Today Dmitri talks with Audiomack co-founders David Ponte and Brian Zisook. They offer a behind-the-scenes look at their music streaming platform that has found its stride by catering to up-and-coming artists worldwide. They share their unique approach, which empowers artists with valuable data – helping them grow their careers organically, making it a haven for creators seeking independence and visibility.
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Episode Transcript
Machine transcribed
0:00:10 - Dmitri
Welcome back to Music Tectonics, where we go beneath the surface of music and tech. I'm your host, Dmitri Vietze. I'm also the founder and CEO of Rock Paper Scissors, the PR and marketing firm that specializes in working with music innovation companies, and there's been a lot of talk in the industry and on this podcast about the post-streaming era or where is streaming going next and so forth, and I think a lot of us just take for granted this idea that there was these rise of these streaming services and this kind of emergence of an ecosystem and that maybe it's unclear what's going to happen next or the next thing that happens might not happen in streaming. But today I've got a couple of folks from the company AudioMac with me and I'm excited because I think they have a global footprint that's getting really pretty big and significant. But a lot of people in the United States don't know as much about AudioMac as they might know about a Spotify or an Apple, and the other thing that I much about AudioMac as they might know about a Spotify or an Apple and the other thing that I like about AudioMac is that they deepen into other ways of having listening experiences, other ways in which you can connect between artists and fans what the listening experience is like and, like I said, the global footprint is something of significance. So here with me today.
David Ponte is the co-founder and CMO of AudioMac, where he oversees the brand user experience and all marketing and external communications globally. Ponte is also the creator of the iconic Trap Symphony, which I'm hoping we'll hear about in this conversation. Hey, welcome to the show, Ponte.
0:01:39 - David
Hi Dmitri, How's it going?
0:01:41 - Dmitri
It's going great and I'm happy you're here and I'm happy we also have Brian Zizek with us. He's the co-founder and EVP of Global Operations of Audio Mac, where he oversees a team of 12 across four continents and manages relationships with more than 400 record labels and distribution partners. Before Audio Mac, z, as he goes by, co-founded DJ Booth, a digital music magazine covering the music industry. Z super happy to have you here as well.
0:02:06 - Brian
Thank you so much, Dmitri. It's great to be here.
0:02:09 - Dmitri
All right, we got these two AudioMac co-founders here to tell us a bit more. But for those who've never heard of AudioMac, how do you guys like to describe it? Ponte, you want to help us with that?
0:02:21 - David
AudioMac is a music streaming and discovery platform. Most people know us by our apps. We have a listener app, we have a creator app. Our mission is to empower artists and to move music forward, who open it up every month, and we do billions and billions of streams every month. So we started in 2012 and have been chugging along ever since now. So the company has evolved and changed a lot over the years, but we're always trying to be ahead of the curve and always trying to be innovative, so there's always new things on the horizon that we like to talk about.
0:03:07 - Dmitri
Awesome and Z. I'm curious with Spotify, apple, amazon, youtube, tidal, all these streaming services. How did AudioMac carve out a space in such a crowded music streaming market?
0:03:18 - Brian
Great question, and the answer is in a variety of ways. So, first and foremost, we created a platform that super serves artists at the very beginning of their journey, and if you're an artist at the beginning of your journey, you very likely have minimal resources, both human and financial, and so everything that we've built has been targeted with allowing artists to grow their brand, to grow their business, without having to charge them for anything, and so we provide a wealth of free creator tools and features, both within the standard creator dashboard and, as Pani mentioned, our creator app, and, unlike other services that might charge a per month or annual fee for access to all of these tools, we give them all away and, very simply, we believe if the artist finds success on Audio Mac, they will champion that success socially. That's the best marketing we could, we could, ever pay for. So that's first and foremost.
Second, there's two types of streamers in the landscape. There are are active and there are passive streamers. Uh, for those listening who don't know the difference, passive is those who press play on a playlist let's say, wrap caviar on Spotify and they just let the playlist rock. They're not interested in necessarily artist discovery or exploring, whereas with AudioMac, we have a very particular type of user someone who is younger. They naturally have more free time. We have 94% of our 35 million monthly active users are multicultural and they have a very specific and more narrow subset of genres that they're really interested in. And so we hyper-curate and human-curate hip-hop, r&b, caribbean, latin, african music and we're super serving the needs of our users.
