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. 

Andre Miranda: But you really gotta create your own thing. Musically you need to stand out, you need to be different. Quality is like a subjective thing. Difference is more quantifiable. You can actually put two songs, you know, the one next to each other and the AI model can say how different they are. You should be different, but not only your music, the way you communicate your merch, your website, your social media, your marketing strategies, your production methods, your timbre, your team, they should all be different. Because that's the only way you have a shot at actually accomplishing your career goals. You'll be creating your new market. A game where you're playing by yourself and by definition, this is what being creative means. You create your own game, right? It starts from scratch, like you idealize everything.

So this to me is a challenge that musicians face. And that's why it's so difficult to make it. You have to be a creative.

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. So I'm excited to be here today with my new friend, Andre Miranda. So Andre was born in Lisbon, Portugal. He's an entrepreneur in the media, music, and tech industry. He worked at Musiversal where his role was to help create the company and the team and the processes and scale it up. And he's helped fundraise over 5 million for the company and currently leads a team of 60 plus people at Musiversal. And I'm really excited to connect with them today to talk about the intersection between, you know, tech meets music meets finance and what they're working on with Musiversal, I think is very cool. And I'd love to just kind of pick his brain and see where he imagines the future of the music industry going and how we can best kind of capture that wave as it comes.

So, Andre, thank-you so much for taking the time to be here today.

Andre Miranda: Yeah. Thanks for the invitation. By the way, I'm loving the camera angles. And if you guys are watching this live, that's a fun part.

Michael Walker: Yeah. It's literally the only thing I have going for me really is like this. Yeah, but I have to say that it really makes it better. Andre, you know, for anyone who hasn't met you before, who's maybe they've heard of Musiversal or maybe they haven't. Could you just use a quick introduction and share your story and how you started Musiversal and kind of the core need that you guys focus on? 

Andre Miranda: Yeah. Musiversal is a platform where you can book recording session, meet musicians and engineers, singers, basically any kind of music service you need to complete a song. And the question is like, why did we even think about doing this? Who is it serving? So the answer is in our mission: we think that the music industry is not particularly working well. We think that musicians need an income and that it's hard to make one. And music creators need to be able to produce music in a way that fits their budget, right? So people don't have unlimited budgets to hire every sort of music production service they want, right? People default to virtual instruments and whatever is on their laptop, occasionally some gear, et cetera.

So what we do on the platform is we pay a salary to our musicians, which are on the roster. And they provide all kinds of services, to our subscriber base. Our subscriber base pays a monthly subscription, and then they have access to every musician. So, as long as you pay the subscription fee, you can access everything.

So the idea was basically, coming from the point of view of a composer. I was a composer, a film composer, and I was like, bro, it is damn impossible to hire an orchestra to play on my cues. It's impossible for me at the time. So I had to find a way of making music production more accessible. It's not a perfect solution, but it is a solution that's working for some people and it's, it's been growing and we've been seeing the effects of the consequences of that, you know, in a number of songs produced and what people are saying on both sides, you know, creators and musicians. We can talk more about this, but basically that's what Musiversal is doing and why.

Michael Walker: Very cool. Yeah. So, it sounds like in a nutshell, Musiversal is sort of like a community or a library; a network of music performers and for an average artist, he doesn't know how to conduct an orchestra or doesn't have access to an orchestra, kind of gives them a way to reach out and connect with session musicians to help take their recordings to the next level. 

Andre Miranda: Yeah, exactly. But it's not only orchestration: if you want a drummer on your track or a singer or a beat maker or editing or mixing or mastering, it's all there and you don't have to pay per session: You just pay your access fee. Then you can do whatever you want. So if you, if you want to shorten it, it would be the world's biggest online studio, right? But it's not a software. It's actually a group of people that are available to you. 

Michael Walker: Wow. That's so cool. And so if I'm understanding you right, this isn't even like a session by session basis or, you know, reaching out to session players and paying them for like a one off song, but it's like part of a membership. And the people who are performing are on a roster and they're getting paid out you as a platform. So literally, it's just the membership that you pay for, and then you have access to like all these different musicians.

