Episode 205: Goal Setting Strategies, Time Management, and Systemizing Success with Cheryl B. Engelhardt

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Cheryl B. Engelhardt is a Grammy-nominated artist, and composer who writes for commercials, films, meditation programs, and social justice choirs and has been featured in Forbes, Grammy.com, and People. She's performed with Sting, secured dozens of TV placements of her songs, toured globally, and garnered over 1 million Spotify streams in 2023. She’s also a certified trauma-informed coach and leads the popular musician mastermind, Amplify, helping musicians get out of their way and set up systems for success.

Cheryl takes us behind the scenes of her journey in the music industry and the pivotal role systems and trauma-informed coaching play. Learn about her approach to planning, goal-setting, overcoming fear and resistance, and how she harnesses the power of intuition to guide her decisions.

Takeaways: 

  • How to set up effective systems for success in your music career

  • The importance and process of healing past trauma to reclaim personal power

  • How to distinguish between fear and intuition to make empowered choices

free resources:

Apply for Gold Artist Academy

Join the Modern Musician Community

Get Cheryl’s free mini course:

InTheKey.co

Transcript:

Michael Walker: So, if you’re listening to this then you likely already know that being an independent musician is a lonely road. And maybe your friends and your family just don’t fully understand why you do what you do, or why you invest so much time, energy, and money towards achieving your music goals. And especially early on, it can be hard to find people who really understand what you’re trying to accomplish and how to make it happen. So, that’s where ModernMusician comes in!

My name’s Michael Walker and I can understand and relate to that feeling. I’ve been there myself, and so has our team of independent artists. The truth is that basically everything good in my life has been a result of music. It’s the reason I met my wife, it’s why I have my 3 kids, it’s how I met my best friends. And now with ModernMusician, we have seen so many talented artists who started out with a dream, with a passion, but without really a fanbase or a business. And if they take that and turn it into a sustainable full-time career and be able to impact hundreds, thousands or even millions of fans with your music. We’ve had thousands of messages from artists who told us we’ve helped change their lives forever. It just gets even more exciting and fulfilling when you’re surrounded by a community of other people who get it, and who have shared their success and their knowledge with each other openly. So, if you are feeling called into making your music a full-time career and to be able to reach more people with your music, then I want to invite you to join our community so that we can help support your growth and we can help lift you up as you pursue your musical dreams. You’ll be able to interact in a community with other high-level artists, coaches, and industry professionals, as well as be able to participate in our daily live podcast, meet these amazing guests, and get access to completely free training. If you’d like to join our family of artists who truly care about your success, then click on the link in the show notes and sign-up now. 

Vasja: But yeah, that's turned out to be the go-to resource for artists who want to see how they're doing across different channels without having to move from channel to channel. And then, because if you have to first check your stats on Spotify and then on Apple, and then on YouTube, you have to hop between platforms. And it's really hard to really compare the data between so many channels. But on Viberate, you have everything in one unified dashboard. So that's why I keep calling it “Google analytics for musicians'', because that's what we really are. So we analyze data with 1 website.

Michael Walker: It's easy to get lost in today's music industry with constantly changing technology and where anyone with a computer can release their own music. I'm going to share with you why this is the best time to be an independent musician and it's only getting better. If you have high-quality music, but you just don't know the best way to promote yourself so that you can reach the right people and generate a sustainable income with your music, we're going to show you the best strategies that we're using right now to reach millions of new listeners every month without spending 10 hours a day on social media. We're creating a revolution in today's music industry and this is your invitation to join me. I'm your host, Michael Walker.

