Kyle Thiede:
Just now in the US with the MLC Collective doing what they're doing and just US royalties from digital platforms, their initial report was 500 million of unclaimed royalties that publishers and songwriters and rights holders have free access to hopefully claim and play a part in getting that.

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 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. Alright. I'm excited to be here today with Kyle Thiede. Kyle is the director of copyright at Songtrust, which is the world's largest technology solution for global music publishing royalty collection administration. Before joining Songtrust, Kyle held copyright and licensing roles at EMI Music Publishing, Sony Music Publishing, and BMG.
And his personal mission within the music publishing industry is to address the global bureaucracy that disrupts performance and growth so you can work with other professionals to help to rebuild some of the standards, procedures, and just the fundamental infrastructure within music to create a more equitable royalty collection ecosystem. Holy cow, what a mission. That's awesome. Thank you for coming on here to talk a little bit about this stuff that, I think a lot of us as musicians are, we know is important but sometimes can fall by the wayside or we don't quite understand it, and so we just never really take advantage of it. Thanks so much for taking the time to be here today.

Kyle Thiede:
No, thanks for having me. This is a great opportunity to talk about it.

Michael Walker:
Yeah, absolutely. To start out with, I would love to just hear a little bit more about some you and your story and how you got started at Songtrust.

Kyle Thiede:
Yeah, absolutely. I am much like a lot of people, moved to New York with bit of a hope to work in the music industry. And I didn't really have my sight set on anything in particular. I was very fortunate to get an internship at EMI, which at the time was the world's largest publishing company. And I was working in sync and just really was thrown into this world of licensing and copyright and how quickly can get very complicated.
From there, eventually transitioned into the copyright and rights management part of the industry, which led me to Songtrust, working for some of the major companies early in my career, showed me an opportunity that perhaps with a smaller company could be more impactful, just because big companies have a certain way of doing things, which is perfectly fine. Songtrust, at the time, was a startup, had probably right around 10 employees. I took my chances and fortunately, it turned out quite well. We're now probably about 150 employees managing a lot more songs and a lot more writers than when I started. It was not something I ever thought I'd get into this part of the industry, but I've enjoyed it because it is challenging and unknown. There is opportunity to fix it, and that's what I've been striving for.

Michael Walker:
Awesome. Yeah, it definitely seems like the royalty collection. From the little bit that I really understand about it, it just seem like there's a big opportunity to streamline it and make it better, and then comes along Songtrust to help fulfill that need. Maybe you could share a little bit about that challenge, that issue that Songtrust has come up to be able to serve. What was the problem that you guys discovered as you were getting started?

Kyle Thiede:
Yeah. I think music publishing especially, specifically within any type of royalty collection, is always the part of the industry that falls to the wayside or is a bit of an unknown. I'd say historically speaking, in many ways, it was designed to shift power away from creators. It was divided up and given an opportunity in many ways to be complicated and allows for more administrators to be involved and third parties. And historically speaking, you look back and you can read all the stories about how certain writers lost their publishing royalties to this, that, and the other.
And then also the industry, just as a whole for the longest time, supported the top 10% of creators and other than becoming affiliated with a performance rights society and that the extent of publishing deals granted to the long tail or even the mid tail of creators really wasn't a thing. With Songtrust, who is a sister company of Downtown Music Publishing, which is a bit more of a traditional organization and publisher, the goal was to just extend who was incorporated in a global ecosystem, because music was becoming more accessible.
It's not uncommon for a writer from the US to perhaps blow up in a different country and is that something that is accessible. And that's really where Songtrust was born out of, of just seeing could we scale a business that hasn't been put to that test before, and it's not without its challenges certainly, and now that has extended to other companies getting involved and we're seeing more and more creators in that ecosystem probably than ever before, which is great.

Michael Walker:
Very cool. It sounds like what you're saying is that Songtrust has basically come along to help shine a light and make things more transparent in a landscape where the royalties is very confusing and complicated. And there's something about ... This is actually a disturbing thing. I don't even know if I should be talking about it, but there was a ... I mean, it's not that bad. There was a cockroach that we found, so we just had the hurricane here in Orlando.
And apparently, in our neighborhood, there's other neighbors that are getting this too, but cockroaches coming into their house. And so last night, I was putting down our daughter to bed, we have it caught on the nest cam. I was thinking more than words by extreme and putting her down halfway through it. I'm like, what? What? Aah! I freaked out because there's a cockroach. And in this analogy, in the dark, cockroaches come out. And when there's a light that's shine, they scurry away.
And so it seems like it's just part of the natural landscape when there is some stuff that's under ... It's obfuscated or it's harder to see or it's basically there's not a light being shine on. It's easier, much, much easier for the cockroaches to come out or bad things to happen underneath the table. And so Songtrust is literally a light that you're shining and providing this transparent look at, okay, where's the money going and how much am I actually earned? Or how much have I owed, even if I'm not one of the top 10% of artists? Really, really cool.

