looking for, right? What they're unhappy about. They're telling us like through live chat, like you don't have enough, whatever, we have customers in 160 something countries, I think. And so the variety is it's very needed. We need a ton of diversity in our catalog. Everything from genre all the way to authenticity, so if I'm a wedding videographer in India, I'm much more inclined to use Bollywood that's made in India and is truly authentic than Just some white dude in his bedroom trying to make some, right? So we try to we try to work in both spheres, right? We we want to have authentic stuff. We want to be able to work with artists who that's their bread and butter, and so that's the thing is we try to balance this whole swath of data that we know we need based on our customers. All with there's an art to it too, it's not a perfect science and yeah, that's where we've gotten today was taking all that data, figuring out, Hey, when we were operating on a rev [00:16:00] share, there was a lot of pros and cons to doing it that way. But one of the biggest is that we're trying to run a business and we have no control over the content that's coming in and like it, we could have customers screaming at us all day for some particular type of music. But. I'll give you a real example. Take the Bollywood thing for instance. When we were early on, most of our customers were in the U. S. It's pretty spread out now. But, at the time, we were trying to expand outside of just the U. S. But we didn't have inauthentic stuff. But the issue was, when we were on RevShare, We couldn't, in good conscience, go beg, or even if we gave all the data, an artist wouldn't want to make something like that if it wasn't going to sell as well as an EDM track. Because they're operating on how well it does. Yeah. By buying music, we're able to stomach that up front, and then it's our job to go essentially squeeze the orange on that copyright. Yeah. So it takes a lot of the risk out of the way for them, and again, there's no obligation. You don't have to sell us anything you don't want to, and then you guys distribute the [00:17:00] music as well, right? Yes, we do. We have a whole admin team where, yeah, we're distributing everything to all the DSPs, so everything's up for streaming. And some of our music does really well on like mood and chill playlists and stuff. We also, have artists that their music just does well with us. But we distribute it out there. And then we also make we make revenue on, it's kinda, it's like, what we deem illicit use on YouTube, so if someone ripped the track from our site and throws it on a YouTube video, so they're not paying for a subscription, we know that. And we have a way to programmatically detect that and we'll just monetize their video on YouTube with ads, right? But for our customers, that's cool. Yeah that are paying subscribers. They don't get hit with that They're able to monetize their own ads and make money. That's what they're paying us for. Yeah so we have a bunch of mechanisms. I look at it like this We and we do this in a way to where we are taking the risk up front by buying copyrights from artists, right? But we're also [00:18:00] able to essentially be a Where as an artist, you would not be able to make enough music and handle all this admin and all this programmatic claiming and stuff that I'm talking about. You wouldn't be able to do all the infrastructure for that. So that's what we do is you are trading the risk of you, thinking it's your next hit and wanting to own all the rights on it and whatever. And we're very upfront about that. If you want to do that, don't sell it to us. Like clearly, but if you want to, just like with any job, if you want to trade a risk for stability, that's the model we've set up. And some people have their cake and eat it too. Some have their own project, but create a moniker with us, right? Or they'll. Sometimes we work with artists because we want to leverage their brand, right? We're like, hey, you have a name in this. So the music we buy from you, we'd like it to be under your name. And then it's up to them if they're cool with that or whatever, and y'all probably pay a little premium for something like that, usually? Yeah, it's, I look at it like this, right? It is and any of our staff composers would say this too. It, a [00:19:00] if we were buying a track from Bob Dylan, we probably wouldn't pay the same as we would a bedroom producer, right? It's not to say the bedroom producer isn't amazing. Bob Dylan's been building his brand for 40 years, right? The power of the brand. Absolutely. Yep, absolutely. Yep. Yeah, that's amazing. dO you have any Times that creators have come back and wanted their music back off of your library? No, so the way we do it is, we are buying it up front, right? So there is, there are people we've worked with in the past that maybe they're like, Hey something comes up where they're like send. Like a contact to us of hey, they want to use this song cause what we will do too is and this is part of what we do for our larger brands, is that we will work out custom agreements that cover them we'll put indemnity on it to where we're essentially saying if you, Put this song on a commercial and for whatever reason there's a copyright issue, [00:20:00] we'll cover you, right? That's part of what we offer. It's like peace of mind and like legal teams that To the brand. Yes, exactly. Like their legal teams are not going to use copyrighted material without some protection, right? So we offer that. And to your original question, what we will do as well is if there's a unique situation where one of our artists sees an opportunity or something, like maybe one of their contacts wants to use, they see it's in the artist's catalog and they hit them up and they're like, Hey, can we use this? Whether they're working with us or not anymore we like, that's something we can certainly have a conversation with them about and