Ariel Hyatt:
... use ChatGPT or use your tool every single day and it's with the use where the fear will quell. If you jump in the ocean every single day, you're going to learn how to weather the storms, how to deal with waves, how to swim when the tide is in or out. And it's not going to feel scary and cold and terrifying. It's just going to be swimming.

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, I'm excited to be here today with one of my favorite human beings, Ariel Hyatt. So, Ariel is the CEO and founder of Cyber PR, an artist development marketing strategy firm dedicated to empowering musicians and music related brands with the tools and knowledge that they needs need to succeed in today's music industry. She's the author of six books on marketing, crowdfunding, social media, publicity for artists, all of which went to number one on Amazon. And her greatest strengths are making what feels overwhelming and complicated, seem easy and digestible and teaching our systems and sharing that with your community.
So, I'm really excited to have her on today to talk about one of my personal favorite things to discuss because I think it's total game changer and at the time of us being here, this is probably the biggest movement and technology since the internet and since there's a lot of considerations in terms of how do we roll this out in a way that we maximize the opportunities and the benefits to humanity and to us as musicians. Also, how do we reduce the amount of risks and the issues with it and use it in a way to serve as many people as possible? Ariel, thank you so much for come on here live to talk a little bit about AI, music marketing and publicity.

Ariel Hyatt:
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Michael Walker:
I would love to hear a little bit about your story and for anyone who's here right now who maybe this is the first time connecting with you, maybe you could share a little bit about your background and how you came across what you're teaching right now in regards to AI related to music marketing.

Ariel Hyatt:
My background is for a long time now, my company just turned 27 years old, I have been in service to mostly independent musicians. I started as a traditional publicist. In very early days, I got very interested in internet marketing and email marketing, and I caught that wave early and started helping musicians unpack something that I saw industry leaders outside of the music industry were succeeding by doing a lot of things like email marketing and somehow in our industry, nobody was looking at those tools.
So, I was early to the digital game and then I became very interested in social media when that came out. And I've always been fascinated by how what is about to come and hit the mainstream and emerging technology can help benefit creators. And obviously, specifically in my area of what my agency does, is we actually help musicians. So, that's a little bit about how I came to be interested.
And then of course, unless you've been trapped under a very heavy object for the last six months and unable to move or you don't read the news at all, you've probably been hearing, reading, seeing articles about AI specifically recently we've seen this Drake Weeknd news, this seemingly came out of nowhere track that got over a million views before Universal Music came and pulled it down. So, you've seen that maybe or you've just been seeing that maybe we should be scared if you have a day job, that AI is going to come and take your job away from you. So, there's a lot swirling around.
I got really interested, as I always do, about new technology and how I view everything I do, which is through the lens of marketing and publicity for creators, specifically musicians in this case, obviously. And I started looking at ChatGPT a few weeks after it came out and my thinking is always, how can we use this to improve, save time, work more efficiently, et cetera?
So, that's how I came to it, and I do love trying to figure out how to make what feels interesting, be actionable. Because if it's not actionable, it's just theoretical and theoretical is not useful to incredibly busy musicians who need to get a lot of stuff done. I started looking at ChatGPT and I started filtering what I do at Cyber PR through it and going, "Wow, this thing is a very powerful tool." That's obviously exactly what you were thinking about, which is why you've harnessed this tool to actually feed the backend of StreetTeam, Michael. So, you and I very much thinking alike in the how do we use this very powerful thing to be helpful.

Michael Walker:
That's so awesome. Yeah, and when I first saw you announce and start teaching about AI and how to use this tool, to me that it was a bit of a breath of fresh air, like a relief where I was really glad that it was someone like you who was starting to navigate this topic, which has such high upside and also has some important discussions around AI safety and regulation, and copyrights and royalties. There's so much to unpack there that we're still figuring out. But also I think just your perspective, having being around in this industry for 30 years, I'm 31 years old, so you've been here doing this for basically since the day I was born, which is amazing. And being able to navigate and see these huge movements with the internet and being able to see an impact of that and being ahead of the curve with that as well as social media and so upsides and also the downsides that we're figuring out with some of these tools, I think gives you a lot of perspective that's really valuable and important with a tool like AI.
So, I really appreciate you being here and talking about this and doing this. You're awesome. And maybe you can talk a little bit about, let's say that someone who's listening to this right now, they have heard a lot about AI. Maybe they've even gone to ChatGPT and typed in and been like, "Wow, this is really interesting. This is crazy." And you talked about how learning how to use that in a really practical way is so important. I'm curious, in your opinion, what are some of the biggest ... What's the big impact of AI as it is right now? What's the big opportunity for musicians if they're ahead of the curve and even though it's a new technology that's a little scary and a little weird, if they're willing to go all in and start using it and integrating it, what do you see as the big opportunity and what might hold people back from really capturing that opportunity or catching the wave as it crests?