Kyle Thiede:
Yeah. Just to piggyback on that a little bit, there is a lot of in the unknown of just what you'll find. And I think publishing is a little bit of the lower value of the whole pie. It is a smaller chunk in the whole. Creators tend to focus on where the majority of their money is without realizing they're letting a perfectly normal royalty stream pass them by. We hear about it all the time and what's unclaimed in this industry and it, and on a global scale, is in the billions of dollars. And a lot of that is for people that music is a hobby or they're not famous or anything, there's plenty of money out there for those kind of creators. All you have to do is, as you say, point a spotlight on it a bit.

Michael Walker:
And so what was that number again? There's billions of dollars that are unclaimed?

Kyle Thiede:
Yeah. Depending on the reports and in things just now in the US with the MLC Collective doing what they're doing and just us royalties from digital platforms, their initial report was 500 million of unclaimed royalties that publishers and songwriters and rights holders have free access to hopefully claim and play a part in getting that. And after a certain amount of time, like many things in this industry, it gets redistributed to right holders based on market share, which goes to the top 10% and things of that nature. It can be a vicious cycle. And for an industry that for a very long time wasn't that accessible, times are starting to change. It's good.

Michael Walker:
That just blows my mind that there's $500 million of unclaimed, untapped revenue. It seems like nowadays with, I don't know, technology, with the internet that there should be systems in place to be able to identify where this money is owed to. Could you maybe illuminate a little bit about where does that mismatch come from? How does money go unclaimed? And it sounds like that's actually part of the model as well with Songtrust, is that we help to be able to make sure that it is claimed appropriately.

Kyle Thiede:
Yeah, it's really what you find in this industry is that it is incredibly data. In many ways, I would love to watch some parallels between this industry and finance because it is just an incredible amount of data exchange. And the problem tends to be where that data originates. It's originating from a source where that's not their main focus. Creators have something far greater in mind, art and building a fan base and building a brand.
And at the forefront of their mind is something so far away from a data feed that, unfortunately, in many cases, the people that are in that room creating a song that's the source. They know best. But because it's such so far from their mind, it takes time to build that rights picture back. Unlike on the recording side where a lot of times, the artist is who the artist is and you put that album out there and the sales come back and it's pretty straightforward. Distributions happen monthly, it just all kinds of aligns and the industry is set up to really accommodate that.
On the songwriting publishing side, there can be 5, 10, 15 contributors to a song, and especially in this day and age with sampling, and it's potentially people that are on that song that you actually didn't sit in a room and work with. They wrote a song 50 years ago and you sampled it and now they're part of it. The complexity of simply song shares and splits has become ... And then you can add in even some new age things, the ability to sell beats online to people you don't know and lease beats and sell parts of your catalog.
And so it's just becoming ... It's always been complex. A rights share, when we deliver our registrations on behalf of our songwriters, a single global rights picture could take up an entire piece of paper and just outlining who's on the song, who represents them, what country we're claiming in. And if we don't have that information correct, and many times we don't because people didn't confirm their splits at the time or we don't know who their co-writers are, when we start delivering that and other publishers are delivering that, you can see where it can get complicated fast, mismatching data, unknown songwriter names, incorrect splits, so on and so forth.
And there is no real centralized place for this. The industry has tried different variations of this over time. The MLC is another opportunity here in the US to do that, but just no database will ever have the same data on behalf of every song. And then you just have some people who quite simply don't know and that they should be claiming it or they're eligible to claim it. It just sits for a few years and is redistributed, and it's tough. I don't know what the solution is to ever be perfect. There will always be people who simply think it's not enough are worth their time. But there's a lot of efforts, there's a lot of companies focusing on this that are very interesting at different levels of the creation process, which is good.

