The Music Business Buddy
A podcast that aims to educate and inspire music creators in their quest to achieving their goals by gaining a greater understanding of the business of music. A new episode is released each Wednesday and aims to offer clarity and insight into a range of subjects across the music industry, all through the lens of a music creator for the benefit of other music creators. The series includes soundbites and interviews with guests from all over the world together with commentary and clarity on a range of topics. The podcast is hosted by award winning music industry professional Jonny Amos.
Jonny Amos is a music producer with credits on a range of major and independent labels, a songwriter with chart success in Europe and Asia, a senior lecturer in both music creation and music business at BIMM University UK, director of The SongLab Ltd and the author of The Music Business for Music Creators.
www.jonnyamos.com
The Music Business Buddy
Episode 32: An Interview with Musosoup CEO Chris Sharpe on the Changing Landscape of Music PR
Discover how the CEO of Musosoup, Chris Sharpe, is transforming the music promotion landscape for independent artists and labels by offering affordable PR solutions and fostering meaningful industry connections. Chris shares his journey from gig promoter to innovative publicist, detailing how his dissatisfaction with traditional PR practices led to the creation of Musosoup—a platform designed to democratise music promotion and bridge the gap between artists and the media.
Www.musosoup.com
Join us as we explore the diverse tools available to both music creators and emerging journalists, highlighting how these platforms empower artists and bloggers alike. From Spot on Track to Hype Auditor, uncover essential resources that aid in navigating the industry, while understanding the thrill of discovering talent early in their careers. Chris and I delve into the importance of authenticity in content creation, the value of grassroots support, and the necessity of sustainable public relations strategies that benefit everyone involved.
Learn about the art of selecting tastemakers and the collaborative environment Musosoup fosters for bloggers and artists alike. We discuss the significance of presentation in gaining public exposure, the power of building evergreen content, and the role of strategic playlisting. This episode wraps up with a heartfelt appreciation for Musosoup's mission and the influential role it plays in supporting independent music creators. Join us for a conversation filled with insights, inspiration, and practical advice for navigating the dynamic world of music promotion.
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The Music Business Buddy. The Music Business Buddy. Hello everybody and a very warm welcome to you. You're listening to the Music Business Buddy with me, johnny Amos, podcasting out of Birmingham in England. I am the author of the book the Music Business for Music Creators, available in hardback, paperback and ebook format. I'm a music creator with credits on a variety of indie and major labels. As a writer-producer, I'm also a senior lecturer in both music business and music creation. Wherever you are, whatever you do, consider yourself welcome to this podcast and to a part of the community around it.
Speaker 1:I'm here to try and educate and inspire music creators from all over the world in their quest to achieving their goals by gaining a greater understanding of the business of music. Okay, so in today's episode I'm talking to Chris Sharp, who's the CEO of Musosoup. Now, I have been wanting to interview Chris for quite some time. If you know this podcast quite well, you'll know that I have talked about Musosoup as a platform before on a few occasions. If you read my book the Music Business for Music Creators I won't be offended if you haven't, but maybe one day you will if you haven't, but if you have, then you'll know that I talk about Musosoup in a very, very passionate way. They are a true disruptor of the music industry in the most positive ways possible. For anybody that's not familiar with the platform, they effectively connect independent artists and labels with curators, with bloggers, with journalists.
Speaker 1:Now in in a digital age, it's very, very important that independent artists and labels are getting as much press coverage as possible. Now I could go really deep on this right, but I'll just summarise this Natural language processing and web scraping are a huge part of how DSPs understand what artists do outside of their platforms. Now, in English, that means that if you have a good, sustainable web presence through blog sources, through internet radio, through various things that make a presence on the internet, that is scraped and informed and plays a part in systems of recommendation. So, to simplify and boil that down even further, if you're not in blogs, blogs it makes it a damn sight harder to get onto the right playlist and build the right visibility and traction for your streams. That's only one facet to it, but it's an interesting one. It's one that sits at the core of the interest of many independent music creators. So musosoup are kind of the answer to that question, which is why I like to talk about them quite a lot because I think they're a really, really important platform.
Speaker 1:Now, musosoup is owned by three different people Mark Meredith, peter Jackson and Chris Sharp and Chris is the guy that's really really so hands on with Musosoup. He's so well respected and he's a thoroughly nice guy. So I wanted to interview him, talk to him about what Musosoup is all about and also their ideas for where they're headed in the future. So here we go, chris. Welcome to the music business buddy. It's great to have you with us. How are you?
Speaker 2:I'm very well, thank you. I appreciate you having me in.
Speaker 1:Oh no, not at all. You know I'm a big advocate for what Musosoup is all about, chris. It's in my book in multiple places. I've talked about it on this podcast on numerous occasions and I will continue to do so. First question for you, chris. So Musosoup is a true game changer in terms of affordable PR for independent artists and labels affordable PR for independent artists and labels. So first off you know it must be said congratulations for creating a platform that benefits so many people in so many ways.
Speaker 2:What was the initial thinking behind starting the platform? In a nutshell, I started being a gig promoter in London. I worked at a place called the Finsbury for about 10 years being the head booker there. I opened a music blog to try and get some more buzzy bands in front of me early to my bookings and I started then trying to get a few of those, basically premieres and stuff. So I end up securing more single launches with my gigs because those gigs work better. So I was getting the old band on louder and war and that lot and that's kind of my little way.
