Michael Walker: YEAAAH! All right. I'm excited to be here today with my new friend, Matt Ermey. So, Matt is an artist/entrepreneur. He's been releasing albums and poetry books for over 15 years. He's the founder of a company called Artist Growth, a music technology company that supports independent artists, labels, and managers.

They've helped clients like Jason Aldean, Luke Combs, and major industry players streamline their operations. They empower artists' teams to boost collaboration, simplify logistics, automate data management, and overall improve efficiency across the music industry. So, I'm really excited to connect with him today and have a discussion around music management, and specifically the tool they've created to help streamline finances, tours, and data for artists. So, Matt, thank you so much for taking the time to be here today.

Matt Urmy: Oh, thanks for having me. I'm glad to be here. I appreciate it.

Michael: So, maybe for anyone that this is their first time connecting with you, could you share just a little bit about your story and how you founded the company, and kind of what the main problem was that you set out to solve?

Matt: Sure. So, you know, my story is: I grew up in Nashville, Tennessee. I was born in New York, but moved down here at a really early age. So, I essentially grew up here. And, that means going through school and growing up as a kid, I was exposed to the music industry because half of my friends' parents worked in it.

Whether they were studio musicians or executives at a record label or something like that, it was around me. And like most kids who were around music at a young age, I started playing it at a young age. So, by the time I was graduating high school, I had already spent years and years in drum lessons and guitar lessons, playing in bands, and having fun.

That just continued on in college. And really, all of the decade of my 20s, I spent running around the world playing music for whoever would listen—playing in coffee shops, bars, clubs, and occasionally opening up for famous artists in theaters and in front of big audiences. I just had the time of my life, playing in and out of bands, and touring as a solo singer-songwriter.

It was that experience, coupled with the life-changing event of my first son being born when I was 29, that led me to not want to be touring all the time and wanting to be home with him. So, I started thinking about what I was going to do.

A friend of mine had recently had a kid too, who was in a band that I’d been in. He was doing his own thing as well. We both had young boys, and we decided, you know, what if—this was just a couple of years after the iPhone, the first version of the iPhone came out. So, everybody was kind of getting used to the whole world of apps and how all that worked.

We thought, what if there was an app that helped artists manage the business side of things? That was something that didn’t come naturally to us, and all of our friends who were musicians and in bands, it didn’t come naturally to them either. But everywhere we went, talking with labels, managers, agents, and everybody else, they would ask, "Well, how’s your business?"

And all the questions they wanted answers to were about how our business was, not about our music. That was always, sort of, secondary. If they were talking to you at all, it was because they liked your music and maybe believed in what you could do. But quickly, the conversations would turn to business. We realized that we had done a terrible job of keeping track of all the information and managing ourselves like a business.

That started us on this quest to build this app. We didn’t know what we were doing; we just dove into it. And that was 2012 when the first sort of proof-of-concept app hit the market. We got a great response from it.

I guess to answer the core of your question, the need we were trying to solve—or the problem we were trying to meet—initially was that artists didn’t have a seamless, simple way to manage and track all the data around the growth of their business. We wanted to help artists take things to another level. When somebody asked them, "How many markets are you working in? How many merch sales did you do last quarter or last year? What’s your expense run rate?"—all these questions that we didn’t even know what they meant when people first asked us—we wanted them to be able to pull out their phone or print off a report that had all of that at the ready. So they could start acting more like entrepreneurs.

That was the genesis of it. Then, quickly, it started expanding. Ever since 2013, it’s been a process of talking with customers, talking with the marketplace, learning from them, and building more software. The platform’s just evolved to what it is today.

Michael: Super cool. And how old's your son now?

Matt: My first son, my oldest son, is 18. He just turned 18.

Michael: Wow. That's a big one.

Matt: Yeah, big, big one, man. Moved out, living on his own, doing the thing. It's super, super inspiring to watch.

Michael: Ah, that's awesome. And you have multiple kids?

Matt: Yeah, I have a six and a half-year-old as well, his little brother.

Michael: Okay. Wow. Oh, that's awesome. Part of the reason I ask is I feel like we're living parallel lives in a way. You're about 10 years ahead of me, but you know, I toured for about 10 years full time with my band. I started this company, Modern Musician, when I found out I was going to be a dad. I've got three kids under the age of six right now. So I'm kind of living a tangential life to what you're describing.

Matt: Yeah, it's crazy, man. When you start having kids, it's like, do I want to be on the road 200 days a year or not? Or more, right? I think it's amazing if people are like, "Yes, this is what I'm going to do." It just introduces a whole level of complexity and challenge that, you know, I didn't want. I really wanted to be around in the early years. Quite frankly, I thought, well, I'll do this for a few years and then I'll go back out on the road and start playing again. And then it's just been, you know, a journey that has really, uh, taken me in. I realized how much fun I was having, uh, building a company and building a software business.

