Michael Walker: So, 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 just don’t fully understand why you do what you do, or why you invest so much time, energy, and money towards 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 ModernMusician 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, it’s why I have 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, but without really a fanbase or a business. And if they take that and turn it into a sustainable full-time career and be able to impact hundreds, thousands or even 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 success and their knowledge 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.

Mike Warner: Tidal have been rolling out Tidal Artist Home, which is also known as Tidal for Artists. What that does is they try and play matchmaker. So any artists that signs up within Tidal’s artist home and says that they're looking for people to collaborate with, they can create a profile. It's private within the backend. At this time, you can choose songs that you want to highlight. You can talk about who you would potentially like to collaborate with. And then they play matchmaker. They don't take anything from it other than helping to match you and feeling good that they matched two artists together and they worked on a track. 

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.

 Yeeaaah. All right. So I'm excited to be here with my Australian friend, Mike Warner. So Mike is a DJ slash producer slash music executive with over 20 years of experience in the music industry across different roles. He's developed some expertise around helping artists to be able to grow their presence and their audience on music streaming platforms. Music streaming. Have you guys heard of it? Bet you have! Welcome to 2024! So Mike wrote a book called: work hard, playlist hard. He's the head of editorial marketing partnerships from North America with Believe, and today I'm excited to have him on the podcast to talk about at the time of recording this, what are the newest DSP provided tools? Tings are evolving incredibly quickly and there's some cool stuff that's being released right now. So Mike, thank you for taking the time to come on here.

Mike Warner: [in a genuine Australian accent] My pleasure. Thank you, Michael. It's great to be here. And yeah I encourage you to milk that novelty of me having the accent for as long as we can. I've been living in the United States for 10 years, and it hasn't gone away, and I'm not trying to lose it either.

Michael: It is nice. Man, I remember when I lived in Australia for a year when I was in like 8th grade, it was the first time that I think I felt like I was special or unique not for anything that I could take responsibility for it, but just because I had an accent like: [fakes terrible Australian accent] Oh my gosh, your accent, your bloody, bloody American accent.

Clearly my Australian accent isn’t good. [both laughing]

Mike: It’s more British pirate or something.

Michael: [fakes terrible British accent] Would you like some tea and crumpets?

That's my British accent. That's not down under at all. Everyone overseas hates me now. They're like: he's got this horrible accent.

But yeah, Mike, maybe we could kick things off. Maybe you can just introduce yourself briefly and share a little bit about your background and kind of how you went from DJ producer to music executive and then develop the expertise that you teach now related to DSP tools and streaming. 

Mike: Yeah, I'm going to try and give the shortest version possible cause I know we want to geek out and talk about all the tools today. So I'm going to do a very quick timeline overview. First things first: in high school, burned mix CDs, shared them with friends. Really enjoyed doing that. I definitely wasn't mixing or anything special. It was just burning, but that was new at the time. Outside of high school, got into promoting at various nightclubs, handing out drink cards to school friends, which was really easy to do when you're 18 and your friends are just going out in Australia and wanting to have a drink and party and listen to music. That led to meeting the DJs and MCs. And then I did a course and then I spent a few years following DJs around, driving them, setting up their equipment, learning the ropes and then started DJing myself. And then a few years after DJing and performing, I wanted to do more. I wanted to travel. So I learned music production. For anyone that's familiar with SAE, the school of audio engineering. And then fast forward to years of releasing music with various projects, I moved to the United States and at the time, and still the current project, or I shouldn't say project, the current group that I'm a part of is called dates night, which is two friends that live back in Australia. We still put out music now. But we were in the process of releasing our first album. Record labels weren't interested because of the name, because of the fact that we were releasing each song almost fell within a different genre despite the fact that we had our own sound. So we decided to just go independent. At the same time, I was of course moving to the US and when I got here while I was waiting for my right to work and green card and all of that fun stuff, I was spending my time at the computer learning more about what we could do to push our music, especially on streaming platforms. And so we had some wins. There are a lot of things that… there were a lot of mistakes but there were some wins. From there, completely went down the path of being independent, but actually had a lot of people that started to approach me as they saw these successes coming through and saying, how did you do that? And that led me on the path towards where we are today, where I started writing books. I started doing workshops. I started speaking at various events and you know, I just found that so much more rewarding personally to be able to just put this out and help an endless number of artists versus just releasing music myself and putting all this knowledge into practice just for myself and my friends. So, yeah, I've been doing that. And I love doing it. I've been doing it the whole time while holding down a day job, a number of different day jobs over the years. And that's how we first connected and that's what brought me here today. I just love, in a way, geeking out on all of these tools that are available and streaming is where my knowledge is. And I just love to share it with anyone that wants to listen and is willing to put this into practice.