Andre Miranda: Yeah. It's kind of hard to visualize that if you don't understand the business model, but just get this: members to pay a monthly fee. And musicians get paid the monthly salary. So you get monthly payments from users and monthly salaries paid out to musicians. So, the more users we have, the more musicians we have on the roster. So there you go. Then all you have to do is say, guys, because you are paying for the musician's salary, just book them out. You know, whatever sessions are available are yours to take for free, essentially.

Michael Walker: That's super cool. And I guess I view it from a few different angles. You know, most of the people who are listening or watching this today are musicians themselves and, you know and they're songwriters, right? So as such having access to, a community where they can compliment their own songs. If they're not a guitar player or keyboard player or drummer. Just to be able to go and do that. I can imagine being super valuable. I also imagine that for a lot of our artists, they're extremely talented at performing and playing their own instruments, like whether it's keyboard or drums or guitar, and maybe they have a good setup for recording, so they could actually also be providers, but you know, potentially on the platform that you're building.

I'm curious what the process looks like, maybe from both of those angles, we could explore sort of like the journey that artists can take. What would you recommend for someone who's listening to this right now, if they were interested in learning more and diving in, would you recommend they get started on like the membership basis and start using it as a platform to help with their songs, or do you recommend they apply to get onboarded as like an artist that is on the salary? That's working with other artists.

Andre Miranda: Oh, you can do both things. It just depends on what you want. So, you can go to musiversal.com and there's a careers button down there. Like you just need to scroll down. You can apply for jobs and you can see, you can see several positions that are open. But if you want, so if you are a songwriter or a music producer and you want access to all of these recording sessions, you can actually subscribe to our waiting list. So we have a waitlist and every month we onboard new people. We're not trying to make it overly exclusive or anything. It's just that to give people the best experience possible, we need to measure the amount of users and musicians available on the platform to make sure everybody has kind of an unlimited experience where they can have access to everything. So definitely go there. You can also hit me up at Andre@musiversal.co. 

I'm going to admit a mistake because I'm not sure how many people are listening right now, but I will forward your emails to our customer support. You know, if you have a lot of questions coming my way

Michael Walker: You'll probably get quite a few people reaching out, which is, but it's, it'll be great. You know, great, great quality, but that's awesome. 

So it sounds like there's a kind of an application or a waitlist process because you have to be careful about making sure there's the proper ratio of members to users who are making the music. Interesting. And just like a rough ballpark, I don't know if there's like different tiers or different options, but  what does it look like if someone gets the membership in terms of a pricing structure for them? 

Andre Miranda: There's only one option. It's a monthly subscription, and it costs $199 a month. And you get access to all of the musicians and all the sessions available there. So you have, like, 3,000+ sessions to book. You're not going to be able to book 3,000, obviously. But the average user ends up booking, like, between 6 and 8 sessions a month, which is pretty good. 

Michael Walker: It's fantastic. I mean, that seems like a great value for what you get. Saves you a ton of time and energy and you get to plug into this network. Very cool. Okay. So I mean, that just seems like a very cool platform. I'm looking forward to checking out more. I'm probably gonna sign up for a membership myself and start exploring that more for, for myself, for my own music. And we'll make sure that we include links to go check out Musiversal so people can apply for the wait list. I know that there is a process for it. Zoom out a little bit. I'd love to hear your perspective on the intersection of tech, music, and finance, you know, that was sort of like coming into these three areas that you've seen to have some really good experience. And so I love to hear what you see as the industry trends that we're starting to experience. And if we kind of zoom out a little bit and look at the next one to five years, where do you think that musicians should focus right now to really leverage those upcoming opportunities?

Andre Miranda: Yeah, I think as a musician even before you consider the technologies and the trends happening right now and in the future, you need to understand what you're actually trying to accomplish and where you sit in your cohort. So, if you understand that, you'll be able to see how you can leverage all these things you mentioned to achieve whatever goals you have.