The magic of it is, for me, you know, I had to sit down and ask myself, like, what was the thing I couldn't live without? Was it being on the road and getting on stage and performing, or was it getting in the studio and making albums? When I really sat down and thought about that, the answer for me was getting in the studio and making albums is what I live for and what I love. And what was great about that is I could do that from anywhere, you know? And being in Nashville, there's studios—throw a rock and you hit a studio.

And it's so easy to build a really killer studio at home, especially now. I mean, in 2010, you could do it, but now it's even more readily available. The instrumentation, the digital instrumentation, and mics and things that have come out are just so affordable. They sound incredible. So that's what really did it for me. It was deciding I can make records, and that will keep my spirit and my soul alive, happy, and inspired. Meanwhile, I can build this business and help other artists, help the industry, and be home with my kids and my family.

It was a big realization that, you know, kind of led me to feel like I wasn't giving anything up. I was actually stepping into more than what I had before. So I was able to, without any kind of regret or looking back, just dive right in headfirst to this whole new way of living.

Michael: Yeah, I mean, especially back then compared to where things are right now, like, you know, there's the internet and social media and, um, the ability to do live streams and things. You know, you can do so much without being on tour, without being on the road. But this wasn't necessarily the case back then, or even for me, that was the same, you know, sort of the same dilemma.

Similarly, like, I'm just so grateful for my life now with my family and with the community we're building. But, um, at the time it was like, I don't know about you, but my whole ego and identity was sort of like attached to this idea of being on the road and being the performer on stage. And so that was a big transition. There was a phase of feeling like a failure as a husband and a father because I didn't know how I was going to provide for them, you know, when it first happened.

Gosh, if what exists now existed back then for us, when we were just kind of making that decision, I wonder how that might've impacted things. But it's one of those things like, if I could go back in time, I wouldn't change it. Cause you know, like everything kind of worked out the way that it should.

Matt: Yeah, for sure. It's a thing, man. I would encourage any artist today who's facing similar decisions in their life or at those kinds of crossroads in their career to, you know, the best advice that was ever given to me that I could give anyone is just be super honest with yourself and know who you are. And if you don't feel like you know who you are in a given moment or are confronted with a certain decision, put that decision off and sit down, get quiet, and figure out how to really tap into the core of who you are before you go start making life-changing decisions. It's such a powerful thing to be able to sit and, you know, know that, okay, I'm choosing this for all the right reasons. And, you know, it's directly in line with who I am and what I feel like my purpose is as a person, as a human being on this planet. And, you know, that, at least for me in my experience, so that's the advice I would give. I think artists, especially those in the early stages of their career, there's so much up and down, and there's so much uncertainty. And, you know, you're constantly sort of faced — at least I was constantly faced with this thought of, "What am I doing? Am I wasting my time? Should I be doing it a different way or doing something different?" And so those regular check-ins of, you know, "Who am I? Where am I going? What feels right to me?" are so important.

Michael: Holy cow, man. That's got goosebumps as you're sharing that. Yeah. There's that exercise of just like sitting in silence and just observing. Yeah. And asking yourself, "Who am I?" That's powerful stuff. I didn’t know we were going to dive this deep in the course of this conversation, but I’m here for it. So, you know, you mentioned that with your platform, it's sort of evolved over the years as needs have evolved, and the genesis of it was really kind of focused on that initial application of, you know, we need a way to simplify our business and actually have our metrics ready so when people ask about it, we actually have things in a row. It sounds like over time, that's evolved as well. So I'm curious, right now, with the current landscape that we're kind of in as a music industry, what do you see as some of the biggest challenges or issues that exist, and how is your platform evolving to help serve those challenges?