0:05:19 - Dmitri
Wow, it sounds like it's almost like you guys have a different kind of genome of where you come from than you know. I mentioned Spotify and Apple, but honestly, it sounds like you're more in the SoundCloud, YouTube kind of world where it feels very creator oriented. Is that right?
0:05:34 - David
That's exactly right. We, like I said in the opening lead here, we like to empower artists. Empower artists. So we, you know, we primarily want to provide value for them and give them free tools, give them information and data and metrics that they could use and take action on. So we do all this for free and I think it's sort of you know, there's a yin and a yang to it, right? Like, if we provide artists with value and we give them tools, then they're going to tell their fan bases about AudioMac and that they should use AudioMac and that we're actually genuinely supportive of artists and what their needs are. So it's, you know, it's it's binary to some degree, uh, but we, we it's.
It's tough being a, you know, relatively scrappy, uh, and I wouldn't I don't want to say undercapitalized, but less capitalized streaming service compared to an Apple, which is a trillion dollar company, or a Spotify, which is many, many billion dollar company. We try to use this to our advantage. We wanna be more nimble, more agile and more focused on what the artist experience is and how to enhance that. We also have curators from around the world. We're less reliable on algorithms or recommendation engines, not to say that we don't have that. I'm actually pretty proud of how our algorithms serve music up to users who might be a little more lean back or passive, as he alluded to.
But we have curators. I manage the curatorial team. We have people from all corners of the globe who are in these dance halls at three in the morning or in the forest in Germany at an electronic concert that's actually a true story Listening to jungle techno music and doing who knows what there. But they're taking this music back and they're synthesizing their experience and putting it into playlists, putting it into our trending sections. On top of this, we have different social features that allows the users and the artists to engage with each other. So I'm sure we'll get into a little bit more about what exactly those tools are.
0:08:04 - Dmitri
So I'm sure we'll get into a little bit more about what exactly those tools are. Yeah, no, I am curious about the differences between AudioMac and other services as well, those different features. Tell us more about the human curation that you were just mentioning and anything else that really differentiates, because we kind of talked a little bit about the artist and the creator experience and that the access there is kind of a key differentiator on that side of the marketplace, but there's the listener side too. So, yeah, go ahead, tell us more about what makes it different.
0:08:35 - David
So we have these curators that I have and we also empower the curators who are not employees of Audio Mack or affiliates with us officially.
We like to surface this music, whether it be in a playlist form or whether it be on our trending section or some sort of combination of, like, an auditorial curatorial experience. We, you know, our job is to put that music in front of the user at the right time, right, which is sort of the apex of what marketing is, and curation is, which is my world right. So if you're listening to an artist, we're going to try to serve you a playlist that would be most relevant to that user through our recommendation engine. But that end product is curated by a person, so that person isn't just relying on data to put that song in front of that user. They actually have listened to this and they actually have taste or a gut feel of why that belongs in that playlist or into that bundle of songs.
And typically we're going very early too. We're focused on emerging artists, not to say that we don't have the big artists in the world on the platform, but we really want to break artists and we have broken dozens and dozens of artists who are huge now and they got their first 10,000 plays on Audio Mac or we did their first content on Audio Mac or Audio Mac World, our editorial platform and we're taking a gut, we're taking data, we're combining that together and making sure that our users, who are now lean in, as he talked about, can now listen to that, enjoy it and then continue to proliferate that music in real life or digitally.
0:10:29 - Brian
Just to add to that, an analogy I always love to provide is you know, I'm married. I often have to go to the grocery store on my way home from work and my wife will text me exactly what she wants me to get, and traditionally it's a very short list. It's whatever we're having for dinner that night and some staple items like milk or eggs, and that's how most consumers venture into a grocery store. But, as anyone who's ever been out in public knows, like before you check out and you're in line, you'll see magazines, you'll see gum, you'll see candy bars. Very few people actually go into a grocery store to pick up any of those items, but they're conveniently located throughout your experience in the store so that it's easy enough to grab them.
