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.

Niclas Molinder: If you're serious as a music creator and want to make a living from your creation, the admin side is as important as the actual creation side. Is it as exciting and fun? No, no, no! It's boring, boring, boring, but so important. To not keep track of your admin is like if you, as a creator, most creators, earlier in life had another job

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.

YYEEAAHHH! All right. I'm excited to be here today with my new friend, Niclas Molander. Niclas is an acclaimed songwriter, music producer, and musician. He's contributed to artists like Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga, and the Jonas Brothers, and he's operated his own publishing company, Redfly Music. He founded the platform Session, previously Oddly, in 2014, which became the world's first independent hub for pre-registration music metadata, aiming to standardize identification, accreditation, and compensation for music creators globally. He also co-founded the Music Rights Awareness Foundation, which enhances global understanding of music rights in preparing for advancements in the industry. The topic of the conversation today, which I'm really excited to hear his perspective on is: how do we make sure that you as music creators are fairly compensated and get the credit that you deserve for the music that you're creating? In particular, it's an interesting time with AI and music creation and generation. I really look forward to hearing what you have to share and thank-you for being a part of the conversation today, Niclas. 

Niclas: Well, thank-you so much for having me. It's great. I'm really dedicated to these issues in the industry. It's more important now than ever that we talk about it and that we try to get as many music creators as possible to understand the importance of knowing your rights, knowing the structure of the industry, because there's more money than ever not finding the way to the right pockets, and also more content than ever released on a daily basis. And the more content, the more data, the more problems. So yeah, it's a very important topic. 

Michael: Absolutely. So maybe to start with, could you share a little bit of an outline of what is the biggest problem that you're seeing right now in the music industry as it relates to the ability for artists to be fairly compensated for their work? 

Niclas: If we start actually on the other side, what's easier now than before; what's better than before, and that is actually the actual creation process. When I started, you needed to rent the big studio that was super expensive, you had limited time to use the studio and, when you had finally had your song recorded, it was super hard to get it out because if you didn't have the money in your own pocket, you needed a company to pay for making the CDs or the vinyls or whatever format it was. So nowadays, the studio is more or less a computer or even the phone can act as the studio. So creating the music now is easier than ever, and that is brilliant! I mean, it gives more creators; more people in the world, the opportunity to explore their creativity and create music and other art forms as well. So that is great, but that also means that more people than ever are creating more content than ever. There are different numbers that we hear, but I think Spotify confirmed recently, not long ago, that there's around 100,000 songs released on a daily basis on Spotify. So imagine the number of songs, and Spotify is one platform. As a consumer today, it's endless opportunities, listening to music, and that creates a challenge for the artists. Like: how should you reach through the noise? How can you reach fans? The problem kind of starts with the new way of creating content. When you're there, when you have your songs released and you do everything you can to get traction and get your songs heard, we also need them to start talking about what your question originally was: what are the problems? What are the challenges when it comes to the next step? If people out in the world listen to your songs in one way or another, on streaming services, on physical media, because people still buy vinyls and stuff, but also on radio, TV, and other sources, you as a creator, you have the right to be compensated for that use. So if we start with the first problem: the problem for the industry today is that we creators, we are not so good at the admin side of the creation process. I would say that if you're serious as a music creator and want to make a living from your creation, the admin side is as important as the actual creation side. Is it as exciting and fun? No, no, no! It's boring, boring, boring, but so important. To not keep track of your admin is like if you, as a creator, most creators, earlier in life had another job and let's say that you worked as a waiter in a restaurant. Except from being there, the most important thing to get your salary is to fill in your time card when you go home and make sure that your employer you have your social security number and bank account number because otherwise they can't pay you. We would never go there without getting salary because it's our job. That part of the creation side, we forget because we are so passionate about creating the actual music. What is more seen as a hygiene factor at another job, time card, bank account, social security number, we don't care about, most of the time because we don't know what it is about. So #1 as a creator, whatever you do on the song, and we come back to the term “song”, because that is also a weird term, nothing in that legal side that is called a song. “Song” doesn't exist in that world, but the first thing you need to do is to identify who you are and what you did, because the music industry today, internationally, suffered from bad or no data about who did what, where, and when on the songs. Even if it comes in millions, if we can't find the people that made it or did it, you're not going to get it. So identify yourself and what does it mean then? Yeah, let's take them the terms again, because one reason why creators are not so into the admin side is because it's very complicated. Just take the terms, for example, in the music industry, we use an insane, inconsistent terminology. There's so many acronyms. There's so much that we don't even understand. Start with “song”. A song from a legal perspective doesn't exist because what a song is, is actually a combination of 2 things: it's a musical work and the musical work is the term for what the songwriters are creating. Songwriters, one or more, when they write what we say a song, what they actually write is a musical work. It's nothing you can hear, even if you play it, when you write it, when it's done, it contains some information. Who are the songwriters? What is the name of the musical work? What's the notes and what's the lyrics, if there are lyrics involved? That is the musical work. Nothing anyone else can hear. To make it a complete song, we need the second part, which is called the sound recording. That is what the artists do when they sing, the musicians do, the producers when they produce it. And the combination of a musical work and a sound recording makes a “song”. It's so important as a creator to understand which side are you on. That is a big problem because many creators today don't understand the fact that there are 2 different parts of a song, so even if they identify themselves, they don't know what to identify themselves to. So that is kind of the biggest problem for the industry. This applies even if you have a publisher, a manager, or someone representing you. The only ones that knows the truth about who did what and where and when are the creators in the studio. Even if you have a manager, if they were not in the room, they cannot guess who you worked with. They need to get the information from you. So at the end of the day, the creators are fully responsible for this.