Matt: Yeah, that's a great question. So what happened was about a year or maybe even less than a year after we launched that initial app, somebody that works at an artist management company called me up and asked me to meet him for coffee. He started talking to me about how they were managing things, and they had, you know, over 50 artists on their roster and some really super famous people on their roster. We’re talking like as big as you get. So we started talking, and I was utterly shocked to learn that, you know, they were using Word docs and spreadsheets to run their business and track all of those artists' schedules and calendars and merch and everything. Because I just assumed, you know, the big guys are going to have it all together. Not that they didn’t have it together, but I thought they would have the most modern, cutting-edge, bleeding-edge tech, you know, because they could afford it. I was shocked that they didn’t. And they were like, "Hey, would you be interested in taking your app and like building out the concept and making it a little bit more professional level? Because if you are, we’d love to subscribe to a platform like that." And so, it sent me back to the drawing board, not just with the product, but with the business plan and really doing a deep dive on what was out there, who’s in the market, and what was the opportunity that I maybe hadn’t seen the whole picture of. I had some good advisors at the time, and so we decided to scrap what we’d built and start over, and start building on the web as well as an app. We built what is, you know, Artist Growth today that we’ve been iterating on for over a decade now, with the industry in mind. Our first clients were artists, managers, and artist management companies. Then we got introduced to some record labels, and started learning from them about their process and how they could use it, making tweaks. You know, every sprint we’d ship new features, and then we’d sign a record label. Fast forward to today, and we now work with all of Universal Music Group's labels in North America, all of Warner Music Group's labels. We work with a lot of Sony’s labels, a bunch of management companies, and a couple of the biggest talent agencies are customers of ours. We just keep talking to them and keep saying, "What do you need? What are you struggling with? What can we build you?" And when we discover workflows that can benefit, you know, our whole customer base, we prioritize it right away and build it. You know, one of the challenges and things I saw early on was that the industry itself, not only were companies struggling to manage their internal processes and their internal data for their artists, their clients, they weren’t doing a very good job or there wasn’t any technology available to make it efficient to collaborate and share and send data to and from the other companies that also worked with their artists. You know, you have a label, a manager, a business manager, talent agent — all stakeholders, all working for the artist, and the artist is at the middle of it all. And all these people’s job is to collaborate together to make the artist's career go right and be their business team. And so, we set off on a journey early on to try to figure out how we could create some interoperability around the information. So, you know, as soon as a booking agent updated something in their system, it would show up on the manager's grid. And if the label put in promo dates or whatever, it would show up, you know, for the agent and the manager and vice versa. And we’re still working on that. It’s still early days because getting everybody to trust us and trust each other with sharing data, you know, that was a huge thing. The industry was still sort of in recoil and healing from what had happened from Napster and the digitization of the marketplace and their product. It took a while to build trust as a technology company. The one, you know, sort of good thing we had going for us was that I was an artist. And so we were from the industry. We were part of the culture. We spoke the language, so to speak. And a lot of software companies that were coming into the space didn’t, you know, they spoke Silicon Valley, and that was something that the industry was really averse to for a long time. You know, it was like, "We don’t want you guys coming in here. You’ve already, you’ve done enough, basically. You’ve destroyed the industry." And, so it took a while for the industry to kind of catch up and get their arms around how technology could strengthen and rebuild the industry. Now that’s happened, and everybody feels really comfortable and has learned a lot about how software works and what it’s capable of, it’s starting to get really, really exciting. I think that over the next three or four years, there are going to be some incredible developments that happen that make not only the people at the very top and all these organizations at the very top be able to be extremely efficient in terms of coordinating and collaborating, but also in the middle market and at the earliest stages of people’s careers, being able to interact with each other, with venues, um, and even managers and labels and agencies. You know, people who aspire to sign partnership deals with these kinds of professionals. I see a world where the business development for artists is going to be a really exciting space. You know, and part of it will be all the information that comes back from, you know, the grid, streaming and e-commerce, and, uh, like stuff like Shopify and online ticket sales and things like that. But also just, you know, what is the consistency that you are building that you are applying to build a business? You know, show me your history, what markets have you been performing in and selling in, and what, you know, how have you been marketing yourself? This kind of information is going to allow artists to really start to put themselves out there. Not only as the artists that they are and their vision for the art they want to put in the world, but the entrepreneurs and business people that they are and their vision for how they want to start building their empire and building their own wealth and making an impact in the world that way, gathering their own leverage, and gathering their own capital and strength so they can then start making their own investments. You know, you see that trend happening at the top where artists are, you know, creating shoe brands and all kinds of stuff. And it's like, I see that being something that is going to continue to be available to people downstream. You’ll see artists who start to emerge as really powerful entrepreneurs who are building not just their own career around their music or their comedy or whatever it is that they’re bringing into the world, whatever their craft is, but they also start building other businesses, you know, and collaborating with each other. And that, to me, is super, super exciting. You know, to see artists sort of harness the power of entrepreneurialism. And I’m a big, big believer, and I learned this from starting Artist Growth. I’m a huge believer that as creatives, artists actually have a massive advantage in the world of business because artists who are, you know, natively, you know, bring creativity to problem-solving and bring creativity to strategic thinking, because they’re so used to pulling things out of thin air and making something out of it, right? Or taking a feeling and turning it into something. People who just go through the business programs and come out are really great at running, you know, complicated macros and spreadsheets, but they haven’t exercised those muscles to be able to make something out of nothing and grind. With artists having that honed in them from an early age, when they start to apply that fitness and those muscles to the exercise of business building, it’s just magical. I mean, you, it’s like, you know, in so many ways, they can see around curves because they don’t just paint by numbers. I am excited about that trend. I hope it continues. And we certainly at Artist Growth are really, really excited about the ways we can lean into, as a company that builds tools for artists and their teams, to try to help continue to bolster those entrepreneurial opportunities for artists worldwide.