Even though that wasn't your initial intention and I think we should give credit to our fantastic product and design team the AudioMac user experience is not overwhelming. Which several streaming services? It's just so much, and I think that ultimately leads to a paralysis. Like you're met with so many choices that, instead of opting to press play on an artist you're unfamiliar with, what you end up doing is just sticking with those artists that you are already familiar with and so, by design. What this leads to on AudioMac is more discovery Someone who enters the app user session without necessarily expecting to discover their next favorite artist. But the way that we've laid out discovery, in particular through trending, as Pani mentioned, makes it so easy that you could just grab that pack of gum, or you could grab that candy bar.
0:12:14 - David
And part of what we do is we're trying to create an immersive experience when discovering music. I think people are a little bored with listening to playlists and expecting to discover the next favorite artists. It's sort of like, you know, robotic or soulless. It's just like an assembly line of songs. Audio Mac World, which I just mentioned, is sort of like what blogs used to do during the blog era, which was like 2005 to 2013. And we sort of wanted to do our best with creating what was valuable about that experience, which is this person is recommending this song and they're writing about the song or this artist. So we have Audio Mac World and we have a content strategy team that is identifying artists that are about to break, that are very early, and talking about why you should care about this artist, or in this song or this scene and the sound, and one of our series is called you Need to Hear. It's exactly what it sounds like. This is our recommendation of an artist that you need to hear. All right, why do I need to hear?
Talking about what makes this artist different, what makes them unique, what makes them someone that I want to press play on, and providing visual aesthetics. What do they look like, what's their image, what are their lyrics like? How do they look like, what's their image? You know what are their lyrics like, what you know how do they structure their songs, just so you can get immersed in this experience.
And really it's sort of like an album liner, which we hear a lot of people you know wax nostalgic about and miss those days about. Like I'm actually holding a physical album and I'm reading this about this artist it makes you like them more, it makes it feel more human. A physical album and I'm reading this about this artist it makes you like them more. It makes it feel more human. So we did this in a digital form with you Need to Hear and other series similar to that, and you're not seeing other streaming services do stuff like this. So we're very proud of our editorial team that's able to bring these artists to life and allow users to discover them in a different way.
0:14:26 - Dmitri
Love it. Yeah, no, I grew up reading those liner notes and definitely when we switched to the streaming service era, it felt like something was missing. Sure, when a lot of the music criticism out there where you get a lot of context, get introductions, hear why somebody thinks something's interesting or what's going on with something, it gives you a whole other way of listening. It actually opens up your ears to digging even deeper into things. So that sounds super, super cool element that's hard to find in the streaming area. All right, listen. I want to ask you guys a little bit about this global impact and what you've learned from being such a global company. But we've got to take a quick break. We'll be right back.
0:15:07 - Speaker 4
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0:15:51 - Dmitri
Okay, we are back and I wanted to ask you guys, with such a global footprint of users, what have you learned about music listening, about fan engagement, about releases around the world and in different regions? Z can you help us with that?
0:16:04 - Brian
releases around the world and in different regions. Z? Can you help us with that Absolutely and fantastic question? I think, first of all, this is a huge credit to our expansive team. We have team members across the globe. These folks love what they do. They're not in it for proximity sake or clout. These are audiophiles and music heads and crate diggers and they understand both sides of the coin in their marketplaces and across their verticals. As an example, when we started to see traction in Africa, we didn't take for granted that the consumer base there was beginning to utilize our app. We opened up shop on the ground in Africa. We have an office in Lagos and we have a team who operates out of that office.
This includes content strategy, content operations, social media management, business development, and so in order to super serve the needs of both the creator space and the user base, you have to be amongst the people, you have to touch grass and so to understand what they're looking for. You can't really do that from abroad, and not to compare with other services, necessarily, but a lot of the content decisions, a lot of the algorithms that are built, a lot of the editorial that's done. It's not done on the ground in these markets. It's done from New York, from Los Angeles, from the UK. Can you do it? Sure, you can do it. Can you do it optimally, with everyone's best interests being served? Probably not.