Speaker 2:And then afterwards I realized that hang on a minute, I'm probably quite good at PR here. So eight years later I've been doing PR for about five or six years eight years, you know, like, as you do, as you build it up and as I got bigger, being a publicist and running a blog, I realized that the expectation of what higher level band that's on the rise wants it's quite unrealistic and I kind of lost faith in traditional pr. So in a sense, you know like there's only so many times I can contact someone from line of best feel clash magazine and someone says, can you do my campaign? And I was literally like I'm not going to be able to get you on this magazine like it's. But other people obviously knew that would be taking their money. Maybe they could as well, you know, I mean. So I kind of lost faith. So I basically got nag what I call naggers guilt where I was literally like I can't do this anymore. But ironically my job was to nag people. But my blog was getting completely battered to death of about four or five hundred emails a week at least. Do you know, I mean, and I I wasn't a big. My blog's called lost the manner. It wasn't a big blog by any means, you know I mean. So it's like the two just coming together and almost self-imploded.
Speaker 2:And smith hub turned up at the time as being like this sort of shining light, because I knew I always emailed jason from smith hub. I mean, hats off to him, pioneering what he's done. He was the first like disruptor in the in the traditional pr sense, and I stole a head editor from enemy magazine called tim hackie was really good and he worked with me for about three years and he was doing that on smith as well and we were like, okay, we're really sustainable now. Do you know what I mean, but basically he threw his toys out the car at one point sorry if you hear that, tim um and said I'm done with the feedback model. Do you know what I mean? So that so he basically left, went off and did his own thing and I I was back to back to square one with my website and then I got a kind of slap in the face from Squarespace going. You know, I was 250 quid for the Squarespace bill.
Speaker 2:I almost quit the blog and at the same time which was the turning point where Musosoup sort of turned up was I was running this festival at the Finchbury called Blogtober. So I basically teamed up with a different blog every single night of the week for a whole month and I did it in advance. But they all gave me their favourite lists and I booked all the bands that they wanted. So the first couple had Clash, magazine, line of Best Fit Loud and War Indie Shuffle, amazing Radio. I had everyone you could think of involved in this, but it was just such a mental booking thing to do. But the main story I got from everyone was getting too many emails. We can't pay any of our staff. That was the general vibe from all of the blogs and exactly the same as me. So I spoke to a couple of my blogs that I was with.
Speaker 2:After a few beers the sort of light bulb went off in my head and I sort of went I'm just going to ask for a couple of quid for that one. For any band I like, whether it's a publicist or manager, I'm gonna say can you just donate two quid so I can pay for my Squarespace bill roughly calculated, what I needed to sustainably keep the lights on. And, funny enough, everybody said yes, that I liked their music. Do you know? I mean, everyone said that's not a problem, I totally get it. The only people said no were the publicists. Funny enough, hilarious, right. And that's me, because you know we're the one getting paid. We don't let the money go. Um. So that was like phase one of it.
Speaker 2:And then I went to phase two and I was like hang on, I'm gonna try and employ someone. Or, you know, get a writer guaranteed on so I can say I can guarantee I'll get you 10 or 12 posts a month. I'll pay you five quid for each one. So I basically gave the option again, was kind of like look, you can either, you know I'll find some way to share your music if I like it, or you know I'll give you, if you can donate, five pounds for the writer and two pounds towards my square space bill. Would that be okay? Everybody said yes. So I was at seven pounds at that point and I just said to my mates then I ran a couple of blogs I said, if I build a platform to do this inside, will you come and join me? And they both said yes and that was it's all indie and turtle temp at the time. Wow. So then, after you know, cut a long story short, here we are now. We've got 400 blogs on the platform.
Speaker 2:Well, when I say blogs, I mean blog station, playlist, influencers, yeah, so the main, the main goal were the whole thing was to trying to put myself out of a job. How could I go from having six clients maximum of being a publicist, feeling completely guilty of taking people's money in the end, to having, you know, a thousand at least a month going through the platform. But we wanted to make sure that no one wasted any money because we felt like I'm not. You know, I said hats off to the other guys piring in the platforms. We just felt that anybody could basically go there with the most rubbish recording, pay the money and go. You know, they just get some feedback saying you know, like 10 words, it's more of a proof of listen and you could waste thousands people wasting thousands of pounds on it. So we literally like.
Speaker 2:So the idea of the muso suit was to copycat the process of me being a publicist. Do you know what I mean? Almost so we wouldn't let anyone into the platform who is not ready to be hired by publicists. That was a standard. So if I, if I ever employed any of someone, they're ready to go onto a blog station or playlist. Do you know what I mean?
Speaker 2:so it's the same principle. Now, if we feel the same not right with their music they're not coming through the door we politely tell them not ready, come back when you're ready. We're more than happy to listen to more recordings, but if they are ready we'll let you into the platform and then we present you to the creators that we're working with. And the idea of when we made the offer system was literally to for the curators, because we didn't have what we call the marketplace at the moment where artists can apply to, um, you know, blogs and stuff. We started with an offer system because we wanted it to be pr, completely in reverse. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, because normally everybody's sort of emailing in mass emails, begging can I have this, can I have that? You know I mean, and the curators basically their inboxes are going absolutely bananas. So we basically wanted to do it so that the curator can approach whoever they wanted at their own pace and basically explain what they needed to work with, to keep the lights on if that was their ethos going forward. No, of course, we've still got people on there now to this day that still they're not interested in cash. They just hate looking at their inbox. So they basically just pick bands they like and they do the coverage for free. Still, do you know what I mean? Or you've got someone that might say can I have a contribution of two pounds towards the squarespace bill and you've got another one. We make sure they always break down where their cash is going and if anyone does want to request any money, they're only allowed to do it.
