Rob Lindquist:
That's the main thing, is if I quit my job right now and do song print full time, can you guarantee me this? Guarantee is a tough word because I don't want to be locked into anything, but sure Christmas is coming up followed by Valentine's Day. If you want 20 ops a week consistently, we can give you 20 ops a week and things aren't slowing down after this Valentine's Day. It's just going to keep moving. We've been able to keep a lot of artists very busy and a lot of artists quitting their jobs, which is super exciting for me. I love the idea of converting people into full-time musicians and they're so excited about it.

Michael Walker:
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All right, I'm excited to be here today with Rob Lindquist. Rob is a Co-Founder and COO of the music creator platform Songfinch. Songfinch has delivered more than 150,000 custom songs, hang out over $20 million to independent artists earning countless awards, including Inc 5000 and Crane's Best Places to Work. Before Songfinch, Rob was actually an employee number three of Music Dealers, which is a music licensing startup where he built and managed a community of tens of thousands of artists to amplify global national campaigns for some of the most recognized brands in the world that you probably recognize, like Coca-Cola, Fanta, Airbnb, and many more.
Today I'm really excited to talk with Rob about the platform Songfinch that they've created because of course one of the biggest challenges I think as musicians we're struggling with nowadays is, how can we take our passion, how can we take our music and actually monetize it and make it sustainable? With streaming a lot of cases, it doesn't necessarily cut it. With a platform like Songfinch, it sounds like there's a huge opportunity to take something you're already doing, you're already passionate about and be able to provide more value and turn that into additional revenue stream. So Rob, thank you so much for taking time to come on here today.

Rob Lindquist:
Of course, thank you for having me.

Michael Walker:
Absolutely. I'm excited. We were kind of backstage talking a little bit about how... Rob, maybe you could even share a little bit about Songfinch and how it's part of your own life personally too in addition to being COO on it.

Rob Lindquist:
Yeah, obviously I've used Songfinch over the last few years a few times, but today has been kind of an interesting story. I have a two year old daughter and since she was pretty much born, we've had a nanny. Today is her last day, so we got her a Songfinch just kind of thanking her for what she's done, memories. We put a video to it. I've been a mess all morning admittedly. The song got me and then the video scene, the visuals all together just... I don't know. I've heard thousands and thousands of songs, but when it's really yours and about you and your story, it hits you right in the heart.

Michael Walker:
That's so cool. The idea of having a personalized soundtrack that mashes exactly what you're going through or where you're at, that was literally hand designed for you, such a cool idea for a service and a cool idea for an opportunity. It's great that both you're able to be a part of this platform, to help you grow and support, and serve these artists and the end users, but also that you're able to be a part of it for your own life, and be able to soundtrack and give gives to your nanny. Super cool.

Rob Lindquist:
It's great. Spreading love is wonderful. I would say 95% of our songs are all based around love, happiness, connection. It's cool to be part of something, especially these days, that is injecting so much happiness and good back into the world. It needs it right now.

Michael Walker:
Yeah, 100%. It seems like that's one of the core pieces of value from music in general. It's like bringing people together, breaking down walls, spreading a message of connection and community, bring people together. Really awesome. To start out with, I would love to hear just a little bit about your story and how you created Songfinch in the first place.

Rob Lindquist:
One of our Co-Founders is actually my brother. I was getting married in 2013, and he's not the best at speeches. I was working at Music Dealers at the time. I did a lot of the custom music, so of course I had some of my favorite artists that I would work with. He actually got one of those artists to make a song about me and wife-to-be. Then he said a few things during a speech, hit play and basically you just see the whole room... just tears. It wasn't like we left there like, "Hey we have to start this," but it was like, "There could be something here."
We're used to licensing at Music Dealer, so you were taking the one song and trying to reach millions. So it's like "How can we do this one-on-one?" From there, in 2016 him and my other Co-Founder approached me and asked if I wanted to get into this and see what we could do. We raised a little bit of money, and we kind of launched it. It went from just a Google Form that we sent to our friends to see what kind of songs we could get, from what inputs. Honestly over the next four years it was a lot of testing, a lot of gut punches, a lot of "almost", a lot of highs and lows.
Everything you hear about startups or career in the music space, or anything, it just you got to keep pushing if you believe in it. Things finally caught on four and a half years later. That's kind of the beginning of it all.

