Logan Thomas: It's kind of the best way I can think to describe this. It's kind of like: I'm sure we've all experienced when you're single it's hard to get the attention of a potential partner. But when you're in a relationship, it seems like the opposite sex gives you way more attention. It's like: when you have it, you don't need it, and when you want it, you can't get it. Very similar thing, where if you're really focused on maybe getting a number 1 song, for example, and that's your goal, it hurts to not have it. But when you kind of let that go and just focus on doing the things to get you there, one day you'll look up and be like: Oh, I have that thing that I was working at and I wasn't even really thinking about it. I think it really does kind of work in a very counterintuitive way like 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 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.

What's going on, everyone? Welcome back to the Modern Musician podcast. So I'm excited to be here today with the one and only Logan Stewart. Logan is someone who, gosh, how long has it been now? Probably over 3 years since we connected and you came on the Modern Musician? 

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.

Logan Thomas: Close to 4. Yeah. It was like right around COVID.

Michael: Yeah, right around COVID. I'll never forget. Logan, like a lot of our team members, started out as a client and went through our program and quickly rose through the ranks and it was just killing it. And I'll never forget when you came into the program, Logan, cause I remember hearing your music and just being like: This is so good! This is fantastic! It made me really proud to be doing what we're doing. Like, man, this is cool that we get to work with such talented artists. I remember being in our kitchen, dancing around as a family to One More Chapter. That was when our son Xander was, I think, under 1. He was around 1-year old. Maybe a little bit younger. Logan is both a very talented artist and singer, a guitar player, and he is our artist success director at Modern Musician. So if you're a part of our Gold Artist Academy and you've gotten 1:1 coaching from our team, then Logan's really leading the charge in terms of overseeing our whole fulfillment and coaching. He's someone that has a ton of experience, both himself being a musician, and he won our gold artist award for generating over 6 figures in a single year with music, which is amazing. But, he also has a lot of experience with working with other artists now as well and seeing what's working and what are the common challenges or pitfalls that artists are coming up against. So I figured this would be a really good opportunity to connect with him and be able to share what he's seen from his experience working directly 1:1 with artists, what separates the people who are most successful than the people who are struggling. So, Logan, thank-you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.

Logan: Glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Michael: Absolutely. So maybe we can just dive right into it. So you've had a lot of experience now, both personally and working with artists, and I'd love to hear from your perspective: What do you think are some of the biggest pitfalls or the biggest mistakes when artists are either coming into our program or just in general, that you see that really prevents them from having a successful music career?

Yeah. I think there's. Two ways to answer this question are going to be two approaches. Logan: I think there's two ways to answer this question and two different approaches. I think there’s definitely a whole conversation around what are the things that you can do that lead to higher chances of success, and what are the types of actions that make a bigger difference than others? I think that's a whole conversation we can have, but I'd like to start with what I think is kind of the elephant in the room that most people don't want to think about, or just don't really think is as important as it really is, which is just time. That can look a lot of different ways and it is true that sometimes you get a big break you have a lot of success earlier on, but I definitely say that all the artists we've worked with, and for me particularly, there's this element of time that you have to do something for long enough to number 1, become knowledgeable in whatever industry it is, whatever endeavor it is to learn the ropes, but also there's some kind of saying about luck is where preparation meets hard work or something like that.

Michael: Yeah

Logan: When you get lucky, per se, if you're not actually up to par with whatever the actions that you're doing. So if it's music, if you get this huge opportunity for a record deal but you haven't really honed your craft, that's not really luck. It means you're not prepared. Really, luck is when you're prepared and you happen to get the right opportunity at the right time. I'd say the reason that's so important is what that looked like for me is: there was this long period of honing the craft. I really wanted things to happen earlier, and I tried and failed earlier on to make things happen before I was really ready for it. So I think it's really important to understand that there is this time frame. I think in the earlier stages, it feels like it's longer than you want it to be, but in the long-term, it's a lot shorter than you really think. I think it was maybe Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg or some tech guy that said: you overestimate what you can accomplish in 1 year, but you underestimate what you can accomplish in 3 years, which I think is super true. It's like when you look at a shorter time scale, you tend to be a little over-optimistic, but the longer that goes out, you tend to actually undersell what you're able to accomplish. I definitely saw that play out in my own life, which is that I really think that it could happen really fast, and I thought that I could do things in the course of a few months, maybe a year. I fell short of those goals, but at the time, what I thought my next 3-5 years looked like, I've now way surpassed what I thought that was at the time. So again, I think time is really this important element and it's kind of hard to talk about cause it's so different for everyone, and there definitely are some artists that put out their first song ever and they blow up and that's awesome, but I think just being willing to stick with it, whatever that looks like for you, just not giving up, continuing to push forward and whatever that looks like for you is probably the key ingredient before we even get into anything else.