Speaker 2:On creativity and marketing, we keep it on a basic, humble UK wage of between £10 to £15 an hour. So if a blog joins from a part of the country and they turn around and say I want £35 for my review and we go well, guys, this is the frame of what it works at, you know. I mean because, like, you can work in a supermarket for 10 quid, you know. So it's kind of like. If it's a pay-as-you-go method of like earning a cost of what a publicist would be, then we kind of like you, the blog's got to kind of move the needle and become more of an influential blog to justify why they're going to be asking for more money than just keeping the lights on, basically. So we're only after a humble sustainability model, if that makes sense.
Speaker 1:It makes perfect sense and I think it's inspiring. I really do. I mean, the thing is it's creating opportunities, not just for music creators bands, DJs, singers, songwriters you know music creators, bands, DJs, singer-songwriters, you know but also on the flip side, there's a lot of emerging journalists, tastemakers, bloggers that are coming through that have really got their ear to the ground, that kind of go. Do you know what? I've tried emailing people. I can't get a gig for love nor money, so I'm going to start my own thing. And they're there and you know, the thing that separates what you do from what other competitors do, I think, is in regulation, and this has always been an issue I think for, and I know that SubmitHub have really tightened up over the years, especially on their playlisters and tracking, sort of, you know, farm streaming and trying to, you know, clamp down and all that kind of stuff. But you, you know you regulate what you do with thought, with, with love of music, um, and with years of experience, and I think that's a, that's a big thing.
Speaker 2:It must be hard to keep on top of that yeah, I mean, we use a bunch of auditing tools, you know, and there's sort of levels to it. You know, we're still happy to work with a blog that's only been open two weeks if we see their writing's really good. Yeah, do you know? I mean, because if you're a new age blogger nowadays and you open up your, your brain naturally would go right, what the tools am I going to use to make this work? You don't have to go in a traditional sense, but obviously we say to them you're like, if you're going to come, use a platform you're not established. Just come and use our platform to source reviews. There's plenty of bands that want to work with you. You need these guys. Come and come and source as much good music we've got for you. And then it's almost like instead of us turning away and saying, come back in a year, they can come and use our platform to find the bands because they're already there. They, those artists, are looking for coverage. Just come and make coverage on them. Do you know what I mean? And then we can obviously help give advice to the curators. We try and make sure that their blogs have set up properly. We give them advice on, you know, navigation and how to make their blog easy to look around, how they should lay out their oh that's good posts and all that kind of. We're trying to mentor them a little bit, you know, I mean, yeah, and on the I say for the artists and like the flip side of what you're mentioning, there there's just there's so many good artists coming through. It's amazing.
Speaker 2:The most buzziest thing for us is when you get an artist that comes on and they put the we share in our little groups. You know, like we get an artist that comes on and like they've got like 10 likes on 10 people following them on facebook or instagram and they are unbelievable. You know, you just listen, all your hair's got up in your arm and you go, oh my god, because you know we get these before all of the managers get them. We get them before all of the labels get them. You know what I mean. This is generally like the first stop before even all the blogs pick them up. When we see the same as submit, I'll probably get them straight for the door at the beginning, like that.
Speaker 2:It's amazing. But sorry, going back to your question, I'm going off on one. No, no, no, it's good, I love it. I love the way there's a bunch of tools that are really good to use, and a lot of artists could actually use a lot of these tools as well. They don't cost a lot and I highly recommend they do so. For Spotify, we use Spot on Track.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, that's a really good one. Yeah, that's good.
Speaker 2:That costs like $8 a month. So, for if you're an artist, that's a no-brainer. There's another one called Artist Tools. I've never used that. Um, submit hub.
Speaker 2:Hats off to jason again. He's made he's made the most amazing playlist bot checker. It's very, very accurate and he's calling data. He's working with um a lot of distributors as well to feed in more data. So I hope I got that information right. But, um, yeah, that I, even though, like you know, they're just someone at a different platform we're using that bot checker on a regular basis.
Speaker 2:Any artist can use that for free, as long as they're logged in. So that's something really recommended. Okay, um, for influencers and stuff, we use a program called hype auditor which can basically crawl back through the whole entire um history and I don't know how they do it, but they basically will give us all graphs and we can sort of spot dodgy in, you know um, inflation of followers and mass followers and things getting cold. We can see all that. So we basically, whenever an influencer or tiktoker joins, we have to go through all the reports and make sure that they're uh, they're on point. Um, so it's easy to spot that kind of stuff. Okay, once you. There's another one called social blade that's free for artists to use.
Speaker 2:So it's good for influencers to check them out. Um, radios I mean, I don't think anyone's really going rogue on the radio, are they? So that's kind of okay. And those other blogging ones. We use a bunch of AI tools to make sure that the AI is not popping up. You know, ai is obviously the Wild West at the moment, but the detectors are getting pretty good now. The Grammarly one's very good. The Grammarly one's probably one of the main key ones we use. Funny enough one's very good the main key ones we use. Funny enough, though, which is ironic, if you use their paraphrasing tool, it will then mark it as ai. Oh really, if you ever use grammarly pro and then pop it back through the ai checker, it will get flagged as ai.
Speaker 2:That's quite hilarious oh, that's funny, wow, and we also when we use plagiarism as well, you know, to check if copyright's going on. Oh, did I say that right? My build always tells me off plagiarism.
Speaker 2:Pleasure isn't plagiarism that's the one he always tells me off I get my english from. That's right. So anyway, yes, I hope, hopefully that gives artists some um confidence that that we're we're proper going through our curators and we're ongoing auditing on an ad hoc basis. Yeah, and if something's going wrong, it normally gets reported by the artist quite quickly because we've got report buttons. So if, if, for any reason, a blog's taken on a writer, that's going a bit weird, it gets reported very quickly. I mean, which we then, and sometimes the blog's not even aware of it, you know right, yeah, because it might be a freelance writer or whatever.