Michael Walker:
So cool. It's great to hear the perspective. I think it's so easy to look at successful companies or musicians... For a lot of us, especially first getting started, you turn on social media and you see all these artists that have millions of fans and they're just so much further along that it's easy to overlook the fact that there was a process that they went through. They didn't start there. They had to go through these trials and tribulations, and that's just a part of it, and it's okay if you're starting out wherever you're at. Everyone started from somewhere.
Now that you've really helped serve so many musicians and generate over $20 million to artists, I'm curious what are some of the biggest challenges or biggest questions that you see musicians struggling with? What's the core value proposition for artists when it comes to songs?

Rob Lindquist:
Some of them we want to do with Songfinch is... We say this all the time. As more I think about it, the more I'm bored with it. It's like kind of creating this middle class musician. If you look at the space you have the .001% that are making millions and doing stadium tours, and living in The Hills and LA, and all sorts of things. Then you have very, very, very good musicians, sometimes better than those stars that I just talked about, that are playing at a bar in your town and scraping to pay their bills and whatnot, and driving Uber on the weekends and whatnot.
We want to create the space where a musician can write with us Monday through Friday if they want. They don't want to be touring away from their family. They want to have a family and just work 9:00-5:00 during the week. They could make $100K, $200K making music. Honestly, our current product we have right now is like the beginning of this. That's our core product, but we're dipping our toes in B2B. That's where my expertise is with my last company. We're landing jobs with Toyota. We're in convo with Coca-Cola, again with Kleenex, with a lot of different brands that could do a lot.
With what our artists are doing with our customers, any single brand would want to be a part of it. To me, our value prop is not only just financial, but we're bringing new fans to you that you're connecting with in a whole new way. We're kind of in the world now where if you connect with your fans, 300-500 really solid fans could be much better than some of these bigger artists that a million fans. But eh, they don't really care. They liked one of your songs and whatnot. When you get someone that writes you a personalized song from your info, you kind of feel like they entered your life.
Some of the information we get from customers, their family doesn't even know this. They just come in here kind of therapy and just spit all this out. They get something back and they're like, "Wow. I kind of feel like a co-writer, but you took my life and experiences and made it beautiful and magical." It's just like nothing I've ever experienced. From an artist point of view, same thing. They've never really had these type of connections, this type of feedback, and dealt with these stories and this love. Love is still in the world, even if it doesn't feel like that, or you're going through hard times. There's still a lot of it left.

Michael Walker:
Wow, that's awesome. It is interesting looking at it from multiple different points of view for the value this thing provided, both for the artist in terms of... Like you said, now you don't necessarily have to throw spaghetti against the wall in a couple of strands, but with the record labels where it's kind of top, a very, very small percentage of people are actually successful but are massive. To actually create that opportunity for anyone who has a passion for making music to make a good living with it, but also the value proposition for the fans or for the people who are receiving the songs, what it reminded me of was...
I think that is one thing that sometimes we don't appreciate about ourselves as musicians is the magic that happens when you create music. For someone whose not a musician, it's literally magic. It's like, how do you do that? What comes to mind is we have an accountant at Modern Musician that we were having a meeting with. I've got my keyboard set up here as we were goofing off. He was doing some bookkeeping in the background. It wasn't even good. It was just sort of goofing off like (singing).
There's three of us and we were jamming a little bit. He absolutely loved it. He was like, "Oh my gosh, this is amazing." He recorded it. He shared it with all of his team. He showed us a video of it afterwards. For such a little moment, I was like I wouldn't have thought twice about that experience but it made his day, and it was something that he was so proud and excited about. He was sharing it with everyone else. Now it was just a little tiny clip. He didn't put a ton of thought into it. But with proper context and with something like Songfinch, you can really personalize and create this experience, a soundtrack that's literally designed for your life to express exactly what you're going through.
Pretty dang cool.

