Russ Tannen:
Obviously, the only people you want to reach if you've got a show in Chicago is people in Chicago. So all of the way that Dice was designed before the pandemic was very local, and now it's very global. We sold tickets in 170 countries since last April. So it's a truly global thing. Obviously, hundreds and hundreds of thousands, millions of people have watched live streams during the pandemic, and we think it has a really bright future as a complement to the live business. So yeah, it's been an exciting thing to be working on, and it's kept us extremely busy. So yeah, it's been fun.

Michael Walker:
It's easy to get lost in today's music industry with constantly changing technology and where anyone with a computer can release their own music. I'm going to share with you why this is the best time to be an independent musician and it's only getting better. If you have high-quality music, but you just don't know the best way to promote yourself so you can reach the right people and generate a sustainable income with your music, we're going to show you the best strategies that we're using right now to reach millions of new listeners every month without spending 10 hours a day on social media. We're creating a revolution in today's music industry, and this is your invitation to join me. I'm your host, Michael Walker.

Michael Walker:
All right. So I'm super excited to be here today with Russ Tannen, who's president of a company called Dice.fm, which is a ticketing platform for musicians worldwide. They've partnered with artists like Kanye, Sam Smith, and Adele and lots of major artists, as well as festival legend Primavera Sound. So today, I thought it would be a great topic to be able to really focus on as an artist, how can we be successful when it comes to ticketing and doing live shows, especially if there's a pandemic recently and you're starting to switch to online or live streaming? I want to talk about the platform of Dice and what it does for artists like you. So Russ, thanks so much for taking the time to be here today.

Russ Tannen:
Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Really appreciate it. Looking forward to getting into it all.

Michael Walker:
Yeah, absolutely. So to start out with, I'd love to just hear a little bit about your story and how you got started and became president of Dice.fm.

Russ Tannen:
Oh, I started 20 years ago now, promoted my first show. I was living on the Isle of Wight off the south coast of England, and I got super into punk and hardcore, but unsurprisingly, they didn't come to the Isle of Wight. So I sat there and started emailing bands that I loved and went to a local venue and said, "Hey, can I kind of book the venue and kind of put a show on?" They said, "Yes, but since you're not 16, you can't actually be in the venue when the band plays." So I did it, anyway, started putting on shows and booking bands. They would get the ferry over to the Isle of Wight and play, and I would wait in the car park with my friends. I'd just kind of meet them after the show. I'd watch the soundcheck, and that was fun.

Russ Tannen:
When I was 16, I could start watching the shows, and I started promoting kind of all over the south coast of England. I've been mostly involved in the live side of the business. I actually ended up at Vice Magazine and running their venues in London, so the and the birthdays. I was basically at the time  those spaces. Because I was so dialed into the new music scene and the shows that were happening there, I ended up managing some artists. So that was where me and Phil, who's the founder and CEO of Dice, kind of started working together, was at his management company.

Russ Tannen:
Yeah, kind of long story short, but yeah, we were managing artists, and Phil started to talk a lot about how the ticketing worked for the artists that we were looking after. I was looking after bands like Peace and Superfood. He was looking after DJs like Banga and Matthew Dear and all these incredible acts, but we would spend a huge amount of time on the show, where the artists should play, the artwork for the posters, and all of those things. But then the ticketing was kind of always the last thing, and it would always be about experience.

Russ Tannen:
So we started to talk about it more and more, and that was where kind of the idea of Dice was born, really, out of that firsthand experience with us as managers. So I've been involved in Dice from the very start, started as our first , and I was running everything in the UK as managing director to the UK. I was the chief revenue officer, looking after sales and just recently at the start of the year became president of the company and relocated to New York to kind of lead on our expansion in the US.

Russ Tannen:
So it's been a bit of a journey, but all rooted in the original experience at 14, 15 years old of promoting shows. The thread through the story is always thinking about how to get people to go to shows and market shows and how to get people to have more of these incredible experiences that we love, which is watching live music and having shared experiences to do that. So yeah.

