Michael Walker: Alright, I'm excited to be here today with my new friend who apparently lives in Orlando, right?

Eric Copeland: Yeah.

Michael: Eric Copeland. So, Eric is the founder of Creative Soul Records. He's produced award-winning artists and projects across the U.S., blending decades of music industry expertise. He's an accomplished composer and multi-genre artist.

He leads projects like Player A Jazz and Quiet Soul Piano while creating for film, TV, and music libraries. He is also an educator who shares his expertise globally through makemusicincome.com, hellocomposers.com, and direct teaching, helping artists make sustainable income with their artwork.

So, today, I'm really excited to connect with him about a topic that I know a lot of artists are super interested in—for good reason—which is sync licensing.

Eric, thank you for taking the time to be on the podcast today.

Eric: Hey, glad to be here. Nice talking to you. Nice to meet you.

Michael: Absolutely. So, to kick things off, for anyone who is connecting with you for the first time, could you share a little bit about your story and how you founded makemusicincome.com?

Eric: Sure. Well, I started out just like a lot of us—as a teenager, a 13-year-old—and found out I could make music. I come from a musical family. My dad was in bands, my mom was an organ player and piano teacher, and my uncle was a producer and a local, regional, Elvis-type star.

It was just a musical family, so it wasn’t a weird thing to be playing the piano all the time. I started writing songs at 13. The quick story is I started showing people my music throughout the next 10 years, including going to Nashville and trying to talk to music producers, labels, or publishers. Mainly, what I was looking for was to get a publishing deal as a songwriter.

Along the way, as I started making recordings, people would say, “Oh, I love your song. Can you produce me?” That became the thing—people wanted me to produce for them, write for them, and arrange for them. So I started doing all of that. I had a kind of foray to Chicago for a while in my early twenties. Then I came back and met my wife in Lexington, Kentucky, which is my hometown.

Almost immediately, I put out a shingle as a composer, arranger, and producer. I could do anything—make music for people’s weddings or whatever. I’ve done all the things every musician has done. I’ve played a thousand gigs, recorded people, and worked with people in the studio. Eventually, it got to the point where I was going back and forth to Nashville so much, starting to work with mastering engineers and engineers, and eventually tracking down there with players.

It was just time for us to move. So, we moved to Nashville, and I lived there for about 10 or 11 years. I still work there every day; I just don’t work there in person. I work with the players and engineers there. I get guitar parts, bass parts, drums, vocals, engineering, mixing—stuff like that from Nashville. That still goes on.

At some point, before I left Nashville and came here to Florida, I finished up a bachelor’s degree. I was studying music history, music production, music business, and all this kind of stuff. I was always looking for a music income, right? I thought, “Oh, I could probably teach.” That would be a thing I could add to my music income portfolio, as I’ve heard it called.

So, I got it in my head that I was going to teach along with producing and composing. Then I found out about licensing. I had known about it for a while, but around 2016 or 2017, I really heard about music licensing, and I thought, “This makes total sense.”

I could kind of get back to my composer roots. I felt like I had done everything a producer could do, and I was getting tired of just producing other people’s songs and not my own. So, I started looking into licensing and got involved with a company in California and Los Angeles that was teaching about it.

This was long before a lot of the YouTube channels and everything where everybody talks about that stuff now. It worked out. I started writing for them, and I focused an album on it. Around 2020, right at the end of the year, I got signed to a Sony BMG publishing company, a music library. I started having some success getting stuff placed in their library.

It had other albums put on there. Then I found out about stock music licensing—licensing non-exclusively for people making YouTube videos and similar projects where they need music to put behind their videos. So, I got into that and started making some money every month from it.

When I moved here, I started working on a master’s in music at UCF, in fact, and finished that right at the beginning of 2021. I was ready to teach, but I wasn’t finding a teaching job yet. So, I started a YouTube channel. I saw there were gaps in the YouTube landscape in terms of what people were saying about making music income and what was actually out there.