Michael Walker:
Awesome. It sounds like what you're saying is that both a blessing and a curse is that as creators, we have a lot more control over this and in large part, we're responsible for the problem in the first place because we are the ones who are originating, we're the sources of this music, but we might haven't claimed or we haven't let people know that we are the ones who actually wrote the songs. What happens ... You mentioned that it's really pretty straightforward, clear cut when it comes to ... Is it the mechanical royalties or when it comes to actual purchase of the sales because when you distribute them automatically they just go back to your ... Usually, there's systems in place where you don't have to worry about it, it's going to go back to you.
But when it comes to the more thought based work or the songwriting shares or publishing shares, that piece of it isn't connected to that same system. That part, if you don't do anything, then you just don't make it. And that's basically how it's set up right now?

Kyle Thiede:
Yeah, yeah. Especially now, distribution for all intents and purposes, it's pretty simple. There's a lot of DIY services or perhaps you do have a label. And in getting all of your works on all of the digital platforms and even if you're doing vinyls and CDs, all of that is pretty streamlined now and is mostly connected back to that single source, whoever is the one that is distributing it. Whereas publishing is so far, there's so many moving parts and so many additional writers and publishers involved. It's comparing the two.
And then the recording side and the sales side is about, I think now, usually about 75% of the income that comes in from the whole, and the rest goes to publishing. For a lot of creators, especially if they're doing well, that money is fueling their career where they're happy enough to keep on creating, potentially ignoring that 25%. It's not uncommon. Yeah, certainly.

Michael Walker:
Wow. I mean, that 25% is a pretty big chunk just to leave on the table. It does seem like, I don't know, just from a simplicity standpoint that it's like when you're distributing the music that there should just be some default tie-ins where it's like, by default, if you don't do anything then 100% of that publishing is going to go back to whoever published it kind of thing. And then if there's an interface to say like, were there any other writers that were involved with this, yes or no? Yes. Okay, what were their names?
And then the identification system where you have to grab your IDs, if you're registered, you have to make your reg. I guess that's where it starts to get more complicated. But it does seem like, by default, the very least that it could be set up as is having it tied back into whoever published the song or distribute it, right?

Kyle Thiede:
Yeah. And we've seen more of this. Songtrust specifically is a pub admin business and we don't do anything on the distribution side, but CD Baby also launched a publishing part of their company to try to simplify it, TuneCore, BeatStars teamed up with Sony ATV to do some pub admin. We've seen more of it where the two are connected, especially with the majors owning a lot of the record side and also having a publishing arm, if they were to assign a large writer or artists, trying to keep it consolidated.
There are certainly some efforts of that, but not as much as one would think. It's very easy to sign a record deal over here and then six months later, sign a publishing deal over there. You have different people representing you and it's just the cost and amount of work on the publishing side just doesn't quite parallel that of a distribution company. And the timelines don't either. And I think this can be a deterrent a lot of time for, especially DIY creators is the distribution side because it's been so efficient for so long and so accessible is quick.
You know what you're earning and can really get a sense of projecting out your income very easy on that side. And the publishing side, sometimes it takes a year to even start to see any money flow, especially if it's international royalties, it can take longer. It's just most of the industry still works on a quarterly or biannual basis. It can just be very discouraging. It just can beat you down quite quickly. There's been some improvements here, but it just is a slow moving part of the industry, even still to this day. And I think a lot of people probably are just like, ah, if it happens, it happens. We'll see.

Michael Walker:
That's pretty interesting, yeah. I mean, a year it's a pretty long time to have money that is your money in the hands of someone else who has a year to essentially exploit that money before you get it interesting.

Kyle Thiede:
Yeah. And something, it's a very hard thing to sell as well as a company that does it or any of the companies that do it in an industry that trust is always a bit shaky. Especially again, if you ever read some horror stories, historically speaking, trust is a hard thing to build in this industry as a whole, but also on the publishing side and specifically, on the publishing side. To try to sell a product where it's like, trust us, it's going to take a year, hopefully not, but it might take a year before you start seeing any real income from the same streams or usage that you got paid on 10 months ago on the record side.
It's a very hard thing to sell and I would completely understand where creators are probably like, I don't know if this is quite the right thing. And then what happens, and is happening more, is people start to jump around. They'll use one publisher, be unhappy, move to another publisher, be unhappy, move to another publisher, be unhappy. And it's a cycle. And every time they move around, the work that's needed to be done to change the rights picture and who's holding onto that admin is way more complicated than people would think, which just adds to that timeline, unfortunately. It's a pretty vicious cycle, yeah.

