Michael Walker: All right, excited to be here today with my new friend, Luke Mendoza. Luke is the co-founder and CMO of Beatchain, a company founded in 2017 that provides data-driven artist and label services to the music industry. He has a background in marketing analytics and has held roles as a campaign manager and marketing analyst at MDSL.

I'm excited to have him on the podcast today to talk about something I personally really geek out about. I was a weird kid in high school who loved math, so the economics of business and the music industry are fascinating to me. For someone with a background specifically in economic analysis and digital marketing expertise in music, I look forward to connecting today and sharing some lessons and insights on how artists listening right now can actually use their data.

Yeah, I’d love to hear a little bit about your background. How did you find Beatchain? How did you co-found it, and what...

Luke Mendoza: Yep. So, back in 2016-2017, I was working with my father, Ben Mendoza, at his company, which he founded and ran. It was called MDSL (now Calero), and it was an expense management company—completely different from music, had nothing in common with this world. For one Christmas party, he had been following a band called Brother Strut on YouTube. They did a crowdfunding exercise to fund their second album, and we got them to come down and play a gig for the MDSL team, who were based in the UK. We started talking to Steve Jones, who had run the band. He was the MD of the band, and it turned out he had a very interesting background. He’d had major record deals but was always frustrated because he wasn’t generating enough income to support himself.

When he started Brother Strut independently, he did everything himself. Every piece of Facebook and Instagram marketing, he created the content, wrote all the tracks, ran the ads in Business Manager, ran the merch store himself, and stored all the merch before drop shipping was particularly useful. He was running everything on his own. As we started talking to him and getting to know him better, we found out that what that meant was Brother Strut was being very successful as independent musicians—the first-ever independent musician to sell out Cocoa in London (about 2,500 tickets), so really great stuff. They were making a lot more money doing that than he had with his previous band, which wasn’t independent, where he made about a fifth of the income. However, he didn’t have any time to write more music or be more creative because he was constantly running the business side of things.

What Ben and I saw as an opportunity back then was that the world we came from was all about building software, building tech, and understanding data to make better decisions. That’s all we did. We thought a lot of that could be applied to what artists were doing back then, and it’s even more applicable now. So, we built Beatchain.

I ended up selling MDSL in 2017, and at that point, we saw our opportunity to do something new. So, myself, Ben, and Steve Jones co-founded Beatchain together, and it grew from there. The sole idea of Beatchain has always been to support independent musicians by giving them as many tools and as much information as possible in one place, stopping them from having to jump between different applications and tools. We’d make their lives easier, so they could spend more time being musicians and try to support themselves through that as a career.

COVID was really tough for us because we were generating a lot of our early revenue by helping artists grow, put on their first gigs, sell tickets, and then grow some more. That’s how we were doing it, and it was looking really good. Then, COVID came, and that revenue stream ceased to exist. Live shows were just not a thing. We worked with a whole host of companies during the COVID period to try and do digital in-home stuff, but we didn’t really find the right formula. After COVID, we decided that we had spent so much time building amazing tools and really robust platforms to support artists, but we didn’t have the stature as a company to tell the world. We didn’t have enough budget, essentially, to tell independent artists that we existed in that form. So, we decided to—Ben doesn’t like this word, but we pivoted—to become a platform and artist and label services company.

Now, what Beatchain does is we’re essentially the Intel inside for other companies who want to work with independent artists. We provide our platform, fully white-labeled, to Oddchild, an amazing label in the UK. So, you can go and do distribution on that platform. We also supply in India with Moves Up Disco, which is a Radio City India initiative. We have a number of clients coming up in the U.S. over the next year, so we’re very excited to start doing that.

Our background was very different, but we ended up building a lot of technology and accruing incredibly knowledgeable musicians and music business folks along the way. Our company is now made up of more music people than tech people—maybe half and half—but that’s how we got to where we are today.

Michael: Super cool. You definitely got my ears perked up when you mentioned it being a white-labeled solution to help music companies distribute music. We should definitely have a conversation about our platform and what it would look like to have distribution added to it.