Rob Lindquist:
Especially as a guy, I'm not good at gifting. I work in a company where I know all of the major holidays and I still miss them. I admit that. Songfinch, you maybe spend 15-20 minutes just like, "Here's the memories. Here are some stories. Here's who I want to give it to," and end product feels like you've spent weeks and months planning it, and contacting someone, and coordinating. It's really just, "Let's get your info together. Just tell us what you want in the song, what genre, what artist you want," and they do their magic and you get the credit and we're good with it.
Then we encourage you to support and connect with the artist and learn about them. I think that connection right at that point, when tears are rolling down your cheeks, is so important. We're going to continue to be able to build tools and stuff that where artists can... I don't want to say take advantage, but hit the iron while it's hot. They are ready to support you at that moment, so we want you to be able to offer concert tickets if you're coming through their town. We want you to offer your CDs and your merch and whatnot. Down the road even more, we want to do some exclusive drops with artists where we connect you with a graphic artist and whatnot and we front the cost. It's you get 100 sweatshirts made that you can offer to your fans and whatnot.
We'll handle all that for you. You don't have to have boxes in your garage of 100 sweatshirts you hope people buy at your shows and you got to lug them around. This is drop ship here, let's do this. If your fans aren't going to buy them right now, we'll get you 100 songs and we'll get them sold for you. When people get that song, they become instant fans like nothing we've ever seen before.

Michael Walker:
So cool. That totally makes sense, creating that type of connection with a fan where you can write a custom song for them is one of the best ways to connect with someone. We should definitely-

Rob Lindquist:
Another side note real quick, right now we're doing around probably $75,000.00 a month of gratuity that just goes straight to the artist. It's just a pass-through. Some people will see the price tag and be like, "$199.00 for a song, I can't do that. That's a lot." They get it and they're like, "Wow, I would have paid $500.00 for this. Let me throw another $50.00-$100.00 to the artist." That's beautiful to us. We don't need to touch that. That just goes straight to you. You earned it, good job.

Michael Walker:
Wow. That's amazing. I think the value proposition is incredible. $199.00 for a custom song like that. We should definitely connect on... We have a software called Street Team that is basically about having a CRM platform. We'll send text messages and emails, and just set up some different... When you're just talking about wanting to plug into helping artists grow their fan base and monetize an original audience as well, I think there're probably some real cool API connections that we could do to integrate Songfinch with our software and vice versa. Let's definitely continue the conversation with that as well.

Rob Lindquist:
Oh, for sure. Yeah. We're growing our dev team right now. We're always looking for new platforms to further this connection. We're still new to this. We have a core product. We do it very well, but how can we continue to build on this and make it the best for everyone, not only customers, but artists as well. So definitely excited to explore any options that you've got.

Michael Walker:
Cool. One thing, we're partnering with Flow blockchain and Dapper Wallets, they did NBA Top Shot and NFL, and UFC, to do music NFT Marketplace. I wonder if there's something there where it's like get an add-on, get a digital NFT of your song that you can share, like you have a limited edition that you could share us on. It could be an interesting-

Rob Lindquist:
Sure, there's blockchain and Web 3.0, is probably a late 2023-2024 project of ours where we're on it. There's so much opportunity there with shared monetization. Kind of just lowering the barrier of entry for the fan to enter the music space... Say I love Chicago and I love summertime Chicago, and I want a song about it because I know everyone else likes it. Go to Songfinch like, "I love this artist. I'm going to pay you $1,000.00 to 20% of this custom song."
We're going to make it. It's going to be part mine. Now I'm on my socials telling all my fans, "I got a song coming out Friday. Stream it. Listen to it." Then at Songfinch we can utilize our resources on Spotify to get it on playlists so people can hear it. Then our B2B angles of "Cool, here's a big up and coming Chicago company. Let's get this song synced with them and start generating some sync revenue." There's a lot of cool blockchain things we can do with shared monetization.
At that point, your kind of treating some of these musicians like stocks. 10 years ago if you were to hear Chance in one of his first, you'd be like, "This dude could be really good. I want to get an NFT of Chance." It's like a rookie card, and now that song that you maybe paid $1,500.00 for, you could turn around re-sell that and now everyone eats off that, including the artist. Blockchain is very interesting.

