Michael Walker: Yeah, I think the thing that AI can't replace right now is community and human connection; like humans connecting with other humans. And there is a need for that. And so I think that by focusing on that thing that really has always been at the core of your value as a musician has always been around the community, but really by focusing on building digital communities around your music; doing live streams around your music, similar to what we're doing here with a daily live podcast. Yeah. I think creating a live experience for a community to come together every single day is a smart strategy that can really help you have a successful year in 2024.

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

 All right. So I'm really excited to be here today with my good friend and team member, Jared Christianson. Jared's been with us since pretty much the beginning of Modern Musician. You were one of our first team members and it's been so awesome to watch you evolve and grow in your own life, both personally and in terms of Modern Musician and your music career as well with Arkaik. You guys are crushing it. And as we are getting ready to roll out a big new update to our coaching offers with Modern Musician for 2024 and a big update to our podcast, we thought that it would be a good time to do a little bit of a jujitsu move here and for our podcast instead of me doing the interviewing for someone else to bring on Jared to actually interview me instead. So Jared, I so appreciate you and thank you for coming on here to interview me. And from here, I think I'll kind of take a step back and you can be the host and take us through the interview process.

Jared Christianson: Cool. Yeah, man. Well, thank you for having me on and getting to play host for today. We've done this before one time and it usually comes along with a big announcement or some kind of big update that we want to get the tea from Michael Walker. So, that's what we're going to do here today. I'll be interviewing you and we're doing this to kick off our daily live podcast initiative and kind of showing up daily for our community and especially you, Michael, taking the lead on this and being like: Hey, I'm gonna, I'm gonna show up. I'm gonna bring value. I'm gonna help educate and inspire our community every day so that they have some mind medicine to take each day. And maybe you're at work… when I worked at Hot Topic for a few years while they were letting me tour and you know, it was kind of a flexible thing. I'd be listening to podcasts every morning while I'm just stocking the shelves. And I think it's so cool when you can have like that source of education and inspiration and motivation in the form of a podcast that you can kind of just tune into and kind of get your daily uplifting from. So that's what we're kind of kicking off today. I'm stoked to kick this off with you, Michael and I’ve got a few questions prepared here. So, yeah, if you're ready, we can kick it in. Michael Walker: Let's do it.

Jared Christianson: Cool. So my first question is could you share your “why” for launching a live podcast from Monday through Friday? What inspired you to go live every day for our community?

Michael Walker: You know, I think the biggest motivation and inspiration for it is wanting to create a space for our community to come together live once per day, same time, every day. And especially at the time of recording this, we are witnessing this revolution with intelligence, with digital intelligence, with AI and we also have an explosion of content that is available on the internet… more information than any of us have time for to kind of go through and digest. And I think that one thing that AI can't replace and really a core part of what makes us humans is our communities and coming together as a community live. I think it's the reason that all of us as musicians have experienced these goosebumps that come when you go to a show and there's a live performance; live music. You have the shared communal experience and that's something that we've experienced for… it's really been a cornerstone of Modern Musician for the past six years has been live events and doing them virtually, doing them over zoom, or doing them together. We do that with our masterclasses and we do that with Modern Musician live and our success with music summit where we interview a bunch of folks. But we kind of figured; we're doing all these podcasts for our musician podcasts. It's been a great platform for me to connect with amazing leaders and entrepreneurs and musicians. And we thought: We’re already doing this… Why don't we just invite our community to be a part of the process so they can have a live audience with these podcasts and certainly the podcast has been an amazing platform and really an excuse for me to meet with really cool people and have fun conversations and hopefully provide a lot of value. And the podcast hit number two on Apple podcast for music interviews, and it's been a great way to connect with more people. But I really think that by doing these live, the live audience is just going to take it to the next level. It's going to help us connect more. It's going to give us a community, a place to come together and get access to some of these top tier industry professionals that otherwise  you wouldn't have an opportunity to meet. And so I think there's gonna be a lot of breakthroughs and connections that come from being here live in the room with these guests that we're connecting with. And the way that we're doing it with discord right now with the breakout rooms, where you get a chance to connect with each other afterwards, it's sort of… the way that I look at this live podcast, it's sort of like we're creating a talk show. Yeah. We have like a daily show, but we're doing it together with a live audience. We're doing it virtually and we're giving artists in our community a place to come together to network with each other and with these guests. I'm really excited for it. It's going to be amazing.