Michael: Hot dog, man. I don't think I've ever used it like for the hot dog, but that felt like it merits it. Man, I can so relate with everything you're sharing. And I mentioned earlier, it kind of feels like a parallel universe. They say that history repeats itself sometimes. And it certainly feels like there are some things happening right now in terms of emerging technologies, and like the music industry. In particular, what came to mind was AI and how that affects everything, but in particular, how it affects creatives. Silicon Valley, of course, is very cutting edge and is developing these artificial reality tools for creators. There's also a lot of resistance and fear, and valid fear, the same way that Napster was seen as bad for the industry if people are stealing all the music and there's no compensation model for it. But also, there is a through line through which this technology helps us to connect and express ourselves more freely and in a more streamlined way. So, it really does feel like in some ways history is repeating itself.

I think, speaking of that, I'm curious to hear your thoughts and perspective on where things are at right now with these emerging technologies. In particular, the one that seems to be top of mind is AI. And obviously, AI is kind of a big umbrella with lots of use cases that aren't necessarily generative music, but that one in particular tends to strike a nerve with a lot of us as artists and creators. So, I'm curious to hear your perspective on where things are at in the world of these emerging technologies. For an independent artist who's listening to this right now, and they want to be able to use the tools that are available to grow and express themselves, but maybe they're feeling a little bit concerned or afraid of losing their voice, what would your message be to them?

Matt: It's definitely on everybody's mind. And if you look back through history, I agree with you, you know, it does seem that culture and society move in cycles. Human beings have a wonderful way—or maybe sometimes it's not a wonderful way—but we have a way of repeating cycles. It's always funny, you know, there's that old adage that people have probably heard all over the place, you know, about the definition of insanity being doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Human beings, we do that, but I don't know that it's the same every time, right? We make little adaptations along the way. So, I don't think human beings, on the whole, are insane because we repeat cycles over and over again. I think what happens is, I've had some amazing teachers in my life, and I was living in New Zealand 20 years ago, and I spent some time with this elderly woman who said to me, "Until you learn your lesson on any particular life lesson, you will repeat that lesson over and over and over again. And the trick is, once you finally do learn that lesson, life will present the opportunity to go around the ride one more time just to see if you really learned it or not. And if you learned it, you'll say, 'No thanks, I've done that ride, I'm moving on to the next one.'"

A lot of us get caught because she said, "The trick of it is, when you get that final presentation of a lesson, it looks a little bit different and it smells a little bit different and it feels a little bit different. So it's not clothed the exact same way as maybe the previous iterations of that lesson in your life." So oftentimes human beings get sucked into that. And then you realize halfway through, "Oh, oh shit, I've done this before. I'm in it again." And she said, "When you really learn a lesson and you're ready, you move on." So, I think that's a natural human thing that is just baked into who we are.

When you apply that to the music business and what's happening with AI and comparing it to Napster, I do see similarities, and I do see that wheel coming back around again in a lot of ways. And my advice to artists and to anyone in the industry is, you got to lean into it. You cannot just do this thing and call lawyers and start suing everybody to stop it from happening. That was how the industry responded to Napster: "Nope, this is illegal, we're going to sue them and put them out of business." They didn't even know what a BitTorrent was or how it worked. You can't put them out of business because it's not a business, and you're not going to be able to stop it—the genie's out of the bottle. Then they got smart and they leaned in and invested in streaming and built a model around it and used all of their expertise and knowledge and talent to build a new business model. And the industry started growing again.

So, I hope that we don't go around that merry-go-round again, where everybody resists and sues everybody and ultimately realizes that that is ridiculous. I think we all just need to lean into it. And part of leaning in means holding companies accountable that are building tools and making sure that they aren't violating rights, making sure that they aren't stealing intellectual property, and taking away the likeness and the vision of individual human beings and commoditizing that into some digital asset that can't be tracked and can't be monetized anymore.

You can't put it on the consumer. You can't say, "Oh, consumers will just reject that stuff and artists don't need to worry. Real art will always have its place." You can't just put it on the marketplace because a lot of the marketplace just wants music they can tolerate, right? And it inspires them. And I've heard some AI-generated music that sounds pretty damn good. And I don't want to have to sit every time or expect every single listener of every single song on the planet to ask the question every time it comes on: "Is this music generated by AI in any way? And does it steal intellectual property from an artist?" I mean, there's just no way a consumer can mentally figure out what pure music is anymore. So you can't rely on the marketplace to regulate itself. I know that's a favorite adage of a lot of people in business: "Oh, the marketplace will just regulate itself." It's like, no, it won't.