All right. So I'm excited to be here today with Vasja! Vasja is the co-founder and chief business development officer of Viberate which is a leading global music analytics platform that's dedicated to helping industry experts to understand their data. They've collaborated with brands like Apple, Sony, UMG, Amazon, United Masters and Empire. So yeah, some of the biggest companies in the world. And I'm excited to bring him on the podcast today to talk about something that is probably the sexiest topic you can possibly imagine: which is data. [chuckles] I mean, data as an aspiring software developer and learning how to write code in the past two years and working with databases and starting to understand that the object-oriented model of how data’s structured, I find it fascinating, particularly with the rise of AI and the ability to train these tools based on data. So I'm really looking forward to connecting with you and just like hearing your insights on the value of data and how independent artists in particular, which is really the audience that is here for the conversation. How does this pertain to them and, and how do they, you know, make the most out of the data that they have from their fans? Vasja, thank you so much for taking time to be here.

Vasja: Yeah. So, it's probably the least sexy parts of the music business. [both chuckling] So back when we started, it was 10 years ago, I was managing a very big Techno DJ. You mentioned you're from Orlando, so we were in Miami this time of year every time for Ultra Music Festival. And yeah, this was the time when I started pitching the idea of analyzing data sets in the music industry and everybody was: Why would anyone use stats in such a cool industry as music? Turns out everybody's using stats now. So yeah, there's definitely a lot of value in analytics because back in the 70’s and 80’s, if you want us to find musicians, you just had to go out on a Friday or Saturday night to your local bar and just listen to musicians who were playing there. And it was much easier to keep track because right now, you know how it is: how a hundred thousand songs get uploaded every day to DSPs. And it's impossible to keep track of what's trending, who's hot, who's fading away, unless you have a service like Viberate because here we analyze right now about a million unique artist profiles and we use filters like genres, sub genres, and we look into data from all major streaming and social sites, plus 30,000 radio stations and some services like Shazam and Beatport for electronic musicians. So yeah, we try to look into all the relevant data and then we use that to rank artists according to their popularity. So that's the base product is ranking. And then you have various charts and then each artist is represented with the analytics profile, it's like looking at Google analytics, but for artists. So we analyze all the channels in detail. We detect trends. You can compare artists with one another, see what others are doing, how successful they are, maybe learn from what they do. And it's a very valuable tool for ANRs and talent scouts. It's quite easy to spot a trending musician who's not already signed to a major label and really breaking out on Spotify or TikTok. And then it's just: click on their analytics profile, check what they did. If you like their music, if you like stats, you look for the contact, reach out to them and give them a deal.

Michael Walker: Super interesting. So if I'm understanding it right, kind of the primary use case that you just described is for maybe an A&R or talent scouts or someone like a record label services to be able to discover untapped potential with someone who's gaining notoriety or ranking up, but they don't currently have someone that has signed them. 

Vasja: Yeah, so that's one use case. And on the other side, the use case for artists is to improve their chances of being discovered. Because if you're breaking out services like Viberate or other competitive services don't have you in their database then you’re missing out because maybe a talent scout that would otherwise discover you because your song went viral on Spotify. They don't find it because your profile is not in a database. So if it's not in a database, you can go and you can open a profile free-of-charge and we'll start measuring your data. For artists it improves their chances of being discovered and for non-creative music professionals like managers, talent agents, promoters, it's a really good resource to discover artists and not just up-and-coming musicians. A lot of promoters use us especially when they have to fill up the non-headlining positions, like warm-up musicians. Because sometimes if you have a huge festival… actually after this call, I have a call with one of the biggest electronic music promoters in the U.S. and they have to book up to 400 DJ’s for a festival. You run out of ideas. Trust me. I was working on electronic music for over 10 years. We were hosting a couple of label nights here in Ljubljana, Slovenia. After four editions, we ran out of ideas for who to book next! And we were professionals. We had a lot of experience. We thought we knew everyone and it's just not true. And also for promoters, if you only book artists that you like personally, you can quickly lose money because maybe people who buy tickets don't share your taste for music. Of course, I always say you have to work with the music that you like, but it also helps if you have a resource to see if that particular artist is also popular in your city because that will increase chances of, a sold out event. 