Michael: Oh man, super interesting.

Niclas: And there are other facts here, and I don't know how deep we should go on it, but I really also would like to mention the identifiers. The system that the music industry internationally have chosen to keep track of all the creators and what they do on what part. We cannot use names for identifying people because some people have same names, of course, so there are duplicates.

Michael: There’s a lot of Michaels. A lot of Michaels in the world.

Niclas: Yeah, John Smith's. I don't know how many we have. [laughing] And also, musical works and some recordings (songs) also have same titles. So we cannot identify by title. Then we're going to get really wrong. I don't know how many “I love you's” there are out there. [both laughing] Another funny thing is that, for doing those identifications, we need to get the full legal names of people. I have a letter in my name that you don't even have on your keyboard because in Sweden, where I am, we have 3 funny letters that you don't even have in your alphabet. I have them here.Yeah. 

Michael: What? I don't? I want those letters! 

Niclas: It's one O with two dots over them [ö] and then it's two A's, one with a ring [å] and one with two dots [ä]. If you're going to try to pronounce those words that contains those letters, it sounds funny for a non-swede. But that means that we cannot even use letters because there's different letters in different alphabets. So the industry chosen to use identifiers, and there's 5 of them. So to secure that you, as a creator, get credited and paid when your songs are used… and I want to clarify again, when I say song, I always mean the combination of a sound recording and musical work. If you want to get credited and paid when your songs are used, you need to make sure that those 5 identifiers are linked and matched to each other, otherwise the system doesn't work. So let's go through them real quick. For everyone listening, there are places to find this out and learn more. We released last year, a platform that is completely free for everyone to learn everything. It's called clip and the address is goclip.org. Clip is created by my foundation together with the UN and the UN agency WIPO, together with the entire music industry. So everything that is correct, and everything you need to learn and repeat from this session here today, just go to goclip.org and learn.