Michael Walker:
Absolutely. Oh man, we're going to have some really cool conversations. I'm looking forward to connecting more. Songfinch, let's say that someone is listening to this right now and they're an independent musician. They're like, "Cool, this sounds like a really cool platform or opportunity to get started with." What does the process look like from a high level for an artist who is coming in and is interested in starting to provide this kind of service and getting started?

Rob Lindquist:
You can go to Songfinch.com. At the bottom in the footer it says, "Artist Application." It's basically our selling page where it just kind of gives you a little bit more information from an artist point of view of what we offer, what you get, what the splits are, how much we pay, et cetera. Then you apply. We get probably... I think we're at around 2,500-3,000 applications a week. Our acceptance rate is around 45%.
We do a lot of quality control up front just because we need to really trust that when we hand you a song and it's due within four or five days, that's going to come back and we don't have to continue to push deadlines because if customers are getting songs to an event, we're backed against a deadline. Basically, you would apply. We have an Artist Integration team that is basically broken down by genre.
We have a specialty pod that works in country that's going to review all the country applications. It's like, "Yes, this is good." Then from there, if you get accepted we have an onboarding process. It's just heftier application process where you fill out your profile and then you do a 60-90 second test submission. There're some briefs on there and then you just got to do a verse and a chorus.
There are some things we look for, instrumentation. Quality is number one. But instrumentation, the you-change instrumentation from the verses, so the chorus, kind of simple things but it makes a big difference when you're listening to a three minute song if you've got a four bar guitar loop over, and over, and over again. Can you work in details smoothly? Then we look for a few other things.
Once that's through, you basically work with your integration person to get you your first opportunity. They basically walk you through that. We spend a lot of time developing artists up front. If you're like, "Hey, I got this mic but I don't really know how to use it well," we will have a Zoom session with you to help you get to a spot where you want.
If you work with us after that, fantastic. If you're like, "Eh, it's not for me," and we spent an hour or two with you, cool. We hopefully made you better and put some more good into this community. We do spend a decent amount of resources up front to make sure that our community is as strong and aligned with what we need as possible. From there, you're just kind of put in the flow and generally on average artists do three to five opportunities a week.
At the same time, we have artists that make $150-$200K with us over the last 12 months. It's not chump change. Like Uber, it's basically on your time and you can be as busy as you want to be. If you're like, "Hey I'm a power user. I want to do five songs a day and lock myself in my room Monday through Friday," you can do that. We'll feed up. We'll feed you the ops, as many as you need.
There is the application process. It takes not too long. Generally, artists will get through it in two or three days. Then it's just kind of off to the races from there.

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Dude, what a cool service. What a cool opportunity.

Rob Lindquist:
Thank you. Thank you. It's exciting.

Michael Walker:
Now I'm just curious about logistics and some of the details of it. When it comes to the pricing of the songs, is it a fixed standard $199.00 no matter what the artist is, no matter what style of song it is? Are there different ranges depending on different ?

Rob Lindquist:
Yeah. Obviously, when we came out, Cameo was something that everyone compared us to. We're the music for Cameo. We're not exactly. We're a little bit different as we built our creator space from bottom up instead of top down. Cameo, 90% of their orders come from top 1% kind of thing. People come to Songfinch more for the output than the person creating an output.
By doing that, we can have people that "It's my first year at Berkeley. I would just love to make some money to buy groceries and just be comfortable in school." Cool, you're great. If you make good music you can succeed on Songfinch. You don't have to have a huge following. That's something that really separates us pretty much from any other creator or marketplace. We bring ops to you. We don't expect you to bring ops to our platform.
With all that being said, it's tough to tell a musician, one them just set their own price because even now, but especially two or three years ago, telling an artist, "We're going to pay you $100.00 to make a song," they would laugh at me. That was always a challenge. But now, you get in a groove. You get a formula down. We allow you to reuse instrumentals if you really want to. There are some things to make it easier while still keeping the product really good from a consumer standpoint.
We have artists ripping these out in 30 minutes and an hour, two hours. Generally, it's I'd say between two and three hours for one of these, and it pays $100.00. I think 40% of orders get gratuity. Then if there's an extra verse, it's an extra $40.00. Generally, you can make a few hundreds buck a song, but generally it's like $100.00-$140.00, plus tips. If you're doing that in an hour or even two hours at $70.00 an hour, it's not too bad. Then basically our agreement is so artist-friendly that you retain all the rights to everything.
If you make a song that you love about Gina's 95th birthday and you're like, "This would be great on my album," put it on there. It's yours. You retain rights to everything. Songfinch gets a personal usage license to give it to our customer, and that's what they have. So, they can't monetize it, they can't cover it, they can't put it on streaming or anything. It's a very artist-friendly deal. It's tough to tell an artist that "You're worth this much and you're worth this much." Who are we to say that?
Especially what would you look at? Maybe social numbers, but how many of those are actually real? It's just a weird time to do that. We've kind of done that in the past with licensing, and it gets super messy. We're just like, this is what is right now. We're going to create higher tier, maybe more collaborative products. We're going to have a B2B space. We're going to do other things that will allow us to get those bigger artists in.
People just want to come... Even just a few hundred bucks a month, that adds up. Maybe that's your car payment, or that's your rent for the month or whatever. It's a fun thing to do, digging into people's personal lives and really making magic like we said earlier.