Michael Walker:
Huh, that's definitely interesting, yeah. It sounds like the real root issue to a lot of the time cycle is just the way that these royalties are paid out and not necessarily having a fully centralized source of truth for these things and having to collect these. And so basically, everyone's on the same playing field in terms of having to wait for these long amounts of times. There's one thing point that I would love to get your perspective on as being someone who's worked at very large companies and then made a life decision to say, I'm going to take a bit of more of a leap of faith and I actually want to work with this startup.
For some people, it might be hard to ... Like, wait. You're part of this major company and then you decided to move to a startup. I'd love to hear you talk about the differences between a startup culture and some of the benefits and the things that we can take away from that sorts of culture versus maybe a culture of bureaucracy. What are the pros and cons? Especially for artists who are listening to this right now, they might sometimes feel like they're at a disadvantage compared to major artists because they don't have the same backing of that big system when, in some cases, they actually ... If they lean into the advantages of that, it could be a huge momentum shift. I would love to hear your thought on that whole dynamic.

Kyle Thiede:
Yeah. There's certainly multiple ways to go about anything and my time with the majors was very eye opening in many positive ways, certainly, just the power of influence from companies like that and working with the artists that they work with and seeing that, especially when I worked in some of the mechanical licensing, so doing licensing with the release of CDs and albums at the time prior to streaming being super relevant. What I worked on a lot was some of our indie releases.
And what I would notice is there's so many artists on our roster that were paid very large advances and maybe promised a lot or assumed they were promised a lot, end up getting caught in some of that big bureaucratic cycle where resources shift to what's hot at the moment. And if you aren't being pushed in that world, it's hard to make back some of that money sometimes based on the contracts you're signing. That was one thing from a major. When things are going really well, they're going really well.
When they're not, you have to be careful of the choices you make in that realm. But what I always tell, especially people major perspective, there's a reason they're a machine and they can change your life in a second, and I think a lot of people respect that. But as a worker within, there wasn't a lot of opportunity for me, as someone very young in my career, to make an impact, to change the way we did things within our systems, whether it was any admin type of related things. But the machine was just too big at that point.
To change something, you have to go all the way up the ladder and do that. That's what I became problem. It wasn't so much what there was to offer or the major supposed to, not at that time, for me, personally. It was simply like, I was like, I want to have an impact and I really want to change the way I can see where there's problems and I want to be a part of the industry conversation, not just assume we're sitting at the top and everything works for us.
For example, if money doesn't get paid, eventually, it comes to the top percent of companies gets redistributed by market share. The industry works really well for them, so there's not a reason to change. When I saw Songtrust, it was definitely a personal decision of just being like, I think I can have some impact here. What I found, and very fortunately, was that was the case. We were a part of all the conversations similar to this and going to working groups and because we were so small with such lofty goals, I was forced to learn a lot.
Instead of working on sync licensing and mechanical licensing, I learned the whole picture of copyright, everything that had to do from royalties being paid to working with creators, to make sure their data was correct. And if something wasn't working, we changed it. And working with our partners, a lot of the performance right societies who are also very large companies rooted in historic ways of doing things, being able to have conversations with being ... Unlike a traditional publisher who maybe signs 10 writers a month, we have 5,000.
How are we going to do that and then try new things? For me, it was purely about trying to find ways to scale the publishing industry, which I was very familiar with, not being scalable, at least from the majors because there was no reason to. It was just being a part of a conversation and asking questions that nobody wanted to ask and finding the right people. I certainly wasn't the first one. There's an underlying backend of this industry of people trying to come up with unique ways of doing this in every possible way you could imagine, it was just being a part of that.
And then extending that to the creators of being like, hey, this isn't so scary, it's complicated, but be a part of the conversation so that you're prepared as this industry gets better, you can come along with us. It was just opening doors, asking questions, whether it was to the industry or to the creators connecting the dots because the industry doesn't always work so well for the long tail or for those that stay in their lane. Be a little disruptive, of which Songtrust was. We were certainly a little disruptive at first and maybe even still a little because we are very large.