Speaker 1:And then you can yeah exactly, or you can react new ones come on and they they've.
Speaker 2:They've said someone might just randomly source something from another blog when they run out of ideas, and then it gets picked up and then obviously the the issue will get solved and sorted out very quickly. Well, yeah, of course, like anything, problems are always going to happen occasionally. But you know, we're on, we're on the board to fix it yeah, clearly.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you for the transparency on that. I mean I I, you know I didn't necessarily want to ask you about all those tools because it feels like it's private information to ask but it's you know I really appreciate the transparency.
Speaker 1:Um, well, talking of like, um, you know, algorithms and stuff. If we just combine these two things for a minute, chris, because this is one of the most interesting, interesting aspects for me, um, firstly, the algorithmic process of natural language processing and web scraping that informs spotify, apple, etc. On artist metadata, right, if we think about that. And then we also pair that with an independent artist's ability to create high-level copy for their press releases that highly influences a tastemaker's wording, let's say these two factors, when used correctly, combine to allow artists and labels to effectively infiltrate how the dsp's start to see them, which in turn feeds how their music is recommended to new listeners.
Speaker 1:Now, this is why blogs and reviews are crucial to discovery, and this is a subject I talk to about a lot to music creators because they often overlook it. So this means that what you have created is a subject I talk about a lot to music creators because they often overlook it. So this means that what you have created is a highly, highly influential thing if used correctly. I know how smart you are, chris, so I'm guessing you are, like, fully aware of what is happening there and the role, how influential the platform that you've created can be for people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I mean, we totally get that. That is part of it, but that wasn't really our intention in the first place. It kind of naturally comes along with that. Our main goal here was to basically support grassroots music because we felt that a lot of artists were getting hired by publicists when they're way too young, do you know? I mean, you know, stick with me for the next 10 years and I'll you know. You know, paying a fortune for a really expensive one because they've got a huge ban on their books, I mean.
Speaker 2:So our main goal was to just make the sustainability for artists at the beginning grassroots, like they can afford to do pr. You know, I mean make the curators sustainable so they can keep going, and that was our main goal to. It's all become about foundational pr for us, like in a I can put in a holistic approach. You know, I mean because a lot of artists focus on just playlisting. A lot of them think, right, playlisting should be all of it, but it's a very short bubble that can pop, you make it onto a massive playlist and then you go oh my god, something's happening and then nothing happens for two years. Yeah, and it won't correlate into people turning up to your gigs. So it's like the main sort of thing for us is, like I say, is that evergreen content? That we would do. We wanted to go for evergreen content of just building a base, building your own story online. Like you say, you get to dictate the story of how you want to present yourself and like this is what you're talking about with the DSP through the blogs. People then will read your information. If it's a news post kind of, your wording would probably go out because it's not a review as such. So you can kind of get the way you want to talk about yourself out online. Industry will find this information. That was the main goal of what we were aiming to do, but of course, in that process, naturally through evergreen content being made strategic playlisting.
Speaker 2:So we want genre-based playlists. We get all of our blogs to switch over to genre-based playlisting, whether they've got a big I mean big playlist or not. We get them all to set up smaller genre-based playlists because hopefully they get treated as having true fans on them. You know what I mean. Some people might look at a small Spotify playlist and go. You know this hasn't got 10,000 followers on it. This is no good. Do you know what I mean. But I'd rather have a playlist on our site which has got 100 people listening to it, but every time they go in the car they go. I want to listen to obscure sound, psychedelic playlist. Yeah, so if a band then gets on that and it's got real listeners, they might actually pay attention to it. Do you know what I mean? Like yeah, yeah, you know the artists are actually in it.
Speaker 1:They might, yeah yeah, which is actually better for their growth on spotify anyway, because it triggers the collaborative filtering and it's rather than just because I've noticed with a lot of artists, especially ones that have had big editorial support, and it feels great and there's a massive dopamine hit, but it all goes once those streams have gone and the follower rate hasn't gone up. So it's like something isn't working there.
Speaker 2:And they also say, don't they that if you get, you know, new music friday, sometimes it's like, because you end up putting a mixed bag playlist, you end up getting skips, yes, then duffs your elbow rhythm up yes, huge skip right, yeah, yeah yeah, which is more, more damaging.
Speaker 2:So, like here, we do have that issue sometimes where people turn around and go you know, you've got, oh, you've got a lot of your plays are quite small and they go, yeah, but it's not the point of them. You know what I mean. A lot of ours we're trying to go for strategic small playlists, building up niche genres. It's going to take a long time to build them all up, but when they do get built up, there'll be. We always say to our bloggers start from the ground upwards, just stick to your genres and build them up, because it's going to be better for you long run. It's going to be going for because we're not really onboarding giant playlisters like smith, hub and groover do, because what's the point in just copying their model? There's no way for them to earn money on our site because they all do this feedback thing. We don't, we won't go for that because there's no feedback model on us. They just hit no, yeah, you know what I mean. So, like, we're not attractive for the giant playlisters. So the playlist that we want to work with again going back to what you were talking about as the dsp thing is like evergreen content. Strategic playlisting is what we want to go for, so they get posted inside the blog posts. That's what we're really encouraging.