figure out something that makes sense. Cause again, like if they win, we win, especially copyrights we own. So it's always something we're willing to try to figure out something on. Yeah. I understand they get paid their performance royalties according to the use, but other than that, is there a bonus structure if one track that they've submitted just goes, just, yeah, goes bonkers and everybody's using it? Any kind of thing that kicks back to them? Yeah, the, Honestly, the biggest thing [00:21:00] is so when we buy it, our whole thing is that we are going to try to earn money on The performance side is where a lot of that would happen, right? Because we have, we're doing sync licensing. However, with the DSPs and Spotify's and stuff, that for us is honestly a way for us, talking about recoups earlier, The artist doesn't have to deal with it, but that's a way for us. To be the penny vacuum and recoup on some of the songs that don't sync as well, right? Maybe it is some obscure I don't know. Mongolian throat singing or something right and it's just it's not going to be as popular as a pop song on there or something That's a area where we can earn money back but that is that kind of goes into the whole risk in exchange for stability thing, right? So we do We want to work out What we believe is a fair price on both sides. So we go into that negotiation up front. Our agreement, I think it's still this way. I haven't looked at it in a while. And we've probably had to button some edges as we've gotten larger, but last I checked, it was one page. So like, My record [00:22:00] label deal was like a hundred and ten pages or something, right? Yeah, it's very simple and it's literally like we are buying all the rights. You can still register as a songwriter Ta da, so that's essentially what's happening. So as far as like any kickbacks beyond that we don't but the idea is just like again, if the artist wants to take a risk with the song, invest in it themselves, they're welcome to do that, but for the stuff where they either maybe they're newly working with us or they have a good track record with us and they think we could do better with it. That's where we step in. Yep. That's cool. Yeah. So along the journey of moving from the music world into entrepreneurship Because it's one thing to know how to code or, to know a little computer science or what have you, but it's a whole other thing to actually put a company together and especially a company that's doing as, as well as you guys are what are some things that, that you [00:23:00] wish you could have gone back and told yourself? At the beginning, some of that hard earned, stuff that, that maybe a listener might be able to be aware of or skip over if, yeah, if it is a great question. A few things, if you are starting. A company I would definitely talk to, like, when we were early on we didn't go through and I love their programs, I wish we had at this point, but we didn't go through something like the Entrepreneur Center, right? So we had all sorts of bumps and bruises from I think when we did our Figuring it out. Oh my gosh, yeah, absolutely. We had, Ten different types of agreements, like nothing was standardized, and I think honestly the sort of If I knew then what I know now thing, I, the biggest would, I'm glad I didn't know Everything I know now. How hard it is? Yes! That is so real. Yeah, that's the number one thing. Man. Anybody listening, just know how hard it is. And that's basically the takeaway. It really is because there's some blissful ignorance, yes. You don't, truly, like I, a real [00:24:00] example, we were bootstrapped for the first two years. So we got to pretty much over a million in revenue before we ever went out and raised money. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. One, no one would give us money early on. . And we're like, fine, we'll just prove the model and see if there's something here. And two, we also wanted to get to a stage where when we did raise capital, we didn't want to have to sell the barn. Like we wanted to still be in control of the business and the board and all that stuff. And when we finally did go out and raise capital, we had some amazing investors early on, but it was also like the process. It was our first time doing. It took a lot longer than we thought it was going to, and. Frankly, hindsight, we shouldn't have done this, but when we first started staffing musicians and professionals in that area, we had lined up about eight people that we're going to start right after we close that funding and we put their start date like 60 days after. What we thought was a conservative estimate for us closing the fundraising round well a week before they were supposed to start [00:25:00] We still hadn't finished signing the agreements And so we very humbly went to them and we're like could you start in two weeks instead? Like we literally couldn't pay for that at the time. They were very gracious about it Thankfully, they were also doing freelance stuff at the time. So yeah, it's fine well then the next two weeks went by and we still had not finished that deal and I Remember my business partner dry heaving over a toilet. I mean we were literally, that was real, he might have actually thrown up. It was like, we didn't know where the money was going to come from, we had our friends, we had guaranteed positions in two weeks, it Eleventh hour it closed and we were okay, but that was a very hard lesson learned because we were all like we never want to feel like this again, so never getting out in front of our skis again and it was, little things like that, you just with the literal definition of the word, you aren't sophisticated enough at the time, like you don't know what you don't know, you don't know, like I had no idea fundraising was going to take,[00:26:00] it took two to three times as long as we thought. We're like, oh yeah, 30 to 60 days but we had to button up so much stuff from what