0:17:57 - Dmitri
Yeah, and in terms of what you learn about, are there different listening habits in other parts of the world that change things for how you approach building a streaming service and building audience?
0:18:10 - David
That is a really interesting part of the job that we could see how people engage with music. I think one example is in East Africa and Tanzania and Dar es Salaam, people are just more likely to favorite songs or like songs, while in the US people are more likely to add songs to playlists. Like little things like that make a big difference. I think in West Africa the stan culture is quite evident. The fans of these artists will essentially act like they're family members of the artists and will go to bat for them and defend them all the way to the grave, and they're just so passionate.
If you go to these shows I was in Lagos and I've been to a couple of shows there it's much different than a show in New York, right? People in New York kind of too cool sometimes to like really just go out and go crazy to see their favorite artists. Not the same thing. And even in UK or in Lagos, for example, where people are screaming and yelling like it was the Beatles getting off the plane in New York in the 60s so you know, what happens in real life is mirrored on the app digitally. So it is always interesting to see the differences in how people engage with the music and engage with the artist, depending on where they are in the world.
0:19:46 - Dmitri
I suspect that gives you guys, audiomac, an opportunity to sort of rethink user experience, because those interactions are different. The expectations and just the behaviors are so different that you don't necessarily have to compete with streaming services that have made their mark entirely in the West right, that are expanding into the West with an existing type of platform user experience, whereas you guys could bring features over that worked well in, say, west Africa and bring them into the US as well.
0:20:18 - Brian
Yeah, I think that there's a tendency in the West to assume that Africa is a monolith, and obviously over the past three years and obviously over the past three years, afrobeats artists have received most of the headlines, but that is, by and large, a very small pocket of music being made primarily in Nigeria that is not necessarily representative of the various sounds that are coming out of the continent at large, and I think what we've been able to do is gain an understanding of the differences across the continent.
That has changed the way that we target, trending and editorial. We've changed the way that we employ our recommendation engine, and the reason is is because you have users who are in, let's say, Liberia and they want their experience to reflect their own unique culture and their people in their backyard. Their people in their backyard, and they feel some type of way when their app user experience is nothing but Afrobeats artists from Nigeria or artists from Ghana, which is another market that we are dominant in, and so being able to customize that experience from market to market and region to region, with the understanding of the unique user experience, I think has been paramount to our continued success and expansion throughout the continent.
0:22:01 - Dmitri
Super interesting. Let's widen out from here. How do you think streaming is evolving and where will it be in, say, say, three years?
0:22:10 - David
I think there's more seismic shifts to come um. One thing that that audio mac is doing we're we're looking at how we could become more social, how we could allow our artists to build communities on on the platform. So you know, as things get bigger and more people get into streaming and become subscribers, I think there's a need to become more niche and more localized so we allow these artists to build fan bases, build communities on the platform through different engagement methodologies like our connect function or connect message function. So on the creator app, an artist and even a tastemaker can send messages to their fan base. They can do anything. They can put anything in these messages that they want. We hope they put audio Mac links in there, but they could put links to their, their merch capsules. They can put their new YouTube video on there.
We've had an artist put a snippet of a song and ask their fans to help them name the song which they ended up doing. I mean things like this you can't really take and put on another platform. It has to be on a platform of consumption to really resonate. We also allow people to comment on the messages or on the songs or albums themselves or playlists, and this builds a conversation. It builds a dialogue where people feel like they're a part of it.
We have a feature, also called supporters, which you can essentially become part of the album or the song by buying a badge that says that you've supported this artist. And by supporting a song or album, the artist can now send messages directly to the people that supported them. So, from an artist perspective, you know that your supporters have put out some money to support you and that's valuable for an artist to understand. All right, this is like a paid fan club that I can now, you know, continue to monetize more or provide more value to. They could get first access to tours, they could get a more intimate conversation going. So we're going to continue to try and build this out and allow artists to build these communities, and that's how we've seen other platforms have success. So we're trying to take what we learn from them and build it out in our own way.