Jared Christianson: Yeah, man. I'm really excited for it too. I think the breakout rooms is a very cool way to like: all right, let's listen to what we're bringing on, like you said, industry leaders, music business professionals, artists that are really successful. And we're talking about certain topics. And then the breakout rooms gives us a chance to like, okay, like let's dive deeper on these topics and let's have a chance to really chat about them. And I've had fun just hanging out in there meeting other musicians. I think that as a musician, it can be really lonely. Most of the time, the people around you aren't musicians, like, unless you're really lucky, and maybe you hang out with all the musicians all the time, but for most of us  it's not like that, so, what we're doing here with the Daily Live podcast, with the Discord community, is giving artists that place to connect with other artists so that they don't have to go it alone. They can be around. It's like that the five people you hang around with most has an effect on you. So like, we want you to have a place to hang around other musicians and have that shared benefit from having a community. I guess the next question I have for you is like, moving on to the community side of things. Why did you choose Discord as the platform for our community?

Michael Walker: Yeah, great question. So we have explored a lot of different social media platforms and depending on the platform, there's a different type of content, different type of community feel that they get from it, different features that are involved with it. The reason that we landed on discord for these is because of the ability to integrate discord with, I don't want to get too down in the weeds and geeky with it, but with StreetTeam and with the code base that we're building discord has a really extensive API. And documentation for it and a way to really customize it. And with StreetTeam, one of our biggest themes of this year and this upcoming year is going to be your inner circle and building your community and creating the ability to access our community at different levels, at different tiers. So you can have one place where all your community comes together, but you have these different roles, these different levels of access based on your supporters. And so discord seemed the most naturally aligned for that, where we could really in a streamlined way, give access to different channels: different chat channels, different voice channels, different stage channels. And we want it to be able to lead by example. And for our artists we see it's one of the most powerful platforms to build a tight knit community. It involves the ability to do live stages like we're doing right now and to bring people on stage and to have gated access to different tiers and different channels based on that. So I would say that's the number one reason that we're working with discord right now. But to be totally frank, I'm not married to discord as a platform long-term, and eventually it could make sense to build the entire community on StreetTeam, or it could make sense to use another platform as well, if there was a better platform that also offered the level of API integration and the ability to have the different roles and different levels as well. But right now, discord seems like the perfect platform for it. And I've really enjoyed digging into it so far.

Jared Christianson: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I know with what we teach at Modern Musician, we don't just teach making offers and being able to build an email list or create traffic and create new listeners and fans and stuff. But we also really heavily encourage artists to have a community. And I see what we're doing with Modern Musician is: we're always doing our best to walk the walk and use the tools that we recommend artists use or use the platforms that we recommend artists use because we learn things. We have an amazing team; a really smart team. We have software people on our team like Spencer, our software lead, you, Michael, Ben… you guys are all building software and doing this extra stuff. So when you talk about API integrations, that's kind of a soft geeky software thing, but what we're doing is we're helping artists; we're creating these easy one click integrations for you to have tiered access for your community. It kind of makes sense to use discord as well because you're not fighting an algorithm. If you have a Facebook group for your band or for your music project, those are great because you can have a place where your email list can hang out and interact and another sort of social media channel for you to post content and interact with your fans. But You still are fighting against every other post in the feed. There is a little bit of that pushback from the algorithm. And you don't have that in discord. You're not fighting like other people's content. It's just your own content.