I was talking about and clean up everything. Yeah. It took three to four months, yeah, yeah. And was a lot of the, or were a lot of the projections, you had to have like with the team that you're hiring, you had to have had, was it like a quota or something where it's like, Hey, when we do, because you're trying to calculate all this and it's got to go on a spreadsheet somewhere and then the investors have to look at it. Yep. So they, you had to literally think, okay, eight people, we can make X number of new tracks every week or something like that. What was that number? Do you remember? Yes, I do. We, I think we started and honestly, we like. Depending on the genre, some people had like different quotas than others, right? Because if you're doing like authentic jazz, Yeah. You gotta lay down real snares. You know what I'm saying? Might have to [00:27:00] bring in some people. Yeah, exactly. Whereas like EDM, it just by nature is faster a lot of times. Huh. Unless you're doing something like future bass, which is, or like something that's really technical, right? Super weird, yeah. Yeah. So we based it on that. We also had some people who like even in genres that may be tougher, they were just naturally really fast. And so we worked it out, per person where they got comfortable with it and we were good with it. But that changed over time. Investors don't want to hear that, right? No! They're like, this is a machine. What do you mean? This one person can't make a song as fast as this other person, or that one song takes longer to make than another one. Yeah, it was, honestly, again, a lot of more art than science at the time, but we did. We Micah, my business partner who oversees the music side, to his credit, did an amazing job. Our financial projections for the first two years, he did them all himself, and they were within a couple percent. Accurate? Wow. Yeah. That's amazing. And that's with a lot of speculation, like we had no idea how fast it was going to [00:28:00] grow. Yeah. Yeah. But part of it was like we, that, and we were very candid with the early musicians that like, this is an experiment. We don't know. If staffing people, yeah, will work out over time and to be truthful, we don't have all those people anymore. Not because they weren't great, but because the model didn't work perfectly how we thought. Yes, absolutely. And it was, that was a and I don't at all mean this woe is me, but I, I've been in a situation where like people I love and care about, I've had to part ways with and that is seeing how that affects the other side is really brutal, like it is. It's a reality of running a company is that sometimes you have to make hard uncomfortable decisions, but Real people are affected by that too. And it's it is an unpleasant experience. No matter the reason for sure Yeah, so let's Let's take it a little bit. This might be a little bit of a tougher question. Sure. We'll see You know, but I do have to ask it because, [00:29:00] this is a, this is what's happening in the industry and y'all's mission or maybe a, just a succinct way of putting it is to keep creators creating, and now you're in a position, a very precarious position, if you ask me where. The creation of music itself is drastically changing to where now you, with generative AI, you can literally just type in whatever you want. Yeah. And so I would assume this poses an internal dilemma. A little bit in terms of, profit versus the core values thing, which is a very common thing for businesses to have to go through, which is why you go through the core values and the mission and all of that. So I'm just wondering, how are you guys thinking about this right now and how are you going to keep it creator focused as. This [00:30:00] drastic shift happens, is it we're going to teach our creators to create three times faster than they are right now, or is it, what are you guys thinking? Yeah, it's a great question. And it is one we talk about literally all the time. I imagine. But it's also, I think a lot of times too, because currently we're in the AI bubble, right? There's a lot of it's sure all that's being talked about, but there's This is my like, pitchfork to come out when I say this, but I was never hype on web three, frankly, like I thought I put money into aetherium, but I also was like, certainly wasn't bet in the barn and I right ready to go put all your stuff on chain. Exactly. No, we never did that because the truth is everyone was thinking about it. It was almost like it was a solution in search of a problem where it is fantastic for some particular use cases, but our customers don't give a damn like that if we Web3 did NFTs or whatever like our customers just don't care. So it [00:31:00] would be more for the I'm in a hurry I need this. Yeah, like I don't you know But it would be more for the artist and we never saw a way where that value would be there for the artist for Us to even spend time on that. However with AI Even though we're in the current bubble typically how this works is new technology comes out It becomes all anyone talks about Tons of investment dollars get poured into it. It's the bubble. The bubble pops, and then it sweeps back into mainstream. A few people left. A few people left, right? But that happened even with the internet. You had the dot com bubble burst, right? And then the internet is just a way of life after that, right? I think we're currently in the AI bubble. But the cool thing about AI that is different than what was arguably a web three bubble a couple years ago is that the value is already here for everyone. Yeah, it's very useful. It is very useful. So many and there's so many potential applications for it. Very similar to how the internet was, the thing we talk about a lot is where is the line between not even, because the conversation has already happened ad [00:32:00] nauseum around who should get paid when an AI makes something, right? Because that's a big one. But I think, honestly, the more interesting question is like, What happens to human created art when AI can make something because do you have tools like Which I'm a subscriber of mid journey. You're familiar with mid journey. