Michael Walker: All right. I'd be here today with my new friend, John Kohl. So John was a founder and CEO of TuneGO. He led the platform's valuation growth from 7.5 million to over 110 million. It's carrying over 25 million in investment capital. He holds 15 patents on innovative solutions that are driving the music industry's direct to consumer transformation. And he's known for introducing forward thinking technology solutions at scale, transforming the way that artists and fans connect. And John, that's like, part of our mission with Modern Musician… help connect artists and fans, and I was exploring your platform, TuneGO, and I think it's really, really cool.

What that and similar platforms are doing is trying to rework part of the music industry from the inside out, because right now there is a pretty big gap between artists and fans. Bringing them together is really important. Thank you for the work that you're doing and for taking the time to be on the podcast today.

John Kohl: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me and I appreciate everything that you're doing for the community as well. It's so important.

Michael: Absolutely. For anyone here connecting with you for the first time, could you share a little bit about your story, how you started TuneGO, and where the idea came from?

John: I'm a tech guy. I grew up in LA around a bunch of music people. I was actually born in Long Beach. The brother of Sublime’s drummer was my power forward on my basketball team, and the DJ from NWA lived down the street. I just had this very eclectic group of musicians around me.

But I always wanted to be in tech. So, these were just friends, etc. I went away to school, learned tech, and originally got involved in hardware. I quickly got into content streaming. I just loved streaming—first video streaming, then music streaming. These were the early, early days when streaming was just becoming a thing. I was fascinated by it. I really studied global networks, global content delivery networks. It was something I was very passionate about. As I had more and more of these conversations, I understood content delivery at a global scale. I understood tech, but I also listened to the creative community.

We all understand the power of music. That can go without saying—no one needs to be told that. You can hear a song 50 years later, and it takes you back to the moment when you first heard it. It’s like a time warp. It touches your soul. All the cliches about music being the universal language are cliches for a reason. So, obviously, I’m a music fan, just like everyone else on the planet. I kept hearing my friends from the creative community talk about the problems in music—the challenges of making a living as a musician, and how hard it is to connect with fans as a musician.

And as a tech person, tech people think. why is something broken? We don't just accept, you know, I think that's just part of our nature and being in tech, you don't accept things the way they are. You view the world as the way that it should be. And so, when I kept hearing about all these challenges and problems with the music industry, it kind of became apparent to me that the music industry wasn't.

Solving these issues from the inside out, if you will. You know, they do great things on many levels. I think that the industry itself looks to grow the pie, looks to provide opportunity and support, and such. But that doesn't always filter down to the masses, to the majority of musicians.

And what about all the people who contribute to a song, you know, who in many ways get left behind, as far as, you know, getting paid fairly and having the royalties filter back down to everyone who deserves it? Things like this. And so, just after listening for years and years, we came up with an idea: "Okay, why don't we fix this? Why don't we go for it?"

It’s going to be challenging. The music industry, when you're a tech platform, is a challenging industry to enter—maybe the most challenging. But it was like, look, this is a cause that’s too important. Music needs to be heard. It’s art, it’s culture, it’s everything. It’s a sign of the times. It needs to be heard.

The industry as a whole, meaning the creative community as a whole, really needs an avenue to properly monetize their work and connect with fans. Really, it comes down to monetizing their art, their work. This is their labor of love, you know, all the blood, sweat, and tears that goes into it. But when you can’t make a living and you have to work a second job just to even support yourself because the economics of music aren’t there for most people outside of the top 1%.

You know, I'm obviously excluding them. They're making, they're doing great, but for everybody else, you know, how do you do that? Well, the way the tune goes, develop or evolved is first we focused really on protecting creative rights. So, when we first started diving into it, we saw this huge problem with creative rights and metadata.

I started to see that there was literally billions of dollars of music collected, but not distributed, and because they don’t even know where to send it, because the metadata of music is so messed up. It’s so fuzzy and muddy, and nobody knows where to send the money. So, we said, okay, let’s—how do we tackle that problem?