I thought, “Somebody should talk about what it’s like to make different kinds of music income.” You know, from licensing, but also as an artist, as a composer, through sheet music, teaching, church music—all the different ways to make money with music. There are so many ways.

I did a search and thought, “Surely, there’s a channel called Make Music Income.” It just seemed like a basic thing—surely, it existed. Well, it didn’t, and don’t call me Shirley. I realized no one was doing that. It wasn’t taken on Instagram, YouTube, or anywhere else. You know us YouTube or internet business people—if we find a domain that’s available everywhere, we’re going to grab it.

So, I did. I started making videos, and next thing I knew, about four or five videos in, someone recommended my channel from another decent-sized channel with a good number of followers. The channel took off. Now, here we are, heading up to about 12,000 subscribers.

It’s become a little bit of an income stream itself—not much, as you know, YouTube doesn’t necessarily pay a ton. But there are other ways to monetize through selling teachings, coaching, and courses. That happened, and right after, I started teaching. I got a job at a local recording school and taught there for a while.

In the past four years since my first licensing deal, things have amped up more and more. Libraries are wanting more music from me, and I’m getting more library deals. Now, I’m at the point where I have a lot of partners I write with, and they pay me to collaborate with them so we can pitch to more shows and build more backend PRO income.

That’s brought me back to where I’m working on music every day and having a blast. I still run the YouTube channel—I just finished the podcast for this week today. That seems to go along fine without too much extra work. I’ve pared it down to about five hours a week, which, as you know, is very hard to do with all the ideas, content creation, and everything else.

But I’ve had to pare it down so I can focus on music all day. I’ve gotten back to not just producing, but producing anything I want to produce and having outlets for it. Every musician dreams of making music and having somewhere for it to go.

That’s what music licensing does for me. Instead of playing gigs or just putting my music on Spotify or other streaming platforms, it allows me—or the library—to get it used on television. Whether I see it being used or not, it’s out there. Every quarter, through my PRO, BMI, I get income from that, and it’s slowly growing.

The key is doing more. That’s what I’m doing—more and more and more. So, that’s my day: I sit here, work on my music and other people’s music, collaborate as partners, and pitch our work to music libraries. We also work on what music libraries specifically ask us for, and that’s what we do.

Michael: Awesome. Cool. Yeah. So, with a channel like Make Music Income, it sounds like with your experience, you've been able to really explore a lot of different streams of income. There are a lot of different ways that they can make income, and it's not necessarily easy to be a musician or to make music income.

But I'm curious—obviously, things are evolving quickly. Things are a lot different now than they were 10 years ago. From your perspective, seeing the landscape right now, what do you see as some of the biggest challenges that artists are facing as it relates to making music income?

Eric: I think independent music artists, especially, are kind of in a hard place right now. My music production career actually existed in what I call the 20-year heyday of the independent artist—or at least what we used to think of as a normal artist.

An artist would make a record and then go out and sell it with gigs. They would come to the studio, pay for the studio time, get the CD made, make a thousand of them, and then go out on the road and try to sell those CDs. They would have sales from being at the gig and sales from their table.

That was it—two income streams. Yeah, there was Facebook, and before that, MySpace, and then everything else, but that was just promotional. There wasn’t really much money to be made from that back then—or if there was, not many people knew how to do it.

What’s funny about that 20 years is it was really kickstarted by one national tragedy and ended by another national tragedy. 9/11 was like a clarion bell for the independent artist. For some reason—I don’t know why—but it just kickstarted independent music.

The other thing that happened at the beginning of the 2000s was the beginning of the fall of the CD. The CD hit its peak in the year 2000. It started in the late ’80s, went up to 2000, and that was its peak.

This is the teacher in me coming out. In 2000, CD sales started to fall. They fell all the way through the teens, to the point where it was totally killed during COVID, I think. Now, you can't even put a CD in someone's hand other than to show it to them and go, “Oh, that’s nice.” They’ll hand it back to you, and you're like, “You can keep it.” They're like, “I don’t have any way to play it.”

