Michael Walker: If you’re listening to this then you likely already know that being an independent musician is a lonely road. And maybe your friends and your family don’t fully understand why you do what you do, or why you invest so much time, energy, and money achieving your music goals. And especially early on, it can be hard to find people who really understand what you’re trying to accomplish and how to make it happen. So, that’s where Modern Musician comes in!

My name’s Michael Walker and I can understand and relate to that feeling. I’ve been there myself, and so has our team of independent artists. The truth is that basically everything good in my life has been a result of music. It’s the reason I met my wife, my 3 kids, it’s how I met my best friends. And now with Modern Musician, we have seen so many talented artists who started out with a dream, with a passion, without really a fanbase or a business. And you’ll take that and turn it into a sustainable full-time career and be able to impact hundreds, maybe even thousands or millions of fans with your music. We’ve had thousands of messages from artists who told us we’ve helped change their lives forever. It just gets even more exciting and fulfilling when you’re surrounded by a community of other people who get it, and who have shared their knowledge and success with each other openly. So, if you are feeling called into making your music a full-time career and to be able to reach more people with your music, then I want to invite you to join our community so that we can help support your growth and we can help lift you up as you pursue your musical dreams. You’ll be able to interact in a community with other high-level artists, coaches, and industry professionals, as well as be able to participate in our daily live podcast, meet these amazing guests, and get access to completely free training. If you’d like to join our family of artists who truly care about your success, then click on the link in the show notes and sign-up now. 

Shevy Smith: Really giving working class artists access to tools that can help them make the best decisions for their careers is what we were driven by because that's the position we were in. We understand that. And as far as gamification goes, it's the future, whether we like it or not.

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 am excited to be here today with Shevy Smith. Shevy is an Emmy-nominated composer and producer and has made a remarkable impact on the music industry. She's been involved in the music industry for a long while. In her teenage years, signed a music publishing deal, was able to win the pro-max gold award, and now she's co created a music discovery app that allows artists like you and like ourselves to be actually able to cut through the noise and get the music heard. So I'm really excited to connect with her today. We were talking a little bit backstage about the topic and landed on a fan gamification and about really separating yourself from the hundreds of thousands of artists and songs that are released every single day. How do you actually build a deeper relationship with your fans and cut through the noise? Shevy, thank-you so much for taking the time to be here today.

Shevy: Thank-you for having me. It's such a wonderful treat to be here with you. So thank-you.

Michael: Absolutely. So to kick things off, I'd love to hear a little bit about your story about Ultimate Playlisting and how you discovered this gamification app and doing what you do now.

Shevy: Absolutely. My background is all in writing and I was an artist when I was younger and I guess still am. We never stopped being, but I was very much in that lane and had all the accoutrement that you have and toured and used to play over 200 colleges a year and come from that troubadour DIY background in making records and writing songs and just playing a bunch of instruments. I started quite young. I was 16 years old when I did my first publishing deal and started recording in New York and had great…  I'm not a young woman anymore, but then, young woman that you would meet that did not have the horror stories that you usually have. I had some amazing producers and people around me and my publishers were trailblazing, history-making women, and I was really fortunate in that I fell in with what I consider to be the best. And got a great education, always had different engineers being like: Oh yeah, this is how a compressor works, and I was a bit of a studio rat. I come from a family of mostly boys and I was always out in the shop working with my dad and my mom is also very skilled in doing lots of technical things. You would walk into a studio and it'd be a big labyrinth of problem solving and toys. It was a joy. So I had a really lovely early experience in making records and I loved being on the road. You couldn't have told me there was anything better than driving around with my Labrador and my guitars and stopping at college coffee houses. [both laughing] And I'm 40 now, so it was the era where John Mayer had really come about in that scene and it was Matt Nathanson and Matt Works and Matt Carney.

Michael: [singing Matt Nathanson] Come and get higher, loosen my lips.