Michael Walker:
Yeah, especially when it comes... Essentially what you're providing is a way for them to get paid to get better at recording and writing songs, and basically presenting them with fuel to be able to write these songs. A lot of times, it's the other way around. They pay money to be given opportunities to be able to co-write and do song writing workshops. I think it's a really amazing, amazing service. The fact that people can get paid a really good living to do that is awesome.
For the end user who's coming to... It's a $199.00 fixed rate with an optional verse that they can add on it, and the gratuity?

Rob Lindquist:
Yeah, so it's $199.00 for the song, and then any... Revisions have been a very interesting topic with this because obviously mispronunciations you're going to have, missed details, et cetera. "I don't want to say it like that. I want to say it like this." There's always a fine line with pleasing the customer, and also doing right by the artist, and also doing right by our employees by not pulling them in so many directions.
We have a very customer-friendly policy, but at the same time very artist-friendly. Any extra work that the artist didn't directly mess up on, they are compensated for. Either we break it out of our fee, or we charge the customer extra. That's the revision on the backside. Up front, it's $199.00 for the song. I think it's $59.99 for the verse, or $64.00. I don't remember the last. I think we might have just bumped it out.
The artist gets $40.00 of that, and then like I said, I think 40% of opportunities get gratuity, and that ranges anywhere from $20.00 to... I've delivered some $500.00 gratuity, which is kind of crazy. And I got some crazy stories about people getting stimulus checks and hitting me to give it to their artist. I was like, "I can't be involved with this. I'll connect you with your artist and you do that." I don't want to be involved with any $1,000.00+ going from one to another.
That was cool. It just shows the appreciation and the impact some of our artists are making in these lives with what some could say is just a simple two and a half minutes. There's a lot packed in there.

Michael Walker:
Absolutely. I would say the value proposition is huge for the fan who's getting the song, and for the artist like what you talked about. Let's say that I want to go get a song on Songfinch. Do I get to brows and look through different artists and choose a person? Or is it something where I label, "Here's the kind of song I want. Here's the genre," and then I'm matched with an artist? How does that process work exactly?

Rob Lindquist:
There's a few different ways. Every artist has their own profile that we will soon be building out into an artist store, which I talked about a little bit earlier. Right now, it's just a photo, some song examples, a bio, your social links, and then a "Book a song with me" button. That's one entry level of "Oh, I love this artist. I want to get started now," bone. Or you can just come to us. Like I said, a lot of people, probably 40% don't care about the artists. They just care about the output.
So, they just go through and is like, "I want country, male vocals. I want it comical and romantic. Here's all the info." We have a Music Supervision team that reviews every order and assigns it to who they think is best. We have around 2,500 artists right now, so they have a vast knowledge of our artist base. We're working on right now, that is going to release in probably two weeks, an Artist Recommendation Engine.
There's going to be a fork in the road for the customers that says, "Do you have an artist in mind?" If yes, you can type the name and select the genre of that artist. If you don't, we will help you select one based on the genre, the gender, the moods, who's best at that. Then you could browse artists and be like, "I like this one." If you don't like any of them because it doesn't hit, then you could either select a different one or we'll select for you. There's a few different paths to basically getting an artist, but 60% of them choose an artist by browsing on our site.