Michael: That's so good. Yeah. What that reminds me of is: a few days ago we had a guest on the podcast, Adam McInnis. and he took one of my favorite analogies, which is the planting a seed and like nurturing it and how there's kind of this process where the fruit grows and you need to nurture the tree before the results come and there's kind of that initial phase where you have to surround yourself with the right influences and kind of have the right fertilizer, and you need to continue to tend to the tree before you actually experience the fruits. But he brought this element to the analogy of ripening the fruit. And like, if you try to pick off the fruit before it's ready, then it actually doesn't taste very good. There is an element of what you're describing with time where sometimes fruit does ripen at different timescales, but it is important to have that ability to keep doing the right things, keep showing up and have faith that what you're doing, you're moving in the right direction. So along that line, I'd love to hear your thoughts around when someone is experiencing a struggle or a challenge, which happens in life, that one certainty is that you’re always going to have challenges or struggles or issues.How do you recommend that they cope with that, and how do they keep their eye on the prize? When they're in an earlier stage where the fruit hasn't fallen yet and they have a strong calling and this is something they really want, but the fruit hasn't fallen yet.

Logan: If I could sum it up in one phrase, it would be detachment from the outcome, which is one of those things that's much easier said than done, but especially something that's so close to your heart and something creative like music, it's really intertwined with a lot of emotional feelings of wanting to be validated or wanting to be loved. A lot of that is really kind of maybe some baggage attached to wanting to do music as a career, for example. So even though it's really maybe difficult to do this until you kind of train yourself to, I think it's really important to say: okay, like I have this goal, I want to be an artist or I want to make music. I'm going to focus on just doing the actions that I know will get me there. And definitely a big part of the journey is figuring out what are those actions that will move the needle. But you also have to be willing to say: I'm going to commit to doing this for 3 years or something, and I'm not going to pay attention to the fruits of the labor. So if every single day you're looking at: okay, well, what's come of this? If that's the way that you're measuring your success earlier on, you're really going to be doing yourself a disservice compared to saying: I'm going to commit to doing these actions and not really even pay attention to what I'm getting out of it until, I think it can be helpful to pick a timeframe because as humans, when you say indefinitely, I'm never going to pay attention to the results, you're not going to motivate yourself. I do like that timeframe of 3 years. It's, again, long enough to really get a lot done, but say: I'm going to do these things daily and whether it's writing songs or, depending on your phase of your business, more about marketing, but figure out those actions, commit to doing those actions, and don't measure success based on the results, measure success based on the fact that you did that action. So if you write 100 songs, don't measure success on those songs about whether 1 of them got on the billboard charts. Measure the success based on the fact that you wrote the song. And of course, the farther you get along, that does kind of shift, and eventually you do want to start measuring those things and paying a little more attention so you can improve them. I think earlier on, if you're feeling discouraged, you're probably just trying to do too much too soon. You need to focus more on the actions you're taking more so than on the results that are coming from them. The flip side of that is that when you do focus mainly on the actions, that does bring the results because you just get locked into the process. The best way I can think to describe this. It's kind of like: I'm sure we've all experienced when you're single it's hard to get the attention of a potential partner. But when you're in a relationship, it seems like the opposite sex gives you way more attention. It's like: when you have it, you don't need it, and when you want it, you can't get it. Very similar thing, where if you're really focused on maybe getting a number 1 song, for example, and that's your goal, it hurts to not have it, but when you kind of let that go and just focus on doing the things to get you there, one day you'll look up and be like: Oh, I have that thing that I was working at and I wasn't even really thinking about it. I think it really does kind of work in a very counterintuitive way like that.