Shevy: Yeah, if your name was Matt, I probably opened for you at that point. But it was just really lovely. And I had a ball and I was also just rootsy enough that I was able to also be in the country scene and this was pre-Taylor, so there was a lot more bifurcation between genres. Now with the app, we talk about a genre-less future. This is the very genred past. But I was able to open portions of tours for Kenny Chesney and Tim McGraw and be in these big stages as well cause I was easy as far as acts go, they could just plug in a DI and give me a mic and I'd go. So I really come from that working class, artist background. There's no billboard. There's no bus. It was just songs and the strength of your booking agent and the relationships that they had. I was able to play a lot of shows and see the world that way. Went on USO tours and worked really hard and had a lot of fun. And then by the time I was 23/24, I was burnt out, if I'm honest. At that point, I'd done almost a decade of doing all of that. And I was interested in producing more and seeing what other avenues. I've always done artwork as well, and so it was like time to just expand. So I ended up moving to LA. I was in Nashville during that whole early period. Moved to LA and ended up getting involved in some really interesting things. I helped run a writing organization for Afghan women and we focused on poetry and education through poetry, and then we'd put on these kinda songwriting musical events here in the States around that. I was really interested in exploring the “why” of why we create music and how it could be connective and collaborative cross-culturally. It was really developmental as far as well-roundedness. And then also the other thing is many times you were creating productions with people who were not seasoned musicians. There's really, I think, an aptitude you get when you have a self conscious 14 year-old, and it's their first time in front of a mic, and they're not a phenom, they're gonna hear those imperfections in their voices. I think we all know that a lot of producing is psychological, and creating an atmosphere where somebody can get their best performance. It was a crash course in that. LA has a rich natural resource of a lot of TV and film, and promo work. So I ended up producing a lot for that and got to collaborate with animation teams and, just like any of us, just going the direction that paid the bills and was interesting and, if being quite honest, least embarrassing. A lot of times you're gauging okay: I'm trying to build a body of work, but I'm also trying to spend my time doing this thing. So do one for the reel and one to pay the bills. I was basically in the same position that all of my friends were in and we were all just hopefully spiraling up together. Then had the fortunate instance of kind of the same thing happening in that era of life too, of producers like Jack Knife Lee or Ryan Ollye really being supportive of what I was doing and pulling me in and I got to, for lack of a better word, apprentice and see how they do things and really learn from them. It was pretty hard to argue with that. And then around 2017, I met my business partner, Khaleed Jones, who is a pure genius as far as just innovative thinking, but also has the ability to put it into words that real life people can understand. He was on the forefront of gaming, as far as he was one of the first owners of his eSports team, and was part of that ownership group. Stanford educated attorney, but also encyclopedic, he grew up in Queens, so encyclopedic when it comes to early rap through current. So we really connected on this love of music, but also, figuring out perhaps the whole Silicon Valley thing of like picks and axes. If there's a gold rush, who's making the Levi's in that scenario? And so we were always interested in doing projects together because I had these artists I was working with who were young, who were very reminiscent of who I was when I signed, and now I was the older adult in the situation and needed to figure out some formalized funding and systems to make sure we could put out the music and give it some shot at being heard. At the time, there were 40,000 songs going to Spotify each day, and we thought that was astronomical. So we had this artist development company. We're trying to figure out methods of getting songs out there. And he brought in this whole other gamification portion of it, which I was thinking of incentivization. Our studio was in downtown LA and so we were sitting with a final mix from one of our artists that we felt was brilliant and Billie Eilish was playing Staples that night. It was still called Staples, not Crypto at that time. And I remember saying to him: I think if we would be money ahead to take 5,000  one dollar bills and go ask each young woman there to hear Billie Eilish, ask her to listen to 30-seconds of this song, I think that our takeaway of actual fans who are going to re-engage with our artists is higher then paying some promotions company or just sending it to playlisting and hoping, or whatever it was. He was like: I think there's something there in that in an attention economy, attention has value. We're inadvertently hiding the ball through, we say payola doesn't go on anymore, but we're paying to get songs heard. We're just going through. A middleman that used to be called a program director. Now, it's called a playlist promoter and those are all valid positions. That needs to exist and will always exist as well. But we wondered whether we could invent another path. Just more, rather than just these limited pathways for artists promotion. And then the other thing that was happening around that time was the predominance of expecting artists to become content creators. It was a little before TikTok dances, but that was becoming the thing. That is so fantastic for the artists that it's fantastic for. I think there was a viral thing that just went around of a girl being like: song of the summer, and I remember thinking the same thing of: if you don't have the song of the summer, if you have a 4 minute slow tempo but deeply moving track, it's going to be hard to get a 6-second snippet that goes viral and is pitched up and used in everybody's reel. To the extent that kind of promotion was being thrust upon artists at that time, I definitely understood: not every artist is built for that. And so, is there a way that we can incentivize long-form listening on the fan side? And so that's really all the conversations and life experience that led to Ultimate Playlist. And I don't want to go deep into the questions that I'm sure we're going to get into, but that's the setup, I guess.