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah Love Mid Journey. No shame to them. Terrible user experience, right? Via Discord? Yeah, cuz I love Discord, but I'm still like Where did my How do I find my thing? I literally have set there for Probably an hour and a half scrolling back through trying to find this one that didn't say even I'm like one thing they don't even tell you is that you can go to mid journey. com sign in and all your creations are there I'm like, why is this not front and center? Really? Yes, so you don't have to do that anymore They literally don't talk about letting me know. You're welcome case in point, right? So anyway that actually In my opinion is tangential to [00:33:00] what like the problem we have is that at the moment there is a lot of AI is the solution, let's find a bunch of problems, right? What can generative music do if you look at First off, it's not there yet, quote unquote. Mid journey is there. You can make pretty much whatever you want with it, right? However, user experience is tough. You gotta iterate a lot sometimes when you're trying to get something really specific. And you can't be like, Hey, recreate this, but change the three pixels here that are red that, there's only so much control. So the with music, I think the real question is like, what problems are we trying to solve? Because even if generative music can look at Facebook's audio craft, I don't know if you've seen this, but it's, they're like open source music generator AI model. Stability, the same company that does Stable Diffusion. They just put out Stable Audio, I think is what it's called. And it's very similar to Facebook's AudioCraft, but it can make stuff, Facebook's is [00:34:00] restricted to 30 seconds, so you can't do full songs with it. Stable Audio can. And it's, the quality is getting better and better, right? But you still have the same issue of take our customer for example, because that's the lens I look through the stuff of, it's like the people we're serving, how do we fix their problems? Yeah. Rephrasing my question or clarifying it a little bit. I'm thinking from the perspective of you guys internally, being able to train on your data set theoretically and have unlimited amounts of music at your fingertips. Sure. Versus, like keeping your people and because I agree the end user, they're editing video or something. They're not going to stop. Probably not. They might, it might get to that point, to where it's just all really built into the, to the editing. Platforms, but in theory, y'all just as a sort of catalog owner and also a real techie [00:35:00] company, it seems like a really good opportunity to cut the creators out of the pie, man. Yeah. Look, this is, I think, given that our mission is keep creators creating, and we are artists. Yeah what's the plan? Yeah, there does have to be a sort of like a how do you put it? Like it's a flag in the sand, right or Yeah, absolutely we have to determine like what are we willing to do and what are we not? but I also the reason I was approaching it from the standpoint of the customer is because I think the bottom line is that if you take music creation, or even take the creation of art with something like Midjourney, one thing that is cool about that is that people who, I am not an artist, but I can use this thing and talk to it and use it to direct it to make art like I want, right? Could the same thing not be true for a more average person? Could we eventually have more musicians in the market because [00:36:00] people who can't play guitar can suddenly make a song easier, right? Or the guys that You know, could only crank out 10 a week or now doing 30 a week. Yes. And there will be, I think AI assisted composition is really interesting. And there's some cool stuff happening in that space right now. But to your, I want to answer that directly. It's what do we plan to do? Honestly, I think right now it's still the Wild West. I think no one there's, if you go to the production music conference or like music biz or whatever, there's so much conversation happening around this because some artists are leaning into it. Look at Grimes, right? And she's make whatever you want with my stuff. I'll just take a cut. So maybe there's an opportunity where even if we started doing generative music, maybe we split it with like the person who, now this is really tough, but the model would have to get to a point where it's able to attribute. Certain characteristics back to the The work that is being derivated from. Bringing back in the like web 3. Yeah. Maybe there is an application. Maybe. Maybe. [00:37:00] Absolutely. But that I think frankly copyright law is gonna have a hard time. Yes, and it's gonna have to figure that out because There's only like we're still at the point where like the quality is not there yet for generative music the usability is not there yet. So we're not at a point where we have to like Essentially, we keep our eye on it, and we also look at it, and I think that it is a Fundamentally, though our job is not to make music more boring, right? And I don't think Mid Journey does that. So that's why I'm tying it into that, is because Mid Journey is interesting, but it doesn't get rid of There's still plenty of artists making money and even huge companies like that are still like selling art or images or whatever, right? That still exists because the customer doesn't necessarily care if it is derivative AI music or if it is whatever, as long as it does what they need. So maybe there's a lot of value in even [00:38:00] if it is not a unique, new song that's a derivative, maybe it's like a chopped up version of an existing song, right? Maybe it auto edits it for them in there. Again, from