Michael Walker: Yeah. There's some very cool things in discord that you can do in terms of push notifications: it's probably one of the most powerful platforms in terms of if you tag a certain role in discord, which basically like: whenever someone joins your community, you could give them a tag called fan. And then if you typed in @fan and then sent a message, then anyone that has the discord app would actually get a push notification on their phone, if they have notifications turned on, which I think by default they are, and of course people can like turn off and on according to how they want to receive them, but the fact that's included by default is extremely powerful. And it's not the way that it works in most of these different social media platforms that you can give a push notification just for your community.

Jared Christianson: That's yeah, that's super powerful. Cause I know artists that have built their own apps just to have push notifications, but you can just do it on discord and you don't have to build your own app which takes so much time and energy and money. So, yeah, it sounds like it’s discord for at least for now and for 2024. I know that at Modern Musician, we're really focusing on community in 2024, like both our Modern Musician community and artists building their community because that's really where you're gonna have success is by having a vibrant community of people who support you, who know you, understand you, get what you're doing, and your mission. I see you tagged the artists in there… there's so many cool things you can do with Discord, so I appreciate you taking the time to explain what we're doing with Discord. And I know we're still working out  some technical stuff, but I love that your personality and the way that you work is like, you kind of just push through the technical obstacles and eventually make it work instead of just giving up. So I'm stoked to see where this goes. 2024 modern musician discord: it's going to be where it's at. So I'm excited for it.

Michae Walker: Me too. It's been a lot of fun.

Jared Christianson: Cool. I would love to hear, given that we're almost in 2024, what do you feel like are the biggest challenges musicians are going to face in this coming year? What do you see as some challenges that may be inside of this: Challenge is the seed of an opportunity, but what do you feel like are the big things for 2024 for musicians to overcome or turn into an opportunity?

Michael Walker: Yeah. Yeah. That's such a good question. You know, I think that like you mentioned, every challenge is like a two sided coin with every challenge.  There actually is an opportunity and like the opportunity comes. You can't separate it from the challenge. I think that the biggest challenge/opportunity is going to be revolving around artificial intelligence, I would say for musicians. And let me put it this way: There's two different types of challenges. One is the fundamentals and the principles. And those don't change. Those are very fundamental. They basically stay there and they're always going to be there. And what are those? Those are the three pillars that we go so deep on, right? It's the artist's identity. It's the fan base. It's the revenue. So those are always going to be the core three challenges is 1) How do I express myself in a way that's true and authentic to me that kind of carves away everything so I can really present myself and express my music and create the best quality product possible, right? So that's always going to be a challenge. It's going to keep being a challenge of 2024 is how do you improve and hone your craft? 2) is growing your fan base. It's always going to be a challenge and an opportunity of: how do I reach more people? How do I take what I'm currently doing, put it in front of more people, and gain more traffic? How do I build deeper relationships with my fans? How do I build a community? And then 3) revenue, just making it sustainable, making an income. It's always going to be a challenge. It's going to continue to be a challenge in 2024; how do I generate more income so that I can continue to invest more and more time, more money, and generate more freedom in my life and in my music career to be able to create the lifestyle that I want. So those challenges are always going to be there and it's sort of like that Miley Cyrus song of [singing] It's always gonna be another mountain. And you know, the truth is like, you know in life and career and goals, there are material goals and things you'll achieve nd when you hit your targets, if you 10X, all of those things, if you generate, if you created 10 times better quality music, more music, they felt more proud of you got 10 times more fans this next year, if you got 10 times more revenue this next year, then those three things would still be a challenge for you the following year. You'd be like: okay, how do I continue to reach more people? How to make a bigger impact? So those things. I've always been, I've always been there. They'll always continue being there. At least they're a lot slower to change than everything else. Although what I'm about to bring up, I actually could throw all of it into disarray just because that is the time that we live in is the time of approaching a potential singularity that just makes it very difficult to predict what happens afterwards. So I think the other biggest challenge or opportunity is around digital intelligence and AI and how that impacts and affects our role as musicians.