Michael: Fantastic. Yeah. Thank-you for sharing that.

Shevy: Yeah!

Michael: What I love about your story is about how it sounds like you've really been steeped in the culture of being a musician yourself for your whole life.

Shevy: Yeah.

Michael: Now you're in this phase of your life where you get to see a piece of yourself and the artists that you're working with, then you get to be a part of changing the music industry. And I can really relate with that. So that's awesome. Also on the gamification front a big piece of what we've been working on the past year has been all about gamification and about building communities and helping artists connect with their fans, so I think there's a lot of opportunity there.

Shevy: You have a discord community. It is not hard to explain this concept to people who use discord. They understand communities, they understand gamification.

Michael: Absolutely. It's a newer platform for us.

Shevy: Oh, okay!

Michael: I think it was probably about a month or two ago that we officially moved all of our community stuff over to discord. We have a few thousand people now that have joined the discord in about a month or so.

Shevy: Amazing!

Michael: I love the intersection of both you coming from having deep roots as a musician, but then also tangential industry with your business partner of gamification.

Shevy: Yeah.

Michael: I would love to hear now, maybe before we dive into the specifics of the gamification features, I'd love to just hear you talk a little bit about the “why” and the purpose behind gamification. Obviously right now with Spotify, Spotify is like the main place that people go to listen to music.

Shevy: Yeah.

Michael: Apple music is the other big one as well. And I'd love to hear you share about the pros and cons of the current model and really the purpose for it in this new era that we're entering.

Shevy: Yeah, absolutely. It's lovely to hear that you have the same thing. I think the line between industry and an artist, because as we're about to wrap on, there are some pain points right now, and we need to be creative about the ways that we go about those. And you look, Jimmy Iovine, is producing Petty and Stevie Nicks and everything, and also running the industry side. I would think that would make a good liaison. He was in the boardroom and able to advocate for the creatives within there because he is one himself. In terms of DSP’s and streaming, it's all of the usual issues that we all talk about: It's signal to noise. There's, at this point, I think 100 thousand songs are going to Spotify each day, so a certain portion of those songs are from artists who are looking to do this as a career, really earnestly going after that, and then there is obviously a lot that is being generated in who knows what way, and by who knows what rights holders.

Michael: It must be even crazier with AI.

Shevy: Exactly.

Michael: With Suno, it's so easy to generate new songs.

Shevy: And if I ran a platform that had to pay direct licensing fees, I too might want to make my own owned content to at least knock out 30-40% of those costs. Then you look at if there's an available market share of attention, and now the broadcaster, the DSP themselves, it's going to fill that up with 30-40% of their own content because they've got shareholders, they've got numbers to make. Then you're left with a really small portion of pie and you're competing against Drake's team, you're competing against… I don't feel like the music listener under the age of 38 is really one thing. We're all multi-genre and really switching between a lot of different genres. And when we're playlisting, we're not just saying: Hey, give me nothing but 90’s and 2000’s country. We're going to mix other things in there and you see it in the collaborations. Is Maren Morris country? Is she EDM? I don't know if there's ever been that crossover before, but there sure is now. So as you look at the pain point, mainly being: how do I break through? I'm an artist sitting here with a project that I deeply believe in. I have $10,000 to promote it. Where do I put that money? Where is that best used? How do I do something beyond, obviously you put it in front of the editorial board at those DSP’s and try to get playlisted, but then there's a whole slew of things that are sketchy that could help you, but also could jeopardize your ability to even have music. So a lot of the playlist promotion things, they're dangerous, and you're playing with fire because it is this unknown. Is it stream farms? Is it: what is actually affecting that algorithm? And you're at the mercy of Spotify to say: sorry, we, this is illegal. You're out. So to have some legit way to reach human fans with ears to give your song a shot. And then the other thing is that there are a lot of indicators that you can get by testing a song. One thing that we love about putting a song on Ultimate Playlist, and I'll explain how it all works, is that you can get real feedback for a very nominal amount of money. You could never put together a focus group yourself as an independent artist at this level and get that kind of data stratification that helps you decide. It's not going over as well as we thought it is, and maybe we pivot to a different song because we do only have this $10,000. And how do we make the most of it? Really giving working class artists access to tools that can help them make the best decisions for their careers is what we were driven by because that's the position we were in. We understand that. And as far as gamification goes, it's the future whether we like it or not. It's already happening. Our music discovery apps right now, the main one is TikTok. Is there anything more gamified? It's fast moving. It's like you're in a casino half the time with how fast they want you to go between all the different offerings. Every third thing is trying to sell you something and it's just massively engaging and their goal is to keep you on the app as long as possible. An artist's goal is to keep you listening to the song as long as possible. And so those incentives are actually quite similar. And so looking at ways to use what we know from the former to help the latter. So with Ultimate Playlist, there's 40 songs a day. So it's a finite list. It's not 97 songs long and your song #94 so nobody hears it. It is randomized because, essentially, we put a game over interactive streaming radio. So it's like we put a game over Pandora. So you don't get to choose: I want to go to this song and that song and that song. Songs are served to you in a random order by a RNG that's locked far away. So every user that goes on, gets a different order and gets a different experience, which also helps our data be more true, because your song: the Michael Walker song might be #2 on my list, but when your grandma logs on, it's #35.