Michael: All right, gotta put this thing...

Eric: It was a time, especially for independent artists in the early 2000s, where you could still sell product because people didn’t have anything else yet. They wouldn’t have Spotify until 2011. They had downloads, and that started to affect things, but not everybody knew how to download and hold MP3s and all that kind of stuff.

It wasn’t until Spotify, Apple Music, and now everything else, where people learned how to press a button on their phone and instantly listen to music. And now that we’ve got that, the genie is out of the bottle. It’s not going back in.

Then we ran into COVID, which shut every live show down for a year to two years. Artists, starting in 2020, had to figure out a new way to make music income. It wasn’t just by going out and doing gigs—you couldn’t for a while. You couldn’t even sing at church for a while. Then there were masks and all the craziness.

On the other side of that, they’ve had to figure out new ways, which is one of the things you help people do. Artists working with me were like, “What do I do now?” And I was like, “I don’t know. I mix. I make music. I help you make the thing, and I can help you get it on Spotify, but past that, maybe help you make some music videos. That’s all I’ve got for you.”

Starting in 2020, during COVID, was when my success with licensing really started. So now I’ve started to push that for artists because artists can do very well in licensing.

I think while the original independent artist bubble may be over and was burst in 2020 with COVID, there’s a new plan artists have now. It’s either work the Spotify and streaming angle and try to make streaming what CD sales were back in the day, or it’s finding fans and working your fans on that whole thing.

But I think another answer is licensing, and I think everyone should be looking into that. I hear a lot of people say, “Oh, I’ve heard about licensing, but that just means everybody’s doing that now. It’s a new craze. So why should I join it? There’s just not going to be any need for all that music.”

Well, tell that to Netflix, which is expanding exponentially. So is Hulu. So is Disney. Name them. There’s a new network every six to eight months, and all of them have original content. All of them need music every minute. You ever watch a reality show? The music changes every minute—60 seconds—when a new scene starts. Guess what? Somebody has to put that music there.

So I think licensing should be a big component in any artist’s strategy. It should be one of their focuses. You can’t just have one income stream. That’s why I have a channel called Make Music Income, not Make Music Licensing, because I think you can do other things.

I still believe in Spotify and streaming. I still believe in shows. I still believe in sales of something. And also, I don’t talk about or teach it, but the whole making groups of people that are following you and offering specialized content to your followers—that kind of thing.

All of that, I think, is helpful for artists and musicians now. But personally, I think licensing is a no-brainer in today’s world. It was a thing 10 years ago. It was a thing 50 years ago. But back then, it was more contained inside the industry.

Michael: That absolutely makes sense. Yeah, I know from just feedback and conversations with our community that licensing is one of the best opportunities for them to make income with their music.

I’m wondering what your perspective is on what, to me, sort of feels like the elephant in the room as it relates to licensing—or maybe not all licensing, but specific kinds of licensing, like soundtrack-based licensing—and AI music.

I’m curious, do you think there’s actually a risk there as it relates to certain kinds of licensing income? Or what’s your perspective on that for artists who might be concerned about that type of work being replaced?

Eric: I am not as concerned as others with AI in the same way. I wasn’t that concerned when CDs came out. There’s always been something that’s changed the game. This changes everything, you know, and we could go back to the record coming out—just going all the way back to when records were first made, the phonograph—and that lasted a long time. Then we got some tape, and then we got radio. Or we got radio, then we got tape, then we got 45s, and then we got cassette tape, eight tracks, and the cassette tape. Every one of these steps along the way, and then, if you continue that road past CDs, you have downloading. Past downloading, you have streaming, which is where we are now, 13 years into it.

And now we have AI, which a lot of people are freaking out about, but they freaked out about everything. You may be too young, and some people may not remember how much everybody freaked out about MP3s. The entire industry freaked out about MP3 downloading. Like, "Oh my gosh, it’s all going to end because people are illegally downloading from Napster or from LimeWire or from wherever."

