Michael Walker: Hey, this is Michael from Modern Musician, and before we start the show, I wanted to let you know that right now I’m looking for new artists to mentor personally. Specifically, we’re looking for artists that have at least 1 song professionally recorded. It doesn’t have to be Beyonce level production, but it just needs to be something that you feel proud of and you’re ready to promote. We’re looking for artists who are really just poised for growth, and are ready to go all in on their music. There’s a saying that when the student’s ready, the mentor appears, and so if that's you, if you’re truly ready for it, then I want to invite you to apply for a free coaching call with our team. The goal is to launch an automated system that allows you to build a loyal and engaged fan base so you make a sustainable income with your music online without having to sell your soul to social media, or post 20x a day on TikTok. Before we get started, we always offer a free 30-minute coaching call to make sure it’s a good fit before you get your campaign launched. At this point, the artists that we’ve worked with have hit over 561.3 million streams, a #1 album on iTunes, and we’ve helped many artists grow from scratch to making a full-time income with their music online. In a few rare cases, they’ve even been able to generate over $1 million a year with their music. With that being said, we are very selective with who we work with just based on who’s the best fit and who we can best serve. Because we have a limited amount of time available for those free sessions, we do require an application process where you can submit your music, and you can apply for a free coaching call with our team. So if you’re interested, go ahead and click on the link in the show notes to submit an application and share one of your songs. I'm looking forward to checking out your music, and now… let’s start the show!

Russ Robson: Some of us have this strange concept of: oh, gotta be a rockstar so we gotta live hard, live fast, die young. And it's so silly. So when I met some of these communities, they just kind of showed me a different way. They showed me basically how to get more in touch with myself and my spiritual side, and how beautiful life is, and why be numb to it? Every moment you have on stage, you know, should be to find yourself in that moment, and that peace, to do it sober and to enjoy it.

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. YYEEAAHH!

All right. Excited to be here with my new friend, Russ Robson. Russ is the founder of Gussapolooza Music Festival and the Indie Distributor Project. He's turned personal adversity into a platform for emerging artists, and he actively helps support farmers, small businesses, and individuals facing addiction and trauma. Today we're gonna be talking about his music festival, Gussapolooza and really, ultimately, how you can build an indie music scene. I'm excited to connect more because I really think that when you look at the trajectory of any successful artist, generally it's not like they're alone and they just build this audience on their own. Generally, it's about the community and it is about a music scene and other artists that they're kind of doing this together. So I'm looking forward to connect with him and hearing about what he's doing with Gussapolooza. So Russ, thank you for taking the time to be here today. 

Russ: Hey, thank-you so much, Michael, for having me. It's a pleasure to be here to talk about all these amazing things going on in our emerging artist world. Let's dive into it!

Michael: Awesome. Looking forward to it. So yeah, maybe to kick things off, for anyone here that this is their first time meeting you or connecting with you, could you share a little bit more about your story and how you started Guessapalooza? 