Ariel Hyatt:
This is a really profound question that has a lot of levels and there's multiple phases of answers, but I want to reverse engineer that. So, the first thing you said are where the opportunities, and then the last thing you said is, and then where might be the place to have fear? So, here's the thing. What history has shown, and it doesn't matter if you've been in the industry for six months or for 30 years, is that there's always going to be something new.
A couple of years ago it was Spotify and oh, streaming and few years before that, it was something else and something else and MySpace and Napster, and [inaudible 00:08:26], and all that. So, there's always something that's always going to come. There's always going to be a new, disruptive thing. AI is not new, let's get really clear about that. It feels like it's new because it's just hit it's big moment where that's mostly thanks to ChatGPT coming.
But we have had Siri and Alexa for a long time. These are other iterations of AI, and we have ... Anytime you've been trying to communicate with your phone company or your cable company online and there's like a chatbot popping up, that's AI, and it's been used for years and we've been interacting in probably ways we don't even know, with AI. So, that's the first thing to understand. This is not new.

Michael Walker:
To that point, to social media. Really, the main algorithms that dictate where a significant amount of our attention energy goes is all AI driven. It's like the AI feeding the mechanism of the newsfeed. So, in a lot of ways, it's running our world right now already in terms of our attention.

Ariel Hyatt:
There's the dark side, right there, is sometimes when you have perspective and you're looking at things like, "Oh, maybe that's not the best way and not the best place to put our attention," but I totally digress. So, as a musician right now being confronted with this new thing, the way that I always like to look at it, and I think this is precisely the way that you are also looking at this, is, how can this be helpful?
So, there's a universal problem with being a musician or a creator, a creator of art, on every level. And the problem is the thing that ... the reason why and the thing that you're creating, now there's an interesting consideration here because now AI is actually helping us make music and that's weird, but bear with me. You want to do this thing, you want to make your music, you want to express who you are, you want to put this down on tape and you want to share it. That's why you're here. That's why you're listening to this. That's probably what gets you excited on a bad day or on a good day.
And on top of that desire has come a lot of problems and the problems are the market is flooded. There's a lot of artists, now everyone can basically walk around with a recording studio in their backpack, and that's a problem because there's too much music and for $30 or less, I can get all my music up onto Spotify and all the other DSPs, or I can just go for free on SoundCloud. So, the problem is not creating the art and distributing it, the problem is all the other things that you need to do. The exhausting, never-ending social media posts and content creation around how you're going to market yourself and the education you need to take yourself on to figure out who your audience is or what your brand is, or any of the things that you need to conquer.
This is why I'm excited about AI tools because they can be assistive in this domain. So again, I am looking at this through the filter of marketing, promotion, saving time. This thing can be powerfully used to generate text that you can post on social. It can be used to edit your bio, it can be used to create content that you might use to connect with your super fans. This is all reasons to really embrace and like the technology. Now, there's this other weird side which you've just asked in your question of should we use it to totally make our music? We've seen with Boomi this week, getting torn off of Spotify, that music that's fully generated by artificial intelligence and then uploaded and then streamed by robots is not useful or helpful at all to a creative industry.
Then we've got the Drake issue of someone who was very clearly gifted and talented at song structure, at writing a song. The fact that anyone thought that this was actually Drake and The Weeknd collaborating means whoever that person was that wrote that track and posted it, actually knew something about how to write a song and how to write a song in the style of Drake and The Weeknd, and that's how it got a million immediately and why it got taken down because it was actually threatening. So, all of this is to say that we are at a weird time where the law has not caught up to the repercussions. Yes, you'll see a Universal Music who has a lot of lawyers and a lot of power and a lot of influence because they partially own Spotify. They can take whatever they want off the DSPs rapidly.
Now, for those of us that don't have those layers and that power, we're in a weird place. And also, there's been few court cases so far about who owns this, where is my ownership of my own voice? And that will come, that will absolutely come. There's no way this is all just going to be not addressed, but we are in early days. So, the way I see this, and I know that you're probably going to have songwriters and other collaborators on this fabulous summit that you're doing, they can probably speak much more eloquently to how do you use these tools. But what I have been seeing and hearing from artists that write music is this can be really helpful if I'm just trying to search for a phrase and I can't quite figure out a lyric, or it can be really helpful if I'm stuck with writer's block and I have maybe the melody, but I don't have the hook. Or I have the verse, but I don't have the way I want to do an intro and an outro. These tools can be useful for inspiring creativity.
They're not here to replace us. They're here to augment us, but there's also going to be quite a journey around where the laws get put into place. So, as an early adopter, it is your job as a musician, I think, to educate yourself. What is this all about? What do you need to know? And unless you can get on the dance floor and dance with this stuff, you have no idea what it feels like. You got to catch the groove, if you know what I'm saying. So, that means, open up ChatGPT and play around with it. Look at Google, what are some top AI tools for musicians, and see what you discover and play around and use these tools so that you're not coming at this from a place of an uneducated place because that's not a good powerful context.