So let me just make it a bit more clear: As a musician, you could be doing a number of things. So let's imagine two options: You could be a performer or you could be a music creator. And that this is roughly like the two main categories for musicians. I'm going to exclude teaching because that's a little bit different.

So as a performer why are you performing exactly? Are you performing an instrument and do you want to get live performances or studio gigs? Those are also basically the two things. In either situation, if you play a particular instrument, you're going to be competing for a very limited amount of gigs or concert placements, and you're going to be competing against a notion of people that unfortunately are trying to do the same thing as you and performing the same kind of instruments as you, or repertoire. And the same applies for music creation in a more abstract level, as in we are all producing the same genres and competing for the same limited amount of eyeballs, or in this case, ear lobes. So, essentially what you have ends up always looking like a burrito distribution. And if you don't know what it is, it can just refresh people's minds. It's this curve that basically says: in any productive endeavor of humans, the top 20 percent of those people get most of the outcome, the top 80 gets basically scraps.

So, it's an unequal distribution of outcomes. So the problem with that, and also the opportunity is that you need to stand out in order to really accomplish anything in the music industry, in any industry to, to be honest, but particularly in the music industry. How do you stand out? Well, if you start thinking about the problem of having to stand out in this distribution, quickly, I believe you will understand that just performing an instrument like performing the violin or the clarinet or the guitar, if that's your offering, you're going to be in the middle of the curb because everybody's doing the same thing. It's a commodity. There's zero way, there's no way you're going to stand out. Therefore you should never expect to be in the top first percentile of musicians, unless you're very talented. It's very difficult, right? And most of all, it's subject to this kind of talent inflation where, is your solution to study more of your instrument and be better at playing? That's valid, but everybody else can do the same thing. So then what ends up happening is that everybody's a prodigy. Everybody is really good at playing certain kinds of instruments and therefore you don't change your relative position in the distribution of the music hierarchy. You just make it more difficult to stay in the same place. So, essentially, I think this just shows you that you need to think outside the box. You need to ditch this curve distribution completely and create a new game for yourself that is not saturated. I'm basically shortening this theory quite a lot, but what I'm suggesting is: Imagine you are a songwriter. It's fine to get inspiration from other songwriters. To even have a certain genre that you want to work with, but you really gotta create your own thing. Musically you need to stand out. You need to be different. Quality is like a subjective thing. Difference is more quantifiable. You can actually put two songs, one next to each other and the AI model can say how different they are. You should be different, but not only your music, the way you communicate, your merch, your website, your social media, your marketing strategies, your production methods, your timbre, your team: they should all be different. Because that's the only way you have a shot at actually accomplishing your career goals.

You'll not be subject to the same curve that is completely saturated. You'll be creating your new market. A game where you're playing by yourself and by definition, this is what being creative means. You create your own game, right? It starts from scratch, like you idealize everything.

So this to me is a challenge that musicians face, and that's why it's so difficult to make it. You have to be creative. Now, I'm going to pause here a little bit, but you know, paragraph two would be how to use technology and the internet and all of these things to accomplish what I just said. 

Michael Walker: Holy cow, man, that's some really valuable gold nuggets that you just dropped there around the burrito principle, the 80, 20 rule, and the value of being different. You know, a couple of things that came to mind were the book Purple Cow by Seth Godin is sort of that classic example of, you know, if you're driving down the road and you look into the field and it's just a bunch of cows, then usually you'll just look back. You won't even really pay attention. But if one of those cows is purple, then immediately, like your eye goes to the purple cow. And so it sounds like part of what you're saying is that, you know, you have to learn how to be a purple cow in some way. You need to figure out what is it that makes you different, that helps you stand apart so that you're on that 20 percent of the 80-20 curve and people notice you and you're able to cut through the noise. Super valuable.