I think you were all going to be asking a question. What does it mean to be a Modern Musician in today's day and age when Artificial Intelligence can help anyone with a keyboard type in: I want to write a song about this and then in a few moments it generates an amazing song that sounds like a professionally recorded studio recording of their favorite artist singing a song about them and their life story about this breakup that they just had with their relationship. And if anyone has the ability to create that level of music, then it's going to change the role of what it means to be a musician and what we're creating music for. I'm not just like people creating their own like fans creating their own music, which I think is going to be a big trend that we're about to start experiencing, but also as artists we have access to these tools that can get us from zero to 90 extremely quickly where we can write an entire song, an entire track, all the instruments in a few clicks. And then we can basically decide: I want to fine tune this, or I'm going to make this I want to tweak it. But I think that is going to get smaller and smaller in comparison to how quickly we can generate this content. That's going to exacerbate an existing challenge or issue, which is just the amount of content that exists online and the amount of music and market economics, supply and demand is really the key lever point. Capitalism and economic theory has always been about this, like supply and demand when there's a limitless supply of something, then the demand for it goes down. If you have unlimited supply. If you have a small supply, if you have a scarce resource, then the demand for it; the value of it, the economic value goes up as long as the demand is higher than the supply. And that's why you see a lot of people… NFTs there's a way to plug in this type of drop mentality where there's a drop and not just NFTs but anything where there's a scarce resource. Like, shoes, like shoes are a big one where like for me, it's still, it's kind of takes me some time to wrap my head around just what's happening with shoes and drops and how people are just losing their mind for these limited drops of these shoes and people are reselling them and it's just this whole thing. My wife does it for baby clothes. There's a company called posh peanut that does these drops for limited edition prints. And so for a musician I think that this is one of the reasons that we're so focused on building the music relic marketplace and creating authentic additions of your music, because in a world where people have unlimited access to your music and have unlimited access to all kinds of music, how do you actually create real value or real scarcity around it? I think that one of the ways to do it is by actually having these limited additions in what we're calling music relics. So I think that those are a big opportunity. It's one of the reasons that we're so focused on that. I think the other big opportunity right now, that's also going to be a challenge is: What can AI not replace? And at the time of recording this… I just saw a video that came out, I think a week ago, and it was an AI model that was ChatGPT, where you could type in a phrase and it would create an actual full song with the lyrics and it would actually have a coherent song, and it's pretty good. It's pretty good. I mean, if you're a musician, you can listen to it and be like: okay, like this is kind of off. It's a little bit weird. It's rough around the edges, but we're really not far away from having fully generated songs. I think the thing that AI can't replace right now is community and human connection; like humans connecting with other humans. And there is a need for that. And so I think that by focusing on that thing that really has always been at the core of your value as a musician has always been around the community, but really by focusing on building digital communities around your music; doing live streams around your music, similar to what we're doing here with a daily live podcast… Yeah. I think creating a live experience for a community to come together every single day is a smart strategy that can really help you have a successful year in 2024. 

Jared Christianson: Yeah, I mean, there's a lot to unpack there. As far as AI goes, I do see the challenge and the opportunity. You gotta really be careful about your mindset, I think, when it comes to next year we're going to probably see even more shocking AI type stuff related to music, it doesn't really help to have like a negative mindset around it, because that's one lens you could look through it, but like you said, what can AI not replace is a good kind of question to ask, and it can't replace friendship, community, the feeling of being together around the same cause and the same interests. I just challenge everybody to kind of figure out how they can reframe… if they're looking at this as a negative thing, how they can reframe it as a positive thing because like what you said, you can type in maybe a few prompts, like: I want to create a hip hop song with keyboards and I want it to be this BPM and you could just hit go and it could do, like you said, 90 percent of it for you, but that 10 percent might be where we come in as humans to make it that much better and that much different from just completely AI generated. But it could be a huge tool like, like ChatGPT right now, to me, I see that as a huge tool. It's a brainstorming tool. It's a writer tool. If you need to write something to your fans, like an email, I know a lot of artists have trouble: what do I write in an email? I've been, I have an email list, but I don't know what to do…. You can just ask ChatGPT like I want to write to my fans. I'm not sure what I want to write about. Can you give me a few ideas and then it'll spit out some great ideas and then you can take that and run from there. Like, can you give me like three bullet points on what I should talk about?