So the 5 identifiers: if we start with songwriters. All songwriters need an identifier and for songwriters called IPI. I know! Acronyms now? Insane! IPI is an acronym of Interested Parties Information. Weird. Just remember IPI. The only way of getting an IPI is to be a member of a CMO, some call them PROs as well, but in the US. they're called ASCAP, BMI, and so on. In almost every country on the planet there is a CMO or a PRO. So to get one, become a member. When one or more songwriters are writing a new musical work, that needs a unique identifier, and it gets an ISWC (International Standard Work Code). When we record it and get a sound recording, that unique recording needs an ISRC (International Standard Recording Code). And on that recording, we have performers, as we call them, and performers includes artists, producers, musicians, backing vocalists, everyone that in one way or another are contributing to the sound recording are called performers. They need, in most of the European countries, not in the US though, but I recommend every performer to get an IPN (International Performer Number. That is the equivalent to the IPI for songwriters, but the IPN is for performers. Many times you are both; you are a songwriter and you are a performer. So for performers and IPN, you also need to become a member of a CMO on the performer side. In the UK for example, it's called PPL. In the US, we have SoundExchange, but in the US they use the fifth and last identifier, which is called ISNI (International Standard Name Identifier). You hear it's a mess, and it's a lot of things to think about, but if we don't make sure that all 5 are assigned, linked, and matched before the first commercial release of a sound recording, we lose control because all users out there, Spotify, YouTube, Apple, everyone, when they play a song, they play a sound recording. In other words, they play the ISRC, and they report to all the companies and organizations in the industry, they report “we played this ISRC”, and if we then don't know the link to the ISWC, we missed the link to the IPIs. In other words, we missed the link to the songwriters. On the other side, if we don't have the IPNs and the performers linked to that ISRC, we don't know who they are and we cannot pay out the money and the lack of information and bad links between the identifiers are the biggest problems in the industry that causes all the unidentified money in the industry today. 

Michael: Man, that is some really interesting stuff. Every time I have a conversation about just the state of what we're describing right now, it's always an interesting reminder of just how intricate and complicated it is on the surface. 

Niclas: It sounds so complicated and yeah, partially it is, but you have options. I mean, the information is there, you can find information about how it works. I mean, you can also get help! If you're a member of a PRO or a CMO, you can call them both. They help you with education and understanding. You can get a manager, a publisher, but I think as a creator, you need to have the basic knowledge and understanding yourself. That's the only way to make a living. 

Michael: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it makes me really grateful for people like yourself and for resources like what you just shared goclip.org. I’m looking at it right now. It looks amazing. What an incredible resource. 

Niclas: Yeah, it's really, really good. It's a lot of videos. Either you start from the beginning, if you're a beginner, you can get the super, super, super basic information, but if you've been around in the industry for some time, you can just search for the thing you want to know. A lot of videos to give you the high-level explanation, and if you want to learn more you read. Everything you read there is confirmed by the whole music industry that that is how it works. So it's all correct.

Michael: Fantastic. So let me just see if I've digested it correctly and if I'm understanding the core principles that you were sharing. It sounds like what's most important for an artist is making sure that they have their identifiers linked up to each other, because otherwise when their music's played and the ISRC, they say, Hey, this  has been performed, well if it's not linked up to those other places that are actually going to distribute and be able to pay out that money. And because of that, if they don't have that, it has nowhere to go. Maybe you could share a little bit about what happens right now if you don't have that linked up, and let's just say hypothetically, obviously a lot of people who are going to be listening to this right now don't have millions or hundreds of millions of streams. Let's just say, hypothetically, that we did have an artist here who had 10 million streams. They went viral on TikTok and had 10 billion streams, but they forgot to put together those 5 identifiers. what would happen to that money?