Russ: Absolutely. So I'm an artist myself, a recording artist, and I was on the road for many years. I did the “every little hole in the wall” type of event you could do, and was very, very lucky to have just toured around North America, traveling and playing and meeting all kinds of musicians along the way. I was living down in Los Angeles for a few years and really got involved with some people running some music festivals down there and just met a lot of communities and met a lot of other aspiring artists in California. I was always just taken back by how many artists leave their hometowns looking for opportunities. I had found myself over the years in search of opportunities as well. Just so many people from across Canada and North America, the US who just leave from their small towns and they wind up in these big cities looking for something more and adventure. So that's really kind of the basis of where I started seeing: what can I do to create opportunity as well, and when I got back home to the Toronto area in around 2017, I just realized that there was a lot of artists who were not here anymore as well, and who had left on the road searching for adventure and for opportunity. So basically, we decided to throw a little backyard party for a bunch of touring bands in the end of summer of 2017. It was humble. We put a pickup truck next to some shelving equipment and I got some sound equipment and we put an open call out on Facebook. So many indie bands answered the call. They wanted to come out and play that we had to turn it from one day into a 3-day event. We had a little inside joke on the road: if we didn't know your name, we'd call you Gus. So if you didn't know the sound guy or you're looking for a tech, you're like: oh, where did Gus go? So many people showed up to the backyard event that we just called everybody Gus, and there is Gussapolooza; that's where it got its name. So after the first event, we basically had so many bands call me and say: Hey, I had such a blast, I had so much fun, and there's nothing like this for emerging artists; there's not a lot of stages that are open to original content and promoting small names. I felt so much happiness putting it on that I just got called to keep doing it and it just kind of grew from there to today where we started off with about 5 acres of land, and today we got 48 acres. We bring in 3 stages. We did 75 bands throughout 3 days in 2022. This year we got over a thousand submissions from across the US and Canada from bands looking to travel a great distance to come play the event. It's been an absolute blessing to do the festival, to put it on, to create opportunities, and that's really the essence of the festivals is how do we create more opportunities for artists, and how do we create a magical stage that is going to launch careers. Not only that, but connect artists across all kinds of different fields: filmmaking, visual artists, musicians and industry folks as well, because we all need each other to build that scene to get behind the artists to launch them forward. So, every year it's an amazing undertaking. It's a lot of work, and it's just open canvas that seems to keep on growing and growing. We just love doing it.

Michael: That's awesome, man. You've certainly come a long way since that first event in the backyard: 75 bands! 

Russ: Absolutely. Yeah. 75 bands was… we don't do 75 anymore. That was just kind of a “after the pandemic to kind of bring in as many people”. It was a little bit too much, but it's a lot of fun. We're excited to see where it goes. One of the big things too that we're doing is trying to connect everybody in the North American emerging independent scene, and really connect these pipelines. So, we get bands that want to play from all over so it's just a great meeting ground for bands to come out and network with each other and meet different folks in the industry, and then those pathways are connected for folks. We’ve had bands from Austin, Texas apply, come on up and grow your audience in the Toronto area. And same for the Toronto bands. You got a friend down in Austin next time you want to go down there and play, so it's that really interesting meeting place. 

Michael: So one thing that I read in your intro was around how part of the purpose and part of the passion that you've created comes from the power of music and community to help individuals who are facing trauma or are working through personal issues like addiction. I'm curious where that part comes from and what you see the relationship being between this community type of event and the power of community for being able to help people heal from those kinds of issues. 

Russ: Awesome. Yeah, absolutely. That's a huge thing for me. Being an artist is not easy. I think that just from… Everybody has a purpose and artists have a purpose to create. A lot of artists have trauma to begin with. I find that there's underlining things a lot of artists deal with, and a lot artists usually wind up trying to numb in some sort of way. So I've had a lot of friends and bandmates over the years, including myself. It's not easy to get in front of a lot of people on stage. It's not easy to go and do these extraordinary things that artists do, and open themselves up. Drugs and alcohol really are a crutch in a lot of ways to a lot of artists and it's such a sad thing. So throughout my career and throughout my life, I've dealt with a lot of that, and I've seen a lot of that. One of my goals is to just let a lot of artists know that there's just a better way forward; there's a way to do business and heal and to be successful and happy in sobriety, and to find that equilibrium where you're not killing yourself for the enjoyment of others; to give art and not give your life. So at the festival, we always put time and effort into healthy living and healthy lifestyles and alternate medicines to make musicians aware of. We live in an amazing time right now; real spiritual time and I find that there's a lot of people who are getting more grounded in our reality, and it's a beautiful time to be alive. So that's one of the big things is just creating that community around people who need a helping hand, and we're there for that. 