So, leaning in means making sure you understand how these tools work and what their terms and conditions are and what they're doing with your data if you use them. But it also means learning how to use them. And it also means looking at it like a paintbrush or looking at it like an effects pedal and getting in and starting to utilize it and being creative with it and making it part of your process to the degree that it inspires you. I heard somebody say recently, "If you're an artist and you're not using AI, then you're in the past and you're getting left behind." And I was kind of like, do you? I don't know. I've heard some pretty great Delta blues that's nothing but an acoustic guitar and a voice with a single microphone in a room that brought me to tears. And I don't think I want that incorporating AI into it. I'd rather just hear that. But if some electronic musician or some pop artist or some, you know, whatever artist decides they want to bring in AI to do something, then I'm here for that too. Like, that's super cool.

But artists shouldn't feel pressure to put it into their art. I think where artists have a responsibility is to understand what it is. And I say responsibility because we all have to protect ourselves. And the way we do that is through education. And the way we do that is through connection with a community, right? And that creates empowerment. If what artists are hearing is, "Look, educate yourself, here are all the resources, get with your other artists, you guys learn together, and then go as deep into the creative side of it as you want," but make sure you understand what that means and the tools you're using. Right? And the terms and conditions for one AI may be different from another.

Entrepreneurs like me, like you, others need to build the definitive guides to how to do this and be able to track it in real time. Artists don't need to go all the way like I did, where it's like, "Oh, I wish we had software to make building a business easier. Okay, so I'm going to go build it and figure out how to build software and then dedicate my life to building that company." Like, artists don't have to go that far. But I think getting hip to what is happening and knowing where the resources are and investing in that is really important.

And then, you got to just watch how it goes. I mean, it's here, can't put the genie back in the bottle. There's different kinds of AI. We're just now about to ship our first update of Artist Growth that's going to have AI machine learning in it. And we've made some very conscious decisions about how we've done that. We did not take the easy road, which was just hook into a ChatGPT API or a Cloud API and bring in a little text field to our app and allow people to basically play with an LLM inside of our app. That didn't really solve a problem. We wanted to automate data entry to make it easier for people who get emailed stuff or texted stuff to structure the data in our system without having to manually key in every single byte of data. So we built our own NLP and applied machine learning to where you could just copy and paste text into our system, and it magically puts it all where it's supposed to go.

We built it ourselves because we didn't want to be shipping our customers' data off to ChatGPT to process, because we weren't really sure, no matter what their terms and conditions said, that they weren't going to use that data to train their models. A lot of the clients we work with, you know, were like, "We can't be giving their data out to just some random software company, no matter how much they're valued by the market. This is private information, and we're not giving it away." So we had to hunker down and figure out how to build our own, internally in-house, and train it on our data. It's a completely closed system.

Operators of businesses who are in this space have to get educated and make their own decisions about how they're going to do it, and then communicate that to the marketplace. My hope is that there's enough people who take the kind of point of view we did, that a collection of companies who are artist services companies will emerge that can be trusted, and that artists feel comfortable. Like, "Okay, my data is being handled in a way I'm cool with by these companies. So that's where I'm going to go do my business." And these companies over here, I'm not going to use their tool, or I'm only going to use it to some limited degree.

I think that has to be the culture of it. I think so much really relies on what kind of culture we build around these tools. It doesn't need to be a culture of "No." It needs to be a culture of like, roll up our sleeves, figure it out, and then let communities start to get built around businesses, entrepreneurs, and tools that they align with, with their own personal value set. And then, once you establish that, like, you know the rules of the road, you know how all these tools work, you know which ones you're comfortable with, and which ones you're not, then you can start to build a business model around it for yourself, whether you're a software company or an artist. You can start to say, "Okay, I'm going to use these tools, and this is how it all plugs in." And so now I know how I'm getting paid, I know how I'm getting compensated, and then you have your model, and you're empowered. No matter how it evolves in the future, you have two solid legs and solid ground to stand on because you've done the work.

So, that's what I think. That's a long answer. Apologies.

Michael: It's so good. Super interesting. Hopefully, it helps, you know, people who are on that cycle right now. It helps to break some of those cycles or transcend, maybe is the right word, transcend some of the cycles that we've been through before. And what I'm hearing from you is, like, one of the main takeaways is, you know, not hiding or leaning away from these tools, but really embracing them and rolling up our sleeves and figuring out how we can best utilize these to serve and express ourselves, and use them as a tool. And one thing that I personally took away from how you described your own use case for using AI with the platform is that you really took the time to be intentional about what is the purpose of this within our platform. And rather than trying to solve a need that is already being solved by like ChatGPT and just creating like a wrapper of ChatGPT, actually looking at here’s the existing problems that we solve, and here’s how we can use AI to make that even easier and more streamlined, in a way that’s also, you know, aware of the privacy and makes sure to protect, you know, the stakeholders who actually don’t want their information to necessarily be shared with, you know, a platform like OpenAI.