Niclas: Very interesting question. So first I must say that all creators, when you create a musical work and/or a sound recording, you don't know if it's going to be a worldwide hit or not. So be sure to get everything together before the release, because if you miss that, you need to then try to reconstruct and fix it afterwards. If it's a lot of money involved, it doesn't matter how good you are of fixing things afterwards, you will miss out on money. Because what happens is that we get into, some parts of the industry don't really like this expression, but a common expression for that money, since piracy is not really common today as it was back in the mp3 days, where people could have thousands and thousands of free mp3 files. Today you pay for getting music either you pay through commercials, you know you get commercials between the songs, or you pay a subscription. So that mean that the industry more or less get paid for every use of music today. So the industry gets that money, but if we now can't find the receivers of it because of the lack of the identifiers, the legal term for it is “unidentified money”, but we also hear “black box money”. When that expression comes up, of course, it's not one black box where all money gets into. The black box money is spread out in the whole world, because money is collected everywhere in the world but if the country doesn’t know where to send it, it's going to be stuck in that country. What happens with that money alters from country to country, from region to region. So there's not one single easy explanation, but in general, I can say that the money is, after a period of time that varies from a few years to some more years, gets paid out to the industry based on market share, because we estimate that if we have a bunch of money based on the usage of all the sound recordings and musical works we know, the ones that received top money should probably have the majority of the part of the unidentified pot as well. Could be wrong, we don't know, because it could be actual one country where one artist that is very popular in one country that should have all the money, but we can't find that artist, so we pay out based on market share, which means that the big music companies in the world receives the big chunk of that identified money. So that's kind of how it works. 

Michael: Wow. Do you know roughly what percentage of the total revenue is unclaimed that ends up being dispersed like that?

Niclas: Oh, that is politically complicated because there's not a verified answers to that question. I'm going to drop a number, not a percentage, but I'm going to drop a number that I've heard. I cannot say if it's true or not, but I've heard it from a few different sources, and that is around $1 billion per year that is unidentified that should be paid out. Is it less? Is it more? Who knows? If it was 1 black box, we could really find out, but since the money is spread out all over the world, we don't really know. Based on the number of songs, based on the number of streaming services, we know that it's a lot of money. 

Michael: Wow. That's so wild. Correct me if my thinking is off here, but wouldn't it seem like that money would improportionally go towards the bigger artists because if there is an artist that's making a lot of money, you would assume that they've got their ducks in a row and they've probably actually they've got their identifiers set up. So wouldn't you think that most of the unplanned money was actually from people who just hadn't set up their identifiers correctly?

Niclas: You think that most of the time the big songwriters/the big artists have everything in order, but that's not always the case because the problem with this system is that…. Let's say that you and I write a musical work together now. We don't really know each other. We've been on emails and stuff, so we know what the names are and stuff, but I have no idea about your identifiers, who represents you, if you have a manager, a publisher or whatever, but if then I do my registrations right, and I do everything right on my side, how do I know that you do the same? If we don't have synchronized information, it is a big risk that it gets wrong. And for all the songwriters out there, I can just say: how many times do you ask for your co-writers IPI numbers, and to make sure that everything is right? You don't. So you can sit on your side with a worldwide hit, you look on all your registration and you're like: everything is correct; we will get every single cent from this, but your songwriter partners have registered something completely different and boom, we fail! Of course, the big, big, big, big names, they have big departments that are chasing this all the time. The answer to your question: yes, DIY (do-it-yourself) artists and songwriters and producers are in a bigger risk than the big ones. Yeah.

Michael: Yeah, I mean, you certainly just think that with, I don't know what the actual breakdown is, but it seems like artists like Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran have a huge proportion of the overall market, and just hypothetically, if we said it was 99% of the total revenue and then you think that all of the unclaimed money or the billion dollars or whatever it is, you'd think that unclaimed money, it's less likely that an artist like Taylor Swift or Ed Sheeran wouldn't have the identifier set up. So you would think that it's sort of… It makes sense, and I guess I don't know if there's a better solution, right? So like, maybe it's not constructive to share it, but it seems the proportion might be challenging to pay it out that way. 

Niclas: No but you're right. Let's say, take this example, a restaurant, for example, most restaurants, and even if you have all your identifiers in order, you're still exposed to this problem I'm going to say now, but let's say that a restaurant plays a specific local artist 24/7 because they love that artist. Since restaurants most of the time don't report on exactly what they play, they play just what's called a blanket licensing. They say like: okay, we play music and we have certain amount of seats and or yearly revenues. Then the local CMOs are calculating how much they should pay for for using music. But they never say that: Hey, we, only play this artist, which means that local artist that they play 24/7 will most likely get $0 out of that money because the system is based on paying what they think they played, because probably they paid the Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran because they are the most popular artists internationally, so therefore the money should go there. Thanks to technology, there are now companies for those situations. Restaurants, for example, where restaurants more or less plug a plug in the socket in the wall that listens to what music they're playing and now can start reporting on exactly what was played on a certain location. So that will change how DIY local artists and songwriters get paid because now the system is not really fair, but on the other hand, imagine if all the restaurants, hair salons, shopping malls in the whole world should report every single song they play. Of course, that's not possible, but with technology, it might be.