Also, we started hearing about, you know, I talked to everybody. I talked to music executives, I talked to producers, I talked to artists and A&R people, engineers, and you name it, everyone in between. One of the other big problems, besides the metadata I heard, was content theft before a song was done.

If someone has a great idea, how do you protect that work before it actually becomes a song? So, our original idea was to create something called the Tungo Vault. The Tungo Vault was designed to be a cloud-based solution where you could upload your work long before it's a completed song. As you invited in collaborators to that work—whether you start off on the songwriting side or the production side—by inviting in collaborators, it creates this chain of custody, if you will, where you could track the contribution and the splits.

So, it created like a birth certificate or a certificate of authenticity for the work. And so, we thought this could help clean up metadata. This could help clean up content so that producers could feel comfortable sharing their work, songwriters could feel comfortable sharing their work, because there was now this audit trail for your creative contributions.

And that, you know, everyone thought that was an amazing idea. They said, "Hey, this is—" I have yet today to run into someone that doesn’t go, “That’s amazing.” But adoption was very slow. It was like solving a problem that people thought, “Yeah, that’s a problem that needs to be solved,” but it was like, “But I’m still not going to go outside of my normal workflow. You know, I’ll just throw my stuff on Dropbox, whatever happens, happens. I’ll just do this, whatever happens.” So, the adoption was slow, which I found very interesting.

Yeah, so we just kept, you know, kept our heads down and said, “Okay, what else needs to come on?” And I think the big lightbulb came on when we started to realize that the real solution here is to first protect the work and the metadata, but then it’s to give artists an avenue to connect directly with their fans.

Because once they start to develop a direct relationship with their fans, they then control their IP (intellectual property), their music. They control their monetization. They control the relationship. They get all of the data so that then they can provide a better experience for their fans, because that’s what their fans want.

Right now, in the current structure, you know, to me, listening is—or music has become a passive sport. You turn on Spotify, you throw your phone on the side, on the side of your passenger seat or whatever, and it’s in your car, and you’re just—it’s a passive sport. There’s not the level of engagement that I think both sides crave.

When I say both sides, I mean creators and fans. And one of the reasons for that is that the creators don’t really have access to the data they should have. You know, Spotify owns the data, Apple owns the data, Instagram owns the data, TikTok owns the data, Live Nation, Ticketmaster—they own the data. That creates a barrier between the creative community and the fans.

The creative community is hungry for a deeper relationship, a more meaningful relationship with the fan, and the fan is hungry for the same thing. And if the creator really knew their fans, they could start to give them personalized experiences, personalized products, which I think is really the future of music: the ability to say, "These are my fans. These are my super fans. These are my avid fans. These are my casual fans. These are my, like, yeah, they pop in and out fans."

Those different fans all have different desires. You know, your super fans want to spend more—statistically, they want to actually spend 80 percent more than the rest of your fans. The 20 percent of fans who are considered super fans spend more. What do they want? They want to support you as an artist, but they also want status. They want maybe a Zoom session, a meet-and-greet. Maybe they want access to music before, you know, a week before it hits Spotify. Maybe they want a backstage pass, a discount on merch.

So, they pay more, but they want more out of the relationship. And that connection, which to me is so important, is what was lacking in the music industry. So, back to the story and evolution of Tunga: We started with the vault. [00:10:00] Then we added an e-commerce capability that was actually built on the blockchain. And what was really interesting about the way that we used the blockchain is that the blockchain is what records all of the fan engagement and the fan interactions with the creator.

So, we took a totally different approach than how many people do with the blockchain. We said, "Look, the blockchain provides security and a level of trust that nobody can change." So, no one can deny that you, as a fan, interacted with the creators. It creates a total system of trust. And then from there, we added a wallet where everyone thinks blockchain crypto. We created a way where all of our interactions happen in U.S. dollars. There is no crypto. It's all Apple Pay, it's credit cards. So, it's really this advanced system, and, you know, people beyond crypto heads and things could actually participate in this music ecosystem.