the customer standpoint, in my opinion, if the problem gets solved there, the other side of it, the supply side instead of I think I look at it from the same standpoint we've always, or perspective, we've always looked at this from the beginning, is that if the customer wins, we all win. How do we marry those two things? But the priority, in my opinion, has to be the customer. We even, all the artists we've worked with, like from the get go, even when we were early on, we always said that. We are going to build this product. For customers not for artists like the artists are supplying the product, right? But like for instance if i'm a farm, I need to know what people are buying so that I can produce it, and that's the same standpoint So that's one of those things where when we get to the point where we're like, hey, we can actually use this now How do we figure that out? it Is [00:39:00] I think copyright law will have a play in it. I also think that figuring out what if we're generating stuff based on our existing music, right? That's maybe the entanglement with copyright law there, but those are things TBD, but I also think that I don't Until it gets to a point where it is better than what we're doing today, I don't know that we'll be using that stuff, right? It could be many years. Music, and this gets to the technical side, but music is, frankly, more difficult to solve on the AI generative side than something like static images. It's just more complex, the nature of it. I think We, it is one of those where we have regular discussions about it. We keep our eye on it and ultimately we're going to do what serves the customer, but to tie this back, I don't like generative music itself. It doesn't have intrinsic value. The value for the customer is does this fit my [00:40:00] project? So whether that is the music we have today, whether it's derivatives generated by AI, and then we figure out how that works on the back end on the royalty side, or if that is purely doing something out of the box maybe stuff that's literally just like ambient sounds is generative, right? Because that's there. You can pretty much do that today. But my answer is that I don't know. I think that it is it's an interesting conversation, but for me, I always look at it through the lens of what does the customer need? Because that always, look at the history of everything, that ultimately winds up dictating where markets go. That's going to determine how we Like our, one of our core values is date the model, marry the mission, and that's on both sides, the customer and the artist side. So when we get to the point where we have to wrestle with that Hey, this stuff is, take in the future where we can spit out something that sounds exactly like one of our songs or it's just as good or whatever, we'll have to figure that out. But [00:41:00] it's also there's not enough there yet to figure out what that would look like. Yeah. Yeah. And you wonder, just you use the sort of food analogy, over time as things became more mass produced, you ended up getting this whole wave of people that actually did want to look into where their food was coming from and know that the cows were treated right and the chickens were treated right. And it has a premium on it. Yeah, and so there might actually be a differentiator there that you lean into over time as, you get a whole lot of vanilla what's happening, I think with with, language models right now is where they can just crank out like. Especially for the average person who doesn't know how to fine tune or prompt them correctly, it all reads the same, it all, it's very vanilla, generic and it makes good copy or human copy, even [00:42:00] not even, it doesn't have to be good. It's just like human wrote that. It was written by a person. Yeah, for sure. And we're all, it's like now our human brains are starting to be, aware of that a lot more without really thinking about it. It's just part of our perception. We're like, Oh, that's probably not real. Oh, that's probably by a human. so I wonder if, if it does come to that point if it makes, if that's something that ends up coming up down the road for you guys okay we're going to. Start doing story, it's like with the amount of data that you guys probably have, I'm sure, some well timed emails to some of your users about, Hey, did you know you've downloaded 10 tracks by this one artist? Here's something about that artist, that's a person. They live in Nashville, they, whatever and I wonder, I would just wonder what kind of extension there could be if you guys started, going that cut in the opposite direction. Sure. Yes. I So there is a [00:43:00] big piece of that where one thing we have hedged on, like an answer we do have today is that we are a premium product, right? So even though we have options for people that are fledgling YouTubers and stuff we are not the cheapest. Product on the market because there are other subscription offerings now. There's other whatever And we believe just like I was giving an example of Bob Dylan right having his own brand We believe in the brand and the power of an artist brand and stuff and the value in that So absolutely even my point in saying we haven't figured out yet there's not enough there yet to figure it out, but we haven't landed exactly on like Here's ABC, what we're thinking with AI. We're certainly trying things. We have an AI search now that you can talk to it like ChatGPT, and it services music in our catalog, and it works really well. You can say, I'm editing a wedding video, and I'm, I have a scene that's a drone flying over a field. Help me. And it'll send uplifting, soaring type music comes up, and you guys started getting into stock footage now, too, right? Yes. Or, has it been a [00:44:00] while since y'all have been doing that? Yeah, we, I think it was but yes, we have stock footage, sound effects, and music and all those we are a music company, but that was like, our