Michael Walker:
Well, that doesn't sound very important as an artist to learn how to dial that in. Nah. Awesome, dude. That's really cool that you started from such a young age, 16-year-olds, could even go into the show, but you were able to really connect with them before and after the show. I think probably a lot of people watching or listening to this right now can relate to that experience of after the show, being able to connect with some of their favorite artists. It's really cool and certainly, too, such a key lever, right? The ability to bring together the fans of the music and the artists and be able to make that process of buying tickets as seamless as possible. So yeah, I'd be curious to hear a little bit about specifically ... Oh, and I guess one quick question to you is just out of curiosity, you had mentioned Vice Magazine and also Dice. So are those interconnected, or is it just a similar word?

Russ Tannen:
Just similar words. Yeah. There's no connection there. Yeah.

Michael Walker:
Dang it. I was about to pitch my new business idea of Mice. We could do a three-way partnership. So with Dice, when it comes to ticketing, I'm sure that having worked with all these artists now and being in this world for so long when it comes to ticketing, there's probably a lot of the same kind of challenges and frustrations and mistakes and common things coming up for artists and promoters when it comes to actually selling these tickets. So I'm curious, what are some of the biggest challenges that you see artists struggling with that Dice really helps to solve?

Russ Tannen:
Yeah. So I think that the fundamental things that were issues for us when we started the company are still things that need solving that we feel like we have solved when things go through our platform. So some of the big stuff that we really didn't like was that tickets would be resold. When a show sells out, there's going to be scalpers there, reselling tickets in secondary sites. All of that money that's being spent by often your top fan isn't going to the artist. It's not going to anyone with a stake in the show. It's just going onto these secondary platforms and to these people who are either buying tickets speculatively or professionally reselling tickets.

Russ Tannen:
So we wanted to stop that, and that was really important to us to do at the start. It's why Dice is an app. It's why the tickets are in your phone. They're not sent as a PDF, an email, or sent as a paper ticket. They're locked into the Dice app, and they're only activated 15 minutes before the doors. It's a dynamic QR code. You can't resell the ticket. So that was really important for us.

Russ Tannen:
One of the other things that we didn't like about how ticket pricing worked was that you would often get shown a ticket price when you were about to buy the ticket, but by the time you get to the end and you're about to actually pay, suddenly the price is a huge amount more than what you originally thought it was going to be. So we do an all-in pricing, where everything that the ticket actually costs is shown upfront to the fan so there's no surprises later.

Russ Tannen:
That point of when fans see the final price is the main place where people actually decide not to buy a ticket, because it's such a shock. So instead, we show everything upfront. "Here's the complete price." There's nothing hidden, and it's just there. You just pay that price at the end of the checkout, and so it makes it a much nicer experience, just actually buying the tickets.

Russ Tannen:
Kind of a lot of the things that you think about when you think about buying a ticket aren't there with Dice. So you don't have to have three laptops open and your friend on the phone, like, "You've got the tickets," and the countdown timers and the capture codes and all of these things are gone. It's just a very simple, delightful mobile purchase, just like when you buy lots of other things on your phone. The card details are saved. It's very quick, and why shouldn't buying tickets be easy, just like buying anything online mostly is easy? So we fix that.

Russ Tannen:
The other really big piece is that fans ... They don't know necessarily what shows are going on, but actually, event discovery is quite complicated. It's been interesting for me moving to New York for the last few months to see how kind of old-fashioned actually event discovery still is in New York, because unlike London, where we've been going for seven years and millions of people are using Dice just to find out what's going on and buy tickets to shows, in New York, we're just getting started, and people are still doing things what I consider to be kind of the old way, which is you have a few kind of dominant blogs, which is even kind of old-fashioned to even think about blogs, which do listings of everything, and you have venues sending out emails every time they are announcing shows, which means that if you're a music fan in New York right now, you have to be subscribed to all these venues' email lists.

Russ Tannen:
You have to check this blog once a day to see if something's been announced, and it's not automated in any way, whereas what we do at dice is scan your Spotify and Apple Music library, start to track what you're interested in, what you like, and then we give you personalized recommendations based on all of that data that's going to tell you every time there's a show that you want to go to either because you know that artist or a show that we think you're going to want to go to based on your taste. That's all going to be served to you in the app or by a push notification and by our emails, which is obviously going to be from a bigger pool of events. So I think that solving how people actually discover events in the first place is the key to getting people to go to more shows, which is the mission of the company. So those are the three biggies.