And they thought that was the end. The industry will still tell you that the industry took a dive in the 2000s because of illegal downloads, but it was more so the hubris of the industry that said, “Oh, we’ve got CDs, and we’ll always have CDs. No one will ever want anything else.”

There’s a story about Napster going to the labels and saying, “We’ll sell you this. Just buy it from us, and you can have it.” The labels laughed them out of the room. They said, "Why? It’s like the late 90s. Why would we need it? You’re stupid. No one wants to sit and wait for a download." Because at that time, it would take, you know, five minutes to download a song or more with the type of technology we had.

So they kicked Napster out, and Napster just said, “Fine,” and went back underground. Then that was stopped, and LimeWire popped up, and all the other ones popped up, and there was illegal downloading.

So, I think freaking out over a technology or worrying—there’s always concern with every new technology that comes along.

Can—like, a use case, you know, when some AI guy gets—what was the big one that just came out this weekend, and uses their voice? Who else was it? Was it also Drake? They used their voice and put it out on Spotify and stuff. Yeah, that’s an issue, but it won’t be an issue long until we get safeguards against it and fix it.

There are already ways that we can check and see if something’s AI just by putting it onto a few. There are a lot of different sites now where AI listens to see if something is AI, just like we have things that look up and see if it was written by ChatGPT. We can tell that. There are also sites now that are listening and see how much of this was likely made with AI, and they can tell that, and those will only get stronger and better.

So I think there will be safeguards against that, just like there have been against illegal downloading. Spotify is fighting illegal streaming all the time, where robots are doing, you know, just repeating the same song on different channels and getting streams.

I think AI is going to be the same thing. We’ll figure it out. We figured out AI, we’ll figure out a way to safeguard from AI.

I think on the licensing side, they’re less concerned about it because they’re so careful. Nobody’s careful on SoundCloud. Nobody’s careful on, you know, on DistroKid. They’re just uploading whatever they want to upload.

That’s DistroKid’s fight or CD Baby’s fight or whoever’s. But I think that, on the front where it’s really important, like for an independent artist, there are going to be safeguards for them. And eventually, there’s going to be CD Baby and DistroKid. Both have gone through lots of things to make sure they have the exact writers and people are paying the right royalties.

We used to be able to upload to CD Baby without any question. We could upload anything, and now you have to—before you can even get past one page—you have to have, if you’re saying it’s a cover song, you have to go through all this stuff to get it done. DistroKid has a way to do cover songs now. All that stuff used to be easy to do, and so people cheated it all the time. Now you can’t really cheat doing that as much anymore, and if you do, it gets heard and found, especially through things like Identify on YouTube and stuff.

So, I think AI will—I use AI tools all the time. I just told you earlier, I used AI tools to make shorts for my video channels, and it works great. I also use stem splitter now, which is an AI technology in Logic, and that’s very helpful as a tool to take out the voice, take out the track, and just keep the drums. Then I can kind of work on a song from the percussion standpoint.

I did a recent cover of Santa Baby for one of my clients, the old 50s song Santa Baby, and I just took out everything except the vocal. Then I played with that vocal and had all the musicians play along with the old vocal by Eartha Kitt. Everybody could kind of be in the feel and the groove because they have the old vocal. I’m not going to use that vocal, of course. I’m replacing that vocal with the client, the artist’s vocal.

But these are examples of tools that AI is providing to us that are going to help us and speed things up. I use AI to do background vocals and to sing my own vocal and then replace it with another vocal with a place called Automy. There are a couple of different sites like that, where you can upload your vocal and then choose a royalty-free person who’s getting paid every time you use their voice.

The answer is ethical uses of AI. And just like we found out how to do ethical ways to stream music and download music and all that kind of stuff, I think that’s going to happen with AI.