Luke: Yeah, I mean, and actually on exactly that, we've actually recently, because we found that our major solution was a bit heavy for smaller companies to take on, as in like, it just took too much time, because the way that we want to separate ourselves and the way we want to support artists, is it not just be distribution, but it'd be distribution with a purpose.

And that purpose in some of the bigger ones is, if you distribute your music through Moosa or Oddchild or any of our other. Imprints and arenas. You get points essentially based on what you do as an artist. And that means for every release you do, you get points for every stream that each release you do, you get points.

Every time you put a post on Instagram, you get points, everything that you do that part of your music career, that's building into it, we've essentially gamified, we normalize it all. And then we gamify it. And if you get to the top of any of the leaderboards, then our arena sponsors, we call them our clients put forward amazing opportunities that will massively boost your career.

So with our, for example, Shea Ryder, who got to the top of the leaderboard last month, over a six month period is now. doing a recording session with Avelino, who's a huge rapper in the UK. And that kind of opportunity for an artist, you know, with a few thousand monthly listeners does not come around very often.

 To then go and do a recording session with someone with 700, 000 who's worked on, uh, tracks with H and RetroP2 and Stormzy and, you know, just unbelievable names is a huge price. But even underneath that, they also offer studio time and mentoring and things that they can offer. Which are part of what they do as a label, but without them having to sign artists, this is the whole thing.

It allows them to work with independent musicians, allows musicians to distribute their music properly and all the metadata be well, and then to keep all of their rights and then. If they do really well and they win these prizes and their career grows then our arena sponsors get all of that first party data because obviously they see everything the artists do, they can choose to work with them in a more formal way.

They can choose to sign them if they want, but it doesn't hinder those artists Pursuing anything they want to do. So that's a big part of what we're doing. So, sorry, I know I cut you off there. and so the new lightweight version that we call imprints, we're talking to lots of smaller indie labels and music companies and saying, we can do this on a much lighter basis.

If you only have like one or two cool prizes, we will compete for, it's still an amazing reason for them to come and put their music out with you. And get all of the other services that you can offer as a, As add ons to that that's how we want to do it. We want to partner with more and more We want to be the kind of intel inside and make something that's really usable and really simple for people to interact with.

Michael: Really cool. Yeah, I'm looking forward to exploring that more together.

One question I have for you, related to your background and expertise, is about the mix of marketing analysis, economics, and digital marketing. I think it’s a really interesting time to be in the online business space in general, especially because of the way data flows between the large social media networks.

There are so many information silos where artists don’t necessarily have access to their own data. I’d love to hear your perspective. Having worked with a lot of artists in different ways, as well as with providers, what do you see right now—at the time of this recording—as some of the biggest challenges artists are facing when it comes to managing their data?

Luke: Yes, I think you’ve pointed out the single biggest problem that faces all of independent music: the siloing of data. Companies that you need to use for certain things can store your data and make it incredibly difficult for you to access it. I’m particularly thinking of ticketing companies here, which do not play well, on average, with other data providers. Whether that’s wherever you, as an artist, choose to release music, or the platforms where you get your information about your socials, streaming, and fan base in general—these often operate as three separate areas.

The biggest challenge is definitely breaking down those silos and then normalizing the data so it makes sense alongside everything else you’re doing. When we started Beatchain in 2017, the world was very different in terms of how social numbers interacted with real-life, recordable data. The big question we worked on early at Beatchain—and one we’ve worked on with all kinds of different providers—was: If I have 5,000 fans in Tallahassee and I want to do a gig there, how many of them, with enough warning and adequate promotion, will actually show up?

That was the first question we wanted to answer because even back in 2017—it’s gotten worse since then—if you wanted to survive as an artist, you had to find a way to monetize your fan base. The easiest way to do that was to play live shows. I say "easiest," but it’s not easy. Relative to other revenue streams, though, it’s the most immediate. It’s something almost every growing artist wants to do: walk out on stage in front of fans and play their songs.

It’s also a huge revenue generator for independent musicians. The problem was that, at the time, we used a rule of thumb: 10% of your fans in any area, according to social media, with plenty of prior warning and adequate promotion, would come to a gig. That was roughly accurate—give or take 5–10%. So if you had 5,000 fans in Tallahassee, you could sell about 500 tickets.