Michael Walker:
Alright. Let's take a quick break from the podcast. I can tell you about a free special offer that we're doing right now exclusively for our podcast listeners. If you get a ton of value from the show, but you want to take your music career to the next level, connect with the community of driven musicians and connect with the music mentors directly that we have on this podcast. Or if you just want to know the best way to market your music and grow an audience right now, then this is going to be perfect for you.
Right now, we're offering a free two-week trial to our music mentor coaching program. And if you sign up in the show notes below, you're going to access to our entire music mentor content vault for free. The vault's organized into four different content builders, the first being the music, then the artist, the fans, and last but not least, the business. When you sign up, you unlock our best in depth master classes from a network of world class musicians and industry experts on the most cutting edge strategies right now for growing your music business.
On top of that, you'll get access to our weekly live masterminds where our highest level of modern musician coaches teach you exactly what they're doing to make an income and an impact with their music. Then once a month, we're going to have our music mentor spotlight series, and that's what we're going to bring on some of the world's biggest and best artist coaches and successful musicians to teach you what's working right now. And one of the most amazing parts is that you can get your questions answered live by these top level music mentors.
A lot of the people that you hear right here on the podcast are they're live interacting with you personally. Imagine being able to connect with them directly. On top of all that, you'll get access to our private music mentor community, and this is definitely one of my favorite parts of music mentor and maybe the most valuable, is that you're going to have this community where you can network with other artists and link up, collaborate, ask questions, get support, and discuss everything related to your music career.
If you're curious and you want to take advantage of the free trial, then go click on the link in the show notes right now and sign up for free. From there, you can check out all of the amazing content, connect with the community, and sign up for the live master classes that happen every week. This is a gift for listening to our podcast, supporting the show, so don't miss it out. Go sign up for free now and let's get back to our interview. Awesome. Yeah, thanks for sharing that. And it's definitely interesting.
I think that it does have a lot of parallels to a lot of us and musicians who are listening this right now, especially if we're indies and we may or may not have aspirations to get signed by a major record label, but there are pros and cons to it and leaning into your advantages and the things, your strengths that you have right now. And one of those, it sounds like, is the ability to move quickly, to move really quickly and do things on your own terms where you don't have to sacrifice your own vision or creativity, you can literally just carve the path yourself, which is a pretty cool opportunity.

Kyle Thiede:
You hold a lot of power, too, in that regard. We have a couple examples recently, I won't name any names, but we've had a couple clients who, quite frankly, were very much the long tail just in the last few weeks and come to find out that they've all gone viral. There was three of them separately of themselves. One was a band from the 2014 that broke up and they had a song and now it's going viral on TikTok, and they just happened to have all of their things registered with us and they had all of their information and data as a result of working with someone, even though they really weren't making a whole lot of money in order.
And now, that money is flowing in. In many ways, they hold that opportunity to say, here's real cash flow. They can take that to a major publisher and have all of their information ready to go. They're prepared to have that conversation. Another one was a young girl who went viral on TikTok also. She distributed her own music and had her own publishing set up. Again, really wasn't making money, but was prepared for what now is happening. Her data's all aligned and it's not unfamiliar to her.
She probably will also sign a major deal probably by the end of the year, I would reckon. And that's just interesting because the industry is set up for some of that virality for creators now. Doesn't mean everybody's going to become famous overnight, but if you're prepared for it on the backend, it's not so scary when the wheels start turning as fast as they can because I can only imagine what's going through their minds right now as their whole world's shifting, right?

Michael Walker:
Huh, cool. Yeah, that's super interesting. And who knows now with TikTok and whatever the next thing is? Things can go viral very quickly. The analogy that comes to mind as you described that, and this one I use in a slightly different context, but applies really nicely to this situation is it sounds like in this sense, having the foundation set up on Songtrust or making sure that your data, that everything is set up, whether you're getting a lot of tracks right now or not, is building a rain catcher. And then maybe a year or two from now, there's a massive storm.
When your songs goes viral and all of a sudden, it starts raining. And if you hadn't done that work of building this rain catcher, then all of that rain would've went into the ground and then it would have distributed to somewhere else. But because you had your foundation in order, you had this rain catcher, now you're actually properly collecting that rain as it falls.

Kyle Thiede:
Yeah. And it can be hard to do that, to take the time and the moment to prepare for. But the people that are prepared look back on it like, I'm so glad I did that, whatever it was. And I don't think it's that different in this industry. It's hard to want to learn the business side of this industry, but I think those that do feel very confident in what their next step is, hopefully, have a sense of peace that they can handle the creative business as they do, knowing that they know enough to get by and maybe have the right alliances along the way too. Whether that's a company like us or a major or whatever it might be that fits their ... Where they're at in their career.