Michael: That's awesome, man. It definitely seems like there's something about community in general that has a very healing effect in that when we have issues or problems or trauma that being able to integrate and be able to share and process, it's not something that we have to do alone. Music in particular is a vehicle to which we can express and be able to come together and heal through some of that. I'm curious, you touched on a few things there that I'd love to pull the thread a little bit. You mentioned how right now you think we're at an interesting time of history where people are maybe starting to wake up or become more grounded and get more in touch with reality. You also mentioned medicines and alternative types of medicines. So could you share a little bit more about those things that you brought up and what you meant by that? 

Russ: Absolutely. Yeah. So in my journeys, I've just been lucky enough to discover amazing people and amazing communities and amazing medicines. So I struggled with drugs and alcohol for a long time, part of my life. For where I grew up, it was normal. A lot of my friends and a lot of people I knew use drugs and alcohol recreationally, and it becomes a little bit more and more and more until you don't realize you have a problem. I had somebody tell me: Hey, you got to slow down, and then I had other people pass away on me and it was an eye opener for me to go: Hey, there's so much more to life. I think, unfortunately, some of us have this strange concept of: gotta be a rockstar so we gotta live hard, live fast, die young, and it's so silly. So when I met some of these communities, they just kind of showed me a different way. They showed me basically how to get more in touch with myself and my spiritual side, and how beautiful life is, and why be numb to it? Every moment you have on stage should be this… to find yourself in that moment, and that peace, to do it sober and to enjoy it because, a lot of these things we just numb and we miss out on. Some of the medicines I've discovered they're ancient, ancient medicines and they've been lost. A lot of things have been lost, but we're kind of rediscovering, in a lot of ways, right now. It's such an amazing time to be alive, and that's why I kind of say that because I find that there's a movement towards a healthier lifestyle. People want to live longer. People want to… maybe they've grown up seeing their parents go through living in a different type of way and they want more for maybe their Children or more for themselves and they want to be around longer. It really ties in to everything that we do with the festival and I find that a healthy, happy, healthy creative populace is just where magic comes from, you know? So if we can encourage people to be happy and healthy and creative, we're going to make the world a little bit better. 

Michael: Absolutely. That's awesome. Yeah, it definitely seems like right now there's more of an impetus to heal and wake up and kind of come together from a standpoint of never before have the tools been so powerful that if we don't deal with our generational trauma and heal from it, and if we do end up getting into a new world war with nuclear weapons and just like the scope of technology, it really could be the end of society as we know it. So it seems like there is more of an emotion towards waking up and healing and coming together and breaking down these walls. I'm not sure if this is exactly what you're referring to or not, but I found it very interesting the resurgence of plant medicines and psychedelic therapy. Right now, there's a lot of momentum and movement towards using these tools to help people heal and to be able to process and digest trauma that has been passed down for generations. I know the FDA passed breakthrough therapy status for some of these therapies and they're exploring using these and, in particular, in therapeutic settings. I think that's one of the most important issues of humanity right now is learning how to kind of heal through some of that trauma, and I think music can play a really powerful role in it. So it sounds like that might be something that you're connected to through the community work that you're doing. 

Russ: You couldn't be more right. That's exactly it. It's such a beautiful thing. It's funny. I believe that… Most of the artists I know, I'm lucky enough to have both sides. I have a business sense and an artist side, and not everybody does. I find some of the most creative souls I've ever met in my life are very prone to negative things: they feel more; they experience more. I think with social media and all of these new technologies and being inundated with wherever you look, a lot of people allowed fear into their heart, and I think that a lot of these medicines are just allowing people to let go; let go of the fear and let go of these negative emotions and get back into being positive, which is a lot of hard work being positive all the time. It's not easy, but it's worth it. The view at the top of the mountain is always better than the bottom, but it's a lot of work to walk up that hill, but it's so worth it. You know? So yeah, I think it's going to have an amazing effect. It already has on our music and on our communities, but as we go forward and more and more people become awake to this experience and getting in touch with themselves, I think it's going to just create more positive things, more art, more creativity, and we're just gonna be better off for it. I think that even though the world might seem crazy, it's always been crazy. If you want to talk about any year going back in time, you can pinpoint a crazy event and a crazy time where it was the end of the world and there was a comet coming or there was a war coming. Doom is always on the doorstep, but it's going to be alright. I think we just have to remember that and for the artists watching this, it's our job to comfort those in times like this. So let your creativity flow. 