Andre Miranda: You just leave the curve because the 80-20 curve is like 80-20 curve of brown cows, but you say I'm purple. So you're completely outside of that game. And you might say, well, there are way more people interested in beef from brown cows than beef from purple cows because they might be afraid of purple meat. But you're going to get a hundred percent of the purple cow market. So even if it's small for you individually, that might be a much better option.

Michael Walker: Super interesting. Yeah, it definitely seems like there's something to that idea of like niching, niching down in order to like penetrate a market especially when it's saturated. I imagine it's sort of like having a sharp edge or a sharp point. Like, you know, when you niche down, like it kind of can help you cut through and it can help you get that initial breakthrough. And then it also seems like at a certain point, you know, if you really want to reach like Taylor Swift levels, like that point, that niche sort of expands but it expands outwards and it, but it needs to start with that, like that sharp edge and that sharp point. 

Awesome. Yeah. I would love to hear your perspective in terms of what are ways that artists can do that and sort of reflect on themselves. I think for a lot of people, we might look at ourselves and feel like: you know, I'm just an average Joe, living my life. What is it that actually makes me special? How can I stand out? So I would love to hear your thoughts on how someone could start going through that evolution.

Andre Miranda: Yeah I'm a big individualist. I really believe that every individual has something special or different, but it's not like that comes in for free, right? So you got to really put effort into developing that. So everybody has the seeds of it, but it requires investments. And I think that's the part where people don't make the investment because they don't know how, and they don't really recognize where to point. I can give more specific examples now, but the reason why you would go for a niche first and then broaden out just comes down to very practical reasons: It's because if you're just an individual with limited financial resources and time, can you realistically talk to a hundred million people at the same time? No, but maybe you could talk to a hundred. So you're going to have to be selective. Okay? Because you have the luxury of being selective you don't need to sell a hundred million tickets. You can just sell a few. 

In terms of how you actually do this: The internet really plays a cool role because there are kind of two ways you can reach people. You can reach them offline or online really, and reaching them offline requires you to be kind of in the privileged location, if you will. So you've got to have the network, you've got to be in a city where there's enough people or where there's nothing so you're the only show in town, but with the internet, it's easier to find your niche because you've got access to everybody in the world. And if you're looking to find your first fans, that's not a lot of people, and it's easier to find like-minded people in the notion of very thinly spread individuals, right? So you could have a fan base, which is a person here in Orlando, another in New York. That's natural on the internet.  So you can produce a niche in a much more efficient way. So, people go about this different ways, but you need to invest in your identity, most of all. And you can start doing this process in a couple of different ways: You can start with your music. You can start with the way you look. You can start with a different kind of concept. You can start with forming a team that's unique and it reflects your unique vision of the world. A mission. You can start by giving yourself a theme. You can do whatever you want. Like, the only thing you shouldn't really do actually is just take notes and listen to what some random guy on a podcast is saying, like, you gotta be your unique individual. You should be at a point where. You're listening to this and you just say, ah, that's, that's BS. That's bullshit. I'm going to do it my own way, but you do it, you know, that would be, I would say the hallmark of a really creative entrepreneur that's not taking shit and he's just going to do whatever he wants. So taking action is definitely. That's definitely the first thing that popped off my mind. 

Michael Walker: Awesome. Yeah, I love that. It reminds me of that famous speech that Steve Jobs gave around thinking different and like the people that change the world are the people who think differently and it's the square pegs that don't fit in the round holes. So I think that's a great kind of central concept to come back to for all of us is exactly what you're saying. Like we all have something that makes us unique. We all are individuals and we all are a sum of unique strands of different points of DNA and influences, and they can form into our own version and our own expression of who we are. But, yeah, asking that question and figure out what is it that actually makes me different? Yeah. What is it that maybe creates conflict or is it going to be controversial even? Like sometimes it seems like those are the things that when you're different, like it can create some controversy sometimes, you know, it's because you're thinking different and, and because of that, it's creating like, you know, a little bit of dissonance between people are resonating here. If you wanted to, you could just play the exact same thing and just be like, okay, cool. But if you play something a little bit different, then you're kind of like traits that I don't know if you can hear my keyboard or not when I do that. I just thought about that right now. But you know, like having that, that different thinking intentionally about how are you doing it in a way that you're creating your own lane is super valuable. So I would love to also explore a little bit more, after someone kind of crafts their artist identity and they really kind of start to lean into what they think makes them unique, what they think makes them different. And they start to create content around it. What do you see as some of the biggest opportunities right now for people to be able to. You know, promote themselves and find the right audience that's going to resonate with, you know, this unique niche.