And then the last piece that we added, which we think is really cool, is a live event component. Any music fan that is going to any venue, we can geo-fence that venue. So, whether you're going to a bar down the street to hear some live music or you're going to SoFi Stadium in LA, that venue can be geo-fenced. So, when the fan walks in, they get an alert that says, "Hey, welcome to the show, collect your free gift." And you, as the musician, can give them a free digital collectible, a coupon to merch that they can buy at the place, a song that's not released, a music video that's behind the scenes—anything you want to think of, any form of media.

So, the fan walks in—now think about this as an experience. As a fan, you're excited, you're going to the show, you know, the energy's high. You walk in, you get an alert that says, "Welcome to the show, collect your free gift." You collect the free gift, you enjoy the show, and then you leave the venue. And our tech will know when you left. And then we can have the creator airdrop to everyone's phone who attended the venue and say, or attended the event, and they can say, you know, it's a 15-second thank you video where the creator says, "That was amazing. That was, you know, we had an amazing connection. Thank you for coming. I love you," et cetera, et cetera.

I mean, that is an amazing fan experience, and our blockchain is recording all of that. And what's cool about it is now the creator knows the engagement level with fans. Now they know who their fans are.

They know who is engaging with them, following them, they're following their profiles. I mean, they know who's buying their music. They know who's attending their live events. And once they have that data, then they can come back and give personalized products. What do I mean by personalized products? Personalized products—All my regular fans, you can have, you know, if you want to buy my album, buy my album. That's great. My super fans—here's my album, plus three bonus tracks, plus a behind-the-scenes video, plus a 20 percent discount on merch. So, it can become very customized.

One of the problems, to me, with music is that it's always a one-size-fits-all product. Everyone gets the same album, but everyone's not the same level of fan. And so, if you can actually personalize your music product or your music offering, customizing or tailoring it for your fan segments, that's going to take it to a whole new level. And that's the platform that we've created.

So, it started off with, "There's a problem, let's fix it." We built this backend system, the vault, to protect content and data. People loved it, but didn't really use it. We added e-commerce. We added the wallet. One other thing about our wallet that's very interesting is we can distribute the revenue in real-time.

So, every time there's a sale, you're not waiting 30 to 60 days to get your royalties. If there's a sale of your music, the money's in your account, literally within a second. And that's another great thing. Yeah, that's a huge benefit. And then the live event technology is just really cool. So, you add it all up together, and that's the ecosystem.

And we think it's going to do great things for connecting artists with music, which we think is the next big economic wave. And that's just not us. Goldman Sachs says that there's $4.5 billion in unlocked revenue waiting to be unlocked for the artists and the record labels that embrace direct-to-consumer, super fan experience, personalized products, and services. You know, streaming is now a mature distribution method.

We all know the streaming economics. I'm sure everyone on your podcast is very well aware of the streaming economics—they're not favorable. You know, 86 percent of the music on Spotify last year earned less than $3. I mean, that's a, that's a coffee. That's one Starbucks coffee, all your work, and you get three bucks.

And so, there is a better way—selling direct, connecting with your fans, and having... you don't need a million fans. You know, I'm sure you're familiar with—I think you've even talked about it—Kevin Kelly.

Michael: Those weren’t true fans. 

John Kohl: If you have a platform that can allow you to really service your thoughts, you know, really go above and beyond for a thousand true fans, and those fans give you a hundred dollars a year, you're making a hundred thousand a year, which is great. You're making a living versus $3 to cover your coffee on streaming. That's what we're trying to do.

That's where we want to have a platform that is going to help the creative community monetize their work so that they can give us more work. We want more music as fans, and we want it from the artists that we love. Yeah, and that's what we're all about.

Michael: Awesome. Holy cow. There's so much good stuff in there. I mean, you're definitely speaking my language in terms of everything you just described. Yeah, that's really kind of the heart and the mission with everything that we're doing here with Modern Musician as well, in terms of connecting artists and their fans.

And it sounds like what you're sharing is that right now, there's a big disconnect between the fans and the artists. I love the way you put it in terms of music being a passive sport. Music sort of being a passive sport, but that doesn't serve either the fans or the artists. There's this movement towards bringing people together and the community aspect of music and the fans.