Michael: Totally makes sense. Yeah, I think that's a great answer. And so, it sounds like what you're saying is that, yes, this is a technology that's likely going to revolutionize many of the tools we use to create music. But there have also been many cases where revolutions in technology have happened. Yes, they've kind of wiped out previous versions, like, you know, we were just talking about CDs—they aren't really used as much anymore, but the heart or the soul of music has still continued to be passed forward. We just learned how to use these tools to express ourselves and do music faster, easier, and cheaper.

From your perspective, you're already using these tools to achieve amazing speed of creation and to replace backing tracks, adding your own, and so on. So, from your perspective, these are tools not necessarily to be afraid of, but actually to lean into and learn how to use ethically. There's a clear distinction between Napster, for example, versus ethical streaming. It's probably the same thing for AI as well.

Eric: And it all comes around. For a while, there will be robotic-sounding stuff. Drum machines were all the rage, and everybody was using LinnDrums in the '80s. And drummers were freaking out, saying, "Oh, drummers are going to be out of a job. There's no replacement for a real drummer." Even still, 40 years later, it's not a thing to worry about, you know? And I think when things get too AI, when things get too robotic or synthesized, they always have a way of coming back. The '80s, which was all synth, gave way to the '90s, which was all, like, you know, rock bands again—garage bands that went all the way back to the garage, literally to make three-piece guitar, bass, and drums music. And so, it always cycles back around.

Michael: That is interesting. Yeah, you can. It's cool having this conversation. You definitely see your inspiration from education. You have a great historical background in terms of these different evolutions of...

Eric: I've just been, I was born in the time to see it all in a microcosm. You know, in the '60s and the '70s, there was no computer. So I've lived in that world—the '80s and the '90s, when computers were young—and I've lived in that world. Those '70s, '80s, and '90s were very specific musical times. And then, you know, the 2000s have just been my career part. I took a lot of music history when I was pursuing these degrees, because I'm kind of a nerd. I love that kind of stuff. There are great stories there. Once you approach it that way, most people just think about their lane and worry about the lane they’re in. They don’t really see outside of that, but there’s a lot to know and learn about the history of things. History repeats itself over and over, and so you can kind of look at trends that happened before and apply them to now, even in music.

Michael: Speaking of trends or history repeating itself, and just the future of where things are headed, I'm curious, in your perspective, having seen these different waves pass and resurge with music, what are your thoughts on where things are headed? One thing that comes to mind is, you know, a couple of years ago, we had this NFT craze where these blockchain non-fungible tokens (the weirdest term ever) started going crazy. People were buying GIFs of hamsters for millions of dollars, then there was sort of a bubble pop, and now, you know, there's a lot of skepticism. Even the name NFTs, in my opinion, is somewhat tarnished.

Eric: Yeah.

Michael: I always kind of felt like there was actually a valid use case for music if done properly, though I feel like it still hasn’t quite had its moment. But I'm curious to hear your thoughts on, in terms of historical context and CDs, collectibles, and things, do you think there's a world in the future where we might come back to that? Or what are your thoughts about where things are headed with music?

Eric: This is a question I've asked students for years. We would do a day about the history of recording, which I've talked a little bit about, and at the end of that, the assignment is to answer one of the questions: where do we go from here? What's going to happen after this, now that we’ve got streaming?

You know, speaking of being a Mr. Music Historian here, records lasted a long time. People were comfortable with records from 1900 to 1980 or longer. And now, it's kind of come back again. You know, vinyl has made a bit of a comeback in the past 10 years. Sometimes, formats just last a long time. But here's the deal: it's about convenience. Every step has been about convenience. The reason albums were wiped out wasn't because of CDs necessarily; it was because of tape. You could take even 8-tracks and stick them into a car, or cassette tapes too, and then eventually CDs. The quality kept getting better each time.

Now, we’re at a place where people are just comfortable with streaming. It feels like you couldn’t tell the difference today with how you listen to music compared to how you did five years ago. And I’m not sure if there’ll be a difference in the future. My hope is, a lot of people have pinned hopes on surround audio. Well, surround audio, or Dolby Atmos, or whatever you want to call it, has been around for a long time. My dad had quadraphonic stereo in the '70s—he had a speaker in every corner and the sound went around you.