Michael Walker:
Awesome, man. Yeah. So it sounds like really, not only do you help in terms of the actual streamlining the process to make it as frictionless as possible, which is great. It's no surprise that one of Amazon's biggest breakthroughs was when they figured out the one click, the one click buy option and saving the cards. It just makes it a seamless as possible. So that's great. But not only that, but also you're helping with the acquisition and the exposure, so really helping to personalize these recommendations for the shows based on their Spotify profiles. That's awesome.

Michael Walker:
As you were describing the benefits, really, for the fan of ... If it benefits the fan, it also benefits the artist as well, because it's going to lead to a better experience, more sales, more people out to the shows, but this idea of not blindsiding the fan at the end of the process where it's like, "Oh, great, this is way more than I was expecting." It sounds like a big part of what you're trying to build or what you have built with Dice is really this ecosystem where people are going to keep coming back and rediscovering new shows.

Russ Tannen:
I think that fundamentally, we looked at how to build Dice I think a bit differently to how a ticketing or event discovery platform had been built up before, which is that we just put the fan and continue to put the fan at the center of all of our decision-making and everything that we do. So our experience with ticketing before launching Dice and using ticketing companies for our artists, it almost felt like the fan was at the bottom of the priority list for those companies. You really felt that as a consumer and the artists could see it when their funds are buying tickets to the shows. It felt like they weren't thinking about the fan experience at all. So we really tried to address that dramatically with building out the products in the way that we have and working on it very hard over the last seven years to get it to where it is and to be able to kind of scale that up now.

Michael Walker:
Yeah. I think having that focus on the end user as someone who's ultimately really thinking about that experience is really important. It ripples across everything. Obviously, the music industry especially and really the live event industry, it's been really challenging. There's a lot of pivoting, a lot of adapting to more of a live streaming model. So I'm curious. For Dice, what has been your experience kind of with exploring the realm of ticketing for live streaming events? Is that something that you see artists having a lot of success with, and what's your process like for that? Do you allow people to do live streaming ticketing events?

Russ Tannen:
I mean, yeah, we obviously had the same extremely challenging wake-up reality moment in March 2020 that I'm sure every business did, but especially ticketing companies working on live music, artists, everyone kind of had that realization that this thing was here and serious and was going to affect us dramatically. I don't think we knew at that point how long things were going to go on for. It still surprises me now that we're still in this conversation, that things are still going on. But we acted pretty fast in the first couple of weeks. One of the things we did was there was no kind of business as usual for most of the company. We were rescheduling events and postponing events at that time, which was a team working on that. But for a lot of people, the things that they would normally be doing weren't there to do.

Russ Tannen:
So we decided to split the company up into small teams, project teams, and do a two-week project. One of the projects that we did was to explore live stream ticketing. So what we managed to do very quickly was start to ticket free live stream events, and thinking all the way back to April and May 2020, there was an explosion of live streams. They were all free. Everyone was jumping on their Instagram Live or setting something up at different places, YouTube. Lots of artists were at home. Everyone thought this was going to be for a couple of months and then we were going to be back on the road. We did in the first two months 2,000 live streams through the platform that were all free, and we quickly pivoted the product.

Russ Tannen:
We realized that the way that our event discovery works was very suitable for live streaming. We changed some of the language around when you bought a ticket how the ticket worked. We were sending people a link instead of a QR code 15 minutes before on their ticket. It was little things we were able to do very quickly, because we have an amazing in-house development team who just wanted to be working on great things, and that was the thing to be working on at that moment.

Russ Tannen:
What we managed to do was actually work with Lewis Capaldi originally to do a paid live stream, and that was the first artist that kind of came out and said, "You know what? I know everyone's doing this for free, but you know what? Let's do something a bit more high-quality." He charged a very reasonable ticket on the anniversary of his album coming out, and we sold tens of thousands of tickets. We realized at that point that it was actually something that wasn't just kind of a gimmicky thing for people to do at the start of the pandemic, but maybe even could generate revenue for artists at a time when obviously most of the revenue streams, certainly on the live side, were not there.