Michael Walker:
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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. So, 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. You can sign up for free. From there, you can check out all of the amazing contents, connect with the community, and sign up for the live masterclasses 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.
So well said. It sounds like one of the key themes that you're talking about is how AI, it doesn't necessarily replace or it is not something that's going to diminish your ability to be creative, but if you use it the right way, that can amplify your voice, that it can be helpful. Oh my gosh, it's just such an exciting time that we're at and also so many unknowns and we'll be figuring it out. But yeah, when I think of the Drake and The Weeknd AI model that sounds like them, that viral hit, and the fact that this is the worst that AI is ever going to be, you have to think that pretty, soon we're not going to be able to tell the difference between AI Drake versus actual Drake, and it brings up some ...

Ariel Hyatt:
Yeah, we need to be concerned. I'm not saying, "Oh, laugh that off," but I just interviewed the founder of Mixed and he was saying it would be a really good step for an artist to find ... I think it's called Studio 11. There's an actual website where you can go and make an AI version of your voice, so that you can understand what does that creation, what does that mean? And until you actually play around with that and you understand what it is and how it works, just sitting there and just judging it without actually knowing it, can be stressful.

Michael Walker:
There's always a group of people that are looking at what is this upcoming wave? What's this trending wave and how can I swim along with it? And if you catch the wave at the right time, then whoosh, you get this huge momentum and then there's a crash where it's like everyone that didn't catch the wave might end up getting hit by the wave temporarily before they swim back up to the surface.
And then there's a group of people who are chasing a wave that passed 10 years ago, and so you can't really catch up that wave. You have to look at what's coming now. So, it is a really fascinating time.
I just get this visual of what would it mean to be sitting at a computer and saying, "You know what? In my voice, I want an AI model that understands deeply who I am based on my voice, and I wanted to write 50 songs in my style and I want to click a button. And then it's like you have 50 fully written developed songs with your voice, with instrumentation." And then you choose, "You know, I actually really like this one or this one." It just seems like there's going to be such an explosion of creativity and content and people who aren't necessarily even traditional music creators might be able to create amazing quality songs. And certainly, to your point, I think 100%, the right approach is yeah, we can try to deny that there's a wave that's happening. We can try to deny the fact that this is happening or try to hide from it, but it's like it's here and it's happening, it's coming, and the best thing we can do is really swim along with that wave, learn how to surf along with it.

Ariel Hyatt:
No doubt. And it's ElevenLabs if you're interested in just playing around with, "Okay, what would my AI voice be and how could I create one swiftly?" I think until you practice, you can't be threatened. So, everyone at my agency now uses AI tools to help us generate, it doesn't replace us. And this is the other thing what you just said. So, this thing could spit out 50 songs that might be slightly iterative and sound like you and be a bit like your style, but the truth is, until you put your human touch on it, this tools as they stand right now, are only going to get you so far. That's the problem with Boomi and why it just all got taken off, from what I've heard, and I haven't heard any tracks, and I'm going to listen to some in the near future so I can understand. But when you listen to the tracks, they don't sound great. They don't sound like a human created them. They sound somewhat weirdly off. So, that's something also to understand, is these tools are here to help in your creative process, not to usurp your creative process at all.