Michael: Awesome. Yeah. I mean, I always try to avoid taking for granted the fact that we have access to such amazing depths of knowledge and experience from people like yourself and just from all of us, like with the internet. Nowadays too it's like an exponential curve information technology is like exploding and it's easy to forget that a hundred years ago, people didn't have this. They didn't have the ability to be able to learn from basically people, like, almost anyone that you can imagine that you'd want to learn from or any skill, any knowledge… Almost all of it's on the internet somewhere. You just have to figure out how to find it. And luckily we're able to host guests, like Mike, to be able to kind of share this knowledge to help shortcut years of your life having to figure this out the hard way. So I really appreciate the work that you're doing and sharing that.

So specifically as it relates to new DSP provided tools, I'm curious what the current landscape is. And you mentioned that there's some cool updates and things to share. So what does it actually look like related to the DSP?

Mike: Yeah and I will just add a disclaimer in here that, like, I talk about music streaming and I know that everyone has different opinions, there's all kinds of conversations about royalty rates and things like that. But music streaming is my world. It's what I know. And it's one piece of the puzzle. I'm not saying just because I don't talk about radio or touring or merch or things like that, that they're not important. They absolutely are.

Michael: [sarcastically] But tell me this, Mike, if I implement what we're about to talk about, will I make a million dollars in my first month with streaming?

Mike: [laughs] If you could do that, I would love to know how you did it.

Michael: [jokingly] That's it. I'm turning this off now. I can't get rich quick and I'm one month with streaming? [both laughing]

Mike: Yeah, no, it's funny. I look back on conversations I had 20 years ago before streaming was even a thing. Multiple friends, we would all say, if we got into music because we wanted to make money, we never would have stuck around long enough to actually see that money. And you know, it's true. When I first was DJing, I was getting less than I was getting in my day job per hour. And I was performing at 10PM at night, I'd be starting gigs. Obviously that changed over time, but you know, if I wasn't doing it cause I loved it, I wouldn't have stuck around long enough to see that DJ fee go up. And you know, it's the same with my career in music. You know, when I first started working in my day job, I took a pay cut and you know, it took a very long time to build that up. So if you're in this long term, like: Yes I really hope that you get to see that, but yeah, overnight? YPou're gonna, you're gonna try something else. You're not going to stick around long enough if you're thinking that way.

Michael: 100%. Yeah. And I think it's good to maybe up front we can just sort of clarify: What do you think is the role of streaming or why is it important for artists to learn how to be successful as it relates to streaming platforms? If maybe it's not the number one way that they're likely to make the majority of their revenue as a musician, thne what is the main benefit that they get from learning this?