Michael Walker: Super cool. It seems like one use case, and I'm curious to hear exactly how it works in terms of the interface for artists who might be interested in using the platform. I guess one question to start with is: the data that is included, that's being charted. Is it only people who add their own profile that it's charting from, or is it ranking people based on like Spotify's API or…

Vasja: So, someone has to open a profile. Whether this is a fan or a manager or artists themselves or maybe we add them because we spot them on a hot playlist. Of course, if you're an artist, if you find your profile, you can claim it. So it's a user generated platform. But yeah, sometimes it'll happen if an artist isn't in a database and then then you have to open a profile or we do it for them. That's why I always ask artists, make sure your profile is in our database because otherwise you’re missing out.

Michael Walker: Cool. And the service, can anyone go and add their profile to the database just to have it on there? Or what does it look like in terms of the different services that you offer for an artist who's potentially looking at using this resource? 

Vasja: So for artists, actually, the best use case for artists is to use what we call “Viberate for Artists”. So it's a special plan that's tailor-made for artists. It's also much cheaper than our Base Plan. So our base plan costs $239 per year, which is still cheap. But our artist plan is $3 a month, built annually. So, it's really, really cheap. It's less than a beer a month. While the main plan gives you access to stats for all artists on the platform, about a million artists, the artist’s plan only gives you access to your own stats. So you can analyze everything about yourself. And it's also slightly based on first party data, which is a big advantage. So if you grant us access to your Spotify for artists, your apple for artists, we will start pulling data from that as well. Because otherwise we pull data from public API’s. Sometimes they have data glitches. It's not as wide as having access to first party data. But yeah, that's turned out to be the go-to resource for artists who want to see how they're doing across different channels without having to move from channel to channel. Because if you have to first check your stats on Spotify and then on Apple, and then on YouTube, you have to hop between platforms. And it's really hard to really compare the data between so many channels. But on Viberate, you have everything in one unified dashboard. So that's why I keep calling it “Google Analytics for musicians”, because that's what we really are. So we analyze data with a website.

Michael Walker: Supercool. So if I'm understanding you're right, it is possible to have a profile, like a fan generates a profile for you and then it tracks it, but it's only access to third party data, so it's not going to be as good as if someone pays the $3 a month, which is hardly anything.

Vasja: Yeah! If you claim the profile, you have to prove that you're actually controlling your profile. So that's why we asked you to grant us access to your feet from your DSPs. Because otherwise we won't share any of your private data with anyone, but yourself, or if you, let's say you have a manager and you say: okay, also share it with this, this account. So, yeah it has to be like that. Fans added most of the profiles, especially from bigger superstars and then it's up to their managers to claim with.

Michael Walker: Interesting. One question that I have is around how the service is built. Just out of curiosity, do you have any provider/API service? We have a software company that is a CRM platform that helps artists run email campaigns and to build a patreon style, a membership community with their fans. And I'm just imagining it'd be pretty cool for us to have an integration with a platform like yours to be able to create a dashboard of all of their socials. And we have some social integrations right now, that’s something that I’m curious to hear if you have any sort of integrations like that. 

Vasja: Yeah, we do have an API. It's one of our products and actually a lot of clients use it for exactly that reason that you mentioned. So it's a great resource to pre-populate any public artist profiles with content. Because usually, especially with talent agencies, they have a bunch of artists with a bunch of profiles and when a promoter goes and checks a certain artist, usually the content there is outdated. And then the link to their Twitterfeed doesn't work because they changed the API. Actually after Elon Musk took it all, they completely shut down their API. And usually YouTube videos are really old. They don't reflect what's currently happening with the artists. So that, that's, that's really bad. And I know it's, it's impossible to maintain hundreds of profiles manually. And this is where we come in. Because our algorithms will push the trending content or the latest content, whatever you select, directly on those profiles, including stats, trends, all the useful information. This way you can be 100% sure that all the profiles are constantly up0to-date. It's up to artists to upload to those channels; to upload videos to YouTube. But then from there on, we take care of everything. So, based on stats, we'll just push whatever algorithm’s think that represents the artist's best at that particular moment. 