Andre Miranda: Yeah. I have a very particular point of view on this because most of my time has been dedicated to growing Musiversal, which is a company, not really a portfolio of artists.  But I can tell you exactly what I did and how I think you can kind of take a piece of that playbook and do it by yourself. So when I asked myself who I am and what makes me unique, actually the answer was not: I'm a particular kind of music composer. No. I like film scoring, but I also like technology and I'm interested in e-commerce. So, you know, you can already see how you can mix different things into the recipe that's not necessarily music constrained and actually puts you way outside the curve, which is good. So what happened in my case? I made a little website with Wix. I don't know if you guys know what Wix is, wix.com or Squarespace or whatever. It's just, you can make a website for five bucks or ten, whatever it is. And in my case, I just created a prototype of my company and I put it out there. I went on Facebook groups at the time, like 2016. And I just told people, Hey, I'm doing this. Do you want to check it out? 

So I was not selling tickets or I was not getting streams. But I was using music in my unique way to create something new, which was my company. So the reason why I'm saying this is because I realized that making money off of music is actually not very easy, but music can be used in kind of an indirect way to generate revenue, to generate income. Why?

So music is great at gathering attention. You can build an audience off of music and you can monetize your audience in different ways. Most of all, because the audience requires your music for free. Right? Your audience wants to listen to your music for free on YouTube. So you gotta find a way to get money in another way, essentially. So you can think about it: Okay, who are you? Are you a musician that likes teaching? Are you a musician that likes visual arts? So you could make a music school with a unique concept. You could make an online program to teach kids how to songwrite.

If you, if you're a songwriter that likes that. You could make a sample library specifically for a certain genre and do that. You could call up software companies and be like: Hey, you know, I'm really good at doing this thing for music. Do you need help with some music AI or whatever? You can do so many things.

You could use merch to try to monetize your audience. You could build an audience with your music. And then, if your audience is really specific, it can actually get revenue from being an influencer and doing advertisement or affiliate programs. So I wouldn't get stuck on just seeing how much money I'm getting from music placements and streams, I would look at my audience as an asset, and I would look for ways to monetize outside of music plays. Really. You gotta be very creative and mix music with some other field if you want to make things work quickly, right? Otherwise you're always going to be stuck in this competition where you've got to be on the top placements for Spotify.

Michael Walker: [sarcastically] Wait, you're saying that Spotify streams don't pay super well to most artists?

Andre Miranda: Oh, I would never, I would never. Yeah. Yeah. I would never imply that. But just think of yourself as an example, right? You're doing this podcast. So that is actually the perfect example.

Michael Walker: Yeah. I mean, Modern Musician started about six years ago after touring full time with my band Paradise Fears. And you know exactly what you're saying. I think most artists who are part of our community understand this deeply because most musicians in general understand deeply that like streams alone are not really paying the bills. And they're not a great way to make a lot of money. And we have some cases of artists in our community who have like a viral hit. Apollo fresh comes to mind. He had a song go viral on Tik TOK and he got over 83 million streams on Spotify, which is remarkable. But even that is like. Relative to that exposure, very little revenue comes from reaching that amount of streams. So it is really important to have different offers.