Mike: Yeah, I would say growing your audience. I don't want to say exposure because that's turned into such a negative word because it basically means free or close to free, which we've heard in the touring world for years. But honestly, the way that I see it is: it is another way that you're going to reach that fan in that location that you've never been before is by being present on social media on streaming platforms. In some ways, and it's kind of a controversial take, I've said if you look at social media platforms where for the most part, you're not seeing any direct return on that investment. You're not getting paid because you posted an image to Instagram or things like that. Some artists have decided to start looking at streaming the same way and saying: well it's a place where I show up. It's a place where I put my music out, where I can be discovered, but I'm not banking on that being my primary source of income. You look at some of the largest artists in the world and streaming, yes, they're getting large numbers and they're making money, but they're making even more money from the touring and all of the other things that they're doing as well. So that's actually helped me, instead of looking at what that royalty looks like each month, actually thinking: okay, I'm showing up on streaming, I'm doing all of these things. Now it's time to do all of the other things in addition to make sure that I'm making an income that I can live on as an artist. But as far as these tools that I wanted to share, for everyone, I can't see the chat right now, but I usually like to just sort of ask everyone in general what streaming platform you use yourself as in, as a listener, as a fan of other artists. And most of the time, like I'm sure that Michael, there's some responses coming in. Most of the time people will say the main ones: Apple music or Spotify or YouTube or SoundCloud. And one thing that I've always found is that a lot of artists won't pay attention to platforms outside of what they use themselves or what they feel are the biggest for them. So there's definitely been a lot of times where artists will say: Oh, I only share Spotify links and I only talk about Spotify and I don't tell people about the other platforms. And when I'm doing an in-person presentation, I'll go through each streaming platform and there'll usually be hands in the room from people that haven't even heard of some of the platforms that I talk about. And the reason why that's important is: People will listen on the app that they choose. You know? It's very unrealistic that a fan is going to go and subscribe to a different app just because you're telling them to go there. If we want an example, let's look at Tidal when Kanye West, oh gosh, I could probably think of another example, Beyonce or Jay-Z went and said, our music is only available on Tidal. The only way that you could stream it right now is on Tidal exclusively. People went and they started pirating it, torrenting it, getting it through other means. And then eventually it became available on all the other platforms anyway. So I guess what I'm getting at with this is: Your fans are going to listen where they listen so reach them on those platforms. To give you some ideas, in the Middle East, there's Angami. Throughout Africa, there's Boomplay. In India, there's GeoSarban. In some countries, there's Cobas. There's only in the United States, Pandora. There's a number of these platforms that get overlooked for different reasons. And some of them are simply that the artist can't download it where they're located so they don't know if their music's available on there or what it looks like. But I think for the sake of today and for the sake of time, we'll focus on the ones that are more commonly known and some recent features that have been added.

Michael: Do you know roughly what percentage of listeners are on Spotify versus Apple music? I assume those are the top two, right? Tidal’s what, in top three?

Mike: Yeah. If we look at… it's an interesting one as well cause if we look at just the US as far as subscriber numbers. Pandora, as one example, only exists in the US, but they're actually in the top five in terms of subscriber numbers, monthly listeners. I think Tidal might be within the top 10 in the US. I've heard people talk about market share before and say: Oh this particular streaming platform only has 1 or 2% of the global market. And I say, well, I'd love to get in on that especially if it's a very minimal amount of work and time invested. If I need to just spend 30 minutes twice per year to have a potential audience on that platform, I'll do it. And the other thing as well is: I find that platforms that are smaller, are working harder to get artists excited and to get them involved and to provide opportunities for those artists. When you get to a Spotify level, it becomes a little tougher to get noticed. But when you've got the smaller platforms, once again throwing it back to Pandora, they're more hands on. They have calls twice per month where editors actually jump on the call and people can talk directly to them and ask questions and they give out their email addresses in the call. To give you an idea, Pandora, last time I checked, they have about 60 million monthly listeners and they're only available in the US. So if you're trying to reach people, there's all of these other platforms and these numbers add up and there's people that are only listening on them. So it's a great way to reach them.

Michael: Interesting. Yeah, it kind of reminds me of that concept of like being a big fish in a small pond or a small fish in a big pond where the big pond in this case might be Spotify, but it's pretty saturated because there's a lot of music there where some of these smaller platforms, you could actually be a bigger fish in a smaller pond. Yeah, I was just looking at some of the stats at the time of recording this. It looks like Spotify has about 30% of the music streaming market share followed by Apple music has like 13.7%. Tencent Music has 13.4%. Amazon has 13.3%. So it looks like Spotify has less than I would have expected of a lead. And also just less than I would have expected of in general, like 30% of streaming happens on Spotify. I mean, 70% of streaming is happening on other platforms aside from Spotify. Much bigger than I would have realized.

Mike: Yeah, definitely. You know, and the thing is like, if you're only focused on Spotify, then you're really only focusing on that percent of the market.

Michael: Yeah.

Mike: And this isn't to say that Spotify shouldn't have your attention. They absolutely should, but there's nothing wrong with also giving some attention to the others as well.

Michael: Awesome. So when we were talking about the DSP and new tools and kind of the current landscape, I'm curious what's happening right now in terms of the world of distribution. 