Michael: Hmm.

Eric: That was 50 years ago. We had surround sound, but Dad had to pay a ton of money to get all those speakers and get a certain kind of amp and get all that kind of stuff. And still, nobody can afford to put a Dolby Atmos room in their family room. We've already gone through the surround sound with the two speakers that were behind you, which my wife always hated, the cords going every which way. Or even if you have Bluetooth, you've got to put them in and all that kind of stuff. It's not convenient. They're not going to spend the money if it's not convenient. We spend the money on a thousand-dollar phone because it's just the most convenient thing that there is. And we'll spend money on convenience. So what's more convenient than music streaming?

I think we're probably looking at some kind of wearable technology coming along where you'll get to the point—and I'm not a genius on this—but I've heard a lot of people talking about this—that we'll get away from the cell phone that’s tethered to the phone and have it embedded somewhere else, either in glasses, hats, clothes, or directly right behind your ear, or little pods that stick on the back of your ear and somehow do some kind of magic that you can hear everything. That kind of thing, I think, is more possible because it's got to be super simple for everybody. It's got to be something that people don't even have to think about. The more they have to learn how to do something, the less they want it. So if they can get something super easy, like with their phone or with their iPad or with a ring or with an Apple Watch... People love the Apple Watch because they can see who's calling them without even picking their phone up. They can just glance down at their wrist. It's got to be some kind of tech that is super easy to use and very convenient. People will value convenience more than they'll value a new gadget or another physical product.

I've dreamed for a while about like a cube or something that you just take with you and put on your TV and it plays and stuff like that. But that's just another version of a hard drive, and again, it's not as convenient. What if you lose it? I just keep my phone or I have internet coming in and driving my TV. Now I don't even need a cable box anymore. You just have the TV. So now it's super convenient. Think, hopefully. And here's the thing: those of us who are in music hope for higher quality. You know, we hope that instead of MP3-type quality, like, let's say, that Spotify has at its very top quality. And by the way, people watching this video, did you know you can go in and change the quality on Spotify to real high? It's probably not at the highest setting right now. You can—I flipped out so many students who said, "Oh man, the music sounds so much better now." I'm like, it always could. You just didn’t know because you just turned it on and said, "That's fine."

And most people are not music purists like us. The people who are watching this video are probably somewhat music purists. We would buy a vinyl record player. We would listen to things on the highest quality we could. We prefer a WAV to an MP3. But there are other people, like my wife or other people, who are not necessarily music purists and don’t care. As long as music plays, it’s fine. They're not listening to the quality. They're listening to the way the music makes them feel. So, as a music maker, I would hope for like WAV-type quality, 24/48 quality through Spotify.

We're the only ones who care about that. Nobody else really cares about that. So I would say if I have to predict the future, it's probably going to be some kind of thing that makes it more convenient for us to have music with us all the time, even more convenient than a phone, which is already pretty darn convenient if you have your pods. But those things are easy to lose and they're expensive, especially the good ones. So, I need something that's on me all the time, like a watch, an Apple Watch. You know, what if Apple makes a way for that to be an experience that happens for you instead of it just being here? It’s here. I don't know. But I think it's probably wearable tech. I've been seeing more and more stuff about that. And as the big goggles become more like Tony Stark glasses, you know, with stereo built into them, I think that's probably where we're headed as far as tech.

I don't think it's going to change. I think Starlink is only bringing us more new information in the air that we're just going to have, and that is just going to need a receptor. And the receptor right now is our phones. I think in the future, it'll be something else that's less... I mean, everybody wants a bigger and bigger phone right now, but I think eventually, there's going to be some kind of wearable tech, whether it's internal, external, glasses, clothes—I don’t know, but I would think that would be the case. But I don’t think we’re going to get away from the digital signal, and that kind of thing. How we work it, I don't know. You know, that’s my best guess right now. Maybe holographic technology and surround audio using some kind of projection system. That is probably in our future. But, you know, how they do that, I don’t know.