Michael Walker:
100%, yeah. Yeah, there's elements of there's going to be disruption and there's going to be displacement of previous things that you used to have to do that no longer ... it doesn't make sense for you to do because now that space is freed up and there's a vacuum of space where you used to have to do something and now there's, "Wow, I've got 80% more time, what do I do with that space?" And then the question becomes, what do you do with that 80% of space? Do you sit on a couch and watch TV or do you take that?

Ariel Hyatt:
Yeah, don't go on TikTok. Don't go on TikTok, it'll all be gone immediately. Yeah, that's a really good question because that's the only thing that we all have of the exact same amount of, that's time. And the gift of what I'm seeing when I look through the lens of how many of you want to spend all your time figuring out what hashtags to put on your stupid tweets? I don't think that's going to be the use that most of us would choose. And so, this is what's really cool about these tools is they can help to shorten the time and then you can figure out what to do with it once you get it back.

Michael Walker:
100%, yeah. So, maybe we can talk a little bit about some of the specific practical examples of AI and using prompt ... maybe even just talking a little bit about prompt engineering and the idea of how important it is to ask the right questions or to know how to navigate with the tool just at that fundamental level.

Ariel Hyatt:
Totally. So, that's part of the art of really getting what you want out of these tools, and this is about asking it in the right way so that what you get back isn't, as I've been saying in my course, garbage in garbage out. Because if you just say, "Write me 10 tweets about my show coming up," it's going to come up with something like generic, "Hey, I've got a show coming up." Hashtag live music. No one is going to care about that kind of a message. But if you say, "I am a jazz, rock instrumentalist and I play electric violin in the style of ... " something amazing, fill in the blank, "And I am from Houston and I am playing my homecoming show at ... " fill in the venue. |I would love some tweets in my style written about my exciting homecoming show." Then you're beginning to give it some prompts so that it can return something that your fans might actually care about.
And so, prompt crafting, prompt engineering is important because you don't want this generic garbage. And unfortunately, what we're going to see and where we're sitting right now is there's going to be a tsunami of crap content coming out. Not only the music that's being made but imagery and a lot of text on the internet and we'll start seeing that, and it's our responsibility to make sure that what comes out that we get to use is good. And so, that's where prompt crafting and prompt engineering comes in. What's really fun is with a few strokes on your keypad, you will find some amazing prompts that you can save and use, aside from the ones that I'm giving away here today. There's plenty that will teach you, how do I get these machines to speak in my voice, to emulate my style? And that's when you begin to get really clever around how to prompt the machines.

Michael Walker:
So good. It is interesting too, the way that these models work is that they're like predictive engines and some people have criticized that they aren't as intelligent as they appear on the surface because really all they're doing is just predicting the next word in a sequence. And what's interesting is our human brains, how our brains work.
One, there's so much that we don't understand about our brains and we're still learning, so that's big. But it seems like in a lot of ways, our brains are predictive engines as well and we're predicting the next word. And technically, when I started talking in this sentence, I actually didn't really know where I was planning ... it is predicting one word at a time, which is interesting. Most of us think of ourselves as the conductor of ourselves, so it's a little bit frightening, if anything, when you look, you're like how much of our drives are actually subconscious and they're just happening and habitual. Learning how to ask a question is so powerful in everyday life just because when you ask a question, it creates a vacuum or it creates space. If you want to improve the quality of your life, improve the quality of the questions you're asking.

Ariel Hyatt:
Also, when you think of it in that term, I think it becomes a lot less intimidating as well. You also have to remember the reason why it seems so smart and it seems to understand, is you also have to remember it's large language training. It's trained on so many data points, it's trained on a huge amount of books and articles and classified information. We don't even know what it's trained on. It's not divulged, but the internet, obviously huge. It knows who certain people are, it knows the style of certain people. It's clearly read a lot of stuff or listened to a lot of stuff, ingested a lot of stuff in different languages. So, that's why it seems so clever. Imagine if you read every single book on a specific topic, wouldn't you be able to very, very easily come back with a response to anything in your domain?