Speaker 2:If you write about a psychedelic band, put all the psychedelic bands you found over the month in that blog post as well. Yeah, I mean yeah, even with like an seo tag. You know, check out all the other bands that we found via our website on our psychedelic playlist. You can check it out here. All these little silly little things that we encourage the bloggers to do, like you're saying for the scraping and all this, oh yeah, it's all found under paradigmatic analysis all backlinks, all this got stuff. We're trying to get them all to do that stuff. But, like I say, it all kind of ties into that question of what you asked. But we're trying to do another holistic approach, you know, I mean yeah. So yeah, we're not, we're trying to do another holistic approach.
Speaker 1:You know what I mean. Yeah, so yeah, we're not.
Speaker 2:We're not trying to be focused on just one thing. We're trying to give a new band a good, a good, a good structure to build upon, because a lot of the time they've only got to build it up to a certain extent themselves and invest in themselves, and then a manager will get no to this, or they can apply to a manager and they can turn around and say invested in myself. The manager will go right, it's a really good base for me to build on here, and then they will unlock all the keys to all the other things, like the booking agents, small labels, publishers yeah, exactly, um, it helps build the story.
Speaker 1:It's interesting, you, you were saying there about kind of talking to uh, to, to tastemakers, about you know, kind of going right, fine, find that niche, stay in that genre. It's funny because it's one of the things that I also say myself. But to music creators, you know, it could be, for example, that there's, um, I don't know, a metal band, um, and they're putting out music and it's really really, really good, but it's just not connecting with their audience and it's actually, you know, and you go hang on. There are a couple of blogs that really really specialize in what're doing, that sub-genre of metal that you're doing. But how are they going to know about you if you don't write up a press release and get it to them right, and it's like, well, I don't know them, you don't need to know them, you've got muso soup, right? I mean, this is how I talk to people, chris, because I believe so much in what you're doing.
Speaker 1:What you're doing, um, you know, it's great to uh, it's great to say what, what is the um? You talked about this a little bit. But the sort of process for selecting um. You talked about regulating tastemakers, which is really really great to hear. But what's your process for selecting them? Do you kind of see some that are kind of up and coming you think, hey, they'd be great for us to align ourselves with, or do they come to you, or is it a bit of both?
Speaker 2:it's a bit of both going. We go through waves like this is the beginning of years. Like january, there's probably a lot of bloggers out there going. Oh, I just need to sort myself out. This year we've had a massive wave of people applying to be bloggers. We always get a good bunch joining every every day. Um, not every day, every day, but every week.
Speaker 2:Sorry, trying to apply, but you know, a lot of them are not suitable. You know, um, I meet every single one of them via a meeting, basically just like we're doing now, because everyone that we kind of look in the eyes and go right, what are your goals? What are you trying to achieve? This is what we're doing and this is what we want to achieve on the platform. So, just like I say, moving forward, we can talk to each other correctly. Do you know what I mean? So all the ice is broken and there's people coming from all different areas of the planet.
Speaker 2:You know I have people chats, a blogger from, or a station from, peru, you know I mean, where they've had to have a translator or I send them to one of my other bloggers because they can't understand what I'm talking about. But we try, you know I mean. But that that's one of our main things is like, if anyone applies, we want to meet them because we don't want anyone using a platform we don't know who they are. Yeah, that's the key, you know, because we want to, we know, we know we can talk to an artist about it and say, look, we've met these guys, we know what's going on, you know, and we can address anything that we need to very quickly because we all know each other and we've got a community online as well. On the. On the. It's only a facebook group, but there's like 800 odd bloggers in there all chatting to each other. Right, that's useful.
Speaker 2:But if we do go and hunt blogs out now what you were saying before about you know a certain metal type of blog, we have a lot of blogs on our platform. That and I'll mainly talk about blogs here, because I don't want to talk about playlists all day um, if we talk about a blogger and you say in a metal one, I've got no issue with um onboarding a blog that covers a different range of rock types of music, ranging from rock to metal to all this stuff. But all we then turn around and say to them is if you are going to support these different types of them, try and do an article where you group three of these artists together in the same one. We call them like roundup articles. So we could say, like check out three black metal bands I've just found. Does that kind of make sense? Yeah, it makes perfect sense.
Speaker 2:Even if it's a small, little short review, because in that way we encourage the curators then to turn around and say and the language is like everybody can work together on the social media, do you know what I mean? So, for example, this is like what we call an offer which is kind of flying, hopefully in a promotional sense. So from the artist's perspective, let's just say this is an eight pound offer. All right on on the. The curator could contact the band. The free option is for them to go on to their black metal playlist. We're keeping the black metal vibe right. So, regardless when this article gets made, if the artists are not in the budget or they're not interested in in, uh, contributing, they can still go in the playlist. It's going to go inside that article. Does that make sense? Okay? Um, and then if once they get like we would say, when you get up to a minimum of three, stack, you can stack them together. You know what I mean. So then that way, the language from the blogger is then kind of like right, you can go on my playlist for free if you want. That's going to go in the article. Or I can write for you a little short intro review talking about you joining my black metal playlist, so it's kind of like an update article, if that kind of makes sense.
Speaker 2:And then what happens then? Also, so the artists then contribute like five pounds each or something like that, which then would equal the blogger getting paid 15 pounds for doing around about an hour's worth of work of creating and sharing between them, but then the artist then can chip in three quid each for um marketing. So what happens then is, instead of them having three pounds, the other artist money combines, which then triples the budget that they've just put into the pot. If that makes sense, okay. So then then what happens? Then they've got the options where the um, the blogger, can then go and spend some of that, a third of that, going doing a facebook boost or something targeting that article at a black metal audience, if that makes sense. So there's growth then on the uh article and the blog, hopefully, okay, all the artists work together, tagged in, hopefully, retweeting, sharing all that kind of stuff, and then the other rest of the money in the pot goes towards the uh, on the, the ad for the playlist. That's in the, in the um article itself.