And you've created a platform that really helps connect artists with their fans more directly and therefore also helps to overcome some of the issues or challenges with the current model, with streaming paying $3 for a coffee, but actually being able to provide more value to the fans and therefore helping the artists have more of a sustainable career.

One question I had, and this is maybe a little bit more on the technical side, but just to see if I'm understanding correctly—this is above my skill level in terms of understanding the blockchain and kind of how things work—but I'm curious how, if I heard you correctly, the platform is built using the blockchain as a source of truth for measuring the engagement between fans and artists.

So, are you saying like every action that a fan and an artist take is on the blockchain? Or what exactly is the interaction there? And is it—usually when I hear blockchain, part of me thinks about, I know there are different networks and some of them are more energy-intensive than others—but am I understanding it correctly that you've built a platform that has blockchain-like transaction interactions for not just purchases, but also just normal fan interactions? And how does that work from a technical standpoint?

John: Yeah, great question. So, ours is a combination of what they call "on-chain" and "off-chain." Some of the engagement, like following profiles and things, remains off-chain, but all transactions are logged on the blockchain. So, if you check into a concert or a live show and claim free gifts, those go onto the blockchain.

If you purchase any music—and artists on our platform typically sell their music at what I would call CD prices or vinyl prices—you know, $12.99 for an album, $3 for a single, sometimes $19.99. We had Snoop do something pretty exclusive with some really cool artwork, and he was selling some of his music for $40. That's a little bit on the higher end, but you know, what you'd expect to pay for a limited edition vinyl or things like that.

So, yes, all of those transactions go onto the blockchain. It's a combination of both.

Michael: Okay, awesome. And the transactions for the purchases. It sounds like there's like a digital collectible. I mean, I know the word sort of has been tarnished a little bit, but I'd be curious to hear your perspective on it. Obviously, there's like a big type and kind of bubble pop around NFTs for valid reasons.

You know, there's a lot of, I don't know, like scams and a gif of a hamster selling for a million dollars. And, like, you know, it was never worth a million dollars, but it's always felt to me like music actually is a genuine use case for like artwork and actually a great use case for something like a blockchain digital collectible.

So, is that a part of the platform? And what's your general perspective on just like witnessing the rise of NFTs and the hype and then the bubble pop? Do you think that there’ll be like a return to Web3 or kind of this world, or how do you view the landscape there?

John: Yeah, so a couple of things. I think the NFT market—we'll see what it does. It seems to be adding a lot of users, and the price for NFTs is coming down. For us, NFT was always a word that we did not like. It’s a very technical term, and I didn’t really understand why it was being used the way it was. I get it, but it just never really clicked with us, and it wasn’t really our main focus.

The NFT does signify a transaction, so there’s that technical piece of it. For us, we always saw the bubble coming. The bubble, to us, and I’m talking about when we started building the e-commerce piece, the wallet piece, and the live event piece, we fully expected this NFT madness to come crashing down and pop.

For us, it was like the old story of the Holland tulips. If you look up Holland tulips, it’s one of the greatest financial stories and all the business case studies. They always study it. All of a sudden, these Holland tulips, which were plentiful for whatever reason, became crazy valuable and then came back to the point where they were just tulips. So, internally at Tunga, we used the analogy that NFTs are kind of like the digital version of Holland tulips. Like, I get it, everyone’s going crazy right now, dropping a million bucks on NFTs, but it’s going to go like this, and then it’s going to go like that. And the real point of our platform was not to sell collectibles.

The blockchain was used very specifically to record the transaction, but the point of our platform was to create connection. The blockchain was a key piece of that, and even though the technical term is NFT, it's never what we were about. We were all about creating connection between the creative community and the fan. These collectibles just happened to be one piece of that, showing the connection.

What the artists are doing on our platform is selling their music. Call it what you want, but they’re selling a digital form of their music, a digital asset. Technically, that fan does own that digital asset, the same way if you buy a Babe Ruth rookie card. You don’t necessarily own the picture because the creator keeps all the rights to their music, but you own that rookie card. That rookie card has value.