Michael Walker:
Mm-hmm. Awesome. I'd love to hear from you in terms of, let's say, that someone's listening to this right now and they're like, okay, awesome, it's time for me. I didn't even realize that this whole other world existed and I need to make sure I'm not giving up 25% of my potential income. Where do they get started? And when it comes to making sure that they have their data set up appropriately or that they can set up their rain catcher so that it's prepared for when and if that storm happens, where would you recommend that they get started with it?

Kyle Thiede:
Yeah. I think the first part is just, and I think this is actually a part of the creative process really, is who you're working with. If you're a solo artist and you write all of your own music and make all of your own instrumentals and lyrics and do all of that, then this world's pretty easy, quite frankly. But I think that's more and more people are collaborating, which is great. It's understanding who you're collaborating with. There's so many opportunities to collaborate with people that aren't in a garage anymore and all of this.
If you're using services that promote that and allow for that, do you understand the offering of that service? Because many of them in their contracts have it all laid out that if you sell this instrumental, you have 50% in there, so on and so forth. If you're in the room, if you're in the studio making with a handful of people, maybe it's a little uncomfortable, but have that conversation, hey, what did we contribute to this? Are we splitting it evenly? Did so and so do more? And there actually are some companies that are trying to implement that conversation into the software of do systems and things like that, which is really interesting to help them have those conversations as you're ending a [inaudible 00:33:04].

Michael Walker:
If someone else can be the person who puts up their hand and like, "Hey, brother, way to go, you got to do this." Like, "Oh, well, Jeff in the corner there, classic Jeff." It's like, "I guess he's right though, Jeff, he's right. We got to talk about it."

Kyle Thiede:
Yeah. And I would say, I've worked on a lot of licensing over the years where albums that have made a lot of money can't be paid out because people don't agree on splits. Jeff thought he was getting 20%, but everybody else thought he was getting 5%. And that doesn't hold the money up just for Jeff. It holds the money for everyone. If you're doing this to make a living and pay your bills and it's your career choice, I would just put into asterisks of being like, then you have to make sure you get paid.
And making sure you get paid means understanding who contributed to a song and just being honest within the group. If you're in the room, be honest with it. If you're using other services, do a little bit of homework. Getting that rights picture is very important, and then go from there. Are you affiliated songwriter? Are you a member of ASCAP or BMI or CSAC or PRS in the UK, wherever you're based? If the music you're releasing is making money, especially, another thing to be honest with yourself of, is this actually monetizing?
I think I just read recently, there's a 100,000 tracks uploaded to Spotify every day. The amount of content that's going out in the world is a lot. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean that all 100,000 tracks will earn money probably. There's also a conversation to be had about that. But once you cross that threshold and know who you're working with, agree on it, become affiliated as a songwriter. You can start to discuss whether or not someone like Songtrust or another pub admin is necessary, especially if you're earning globally.
And don't just assume that companies like, if you sign a record deal or music publishing deal, that everything's happening the way it should. Ask questions, be a fly on the wall, be involved and listen and make sure that what you anticipate is happening from those companies, actually. They're not afraid to share with you those details and be helpful. Because there's so much going on in this industry, it's not uncommon for things to go into conflict or to be counterclaimed. You don't want to wait two years to realize something went wrong.

Michael Walker:
Hate to bring things back to this analogy, but our pest control guy just came two or three hours ago and he told me, he's like, "Oh, this is a pretty common thing hat happen because of the storm, because of the rain water. If you want to prevent this, then once a week, this bathroom, you don't use it very often, but you might want to run some hot water through the drains and that's make sure that they wash down any ... They're not going to climb up." And what my mind went to as you're describing like, yeah, you want to be involved, you want to have maintain conversation, just so there is a light that's being shown on it, like turning on the hot water to let the drain run a little bit. Sorry, I had to share that, unfortunately.

Kyle Thiede:
Yeah, yeah. Because not specifically us, but just any company, we're certainly invested. Obviously, a creator's success and our success of distributing those rights is important to our success, but it doesn't mean things can't go wrong. We deliver data to so many partners. There's so many systems involved, and data's being shared with them from other writers and other publishers involved on those songs. There's always so many opportunities for something to go wrong, anything in the world.
Being involved, asking questions once in a while, taking a look at your statements, does the things add up? If you thought you were going to make $10,000 and you've only made $500, maybe it's time to ask a question. And it's okay to do that. Like I said, it's your livelihood, it's your living. It's okay to be whatever you want to call it, involved, pushy, and everything, and .