Matt: Yeah. I mean, I think we will have one of the early music business trained and LPs out there, you know, and machine learning stuff that’s starting to get applied in a business context. We’re not at all focused on how you can make music using these tools. We're leaving that to other people. What we are laser-focused on is how can we make running a business and managing the data that a business generates super easy and streamlined and secure using these tools. That’s our lane. And at Artist Growth, we don’t stray outside of that. But we’re always looking for partner companies to integrate with or align with who are doing things in different lanes that have the same values that we do. And the core value, the number one, you know, the first question that gets asked in the first box that has to get checked every single time is, is the mission of this company, is the heart center of this company that we’re talking to, built around empowering and helping and serving the people who bring art into our world? And if the answer to that question is no, then the conversation stops. If the answer to that question is yes, even if it’s not directly something that, uh, that an artist uses, like they don’t have to make pianos or make plugins or be a distribution company, even if the artists themselves really don’t touch it that much, if the purpose of it is still around empowering them to thrive, so they can put more art into the world, then those are the companies we look to align with. Because at the end of the day, man, you know, business is only there to help the artists be able to exist and provide substance for themselves and their loved ones so that they can keep putting art in the world. That’s the purpose of it. And the more money they make, the more success they have, the more their imagination and their creativity can expand and thrive. And they can fill the world with more art because filling the world with art is what keeps humanity from its worst instincts. You know, we just went through an election cycle and I don’t know who you are or anyone you voted, who’s watching this or listening to this voted for, and it doesn’t matter to me. But what I do know is that if you look back through history, every time there’s been a time of turbulence or every time there’s been a time of, uh, human beings doing the absolute worst things they can do in history, if you look at what was going on right at the end of that period of time, when humanity came away from that, it’s usually some sort of artistic Renaissance that’s happening, whether in music or painting or whatever, but it’s usually the artists who pull us back away from the brink. You know, the 1960s in America is a great example of that. Really all over the world, but the U.S. was a hotbed of that. And so you can look at that as a model, right, of why art is so important in our world and why music is so important in our world because it gives humanity a way to wake up to, oh, if we stay on this path, uh, we’re probably going to go over the edge, right? And it just has such a powerful way to connect with who we are at such a visceral, spiritual, DNA level. And art for the most part, even really dark art that is hard to watch and hard to look at, generally brings us back to a center of feeling connection with the world and connection with other people and strengthens community, you know, and human beings, we have a way of straying from that and doing things that are pretty atrocious to other human beings. I know there’s a lot of people in the world right now that are worried about it, where we’re headed, uh, globally, with multiple wars happening and, you know, just so much devastation and then so much turbulence here in our country and so much division, you know, and so while I think civic engagement is incredibly important and a responsibility we all have, I also, in times like this, I’m thinking we need as much art as we can get in the world. We need as much authentic, powerful art as we can possibly get. Out into the world. You know, when people say, like, “Oh, there’s too much music now, everybody’s making music in their bedroom,” it’s like, good. Even if 10 people hear it, like, we need as much music as possible because the world is interconnected now. And if we don’t have something that’s holding us to that higher vibration, then, you know, we’ll get back into a cycle like the 1930s and 1940s where really dark stuff happened. You know, and I don’t think that, you know, any generation is, uh, omitted from the potential of being able to do that, those kinds of things to their brothers and sisters around the world. And I think music is a huge hedge against that. Music is a huge guardrail, art in general. And it takes our consciousness places that nothing else can. So I am like, fill the world with music, empower artists to make as much money as possible so they can reinvest all of that back into art. So our world is filled with art and let the culture, you know, be just washed in that. And that’s what gets me up every morning on the business side of things. It’s like, if I’m helping artists make money through some way, even a little part of that story, then I’m spending my time every day doing something worthwhile and something that I think is a foundational, fundamental, important, critical thing is that our world is filled with authentic art. And I do think when you talk about AI, there will be eventually, there will be more and more ways for people to recognize and understand and feel like, “Oh, I’m listening to something right now that was made by a human.” And so we’ll have that, even if there’s AI in it, there’s still a human being who’s at the helm of this. And you’ll feel that. You’ll always feel that. At least, I think so. I haven’t heard any AI yet that sounds so much like a human that I really can’t tell the difference. But, and it may come, but even if it does, so be it, you know, if a computer algorithm can generate music that, that keeps humanity falling in love with the world and falling in love with each other and living on that wavelength, then great, keep it coming. That’s how I think about it. Anyway…