With the blockchain, you can actually resell that. It’s not much different than if you buy a limited edition vinyl. Let’s say I buy a limited edition vinyl today, and I go to sell it at a record store or wherever. What does the artist get? The cool thing about the blockchain is if someone buys a limited edition digital version of your music on TuneGO and sells it to another fan, you, the creator, get a 5% royalty.

To me, that was one of the problems with art in general. Say you're a painter, and you do a painting and sell it to someone for $50,000. Then they keep it on their fireplace for 10 years. All of a sudden, that painting is now worth $10 million. The person who owned it and kept it on their fireplace for 10 years can sell it to an art gallery and take all $10 million. What does the artist get?

Got nothing. To me, that was a big problem in art and music—that the creators should always get residuals. That was part of the reasoning behind using the blockchain.

But going back to something else you said, which is really important: one of the negatives of blockchains is their energy consumption, which isn’t ideal. The blockchain we chose is called Flow. It's not one of the more well-known ones, like Ethereum, which uses a lot of resources. The cool thing about Flow is that the carbon footprint of a Flow transaction is equivalent to posting on Instagram or doing a Google search.

Without getting too technical, Flow uses a completely different architecture that makes it environmentally friendly, and this has been validated by some of the biggest firms, like Deloitte. That was important to us, and it's obviously important to the creative community.

We had to wait for Flow to grow, so we took a hit as a company. We could have jumped into Ethereum because it was easier to build on and had more tools and developers. We could have advanced the company much quicker if we had chosen a solution that wasn’t as eco-friendly, but we didn’t. And it was the right decision.

There are other great things about Flow, too: no gas fees, which aren’t even a consideration, and the ability to transact in U.S. dollars versus using crypto. But the eco-friendly aspect was also a big piece. I'm glad you brought that up.

Michael: That's awesome. Yeah, no gas fees, it's easy to use, eco-friendly, and less intensive than making a post on Instagram. Oh man.

One question that I know a lot of folks here would find really valuable is managing the bridge between how someone goes from not knowing who you are to becoming a super fan—or even just a fan in general—using the platform.

I'd love to hear your perspective on what’s working really well right now for new artists to establish those core relationships and connections. I 100 percent agree that the relationships and connections are what make making music worth it—the relationships we build in the community.

So, what are some of the best ways you’ve found to help artists establish that initial root connection?

John: Yeah, no, that's a great question. Ultimately, a lot of it relies on the effort of the artist and the right strategy. I know you talk a lot about strategy and about knowing who you are as an artist to create a thriving fan base, etc. It kind of follows those same principles.

I believe that when artists really serve their fans, that's how they grow their fan base. Don’t be concerned if you're only giving everything to 10 fans, because you can grow those 10 into 100. When you put forth energy beyond the music into your fans, they are going to naturally recruit their friends because they’re going to be excited. They'll feel special. If you make the fan feel special, they’ll spread the word.

Come up with creative ways to engage, and that's what our platform helps artists do: identify their fans and give them VIP features or VIP status. That’s going to make them feel good, which will help you grow your fan base.

Again, you don’t have to worry about getting a million fans. If you get to a million fans, awesome—more power to you. But if you get to 1,000 fans and you can earn $100 per fan per year, you’re making $100K. That’s a great thing too.

We have a growing community, and we try to help in ways that we can, but we’re not a marketing company. We’re not like a record label that’s going to come in and invest in marketing the product. What we do is invest in the platform, providing you with the tools to connect with your fans.

So, we're not like a record label who's going to come in and actually invest in marketing the product. But what we do is we invest in the platform. That gives you the tools so that you can then go connect with your fans. 

I'll give you a couple of examples. One is a local rock band out of LA, a really cool band called Rivals. I think they did a very good job. What they did was create a fun way to release music: they would release one song each day, Monday through Thursday, and if you bought all the songs (one song each day), they would unlock unreleased music at the end of the week.