Michael: Grandma!?! Oh, when you said #35 it wasn’t priority.

Shevy: No, no, no. She rated you 5 stars. 

Michael: My grandma and I have a very great relationship. [jokingly]

Shevy: Perfect.

Michael: Come on my podcast and start talking about my grandma. [both laughing]

Shevy: No, she rated you highly. Don't worry about that. I did too, though. It's just saying that it's not giving the advantage to the Drake song that always appears first on the list. And I don't mean to pick on Drake either. He and I have no beef. [both laughing] Yeah, so it delivers the songs and at each increment at 30 seconds, the user gets an in-app ticket. So there's 2 games, there's a daily cash drawing, and then there's Ultimate Payout, which is a big large prize. So right now it's at $85,000, and then the daily cash is $2,000 we give away daily, no matter what. We have ten $50 winners, $100 winners, two $250 winners and then one $500. So you're earning tickets. You earn at a minute. You earn 3 more once you listen to the entire song. If you rate the song, you get another ticket. If you add it to your Apple Music, which you can do in-app without leaving, which also helps your algorithm over in Apple Music, you get two more tickets. So you accumulate these tickets, and at midnight Eastern each night, there is a drawing that happens and the winners are announced and they get an email with an e-gift card. And they go shopping, or do whatever they're going to do with it. We've had really beautiful stories of people spending them on Christmas gifts and that sort of thing. Cause it's just truly money for doing what you'd already be doing, which is listening to music, and the artists get the assurance that it's a real US-based fan listening to their entire song ostensibly, or at least incentivized to do that. So yeah, that's the basic way that it works. And it's been really illuminating and successful and wonderful so far.

Michael: What a cool idea.

Shevy: Thank-you!

Michael: Thank-you for coming up with ideas like that that kinda put the ball on the court of independent artists, because it is so heavily skewed towards these existing major record label artists. So it's great to actually have a platform that helps to encourage fans to connect with artists and smaller artists potentially. So I definitely have a few questions just in terms of how that process works. So if I'm understanding you right, basically every single day you're giving out $1,000ish?

Shevy: $2,000.

Michael: $2,000 to fans who are listening to the songs.

Shevy: Yeah, correct.

Michael: Wow. Where does the $2,000 come from? Do the fans pay for a subscription fee or is it from the artists or how does that work?