Speaker 2:So if they do, if they do a number of these um reviews like this over the month, then basically the playlist is permanently got ads running on it yeah, so if you think from an artist's perspective, if they come and get in that article, hopefully they've got an advert on social media going off to a target audience of the genre they're in. They're tagged in with the bands of the same genre and the playlist they're going into has got ads on it as well. That's like the the ideal, best, perfect scenario, but it doesn't always work like that. Some of the bloggers don't know how to run ads and they're scared to death of them. Right, fair, well, fair enough. It's all. We're doing our best to try and convince them and train them how to do this.
Speaker 1:Well, good, good for you, good for you for stepping in and trying to educate on that. Chris, if it sounds like I'm kind of giggling to myself as you're talking, there is a reason for it, right, and it's not because I'm being rude. It's because I've done so much research over the last two years or so on systems of recommendation, particularly on Spotify, and how the algorithm suggests new music and how that's also changing over the next. You know we're not changing massively according to my research, but certainly how it works and how music is recommended.
Speaker 1:And one of the things, one of the many things that feeds it, is grouping of artists in terms of how text is associated with one another. So, for example, people say to me oh well, you know what's the point of getting played on an internet radio station Because you know it might not be. There's anyone listening? And I'm going it doesn't matter if there's no one listening. What matters is that all those other bands on that playlist and the producer and the DJ and whoever else they've written about, is all getting grouped together and being used inside of cultural vectors and top terms and things that trend Exactly and I list my playlist of all those bands.
Speaker 1:Yeah, terms and things that trend exactly on the list. Here's my playlist of all those bands. Yeah, so you know, it's like when you're talking about these things, I'm like looking at how that's fed and going, wow, this all makes like perfect sense. Yeah, it's so future.
Speaker 2:We've we've really used my. I don't run my blog anymore. My lost the man of one. Because I don't have time, I've handed it over to writers no, no I haven't got time yeah also, I don't want to earn money from it because it's not.
Speaker 2:I'm running the platform. Yeah, I'd rather let some writers earn the money from it and they just basically run it between themselves. But any concept we have, we guinea pig, my blog through it, basically, and we we've literally tested that, the, that, what we call the roundup article, what I just talked about. Then we've tested it and it 100 works. Wow. So we run, we run free playlists, everybody that joins. That we've never worked with before. We give them a really good, good um, low contribution, sustainable um offer for the keep the blog running. And then you know, it's obviously very easy for two people to work together. They get the snippet for their press pack, little review. They go into the playlist. That they don't, you know, if they don't have the budget, but we still like them, so we still support it. But it's 100% works.
Speaker 2:The ads on the playlists have brought our natural listeners. I think the rock one's sitting at around about 7,000 followers on it, but that's all done purely through ads in the right direction of the audience. We haven't once said to the blogs I mean to the artists we'll only put you in our playlist if you follow it. We've never asked that. We've literally just done it all through the, the, the method of the contribution for the writing and the marketing, together with the artists, and done, done exactly what I just said, basically what I explained a minute ago, and it 100% worked. But then then we, then we do little interviews with them afterwards sometimes yeah, yeah it's kind of following something.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we can work with them again like a month later to keep it going, um, but yeah, it definitely works. 100, I didn't really think about what you were saying, then that does make sense. Again, tying in with that dsp thing, um, where, where, if you've mentioned, three genre based bands together, or up to five, that's, that probably scrapes so much better than just one on its own yeah, yeah, I think so.
Speaker 1:It just it what it does. It just it just feeds data that people want to. You know, like spotify, youtube, for example, another, they use nlp, but use it differently. Um, but I mean they don't want you know bands and artists that are massive on their platform and unheard of anywhere else. So the one of the ways that they negate that risk is through web scraping. It makes perfect sense, but the ways in which their web scrape fall in line perfectly with how you are doing those kind of roundup articles, especially on the ad side of it as well, and how kind of the sort of microeconomics of people plant pushing together to support something. I mean, this is how scenes are built, ch, chris.
Speaker 2:I mean it's exciting man, it's like the same scenario as a gig, isn't it? You hope that you're on a line-up of the same bands and their fans, become friends of their fans and hopefully a couple of those turn up for that gig. So that's the idea of the Roundup article. It's the same, isn't it? You send out five bands together on the same article, hoping that one person that knows that one has seen that one. We'll check that out. While they're seeing their friends band on that article when they read it from the social media, hopefully they'll go. That one was good and I'll add that to my playlist on spotify and I'll go and listen to that while I'm driving the car or doing the hoovering.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, you know, like you hope, you hope, don't you? Yeah, that's that's. That's the and and and what I mean. Going to looking at music creators, those that would kind of you know, know, use your platform. Now, of course, you know there's certain qualities, isn't there, that we expect to see in emerging artists, and there's such an expectation on so many music creators these days to be so well-versed in so many areas and to a certain extent it feels unfair. But then at other times it's like well, you know, you do need to have a press release and you do need to have good quality pictures, because tastemakers can't really work with you without that. What? What kind of qualities do you look to see in emerging music creators, particularly recording artists, to be?
Speaker 2:honest, it is two different, two different levels to it. You have people that apply on our site that are just so out there, not ready. Yeah, do you know what I mean? Like we've got an application process at the beginning where they can literally just drop us an mp3, you know I mean, and then we can have a listen, you kind of like. Even even at the recording level stage, you can see that someone has not got their facebook or set up yet, they've not got their instagram set up yet, and they're they. They use an mp3 instead of dropping us a soundcloud on private or something like this because it's not released yet, and you can generally spot them a mile away quite quickly.