0:24:55 - Dmitri
Yeah, it seems really like a very dynamic way to experience music. That's different than a lot of the mainstream streaming platforms, where it feels like it's just super you know, like super narrow experience. It's just passive listening here and it really seems like it can build relationships. Z are there other features that AudioMac has built out to kind of address some of the things we've been talking about?
0:25:19 - Brian
Yes, pani touched on most of them. Another feature that we have is our promo assets. So when an artist sees success on Audio Mac and that success can come in all shapes and sizes it could be as simple as their newest song is added to trending or an editorial playlist. Perhaps they've reached a milestone, meaning they've eclipsed 10,000 plays or 100,000 plays. These wins, big or small, should all be amplified. Why? Because any artist needs to understand that it is their job to create community, and nothing creates community better than coming together with those that made these milestones possible and celebration. So, whether you log into the creator app or not, by simply having access to your account either you created it yourself or you claimed it after your distributor created it for you we dispatch celebratory notifications via email wherein you can actually download these promotional assets directly from the email body and then throw them up on Instagram or X or Facebook. If you have access to your creator dashboard or creator app, you can go in at any time and download all of these assets from a repository that we have created for you. So that's a huge help. You know, as an artist, you might not have the budget to hire a graphic designer to assist you with the creation of these assets. We create them automatically and they're dispatched automatically.
Pani touched on Connect, which also has been integrated into the Creator app experience, which is a fantastic tool for actually reaching all of your followers. We also have a robust Creator dashboard that provides fantastic analytics. It helps you track both song and album performance, but also demographic information. You can find out where, within the AudioMac ecosystem, your streams are coming from and that helps paint a picture in terms of what type of consumption is occurring. So, for instance, if the consumption is happening in listener library, that suggests stickiness and resonance.
That user liked your music so much they have saved it and downloaded it to their library to return for repeat listens, as opposed to consumption that is occurring on an editorial playlist or trending, which can be fleeting once that song is no longer present on trending or in a playlist playlist. We also provide analytics for engagements. We've touched on a few of them, but that includes likes, favorites, playlist ads and re-ups, which is basically our version of a repost or a retweet, so a lot to chew on. And any artists who are listening to this podcast, I implore you, if you don't have access to your account, gain access by requesting it through content ops at audiomaccom and then download our free creator app. It's available on iOS and on Android and just play around.
0:28:37 - Dmitri
Yeah, sounds like there's a lot to play around with, not only with reaching out and connecting fans, building an audience, but also finding out what's going on and really getting that feedback. That's hard to get in a fragmented era. So interesting how many different fronts you guys are working on to kind of reunite that experience the discovery experience, the context, the listening, but also the artist-fan connection and the artist really knowing who are their fans and how to connect with them. It's super cool and you're right, we do have artists listening to the podcast. We also have startups listening as well.
0:29:23 - Speaker 5
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0:29:57 - Dmitri
Okay, back to the fun stuff. Okay cool. This has been super interesting to find out the differentiators of Audio Mac more about, like, what you guys offer and sort of how you're thinking about where things are going in the streaming world. Ponte, we talk a lot about starting music tech startups here on the podcast, but you guys aren't just a small startup anymore. I mean, clearly there's a lot of traction there. What were some of the biggest moments in AudioMax history that led to your becoming a scale-up?