Michael Walker:
I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on, from your perspective, maybe even just in the short term, what do you think are some of those big waves that are cresting right now, that if someone is watching or listening this right now and they've been on the fence or they haven't ... they can clearly sense that, wow, there's a tidal wave that's coming right now. I want to be able to swim along with it and start to capture it. What would your recommendations be for first steps for them to go and start learning how to surf and learning how to catch the wave of AI?

Ariel Hyatt:
It's like anything, you have to use it. Shelly Palmer who's a genius in the AI marketing space, months ago I started reading his daily newsletter just to stay on top of what was going on. And interestingly, Shelly Palmer is a very successful musician who has a whole musical career before he got into AI genius. And he had really great advice. And the advice is use the stuff, use ChatGPT or use your tool every single day. And it's with the use where you're going to begin to ... the fear will quell. So, back to that ocean analogy. If you jump in the ocean every single day, you're going to learn how to weather the storms, how to deal with waves, how to swim when the tide is in or out or whatever. And it's not going to feel scary and cold and terrifying. It's just going to be swimming. So, using this stuff is key.
Reading about what's happening in our industry, also key. Listen, you don't have to become a lawyer and understand all that, but it is our time to influence what happens when there's an early thing that goes on. And right now we are still in early adoption mode, even though a hundred million people have tried ChatGPT, there's still a very small percentage of humanity that have really used it. So, just understanding how it works, understanding the different tools, using it in the context of being an artist and a creator, and you don't have to take anything that it delivers to you. You don't have to use it if you don't want to, but just being open and curious about how can this augment or help me in some way? That's the right question to ask.
There's already a huge amount of statistical evidence that people are using these tools to help them with workflow, to help as their assistance. There's a reason for that. They're useful and helpful and they can shorten your time. As a publicist, just a few days ago I had this press release that was crushing me. I had three very separate very important parts of the press release that needed to be conveyed in one title of the release. And I couldn't figure out how to get them to all flow together. I was driving myself bonkers. And finally I went, "Okay," I opened up ChatGPT, I've said, "Please take this very long crappy title and give me 15 ideas of how we might write this in a way that it flows." And boom, 15 ideas came back.
Now, I took several pieces from six or seven of the different ideas and I thread them together because I've been writing press releases since I started my company a long time ago. It was so helpful to have a tool that just gave me a different way to look at my own words. So, there's an example right there, of a great way to use it. I didn't steal anything. I didn't take what it said word for word. I took my own ideas, I put them in, it reorganized them in a way that I couldn't figure out, and I got a great result. So, this is a way that you can think about this. It is how can you use it to condense ideas or save time?
But really, it's so funny. I've been working with artists and marketing for so many years and I remember when iTunes came out, this was before we had Spotify and all these artists would call me up and they were like, "I want to be on iTunes and I want to be on the front page of iTunes and I want iTunes to feature me." And that was the big thing. And, "I want to sell tracks on iTunes. I want to sell my 99 cent downloads," because that's where the zeitgeist was pointing us. And so, I would always ask, "Okay, have you ever purchased a track on iTunes?" And the look of shock on the faces of most of my artists. I'm like, "Okay, you're trying to understand something that you've never used." And I would say, "Listen, you need to immediately go to iTunes. You need to get an account, you need to put it on your computer, you need to play with it, and you need to buy other people's tracks for 99 cents and understand when they download, where are they going? Are they on your desktop? Are they in a hard drive? Where are they?" So, you're sitting here barking at me to fix your problem, but you don't even know where and how this begins.
Oftentimes people hire me for publicity and I say, "Great, what kind of music blogs would you like to be featured on?" "I don't read music blogs." Okay, maybe you should come to the party having at least a little bit of an understanding of what we're trying to accomplish together. So, that's my example of just saying to be fearful and scared but not understand how the tools work, will definitely not allow you to be masterful at them. And it was always my clients that came to me going, "You know what? I tried to do a little bit of publicity and here's where I fell down. Or here's the places where I got some action using SubmitHub and now I need some help." And I'm coming from an educated place as opposed to a place of, you fix this for me.
If you're trying to get on a ton of Spotify playlists and you don't already listen to Spotify playlists or you've never curated your own playlist, you might want to try that before you go hire someone that may or may not do a great job of helping you in that domain. Just saying.