Michael: This stuff is so interesting. I mean, just even discussing the identifiers and the way that the internet's set up to try to link together these pieces of work to compensate the creators for it, what you just shared with we're getting better at verifying and keeping track of some of those things. I know the Google ContentID with YouTube seemed like a solution that's been created to try to better map out these identifiers. My mind goes to things like Neuralink and potentially more digital integration. I think there's the concept of the internet of things that sort of speaks to this idea that at some point every single object in our physical environment has a digital identifier. 

Niclas: YouTube's ContentID is an interesting technical solution. Easily explain what content… It's identifying 3 things, either videos, so they can see if someone uploads a video that already exists, they can say: Oh, stop this video. You stole it from this. Technology more or less identified. They can do it with sound recordings, so when you upload, you cannot take Thriller by Michael Jackson because it will say: stop, this is not your sound recording. It's uploaded over here. But they also have it for musical works so they can identify melodies, and they can say: wow… Not only for stopping, they can identify: oh, we have a sound recording here, but we don't know which musical work it is, and then they can use their technology to figure that out. Then you asking yourself: okay, does it really work? And they gave me a demo one time and picked one of my songs and we found a teenager with pimples all over the face, I don't know 13 year-old, somewhere in Asia in the bedroom with a guitar playing a lousy version of my musical work. I hardly heard that it was my musical work, but the lyrics was all wrong and pronunciation, but the system picked it up and said: this is the underlying musical work to that cover that this kid is doing. So, that technology is great, but if YouTube don't know which ISWC and IPI that is linked to me it is, they can't find me even if they can identify what it is. They need also to know who I am and who's connected to it. So therefore the identifiers are always crucial if you want to get credited and paid, even with the kind of technology we're using. 

Michael: That is so wild that it can hear the musical work and it can recognize the melodies and the patterns. I would love to hear more about the platform that you've built. I know that created a process to help independent artists to be able to make this process simpler and make sure that they are prepared before they potentially miss out on the revenue that should be coming to them when they release the song. Could you share a little bit more about the platform that you've built to help artists do this?