Michael: Yeah, that's so interesting that that relationship between want and desire and getting the thing and how sometimes, if you're too attached to the outcome, then it actually sabotages it. While at the same time, if it's harnessed in the right way, having a goal or having a strong desire can be an incredibly motivating thing that really helps you get it. So maybe we could dig a little bit deeper into that, like finding that balance. But I love that timeframe that you talked about: really kind of zooming out and looking at like 3 years as sort of like a big picture movements around your bigger goals and whether you're moving in the right direction or not. I also personally really liked the year-long timeframe from a standpoint of… I know for paradise fears, when we were just getting started we basically graduated from high school and we had to make a decision. Do we go to college? The three of us had full-ride scholarships and I was planning on being a dentist for most of my life. So deciding to go all in on the band was a really difficult decision to make. One conversation that changed my life was with one of our first producers, Jordan Schmidt, who, at the time, was just an up-and-coming producer. Now he's gone on to become a multi-platinum producer, very successful in the country world. But he gave us some advice early on that totally changed my life and our band's career, which was: when we recorded our first EP with him, we were in the studio and that was when we were making that decision point around, do we go to college or do you go all in on the band? At the time, we were thinking we're going to go to college together and do the band at the same time on the side. He stopped us for a second and he said: it depends on your guys' goals, but if your goal is that you want to be successful through music, then it's not going to happen if you go to college and you're doing it at the same time. It's the bands that go all in and they burn their bridges are the ones that are actually successful with it. I mean, it's okay if you want to do it on the side and it's more of a hobby, but if you really want to be successful with it, then you have to go all in. For us what that led us to was figuring out that we actually could “go all in” for a year and defer our scholarships. Basically we gave ourselves a 12-month time frame to say: we're going to go all in on our music for these 12-months and see how it's going. If it's working out, then we'll keep doing it, and if not we can go back to college. But like what you're saying right now, I feel like giving yourself that time scope, and I think a year is a great period of time because you can really get some significant things done in a year, at least to know that you're on the right track. You can kind of chart your progress and be like: wow, in the last year I went from just starting out with 10 email subscribers or 100 email subscribers. Now I have several thousand, right. And you can kind of see some serious growth. But yeah, it does seem like making that decision to go all in versus tiptoeing around it or not fully committing is sort of like in that tree analogy, digging up the roots every few minutes early on to check it and be like I don't know if the fruits are really growing yet. And it's like, if you dig up the roots and you don't continue to nurture it, then that actually can get in the way of the development of it. So how about as it relates to… I love this point that you made around when you're consistent doing the right actions in the short-term, that leads to longer term results. And so if you can let go of the attachment, just focus on doing the right things day by day, that's going to help you get there. So in your opinion, what are the right actions and the right habits that artists should be building to be able to create a healthy career?

Logan: Yeah, great question. I think it's something that evolves over time and depends on where you're at. I definitely like looking at things in seasons and there's some seasons where you might be focused more on the creative side or the business side. With that being said, I think it's also good to have some of that going on at all times. But I think it depends on your phase. For me, what that looked like was earlier on, it was all about writing more songs. I perform a lot, so doing vocal exercises and lessons and just practicing the craft itself. I think it depends on what kind of person you are. Some people are maybe too self critical and some people are maybe not self critical enough. So I think the first thing to realize is: try to get some honest feedback. Is your music there yet? Is it good enough? Because if you do all the right things on the business side, but the music's just not quite there yet, you're not gonna get to where you need to go. Same thing if you have great music, but you only focus on making more music, you don't focus on the marketing/the business side of it, then that's going to get you so far. I think there's no right answer there. It's really about being honest with yourself, and if you have trouble doing that, then maybe getting some outside perspectives from people that can give you real honest feedback. Are you at the level of your music's quality enough that it can stand a chance in the industry overall? So I’d say if you're earlier on, if you're not really sure, I'd say, actually regardless where you're at, it's always a good move to make more music and keep writing. So let's say, maybe the central thing to being an artist is to write more songs. Even artists that are pretty talented, if you have a natural knack for songwriting, if you just write 10 songs and put it on an album, those might be good songs. I had a lot of experience playing in bands. So as a band we would spend a whole day or a week or so writing 1 song. And that song might've turned out to be pretty good, but we kind of just were like, okay, well we have the song now, so let's go play it and go make an album. When I got out of the band side of it and more into being a solo artist and writing, I realized like: no, you should write as much as possible and pick the best. Say you write 100 songs, pick the top 10 or 20. Even if you can write 10 songs and all of those 10 songs are pretty good, if you write 100 songs and pick the top 10 out of that, those songs will be great. So I think that's maybe the foundational thing as an artist is just write more songs; make more music. That's simple and probably should go without saying, but I think it is important to reiterate because it sounds logical when you say that, but I think a lot of us as artists do tend to just pick the first thing that comes out of our head and like: okay, we have the song now, let's go do something with it. And sometimes that does work, but I think what's more replicatable is actually just making a habit out of writing, and choosing only the very, very best of what you create. I live in Savannah, Georgia, and there's a big art school here called SCAD, really like nationally renowned, internationally known art school, and some of the teachers have a saying called “kill your babies”. [Michael laughs] And the idea is: you might create this piece of art and you think it's amazing you're so attached to it, but you have to be okay with completely trashing that and making something new and better. Again, much easier said than done. That can be really uncomfortable, but that's how you get to your best work, I think.