Michael: Yeah, it hit me right in the heart. Yeah. I mean, what this reminds me of is just how important it is to wake up with something that gives your life purpose and meaning and to, it makes you excited. You know, it’s kind of like, to live each day. So what you’re describing with your personal mission to empower creatives and, and artists to be able to express themselves in a world where there’s a lot of walls and divisiveness and trauma, the music being a vessel through which a bridge that we can connect with each other, uh, it’s a powerful motivator. I feel that too. So, man, thank you for, for sharing that and for everything you’ve been doing with your platform to help empower, you know, artists and creators and, you know, I would love to, to hear for everyone that’s listening and watching this right now, which, you know, like we talked about before, is a lot of, uh, independent creators and, and also, you know, people that, um, have deals and whatnot, but I would say like a lot of folks who are watching this right now are independent creators and, I’m sure many of them will be very interested to understand a little bit more about the platform that you’ve created. So, could you share just a little bit of like a deeper dive into, you know, Artist Growth as a platform, specifically for an artist, right, that might be listening to this right now, who is an independent artist who wants to learn how to simplify their business and keep track of what matters and how can they take the next step and using the platform?

Matt: Yeah, so, I appreciate you giving me that opportunity. Anybody can just go to our website and sign up. We didn't always have a sign-up. There were a period of years where you literally couldn't just sign up through our website; you had to contact us because we were still building things out and we were so focused on building tools for management companies and record companies.

So, I learned early on, if I can't make money, then this platform is going to go away. Meaning, if the company can't bring in revenue, then this company, this whole mission, this whole thing is going to die. I realized in the earliest days of Artist Growth—I knew this intuitively from being an artist myself—I remember the year ReverbNation came out. And I remember there was a platform called Nimbit that I used for a while for like an email campaign list. And there were all these tools, like CD Baby. I remember when all those things first launched—TuneCore and I was all over all of them, right? Trying to find the best ones.

And so, I understood that when you're trying to… Artists have a limited amount of money to spend and it's all self-funded. You have to spend money on distribution, on gear, on recording software and mics, or you have to pay somebody who has those things to record you. Right? So, you have to spend a considerable amount of the money that you make from whatever jobs you're working, just to get in the game and make your music. Right? And then you have to hire a photographer, and you have to do all these things. Then, you have to pay DistroKid or whoever it is that's distributing your music, and it starts to stack up.

What became very clear to me was, asking an artist to spend money on organizing their business is going to fall straight to the bottom of the priority list for a lot of artists because it's like, "Well, I’ve got to spend my money on all these 20 things before I get to even being able to run a business." And there's not much money left over, right? Especially if you've got kids, or if you have a lot of debt or whatever it is that you're paying off from school or wherever. So, it became clear that in order for me to be able to fulfill my mission of helping independent artists— that original mission, which is still very much alive in our company—I had to establish a relationship with the industry and start making money from them.

By serving them, I could then have a profitable business by which to continue to build tools for artists and give it to them for free. And so, now you can come to Artist Growth and you can sign up and use the tool for free if you are an independent artist and you're self-managed, doing it alone.

And that's the same tool that, you know, Capital Records and Republic Records—Taylor Swift's label, you know, and Atlantic has Ed Sheeran and Lizzo—and all these huge artists, their labels, their managers, or their talent agents are using this software every day in the real world.

If you're an independent artist doing it yourself, you can go to our website, artistgrowth.com, sign up for free, and use the tool for free forever. We're never going to force you to pay. Now, as your artist business grows and you start adding other people to your account, or you want to start using some features that are really only relevant once you hit a certain point in touring or in your business, then you move up into a paid tier.

But for anyone who's in that space and time that's just like, "I'm figuring it out, I'm doing it all myself," they can use it for free forever. And most of the features that the big companies we work with get are in that free tier. You’ll have a calendar where all your writing time is booked, all your shows are booked, your studio sessions are booked, and your social media calendar that you're building out—like, "I'm going to do these things to promote myself"—so all that promotion, all that marketing, whatever it is, however small it is, you go into the tool and start scheduling this stuff out.

That's at the heart of it, right? Start building a plan for yourself. Then, when you log in every day, you're looking at your whole year. We have a music industry calendar built in a grid that allows you to see your entire year at a glance. You can start to see, "Oh, here's all the things I’m doing. This is what my year is going to look like." Right?

So, you start planning 2025 now. What are you going to do in the first quarter? Are you going to be in the studio? In the second quarter, you start penciling in, "Oh, I want to go play in these cities," or "I want to launch a YouTube channel," and "I want to start interviewing these kinds of people." You start booking those things into the calendar and your business starts to take shape.