Shevy: It's actually completely free to play for the fan. In 2021, we actually were acquired and went into a partnership with the Arizona Lottery. So the leadership there was incredibly innovative and are changing. That's a whole nother industry that's really fascinating to me. It's nothing that I knew and something I've become very knowing of now. But the Arizona lottery was looking for a way to reach a younger demographic for a way to be more, I guess, culturally relevant with a younger audience who maybe aren't going and buying scratchers quite the way their parents do. And honestly, they're doing fine. They're like a $2 billion a year industry in just Arizona alone. So like they're doing great and they provide amazing scholarships. And they were looking for a way to offer a free game because there are a lot of limitations to what they can do on mobile. So the leadership there and the staff were all about this as a way to bridge into being in cultural; in the music and art space. So we created this. We had created an MVP and done a lot within Figma and we had a tappable prototype and so we were able to show them what it could be. And then they came on board and our engineering team and with Colleen, my business partner, and I are really overseeing and completing the project. They then released it out into the wilds nationwide. So it's a nationwide game. It's not gated to Arizona or anything. Last November, we went into beta. In the summertime, started switching on a little bit of advertising, but it's really been pretty organic. There's been, as with any new technology, it's been a lot of trying and learning, and once you get people in there, really trying to iterate and have it be as optimized and run as smoothly as possible. It's a pretty difficult engineering task because we have music, we have streaming, we have timers, there are certain actions that have to be rewarded at certain increments. And so it's pretty intense on the programming side. I went from audio engineering to learning a lot about the coding side of things and really being in lockstep with my engineers. We've all become great friends, just like you do in a studio because whenever there's any sort of challenge that comes up, it's all of us who are up all night trying to get things patched or whatever needs to happen. As we've gotten more users in it, it behaves differently than when there were testing amount of users and stuff. So it's been absolutely the most creative and biggest lift of my life. It's taken a lot of time and a lot of intense months because we developed it pretty quickly. The deal with Arizona happened in the summer of 2021, and we had it to market by November of ‘22 which was an insane pace. Yeah. I don't really remember a lot of socialization during that time, but it was really fun, and it's been really a great time. The Arizona lottery folks, half of them have bands and are musicians and so they really have just such a love for artists, and it's been this really wonderful collaborative thing with them. So the prizing comes from them at this point. And once we get to full user base, it'll be self generating because artists, right now, are appearing pro bono as we get the data and prove why we have value. We don't want to go to artists and say: we just started, pay us. So we're getting all of our data in order so that we can go and present a compelling case of why this is a great option and then at which time it does become something where you're paying for that slot. It'll be under $300 a slot. So it's definitely not an arm and a leg, and it's something that, for the value that you get from it, it's a really wonderful value proposition, which is important to myself and to Khalid and to the lottery. Everybody involved. It's one of those rare things where there's not a single one of us that are like: How do I? We all have been on the other side of it, I guess, that the excitement and the victory is really being able to create something that has everybody benefit, and has a really compelling value proposition because I think that's the thing. I know what $300 is when you're playing 200 shows a year and you're unloading your own gear and this better have some redeeming value. It's not just toss away. And so that's how the whole thing works.

Michael: That’s fantastic! Yeah, I know that there are a lot of like playlisting and promotion companies that, like you mentioned before, a lot of cases, they're just bots or they're not even real people charging thousands of dollars a month for it.

Shevy: With no guaranteed results. What I've found, honestly, with promotion with PR and everything, I'm always like: it's the great immeasurable thing. How do you know whether the result came from them trying and it not succeeding, or them not really even trying. You don't really have any way to quantify what you paid for and measure the result. With ours at the very least, you're going to get a dataset back that says, this is how your song performed. This is how many real humans who could potentially come to your club show in Cincinnati listened in that region. So the numbers may not be exactly what you want to see, but they will be numbers and they will be real and they will be something that you can make, hopefully, smart decisions because you have access to that data.

Michael: Awesome. It's funny, first of all, this is an interesting collaboration between the Arizona lottery and a music company. My grandma actually lives in Arizona right now. She's a huge fan of lottery.

Shevy: I tell you what we actually are doing, I don't know when this goes to broadcast, but the Arizona lottery team is just radical and wonderful in the best way, in that they're community driven and arts driven and just supporting the people. And so we're actually doing a live event there on the 20th of January [2024] at the Phoenix art museum. We're doing a kind of a partnership with the Phoenix art museum where we're going to have 5 independent artists come and perform live and do a bunch of celebrating this concept, I guess, by supporting a few musicians live. If she's around, I'll give you the information. It's going to be a good time.

Michael: I’ll forward it to her!

Shevy: Yeah!

Michael: That'd be a fun thing to connect with her on.

Shevy: Very cool.

Michael: Cool. I have a bunch of other questions are coming to mind, and at some point I would love to go to the live audience and hear your guys' questions as well. I do see a couple of questions coming in here. I do see a bunch of questions coming in here as well, so we'll go here next.