Michael Walker:
Ask questions, yeah. Totally. Awesome. One thing that, if I remember right, Songtrust, it seems like one of your missions or one service that you do such an amazing job at is providing education and just resources for anyone, any artist to be able to educate themselves and learn what's the actual checklist. Do you have any sort of resource that someone could go to on the website that they could just walk through like, oh, here's step one, step two, step three, step four, to just check my bases and make sure that I am claiming what I should be claiming?

Kyle Thiede:
Yeah. We have a few. We certainly have a music publishing 101, almost like a book that we've produced over the years that's very involved and it's jumping into the weeds a little bit, but to the ability that you want to really get into it. But there's some links on our how to and in our blog that will basically walk you through of just being to be successful, just do these things. And again, it's understanding your data, getting affiliated, and registering things correctly, and all of that. They'll walk you through.
But the educational part of Songtrust, and I'm glad to have been a part of it in the early days to contribute to a lot of those, was to demystify it, maybe sometimes to a fault. The more content you put out educationally, the more questions arise and people bring up really good points. Especially as a company or as an industry, being a bit vulnerable and being like, here's everything, it's complicated, ask your questions, and not always having the best of answers.
The worst thing I've had to say over my career is, unfortunately, sometimes that's just the way it is, which hurts deep down. But there are some realities of that in this industry that, again, are changing. Education wise, what we've put together over ... I've been at Songtrust now for seven years, but maybe even going back a bit further over the last 10 years, especially as it relates to music publishing is I would like to think second to none. It is something we've put a lot of time and effort into.
We have whole teams that focus on it and work with other companies in this industry to make sure that we're accurate and also providing knowledge and perspective that isn't exclusively coming from within our own office. We bring people from other companies and other parts of the industry to also share what they have, so that it's not so singular. And it's great. I'm really proud of it, quite frankly.

Michael Walker:
Absolutely. I mean, you should be providing incredible service. And I think that mindset, too, is so powerful and honest of the being willing to receive questions or ask questions and acknowledge that not every question we're going to know the answer, but every question, it opens up something and it allows you to learn. But the truth is that we're all figuring stuff out together and there's a lot of good questions that don't necessarily have answers yet. But by asking the questions, we create new movement.
I would love to hear your take on having both a lot of experience with majors and the history of publishing and royalty management and admin and data collection as it relates to this. If you're zooming out and looking over the next year or 5 years, even 10 years and looking at trends and thinking about what are some of the biggest revolutions or game changers or different ways that we're moving towards. Obviously, the future is untold and things are changing so quickly right now. Who knows?
If you asked me 10 years ago what I'd be doing right now, I certainly wouldn't be like, yeah, this is where I'd be right now doing this and I have three kids. But with your experience and just with where things are at right now, I'd love to hear your perspective on where things are moving and what are some of the biggest trends that you're seeing.