Speaker 2:I know there's nothing wrong with a bedroom recording because nowadays artists can record themselves so well at home, especially a lot of the producers like artists that don't need bands. But we're just looking to make sure that, like I said, going back to the point where we talked about saying if they're not ready to hide by publicist, we're not going to let it through the door. So it's like you can just tell the recording quality of this, like sometimes it's just the drums sound awful on a band, do you know I mean, or the vocals. I know people can sing out of tune sometimes and it's meant to sound that way and they can get away with it, like in a garage rock song or something like that quite lo-fi vibe. But when you have someone then that sings trying to do it in an indie rock song and they're trying to be really good but they just can't sing. Yeah, or, like you know, you get two-thirds we're flicking through the track trying to figure out if we want to work with it or not on the platform and you get the chorus. They just go completely off key on one bit. I mean literally.
Speaker 2:I'm really sorry, you know, we feel. Like you know we've enjoyed of it, but we're just not going to proceed with this one and, like you know they, obviously they're going to go and spend their money somewhere else. But what we find as well, which we're quite lucky for is, I think, because we've already got like a hire for you to use us as a PR tool, which is obviously equivalent of not hiring a publicist. You're hiring us for 30 quid're the first go-to one. So a lot of them probably would have gone and spent money on Groover and SubmitHub first, got their music rejected, and then they would come to us and then go hang on a minute. I've got to pay X amount of money before I even start. They can still submit to us for free for us to listen and tell them if they're good enough or not to get in, but a lot I've never noticed it almost like an agency sort of level.
Speaker 2:So a lot of the bands that come into our system, uh, are pretty organized already and the ones that like say, for example, if one joins, they haven't got a press release. We've, we've made, um, what we call a press release generator where it can answer you. They fill out a bunch of questions and then we've used an AI tool which will basically then summarize it into a press release for them. Really, yeah, yeah, wow, we've used that, but that works really well, you know. So it's almost like a questionnaire. You know, like, you know who's involved in the band, what was the process in your recording? Where did you record it? From your local senior in it's got, it's got a bunch of stuff, wow.
Speaker 2:But going back again to like, you're saying about the bands that they feel organized or not with photos, you know, if someone's got some really bad photos, you know, and we we literally say to them look, I've got. You know, occasionally I can I go and google and go, um, go and google brick wall, take a photo of an iphone for a band shot. And you know, I use this tool. I don't know if I've emailed you before, but I use this tool called loom. Well, I'm on the, I'm on the pro version, but basically what it means is I can screen record of my head in the corner like a youtube video, and so if someone joins and they're not set up correctly, I generally will feed back to them and go look, guys, everything's nearly here.
Speaker 2:But you should go away and try and do one of the press shot like something like this. It's really quick for you to do. Just get someone to come help you go and wander around the streets and find something similar to this and I can direct them and then they come back or they go and spend their money somewhere else. But at least we tried, yeah, but yeah, we have that. The loom tool is amazing for that, you know, because sometimes people submit their music's not distributed, so we want to make sure there's always a distribution date yeah, in the future at least you know, because otherwise all the creators start reporting it's.
Speaker 2:It's broken because it's not on spotify. Basically, oh, okay, okay, we need that, we need that, we need that future release date. But you can submit 90 days early with a, with a soundcloud, if you want, for the same price.
Speaker 1:So you get massive campaigns ah, that's useful, okay, oh, that's uh, yeah, that's very useful, um, so, um, so finally then, chris, what, what, what does the, what does uh, you know the, the, the, you know, what does the future look like for? For museo suit, what kind of plans have you got going forward and how do you see it? Kind of you know, I mean, I see it making a much bigger impact, um, globally, um, I can see, sort of um, how that's going to happen, but what, what are your ideas going forward? I?
Speaker 2:mean I guess the the basis of it is to try and support, you know, grassroots music, the whole entire show of the, I mean just based on uk. I guess it's like you know, venues shutting down living in london, you just see venues disappear every five minutes. I mean, when I moved to south end, which is just outside london's like there is no music scene here whatsoever, everyone only plays covers. It's ridiculous and the one good venue closed down. So it's like, you know, like I think that's the main thing is to make sure that good music can get out there and be affordable. You know, I mean like of course you can still do it the diy way for free if you want. But you know everyone's got ways to try and make it easier for each other in this day and age, whether what tools you can use. You know I mean so like we're trying to, we're always going to try and keep this really affordable for people to use, making sure that the connection and the relationships that the artists can form with the curators is direct, so there's no one in the middle basically saying if you don't pay me anymore, these connections are all gone for you, because these connections now with the bloggers and creators to artists are all direct. They're there to the both of them to build upon with each other, yeah, I mean. So that's what we want to keep doing and obviously we started to.
Speaker 2:We got, you know, hopefully get another member of staff on board soon, because sometimes we just sort of scratch our heads going, oh my god, what we're going to do today. We haven't got time to do this, you know, because, like it's just, it just gets. It gets ridiculous sometimes, but, um, but obviously that's a good problem to have, isn't it? You know, we've got a very exciting features coming out, um, in march I'm not really going to talk about that too much in case someone steals it, I'll tell you. But, um, yeah, um, yeah, hopefully. We talked briefly about that industry idea I talked to you about. Yes, yes, well, yeah, I mean, we're well up for doing that, but that's a project in itself, so that's going to be something for next year. Okay, okay, yeah, I remember sorry not next year.
Speaker 2:I talked to you in before christmas. It's something for this year. Okay, this year we need to get our new build feature out the way first, because it's kind of colossal what we're doing at the moment.