Russ Tannen:
So we had an amazing journey with this over the last 18 months, where we've ended up ticketing six and a half thousand live streams. Since about May last year, they've been predominantly paid streams. We worked with a company called Drift on shows like Laura Marling and Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue. We did an awesome artist from Houston called Tobe Nwigwe. We did David on the roof of the Rockefeller Center. We did all of these different, amazing shows, and they continue to come through.

Russ Tannen:
For us, it was a great experience, because for the most part, we had artists and their managers working with us directly on making these events happen, and they were either going into a local rehearsal space or a studio or even just at home or a local venue and putting together the production themselves. We were guiding people and started guiding people on how to do that in a high-quality way and then doing our thing, which is helping to actually market the shows, but for the first time to a global audience. When you market a live event, obviously the only people you want to reach if you've got a show in Chicago is people in Chicago. So all of the way that Dice was designed before the pandemic was very local, and now it's very global. We sold tickets in 170 countries since last April.

Russ Tannen:
So it's a truly global thing. Obviously, hundreds and hundreds of thousands, millions of people have watched live streams during the pandemic, and we think it has a really bright future as a complement to the live business. So yeah, it's been an exciting thing to be working on, and it's kept us all extremely busy. So yeah, it's been fun.

Michael Walker:
Hello. What's up, guys? So quick intermission from the podcast. I can tell you about an awesome free gift that I have for you. I wanted to share something that's not normally available to the public and normally reserved for our $5,000 clients that we work with personally. This is a presentation called Six Steps to Explode Your Fanbase and Make a Profit with Your Music Online. Specifically, we're going to walk through how to build a paid traffic and automated funnel that's going to allow you to grow your fan base online. The system is designed to get you to your first $5,000 a month with your music. We've invested over $130,000 in the past year to test out different traffic sources and different offers, really see what's working best right now for musicians, and so I think it's going to be hugely valuable for you. So if that's something you're interested in, in the description, there should be a little link that you click on to go get that.

Michael Walker:
The other thing I wanted to mention is if you want to do us a huge favor, one thing that really makes a big difference early on when you're creating new podcasts is if people click Subscribe, then it basically lets the algorithm know that this is something that's new and noteworthy and that people actually want to hear. So that'll help us reach a lot more people. So if you're getting value from this and you get value from the free trainings, then if you want to do us a favor, I'd really appreciate you clicking the Subscribe button. All right. Let's get back to the podcast.

Michael Walker:
Wow. That's super cool, man. So just out of curiosity, with the live streams, I'm sure you've seen this with different experiments and different price points a month for them. What's kind of like the average asking price for a ticket for a live stream?

Russ Tannen:
It's interesting. So it started out pretty low. It would be like $10, and then it kind of creeped up during the last year. Now it's come back to about 10, 10 to 15 for a paid live stream. So yeah, I think that's going to be where it kind of lands. That said, I think that everything is probably going to look different again in another three to six months, just because there's a lot of touring going to be happening. People are going to be doing live streams maybe on one night of their tour. People are going to do varying amounts of additional production to produce the live streams. There's going to be different costs involved. So I think for some artists, they'll probably ended up still going much higher than that, and there's still lots of artists putting up live streams where they do have much higher ticket prices. But I think that it's going to come down to around that mark, probably going to balance out similar to what you'd pay to watch a new film on an Amazon Prime.

Michael Walker:
Wow. That's awesome. I mean, it just seems like it's such a good move to have a paid live stream that ... I've heard this before. A few of my mentors have ... I'm going to butcher the phrase, but something like people vote with their dollars, and what people invest in is what they take seriously. It's almost like a commitment, and it shows that they care. If someone invests something, they're way more likely to show up and actually engage, interact. They get more value out of it, because they really put their money where their mouth is. So I can see why making that shift from a totally free live stream where there's just so much information and a lot of it's kind of lower-quality or whatnot to actually having a paid model of a $10 live stream, more intentional, they really show up. It shapes the experience. It makes it a better experience for everyone involved, and sounds like it can be a really powerful revenue stream as well for artists who maybe aren't playing live shows in person right now.