But things have gotten much more complicated since then. With the decline of Facebook, the growth of Instagram, and the arrival of TikTok, year after year, your numbers no longer correlate in a meaningful way with the number of tickets you’re going to sell.

Now we’re having to use what I call "old-school" methods of marketing. For example, email lists—pre-recording, we talked about how incredibly valuable those are. Getting people’s phone numbers and emails is now way more valuable than accruing fans on Instagram or TikTok, which seems bizarre.

That shift forces a lot of artists who want to remain truly independent—not just without a manager or live agent, though that’s still a good option for some—but who want to own their rights and monetize them. They’re having to fight the old-school fight for attention.

Another massive change is that indie labels no longer nurture talent from the ground up. They’re now taking bets on artists who have already invested significantly in themselves and have growth numbers on TikTok. That’s a huge issue. Labels are only betting on runaway successes on platforms like TikTok or Instagram. It leaves a massive gap in the market—a gap where artists aren’t well-served in understanding what’s going on with their data.

At Beatchain, one thing we’re doing—and honestly, this isn’t even an ad for Beatchain; you can find similar tools on other platforms—is helping artists better understand their data. For instance, you can see where your streams are coming from and get demographic insights. If you’re building a mailing list, gathering phone numbers, or using Beatchain or OddChild for free, you can input your artist name, authenticate your Instagram account (we’re Meta partners), and see a map where your streaming numbers and Instagram fans overlap.

Now, you can’t do that for TikTok yet because their API isn’t there, but this kind of visualization is what we’ve been working toward. It makes it easier for artists to make sense of their data.

For example, if you’re an artist in the U.S. and you know you have 1,000 Florida mobile numbers, 2,500 Instagram followers there, and 6,000 monthly Spotify listeners, you can estimate that you might do a gig to 150 people. That’s actionable data.

Again, I’m very passionate about the intersection of data and music and could go on for a long time about it, but to answer your question: the major issue is breaking down silos and finding platforms—whether it’s ours or someone else’s—that help you understand all your data in one place. The goal is to have it normalized, readable, and actionable for the artist.

That’s how I’m thinking about it right now.

Michael: Hmm, got it. That totally makes sense. And yeah, just to recap what I’m hearing you say—and maybe for folks listening to this who aren’t sure what a silo is or what the concept means—it sounds like one of the biggest issues is with these “silos.”

A silo, in this case, refers to platforms like Facebook, Spotify, or Ticketmaster. These companies hold information about the fans, such as who they are, what they spend, their contact information, and their names. However, the artist, who actually sold the tickets or has the followers, might not necessarily have ownership or access to that data.

Luke: And it’s kind of spread. A hundred percent—that is exactly it. And even beyond that, the depth of data that companies like Google, Spotify, Ticketmaster, and Live Nation have is unbelievable. If you had access to that information—not saying every artist needs to become an expert in data analysis or anything—but there are people like us out there who, given that information, could normalize it and make it usable and readable for you.

For example, Spotify knows when, where, and how people are listening to your music. They know whether people actively searched for you, found you on one of their playlists, or heard you on a radio play. They even know if people are listening to your song during their commute or at the gym. All this information is out there, and it’s incredibly useful.

That kind of data, if you understand how your music affects people, changes how you advertise, build your messaging, and create content. Let’s say you’re an indie band, but one of your tracks really hits hard, and everyone’s listening to it at the gym. Suddenly, when you’re advertising that track, you could use Facebook Business Manager—or come to one of our partners and use our ad builder—and target audiences around fitness.

These little tweaks make the money you’re spending to promote yourself much more effective. It’s the difference between getting a 75% view of your content, which becomes a re-targetable person, versus missing that opportunity. That’s someone you can put into an audience for later and say, “Okay, I’ve got more content now. I’ve got a new song coming out. I want to hit everyone who watched 75% of my previous videos because they’re definitely interested in what I’m doing.”