Michael: [sarcastically] I mean, I feel the same way about having actual babies too. [both laughing]. Sorry. 

There's so much good stuff in there. This is an analogy I come back to a lot as it relates to improvements and describing doing the right things and learning from them and iterating. But it sounds like what you're describing with one of the right habits to do is to keep being creative, keep creating new music, honing your craft, and at the same time, like you have to be marketing it and getting it out. I think probably the best example that I can think of as an artist who's doing this really well and when she shared her story, this was like a core part of it was Erica Mason. She described how her process of honing her craft was just creating that daily music; creating that daily moment and then putting it out. When she created that 30-second hook and put it out every day, that actually gave her that feedback and, similar to shooting a free throw, if you want to get good at making baskets, it's kind of like everytime you write a new piece of song and every time you release it, it’s like you're shooting a free throw and if you don't have any feedback, if you're not putting it in front of people and actually getting their genuine feedback, then it's sort of like you're blindfolded. Sure, you could grab the basketball and just make music and throw it out, but you have no idea what's actually happening there, or if it's going in the basket. You don't really have a goal, whereas, if you do have a target or goal, you're getting feedback from people, then it sort of allows you to see where you've missed the mark, or see what people are really thinking about it; see what resonates with people. And so the next time you grab the basket, you can shoot a little bit closer to that thing that you see is really resonating with people. So I just love that idea of creating new music every single day, carving out space in your daily rhythm to create music, putting it out in front of people, getting feedback from it. If you're Erica Mason, then do it every day and grow from it. It seems like that's a great way to hone your craft and to build an audience at the same time.

Logan: I think I also like to pull examples from things outside of music. I'm really a big fan of things that are universally true, regardless of what your endeavor is in life. A couple of things come to mind. One is Jerry Seinfeld. One of his things he has is: don't break the chain. Every single day he writes a joke. Back in the music, Stevie Wonder is the same: every single day he writes something. It's not about it being good, it's more about exercising that muscle. Like you said, like kind of shooting the free throw or like thinking about doing reps; you're repping the weights. You got to get the reps in. And also another example for me right now that I have seen this kind of come true in the domain of life is I'm trying to learn Spanish. I recently got married. Last week, actually, so very new, but my wife is Hispanic. I've been trying to learn Spanish for about a year. [awww soundfx plays] Oh, thanks. Yeah, I think we've talked about Duolingo cause there's a great TED Talk by the guy that runs Duolingo, but there's some really great psychology in just human nature behind the idea of: don't break the chain. With Duolingo, it's like: I got to do my lesson because I can't break the chain. A similar thing. If it's songwriting or whatever it is, there's a lot of power behind building that habit, and then it kind of becomes self-sustaining. It goes back to the concept of working on the action, not the outcome. By nature of you writing those songs every day and doing something, first of all, you get kind of addicted to keeping the chain more so than how good the song is, but by doing that, the songs become better.

Michael: Yeah, that's awesome. I love that Duolingo TED Talk that we share around the team and the Slack channel and the idea of breaking the chain. We talked about applying that to the handy dandy music cards and basically setting up something like streaks for your fans so that they get incentivized or rewarded every time they scan the card, maybe once a day. So that's going to be really cool. But one thing that you brought up that I think is extremely valuable that I would love to dive deeper into is just the process of habit creation in general. We love analogies here, but the analogy is sort of like launching a rocket ship and when you're creating a new habit, it can be challenging at first, but once you break habit gravity, then it gets a lot easier to do it. So maybe we could riff on that for a little bit. So in terms of building habits, what advice or recommendations would you have? We've talked a few times during this, sometimes it's easier said than done. So how should people think about creating good lifelong habits that support their music career and kinda working through that initial phase of getting it off the ground?

Logan: This is the perfect time for this conversation. I'm going to grab something out over here. So I listened to this on audio book a while back, but I'm going to get the physical copy: Atomic habits. Great book.

Michael: Yeah!

Logan: Michael, I feel like you must have read this book at some point. If not, then you definitely need to.

Michael: It's been a couple of years, but I need to go back through it. I remember that was one of those I read where I was like: wow, just jam packed with value.

Logan: But yeah, I'm doing a reread right now. It's definitely top of mind. Let me open it up real quick, cause when you talk about how do you make those habits, this book kind of breaks it down into a 4-step system: make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, make it satisfying. And obviously there's a whole book you can dive in if you want to get into that really deep. But like I said, a lot of things are easier said than done. So the answer is try to make it easy. That can look a lot of different ways. Maybe a simple example is if it's songwriting: if you have a habit of every day, you get home from work and like you turn on the TV and you watch Netflix or whatever, put your guitar on a stand next to the TV so that way when you get home, you pick up the guitar and sort of turn on the TV. Little things like that can go a long way.