Russ Tannen:
It's true. It's a good point. We have our own player now, and everything kind of sets on the Dice player when we do a live stream. We didn't have that originally. We were working a lot with YouTube and other players, and I remember talking to YouTube early in the pandemic. They were saying one of the things they were amazed with the paid live streams was the actual watch time on the stream. So people were really sitting down and watching it for an hour and a half or two hours. They were watching the whole thing, which is a totally different type of watching or viewership, I guess, than what you'd normally expect from when you're watching YouTube and you're flicking through videos and you're kind of going from thing to thing. This is really like you paid. You're there to watch it, and you're going to watch the whole show.

Russ Tannen:
So yeah, that's a good point. It's just the psychology of paying for it that shifted, and then it shifted what was possible in terms of production. It's how, to use the Nick Cave example, they were able to do this beautiful film in Alexandra Palace, which then they've turned into a record and all the rest of it. So yeah, I think it was an important move, and I think that people were happy to pay. I think that people realized that this was a source of income for artists during the pandemic, but I'll say that people want to watch quality shows when they're sad and they've got all the other things they can watch on TV. They're stuck at home and locked down, and they could be watching all the different streaming services that are all spending billions of dollars on content, trying to get you to watch it. They're happy to pay something to watch something that's at that sort of standard. So I think it was an important moment in the pandemic, for sure.

Michael Walker:
That's really cool. I mean, I can even imagine there being a model or using the platform to you have these ticketed live events and then afterwards having the replays and having either a subscription model or something where fans can get access and watch different shows or access other recordings for a discounted price or something like that. It could be super interesting. That really ties in with the fact that it's done virtually. So we have the recording. You can leverage it. This is super cool. I think this is really interesting, especially for I imagine release parties and shows like that, where it would be really powerful to have a nice, streamlined platform that looks great, that ties in for musicians, for their release party that they can send people to for a ticketed event.

Michael Walker:
What's the process for ... Let's say that someone's watching or listening to this right now, and they're interested in becoming an artist and using the platform and actually setting up a live streaming event. It sounds like a lot of what you're doing right now is really working directly with the artists and setting up these events and collaborating with them together. So I'm just wondering what that process looks like, how much of it is sort of do it yourself versus a selection process or working with a limited amount of artists and what the process looks like.

Russ Tannen:
Yeah, definitely. I mean, we have a curated platform. That's something else that's different about Dice. So we're very selective about what comes onto the platform and on the ticketing side when we're choosing which venues we want to work with on the live streaming side, which tends to be more artists. I think what's different about now versus if we were having a conversation a year ago, predominantly we expect the live streams that are happening from now on to come from some of the venues that we work with, which we're setting up so that they're ready with some of the basic infrastructure that you need to do a genuinely live stream.

Russ Tannen:
So what I would say now is firstly, they should talk to our artists' development team, and the contact details for that are on the website. An amazing guy, Jordan Gremli, who's joined us after eight years at Spotify, where he was building out all of their Fans First program and everything, he's come to lead and build our development team to work on exactly this with artists on how they can grow their career through lots of different services that Dice offers, but initially through live streaming. So they should speak to him and his team, but then they should look at which venues we're working with on streaming, and we can help them find the right venue based on either where they are or the genre of music that they play to maybe get on a bill at one of those venues or have a show at one of those venues. Then we can live stream that event, and that's going be kind of the model, going forward, predominantly.

Russ Tannen:
I think that there's still going to be great opportunity for people to do special one-off live streams that sit separate from the live show, more similar to kind of the big things that we've done in the past. We'd love to talk to artists about that as well, but you said maybe a record release event, something very ambitious visually that they might want to put together. Again, for the most part, that's a conversation between us and artists, maybe their label, and we'll make it happen.

Michael Walker:
Cool. So it sounds like really, the best first step would be going to the website and reaching out to the artist development team there and going from there. Awesome. I mean, part of the reason that I ask is kind of selfishly. I know a guy. I know a musician who's getting ready to release some new music, and it's this guy, the guy [crosstalk 00:24:32] myself. So yeah, I would love to explore I'm using the platform for an earliest party show. Yeah, it just sounds like a great model, too.