Michael: It's super interesting. I mean, this is like my favorite thing to geek out about.

Eric: I know.

Michael: It's funny you mentioned that to you about wearables, even like Starlink, because probably about a month ago now, we released an episode that we did on the podcast with Noland Arbaugh, who’s the world’s first Neuralink patient. So, he has a brain interface installed, and he’s quadriplegic, but together, we created a song telepathically using his Neuralink and AI. I’m totally on the same page there. I really think interface and tech is getting more and more intuitive. I never really thought about it the way that you described around like it’s sort of a function of convenience. Everything is getting more and more convenient.

Eric: We're lazy. We want it as convenient as possible. We want to just say, "Hey, [device name], play blah blah," or "Send a message to so-and-so," or "Do this." We’re so lazy. It won’t be long until we’re like WALL-E and we’re all on the beds that just fly around, and we’re just having smoothies that go into our mouths with music playing in the bed, you know?

Michael: It certainly seems like that’s a possibility. You know, what came to mind was that it seems like convenience is one of the main variables in the equation of what drives things forward. Convenience is really important. It also seems like time is an important factor. If we can do something a lot faster, sometimes we’re willing to do it. Like, if I can get this done in a week, even if it sucks, compared to three months, I’ll just do it. I’ll get it over with. So, time seems like one of those things in the equation if it gives you back time. Value is still there, but to your point, the extra value that people get from going for a slightly better quality is like, yeah, it’s a little more valuable, but not worth the extra inconvenience. It’s like if you could climb up a really steep hill for half an hour and at the top is a Ferrari—you get the Ferrari if you get to the top of the hill—it’d be kind of inconvenient to climb up this mountain, but most people would be like, "Okay, I’ll embrace this challenge because I’m getting a Ferrari at the top." But the extra music quality for a lot of people isn’t like getting a Ferrari, it’s just kind of...

Eric: For most people, it’s not worth it because most people aren’t listening the same way that we are. They’re not listening for the music's quality; they’re listening to the music's feeling. It’s why, during a jury trial comparing two songs—when they did the jury with Pharrell and... I’m blanking on the artist right now—but it was compared against the Marvin Gaye song, “Got To Give It Up.” The jury, even though the songs were completely different, had different baselines, different rhythms, different everything, just because both songs had a party going on in the background, they found for Marvin Gaye’s family. It felt similar, so they ruled it as copyright infringement. That’s how people think about music: how it makes them feel. Most people don’t know the ins and outs of melodies, beats, bass lines, and things like that. That wasn’t the trial. The trial wasn’t, "Does this have the same melody?" or, "Does this sample it?" The trial was, "Is it too much like that song?" And in the jury’s mind, “too much” meant, "It sounds like a party here, sounds like a party there, it must be copyright infringement." So again, people don’t think musically because they’re not musicians, and that’s okay. We have to remember that. It’s hard for us people who are thinking, "Is that hi-hat too loud? Is it just one dB too loud? Should I bring it down or up? Maybe I should fade it, or use a different sound." The person listening to this song—98% of them aren’t even going to know what a hi-hat is. They’re not going to worry about it. They’ll go, “What is that tick tick tick sound? That’s too loud.” They might do that because they’re listening on a phone through cheap phone speakers or through very tiny, cheap earphones, and they’re just listening in the worst environment possible. They’re turning it up super loud because they’re in the mall, or somewhere where it doesn’t matter. That’s the only reason they’d say anything about the quality of it. It’s not working for them where they are.

I forgot the question, but anyway, that’s my take. I just think, you know, there’s a great documentary about this from a few years ago about the MP3 and how bad it is compared to what musicians know and make in the studio. Then it gets brought down to this terrible sounding thing, but the only people who really worry about that are the musicians, because everyone else doesn’t care, unfortunately.