0:30:25 - David
Well, we've been around for about 12 years, 12 plus years. We, I think I like to compare our initial scale up to a phoenix rising out of the ashes of the blog era. So the blog era, like I said, from about, you know, mid 2000s to early 2010s the streaming services that came along sort of ended that. We, around that time, recognized that it made sense to really pivot to being primarily a streaming platform. We initially started really as a place where artists could just host their music for free. Right At the time there was just like file sharing sites that were maybe even less reliable than like a Napster or a Kazawas at the time, but we did this and provided value to these artists, allowed them to host their music in a professional manner, provided value to these artists, allowed them to host their music in a professional manner, to be able to share links with magazines, blogs, be able to send to labels. So we were all doing this part-time right and we didn't have any investment at this point. The investment was a couple thousand dollars that I put in to essentially start the LLC, but it was myself, zee and three other founders that were devoting our time. That was the real capital that was injected into the business. So around 2014 is when I quit my full-time job to do Audio Mac as well as our other founders did similar things to really focus all our time. 2014 and then into 2015, we, um, you know, wanted to think about all right, how can we market the company? Um, that's when we came up with the trap symphony series that we mentioned at the beginning of the show. Trap symphony is when we pair an orchestra with a trap artist or a rapper, fuse the two types of music together to create a truly unique version of their popular songs. So the first artist we did this with was migos, and that immediately went viral after we dropped it. It actually showed I believe it actually took Migos to at the time they were known as like a gimmicky sort of rap group, right, and I think it really showed how talented they were Takeoff, rip and Quavo how actually talented they were going toe to toe with some Juilliard trained musicians who were performing with them. So that helped catapult us to the next level. Obviously, we've done Trap Symphonies with Roddy, ricch, burner, boy Chief, keef, little Dirk, many other artists, and I've gotten hundreds of millions, maybe even close to billions, of impressions at this point. So that was a huge, huge moment.
I think around this time we started in 2017, we started to see a lot of traffic coming from West Africa, nigeria and Ghana in particular. Just huge influxes of traffic. And I think what people in Nigeria really gravitated towards was our ability to take songs offline. West Africa is certainly not known for their amazing 5G internet. Their internet, especially at that time, was still developing, so for a young person in Nigeria to be able to take their favorite artist song offline was incredible. So we started to see rapid growth. Nigeria is actually an enormous country. There's over 220 million people there and it's actually the youngest country in the world average wise. So we started to see this traffic, we leaned into it and we helped propel and make you know.
Afrobeats, music and all types of music around Africa become popular in the US, in the UK and in Canada, because we were really prioritizing this music in our curation have talented artists like Burnaboy, wizkid, david Doe champion your platform at the same time and you know, we saw these things grow. So those were some big milestones. The last one I'll mention is the creator app, which we discussed quite a bit. Most apps, most artists, apps from other streaming platforms take a different approach. Zee went into great detail about the value that it has to have the creator app on your phone. As an artist, this was huge, putting the tools and the control right in the artist's hands, and this helped propel our growth from the artist side of the platform, which then subsequently helps grow the listener side of the platform.
0:35:31 - Dmitri
Wow, I think it's so interesting how much in-person stuff was happening in your description of some of these benchmark moments for AudioMac and it really shows you know, like with both of your history and the founding of AudioMac, that you're really connected to music scenes. When you launched the company, it wasn't a tech idea, you know it was really. It was really more. You guys are the, you are the crate diggers, you are the curators. You're you're the music freaks.
0:35:59 - Brian
Already that it came from Spot on, and when people ask me what makes us unique and different beyond what they know, what is public knowledge, I often highlight that there are so many people at this company who come from a creative background. One of our co-founders and our CEO, dave Mackley. He and I connected on the Internet in 2004 via email because he was a college DJ. I was a college DJ at different colleges and we had that in common. We have our current VP of product, who is also a recording artist. Also, our outgoing CRO got his start as a producer. So you have people embedded within this company who understand the plight of the creative, because they themselves are creatives, and so the solutions that they help come up with derive from what would I want as the artist, not just as an employee of a streaming service.
0:37:25 - Dmitri
Going back to startups and kind of like how you get from here to there or from there to here, do you think other startups that have had the type of organic growth that you've had should be focused on seeking investment for even more growth, like really pouring the kerosene on the fire, or should they just continue bootstrapping? Do you have a perspective, having lived through this?
0:37:45 - Brian
Yeah, I highly recommend bootstrapping for as long as you can. Pani mentioned sweat equity, and we put a great deal of that into the company. Let me explain why. So traditionally, when you take money from an entity, either a VC or a bank, you're beholden to that entity, and so you start making decisions that aren't necessarily in the best interests of the long-term health of the company, but more so in making good on that investment.