Michael: You'd probably appreciate this Logan. I don't know if you've heard this or not, but I heard John Mayer at one point, he said that his secret to guitar success is that he has a guitar right outside of his bathroom. So whenever he goes to the bathroom, he sees the guitar and then plays it. Totally in line with what you're talking about right now.

Logan: It sounds simple, but it's really, really powerful. Those visual cues go a long way. And there's a million little examples I can give of that, but I think at a higher level, it's more about those habits that are harder to form, do whatever you can in the short-term to make them easier to stick with. But the kind of light at the end of the tunnel is in the long-term, they become self reinforcing. I think a lot of times earlier on, just kind of keep that in mind that if something seems difficult right now, and you're having trouble sticking with it, but also know like the more you do stick with it, the easier it becomes and the more kind of ingrained it becomes.

Michael: Yeah.

Logan: I've definitely seen that it can feel like pushing a boulder uphill, but after a while it almost happens without thinking regardless of how heavy it is.

Michael: Yeah. 100%. Maybe we could actually go into each of those four steps a little bit. Cause I mean, all of those are gold. So like the first one was what, made it obvious.

Logan: Yeah. I literally got my little reference here. Make it obvious. Yes. That example is like putting the guitar by the bathroom door/by the TV.

Michael: Yeah. I mean, that's super smart. The way I've used that in my own life for going from not being a runner and absolutely despising running, never thinking that I would enjoy running to, usually I run a few miles a day now and I think it's one of the best habits that I have. There's all sorts of good stuff that happens from it. But one of the small things that I did was: the night beforehand, I just set out my running clothes at the foot of my bed and just set it up so literally when I roll out of bed, I've got my clothes and shoes and stuff like right there and it's a little thing, but it does make a big difference. It's just a visual cue. We just had this conversation a few days ago with Adam McInnes around setting up visual cues around your studio to sort of remind you of your goals. If you set a big goal for yourself, just making that visible and apparent so you see it every day. It seems super powerful.

Logan: Totally. 

Michael: Any other ways to make it obvious. Also, I would love to hear from you guys who are here live right now. Daniel, Recuda, Voz, Jersey, Apollo, Danny, Steve, Jerry, all you folks here in discord. If you have any tips and tricks around things that you've done to instill healthy habits and make things obvious, I would love to hear from you as well.

I'm also looking at the chat here and it's probably a good time to mention, if you're watching this live anywhere on social media or you're listening to the replay, if you want to be a part of our live audience, we do these live every day at 1pm Eastern during weekdays and it's been one of the coolest experiences to be able to connect and interact with the artists in our community live. So if you'd like to join there's a link probably in the description. If you click on the link in our bio on social media, then you can come join the community and you'll get invited to a private backstage pass to be able to be here live while we're doing these podcasts and then you can get your questions heard.

I see a question from Voz. So, Voz said, I've got 3 questions I'm curious to know. I'm going to start with question number 3 cause I think this is a great question, Logan. So basically the third question asked was: why do you do this? What's your purpose being a part of Modern Musician and with your role at Modern Musician.

Logan: Yeah, also some context, Michael. I was on the call with Voz right before this, and he asked me, he was like: I wonder what Michael's top three goals are. I was like, come on the podcast, we can ask him. I have a long background and story of how I got to where I am with Modern Musician and with music in general, but I would say: I think the moment that always comes to mind for me is when I first came to the program as an artist, I went through the program, I loved it, and I really especially loved the automation and the tech stuff. And I was like, yeah, this is so cool. Like chatbots and email automations and custom CSS and JavaScript. Like, this is awesome. And then when I came onto the team within a few months, I started to realize it was that most artists do not enjoy this. They do not like the tech side. They just want to make their music. I kind of realized like: Oh, I'm a musician, I'm an artist, but I also really enjoyed this technical/logical aspect of it as well. I kinda felt called to serve in that way where I'm like, well if I can see both sides of the equation, cause most people you're either very technical and not very creative, or you're very creative and you're not very technical. I feel like I have a little bit of both. I can kind of see both sides of the equation. So I just kind of felt really called to help those artists. Because I don't think as an artist that you should need to become a software engineer to run your music business. So, I would say my bigger vision is: I like playing that role of understanding the creative side and understanding the artistic instinct and being an artist, but also I can help fill in the gaps by doing the tech stuff that artists maybe aren't as good at, or I try to make it as simple as possible. I see that as being my role in my vision for being with Modern Musicians specifically is kind of bridging the gap between creativity and like the technical stuff that gets the music out there in a way that people can actually support you. Overall, I just love the culture of Modern Musician. Voz and I were talking to you just about the vision for where we're going in the future and how we've evolved and just the way we're building this new model. I just think it's a really exciting thing to be a part of. It's new, it's fresh, it's something that no one else is really doing in the way that we're doing. So I'm just glad to be along for the ride.