thought was, and we were hearing this from our customers is if I go to Starbucks, I'm not upset that they have sandwiches if I'm hungry, right? Yeah. So the idea was these are add ons for our customers if they need them, cause they're trusting us with music. Opportunity. Exactly. That it's probably, you can get into their workflow. And exactly, just provide value So that's really cool especially because You can deliver the two at once right or you're like and here's what we think like a wine pairing or so Yeah, here's the sound effects and here's what we think exactly would go along with that. Yes. Yeah so the you know on that note, I think if One particularly interesting thing that will wind up happening when generative music becomes a thing, to whatever degree the quality is and all that stuff we will see the same thing we've got all these [00:45:00] memes with mid journey type images right now, we also like I do. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, you're great. It's awesome. And then we've also got sometimes chat GPT just doesn't follow your instructions. There's all these things. Hallucinate. Yeah. But I think that where generative music, even if it becomes really good at a particular thing like again, ambient type stuff or whatever someone isn't looking for like premium. Ambient sounds, you know what I'm saying? But someone might actually be looking for like authentic Motown and that's where we step in, right? Like we are and we hear this again from our customers a lot of the Bollywood example I gave right like they want to use authentic stuff sometimes they want to use music that is really particular to a culture and they want it done in a way that Like, is respectful to that culture because it was maybe it was, I don't know, if it's like a particular type of tribal music, it was recorded during a ritual or whatever, right? It can go as, as intense as someone wants. It's not people pretending to [00:46:00] be, like, natives or something like that. Yeah and there's My, my point is that like even if some areas wind up getting usurped by AI or whatever, again, Midjourney has usurped some level of stock image needs, right? Sure. There will always be the need for human created content. If there's not, I don't think that's a world any of us want to live in, you know what I'm saying? If there's just no human element, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. My, my viewpoint is that we're stepping into the paradigm of the super creator where it's really, it's going to separate, it's really going to actually expand human creativity in a beautiful way. And, the argument whenever photography was invented was that, painters weren't going to have any, nobody needs painters anymore. And so they started doing impressionism and, cubism and all these different disciplines that, weren't, probably wouldn't have been thought [00:47:00] of, if that, if technology hadn't have come along. I believe personally that it's the. The people that really learn to leverage it and are highly creative and especially the ones that are techie because that's the nature of the beast. A lot of these tools, when you first start using them, are gonna probably throw you off a little bit if you're not a tech oriented person. Sure. And so you're gonna have to wait for that, long tail of ironing out all the kinks and where MidJourney no longer works on Discord because who knows how to use that app or whatever. And so it's like in the meantime, I believe we're going to have these like people that embrace it and that are highly creative and highly artistic, but they're not really, they don't have any problem with Okay, if this thing can do what I want it to do way faster than I could have done it myself. I'm just going to use that, but I'm going to add value to it in [00:48:00] some way to where it's one component of my creation instead of, Oh, that's good enough. Do whatever I want with that. It's going to be like, wow. Okay. Now I have to redefine what it means to be an artist. I have to redefine what it means to be a creator because these tools are a lot easier to use and because I can do X, Y, Z, now how do I want to express myself? Absolutely. Yeah. You've even got the photography example is an interesting one and you've also got stuff like when Spotify, right? That's forever the long running discussion of, do they pay enough and all that kind of thing. But you also have new business models from that, mood music. There are people making a living from that. That used to, just would have been on like one compilation CD. At some earth store, yeah, it's so crazy how well instrumental music does. Totally. On Spotify. It's like the Yeah, and it makes money every time. The renaissance of instrumental music right now. It totally is! So I also think like [00:49:00] to your point, I was talking to a friend of mine that runs a podcast called modern CTO and it's a tech focused podcast. And on the show, we were talking about this particular thing of what is going to happen when generative music is as easy to as clicking a button and you get something what you want. And his perspective, which I agree with is that. Take the photography example or the mood music thing or whatever. The people that come out on top in situations like that, like it, and this is not the not everyone, of course, but it's like bar none, the people that typically wind up excelling are the ones that have discipline to learn and use and adapt. And so taking the same thing with the. It is fine to have a a stance or something on Take a Spotify royalty, right? That we need to get paid more and fight for that and stuff. But at the same time that, there is only Look at any technological advancement in the history of mankind. Once the genie is out of the bottle, it's not going back in.