From 2012 through 2018, we took no outside investment whatsoever, which is what I believe allowed us to launch successfully and make all of the changes on the fly, based on the feedback and the data that we were getting. And then, even when we did take our first round which is the only round to date that we've taken in 2018, it was with partners that have not held our feet to the fire, and that's important because you want to make decisions that you believe will be in the best interest of, at least in this business, both the creator and user space, and we've never felt the pressure that otherwise would have come with taking investment too early. I also know from having worked with 400 some odd record labels, streaming services, distributors, aggregators how difficult a business it is to be in and so taking money, you might think, will speed up the process, but really all it can do if you take it too early is complicate things.
0:39:37 - Dmitri
Wow, I really appreciate such a direct response from your experience, z. I mean, that is not the message we hear on this podcast very often, and we've put a lot of focus on helping startups understand how to attract investors, how to talk to investors and so forth, but I think it's a really important message to remember that timing can be critical as well.
0:39:59 - David
There's a lot of parallels between an independent artist and a startup.
Typically, Z and I and other people at AudioMac are giving advice to independent artists and their teams typically very young people and it's almost like the goal is like I want to get signed to a label or a major label. The parallel to a tech company is like I need to get funding from a VC company and once I do that, I've reached success. And there's startup culture and tech culture. There is this sort of like notion that like, oh, we raised $5 million, $10 million, go to TechCrunch and TechCrunch like talks about it and that's a huge success. It's sort of out of whack to me. Like, really, you want to build as much value in the company and get as many valuable stakeholders involved in the company as possible before you raise money or, from an artist standpoint, before you get signed. So you want to have leverage, right. If you're an independent artist, you had one song. Or you're a startup and you had one, you know, jump in traffic, you had one, jump in traffic. If it's that type of startup, then it doesn't go all right. Where's the highest bidder? Let's go. You don't have the most leverage at that point, which means that whoever is investing in you, whether it be a label or a fund, has more control. They have more say, they can influence direction of the company and make strategic decisions more, and maybe that's not in the artist or the startup's best interest. Once you get traction, then you could go and have more competition for your investment or from labels and then you could get a better deal and have a more balanced approach strategically moving forward.
So I think it's not like raising money or getting signed is bad. That's certainly an important thing and useful thing a lot of the time, but I wouldn't say it's necessary, especially these days when independent artists can do almost essentially everything a major label artist could do and a startup can, with all the resources available, operate in the same way as a big company can. So we're similar to that. Right, Our platform is not much different, at least utility-wise, from a trillion-dollar company's platform. Right, you could play songs, you could listen to music, you could do all these basic things. We could do the same thing that they could do, and obviously we have some advantages to that being nimble, being agile, being able to innovate faster, pivot faster. So there is a lot of parallels to see that, uh, between independent artists and between the startup. So we do have a different approach.
And I think, one last point here our growth has been brick by brick, right. A lot of times the brightest star burns out the fastest right. What was? I don't want to like talk bad about any companies, but that one company that was during COVID. What was it? Clubhouse.
0:43:20 - Dmitri
Skyrim Clubhouse yeah, no offense.
0:43:22 - David
Obviously, maybe they're doing great, I don't know, but they grew so fast and they burned out just as fast and went down right. So I mean maybe it worked out for them right. So I mean maybe it worked out for them. But when you have a strong foundation, building brick by brick, the wind can't blow you down as easy.
0:43:42 - Dmitri
Yeah, nice. Well, this has been super great guys Learning about AudioMac, hearing about not only how you fit in but how you're innovating and pushing the whole music experience forward. I have just one last question for you, because a lot of times we like to sort of do some horizon scanning with our guests to find out what else is out there. Introduce us. It's part of the community building you guys are doing in the app, we do on the podcast too, to sort of help people with discovery. So I'm curious are there any other music tech companies that you guys are keeping an eye on or excited about Anything?
0:44:16 - David
you want to share with our listeners. Yeah, there's a lot of great companies out there. I'll just name a few that are tangentially related to AudioMac. One is Carry First. This is a company in Africa, a platform. It's very unique. It was essentially a brand new value proposition, but still simple. Carry First in Africa provides users the ability to pay for digital items easier. So in Africa, generally speaking, that's one of the obstacles that many people face. There is just banking and the lack of options to pay for things. Credit cards don't function there as they do in the US or some other areas of the world. Carrier First allows users to pay for digital items like things like, you know, fortnite skins or different weapons in Call of Duty, I mean, and just so many different things you could get. And actually, audiomac is the first streaming service to allow users to pay for week, month or day passes, which is a way to subscribe on Audio Mac, where you could subscribe for one day, one month, et cetera.