Michael Walker:
It might be a fun experiment to play around with Artist AI, which if you're here right now and you have StreetTeam, then it's actually here in your accounts and you just have access to it just built in. If you don't have it yet, then you can get the free trial and get full access to Artist AI. And maybe we could do a little bit of a playground experiment with Artist AI together.

Ariel Hyatt:
Do you want to take one of my prompts and actually plug it in? Shall we use one of the ones that I've-

Michael Walker:
That's a great idea.

Ariel Hyatt:
... created? Let's do it.

Michael Walker:
Yeah, let me pull that up. Ariel has taken a hundred examples of prompts, so helpful to get you started. And this is going to be a bonus that she created just for you. And maybe we can go through and we can choose one of our favorites here to kick things off.

Ariel Hyatt:
Why don't we do the Instagram one right at the top. It says, "Give me three Instagram photo captions for a picture of ... " and about. So, we'll add that in. Okay, this is, let's say, a picture of me playing my guitar, which is a ... I don't know, Fender Telecaster or Martin, [inaudible 00:34:50] Martin in the style of ... Now, let's see. Choose an artist that you often get compared to, Ed Sheeran.

Michael Walker:
Or let's say Taylor Swift.

Ariel Hyatt:
Taylor Swift. Okay, give me three Instagram photo captions for a picture of or about me playing my guitar, which is a Martin. Should we give in the style of Taylor Swift? And then let's maybe add act as if you are a professional guitar player. Let's see.

Michael Walker:
All right, that's pretty interesting.

Ariel Hyatt:
Let's see.

Michael Walker:
Let's see what it comes up with.

Ariel Hyatt:
Channeling my inner Taylor Swift with my trusty Martin by my side. Guitar goals, Martin Pride, Taylor Swift vibes. Some people have coffee to start their day, I have my Martin guitar. Morning jam session, Martin guitar. Fabulous, feeling the music. It's funny, I was going to say maybe we want to prompt it to add hashtags, but you've already taken care of that. That's amazing. These are all great. Sometimes when you're just stuck, now maybe you'd want to take one of these captions and slightly edit it, but here's three perfectly useful captions that you can use. Like this caption, but add-

Michael Walker:
What do we want to change?

Ariel Hyatt:
... a sense of humor and then put ... Sure, here's some options. Just a Martin and me making beautiful music together. Taylor who? I want-

Michael Walker:
Slayer Swift.

Ariel Hyatt:
I wanted to date a Taylor, but I settled for a Martin instead, still just as in love. Okay, it's official. My guitar is more reliable than an ex-boyfriend, thanks Martin. So again, funny. Okay, so if that's not your brand, you can say, "Add a bit of heavy musician speak," or add ... there's so many ways that you can go with this.

Michael Walker:
So cool. Yeah, the ability to be able to iterate back and forth and have a conversation and say, "I like this piece, but I didn't like this piece." Or, "Can you make it a bit more like this?" Or, "I want to make it match my voice this ... " seems like such a powerful piece of the software, is being able to go back and forth like that and add your creativity to it.

Ariel Hyatt:
No-

Michael Walker:
This made me laugh though. I am a dad, so dad jokes do it for me, but-

Ariel Hyatt:
Right, exactly.

Michael Walker:
Slayer Swift.

Ariel Hyatt:
Again, it takes time to think about this stuff and look at this, it can just do this really quickly and you can go about figuring out how to save a lot of time, so that's fun.

Michael Walker:
Yeah, so look at this resource that Ariel put together with a hundred prompts. So yeah, I'm just barely scrolling down. Look at this. Look how much room we have left here. So you're definitely going to want to pick up this prompt generator. It's awesome. And maybe we do one more example here. What would be a really popular one you think that would be helpful to-

Ariel Hyatt:
Let's go down to the marketing and PR section because these are obviously ... you can see the social media stuff. I really love this idea of using this to really help you come up with your brand voice. Of course, it does actually have to do with cutting and pasting some stuff, so maybe we don't have that on hand. How about this? Can you give me some album release party ideas for ... let's grab the fan interaction and participation, the top one. Perfect.

Michael Walker:
Cool. I'm going to do a quick refresh just so we're starting with a clean slate in terms of conversation.

Ariel Hyatt:
Right, it's not going to want to write you more Instagram posts.

Michael Walker:
It's going to help, yeah, Martin guitar is-

Ariel Hyatt:
Taylor.

Michael Walker:
... part of the new show.