[00:50:00] My Call to action for artists would be like learn to leverage it and own it because the artists that will win in the new world Are going to use that kind of stuff whether it's an AI mixing plug in there's those things have been around for the last few years, right? whether it is using AI for melody or composition assistance or like lyric assistance like Have ChatGPT do the first pass of lyrics, and then you go back in and make it your voice, right? Why not? Why spend eight hours, if you want to, sure, but, And at this point, it like, again, back to the nerdy techie ones. And this is where it gets tricky. So forgive me all you copyright lawyers out there, but you literally, you can train a model on all of Bob Dylan's lyrics and be like, and the style, Bob Dylan, write this song. And it would probably be pretty good. It surprises me how well the large language models [00:51:00] do analogies and poetic metaphors and things like that, that are actually gobble up a lot of brain power for humans where maybe we see a big creative vision. Or hear the song that we want, but then getting down and going, where's that one turn of phrase that I just like, I want it to hinge, and if you give it clear enough instructions, it'll give you 20 to choose from. A hundred percent. And you go. Wow, that one's actually really good. Absolutely. And sometimes the answers that it gives you really surprise you if you know how to do it. That, I had a friend, or the same guy actually that runs that podcast I was talking about. He just released a book called Patriots and Traitors on Amazon and it's basically like a fictional war story essentially and He that's what he did is he wrote the book at any time. He got writer's block He just went and dumped his thoughts into chat GPT and it would start him right back up and that's what I'm saying so now [00:52:00] You know, it's I understand that the pushback from musicians, they're going, okay, now we're all expected to constantly be on TikTok where we got to be content creators. Okay. That's not actually as big of a problem as it was before. If you want to like. Make your dent in the world and be a true artist. Yeah. Go write a book of poetry. Now go, start a podcast or go, whatever it is that, that is an extension, an interest of yours, but may not have been something that you thought was like your creative outlet. Now you can do all the things and you can really. seNd your message out into the world in any number of ways that you want to totally, and I think it's very empowering At least for me personally, and I hope you know through this podcast That's one of the reasons why I started it was to just start having these conversations with [00:53:00] smart people like yourselves and hopefully Trickle that down to a lot of the creator community because a lot of our audience is on that side of things Yeah I know a lot of industry people will be listening to, but I would say the majority of our audience is going to be creative people and, they're, they're waking up, picking up the guitar and strumming. And it's like this, it gets so easy to stay in your little routine in your box and not go, okay, cool. How am I gonna actually. 3x my output or 5x my output, or how am I gonna, take these little new things that are available to me and put them together in a unique way, in a different way, and, use them as ingredients in my art instead of just doing things the same way. And I understand, we're all creatures of habit, but I feel like right now it's very necessary for people to [00:54:00] break out of the box and yes and there will be that other direction where, you'll find, probably that the vinyl will continue to rise and people will continue to want to try to find some. Like real tubes and things like that to use in their audio. Because again your distinctions between those sounds will just grow as you're hearing all of this it's Oh, wow, that might be AI generated, but I love it. It's actually really funky or whatever. And but at the same time, I do think it's going to be tricky to. Create some of the nostalgia and the, those sort of the warmth we can have all kinds of weird music y terms like that. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. So we'll see. We'll see. I think that's another so if it's if you're one of the people that's I just reject [00:55:00] Okay, go hard in the other direction, right? Yeah, absolutely super hard make cassette tapes make you know, do vinyl Yeah, be that person because there will be that will attract people. I think yes for a while as well So yeah that it's honestly it's really important In my opinion to focus on what are the things, because the things that make someone unique today may not be the things that you need to make you unique in, tomorrow's world, right? That being said, you don't have to lose who you are in that, it's not that you, just to your point, it's not that you have to get on TikTok and do something that's totally out of character for you just to, right? But it can be that, like what are the things that I still, I love the whole like, instead of trying to sell out stadiums, just get a thousand superfans and you can build a career. Yeah. That's still real, right? So find those. I think it's becoming more and more real. I [00:56:00] agree. And find those a thousand people who they want to watch you make your own instruments that you play on your, or whatever, right? Yeah. That, that is going to exist. And at the same time, Maybe you can make some really cool AI stuff and there's gonna be people on both sides on the consumer side that like either right like when the AI generated I think it was like a Beatles tune that had John Lennon's voice in it, right? I haven't heard that yet. It's crazy It's got like John Lennon and then young Paul McCartney's voice in it and it sounds like a Beatles song and in the comments I was like This is evidence of where this is going because half were like this is amazing I'm literally crying because I how much I miss John Lennon's voice and this is new right and then the other half were like This doesn't even mean real