Michael Walker:
So if I'm hearing you correctly, it sounds like a big part of what you guys are focusing on right now is really collaborating with the venues themselves and helping them get great set-ups where they can do live streams themselves and sell ticketed events, which is really smart. I mean, the venues have been impacted so much, just as much as any of us have from the live event. So really using them as a basis foundation for creating events makes it seems like it makes a lot of sense, but also, it sounds like you do work with a curated list of artists that are doing it from home as well if they have a good kind of setup for an early show or something like that.

Russ Tannen:
Yeah, exactly, and quality is the focus for us. So want to continue to keep that quality bar extremely high. I think you're right to point out the focus is definitely right now with venues. We hadn't talked about live streaming before March last year. We didn't think that Dice was going to be a platform for live streams, but now we really do believe that it's going to be, as I mentioned, an important complementary part of the music business. A lot of that is because of the breadth of where people are watching these streams from. If they're reaching this truly global audience, even on an individual stream, we were having over 100 countries doing one event.

Russ Tannen:
That audience isn't going anywhere, and those artists aren't maybe able to reach all of those people live. So I think continuing to serve these audiences, thinking about moments like a record release or an anniversary of an album or the New York show on the tour that you just want to play because you're playing this amazing venue, sort of those reasons, those hooks that you can create in the storytelling of why this is worth being shown as a live stream I think are the crucial things to focus on as an artist.

Michael Walker:
Yeah. It just makes sense in terms of the model itself why it works in the sense that it seems like a big part of it is that it's a lot more intentional than a lot of live streams that we've been frankly inundated with since the pandemic. There's so much ... I mean, the Internet, there's so much information, there's so many things happening, and since the pandemic especially so many live streams that it seems like a huge part of the value proposition is really the intentionality behind it and making sure that there's a reason. There's a reason why we're doing this, and that's great.

Michael Walker:
So one thing that I'm curious about, with our program, where we're working one-on-one with hand-selected clients with Modern Musician, we're setting up some really advanced marketing tools and things that are doing event tracking and integrating it with Facebook and Instagram advertising and creating lookalike audiences and tracking the event value and whatnot. So one thing that I'm curious about is when it comes to artists using the platform, what kind of access do they have to the data of their fans who are purchasing tickets? Are they able to have the database and be able to see those events and be able to run ads themselves, or what's that process look like?

Russ Tannen:
It's one of the really interesting things about what happened in the last 18 months. With ticketing and the data that you get from a ticketed show, obviously, that is given to the venue, who's passing it to the promoter, who's passing it to the booking agent, who's going to pass it to the manager. Then the artist is going to get told once it's gone through that chain, "This is how many tickets you've sold for the show." With the live streams, because the artists were coming to us directly, we could set them up straightaway on the backend and they could see live, because they are the promoter of their live stream. They're doing almost ... I think it was like 95% of the live streams we did were just done by the artists themselves or by their managers themselves by the label.

Russ Tannen:
So they were able to just log straight in and see all the same live and sales data, and they were able to see the demographic information that we share, all of the data points that we show and the analytics we show in our tool, which is normally only really shown directly to the venues and the promoters. So there was an interesting one. I remember on some of the early live streams we did managers reaching out, saying, "This is amazing to be able to see this stuff," because normally it kind of goes through that whole chain. But with the live streams, it was just so much more direct.

Russ Tannen:
So yeah, as an artist, you're able to just log in and see everything in there, and you can see the sales going up. Then you can really make those connections then yourself around, "Oh, I'm going to do an Instagram post about my live stream," and then you can check and you can see, "Oh, actually, that made a difference. Now I've sold some more live stream tickets." So I think being able to just give the artists that information directly on the streams is really exciting.

Michael Walker:
That's super exciting. Yeah, I would say that's a huge value proposition compared to, again, a lot of other ones where you don't necessarily have access to the actual event data or it's tricky, I mean, especially if you're running ActiveCampaign or a CRM and you actually want to know, "Who should I follow up with? Who's actually gotten the ticket? Who hasn't? Who should I send a followup email to or a text message?" That's really cool. If I'm understanding you right, so right off the bat, you can really see who signed up for it and which of your marketing campaigns have really moved the needle and made an impact on it. Are they able to export a list of everyone that's purchased and a table, or are there direct integrations between, I don't know, Zapier or even native integrations with other CRMs?