Michael Walker:
Gotcha, so the majority of people will do some browsing and choose the artist. They listen to some of their examples and they go-

Rob Lindquist:
Yeah, and we do a lot of artist promo and features on our social, because our social has been growing decently because we have some reveals which are super hot content. That also helps. If someone goes on our social and they're featured, their requests naturally go up. So, it's kind of cool to see the influence of that as well. Just kind of the control you have over... It's kind of what the labels have seen for how many years now. You push this artist in front of someone and they're going to like it. It's kind of interesting to see that on a lot smaller scale.

Michael Walker:
That's cool. It's interesting, I can understand how from a customer point of view, which is ultimately this is really important because this is who the platform is serving and how income is flowing in, and how value is being provided, having that standard $199.00 model is going to make things a million times more streamlined for the fan. There's not as much decision fatigue, and they have to kind of bounce around.
I can also see how that might... It sounds like based on what you said that it is a challenge for some artists coming in who are looking at "Do I want to value the songs as $199.00, or $100.00, $150.00 per song." It sounds like you guys are considering or you have some thoughts around having different tiers or having something where there's higher value services. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about the vision for that, or some ideas around it for prospective stuff looking forward.

Rob Lindquist:
There're musicians listening to this. Obviously, $100.00 a song is not for everybody. I'm totally fine with that. I understand that. I've worked with artists of all sizes, and this wouldn't make sense for a chunk. A nice amount are cool with that. So, how do we service those other artists that maybe they have a small pub deal, or they're on our label, know where to go from there, or whatnot?
The opportunities from whoever they're locked into aren't coming in fast enough. How can we supplement that? To me, we're such a good resource to those publishers and to those labels. If you can't provide the artist that you invest in enough opportunities to at least keep them fed and keep a livelihood with them, like what are you actually doing, that's where we could do that. That's been a challenge to infiltrate that space a little bit.

Michael Walker:
There's this thought that popped up that could be interesting to consider, what if for artists who are at that level, who already have an established audience... For example, one of our clients that I just met with here in Orlando who had just gotten off of a $14,000.00 private party experience, and if they're going to do a custom song then they don't want it to be custom. That's something like a premium value for their audience.
What if there was an optional profile for everyone where using the same intake form someone could fill in the details, but then they could propose or make a proposal for an artist where they could say, "Here's the budget that I'd be willing to propose," and then it could be an optional thing for the artist where they receive those opportunities and they can decide yes or no, but it's in the hands... There's no direct offer where I know some artists would probably feel a little bit skittish about "Hey, pay us $10,000.00 and we'll write a song for you."
If it was more of like an open thing where someone... It sounds like you have an amazing intake form where they're probably filling in the personal details of what they song about, the meaning behind it. Some songs deserve to be written. Some songs, it's going to really help people. It's going to serve... They're going through a really... Either they had a family loss, or they have something that truly a song just can emerge from it. For things like that, it could be interesting to have that proposal sent to the artist where they can look at those details and they can see what's the available budget.
Even if it's a bit less than what they would normally do for it, if it's a connection with the right fan they could even accept that. It could be an interesting idea.

Rob Lindquist:
100%. We've kicked around stuff like that. Something that customers want is to review lyrics beforehand. We also thought about say you're an artist. Maybe you have 10, 15, 20 instrumentals. A customer can choose one of them, and it's like "Cool, this is what I want." Now they feel more a part of it without totally being a part of it.
To me, you could charge $9.99, you could charge $14.99 for something like that. That's where you start, the wedding space, the bar mitzvah space, the ones which the budgets are much larger. We've had a little trouble getting into the wedding space because if you're paying $2,000.00 for the tax on your flowers, it's tough to be like, "I'm going to $199.99 and seven days get my first dance song." It just seems like it would be awful.
When you're dealing with these big dollars... There's a lot of collaboration that you can offer that doesn't take a lot because there's so much dev and tech automation that we can build into it. It wouldn't take a lot from the artist or our side, outside of building the technology, that can really enhance the experience and make it way more premium to justify charging higher. Then the artist makes $500.00 a pop, or $750.00, or whatever makes sense.
You can get a way different set of artists at that range. Then some of the artists that are down due to $100.00, throw them some of the bigger ones as well. It could be really cool. There's a lot of things that we're really exploring with the higher tier product, as well as some AI components for a lower tier product where there's a fee to make the song, and then there're some royalties that come along with it for each greeting card you sell with the song in it or whatnot.
There're some lower, easier barrier to entry of this custom music space that we're digging in as well. We have some connections that some of the large retailers try to get them on shelves there to become a new greeting card, and I think that could be really, really cool too.