Michael Walker: Very cool. Yeah, I'd love to connect more on that and see what that might look like if we were going to integrate with a service like yours for a dashboard for reporting on music-related analytics. I mean for us, we have very good analytics on their CRM platform and the results from either campaigns within the platform, but I think for a lot of artists, it'd be interesting for them to see the social media dashboard as well. I'm curious to hear your thoughts, to take things a little bit of a different direction, around data and what's happening right now with AI. Obviously the last year has been a huge breakout year for AI. It's been around for a long time, but, you know, in particular with open AI and ChatGPT, it's escalated quickly. Now, Sora just got announced and that's amazing. And one of the most interesting things about the technical paper they released was that they showed that literally just adding more data, adding more compute, significantly improved the results of the video. Like: little data, you know, very poor dog looks all gorbally, decent amount of data started to look a little bit more like a dog, 16 times the amount of data. It actually looks exactly like high fidelity, like a dog. And that was really the main thing was just more data. More compute. Then there's emergent properties from the AI that just started to take its own life. So I mean, I'm curious from your perspective, being a data person and being in this world, are there any plans or things that you're considering with the data that you're collecting, is there a use case for AI to be able to predict trends, or as an artist, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on AI and where you think things are going. If someone wants to make the most out of it.

Vasja: Yeah. So predictions are always tricky because there are elements of luck, of being in the right place at the right time, being spotted by the right person. You never know what's going to pick up with with certain target groups. It's not that data services have a crystal ball to know exactly who's going to break out in a year or so. Because if we had that feature, we wouldn't offer it to labels. We would become a label, probably the most successful in the world. [chuckling] So we tried a bunch of models of predicting which song is going to blow up, but it's not reliable enough to be monetizable right now. But we do use AI. Especially one of the clients of open AI, we use their API. But it's just for features that are in the background. So, you can imagine that we need to deal with a lot of data sets that aren't 100% compatible. So you have to match a Spotify ID with a YouTube ID for the same artist, because if you want all that data to point to one profile, we have to match them. Before AI, we had 120 human curators who sometimes needed to go actively search for profiles for a certain artist or correct wrong data for a million profiles. You can imagine how tedious that can be. But with the arrival of ChatGPT and open AI's API, we managed to teach OpenAI to do this for us. And that saved a lot of money for us. Also, this is just early alpha, so it's just a closed system. So, we use chatGPT to train on our data to automatically apply filters. So you can basically speak to Viberate as a service like you were speaking to me, but a human language asking us: can you show me the most trending rock musicians on Spotify from Norway? And it will automatically apply all the filters and show you the chart. Like I said before, it is the least sexy niche of the music industry and a lot of music executives don't like to use services like us because they don't want to click filters and move sliders around. But what they want to know is exactly that! Who are the most trending artists without having to do all this stuff. And this way they'll just have a chat bot answering the questions. It is in very early stages, but hopefully it's going to be launched soon. I think it's going to be a pretty, pretty cool feature.

Michael Walker: Sounds like it. Yeah. So it's really interesting to see… there's so many different use cases that are exactly what you're describing right now, like: creating an interface with the AI services to streamline. I know for us, a huge focus point this year is to streamline the onboarding process where we can personalize an artist's email templates to match their voice and rather than just having the cookie cutter template they start with. I could be going down the big rabbit hole here so I'll try to prevent going too far down it. There's some interesting points that Spinoza made. I think Albert Einstein was famously quoted as saying “I believe in the God of Spinoza”. Spinoza, he created the articles or proofs about how the universe works. The reason I bring him up was just that he brought up an interesting point about prediction and it seems like prediction is really at the core of how our brains work and also how these AI tools work because they're predicting the next token. I feel like the nature of thoughts is sort of predictive in nature in a certain way. Like we said, goals. We have thoughts. So it does seem like there's, I don't know, the movie minority report where they can predict the crimes that happen before the crimes happen. They put them away in jail. [chuckling] It is interesting to think about that in particular, the use case for a tool like what you're offering with the amount of data that if you could start to create a prediction engine, which I mean, you kind of already are in a way. The reason that services use you is because they want to be able to predict who is the next up-and-coming trend, but it just still takes that bit of human deciphering and we don't have the answers yet. The reason I brought up Spinoza is because his point was that there's always a prediction. There's always a cause and effect. We just might not understand it, but if we did understand it, then we could actually predict, things with more fidelity. 