Having more of those engaged viewers makes it much cheaper the next time you run a campaign—or even when you’re just putting out free content like reels. An engaged previous audience gives you a boost in the algorithm. So understanding your data and how people interact with your music is incredibly valuable and can make a huge difference in how you spend your money.

Another thing that’s really hard for indie artists—and I have this conversation a lot—is they might pull together a budget of a few hundred pounds or dollars and ask, “What should I spend it on? Playlist promotion? Facebook or TikTok ads?” It really depends on the artist, but it’s tough.

You can run ad campaigns, but the cost per click through to your Spotify might be three, four, or five dollars. The chance of that person then becoming a follower is slim. So, you might get 20 listeners, but it can feel defeating.

A big change that needs to happen is these companies breaking down their silos and allowing third parties and artists to access their data. That way, artists can better understand their audience. When they do spend money to tell people about a new album, merch drop, or gig, they can actually reach the right people.

In the meantime, doing things like building a mailing list and directly engaging with your fans is the best thing you can do. Reply to comments on Instagram, get your fans to provide their phone numbers, and start building a real connection. It’s a hustle, but if you want to succeed as an independent artist, you need to hustle.

That’s basically where we’ve got to now.

Michael: A hundred percent. Yeah, there's just so much good stuff there. So, to summarize part of what you're sharing, you mentioned this concept of needing a way to normalize the data from all these different silos.

It sounds like what you're saying is there are all these different silos—different companies that host profiles of your fans—but you, as the artist, don’t know who they are. The companies have a lot of depth in terms of who your fans are.

What a platform like yours does is bring together these information silos and normalize or summarize the data into a single source of truth. This gives you a much better understanding of who your fans are. And when you know who your fans are, it ripples out across everything you do in advertising and marketing.

Luke: A hundred percent. And actually, on that, what we've built—and this is not a pitch, again, this is just for information—is we've taken everything we can do as a tech platform that you can get for free and put it into one place. So, while it's not as deep as we go when working with artists more closely on our Discover platform (which includes independent artists growing at a certain rate who come to us for editorial, playlist pitching, and so on), we then take on things like their mailing lists and more manual data. We have a team that normalizes that data against all the other data we have on them.

But any artist, anywhere in the world, can go to Oddchild (oddchild.app, our local platform) or, if you're in India, moves.disco.com. They can sign up for free, input all their socials, streaming names, and DSP IDs, and get all that information normalized and overlaid on a big map. We even bring in things like how Spotify gives you information about your track's musicality—whether it's upbeat, downbeat, and so on. That's all included.

We can show you how popular you are compared to similar artists in your specific genres and sub-genres. And this all comes automatically. You get it for free forever. Come and use it. It's awesome to look at, and it gives you a really good basic understanding of where you're making an impact.

Even though it's not as deep as what you can get working more closely with us, it might give you a better idea of what kind of content to create or what kind of music to make. You can start understanding your demographics and where your music fits within your peer group. Giving it context like that is one thing. And just seeing all of your peers and how they’re performing next to you is quite handy. For example, if you want to reach out to them on Instagram and say, "Maybe we should do a collab," it’s free!

Michael: What this makes me think of is a really big idea, and I would love to hear your thoughts on this as someone who clearly is steeped in the depth of this—data integration and finding practical ways to connect with fans. What I’m understanding is that this platform allows you to integrate with some of the other providers who are essentially siloing data. And as much as possible, by using their APIs and artist IDs, you're able to access the audience details for that artist on that platform.

One question I have is: I feel like at some point, maybe in the next five to ten years, something will emerge as a solution to this. But there are also a lot of ways this could go wrong. How this develops will be a big factor in whether it becomes a source of truth, like a universal user identity across different platforms. Because, as you pointed out, each of these platforms is very tight with their data, and you don’t necessarily have access to all of it.

For example, if there's a Spotify user who is the same person on Facebook, you can’t necessarily tell Facebook and Spotify, "Hey, this is the same person." And, obviously, there are privacy issues with doing something like that—how do you make sure the user has access to that, understands it, and wants it to happen? There’s a whole controversial discussion around how our data is being used. A lot of it isn’t necessarily transparent.