Michael: That's awesome. Yeah. I mean, that's definitely one thing that became clear really quickly as you joined the team and were going through the program is just the aptitude that you have for automations. There's a certain type of brain muscle I think that happens as it relates to automations and the logic and kind of setting those up. So I think you're right that that's a huge value that you and the systems that we're building can conserve. What a beautiful time to be alive and witness the evolution of humanity and technology and AI and what it means for musicians everywhere. Certainly, in the last few years even, so much has changed at Modern Musician with StreetTeam and the software and with AI now. It’s pretty dang cool. It looks like you were asking both of us that question, so I'm also happy to share why I do this with Modern Musician is similar to Logan. I feel like there's a calling or there's a need that exists right now, and it's a need that I've experienced personally in my own life when I was just starting out as a musician. I usually can't talk about this stuff without getting emotional. I just think about my own life and basically everything good in my life is from music. I'm just so grateful for music. It's the reason I have it's the reason I met my wife. It's the reason that I have my kids. And it's the reason that we have Modern Musician here right now, and we have this amazing community and the team that we brought together. So really it just comes from this huge gratitude for music and seeing the impact that it's made on my life personally. I was witnessing the ripple effects that your music makes on the lives of your fans. We just did our artist of the year submission, and I know a lot of you folks who are listening to us right now submitted a video for it and it was just really humbling to watch and hear your stories. Erica Mason sharing her story and her journey and just like seeing the lives that she and all of you are changing with your music. Yeah, I think there's really like a healing process that comes from it, both for you yourselves, but also for your communities. So, it's amazing. Yeah. It's a blessing for all of us to be a part of it. And music is about expressing who you are, and so I think the world needs more love and it needs more healing and it needs to bring people together, and I think music is a tool that can do all those things. So pretty incredible that we all get to build that together.

All right. So, Logan, I'd love to hear what you're most excited for. You touched on a little bit that one of the reasons that you enjoy being a part of Modern Musician is the vision and what we're building together and the future of it. So I'd love to hear, from your perspective, what's the most exciting thing that we're working on right now, or what's the thing that you're looking forward to most?

Logan: Yeah, I mean without getting too much away because we have a live coming up this weekend, but I'm really excited for the artist suite model. I think I can pick any number of the awesome things that we're doing. I think what I'm most excited about is that we've always been very much like a premium highest level of the industry Gold Artist Academy, which is an amazing program. I'm really excited that we're opening up to artists of all levels, regardless of if you're writing your first song or if you're Erica Mason, you're already having this thriving career. I'm excited for the fact that we're going to have something for artists at every level. And that instead of artists needing to meet us where we're at, we can meet them where they're at. I just really like that shift in our approach. On a more tangible level, I think the music cards and building in some of the higher level functionality in StreetTeam with artist AI. That's kind of revolutionary. With software in general, there's a lot of options out there for CRMs and funnels. The reality is there's really not that much of a difference between the functionality of sending an email or creating a funnel, so there isn't necessarily that much value between the functionality of the different tools. I think what differentiates different companies and products and software and just everything in not just the music space, but in tech in general is like, how do you use it? How do you help people with it? I think what we're really focusing on now more so than just the functionality of what can StreetTeam do is like: how are we supporting artists in using it? I think that's a big gap in the marketplace. The fact that anyone technically could go out there and create their email automations and their funnels. There's nothing stopping any artists from going out and doing that all themselves with whatever tools they want to, but the fact that we're packaging it in a way that makes it accessible and we’re providing the support and the templates and the resources and the training. I think those things are all much, much more important than just having a software that does something. I'm just excited to kind of be part of that evolution in the software industry in general is shifting from this model of: what does the software do for you to how can we help you implement it in a way that works for you?

Michael: Yeah, so, so much exciting stuff that were building. This is a good time to mention you know, if you're here live right now, then in a couple of days, we're going live for a Modern Musician live, which is our annual event. It's really like our #1 event of the entire year. I mean, you've probably seen a bunch of emails from us if you’re on our list, but definitely register for it. Definitely block off your days. It's going to be the most incredible event that we've ever hosted. There's going to be a lot of opportunities there for networking and for learning and tapping into your music career in 2024 and how to make this the best year yet.