Shevy: Okay!

Michael: When you say there was a top 40 list, so a top 40, but it's randomized. Is it limited to 40 songs total on the platform?

Shevy: Correct. It’s 40 songs per day. So it's not top 40 in the general sense. It's multi-genre or genreless. The way that it's programmed is we have four different categories of artists. So we have underground, emerging, current, and legacy, and then we have the different genres. So we have hip-hop, country, pop, alternative. We don't really get into too much harder stuff. Generally, we kind of stick to those stratifications right now. When an artist submits their music, it needs to be clean; It needs to have a clean version. And it needs to be distributed through Spotify or Apple. And so we put together a 40 song playlist given those parameters, and then that playlist of 40 songs is delivered in a different order to each listener just so that it’s not the same; so that nobody's advantaged at being song 1, 2, or 3 on everybody's list. And so it helps the artist have a better vantage point at: this is the data knowing that everybody received the song at a different point in their journey through the game. And so you can bank upon the data a little bit better, knowing that it's not weighted by where the song appears.

Michael: Super interesting. One of the questions that comes up, and I'm sure that this is a part of the thought process as the platform develops more too, is just like the 40 songs per day. Let's say you have 2 million or 3 million artists on the platform. How do you narrow it down to 20 per day? Is the plan always to keep it at 40, no matter how many people are on the platform or is there going to be like a process to expand that. I'm just curious about that.

Shevy: There's definitely the possibility of making them more genred, would be probably the way we would end up with 4 different 40 song playlists.

Michael: Interesting. Then everyone gets their own personalized 40 song based on things they've interacted with in the past, maybe, or their style, or maybe that kind of goes against what you guys are looking for.

Shevy: Yeah. We're not necessarily wanting… there's this misnomer, I think, about the DSP’s and the way they recommend music. They really are recommending more of what you've already heard, and as an artist and a producer, I get why that's a thing. It doesn't excite me. I like the idea, to the extent that we can, of introducing music that maybe you wouldn't normally listen to. So I don't foresee us going down the avenue of algorithm “because you like this, you're going to listen to this”. It would more be that: we have certain listeners that they'll write in and they'll be like: I hate all the hip-hop songs. Or: I hate all the country songs. So it would be more for the user to be able to avoid the type of music that they truly don't enjoy. But as far as the finite list, that's something that's fairly static in that once we start getting up into 60 songs, that's such a time commitment for the user. Right now, 40 songs, you can usually complete it in about 2.5 hours or so over the course of your day. Part of the reason we can get data that we can count on is because we know the users are engaged and not fatigued and it's something that is a realistic proposition for their world. I think once you start getting into 50/60 songs, you're asking for a lot of a user's day, and perhaps they'll be rabid enough that it will make sense. But that's not where our mind is going. We would make more 40 song playlists before we would probably make the number higher.

Michael: That definitely makes sense. It sounds like this is on what you guys are building, but if there's a platform that could gamify the experience for me to discover new songs on a daily basis and that could give me novelty cause I think that's important. Like we don't want to just literally hear the exact same thing, but 40 songs would be like a pretty huge commitment for me on a daily basis, but if there's different like tiers or you actually unlock different benefits or perks it's if streaks, like if you listen to the first one a day…