I do think that you need to add some human touch to ChatGPT to the language… I think it's that 10 percent. You got to get good at that 10%. And start using the technology, because you're probably going to get left behind right? It's going to get to a place where like, if you're not doing this, the people who are just being more productive or their output is higher. Like you said with the things that aren't going to change: becoming the best artist you can be, your artist identity, building a fan base, reaching new people, and generating revenue, those are always going to be challenges. But yeah, I definitely see the next year… I hang out with my Modern Musician crew and we don't look at it from a place of fear. We're like: Whoa, this is like, cool. This is exciting. There's an opportunity in this challenge that's coming up that we can take advantage of. So yeah, I appreciate your thoughts on all of that.

Michael Walker: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the bottom line is it's going to unlock a new level of human capability, right? And like every tool that's come before, it's going to create a vacuum of certain things that we used to have to spend our time and our energy focused on and doing. Thousands of years ago, we would have spent mostly all of our time and energy foraging for food, and that would have been like our life was just focused on looking for food all the time. And now that we actually have systems and processes to like that part's taken care of now we get to explore and do artwork and spend more time doing different things that aren't necessarily directly related to looking for food and hunting and gathering. There's always going to be… when you create that vacuum, we find things to fill in the space with. Right? So I think the question is going to be, what's the vacuum that gets created? What are some of those roles that currently we're spending time and energy doing that will just create an open space? And then what we decide to fill in that space with is going to be the question that helps us have direction.

Jared Christianson: Absolutely.

Michael Walker: And I agree, I think like focusing on like, especially right now… this technology is a equalizer in a big way, like huge equalizer that people who don't have any experience playing instruments, people who don't have experience writing songs, people who don't have experience producing songs, or arranging songs are going to be able to just have an idea of what they want and have something created at a very quick high level rate that, absolutely, there's going to be zero way to compete with it unless you're also using that tool. You know, I've heard it described that it's relative to analog recording versus digital recording. And when digital recording first came out, there was a lot of pushback and hesitation around what that transition would look like. We just interviewed Bobby Ozinski on the podcast and he was talking about this. He lived through this. And apparently people were even concerned about just like, it was going to be harmful to our ears hearing digital recordings. And the bottom line was that what it ended up doing was professional studios with tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of analog equipment, now, a kid out of college and his dorm room can record in the box with a digital audio workstation (DAQ) and be able to compete with someone that has tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars. And so what that does is it helps to create an equalization and the thing that doesn't change, though, is the creative energy, like the thought, the imagination and like the impulse, right? So, it is like: we have an advantage, right? If you're a musician, you have an advantage versus someone who isn't a musician in that you know how to think  how to guide your thoughts and imagine music in a way that not everyone has. And so, just, our ability to use that imagination and then apply it towards using these tools to express that I think are going to be super important this next year. 

Jared Christianson: Yeah. And another like last tidbit on what AI can't replace is: You on stage too. They're not going to put a robot. [both laughing] Well maybe.

Michael walker: Some of these AI avatars that they're like the likeness that they can kind of create. Like I know that they've created some like Michael Jackson's replicas. I don't know. Yeah. That's, I, that was literally the first time that I just thought about it like that, but that’s literally the first time I even thought about it like that.

Jared Christianson: I went to a show this Friday and it's just like: the community, that the performers on stage, that's not going to change. We still want human to human interaction in the same room, in the same place.

Michael Walker: Yeah, a community. 

Jared Christianson: Yeah! And however you create your music, like who cares? Like, is it a good song? And then can you go perform it for people? That stuff's always going to be the same.