Michael: That’s helpful. It’s a nice reminder because I think a lot of times, we get in our own heads and we spend a ton of time with diminishing returns, without it actually moving the needle. So, being able to remember what’s really important and getting back to the feeling of it—yeah. All the other stuff is fun, and it can add to it, as long as it actually does enhance the connection, the feeling, and the main reason that people are listening to music.

Eric: Well, it's kind of the plus about licensing. Not to bring it back to that, but the reason you do, you make a song for a show or a music supervisor or whoever gets the song to put behind a scene is because it adds to the scene. It makes people feel tension. It makes people feel happy. It makes people feel scared. It makes people feel whatever that scene needs, and it's using music. So, in licensing, it's a different deal. People who are sitting watching Netflix will feel something. They're still not worried about the music because they're watching the show, but the music is affecting them. And so it works both ways. It works. But even then, they don't have to hear the music in super high quality to get that feeling. And most of them don't know what super high quality is or care. So, and they're probably getting it through some place like Netflix if they have a good connection and they have a good television with a good sound bar and all those kinds of things. But then they could just be watching on the phone and cheap earbuds. And, you know, it is what it is. They're just passing the time. Like you were talking about a minute ago, just put on... how many times have you put on a show just so you, you know, well, we're here? It's not necessarily a show we want to watch, but we'll put it on to pass the time. It's kind of depressing, but it's true. Amen.

Michael: Conversation. It's been really fun kind of exploring music history and kind of where things come from, where they’re going. Also, I found it really helpful to sort of reframe some of the ways that I'm thinking about AI as it relates to licensing and as a tool. So, hopefully, people watching this right now are feeling more inspired to actually use the tools that are available and to be able to dive into some of these opportunities where they can actually monetize their music.

Eric: I would say the only danger is trying to make music with AI that doesn't involve you, where you are just putting in a prompt to make something and then calling it yours. I think that is where AI is a problem. And there's a lot of people, but to be fair, people have been doing this with music programs for a long time. There's Splice and all these other programs. And since the computer was invented, you could start a track and play some little boop bop boop bop and say, "Look what I made," when you really just pressed a button. So it's no different than that. We just have to be smarter on the music side as listeners and as professionals to know what's real and what's not real and do our diligence on the back end to make sure we're using real music and real music made by real humans. Unless you’re looking for something... What if you're looking for a movie about AI and you said, "I want to just use AI to complete the whole soundtrack for this on purpose as a use case," you know? So it's hard to... it's a tough one, but I think it comes back to making music that you want to make, that you feel strongly about. And that doesn't necessarily mean just have a machine make it for you. And I think that's been frowned upon for all of time: to have something do something that's not yours and then call it yours. So I think we've been fighting that fight long before computers. We were, you know, if we had someone else write a song and then we called it our song and put our name on it. So we wrote this song. It's Milli Vanilli all over again, you know? And so it could happen in lots of different ways.

Michael: Absolutely. Yeah, that's very true. Well, Eric, it's been a lot of fun having you on the podcast today, and thank you for coming on to share a little bit about your perspective in terms of music history, where we've been, where we're going. And, you know, I know before I hopped on here, I was looking and it looked like you might have a cool gift for people who are watching today. Something about Make Music Income, free intro courses...

Eric: Oh, yeah, I have all sorts of free...

Michael: A little bit about that?

Eric: Yeah, you just go to makemusicincome.com/free. All sorts of free ebooks, free courses. You can start all our courses for free for the first three chapters of each course. You could start it for free and get a real good sense of what we do or what I talk about and just get a lot of information for free. I have an ebook called 50 Ways to Make Music Income. I have one called Tools to Make Music Income, and we try to update those yearly. And those are all free. You can just go to makemusicincome.com/free, and it's all there.

Michael: All right, fantastic. Well, like always, we'll put all the links in the show notes for easy access. Eric, thanks again for being on the podcast.

Eric: My pleasure. Thanks.

Michael: Yeah. Woo.