Shevy: Absolutely. Well we have a leaderboard right now that is not connected to any reward and people are insane about it. Just seeing your name on a leaderboard, and the fear of that name dropping is such an incentive that I did not anticipate because I don't know that about myself that I'm too affected by that, but other people really are. And that's what's fascinating is learning about the human psyche in all of this. But you're absolutely right. We're going to double, triple, quadruple down on the incentives. We're getting the main idea executed as well as possible first, and then those leaderboards and like you said, streaks, we don't really have any desire to go into social on this, because then you're overseeing a social platform, which is my worst nightmare [Michael laughs] to have people actually like commenting or interacting, but to the extent that you could have smaller competition groups, or whatever. We all know there's a million ways you can gamify something. So we will definitely be doing that. Back in 2020, we filed for a utility patent thinking that there might be something novel in this whole gamification, basically tokenizing the listening of a piece of audio. And we actually were granted that patent in August of this year. It finalized in November. And so this whole concept has a lot of application when you think about all the TV streaming. When you think about podcasts. When you think about literally anything. It's for streaming audio, it's not for songs. So unless you're a silent movie, you're going to be streaming audio as well. And so as all of the streamers, whether it's in music or television, market share is done eight up. We all have all the subscriptions that we can possibly manage, right? And we're all looking at ways to cancel subscriptions because our attention is so oversaturated. It is our belief that a lot of these different platforms are going to be going into trying to incentivize and gamify their offerings. This has turned into this wonderful use-case and Ultimate Playlist represents the first offering of this utility, and the Arizona lottery is incredibly forward thinking to be the entity that really made that possible because without them, this plane doesn't fly. We were able to launch at scale because of their muscle and their power and they are wonderful partners in it and we all are kind of of the belief that this, for artists, is a beautiful thing, but this is also something that filmmakers and podcasters and basically anybody offering something to the public that is asking for attention. It could go into advertising. That's not anything that's sexy or alluring to me, but that is where we see this going. This is about the concept of looking at a fan and saying: listen, we're not going to lie to you. We understand and you understand: your attention has a value. So somebody is going to pay you for that attention one way or another. We're just not going to be disingenuous about it. We're not hiding the ball. We're flat out saying: we will pay you in potential cash to give us your two-hours of your day. Instagram's not paying you to scroll. Like there is no chance that at the end of the day, when I've spent 2.5 hours, given Instagram my attention, I'm not perhaps winning a $250 gift card after that. Most likely. And so that's the value proposition and kind of the idea that we're very excited about looking at how market share is pretty saturated at this time.

Michael: That’s awesome! I love what you guys are building and there's some huge alignment with where our focus has been for the past several years with StreetTeam. In fact, I would love to connect more and talk about the idea of building an integration industry team specifically for artists to be able to create maybe a playlist of their music where they could actually gamify for them to their fans being able to give them rewards for streaming their music and having a leaderboard based on that.

Shevy: You nailed it. You're going into the other place. Our patent actually includes some blockchain language as well, because having actions trigger rewards is what you're speaking of and makes all the sense in the world and should be done on that artist level. It's absolutely absurd to me that like some of the biggest artists, I'm here in Nashville, who have brilliant management, brilliant agents, brilliant concert promoters, they kinda don't know how many shows a fan attended in a year. That number could be 2 or that could be 8. Just by a token given at each show, you could know: Oh my goodness, this fan came to 11 shows this year. And when you're doing your end-of-year like winner's circle or whatever, that would be something you would want to know about somebody who 11 nights out of the year chose to come be at your show. I think the fact that we don't have an automatic way of knowing that. It's a very manual way of knowing that. So it sounds like we're in the same collective consciousness here.

Michael: 100%. Yeah. To give you a quick crash course on StreetTeam, basically that's the premise of it is that fans… we have a robust system for tracking fan actions and attaching a point value to those actions. Right now there's a few actions that are like repeating actions that fans can take to generate more points and they can redeem those points within the artist community to unlock different access and perks and benefits. And right now there's a lifetime value integration so that for every dollar that the fan spends with an artist, they get 100 tokens to be able to redeem and to make requests to the artist. And then there's a referral mechanism. We have these cards, we call them music cards.

Shevy: Beautiful! Great design too! 

Michael: Thanks! Yeah. Shout out to Curtis on our team. He's taken our design stuff to the next level in 10,000 different ways. But so these cards use the same technology that ApplePay uses to basically scan wirelessly to a phone and unlock exclusive content to be able to, on a daily basis, if they enter the community, they can get 100 points/day to be able to redeem. And so it seems like there's some serious alignment with what you guys are building.

Shevy: Absolutely. We definitely need to have a conversation. I love hearing the way you've put it together is really understandable and streamlined too, which I think has been a lot of the barrier of NFTs as a term. I recoil at it because I know how many people in my actual life are going to hear that and be like: I'm not buying a cartoon.

Michael: A gif of a hamster.

Shevy: Exactly. Yeah. It's so bizarre and ununderstandable to them that they'll dismiss something that they really would enjoy, like what you're doing. So I think the fact that you have this very tangible speaking and lingo that we all understand historically, and it sounds brilliant. Congrats! It's really beautiful execution as well.

Michael: Thank-you. Yeah, it seems like we're definitely in the same mindset, so I'm looking forward to connecting more and figuring out how we can integrate the platforms together.