Niclas: Definitely, and just to clarify, together with 2 really successful creators from Sweden, Björn Ulvaeus from ABBA and Max Martin, I created 2 things. One thing is the education platform GoClip.org that I talked about before, but that is completely separate from what we're going to talk about now, which is the actual tool that helps you capture all the data and make sure that everything gets right. The reason why we're behind both, we actually started with the platform called Session Studio because we saw the lack of a tool that was super simple to use that didn't take too much time for the creators and didn't disturb the creation process, but we also saw the need of education. Even if we provide a tool that helps the creators collect all the information, if you have no idea what IPI, IPN, ISWC, what it is, it falls anyhow. So therefore we’re behind both, but they're 2 completely separate organizations. GoClip.org is a foundation, not-for-profit, but Session Studio is a company that provides services and solutions for the industry. What Session Studio is, it's a platform available on phones (iOS and Android). It's also available on the DAWs (digital audio workstations); the softwares that the creators are using on their computers to record music (Logic, ProTools, Ableton, Garage Band, FL studio). We have, with session studio, simplify the process of identifying who you are and what you do by super simple, easy steps. Use the session studio application to whoever you work with in the studio, same studio or remotely on different places, just connect through that and tell what you did. It's so simple. So if you're in the same studio, the person that runs the recording software, the DAW, just brings up a QR code and you, with your phone, just scan that QR code and boom, you're matched, you're linked, everything is done and you don't have to think about anything else to identify yourself, but since creators are so afraid of the word “data” and “administration”, we don't call Session and a data application. We call it a collaboration application. So see Session as your best friend during the creation process to keep track of all the things linked to the songs: lyrics, audio files. We have the best audio file management system on a song level ever. It's so good. You can keep track of everything from voice memo recordings, which if you're a songwriter, you probably know what I'm talking about when you say that you're looking for an idea that you recorded on the voice memo recording software. You'd go like: Oh, I don't remember when or where. But in session studio, it's on a song level so you always find what you're looking for and all the different versions: the original version, instrumental TV tracks, stems, and all that. So it's all in one place together with lyrics and all the information about who did what, where, and when in a super easy to use interface. You do that, even if it takes one day to create a musical work in a sound recording, or if you work on it, which happens actually that I've worked on a song for, not actively, but the song has been in the drawer for 3-4 years, and then suddenly it's released, and go back to a music creator and ask a music creator after 3 years: Who played the guitar? Who played the bass? Who did that? No idea. It's all there in Session Studio. Boom, ready to go. We use this standard format for the industry, so when you want to send it out, you send it out to your label, to your publisher, to your CMO super smooth and super simple. If you don't have a label and if you do everything yourself, we are connected to some of the tools that you need to use as a DIY artist: the so-called aggregator, which is the platform that you go to release your music. Session Studio is directly linked to TuneCore, for example, so you just send it directly to TuneCore and from there, just release it. If you're using SoundCloud, it's fully connected to SoundCloud. So now, instead of just uploading your audio file to your SoundCloud account without any information, you do it directly from Session Studio and all data comes with it in full control so you never lose control and you will get credited and paid when it's used. So, that is what Session Studio is.

Michael: Wow, holy cow. That sounds amazing.

Niclas: Yeah it's cool. It's really good. 

Michael: It's really cool. So, thank-you so much, Niclas, for coming on today to both, help us understand a little bit better about how this works with the different identification systems, and also for the platform that you've built to make it easy to make sure that people are compensated for the work that they're doing. For anyone that's listening to this right now, what's the best place for them to go to get started with Session Studio?

Niclas: SessionStudio is also free to use. So try it out. Go to SessionStudio.com or you download it from any app store that you're using. It's completely free to set up and start using. Since we provide opportunities to upload audio files, we give you 5GB for free, and if you want to use Session as your main storage for audio, we have a subscription for storage that you can activate after, but you can always try it for free. So SessionStudio.com, or in your app store.

Michael: All right. Fantastic. Well yeah, this has been a really interesting conversation. I feel like every time I have a conversation like this, the veil gets pulled back a little bit and it helps to start understanding it a little bit, and then it just makes me very grateful for, very similar at the beginning of this conversation, I think when we were backstage before we started recording, we were talking about how my house was struck by lightning about a week ago, and it was wild experience and our alarm systems started going off, a bunch of our electronics got fried, but also it was a reminder of how lucky and fortunate we are to live in a world where a lot of these crazy complicated things like electricity… What? Electricity is crazy! But people understand it. You know, the electrician was out in no matter of hours and similar to that, you just described the equivalent of electricity for the music industry and how these things are connected and there's people that have put so much energy and heart into creating platforms to help serve and solve those needs. So thank-you so much.

Niclas: So I must say that is an interesting, I'm going to use that comparison. I'm going to steal that from you to say that: Knowing your rights and knowing what you need to do, is your electricity. Try to make music in your studio if the electricity is down. Nothing comes out, and that's the same thing here. If the data is not right, 0 payments, 0 credits. So that is a good comparison.

Michael: That's awesome. Yeah. Sort of like you have rubber stops. Everywhere that you don't have the ID, there's a rubber stop unless you have it figured out. Good stuff. All right. Well, like always, we'll put all the links here in the show notes for easy access and Niclas, thanks again for being a part of the podcast today.

Niclas: Thank-you so much.

Michael: Yeeeaaaah. 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.