Ariel Hyatt:
So this again, is as a publicist, we get hired all the time for, help us figure out our record release strategy. And a lot of our artists play out and we're like, "Okay, let's make a really unique, fun, special idea around a live show." I think especially now that we're through being locked up in a pandemic and not ... being denied all the human interaction for so long, I think that people very much don't want a 45 minute set in a bar anymore. I think they want a little more something special. So let's see. Can you give me an album release party idea for my, let's think about Eli Lev folk pop record, all about participation. Let's go total Eli here, collaboration and world travel.

Michael Walker:
Love it.

Ariel Hyatt:
Of course, here are some release party ideas around the world theme. Decorate the venue with travel theme decorations such as globes and maps. Maps and suitcases. Have guests dressed up in clothing inspired by different cultures. Serve food and drinks from different parts of the world. Collaboration theme. Invite other-

Michael Walker:
Wow, I'll go there. I'll go to this party.

Ariel Hyatt:
... invite other local musicians to perform a few songs alongside you during your set. Display some artwork and photography from artists that inspired your songs and have Q and A. Folk inspired, create cozy atmosphere with candles and string lights and rustic decorations. Offer guests a warm beverage like hot cider or tea and have a bonfire outside.

Michael Walker:
Wow.

Ariel Hyatt:
These are all ideas you could build on any of these. I love around the world one, the globes, the maps, the suitcases. Invite people to wear maybe something that is meaningful for sharing their culture and history. What a fun thing to have people come to your record release party, but you're shining a light on them. This is perfect, Eli Lev. And funny, I think about him and Megan, they actually have candles and string lights in some of their amazing videos from the barn. So, this is great. Can you create-

Michael Walker:
I was going to say, can you create a step-by-step action plan to make this event happen? A release party? Just out of curiosity, sometimes the how-to guides where it just breaks things down into action steps. I'm like, "You kidding me?" That's just so helpful.

Ariel Hyatt:
Choose a venue, invite your guests, decorate. Amazing food and drinks. What's really fun, I have an idea after this. Entertainment, consider inviting local ... great. Merchandise, yes. Promotion and follow up, of course. Oh, StreetTeam is telling us what to do. Perfect, excellent. Okay, so now maybe can you make me a recipe for a cocktail using vodka, pomegranate, and cherries called the Around The World In Red?

Michael Walker:
Like that?

Ariel Hyatt:
Yeah, why not? Let's see. See what it does. Aha, vodka, pomegranate juice, cherry juice, lime juice, agave, lime wedges. Look at this.

Michael Walker:
Wow.

Ariel Hyatt:
So, you could make a special mocktail if you're not a drinker, or a cocktail that you can serve, right there. So, this is just some creative ways that you can use these tools to help you come up with ... and I'm sure you could say, "Can you give me an around the world playlist?" It will curate a playlist to play as people are walking in the venue, on and on. And the only limit is your imagination here. Really fun. Here we go. Africa by Toto. There you go.

Michael Walker:
Wow.

Ariel Hyatt:
London Calling, New York, New York.

Michael Walker:
See, and this is such a good example ... because the part that ... This wouldn't be here if it wasn't for that creative thought, which was that we wanted to add the playlist around the world. And so, this was formed from this question, this prompt that came up because of the way that your brain, your mind, through the experiences that you've had and through your expertise, were able to present. So, it's a great example of how we can work in sync or in tandem with technology and how it is important that you know that if you do have experience, then you're way better off than if you didn't know the right questions to ask.

Ariel Hyatt:
Totally. And then, I mean, you could drive yourself mental trying to put a playlist together or it could do a lot of the work for you. Pretty fun.

Michael Walker:
Cool, awesome. Thanks for helping me come on here and do a bit of a demo of this. And like we mentioned, amazing resource with a hundred prompts to be able to play around with this based on practical usage. Super valuable. So Ariel, let's get ready to wrap up for today. But thank you so much again for everything that you do that you've done in the past 30 years. I think it's provided a huge service to independent musicians everywhere. So, I appreciate you and thanks for staying on the cutting edge and helping to be a voice that's helping us navigate this new wave of AI.
Hey, it's Michael here. I hope that you got a ton of value out of this episode. Make sure to check out the show notes to learn more about our 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 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. And I look forward to seeing you on our next episode.