Vasja: I mean, it's easy to predict how many streams an artist is going to get tomorrow, but this is not how you discover artists who are going to blow up next year. And this is where… This is the sweet spot. So you have to get them while they're still not super famous and just the time period is too long. In a way we are predicting it, but we're not answering the entire question. So we will just direct you in the general direction and the rest is up on you and your luck and your skill. Because also skill is definitely not only with the artists, also with who an artist is working with. So you have a skillful manager, a label, your agent, if they know how to sell you, if they have other artists on a roster, they can match you up with a good marketer. So there are a lot of factors that can change the artist's path, regardless of the stats. You can start with zero. If you have a really good team behind you, you have a good chance of making it. Or vice versa. You can have amazing stats, but if you want to work alone, if you don't want to help, because you want to make it on a global market, you need to have a team. If you choose not to have it, you're not going to make it. It's just as simple as that. So those are all the factors that cannot be predicted.

Michael Walker: Yeah. Super interesting. I mean, in order to predict something like that, you'd really have to basically understand the totality of everything. You'd have to have data on connections, the relationships that they're having with other people like producers.

Vasja: We have that. So when we analyze the artists’ followers and we can single out followers who are artists. So if you have a rock band, you play in our garage, Metallica starts following you on SoundCloud. They like your music. So something's happening there and we have that data. And also we have a very simple methods. Let’s stay with rock, if you're looking for a new hard rock band, you can use our performance filters. So first, you filter out rock musicians and then after that, you start playing with stats. So you can say: don't show me the top 50,000 artists in the world, because those are already signed to a label, they're already probably superstars. So you start browsing below rank 50,000 and then you say at the same time, show me which of those musicians have over 200,000 Spotify monthly listeners.

So not super famous, but amazing engagement on Spotify. So they're actually getting traction. And then finally you say: show me only unsigned artists because you also have label information. And then you usually end up with a neat list of like 100 artists out of a million. Just with a couple of tricks, you dilute the database from a million artists down to 100 that fits your profile of what you're looking for. And this is not prediction, but it narrows down your list of potentially interesting artists. And then it's up to you to go check out what they did and if you like what they did, you can contact them.

Michael Walker: Super interesting. Yeah, I can totally understand how a tool like that would be extremely valuable to talent scouts for being able to identify opportunities. And it's interesting, just on this topic of prediction, it definitely depends on where you draw the line like what you see as a prediction, but I would definitely classify that as like a form of prediction and in a really valuable form of prediction. And then the question might just be like, where's the limit of how much can we actually predict? Where does the spectrum lie? Well, anyways to bring things back down to earth a little bit…. I mean, I love having this conversation. This is one of my favorite types of things to geek out about, but I'd love to connect with our live audience here and see if there's any questions that they have, they'd like to ask you personally. So if you have any questions that you'd like to ask to Vasja, raise your hand and we'll bring you on live.  We've been doing a little bit of tech tech stuff here so we'll see if this works.

VoZ is coming on here live and VoZ, if you want to say “Hey”, we'll see if we can hear it.

VoZ: Hello! I have a simple question. I went in and checked your website out. It looks outstanding, and it looks like you offer a nice tiered service that could be affordable for most artists who are interested in following their stats. But I have a simple question about roperly implementing metadata so that it works throughout all the different systems that tracks that information. Do you provide any tips or services to your members for them to properly implement metadata onto their songs? Or is this something that you already have them do?