Russ Tannen:
People are able to opt in for additional marketing. So if fans have opted in for marketing from you as the artists, then you're able to download that data and use that and integrate that into your other campaigns long-term, because obviously we're working with you on one event, but later you might want to be selling those fans your record appointment to Spotify or whatever it is. So yeah, so you're able to access that data.

Russ Tannen:
I think what we show you in the backend is really sophisticated in terms of setting up all the different links you might want so you can see which links are tracking round and selling on different platforms, the demographic and analytics information that we show based on where fans might be coming from, what ages they might be, what other artists they're into. There's the latest stuff that we kind of show you in there that is actionable as well, that there's kind of quite interesting stuff just to dig into. So that's the type of stuff that you can get into. Again, it's all the things we built out actually more with the live side in mind and venues and promotors in mind, but it actually all translates really nicely for an artist.

Michael Walker:
Yeah, I really imagine the difference between a fan who streams you once on Spotify or even joins your email list and is connecting with your music versus someone who actually buys a ticket and comes out to a show or attends a live stream, there's going to be such a higher level of connection and engagement, and being able to have that segment and be able to create a lookalike audience based on those people so you can attract more fans that are going to be the types of fans who actually really connect with the music and actually come out to shows, come out to live streams can be super powerful.

Russ Tannen:
Yeah. Yeah, it's totally different. I think all artists' careers are built on that experience of seeing a show. That's when you create huge fans, right? When you actually get people in the room for the first time. You sell your first couple of hundred tickets, and you start building art. Those are the moments when people are like, "Yeah, I'm a massive fan of this artist." You need to have that, and live streaming has been a way of us doing actually something that does hit that emotional nerve in the same way, but being able to open it up to a much broader audience, where for most new artists developing, yeah, they're going to play major cities, but they've got to get to a certain size before they can do huge tours or global tours, whereas a live stream, you have an opportunity to create those types of fans very early, actually, in a career, if you can reach the right audiences and get people to watch it.

Russ Tannen:
That was one of the really surprising things early on as well, was how similar, not the same, but similar the experience of watching a live stream could be emotionally and seeing people posting pictures of themselves in tears, maybe, like they've just watched Laura Marling, and they're crying. It's this really amazing moment, and you wouldn't have thought before the pandemic necessarily that would be possible digitally, but actually, it is. So you can create real fans, lifelong fans, I think, using live streams. Yeah, we're excited to do more of that work.

Michael Walker:
Yeah. I mean, I guess in one way, it could be kind of similar to the movie theater experience. There's a communal experience at going out to movie theaters. I think there's probably a bit more elevated experience communally when you're going out to a show, but in the same way, there is a community, kind of live, in-person feeling to the movie theater. But talk about how convenient it is to be able to rent movies or watch Netflix or something at home and be able to sit on your couch and in your own space. There is a big appeal to that.

Russ Tannen:
We think as well that people are going to go to screening events of the live streams. I think that they're more for the bigger artists, but the same as you would with major sporting events, because we're seeing this already. We saw it during the pandemic when countries are in different stages, where they were able maybe to do socially distanced screenings in bars, where people would get in touch and say, "Hey, I see you're doing this live stream with [inaudible 00:34:09]. Can we do a screening?" We'd be like, "Where's this venue? Oh, it's in Tokyo" or "It's in Hong Kong." People are getting in touch and just saying, "Hey, we want to organize an event to have people watch this live stream."

Russ Tannen:
I think that could happen. You can imagine the right types of bars, the right types of spaces actually having a screen up and yeah, wherever the artist is when they're playing their show, if they're live streaming it, then people might get together and watch it together. Even if they're not able to go to the show, they can just watch it together in a bar somewhere. So we think that's going to be a thing, too.

Michael Walker:
That is a really cool idea. One other question that I'm curious about when it comes to the ticketing, is it usually a one price ticket and you get one thing, or is there any elements of if you want to get a VIP upgrade, like a meet and greet, there's a few different tiers of pricing?