For our band, one of the things that we did was like house concerts and private parties. And those are things that are, you know, $1,000+ and super valuable to fans. And we did a lot of touring. We did a lot of live shows. So it definitely seems like that's a much bigger opportunity for artists in terms of monetizing their music, then relying on streaming.

VIP memberships as well. We call it creating an inner circle where fans can get unlocked access to you and your music and maybe you do live streams where they could be a part of it. Kind of like what we're doing with this podcast right now where people can attend live. But if you adapt this music community where you're performing live, doing requests, that's something that we see working really well.

But it seems like the general like point of what you're making is that where the biggest opportunities lie is when you think about doing something that is different and it's not something that everyone else is doing it. If you're just doing the same thing as everyone else, then it's really hard to kind of cut through the noise. You're just another brown cow in a field of brown cows. So what you really need to do is figure out what are some unique advantages or strengths or differences in you and what you can do, and it doesn't have to be music related. Right? It can be, you know, related to a different vertical with a different skill set, but, your music can be a unique asset related to that. One great example of what you're describing too, is one of our mentors that we have that we've had on the podcast before is named Tiamo David Tori, and he is big into keynote concerts, as he calls them. Basically mixes motivational speaking with music performance and teaches artists how to get 10K plus opportunities doing these basically speaking gigs where you're performing music at the same time. It seems like a great example of what you're describing.

Awesome. Well, Hey man, I love this conversation. It's been really valuable and I would love to open up the floor to anyone that's here live that might have a question or would like to run something by you and get some feedback. We do have a live audience here. So, if you'd like to come on live, you can right click on your profile, raise your hand and we'll bring you on here.

And I see lots of good conversation happening here in the chat as well. People talking about the 80, 20 rule, building your own pond, making sure there's plenty of room to fill in with your brand of water. A lot of people saying this is inspiring. Thank you, Andre. Yes, Andre is the man. All right. So I see Rakuda raised his hand.

So let's bring on Racuda. 

Hey Racuda, how are you doing today?

Racuda: Good to see you, Michael. Great to meet you, Andre. Okay, so in my situation: I play my own parts. I sing my own parts. And I come to you. Do you have, say, a producer on staff listening to my stuff and saying, this needs this, this needs this, this needs this, we can replace the guitar track, we can… any kind of production level stuff.

Michael Walker: So just to confirm the question, it sounds like what you're asking is as like a member of Musiversal, if you have like some songs and you're not quite sure what should I get placed on the song and what could take it to the next level, is there someone that can arrange the music or that could recommend different sessions to add to it? 

Racuda: Yeah. Arranging and a production level in terms of mastering, even if you've got a mastering a person in your house.

Andre Miranda: Yeah, we actually have all three things. We have, our mastering engineer has 11 Grammys, so he is really good at what he does. And then we have an arranger that can arrange stuff for you, but we also have someone that is a producer. Actually, we have different kinds of producers, so we have someone that is able to advise you and write, you know, chord charts for you or give you some advice and tell you, you should book this musician or the other one. But then we also have music producers that are just beat makers and they just, they'll just sit with you on a daw and be like, let's make a beat together. So essentially, everything you need to be in there unless you want something really crazy we didn't think of.

Racuda: Maybe I'll throw that your way, but yes, I'm at the point now where I have all of my songs produced up to a level. They are very good quality demos or they're very low quality radio quality, call it whatever you like. I've been told to get a producer. Michael's brought it up. I think others, several of the guys here that are on the chat right now. So that's where I'm at. And you say $199 a month buys me in and I'm able to confer with your experts there and work it out.

Andre Miranda: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. We have a lot of people on the platform that do exactly that, you know, that they take the music up to a certain level and then just polish it off with MusiVersal. So, making a song takes so many services, but people either just lay on like an instrument or two, they mix and they master. So it's really what it is there for.

Racuda: I haven't even signed on yet, but I like the sound of it. Really. I love the sound of it, Andre. And thank you, Michael, for bringing Andre on.

Michael Walker: Yeah, you got it. Thanks for your question, Racuda.