There was kind of this fun game, so they would see who would buy the whole set. For those who did, they gave them unreleased music. If you're a fan of that genre, they're an awesome local band and awesome live. Then, they started doing some really cool things live.

They gamified it and made it fun. People would be waiting for the release at 10 a.m. each day. What was cool is they took it one step further and said, "If you buy this album, plus this album, plus this album, we’ll give you the chance to hang out with us backstage before our concert."

So, fans would come to the show and literally hang out with the band, play video games, or play pool. They set up these cool little things. Of course, it’s hard to do that in person at every show due to logistics—performing and getting your fans all at once—but you could do things like that virtually.

What if buying an album unlocks a Zoom session with the artist? Fans just want to connect with the artist. I think sometimes artists take it for granted how special that is to a fan—to be able to talk to the artist. They're already connecting with the music and the story behind it. They want to know more, and when you give them more, they’re going to become super fans.

When they become super fans, they are going to tell everyone they know. They’ll say, "Look, this is the next best thing. These artists are great." They'll promote you, and you’ll have built your own promotion team. When you have your own promotion team, they’re going to keep coming back to that experience.

That’s what we’re trying to offer with the platform: we give you the backbone so you can come up with creative strategies and give fans something extra, something special.

Turn those fans into super fans, who become your promoters, and have them all come back to your home base, which is your profile. Then, new people will start following you, and new people will start buying your music. Use that to grow and grow it as fast as you can.

Don’t worry about becoming number one on Spotify because there are a hundred thousand songs being uploaded every day. I mean, that’s so challenging, especially with record labels paying millions of dollars to promote that music. Unless you have a million-dollar budget, it’s just hard to compete.

But if you focus more granularly on driving value to your fans and connecting with them, letting them know who you are, and going beyond Instagram—it's not just your standard social media posts—give them something more. Offer them something more intimate, whether live or virtual. Once you create those strategies, you'll grow your fan base and be successful.

Michael: Awesome. Yeah, really good stuff there. So, it sounds like the core of what you're saying is that the way to build a relationship is by investing in it. You show up, provide value, and do things that are special. You champion your fans, and then ultimately, they end up championing you and becoming some of your best promoters.

Awesome. Cool. Well, John, this is really cool. I really like the platform you’ve built. I’m looking forward to exploring it more myself, and thank you on behalf of the community for focusing on helping solve some of the big issues that exist right now in terms of monetization and, ultimately, just community building and connecting artists with their fans.

I know you mentioned you might have something special for the folks listening to the podcast today in terms of the platform. Could you share a little bit more about how anyone interested in exploring the TuneGO platform can get started?

John: Yeah, so if you're a fan, go to fandom, F-A-N-D-O-M.tunego.com, and you can get a free music pack. Even if you're an artist, it's good to see how that side works. You can get a free music collection. There are other ways to earn points, see how the levels work, and experience the whole fandom experience, which is pretty cool.

You start off as a toe tapper and can work your way up to super fan, earning points along the way, etc. That's pretty cool for creators. Go ahead and join TuneGO by visiting tunego.com or creators.tunego.com, where you can register as a creator. But reach out to our support team.

We have an artist success team. You can contact support@tunego.com, let us know you heard us on the podcast, and ask for a free consultation. We'd love to learn more about you—where you are in your music career, what's your passion, and how we can help.

Once we learn more about you, we can give you tips and advice on how to structure some of these strategies I’m talking about. For example, how to take your catalog music and re-release it or how to take your new music and stage it so that it becomes a fun experience. Let's make music an experience again. If you make it a fun experience, fans are going to love it, and they're going to love you.

We can share these tips and strategies with you and show you what's worked. We’ve had everyone from independent artists who are 16 years old and just starting out to global superstars. Even Sony Music Publishing has done projects on our platform. It runs the gamut, so we've got a lot of data and information. But definitely reach out to our support team, let us know you heard us on the podcast, and we’ll try to learn as much as we can about you and see how we can help in any way possible.

Michael: Awesome. Well, like always, we'll put all the links in the show notes for easy access. And John, thank you again for being on the podcast today.

John: Yeah. Thank you.