Speaker 1:That's yeah well, that's good because you know there's, you are, you are, uh, one of the a pipeline filter right for the music industry and um, there's a lot of um, you know a and r's out there that that want to. You know that are under immense pressure to find you know, uh, the next big artist, as they always have been. But um, but very often they're going through you and you're meeting them first.
Speaker 2:That makes you very useful to them I mean we'd love to have those relationships because, like, it's no skin off our nose to literally tag a band and then say to an ar log in our site once a month and come and check out all the people we think you should take note of. Yeah, do you know what I mean? So, uh, yeah, obviously it's funny. It's like the same as anything we've made it easy to get through to a blogger, but for us to get through tonight and are ourself is still impossible yeah, that's isn't that funny.
Speaker 2:I mean, like you think you think that these people would want to talk to you and work together. But building partnerships also is very, very difficult, even from people like us. You know, some listen, some don't, you know, and then and then we are brought to get what's the correct word bureaucracy layers.
Speaker 1:Yeah, to get well. Yeah, because I mean those same a and r's that you know struggle to get replies from music supervisors. You know, there's like all these chains of like, yeah I guess?
Speaker 2:I guess in this day and age as well. For them it's a bit like the movie money ball, isn't it like? This person's had this amount of views consistently on tiktok, this person's had this amount of plays on spotify and they they've got all these algorithms they can look at and go. Let's go and risk working with these guys regardless of not not like I saw my gig, I'm gonna spend a fortune on them. I think the only person I've ever seen from my gig days that blew up was it was ed sheer. You know he played one of his first gigs in London for me where he was in his school uniform after school. But he was original, really. Yeah, yeah, he was original. Yeah, he used to play my acoustic nights.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow.
Speaker 2:But he was pure original. You know what I mean. He wasn't copying anyone. You know what I mean. That's amazing so that's why he blew up, naturally the way he did when the right people caught.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, just grafted it. So was that in Finsbury?
Speaker 2:No, it was a place called the Edinburgh Cellars. I used to do it in Newington Green in acoustic nights. Okay, yeah, he worked really hard gigging around a lot of places. But yeah, we gave him one of his first ones. I think he's played about 50 gigs for me. I reckon back in the day, good God, wow, wow, gigs for me. I reckon back in the day, good god, wow, wow, that's it played all the time.
Speaker 1:Everyone loved him. Yeah, good, you know. What's really interesting is that you know if certain platforms, like what you've got right, would be making such a big thing out of that and you would be like you know which would be wrong, right, but like you know, that could be like a real poster boy for your story. I mean, I know you're not like that, chris, you're a man, that wasn't.
Speaker 2:That was when we were running a different platform.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I know. But you know that's not how a lot of people would see if that was them. But again.
Speaker 2:I can't get through to him. It'd be impossible. If I saw him in the street, he'd come up to me and shake my hand and go. How's it going, mate?
Speaker 1:It's been a while. I'm sure he's very grateful, though, for the opportunities that you created. I mean, you know, that's wonderful, I love that, wow. But yeah, grassroots man, it's always been about that. That's always where talent comes from, exactly.
Speaker 2:It's where scenes start. Got to make it survive.
Speaker 1:It's where movements start. You know, you look at all the major conglomerates and all the things that they try and do is to tap into local culture and and to tap into movements and scenes, and they have to start somewhere in order for that to happen. So it goes.
Speaker 2:I was actually having the exact I was actually having the exact same conversation with pete that one of the guys I'm accompanying with me was like whatever this trend that kicks off, you know, and goes off, it's not something that's been mass produced by the major labels, it's generally a band right from the beginning, right at the bottom, that are amazing. They come up through the ranks and then everybody tries to copy them as a trendsetter. Yeah, because it just a new music becomes buzzy, doesn't it again? Oh, yeah, I mean like, so it comes from the bottom in what we're dealing with in the level of bands. If one of those pops up and again, that's the same event. Sharon, right, he came from the bottom, he was original and now everybody's copying him. But if they, you know otherwise we'd all be listening to Blimmin' Radio 1 five years ago when it was all just commercial hard pop. At least they're trying, I guess a bit now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, it's true, it's true it has to. That's fascinating. I love that. Well, it's a good note to finish. On Chris, can I just say you are such a top guy man and I love what you do with your platform. Uh, my hat's off to you mate.
Speaker 2:It really is um and uh. I congratulate you, thank you. Thank you for you, for being an um. You know you ambassador for us.
Speaker 1:You know you go, you tell as many people as you can oh, and I was with us actually not asking you to do any of it for us so that we, no, no no, no, it's all, it's all, uh, non, non-biased, um and uh, yeah, no, it's, uh, it's, it's, it's well, well worth it, and uh and uh, it's well deserved. So, uh, yeah, good for you, mate. Well, there we go, you see. Now one of the things that I like to do here everybody is to offer a level of transparency and honesty. So if I do endorse a company, I'm doing it for good reasons and for the right reasons, and that was very much.
Speaker 1:The theme of today was to talk about what Musosoup do. I boldly predict that they will help an awful lot of independent music creators, artists in particular, and also the next emerging generation of writers, journalists, bloggers, etc. It's very important that those two groups of people are connected through a centralized platform, and musosoup do that. In fact. When it comes to blogs, um, they probably have an edge on submit hub and groover. In my opinion, where submit hub and groover maybe have the edge is in playlist curation and powerful youtubers. Musosoup, when it comes blogs, they really are at the top of the tree. So I fully endorse what they do. I hope that you found that useful. Feel free, as always, to reach out to me with feedback, suggestions, anything you like. I want to be useful. I want to be resourceful. I will leave you alone for today. May the force be with you.