When it's sitting in front of you like that, it's so much easier to execute as opposed to when it's all just living in your head or in your notebook. The difference between us and iCal or Google Calendar is that inside an event on our calendar, you have a place for your guaranteed ticket sales. It's got a guest list built into it. It's got file attachments. You have a profile where you can put who's on your team, and all your assets—link out to all your assets in Dropbox or whatever. It’s built for the music industry.

We know all of the things that you have to keep track of and manage when you're doing these different kinds of events—whether it's promo, a publicity thing, or a live performance. All that business data is housed in one place, and it becomes your central hub and database. If somebody starts managing you, you can add them to your account.

Some of the coolest things I've ever seen happen is when an independent artist who's using our tool starts doing well, and they get signed by a company who's also using our tool. We get that request: "Hey, could you migrate their profile from their account into our company account? We just signed them. They're on our roster now." And it’s like, "Oh my God, that’s so cool!" We make it appear in this management company or on this label.

The benefit to those guys is that they bring along with them all those years of everything that artist has done up to that point. The new partners are looking in the account and going, "Oh, look, you were playing in Miami and Athens and all these places for years. These are the venues you worked at, and all those details are there." Who was on the guest list? None of that stuff is ever lost.

And that's the fundamental key, right? And you can do all of that in AG for free.

Michael: Wow, absolutely incredible. Yeah, there is something magic about a calendar. I feel like actually putting things on the calendar is when something goes from a wish or a dream to actually being something you execute on and something that takes shape. So that's so cool that it's just built directly into the core of the platform, but not just a calendar, but actually the resources, the database to organize it and have historical data. You know, three years from now, you can look back at those events and actually see the guest list. You can use that moving forward. That is awesome. Well, man, it's really been a pleasure connecting with you and hearing you share your heart about what you've built as a platform. I've found it personally inspiring for what we're doing here at Modern Musician. So thank you for paving the way and sharing some insights and lessons for folks who are kind of going through a version of the cycle right now to be able to learn from. And for anyone that's watching this right now, I'll always put all the links in the show notes for easy access. And, man, thank you for being on the podcast today.

Matt: Oh, man, I really appreciate you having me. Thank you so much. And anybody who is interested in checking us out, come to the website. You can reach out to us. You can chat with us. You can set a call with us. We have ways for you to just get in touch with us and book a call. We love hearing from artists because, I would say, 90 percent of the new features we build come straight out of conversations with artists and their teams. Like, "What do you need?" What do you need? So we want to hear from as many people as possible. And we also have some super crazy cool stuff that's about to drop that's going to change the game for so many people. Like, we're starting to... Just right at the end, I'll tell you this. Maybe by the time this launches, it'll be live. Or by the time this podcast is public, we'll have launched. But we partnered with a bank. You know, interest rates have been crazy high. It's very, very hard for artists to get access to capital. What we went and did was negotiated a deal with a bank to where now anyone who works in the music industry, any artist, any creator, podcaster, musician, YouTuber, manager, somebody who works at a record company, or who manages on the side, or whatever, can come to Artist Growth. And we now have three different kinds of credit cards that this bank is willing to offer to our customers, even the free customers, that has a fixed interest rate of 11.99%, which is less than half of any card in the world. My son got a credit card application from Chase or somebody recently, and it was a 29 percent interest. So this is something that I'm so excited about because for artists to be able to make an investment in yourself and get the synth you need, or book some studio time, or actually go out on the road, and if you're short on a night, you don't have to sleep in your car on the side of the road. You can go get a motel or something. I mean, I've done that. I've slept in my car many times on the side of the interstate or at a rest stop. But, you know, the idea that if you can have a credit card that you could use for your business, that isn't going to just pile up interest on you. And it's not an adjustable rate card, so it's fixed forever, and the bank can't move that rate. That's something that doesn't exist in the world right now, to my knowledge: a fixed-rate 11 percent credit card. And so that's going to be coming out soon. We're going to be working on more ways to help artists integrate their finances into the platform as well, so it becomes seamless for people. You know, when you want to do your taxes at the end of the year and do all your deductions and everything, you just click a button and can migrate all of your AG info related to your taxes straight into TurboTax. So that's something that's coming too, and I'm really, really excited about that because then it won't just be managing day-to-day business, but being able to bring the financial side and really be able to manage your finances, soup to nuts. It's going to be so dope, and I couldn't be more excited about that.

Michael: Dang, dude, that's incredible. 11%. Well, that's awesome. Hopefully, by the time people are watching this, they'll be able to go check it out right away. So, like I mentioned, links in the show notes for easy access. And, Matt, thanks again for being on the podcast and for creating this platform to support artists like all the folks who are watching this right now.

Matt: Yeah, man. I appreciate you having me. Have a great day.

Michael: Yeah, me too.

Matt: All right. Yeah.