Andre Miranda: Thanks, Racuda

Michael Walker: Yeah, I love it. I think it's a really cool idea. I've seen some things in different markets around graphic design where you can have a queue and for a membership fee, you create project designs and briefs and whatnot, but I've never seen anything like this before for musicians to be able to tap into a network of professionals for performing.

Andre Miranda: Michael, just, I just want to mention something. So we've been looking internally at what services we should add next on the platform and keep in mind, every services is free once you pay for the membership. The top service we want to add is marketing advice and marketing services, because everybody's saying: Hey, I need help promoting my music once it's done, right? That's a logical next step. So the service is not on the platform yet. But if people listening to this topic, we've be talking about marketing and promotion. If you'd like to have the service in MusiVersal and have a free consultation, email hello@Musiversal.com, and say that you want marketing advice. Because it's really research that we want to do. We want to put the service on the platform, have people try it out and see if it actually works for people. If it's valuable. If you're curious, I would say go ahead and let's see what happens. 

Michael Walker: Awesome. Yeah, there seems like there's a ton of alignment in terms of what we focus on here with Modern Musician and what we've built with our StreetTeam platform. So StreetTeam is basically a CRM platform that allows artists to more directly connect with their fans. It includes email automations, text message automations, you can have a contact list based on lifetime values. You can see who your highest engaged fans are. You can incorporate that into your targeting for running campaigns through StreetTeam. So I can imagine if that's something you guys are looking to explore we could potentially figure out a partnership even if you're looking for a tool you can integrate with and  people can in a couple of clicks  get their music promoted in front of people, not just like fake bots or numbers, but like real human beings that they can have conversations with. And part of the platforms that we have offers built into it. So people can hook up their Stripe account and can set up products for sale. We have tons of templates so that artists can basically in a single click have their music business set up. So that's something I would love to explore if you guys are interested in moving in that direction. I'm sure that we could provide a lot of value and we could figure out a good win-win in terms of what our artists need as well as what you offer in terms of music production and songwriting and high quality music. So that really seems like a peanut butter and jelly kind of situation.

Andre Miranda: It sounds like it. Yeah. You know, I think music companies should work closer together because it's a market that's so fragmented, right? So you have a lot of small players and none of them actually is very powerful in order to make a difference.

So partnerships like this could be really interesting. Of course you have the Spotify's of the world, but you know, not particularly useful. Anyway, you know, if there are some more questions, I'm happy to answer, but I could also just talk more about a few interesting things here. 

Michael Walker: Well, Hey, Andre, thank-you so much for taking the time to be here today. This has been a really interesting conversation and a good reminder of just one of the core principles of success in general which is that 80-20 rule and learning how to think differently and really set yourself apart. So, thank you for what you've built. Thank-you for sharing some of the resources that you've created here for our community. And again, one last time, could you just recommend for anyone that's here listening to this right now, where can they go to dive deeper if they're interested in learning more about Musiversal?

Andre Miranda: For sure. Go to musiversal.com and you should be able to check out everything out there, every service. And guys, just thank you so much for the invitation, Michael. Everybody listening, just keep doing your thing. The important thing is you do it on your terms and don't waste time because life is long, but it goes by fast and you gotta seize the opportunity, man. You gotta, you gotta act as soon as possible and get to your goals, whatever way you can. So it's pretty crappy advice in terms of, I'm not telling you exactly what to do, but I'm just telling you to do it as soon as you can. Just take a step no matter what it is.

Michael Walker: Yeah, that's super powerful. Thank you for sharing that. And yeah, I mean, I think that's what all of us need to hear, right? If there was like a way that always worked every single time, then it just. Yeah, it would make no sense. And it would also make life not very fun to live. If you know, the fact is like everything is evolving and growing and changing every single day. So the most important thing is just to take the next step, like you just described. So, thank you for sharing that. And for anyone that is listening to this for easy access, we'll put the link in the show notes. And yeah, let's give it up for Andre. Yeah.

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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