There’s been a lot of movement towards more transparency in user data, but I’m curious if you think, at some point, there will be a source of truth. Imagine if each of us had one identity, instead of a bazillion different profiles—a single source of truth that’s linked to us. We could go to these platforms and say, "Yes, I want to give you permission," kind of like OAuth, where it’s like, "If I’m going to a hospital, you have access to my health data temporarily."

What are your thoughts on that idea in general?

Luke: I love that idea. Obviously, that would be wonderful. I think the major issue is in Europe, the EU, and the UK, where GDPR basically stops you from doing that. There are lots of rules about how you, as any company, can collect and use data. One of the big ways around it, for big companies and many of those siloing data, is that they automatically anonymize the person against their record.

Back in the day, you used to be able to upload mailing lists to other companies. For example, if you said, "Here are all the people that have bought T-shirts from my shop, and I've got all their emails. I want to retarget them—not just with an email, but I want to retarget them and audiences like them on Google and Facebook Business Manager." That was pretty easy to do. It's much harder to do now, and you have to be incredibly careful about the rules you're following. And that's true across platforms as well.

So, that golden source of truth, the challenge is: Spotify's not going to tell you that Michael Walker at Modern Musician Studio is the same as the one on Instagram, and the same as the one on Google that searched these things. Back in the day, that's what cookies were basically for, right? While you didn't have to have the name, you could target audiences who had done certain things—that was the idea of it.

I would love that as well. And actually, I think one of my predictions for what's going to happen in independent music, particularly, is that as these older school ways of promoting yourself come back, more and more companies will realize that. Right now, whether you go to Indie Week, Music Biz, or South by Southwest—wherever you're going—all the new tech companies seem to have some kind of direct-to-fan relationship. That's the big hype in the industry right now.

So, I think there's going to be a world where all those big companies see lots of artists—who are their kind of gravy train—moving off-platform. You know, with companies we've worked with, like, you can put out releases early on, even for a small fee, so your biggest fans can listen to that. And that's a huge win.

As that happens, as these companies get more popular and a few big ones win out—which I think probably will happen, because that's how everything happens in every industry—I think those big companies that have been siloing data will come up with ways to allow you to re-engage that audience on their platform.

And that will be as close as we can get to a single golden source, like you're talking about. Because then artists will be able to basically say, "Here are all my fans I've accrued from all my hard work, whether it's from YouTube membership, Buy Me a Coffee, Patreon, or whatever the platform is. Now I want to find them on Spotify and tell them I have an album coming out. Now I want to find them on Krates and tell them I'm doing a limited run of vinyl. Now I want to find them on Instagram and tell them, 'Oh, you've heard all my music, you follow my playlist, come follow me on Instagram.'"

I think that's how it will end up going in the next few years. Only time will tell.

Michael: Yeah, I mean, you're definitely speaking my language. Modern Musician, StreetTeam—this is a core part of the movement. As you mentioned, this is happening right now because there's such a big need for it, like, because of the data silos. You can't talk to your people on Spotify; you can't actually notify your followers without them happening to see it across a bazillion other posts. So, there's just a big need for it. I think it makes sense that there's this movement toward it.

Luke: I do have one other thing, which I've been banging on about for ages and I'm obsessed with. Actually, in the U.S., it's more difficult, so I'd love to get your opinion on this. In the UK, we have the Small Venues Trust, which is fighting really hard to stop independent music venues from closing down. There’s a levy coming in on every ticket that a major player is selling to any of their venues, whether that’s Live Nation, AEG, or anything like that. A pound of that, or the equivalent of a dollar, basically goes into the Small Venues Trust to help keep small venues alive. The small venue, independent music scene in the UK, and Europe generally, is very important and starting to bubble up again. It’s starting to look really exciting.

With that in mind, every time I meet new artists who are just starting out and they start talking about streaming numbers and getting a TikTok hit, I basically say, stop doing that. Make some cool music, go to your local venue (if it’s just your pub or local bar), and ask how much it costs to rent it out for a night. You can bring your friends and family down, and whatever.