Vasja: Yeah, so we're not, we're not actually offering this. So we're not in a metadata business. Just to the certain level that we need to implement in order to track stats. So we are in the popularity business. For metadata, you have services like Jaxsta or Genius. They provide a much better service there. So we have some basic ISRC stuff like that, but we don't have underlying information. So who's the author of the song? Or the songwriter stuff like that. We don't have it unfortunately. 

Michael Walker: Got it. Yeah, that makes sense. So, you really focus on tracking the stats that help people to predict the… I keep wrapping on prediction, [both chuckle] but allows people to figure out who are the artists who might be the best fit for an opportunity.

Vasja: Also, some marketers use our audience data. So we have a whole audience step. So when you plan a marketing campaign, you need to know whether listeners are mostly, I don't know, females aged 18 to 24, then you go to TikTok. Where are they from? So if they're from the US. or France or Germany, so you have to then channel your marketing efforts to those countries where you know that the audience actually is. So yeah, it's not just a prediction, it's also analysis planning, marketing campaigns monitoring the effectiveness of that marketing campaigns. So after you invest a bunch of money into a campaign, and maybe have a tour for an album, you want to see spikes. You want to see spikes in your audience engagement and the growth of your audience. We offer all those metrics.

Michael Walker: Super helpful. Awesome. Any other questions that people would like to ask while we're here live? If you have a question, you can right click on your profile and raise your hand. Or if you want to put it in the chat, I can also forward the question for you as well. And I see David he raised his hand. So we'll bring him on here to the stage. Hey David!

David: Hey, really interesting stuff. This is the kind of stuff that I really think is great. This is just for live performances. You do this or what? What do you think is your strongest point? 

Michael Walker: Yeah. Thanks, David. So it sounds like the question is what platforms specifically do you integrate with and what kind of data are you grabbing it from?

Vasja: Live is just a small fraction. We do have some information about concerts. We tap into APIs with major ticket providers, but it's just a really, really small percentage. So our focus is still on recorded. So we tap into major streaming services, social media sites, radio stations and other specialized music services. So I think right now we have 17 channels, but all the global ones that actually matter. We actually started as a live music service but then quickly we saw that there's a bigger opportunity in recorded, especially after the pandemic hit. Live was practically dead. But yeah, I mean, in terms of live, we have probably the world's most biggest organized database of festivals. So we have 6,300 festival profiles with all the lineups, future and past, all the analysis. You can filter festivals by their genre, by the country size, stuff like that. So that's also a part of it. Not just artists either.

Michael Walker: Very cool. Yeah. So it sounds like there's, in addition to live, which is just a small part of what’s is included through you, so you have that part of it, but it's also mainly about all of the different platforms and having a broad perspective of their music distribution and their social media and their live shows to be able to create that ranking. Awesome.

Vasja: Yeah. And then also it's connected. So if you're a promoter from New York, if you want to book an artist that's not super famous and you're not really sure whether they're going to sell out or not, you can try the recorded its stats. So you can see if they have 30,000 monthly listeners from Spotify coming out of New York, if they have 10,000 TikTok fans that live in New York, 20,000 Instagram followers from New York, those are probably people who are going to buy a ticket to see the act live. So you can use data from recorded also in their lives. And a lot of promoters do that.

Michael Walker: Got it. Yeah. So it's helpful for planning live shows, planning markets, seeing untapped opportunities that you can lean into. Cool. 

Someone asked about: do you think it's valid to be concerned about AI replacing musicians and companies like yours and just like all of us, like AI replacing us. So I'd be curious to hear your perspective on the rise of AI as technology and how we should view it in terms of using it as a tool and how do we live with that fear and is AI going to replace us? How do you think we should respond to that?

Vasja: It depends whether it becomes sanctioned or not, because that's all music is all about.