Michael: Good stuff, man. Yeah. It definitely seems like the role of a musician and being a modern creator really is related to this conversation of bringing people together when, in some ways, we're more connected than ever because of the internet, but in a lot of ways we're more disconnected than ever, and we've kind of created an extra identity or an impression through our profiles that we want to put forward a certain self image that we've already added on to our existing self image. So it does seem like we need communities to help kind of bring us back together, and music is such a powerful way to break down those walls and kind of help people get connected and get back to the roots of who they are. 

Russ: Absolutely. I mean, that's such a huge part of my purpose on this planet is to create those communities to bring lucky… I mean, I know you've probably traveled a lot and as a musician that's one of the perks is we get to meet all these beautiful people in our travels and all these creative types and all these amazing folks. It's just an honor to exist at the same time. I think that there's been things that have really chipped away at what our culture has known for thousands of years, this community. It's almost like we do it to ourselves, but the more that we want, the more that we work, the more that we're away from our communities, the more that we're spending time not being involved in our communities. I think that festivals are such a great way to bring communities back together and to support each other. That's really one of the underlining things of Gussapolooza is that everybody's a “Gus” at Gussapolooza and everybody has something to offer. With the festival it's such a great way for everybody to get involved who has a small business, or who has a service to offer in the entertainment sector. We offer special discounts for everybody to come out and to be part of that community. I think that in doing this festival for so long, one of the things I've noticed is that a lot of the bands that submit, we'll get everything from somebody who's sitting in their parents basement and they've got dreams of hitting the big stage one day, and it's an amazing thing because they're sending us their material and that's the stage they want to play. They've got a long ways to go, but we also get submissions from musicians who are well established and they've got millions of streams on Spotify, but they're worldwide and they're not localized. They don't have a local community that they can bring out to the show. I think that's where we've lost something is having that local foundation that really lifts you up to the world stage. Our passion/my passion and one of my goals is to create that community of music lovers because at our festival, they are essentially the most important part of the festival: people who want to come discover music and to uplift artists. That's why our festival has such a great vibe to it. It's like a lot of these people are those types. They come out and they want to explore new music, they want to discover and they want to be there first and to be in at the ground level. It's been an absolute honor to open our doors and meet all these special kinds of people that really sew that community together because what we've taken on is basically, it's not just a festival, it's a happening. We understand that there is no magical stage without a magical scene. What we're doing is building a scene and the biggest players of that scene are the people who love the music, the people who are inspired by those artists who… That's what we do it for as musicians and artists. That's why we create is to share with those people. So it's such a blessing to have that marriage going on and that's what we really need is that local foundation. 

Michael: So cool. Yeah. The more that you talk about this, the more that I'm like: man, I would love to be a part of that and go attend one of the festivals. 

Russ: Absolutely! Yeah. Well, one of the big things is… So what we've done this year, it's a project that I've been slowly building on is: we're also hosting a convention as part of the festival. My idea with the convention side is that we want creative entrepreneurs like yourself, people who offers amazing services, to come out and network and show their products, show their business experience, network with artists, and really kind of connect the North American emerging scene. So if you're watching this, and you have something to offer, get a hold of us because we want you to be part of that convention and to network and to let everybody know what you're doing. I think that's just going to raise… It's kind of like a rising tide that lifts all ships, so to speak. That's the idea. Like I said, it builds that community, around emerging music and emerging business and emerging art so it's just a perfect fit. So by all means, we'd love to have you at the festival and anytime, let me know how we can get you out. 