Mike: Yeah, definitely. So some recent tools: I'm going to share these links with you directly if you want to share them with everyone else as well. One from Amazon music that they launched recently is called Hype Deck. Now, what this does is it allows you to create what they refer to as hype cards where you can share milestones, you can share new releases, you can share pieces of content within Amazon Music. And I don't like referring to music as content, but this also includes podcast episodes, artists profiles, and things like that. So it's not just music within Amazon Music that you can share. These cards, they're basically created for you. You can customize the color and the size and things like that and they're ready for you to share on social media. One thing people might say is what's the real benefit in this? I'm just sharing a card and a link to myself or my music or a podcast episode on Amazon Music. One thing that I've noticed they've started doing is these links are clearly trackable so they can see how many people are following that link, which means how many people are you sending from social media to an artist in Amazon Music. Also I've noticed that when people have been sharing them and tagging the Amazon Music for artists account on socials, such as Instagram, sometimes they've actually been going in and sharing them which means that you're getting eyes from the social media team and potentially getting noticed across Amazon Music's accounts as well. And it's one of those things where the artwork is created for you. The link is generated. You just go in there, a few clicks you've got something to post. For a lot of artists, they find it challenging to do a different post for each streaming platform on social media. This is one example of why that is so important because you're bringing awareness and the platform is taking notice as well.  I should mention with that example with Amazon music, Apple music has something similar as well. So they have a feature called promote within Apple Music for Artists. And this will also create custom assets for social media, images, give you a link. Now, one thing that's really big and the reason I've kind of grouped these two together is that I want to talk about the importance of encouraging people to follow you on these two platforms in particular. So with Amazon Music, if people follow you, the artist, on Amazon music, they will get notifications on their Alexa device in their lounge room, on their Amazon music app, on their computer or phone every time you get a release in the future. As long as you're submitting those forms with your music in Amazon Music for Artists and saying: I have an upcoming release, here's the mood, here's the genre, here's where I'd like it to be considered, by submitting that form, anyone that follows you will get a notification for that release to their device. So that's a big one. Apple music for artists, there's actually less steps involved. If someone goes and favorites you on Apple Music, which is like a little star now, every time they open the Apple music app, on their home screen and they scroll down, there's a section that says favorite artists and you'll be right there on their homepage. Additionally new releases, every new release moving forward from that point, as long as they have notifications turned on, they will get a notification that you have a new release available. Also, that new release will potentially be highlighted on their homepage because they favorite you as well. So I found a lot of artists because Apple music don't show stream counts, they don't show favorite counts, follow accounts, I've seen artists maybe overlook that part, but I think that it's incredibly important. We were talking about market share before. Think about how many people have an Apple device that have at least had an Apple music subscription at some point as a result and still do. By encouraging them to just go ahead and favorite you, means that you are now on their homepage every time they open the app and they can tap straight through to your profile. So yeah, I would say that that's a really big one that I've been encouraging and using this promote tool in Apple Music for artists, there's even an image that says: favorite me on Apple music and then you could say something like, don't miss our future release. And then it includes the link for you and goes straight to your profile. They still of course need to click that button. But hopefully they're prepared to do that as a fan. So yeah, those two are ones I wanted to share. And then if it's cool, I'll jump into Tidal as well.

Michael: Yeah, let's do it.