So you have to be sanctioned to write emotional lyrics. Of course, AI is going to learn how to write, how to mimic emotional lyrics, but I mean, emotion is something you have to feel, so you can feel what is fake or not, sooner or later. Maybe you won't know why you feel the difference between a human-written song and AI-written song, but it I think it's gonna be there: The difference is gonna be there. And also people like to go to concerts to see the band on the stage play the music, try to catch the guitar pick in the crowd when the guitarist throws it in. Stuff that AI cannot replicate other than, I don't know, having robots playing guitars and drums on the stage. It's just going to be the same and people love to go to concerts. We saw after the pandemic ended the concert industry grew beyond where it was in 2019 before the pandemic, because people wanted to go out so much. So that's the part that's not going to be replaced by AI. But recorded music? I mean, I listened to a couple of AI generated songs and they're pretty good and they're going to get better and better and better, especially in electronic music which is my previous career. AI generated songs can be pretty fascinating; pretty cool sounding. So yeah, I think that first we're going to see AI DJs, and after that it's going to be rock bands, not the other way around. But actually a couple of days ago I saw an AI based robot playing the drums. Amazing. So, but I'm not afraid that it's going to completely replace it because, like I said, a big part of music is emotions and so far, luckily, AI doesn't have emotions. So let's try to keep it that way.

Michael Walker: [laughs] Yeah. Yeah. Pretty, pretty wild. It does seem like AI a tool, you still need someone to be at like prompting it and kind of guiding it in the right direction. It, in and of itself, doesn't seem like it would be that entertaining to listen to. But human using AI to be able to compose a song at a very high level seems like that's totally something that, at least in the short term, that's what will happen. So it's like all of us as musicians, we should be using AI as much as possible, learning how it works, using it as a tool. But also to your point around community and live shows, it seems like we have a big opportunity to focus in on the parts that AI can't replace, which is the connection or the human-to-human part of it. So all the things we're doing around building community and live communities seem like that's a good bet to hedge your bets on because the music generation itself is something that's going to be pretty easy to replace pretty soon.

Vasja: Yeah. I would rather than on threat on the music industry, I would focus on where musicians can use AI to improve their working process. I use AI constantly. When I speak at conferences, I write out a speech and then I have ChatGPT pimp it up for me because it's always better. And same goes for music. My friend, Christian from, from Norway, he has this cool AI startup called MasterChannel, and they use AI for mastering. So you can upload your songs and AI is going to master them for you. Even convert your stereo to spatial audio. And that saves a lot of money. It works amazingly well, and we should look for tools that could improve music production instead.

Michael Walker: Sorry, what was the name of that tool?

Vasja: MasterChannel.

Michael Walker: That's cool. Wow.

Vasja: Yeah. And yeah, so when I'm visiting conferences, listening to panels, constantly debates threats of AI. How should we treat copyright? How should we do that? How should we protect the industry? I mean, those are definitely legit questions, but, what I'm missing is the equal amount of: how should we use AI to improve what we're doing? And we use it with, like I already explained, we use it heavily and it helped save us a lot of money. It helped make our service better, faster. So yeah, the technology is here. Let's use it any way we can. And yeah, of course, let's not abuse it. That's also a problem that needs to be addressed.

Michael Walker: Yeah, definitely. The: “with great power comes great responsibility”. And the same tool can be used to do good things and also can be used to, to create destruction. So the most important thing then is figuring out the intention behind it, what we're doing and the purpose for it, and then using the tools to achieve purposes that make things better for us all. Awesome.

Well, Vasja… Man it's rare that I get to talk and geek out this much about data! If anyone's been listening to our podcast, they know I love to go on about AI and this stuff. I think it's fascinating, but I definitely appreciate what you brought to the conversation in terms of your background with your company. And it seems like an extremely valuable service that you're providing. So, thank you for being on the podcast today!

Vasja: Thanks for having me!

Michael Walker: Thank you. For anyone that's interested in connecting more or learning more about the tool, what's the best place for them to go to dive deeper? 

Vasja: Yeah. Viberate.com. But also let's connect on LinkedIn. I'm the only advisor ever with that name. It's quite easy to find me. [laughs]

Michael Walker: Very cool. All right. Yeeaah 

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