Michael: Awesome. Yeah. I appreciate you sharing that. It sounds like it'd be a great fit and I'd love to be able to contribute. The biggest challenge for me right now is just sort of planning travel and trips and being away from the kids and my wife. But something like this I think would be really cool to connect with and contribute. 

Russ: I'd love to touch on that. I'm also a family guy. There's no bigger fans of music in the world besides kids, you know? [Michael laughs] The magic is so bright in their eyes when they see music and they just get so excited. So we've always made our festival family friendly, and we even have a family campground as well because the next stars, the next emerging musicians, we want to inspire the next generation of music creators. Like I said, when you see kids running around with a thrash metal band t-shirt on, or just any kind of buying merchandise they just love it. When they meet one of the artists, it's just like they're meeting a God. They're like: wow, this guy just played on stage and I got his autograph! It's such a great part of the festival that we're always going to make it available for kids to come out and enjoy it. 

Michael: That's so cool. I'm sure our kids would love it. I remember the first… What really inspired our band to start about like 10 years ago or actually no, sorry, it's longer than that now. It's about 10 years that we thought we toured full time, but in high school we attended a festival and there was a band there called Quiet Drive and it was exactly that experience. I remember getting a photo with Justin, their guitarist. He was so awesome. We're just like Ah!!! This is great! That really inspired us to start making music ourselves and performing. 

Russ: And same here! It's like: music is that magical thing and it doesn't matter how old you are. It just brings people together and inspires people and it's a way to talk to people when you can't talk to them. We live in such a strange time right now where people are having such a hard time talking, but yet we'll listen to the same song with the same message and we'll both love it, but sometimes we just can't communicate. I think exactly the same thing for me, man. As soon as I had a guitar in my hand, as soon as I saw somebody play, I was like: what is that? I just want to keep on keeping that on for everybody else. 

Michael: Awesome. So, one question I think would be really helpful to dig into for folks who are listening to this right now is just around this concept of community and building community in general. I think a lot of artists want to be able to build their own community. They want to build their community with their audience and with their fans. So as someone who has both built a community as a musician yourself, and traveled and been able to meet people, as well as building this community now with the festival, I'm curious if you have any best practices or tips or advice for artists who maybe they're early on, maybe they haven't built a large fanbase yet, but that's really what their goal is: they'd like to build a community around their music. What are some tips or advice to kind of help them get that started? 

Russ: Absolutely, and that's the only thing that's going to help them out is building that community around them. The advice I always give to artists, especially one of the things at the festival, what we try to do is we always try to provide seminars as well, and provide a business side of things because whether you're creating music or you're creating a running shoe, it's the same thing: you're creating a product and that product has to be special. Not only does the product have to be special, you have to market it as well. My advice always is to artists starting out is to market yourself as you are the product and you are providing an amazing service to people. You're able to get them angry. You're able to get them happy. You're able to get them sad by sharing your emotions through vibrations. I think you are a magical thing, so share your magic with people. Every time you get a chance to talk to them, talk to them about what you do and how your product is available; where they can find it, share it with them and ask them to come out to see your shows. I think a lot of us get so up in our heads about how we're supposed to act or we see things on TV and we go: Oh, I'm supposed to be this way, or I'm supposed to act in a certain… I think just be as real as you can be with people and share with them and let them know what you're doing. There's a saying “ask and thou shall receive”. Ask them to come to your show and keep in contact with them and keep on creating and let them watch you grow. People love to watch and to be there from the beginning and see where you go and say: Hey, I was there when he was putting out these videos in his basement, and now he's playing on this stage. So don't be afraid to talk about yourself. Don't be afraid to talk about your music and don't be afraid to share why you're magical. That's really the advice. Also it's like, don't forget that this is business. You don't want to be working in the shoe factory and you want to be working in the music factory, then get your product good; put that time and effort into creating the best product that you can and presenting it the best way that you can, and think outside the box. I know that with Paradise Fears, you guys were able to think outside the box. It gave you an edge on the competition. It was a great way to get your name out there, and that's what it takes is innovation, in anything you do, is innovation and creativity. So if you're creating music, create a way to market it that is ingenious and that'll help you grow that community as well and reach more people. 