Shevy: Absolutely. I love that. Yeah. Let's pull Khalid into that conversation cause he'll love what you're doing as well.

Michael: Awesome. All right, well, speaking of interactivity and connecting with a community and audience I'd love to take this opportunity to open up the floor to our live audience. And if you have any specific questions or anything that you'd like to ask about Ultimate Playlist or to Shevy, then feel free to either raise your hand to come on here live, or if you'd like to leave a question in the chat, you can also ask there and I'm happy to forward the question for you. Jerry asked if currently the app is limited to the United States only, or does it work overseas as well?

Shevy: Unfortunately, it's United States only. So it's only going to be offered in the US appstore and GooglePlay. I do believe if you have military… if you have a phone that appears to the network as a US. based phone, I think you could play anywhere. But I was actually just on our Google analytics this morning and definitely some people, according to Google, are accessing from Mexico. So I assume that they're in Mexico, but have a US-based carrier system. I'm not quite sure how that works, but the short answer is: it's US right now.

Michael: There's probably some pretty complex legality around like giveaways and stuff.

Shevy: There's a lot. We actually are looking at the possibility of an Australian version, obviously the UK packs a big version. For Australian and European based artists or Korean based artists, it actually, I think is going to end up being a good way. I've had a bunch of friends in bands from the UK who, when they're coming to the US, they're like: it is this big beast of a country. How do you even begin? And they could test some songs and be like: okay we seem to have a lot of traction in the SouthWest. Maybe that's the part of the US we'll bite off first or, that sort of thing. In terms of trying to perhaps break in the US if you're from another country, it's another access point. We can assure you it's real live human beings with ears listening and legs to walk to your show. [Michael laughs] So that is an assurance that I don't know if I'm just a skeptic, but I'm always like: Ooh, I don't know. Am I paying for a bot farm in Northern Sweden to listen to my song or are these people? And so we can definitely put songs from other countries on it, but as far as players, they need to be U.S based.

Michael: Makes sense. So looking at other questions from the audience… I see a lot of people saying, thank-you. Great stuff. And Sophia Alpha said, what's it called? It’s called the Ultimate Playlist. Tersia Pello said, I was able to download the app in Costa Rica connected to the US store. So there you go.

Shevy: There you go. Okay, good. Good. That's some good anecdotal evidence there.

Michael: Fantastic.

Shevy: And yeah ultimateplaylist.app is the website that will give you the link to either store if you look up Ultimate Playlist. The logo looks like the word up with the play sign and the P, so it's pretty recognizable on a search.

Michael: Awesome. Well Shevy, thank-you so much for taking the time to come on here on the podcast today and share what you've been working on.

Shevy: Thank-you, yeah.

Michael: I appreciate the life experience that you bring to what you're building now with the software. Also as someone that has started out as a musician, toured for 10 years, started ModernMusician, dove into the world of software development, I’ve just geeked out for the past 2 years learning how to code. I can relate to that story of engineering and the coming together of multiple worlds: Gamification meets music. So I love what you're building. And for anyone who's listening to this right now who's interested in diving deeper or signing up for Ultimate Playlist and submitting their music, what would be the best place for them to go to connect more?

Shevy: So you can go to the website ultimateplaylist.app and then it's submissions@ultimateplaylist.app. You would need to send a link to your song on Apple Music. The link will be your song, but make sure you put the title in there and that sort of thing. And then as far as playing the app, you just go to the app store and download it and we'll be so happy to have you. On Instagram. It's @ultimateplaylistapp. I'm Shevy Smith. It's Shevy with an S so you can find me on there and always ask me any questions as well. I love the ability, when I've had my own things, to reach out to a founder and get a direct answer. I'm always happy to hear from people on there. And yeah that's the scoop on where you go.

Michael: Fantastic. Like always, we'll put the links in the show notes for easy access and yeah. Shevy, thank-you so much for being here today.

Shevy: Thank-you. It was a pleasure. Thank-you. It's such a joy.

Michael Walker: YYEEAAHHHH

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.

First if you hit ‘subscribe’ then that’s make sure you don’t miss a new episode. Secondly if you share it with your friends, on 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 take their music to the next level. The time to be a Modern Musician is now, and I look forward to seeing you on our next episode.