Michael Walker:
Wow. Awesome. That totally makes sense. After you deliver this amazing song it's like, "Oh by the way, here's all these different applications." You can actually get this in a greeting card format. You could get it on a T-shirt. You could get it on XYZ. There's kind of the collectible nature of that. The NFT that. Super interesting.
Awesome. I'm curious, what are some of the other biggest questions or concerns that you hear from artists maybe as they're getting started with Songfinch and when they first come to you? What are some of the biggest questions that they have?

Rob Lindquist:
A lot of the artists come to us from referrals. It's incredible how you can separate yourself in the music community by caring about musicians. It's just weird that they're not totally used to that. You're like a unicorn of like, "Hey, they actually care about doing well with us." A lot of them come from referrals so it's just fairly quick signups.
Things that we hear from musicians, obviously just "How can I make a living doing this?" Obviously, that's the biggest thing. As far as Songfinch specific, "Is the $100.00 negotiable? Who owns the rights? Am I locked in?" Basically, you as an artist, you own all of your rights, you always will. We don't own anything. You're never locked in. It's like Google. You can turn it on and turn it off. You can deny ops. You can accept ops to your schedule.
Those are the main things. It's just mainly "How much is this? Can you feed me as well? Can you keep the ops coming if I quit my coffee gig job?" It's like, yes if you get to a certain point and you're, one, consistent... To me, consistency, quality and just continuing to be available are the three things that you can win here. If you make good music, we can give you ops every single day if you want to.
There's plenty to go around. That's the main thing is, "If I quit my job right now and do Songfinch full-time, can you guarantee me this?" Guarantee is a tough word because I don't want to be locked into anything, but sure Christmas is coming up followed by Valentine's Day. If you want 20 ops a week consistently, we can give you 20 ops a week. Things aren't slowing down after this Valentine's Day. Its just going to keep moving. We've been able to keep a lot of artists very busy, and a lot of artists quitting their jobs, which is super exciting for me.
I love the idea of converting people into full-time musicians. They're so excited about it. But there's not too much pushback or questions just because I think it's new, and you get paid within 30 minutes to an hour of submitting, which is super rare in the music space. It's always like, "Hurry up and wait." It's always chasing dollars from promoters to ASCAP. It's just always chasing and waiting months, or even years sometimes for dollars to come in.

Michael Walker:
Yeah, if ever even.

Rob Lindquist:
Right.

Michael Walker:
I just had a conversation about Songtrust, and the amount of unclaimed royalties is just insane. That's so cool that within 30 minutes, 60 minutes, that they're able to actually see the result.

Rob Lindquist:
Yeah, they see it in their PayPal. Then also, back to our convo about blockchain. This is super random, but to me ACAP, BMI, the PROs, blockchain is about to change the game for them because this formula of knowing how much you've earned that no one understands there or can explain, you're going to clearly see where things are and where they're played, and who owns them, and who deserves what.
It's going to be a little bit of a game change for that space, I think. I don't know what that's going to look like exactly, or if ASCAP, BMI and them are going to tweak their business to become part of that, or kind of just get passed up by these new tech companies. I think blockchain is going to have a huge impact, not only on the music space as a whole, but especially the PRO space.