Michael: Yeah, along this topic of community and building relationships, I really do think that that tour hacking strategy of just meeting people face to face in lines for shows over and over again really helped us to connect with people and build a community. I'm curious because the advice that you gave, I think is so, so important; so spot on in terms of helping artists to recognize their value, and recognize that they have magic and that they can really serve people with their music. I think sometimes it's hard to balance or kind of figure out where's the line between: we really don't want to come across as overbearing or spammy, and it is possible to be spammy and to just to send out mass spam messages to someone, and that's on the other end of the spectrum too. So I'm curious how you kind of find that balance of both being proactive and sharing your music and sharing who you are, and also avoiding being too like “me, me, me, me, me”, and actually like kind of building that community. 

Russ: You hit a subject there that as soon as you said it, I got goosebumps. So purpose: if music is your purpose, then your job is to share it with as many people as you can. If you want to talk about spammy, Coca-Cola is spammy. You see it everywhere you go, but people don't get angry at Coca-Cola. It's just there. They recognize it. Branding is some… You have to stop…. This is what artists, such as myself, are always guilty of: we don't want to take people's money. We want to create, we want to help, we want to do it all for free, but you cannot fund yourself for free. You have to make money, and making money keeps you alive and allows you to do what you do and you’ll help people with your product. You're not creating something that's going to make people sick, you're going to create something that helps people, and you have to think of that in that way. So my advice is stop being so selfish. It's not all about you; it's about others. You're trying to help others and you have to get out there. You have to push yourself. You have to break down those boundaries and don't be afraid to do it because in this world that we live on, it's not a fair and free place. If nobody had to eat and everybody just got to live forever, then there'd be no magic. We'd all be bored. It'd be too good. So there's trials and tribulations and you have to push the boundaries and you have to put yourself in an uncomfortable position, and I think that's the best way to grow as an artist. If you're pushing yourself, you're uncomfortable, if you feel like: Oh, I shouldn't do that. You should. You should try it out and you're going to grow and you're going to keep on going because if you want to make it as an artist, or if you want to make it in business at all, whether you're creating a shoe or you're creating music, you have to do it. You have to put yourself out there. 

Michael: So good. Yeah. One of my favorite quotes or the general ideas was, Joseph Campbell who shared something along the lines of: our greatest treasure is often in the cave of our deepest fears, and how that can be compass to kind of like go towards those things that we're afraid of. So I'm curious: how can artists distinguish between the fear that's like good fear or valid fear, versus the fear that's like preventing you from embracing your truth?

Russ: Absolutely. So fear is a tool. If you see a dog that could eat, you feel that tingling sensation, maybe you should run, but you have to be the master of your fear. You have to learn how to get in control of that, and if you don't, you're going to wind up with a drug problem or an alcohol problem, because you're going to go to those substances for that to deal with your fear. So, meditation! Meditation, medicines, and putting yourself in uncomfortable situations for long periods of time is the best thing that you can do. I still get nervous when I get on stage and I love it because I feel alive. I don't ever want to lose that feeling. It's magical, so learn to love that, learn to embrace it and learn to be a leader, because it's a leader who can be courageous in times where everybody else is afraid, and if you can master your fear, you can be that leader that you need to be either for your band or any other aspect of your life. So I would highly suggest doing some inner work, getting control of that because if you can control your emotions in this world, you can do great things. You can heal. 