Michael Walker: Yeah. Yeah. Community. Like we talked about the beginning, like forming that community, that's one of the core functions of humanity has been to like form these societies and communities coming together. So yeah, I mean, I don't want to, we could really go down a rabbit hole here and maybe we want to go there at some point or get there, but when we start talking about community and like the future of community… there's devices like Neuralink that are being created to help us to interface with our thoughts and to be able to communicate with each other, community, communicate, communication… our ability to translate our thoughts into a form that we can exchange with someone else and then their brain can digest it. And through that communication, our brains can come, our thoughts can come together to form sort of this higher level community; this entity. It'll be wild to see what happens if we up the bandwidth and we go from dial-up internet to extremely high speed bandwidth. And instead of talking and sort of in a very dial-up way, translate these thoughts into words that we have to understand and share these words, and then I communicate them to you and then you digest them and interpret them into meaning; back and forth. If we were able to increase the bandwidth by a factor of a thousand or a hundred thousand between us, then you can only imagine what that would do to humanity and to our society to be able to communicate that quickly. And that's, it seems like that's one of the biggest opportunities with a device like Neuralink.

Jared Christianson: Yeah. It's a crazy time to be alive.

Michael walker And there's a YouTube channel I watch where his catchphrase is… it's called two minute papers. It's awesome. And he's covering a lot of the AI stuff, but every video at some point he'll be like, what a time to be alive. I love it. That's like his catchphrase.

Jared Christianson: Seriously. Cool. Well, as we're kind of winded down for the podcast today, is there anything that you want to talk about coming up as, as far as events that Modern Musician’s doing outside of the live podcast? And then what to look forward to as far as our daily live podcast that we're going to be doing, any updates on what's coming down the lane. 

Michael Walker: Yeah, absolutely. So I'd say, first of all, depending on where you're watching this if you're not watching this or listening to this in our community live right now, and you'd like to be a part of the community, then we'll have a link in the show note that you can go to sign up for the community completely for free. And you can actually come on here and be here live, ask questions, connect with us, with the guests on stage with each other. It's the best place to experience this. So I would say that's where I'd recommend going if you're listening to this on the podcast right now, click on the link in the show notes, come join the community, come hear live.

And then I would also recommend for everyone… and this goes for: if you're an artist in our community or your a client, or you're a team member; if you're listening to this right now I would recommend, if at all possible, working your schedule, blocking off a 1 pm Eastern every weekday to be able to come here live for the space where we're going to be doing networking, we're going to be giving you the opportunity to connect with these industry professionals, with each other. And we're also going to be doing free masterclasses during this slot as well. So this Thursday at the time of recording this, that'll be in a few days, we are hosting a masterclass all about YouTube and we have one of our platinum artists who has generated over 500 million views on YouTube is going to be coming on, doing a masterclass, teaching you how you can be successful with your music on YouTube. We have a bunch of masterclasses in the pipeline that we're going to be doing here live at 1 pm every weekday. And so I would definitely recommend just carving out that space in your calendar to be able to come here, be live. And if you're a part of our artist development suite, so if you're one of our clients, then you're going to get access to all the masterclasses for free. Otherwise all the masterclasses will be available for $97 is the initial price for like lifetime access to it. Or if you're here live, to make it as accessible as possible, we want to air it for free live. So basically if you would like to get the value from it, then you can be here live, get it for free and afterwards, if you miss it, if you can't attend it live for any reason, then you can always pick up a masterclass based on what's most valuable to you.

Jared Christianson: Awesome. Yeah, we're going to be busy here in discord in 2024. Michael, thank you for taking the time to be here and to get us up to speed with everything going on with Modern Musician.

Michael Walker: It's been great to connect with you guys today. Thank you for helping us kick off our first live podcast. The first time we've ever done it on a Monday. So yeah, I think that we're gonna dial in our systems to make sure everyone's aware of it and can come to it. Normally we've been doing these on Fridays at 4 pm Eastern, but really what I would recommend for everyone is if you'd like to be a part of this live community and the coaching and the community and the connecting with the guests, then I would set aside a slot on your calendar for 1pm Eastern every weekday to be able to come here live and we'll be able to connect more together. 

Jared Christianson: Awesome

Michael Walker: YEEAAHHH!

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 guest today, and if you want to support the podcast then there’s a few ways to help us grow.

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