0:45:41 - Dmitri
That in itself is super cool. We didn't talk about that at all, but it's super cool for a different market.
0:45:46 - David
It's huge and it's compatible to a lot of people's lifestyles there. If you're hosting a party, buy a day and you could have, you know, no, no ads on while you're listening, which is obviously how we how we create revenue and how we pay artists.
So carry first is allows people to pay for safely and confidently for this and, from our perspective, we we know that we're getting paid right because the problem is there's a lot of churn and you know people's cards don't work and there's just a lot of reasons is there's a lot of churn and people's cards don't work, and there's just a lot of reasons? Obviously, we have a lot of young people. That's another thing that happens, but that company is really great and they're growing super fast. If you're in Africa, check out Carry First, or even if you just want to learn about new, interesting technologies, check them out. There's also a company, airbuds. We're in discussions with them. It's uh, but air buds is a way again talking about community building and the social part of of listening to music, this is a way to basically share music and playlists and uh with with your friends and with other people of various streaming services. Um, airbeds is a top 10 app. It's really cool. Audio mac will be on there soon, uh, and that's really exciting.
0:47:00 - Dmitri
And then I found out about it from my 15 year old, so I now get to see what my kid and their friends are listening to and even comment on it.
0:47:08 - David
It's really fun yeah, I, I, I really like it. Uh, we're very happy to be talking to them and hopefully be on there soon, maybe by the time people are listening to them, and hopefully be on there soon, maybe by the time people are listening to this and then, I don't know, z, do you want to talk about Mogul?
0:47:21 - Brian
Sure. So, obviously, artists today are generating revenue and royalties from a a vast number of sources, and what Mogul has accomplished is they have created a dashboard that pulls in royalty tracking from all these various stores and platforms so that artists can really get a sense of how they're performing in as close to real time as possible, as opposed to separately having to log into multiple dashboards across various sites. So they're basically aggregating financial data and putting it into a one view, one stop shop option for artists a one-view, one-stop shop option for artists. And so we recently announced that we have integrated with Mogul, and this fits in line with everything that we've done historically as a company, which is to super, serve artists and provide them with a wealth of tools and features without having to put hurdles in the way that they have to clear in the first place.
0:48:38 - Dmitri
Well, I love that these recommendations of other startups come out are ones that you guys see value in enough to partner with as well. This is just not like horizon scanning in the distance, but you have such a collaborative spirit and if you see a good feature, you're integrating or talking to folks about how you can partner. It really says something about the culture with you guys. This has been super valuable. I hope that everyone listening has gotten a lot from this. I've been talking with David Ponte, co-founder and CMO of AudioMag, and Brian Zizek, the co-founder and EVP of Global Operations of AudioMag. Guys, thanks so much for being on the podcast. Thanks, Dmitri. Happy to be here. Thank you.
0:49:12 - David
Guys, thanks so much for being on the podcast. Thanks, Dmitri, happy to be here.
0:49:14 - Brian
Thank you. Thanks, Dmitri Take care.
0:49:19 - Dmitri
Thanks for listening to Music Tectonics. If you like what you hear, please subscribe on your favorite podcast app. We have new episodes for you every week. Did you know? We do free monthly online events that you, our lovely podcast listeners, can join? Find out more at musictctonics.com and, while you're there, look for the latest about our annual conference and sign up for our newsletter to get updates. Everything we do explores the seismic shifts that shake up music and technology, the way the earth's tectonic plates cause quakes and make mountains. Connect with music tectonics on Twitter, instagram and LinkedIn. That's my favorite platform. Connect with me. Dmitri Vietze, if you can spell it, we'll be back again next week, if not sooner.
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The Music Tectonics podcast goes beneath the surface of the music industry to explore how technology is changing the way business gets done. Weekly episodes include interviews with music tech movers & shakers, deep dives into seismic shifts, and more.
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