Michael: So good. Yeah. It definitely seems like using fear as a bell or as a signal as: there's something… there's an opportunity here/there's something to work on is a great mindset to approach and kind of lean into it as opposed to hide from it or avoid it or repress it. I've heard this concept before about when people are looking at leadership and the people who become leaders. The way that they respond to crisis situations is significantly different in that leaders tend to… When there is a crisis or there's a big problem, there's an issue and you gotta handle it, there's a few different responses that you can have, but for leaders, generally, that's when they woke up and they kind of performed their best because they saw they needed to rise up and wake up to to be able to respond to it and kind of face the fear head on. So I think there's a lot of wisdom in that concept of being aware of your fear and leaning into it, facing it head on, as opposed to hiding it or trying to repress it, and all the trappings that we use to avoid looking at those things for ourselves. Really powerful stuff. 

Russ: Absolutely. Absolutely! Yeah. I think we're all here for something. We're all lucky enough to be alive in the first place. I think everybody's got something going on, and I think it's such a… Fear is one of those things that can really, once it gets in, it can really do damage. Anybody is able to rise above it, it just takes hard, hard work and you just become better and better every day that you go through it, and for artists, you get so in control of your emotions that you start controlling other people's emotions and that's what you do. That's why you're magical: You get on stage and you have a thousand people staring at you and you stare right back at them and you make them feel something. That is magic. If you can do that, you can do anything. So bless all of you out there that can do that. 

Michael: So awesome. Russ, man, I've really enjoyed this conversation. I really appreciate the work that you're doing with this community to help to heal and to bring people together and help give a voice to these musicians. For anyone that's listening or watching this right now, who would like to apply for one of those spots or just attend the events and be a part of it, where's the best place that they can go to connect more? 

Russ: Absolutely! So, you can find us on social media @Gussapolooza and Gussapolooza.com has all the information there on the website. We're always looking for emerging artists to come out, whether you're playing or not. Last year, we received over 1,000 submissions. It's my favorite thing in the world to do is go through these submissions because I discover my new favorite bands and every year I'm just blown away. Get on there. Sign up to our newsletter because we open submissions and then we close them. We're getting more and more submissions, but what we look for in artists is: we don't care how many followers you have, we don't look at those sort of things. What we look at to see who is going to be ready for what the festival offers. So every year we hand out some big awards. Our 3 major award winners last year come back and headline the festival. We get them involved with record labels. All kinds of things can happen at the festival. So it is a magical place. You never know what's going to happen, but if you're just starting off, don't fret! Send us in anyways, because we're looking for people who are serious about their business, and if you're serious about your business it’s going to shine and we're going to notice that and we're going to give you a spot. So, if you got a good product, and you got good business, you've got a career and a future, and that's what record labels want to see anyways, these days, is somebody who can take care of themselves. If you can take care of yourself, the world is going to open its doors to you, so always looking for that community. Also, like I said too, if you offer service or if you have an interesting company that's involved in the emerging entertainment space whatsoever, we want you out at the festival as well to come out and share your products and to meet and network with artists and to grow that side of our community. We're excited to see what happens every year. The festival takes place every September; the third weekend of September. This year, it's the 13th, 14th and 15th. It happens in a little tiny town up north of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, in a place called Cookstown, Ontario. It's amazing to know how many fans have been interested in coming from all over the place just to this little tiny town from coast to coast. So it's very interesting and you never know who you're going to meet. We're very excited for the future with the festival and we're excited to grow and make more opportunities for all artists and creative entrepreneurs. 

Michael: Awesome. Well, like always, we'll put the links in the show notes for easy access and yeah, who knows if you go to the event, then you might see me there as well cause it sounds awesome and I would love to be a part of it. 

Russ: Great. Yeah. We'd love to have you and reach out to us. Anybody's got any questions, we always answer people on our Instagram. It’s probably the best way to get ahold of us.

Michael: Hey, it’s Michael here. I hope that you got a ton of value out of this episode. Make sure to check out the show notes to learn more about our guest today, and if you want to support the podcast then there’s a few ways to help us grow. 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.