What we’re finding is that bars often have a sound engineer they use for gigs, and you can get them on the cheap. They’ll often let you rent the space out for like $50 because they want you to bring people to drink in their establishment. For $150, you can maybe charge $10 a ticket to your friends, family, or anyone who has followed you so far to come down locally. Build up your fan base locally because you’ll get loads of amazing organic content from your friends and family filming you playing. That spreads out. You can use it on your socials, and it spreads from them telling their mates to come down.

If you put on a good show, you have a great time. That old-school organic growth... and I don’t know whether you swear on this podcast, but I’ll try not to. Basically, f**k waiting for A&R to come and find you. A&R people no longer roam the bars and clubs so much. They sit on TikTok with a bunch of interns, hoping they’ll find the next big thing before someone from Warner does. Whatever. I hate that. I think it’s awful. Go and play locally and start building up because if you have the talent and the drive—the hustle that the best indie artists need—then that’s the best place to start. It gets some money trickling in, gets some hype building up, and really does so much more for you than trying to predict what music you could make that might go viral, which is just a horrible sentence, right?

So that’s something I really want to push. I don’t know whether you think that’s a viable strategy in the U.S., finding local music venues and bars that could support you.

Michael: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s the right direction to go: just direct connection, building relationships, and building your community. And who do you have the strongest relationship with? Probably your closest family members, friends, and people in your social network.

One of the things we did with my band when we were first getting started about 11 or 12 years ago was we had zero fans. We grew up in a very small town that didn’t really have a music scene. We discovered that when we went out to see one of our favorite bands perform live—they had thousands of people waiting on the sidewalk to get in. So, we approached those people, introduced ourselves, and shared some of our music.

Our music wasn’t great back then, but the strategy worked incredibly well. It worked so well that there were six of us in the band, and we split up into groups of two. We followed six different tours and bounced between them for about six and a half months. We sold 24,000 CDs doing that. That’s what helped us land our first tour with a band called All Time Low. Eventually, we were fully independent, but we went on to release an album that hit number two on iTunes. It was 100 percent from the strategy you’re talking about in terms of starting by building relationships and connections.

We started by playing local shows. While this might not always be the case now because the online scene has really blossomed, I still think that for the majority of successful artists, a big part of their story has been building their local communities and having the network and relationships that they’ve built as a prerequisite before they start to really expand.

Luke: Good to hear that. I mean, I know that independent venues generally have been struggling. I don't know if it's true across all of the U.S., but from where we have friends, clients, and people we work with, and a lot of artists we've worked with over the years, it does seem that some of them have really robust local venues that they can go and play at a lot, while other areas are struggling.

So, what's interesting is there's a company you should definitely talk to. Somebody should have them on the podcast: a guy called Jordan St. Pierre from Something Dope for the People over in LA. They're building an incredible ground-up music thing. Basically, it’s like the ultimate open mic night. They put on these crazy open mic nights where they get a load of A&R people, producers, and everyone puts their name in a hat. You go up, you get two minutes to play something, and you get live feedback. It's awesome. It’s really cool.

Michael: What'd you say the name of it was?

Luke: Something Dope for the People. And Jordan, he'd be a great guest. He's a great dude. One of the things that I noticed was in LA, it took an event like that for a lot of smaller artists to realize that they could go somewhere, play music for very cheap or nearly free, and get some content out of it.

I think quite a lot of artists who are very talented can make great music, and then either don't want to do the "toilet door tour" or the rat race kind of like tiny, tiny venues, or don't know that they can—four-walling is a thing. You can put on your own show by just asking. Most of the time, you don't need to have a special live agent. You don’t need any special manager relationships. You can go into bars, pubs, clubs and say, "Do you have a way for me to rent this venue?" It's free for you to do. You can call them up as well; you don’t actually have to go there, though. I do recommend it.

Michael: Maybe you can set us up with Jordan from Something Dope for the People.

Luke: I will put you in touch. He's, yeah, he'll be an amazing guest. They're doing some really amazing stuff. They've now started going on tour around the U.S. and the world, putting on open mics for artists to come and meet big producers and managers. It's just an amazing networking event.