Russ Tannen:
Yes, it just depends on what the artist wants to do. I think there's been some interesting things around meet and greets that have been done, meet and greets, [inaudible 00:35:04], building and growing a segment that sort of directs artists' fan club type experiences that people have been developing over the last few years, and it's getting bigger and bigger. Then it was interesting how quickly that translated into kind of digital things, and we did a bunch of things over the last 18 months on that as well. So you're able to offer those types of experiences.

Russ Tannen:
We're also doing things like merchandise that you can add on through the platform or do separate merch drops. We did a merch drop with Iggy Pop and an amazing company called Drop Party where he did live stream of ... It was actually a premiere of a film that he made before the Sydney Opera House. We premiered that on the platform, and it came with a merch drop just for attendees. There's extra things that you can do to generate more revenue and also create amazing experiences for the fans. So there's a load that you can do with the platform to do things like that, but it really is a very bespoke kind of thing. The different artists from the do different.

Michael Walker:
That's awesome. Yeah, that's fun. So it sounds like what you're saying is that in a lot of ways, it depends on the artist's vision and having different offers, but it's definitely possible. Cool, man. That's super cool. So one thing that I want to mention for everyone that's watching this right now, I just feel like for us that I'd be really curious in exploring if you guys are ever at a point where you're looking to expand at least part of it to a beta for more of like a do it yourself or less curated, but you still have the ones that you work with personally do the curated. I think that a lot of people who might be listening or watching this right now would be super interested in being a part of that beta trial. So I would love to work together personally with you. If you guys were ever interested in kind of exploring that and you wanted some beta artists to test it with, we could give you some really high-quality artists to be able to try out some new ideas.

Russ Tannen:
Yeah, great. That sounds awesome. Like I said, we're just building and expanding that team. So yeah, the arts development team is based out of New York and London, but kind of headed up here in New York. Yeah, it's going to be a big team of people that are there to connect with artists like yourself and the artists that you're working with and make this stuff happen. But yeah, that sounds perfect.

Michael Walker:
Cool, man. Thank you so much for taking the time to be here and for creating a great tool and a platform that solves a big need for artists just in general with live events and streamlining the process, but also especially in the midst of the pandemic and a really challenging time for a lot of artists, it sounds like you've really been a ray of light that has been able to shine and really help a lot of these artists to continue doing what they were put on this earth to do. So thank you so much for that.

Russ Tannen:
No problem. Anytime, man.

Michael Walker:
Yeah, and so to recap for anyone that's listening to this right now who's like, "This is awesome. I would love to be involved. I would love to get in touch," what's the best way for people to reach out and see if they might be a good fit for Dice?

Russ Tannen:
So you can go directly to our website, which is Dice.fm, and from there, you'll be able to navigate whether you're an artist that's listening and you want to get in touch with the arts development team, whether you're a promoter or venue that might be listening and you want to get in touch with the partnerships team, or if you're someone that wants to come and work at Dice, we're hiring a load of people at the moment globally. So no matter where you're listening, there's probably something close, all different types of roles. So yeah, please check out the jobs page as well. We're growing rapidly. So yeah, there's some really exciting stuff up there. So do check that out, too.

Michael Walker:
Cool. Awesome, man. Well, yeah, I would highly recommend for anyone who is listening to this right now who this has resonated with or you're interested in exploring this, too, to check out the website, and we'll put some links in the show notes to make it as easy as possible to click through to it. Yeah. Russ, thank you again. I really appreciate you taking the time to be here today.

Russ Tannen:
Absolutely. Thanks so much.

Michael Walker:
Hey, it's Michael here. I hope that you got a ton of value out of this episode. Make sure to check out the show notes to learn more about our guest today, and if you want to support the podcast, then there's a few ways to help us grow. First, if you hit Subscribe, then I'll make sure you don't miss a new episode. Secondly, if you share it with your friends or on your social media, tag us. That really helps us out. Third, best of all, if you leave us an honest review, it's going to help us reach more musicians like you, who want to take their music career to the next level. The time to be a modern musician is now, and I look forward to seeing you on our next episode.