Mike: So a few things with Tidal… Tidal have been rolling out Tidal Artist Home, which is also known as Tidal for Artists. One feature in there that's in beta right now that they've just started really pushing is called Collabs. Or Co labs, depending on your accent. But what that does is they try and play matchmaker. So any artist that signs up within Tidal’s artist home and says that they're looking for people to collaborate with, they can create a profile. It's private within the backend, at this time. You can choose songs that you want to highlight. You can talk about who you would potentially like to collaborate with. And then they play matchmaker. They don't take anything from it other than helping to match you and feeling good that they matched two artists together and they worked on a track. Then Tidal also has other features. There was one, I just want to be clear, this was a test that they did in December 2023, where for 2 weeks, they opened up the opportunity to pitch for editorial consideration, specifically playlists on Tidal. And the way that artists could find this was in Tidal’s artist home for that two-week period. There was a button that showed up and artists were able to submit directly. The reason I mentioned this now, is that it's likely that things like that are going to start happening more and more in Tidal’s artist home. So if you haven't signed up yet, it's artists.tidal.com and you're going to see those things in that dashboard before you see them anywhere else. Like the option to collaborate, I saw that just by checking. I check once a week. I don't check daily. And that's where I saw the editorial playlist pitching option. And I just told everyone. I said, let's break this thing so that they know how much demand there is for this from artists to be able to actually get in front of the editorial team for consideration. One more thing with Tidal, and I will just say that currently to do this next feature you need to have a paid subscription. But you can go live in Tidal in the app. And what that means as of today is that you can start playing music and then on the app on your phone only at this time, in the top right corner, there's a button that says live. By doing that, everything that you're playing, anyone that listens in is hearing it at the same time. There's no talk breaks, there's no ads being served or anything like that. There's a two-hour limit. But what I found really cool about this for use case for an artist is you could broadcast this on social media and say, hey this Friday at 2 pm. I'm going live playing my new album from start to finish and then playing a few selections of songs from other artists that inspired the album and continue to inspire me. And it's an interruption-free listening experience for the fans and the artists. Of course, they can be chatting on discord or another platform while they're listening and it will show you how many people are listening in real time. So if you go live and let's say you have 10 people or 100 people listening, you'll see that in the top right corner. If that's 100 people, that's 100 individual listeners listening to that song. That's 100 streams for that song in that exact moment. So for an artist, if you're playing 10 or 20 songs that can add up very quickly. And you know, when looking at royalty rates, I won't quote them because it's changing constantly, but Tidal is definitely towards the higher paying out of other streaming platforms as well. I've seen really good use cases for this for artists, and there's really no preparation involved other than choosing what you're going to play. You don't have to worry about being camera ready. You don't have to worry about what you're going to say. And yeah, for a lot of artists, it's been really fun to tune in and hear what they play on there. And of course, if you have a playlist on Tidal that you've created, that you're playing through in that live session, people can tap through the list as well as long as it’s public. 

Michael: That’s interesting!

Mike: So. Yeah, that's a thing that I've been using a lot and I found it really fun. It's always interesting to see what…. and also I should mention Tidal, when you go live, they highlight live sessions on the homepage as well. So there's a lot of opportunities to be discovered by listeners that may not even know you, the artist, yet. So it's a great way to be putting your music out to an audience and to people that don't necessarily know you yet as well.

Michael: So, just to make sure I'm understanding the tool correctly…. So when you go live, it's sort of like creating your own radio station that people can tune into live in real-time and listen to the same thing. And you'd handle the chat within a different platform, like discord or something, but this basically lets you create your own playlist or a radio station, kind of like a broadcasting platform where people can tune into the same thing?

Mike: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. They don't have a chat in the app or anything like that so the artists can manage the chat elsewhere. And the good thing is once you've gone live once, that link that you would share to say: Hey, join my live session on Tidal. It's the same every time you go live after that. So if you're consistently going live every Friday at 2 PM, people can go to that same link. So if you have it perhaps in your smart link or your linktree or whatever you use you could say: join me every Friday, 2pm PST for two hours on Tidal. And yeah it's like your own personal show that you're hosting. Well, hosting without talking.

Michael: Yeah, not as much pressure.

Mike: Exactly.

Michael: Well, speaking of being live and hosting a show, we are here with a live audience. And so I'd love to open up the floor to anyone that has a question that they'd like to ask. Feel free to raise your hand or you can put it in the chat. I see VoZ raised his hands. Let's bring on VoZ. Hopefully we'll be able to hear you okay. Hey VoZ.

VoZ: Hey, how are you? Can you hear me okay?

Mike: Can hear you loud and clear!

VoZ: Beautiful. I was wondering, if you're not interested in dealing with all the competition that's in all of these DSPs that have just got gazillions of artists performing, since we are tailoring through Modern Musician our funnels to curate our own communities, what do you think about the idea of establishing a subscription to somebody with a catalog like I have, only to the people that are willing, that want to subscribe to my channel. It may not get me to be that super wealthy person overnight, but it will give me an edge on other musicians and other artists that you can only see my stuff, primarily on my subscription to my channel. And we can put a few things here and there on YouTube or other networks, but this is truly being independent and just driving revenue through a subscription service on our own platform. I'll leave that to the floor.