Michael Walker:
Super interesting. Yeah, it seems like there're some pretty big revolutions that are coming in regards to blockchain. In terms of NFTs too. I would say that's probably the number one thing that I'm committed to right now, or the biggest vision that I have for my musician is to create the equivalence of what the iTunes Store was for creating digital downloads, and what Spotify was for creating streaming.
That version of NFTs, to be able to standardize them in a way that people understand exactly what is a music NFT, and to create a platform that it creates something that... In my mind, the fact that you can buy the Mona Lisa for $800 million, but Let It Be by The Beatles has never been bought for more than $1.00, it seems like there's an opportunity there.
It wasn't until being able to verify authentic ownership that you could do something like that with a digital asset... Definitely cool stuff. I'm looking forward to connecting with you more on some of this stuff.

Rob Lindquist:
Yeah, yeah.

Michael Walker:
Cool. Such a cool opportunity. I hear it all the time from artists who they want to transition from a day job or they want to transition from another form of income, to being able to focus entirely on their music. Even if it's someone whose starting out as early on, and looking at a platform like Songfinch, there's this opportunity to hone their chops. There's quality control, and you need to be committed and actually provide a good service with it, but you guys are even willing to hop on calls with people and help them to hone their craft and improve their chops.
Like The Beatles, they became The Beatles because they played ever single night and they rehearsed and they practiced a lot. What better way to practice than real world situations where you're literally creating value? There's a need that's being proposed. There's an opportunity. Then you're serving that value with your music. It's so awesome.
You mentioned how right now the opportunity flows as well. There's a huge opportunity because you can keep providing. The opportunities keep coming in, and if someone's willing to show up and keep providing those songs, then they can get those opportunities. I will say that for anyone whose listening to this right now, that I would recommend catching this wave early on while the opportunity...
There's always going to be an opportunity for it, especially because the demand... There's going to be more and more people as well who are looking for these songs, these gifts. It's not like those are going dry up. If everyone whose listening to the podcast goes and signs up immediately, then at least temporarily there's going to be less opportunity flow. Maybe a certain point there will be a point where it's not as... Because you weren't an early adopter, you might have missed a little bit of that initial wave in terms of being a musician and having all this opportunity flow.
Based on our conversation, I think you're going to continue developing opportunities for musicians. The point that I was trying to make is that if it was this right now, kind of earlier on, I would highly recommend going and checking it out, and exploring it. Rob, dude thank you so much for taking the time to come on here and share a little bit about Songfinch. The platform sounds amazing. It's such a cool opportunity.
It really clearly comes across just in this conversation where your heart's at, and that you really do genuinely care for these artists. I think that's probably one of the biggest reasons why Soundfinch has grown so quickly and provided such an amazing value. On behalf of all of us musicians, thank you for having a heart and really caring about artists and the fans for getting such an amazing value from that.

Rob Lindquist:
For sure.

Michael Walker:
For anybody's whose listening to this right now who wants to explore the platform and sign up, and kind of start that initial application process, what's the best place for them to go to, to learn more?

Rob Lindquist:
Go to Songfinch.com and then in the bottom footer it will say "Artist Application." Hit that, fill out the form. It'll take a minute. Then we'll get it back to you within 24 hours.

Michael Walker:
All right, great. Like I mentioned, I think that if you've been listening to this right now and been thinking, "Wow, this seems like the exact right kind of platform for me to start to supplement my income and hone my chops," that I would definitely recommend going and checking it out. We'll put the links in the show notes and everything like normal. Rob, thank you again so much for taking the time to come on here and share a little bit about Songfinch.

Rob Lindquist:
Thank you as well. For the artists, if you're on the fence, give it a shot. Make a song or two. A lot of people, especially with COVID, needed a different income. So, they gave us a shot. Maybe they wouldn't have outside of COVID. And now they're die hard fans. Give us a shot, and if you like it, fantastic. If not, you made a few hundred bucks and hopefully we could bring you a couple new fans.

Michael Walker:
Hey, it's Michael here. I hope that you got a ton of value out of this episode. Make sure you check out the show notes to learn more about our guest today. If you liked this podcast, then there's a few ways to help us grow. First, if you hit subscribe then I'll make sure you don't miss a new episode. Secondly, if you share it with your friends on your social media, tag us. That really helps us out. Third and best of all, if you leave us an honest review it's going to help us reach more musicians like you who want to take their music careers to the next level.
The time to be a modern musician is now. I look forward to seeing you on our next episode.