people. I can't connect to this, right? And that's okay! Yeah, that's how amazing is it that someone got to experience that was crying because of it that never would have happened a year ago Yeah There is a world for both. I believe that. Yeah, cool. Yeah. Is there anything else you want to talk about before we wrap up? We didn't make it to [00:57:00] file pass Oh, yeah, if you want to mention, sure that I'm curious to know So, what, it's not probably, I do get it cause I'm a serial entrepreneur too. So I've got all these pet projects and I like just to start new stuff but you probably had plenty on your plate with SoundStripe and then you're like, Oh, I'm going to go do this other thing too. What was the, the specific pain point or problem that you were solving? Sure. And how does it do it differently than the other, solutions that are out there? Yeah. Dropbox or Yes. There's a whole kind of like origin story to it that's probably too long, but the main thing is that Dropbox and all these other tools weren't really solving the needs of like freelancers that are doing audio engineering or Just production in general, right? And that's who we're built for is like producers, mixing engineers, mastering engineers and all the features are tailored to that So it's got Dropbox added some of the things like now you [00:58:00] can do like time stamped comments on waveforms and stuff but our platform is like it's all lossless files. So if you put a wave file in there That's what's gonna get streamed When someone on the other side. Yes, it's Dropbox. Some people think they do not they compress the crap out of that When you're listening to it, you can download it and get the original right? But when you're streaming it on their app or in the browser, yeah. No, it's like it's that yeah It's like a 128 mp3 or something. Yeah. No, it's whatever you put in there if it's lossless wave or flack or whatever, that's what we play. Now, the other thing is that you can quickly send a link to the band members or whatever, and they don't have to have an account, they can pull it up on their phone, and immediately start leaving comments and leave their name and stuff. It's made to fit within the workflow specifically. Mixers. Yes. Yeah. And it works great because you can have a it goes from, Idea all the way to paid product. So at the start you can send a link before You ever start mixing it to your [00:59:00] client and they can drop session files reference files, whatever into It's like a client upload portal right cool stays in that project It's almost like a per project to Dropbox because okay stays on that project makes sense Then you can take all that stuff do what you need to do you upload the file and then in that same link all your files show up They can leave comments, all that. When you go back and forth, you don't have to worry about being a debt collector. Whereas used to, you'd be like, Hey, haven't paid me yet. It doesn't, basically what happens is whenever they're happy with the product, they just put in a card and pay for it in that link. And then the files are unlocked and they download it, right? If it's Mixed Revision 2 and they're good with it So it's a very vertical SASS. Yeah, yes, very much and that's it. We just, like, all the features are tailored to that. We've got some other things coming that are we now have some Like we have a couple of mastering engineers that are doing like three to 400 projects a month in there. Cause they have a team. So we're building some features that are tailored to helping them manage all that and stuff. But is it going to become a plugin or [01:00:00] is it a plugin? So we didn't, there are, we actually have some competitors now that do plugins like in the DAW, right? Yeah. And it's really cool, but it's one of those areas where we didn't want to focus on, basically we didn't want to spend our wheels. keeping up a plugin and maintaining it because it's a small endeavor for us. And also you can just pull up your browser next to it and drop the file. Like we have it set up to where literally you can drag a folder in or whatever and it'll just do it. Straight into your DAW. Yeah. Or sorry, no, in your if you're in your DAW and you bounce something out or you've got your, your Finder window in Mac or whatever, you can drag it into the browser and it'll, yeah, do its thing. So it's still super easy to use. It's just not There was so much effort involved to make it native that we were like, we don't want to spend our wheels up keeping this as every dog keeps changing. And yeah, we'd rather spend it on a new version. Exactly. So we haven't gone that route, but we do some other things like we have a feature where it's a lossless portfolio player that you can embed on your website and it will play the wave files [01:01:00] for clients. So if you're hiring a mastering engineer, You want to hear like what the, and especially if you're a mix engineer, who's hiring a mastering engineer, you want to hear what the thing sounds like, not the Spotify link. Yeah. So it's a player you can embed and then it has on the mastering engineer or mixing engineer side. They get analytics. How many times have your songs been heard on your site? What are people gravitating towards? All that kind of stuff. So we have like little features that are like tailored to help you build a better business essentially as a freelancer. That's sick. Very cool. Thanks. Yeah, it's a lot of fun. But yeah, it's called FilePass. We've got plans for people that are getting started all the way up to like people doing it as a living and stuff. Awesome, man. Yeah. Alright, anything else? No, just I think the one thing I would say is Take a deep breath as an artist and a creator. I get it. I am one too, but the world will keep turning and as long as you, when you get up in the morning, you are willing to try to figure it out. You will be okay. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome, man.