In terms of the future and what we're most excited about, cause  that was another question you had asked, Voz: where do we see us in three years? I’ll share a little bit of where I see the biggest opportunity as it relates to the intersection of AI and technology and music. I think right now, there's probably the biggest movement in the world as it relates to technology and, by scientific standards, the fastest growing company of all human history is OpenAI. They grew from scratch to I think 100 million users in a period of like a month or so. It was the fastest [growing] company in human history. I think that we're about to enter an era where AI becomes more and more tailored to our personal needs and that we'll all have our own personalized AI assistant that sort of represents who we are, and maybe different facets of who we are. So I see what we're building with ArtistAI and ArtistAI Avatar as one of the core focuses over this next year. We've created an AI assistant that you can use to quickly write emails and quickly create social media content and help you with all sorts of things. It's in StreetTeam right now, and it's awesome. I think the thing that we want to lean into moving forward, and this is really going to be the thing that kind of separates it from just a generic AI chat bot, is the ability to personalize it based on your artist identity and based on your actual data of who you are and your fan data. So with StreetTeam, one of the core functionalities of it is that you have the system to track all of your fans who are in your community, and to be able to sort of rank them on a leaderboard of sorts and say: who are my most dedicated fans based on my fans who've spent the most to support my music. Because if someone has spent $2,000 on your VIP memberships and on coming to shows and buying merchandise from you, then they’re someone who probably really, really resonates with who you are and your music. And they're like a superfan versus someone who maybe has never spent anything or has spent $5. And so we have this depth of understanding: who are your most dedicated fans; who are most aligned with who you are. I see that as incredibly powerful data for you to be able to improve your targeting, to be able to get you in front of the right fans who are similar to your superfans and people who resonate most. So really what we're looking to build Voz and, and for anyone that's listening, I'd say our biggest ambition is the same way that iTunes, when it became a platform, revolutionized the music industry because it changed what it meant to have a music asset and Spotify made a similar revolution when they introduced streaming and now the definition of a music asset changed. I think that with blockchain technology, music relics, that platform is what we're looking to build. Our goal is to build the next iTunes, the next Spotify, but to build the relic marketplace that creates tangible assets around your music that fans can own. I think that one of the biggest challenges or issues with Spotify is that, in some ways it's amazing because it makes music more accessible because it's basically free for anyone to listen to, but from an economic standpoint, it's not effective because it basically makes it entirely free for people to listen to stream unlimited music if they pay for a small monthly subscription. In supply and demand, that basically means that the value of your music goes down to $0. So that's an issue. There's also the issue with lack of connection with those fans. If someone streams your song on Spotify, you have no idea who that person is. A stream is not necessarily an indicator of how much of a superfan someone is. If 10 different people stream your song, it doesn't necessarily let you know if someone is a superfan who it changed their life. I think that one of the benefits of StreetTeam and what we can build with this advanced tracking of knowing who are your top fans based on lifetime value and based on engagement score, is that we have more depth to be able to go deeper in terms of a recommendation algorithm so that, rather than just sort of looking at a blanket these type of people stream your songs, you'll actually have a new dimension that you can go deeper into of knowing the depth of fan and based on understanding that, we can do things like improve your targeting to reach the people who are most likely to enjoy your music. So I see that as like the big picture. We're building a huge data set for you to be able to target identify: who are your top fans and to be able to feed that information back into the platforms that let you target your fans. Meta lets you create a lookalike audience based on lifetime value, so if we can create the best data source for you to know who your top fans are and be able to connect with them, then I think we can create the best platform for you to be able to connect with your fans and build a community. And that's what we're building.

All right. So, let's go ahead and let's get ready to wrap up for the day. I would love to invite anyone who's still here, if you'd like to raise your hand, come on here live to ask a question, awesome. Tina asked: what was the book that Logan was giving those steps from for the habits?

Logan: Atomic Habits by James Clear. It looks, looks like this [shows book]. Might be backwards, but you get the point.

Michael: We can see it right side up.

Logan: I listened to it on audiobook a while back. I'm reading it as a physical copy, but I would highly recommend it.

Michael: Yeah, that book is so good. Absolutely fantastic.Trish DiAppello asked, Logan or Michael, have you thought about creating a Modern Musician label and Spotify playlists?

Logan: Yes, we've created the playlist. That kind of got put on the back burner when we had StreetTeam and that kind of got buried underneath it, but they're there. I think it's something we may revisit this year is prioritizing having that be part of what we offer for artists. I know we talked with the label idea. Maybe you can expand on that. That's something we had discussed is a singularity records, right?