Michael: Super cool. All right, man, I think we're approaching the end of our conversation here, and there's one thread that I wanted to pull back and wrap on, just because I think this is such a big idea. I totally agree with what you shared in terms of when we were talking about the source of truth and like a single user and how it would break a lot of privacy laws. There'd be issues with someone sharing that with someone else.

I feel like in order for that to actually happen, it would almost need to be some sort of worldwide governmental agency that had an individual track for each person. And who do you trust to be the arbiter of truth, right? You wouldn't want that to be centralized in one source. So maybe that's where something like decentralization, blockchain, or AI could help with that.

The reason being, like you talked about the data silos—the fact that there's a different Luke Mendoza on Facebook, a different one on YouTube, and a different one on Google, although they might be connected, and a different one on TikTok. It's just so inefficient.

Yeah, it's inefficient because there are incorrect abstractions of who you are based on incomplete data that's not all connected. So just for the benefit of humanity, it seems like if we did have a trusted source of truth that we had more control over, where we could actually look at, like, "Oh, wow, this is who I am according to my digital identity or my digital avatar," there's all these things about myself I wasn't even aware of. And my goals are, I want to become this person. And now, all the platforms, maybe they're serving you ads like, "I want to learn how to play piano." It's like, okay, cool. Because we know that about you, we're going to serve you ads about how to play piano.

I feel like at some point, there's gotta be something like that.

Luke: Yeah, I mean, so I am definitely no expert on blockchain or AI. Though we do use it. I have a full tech team, obviously, who does this. We use AI and ML in our ad buying tool on behalf of artists so they don't have to learn how to do stuff.

And you will have noticed over the years that if you go to your friend's house for dinner and they say, "We're going on holiday to Costa Rica," and you say, "Oh, that sounds amazing," then suddenly you'll be served ads to go on holiday to Costa Rica and all that kind of stuff. They are listening, and the technology is out there to do that kind of stuff.

To focus on two things very quickly, back to back: blockchain, for me, and for what I’ve seen people in the music industry doing, and this is just my opinion—I’m sure lots of your listeners will be avid Web3 fans, and I know it can be quite divisive, so I’m trying not to be divisive. For me, it is a solution looking for a problem.

Our CTO, Ed Codshaw, before he came to Beatchain, worked at MDSL for a while and then at a Blockchain Development House. So he literally built codebases for people to use blockchain to do different things—whether that's centralized contracts or… this is kind of pre-NFT hype. And then we thought it would be really good to use for ticket sales. We had a Brother’s Truck gig that we wanted to put on at Brixton Academy—like 5,000 tickets—and we thought this would be an amazing use case for it. We’d be trailblazers, bringing blockchain into the modern music industry.

What actually happened was, the way blockchain has to authenticate a ticket—someone having a digital wallet, having all the right stuff, not losing anything, having the right app, and then going to someone who has to have the correct app and scan it, then it has to go through some authorization string and do an authorization check, making sure that through eight levels of anonymization that it’s the right ticket for the person—took too long.

We built and tested this as an idea, as a concept, and it would take a few seconds for the ticket to be authorized. But if you have 5,000 people coming into a venue, and you have eight doors, it can’t take a few seconds. So just in that one instance, blockchain literally is much less efficient than a QR code.

Now, it might be a better solution until the moment of the gig, where you can stop people from having a gray market or a black market, and you can stop the bots, which is awesome. That kind of application I get, but then still, at some point, before the show, you have to send everyone a QR code, because there’s no way you can use the authorization string to properly check. And if you're going to send a QR code, you have to work out how you’re going to deal with people’s data, make sure you get the right name against the right ticket, and all that kind of stuff.

That’s just one tiny example. But even beyond that, we talked to lots of people about NFTs. We talked to lots of people about syncing their music in Web3 opportunities and gaming, and that kind of stuff. And there are companies out there, which I can put you in contact with, like Token Tracks, who focus on that. They're really genuine guys who are building cool stuff. But for me, again, it’s a solution looking for a problem—no magic fix there. And there are a lot of ways that it can go horribly wrong.

AI, however, I think is a force for good on average. I think we can use AI, particularly for artists, managers, and labels. There are ways to use AI to make things better. For me, the big one, which I’m telling everyone who’s ever talked about it, is building your EPK. You can do that with AI in a way that you definitely couldn’t do before.