Kyle Thiede:
Yeah. I think there will always be a place for the majors. There just is what they can provide financially and marketing and branding and building a career for someone. It's hard to replicate that. This industry still is designed that way, and I think that's okay. There's nothing wrong with that 1% or 10% that fall into that realm. And I think it's also a bit of a career checklist, even to this day, for a lot of people that want to sign and have that moment. And it's very gratifying and completely understand that and there will always be a place for that.
What I've seen shifting for a long time, and we see it more than ever with all the tools and accessibility to do this yourself and what that can mean financially, it has allowed so many more creators to be self-sustaining, whether it's DIY distribution or DIY publishing or the ability, again, to collaborate with people around the world. And so many people are making careers off selling instrumentals in beats and the marketplaces that have really arrived to power this and just the overall cost to make an album these days are a song. I mean, it's almost nothing.
What I think I'm seeing more so now is just the power that some of these digital services have, quite frankly. And obviously, I think a lot of people notice this. And not even just from going viral on TikTok or creating a brand within Spotify and doing music or podcasts and so on and so forth, but actually these companies fostering a lot of talent as well in investing back into the creator community using TikTok or in parent company, ByteDance is an example. They have a new offering called SoundOn, which is their own version of a distribution company.
And Spotify, I think, tried this at one point. I don't know if they still do, quite honestly. But you see these services trying to say, maybe we are, in many ways, the new age marketing company or record label in trying to build that in a way that's not just replicating what all the majors have done, not just signing the top ones, but actually being a marketplace for people to foster the potential to succeed. And I think that will be really interesting to see, to watch develop as some of these companies that, quite frankly, control a lot of the digital music are also getting involved in that community, in supporting it because they're success.
It's a circle. Creators are successful, they're successful, everyone's successful and happy. But it does cut out a lot of middle men in that regard too, which isn't a bad thing either. I would say and hope that a lot of these digital services are prepared to foster what that all means, but the data and all that. But I think that's interesting. Will TikTok or whoever be able to foster the rise of people going viral and actually manage a music career? Maybe. Well, hopefully. That's interesting. I'm also, maybe on the flip side of that coin, a little concerned with so much.
There's so much being granted to creators and so much accessibility that it almost becomes complicated again. We wanted to give you all the options to choose what's path is best for you, but now you have a lot of options. And every option has a consequence. Not to sound negative or anything, but just an example. Perhaps a lot of artists are selling their catalogs these days. You see it almost like on a weekly basis, so and so sold their catalog for however much money. The ability to do that as an average artist is actually something someone can do.
You can sell part of your publishing catalog for whatever amount someone's willing to pay for it. And maybe you want to do that so you can raise 20 grand to release a studio quality album. But it's like, do you actually understand what the ramifications of that could be losing out on future residual income and having a more complicated rights picture. If you sell instrumentals online, do you understand what you're giving up by doing it, did you read the fine print, all these things? With new opportunities, certainly comes more responsibility as well, I think.
It's a marketplace that's being created to the individual, but now there might be a little more responsibility on that individual. It's like reap what you sow. If you're good at it, you'll be successful. If you struggle with that, you're back in that place of uncertainty.

Michael Walker:
Super interesting. The creator economy, the movements back in the giving greater access, greater really potential and power directly in the hands of the creators. It'll be interesting. We'll see over the next 5, 10 years what happens. But thank you so much for your role in Songtrust. I know you've been there since there was 10 people on the team. You've helped to really shape it into incredible service. And thank you for taking time to talk today and shine a light on some of the darkness of the dark area that might be confusing or obfuscated to people.
Not to say that there's just a bunch of cockroaches, there's like, oh, this greedy evil people, but to be able to shine a light in this analogy, just to clarify things, whether there's any ill intent or not, I think, is hugely valuable. And so for anyone who's listening or watching this, if they'd like to learn more about Songtrust and get access to those resources and dive deeper, what's the best place for them to go to do that?

Kyle Thiede:
Yeah. Go to the website, Songtrusts.com, check out the how to, check out the blog. If using a service like Songtrust is something that looks like it could benefit your career, we have support, reach out via the website, ask some questions, be curious, and we'll certainly get back to you quickly as we can and have those conversations. And I'm always accessible as well, LinkedIn, any of that, I'm always happy to have these conversations, I have my whole career. They're a bit rejuvenating to speak to creators individually and everything. I'm always available as well.

Michael Walker:
Okay. Awesome. Cool. Well, like always, we'll put all the links and everything on the show notes. And thanks again. I know that sometimes this kind of stuff is easy to overlook or it can seem complicated and so we just avoid looking at it. And so I think that having a platform like Songtrust to be able to shine a light on it is super valuable for the creator economy and for all the independent artists, like the people who are listening to this right now.

Kyle Thiede:
Yeah, and best of luck. It can be fun, enjoy it, the ride and everything.

Michael Walker:
That's some good life lesson right there. I talk about that sometimes about how it's like, we all are going to end up at the same place where we're on our death bed and we're about to say goodbye to everything. It's true. That's a very humbling point to get back to like, oh yeah, I'm going to ... Some point, all this stuff that feels crazy and really important as I'm about to say goodbye, pretty crazy. Cool. Hey, man, great connecting with you. Looking forward to staying in touch. We'll put the links and everything in the show notes, and I'll talk to you again soon.

Kyle Thiede:
Alright, sounds great. Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it.

Michael Walker:
Hey, it's Michael here. I hope that you got a ton of value at its episode. Make sure to check out the show notes to learn more about their guests today. And if you want to support the 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 or on your social media, tag us. That really helps us out. And third, best of all, if you believe it's an honest review, it's going to help us reach more musicians like you who want to take the music careers to the next level. Time to be a modern musicians now, and I'll look forward to seeing you on our next episode.