Michael: Singularity records. Yup. I'm super excited about both of those opportunities. This shouldn't have been a surprise to me. It was more surprising than it should have been, but one of the biggest pieces of value that I've gotten from bringing our community together in discord and having this place where we all come together is the share your music channel. It's been really cool just looking at the new songs that are coming in and seeing artists at different levels in our artist development suite come in and share their music. In a few cases, I've heard something that… Everyone has different musical tastes, so I'm not the be all end all of like “my taste is like the ultimate thing”, but for me, there's been some songs in there that I hear and I'm like, holy fricking X, Y, Z this is incredible! You know, you're a dad when I don’t swear. [both laughing] “X, Y, Z”. But you know, it's absolutely amazing where I'm like: man, I want to buy something from this. I want to purchase a song, but I'm not going to go into iTunes and just buy a digital download. I don't listen to songs and digital downloads to show my support for new artists coming in. It doesn't make sense for me. Of course, I can stream their music on Spotify, but that's not really… but really what I'd like to do is just make it really easy for anyone sharing their music in the share your music channel to share the relics for it, and then if there's an artist that I really like, I would love to pick up one of your music relics and add it to my collection. It'd be super cool. And so this playlist idea, I would love to lean into that, but maybe focus on the platform that we're building, right? So like if we created a good marketplace or we created a good playlist for music relics and we could have a top 40, we could have kind of rotating songs, then I think that that would be really cool, and I would love to showcase your guys music cause we have some incredibly talented musicians in the community. So that's probably the angle that we would lean into it. And it might not necessarily look like a Spotify playlist, but it might look like a music relics and adding those to a playlist that rotates.

Modern Musician record label. Yeah, we talked a little bit about Singularity Records. If we do create a version of a record label that offers record label services, I think that we'd want to pretty clearly distinguish it from a traditional label from the standpoint of… I think that one of our core values and beliefs is that: what best serves you as a musician is actually to take more ownership of your music business and your career, and to actually lean into entrepreneurship, and with a lot of traditional record labels, it basically means that you give up ownership in a big way. And so I would love to figure out what that looks like in terms of a win-win that maybe provides record label services, but isn't necessarily like: we're going to take most of your ownership. Specifically, one thing that we're definitely going to be exploring moving forward is the idea of creating a Modern Musician channel where we can basically showcase you and your music. One of the core concepts of the Modern Musician community is helping you create your “artist showcase”. Your artist showcase is basically like a debut release party for you as an artist where you go live and you could do it in person if you wanted to bring out people to a show, but generally how we do this is actually a virtual live event where you share 3 of your songs and you share a little bit about the purpose behind what inspired the songs and you share your overall artist identity and your mission and purpose, and it's really sort of like an artist debut. So one thing that we do is we help you to schedule this and to create your artist launch with that showcase. Once you do that live, then you can take the replay from that and you can turn that into an evergreen automated sequence so everyone new that discovers you, that comes into your community, can actually go directly to the root of your core purpose and your songs and what inspires your music. One thing that we're going to be exploring is actually creating a studio space where we could actually fly in artists who are going through our program like gold artists or platinum artists who want an extremely high quality production of your artist showcase. That way we could actually give you this sort of stage where you debut your music and maybe you perform live. Maybe we do some sort of initial drop where when you do your showcase, we have your starter music relics, and maybe there's an incentive where the goal would just be to help you sell out of your initial starter relics. If we built a channel with Modern Musician, then we could really provide a service or a role where we're bringing on breaking new artists and showcasing you to our existing audience of fans. We could help you do a successful launch with your showcase and then you have the asset just built into your system extremely quickly because we've helped you create this high quality content. So that's one example of “record label services” that I think would be very, very valuable to add into the suite of what we're offering for you.

Logan:Oh yeah.

Michael: Oh yeah. All right. Well hey, let's get ready to officially wrap up for today. So, let's give a virtual round of applause to Logan for being our guest today and coming on here live. Logan, man, I so appreciate the role that you play at Modern Musician. I think that you're a light for a lot of artists. Your genius zone and your gift of being able to help out with the overall artist success, as well as the more intricate details of automation and technology is extremely needed. And just on a human level, I think that you are very talented human being and have a really good heart, and so I'm really grateful to have you as part of the team. For anyone that is here right now who would like to connect more or dive deeper into you and what you're doing both personally and with your music, what would be the best place for them to go to connect more?

Logan: Yeah, LoganThomasMusic on any social media, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, that kind of stuff, or my website’s LoganThomasMusic.com. Any of those places will get you to my stuff.

Michael: Awesome. If you're here live in our discord community, then Logan is definitely popping in around. He's our head of artist success here, so he's definitely a familiar face that you'll get to connect with. Awesome.

Logan: Thanks for having me. 

Michael: 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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