You can upload all your music that you’ve made, upload your album images, upload your headshots, upload your stuff, link it to your Spotify, link it to all your digital footprint, and you can say, "Make me a really cool EPK so I can send my demo to this guy, I want to be my manager." That’s something you can do for like 20 bucks a month or whatever OpenAI’s ChatGPT is, but there are a million others.

That’s something which immediately makes a huge difference to you as an artist, or you as a manager, or you as a label. Suddenly, you’re pitching for a sync opportunity, or a prize opportunity, or you want to get on a TV show—whatever the thing is that you want to do as an artist. Having an incredible EPK built for you in seconds that you can manipulate, and you can even get it to design it for you, is awesome.

The thing that artists have traditionally been terrible at is presenting themselves well to the people that could really help them grow. Getting the right manager, the right lawyer, the right live agent, the right label when it’s ready is the most important thing you can do as an artist. And the way that artists do it by having, like, bad demos on their WhatsApp and going, "Oh, this is my demo," it’s an awful system. That can be fixed with AI immediately.

So, well, I don’t know if there will ever be a central, perfect golden source. I think what AI can bring to what you can do using AI is incredibly valuable, and that’s just one idea. Now, you can say, "This is my demo," go to, you know, Dolby’s mixing and mastering services. Using AI now is incredible. Really good, and it costs a few bucks. You can say, "This might just be my demo track, but for a couple of dollars, I can have it mixed and mastered really well." So when I send it to potential bandmates or I send it to the labels, suddenly my demos sound awesome.

Managers can understand what you're trying to do and get the depth and the sound that you're trying to create and stuff like that. So yeah, I mean, again, I don’t know if there’ll be a golden source for each individual user. But I think, from our insights looking out at the world of potential fans for artists and managing stuff, I think AI is incredible, and I think it’s only going to get better. I don’t think it’s going to replace anything we do.

I'm not one of these nihilists saying, "Oh, they’re going to create every song with AI, all the players in AI..." I have a lot of these conversations, and I don’t think that’s the case. I’m sure I’m probably wrong to an extent, but I’m pretty certain that if you just get good at using AI to do the jobs that are boring or annoying, or that you’re not very good at, then that can help you do the things you are good at. Even on mailing lists—"Help me write an awesome email to promote this," and it can go and find examples for you, build it all, and show you how to build templates and your drip campaign or, you know, whatever email service you use. Or whatever. It’s just awesome.

I think that kind of stuff means you don’t need a business manager or a day manager anymore. You can focus on making music and trying to pitch higher up the chain and stuff.

Michael: Mm, a hundred percent. Yeah. What a time to be alive. And it's, you know, the fact that this is the worst it's ever going to be, and it's been improving at such a wild pace. It’ll be interesting to see where we are 5, 10, 20, or 50 years from now.

But Luke, man, it’s been awesome connecting with you today. Thank you so much for coming on here and sharing your passion for a topic that I think a lot of people might not be like, "Ooh, data—woo!" but it’s so important. I think the perspective is really needed, and I appreciate the platform you guys are building to help fill that gap for artists.

Could you just real quick share one more reminder for someone listening to us right now? If they’re interested in taking a step further and setting up for the free platform, where do they go to sign up for an account?

Luke: So, if you're pretty much anywhere in the world right now, our biggest platform is Oddchild, which is sponsored by Oddchild Music, a label out of the UK. You can get there by going to oddchild.app. We'll put it in the show notes. If you're in India, you can use moozartdisco.com.

But what we've also done is put together a code. If you go on and sign up for any of these for free, and you want to release or put an ad campaign out, you can get 10 credits free using the code MM10 for the next week. That’s enough to release a single on every single distribution platform.

Once you do that on all of those platforms, you also get all the streaming data. We get line-level streaming data as a distributor, and that then feeds into your very rich, very free insights, which is awesome.

Michael: That is awesome. Cool. Well, I’ll put all the links in the show notes for easy access. Luke, thank you again for taking the time to be here.

Luke: Thank you so much, Michael. It's been a pleasure.