Michael: Awesome. Thanks VoZ. So, just to recap, it sounds like the question is: how do you feel about gating certain kinds of content to a subscriber-only channel and how do we use these tools like Spotify and these other platforms where there's millions and millions of listeners already, and what do you think about the strategy of having some content that's available, but some content that's like gated behind a subscription only paywall?

Mike: Yeah. So one thing I say is you should be available everywhere, but I don't see any problem with some content being just for those true fans and gating it. You know, there has been rumors about some DSPs moving in this direction where fans that follow an artist or maybe pay a few dollars extra per month that is meant to be direct to that artist will get early access to music and things like that. I'm curious to see what that would look like, but I like that idea because it means people are already using that app, so to get additional content from that artist, if they're making a direct payment to that artist, that sounds good to me. Creating a separate streaming platform for 1 artist might be a reach, but I also think it's worth trying. I think if enough artists start doing it you know, as long as there's experiences within your separate offering for your fans… So maybe it's: Hey we're going to have conversations, you're going to get access to my new music videos, you're going to have a continuous stream of my music that you can listen to, to your heart's content, and music that I haven't released elsewhere. I think it's definitely worth trying. But yeah, I guess I would just say: still put out your music on other platforms so people can discover you. And then ideally someone hears one of your songs that you put out, as you said, through DistroKid and they hear it on Spotify and then they come and find you and they subscribe to your own platform directly as well. And they get access to more content. You know, I think that would be the play that I would see there.

Michael: Yeah, 100%. Yeah. You want to meet people where they're at. People, our habits are things that are generally pretty hard to change. If we are doing the same thing every single day, then to start doing something new, it requires a lot of extra gravity or extra force to change. But. Yeah. For sure, having like a patron style subscription or having like an inner circle, like what you're building for your community now is extremely valuable as it relates to things that they can't get on those other platforms. On Spotify, you can't talk to the artists, you can't chat back and forth, you can't do a house concert. Right? On Spotify, you can't deliver a house concert, but you can to the people who are members of your inner circle that are members of a tiered subscription. So yeah, 100% agree with the feedback that Mike shared there.

Mike: I did hear mention: there was something about a music forward foundation. I just want to be clear. It's not my foundation. I have spoken at a number of their events over the years. I will share the link for anyone that's interested, but it's through Live Nation, House of Blues, Music Forward Foundation. They put on events multiple times throughout the year. Most of them are in-person in LA but they do virtual events as well. There's one coming up soon, which is called: All Access Fest. That's more so geared towards ages 16-24 who are looking to get a start in the music industry. As the name suggests, it's all about access to music executives, established artists, people that have been working in music for a long time to provide advice and hopefully give them a head start. But they do have other events where they'll focus on personal branding and things like that, which are open to all age ranges as well. But they do incredible things and. I'm a really big fan of what they're doing. So, for anyone that wants to check them out, MusicForwardFoundation.org. 

Michael: Awesome. Yeah. Thanks for sharing that. Just put that in the chat as well. All right. Well, Mike, man, thank you for coming back on the podcast and sharing some of the latest updates that are happening right now in music DSPs. It's a good reminder of the concept we talked about with the big fish in a small pond. I personally was really surprised just to see the breakdown of 30% of listeners are on Spotify. In my own mind, for some reason, I thought it would be like 70% or 75%. So, great reminder of different ways that people can connect with their fans. So thanks for being on the podcast. And for anyone that's listening to us right now, who is interested in learning more or connecting with you deeper, where do you recommend that they go to dive deeper?

Mike: Yeah, definitely. I mean, for me, you can go to AskMikeWarner.com. That's also my handle on all social media as well. And I will say that as far as platforms I'm most active on, some people are surprised by this, but I'm most active on LinkedIn. And the reason for that is that that's where I've really started to build a strong network. And what I like is that we have artists, we have music executives, we have supervisors for film and television. We have people with the DSPs and everyone is open to talking on there. If you're on LinkedIn and you have an open profile, people are going to message you. I've made some great connections on there. I've made some great friendships on there as well. So that's where I spend most of my time. And then when I want to share something really quick, I do a short form video and you can find me on TikTok, Instagram, and Youtube shorts and all of those as well. 

Michael: Right on. Well, like always, we'll put all the links for easy access in the show notes and let's give a virtual applause to Mike Warner. Yeeaah. 

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