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 51: Hits, Syncs and Serenada - The Lloyd Perrin Story
What if streaming platforms actually paid artists fairly? This question has driven acclaimed producer Lloyd Perrin (Papa Zeus) to develop Serenada, a revolutionary social streaming platform that could transform how musicians earn from their music.
Perrin's impressive career spans from chart success with "About You" (which brilliantly reimagined CeCe Peniston's "Finally") to scoring films like Street Dance 3D. Despite these achievements, he's witnessed firsthand how streaming economics have devastated artist income. "When I first started, we sold CDs and made money. Then downloads meant less money. With streaming it makes even less money and even less sense," Perrin explains with refreshing candor.
Serenada represents a powerful alternative – a user-centric streaming platform where your subscription fee goes directly to artists you listen to, not into a communal pool where only megastars truly benefit. By combining social media engagement, content discovery, and fair compensation in one platform, Perrin aims to remove the fragmented journey between discovering music and supporting creators.
The platform will ethically utilize AI to enhance music discovery based on emotional resonance and compositional elements, helping listeners find their perfect musical match while ensuring artists get discovered by the right audience. Most revolutionary is Perrin's commitment that all artists – from bedroom producers to established names – receive equal treatment on the platform with no preferential deals for major labels.
This episode offers a fascinating glimpse into a potential future where streaming actually nurtures artistic development rather than treating music as an expendable commodity. Whether you're a music creator frustrated by streaming economics or a fan wondering why your favorite artists struggle despite millions of plays, Perrin's vision for Serenada presents an inspiring path forward for the industry.
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The Music Business Buddy. The Music Business Buddy. Hello everybody and a very, very warm welcome to you. You're listening to the Music Business Buddy with me, johnny Amos, podcasting out of Birmingham in England. I'm the author of the book the Music Business for Music Creators, available in hardback, paperback, ebook format in all the major bookstores and online. I am a music creator with a variety of credits I'm a consultant, an artist manager and 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. 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.
Speaker 1:Okay, so in today's episode I'm going to play you an interview that I did with Lloyd Perrin. Now, some people might already know Lloyd. He's very well respected in the music industry, but for anybody that doesn't, you may know him by a different name, which is Papa Zeus. It was under that name that he achieved a lot of critical acclaim and a lot of success. But actually, as a music composer, he's written and produced and officially remixed for the likes of Tiny Temper, pixie, lott, t-pain, newton Faulkner, lamar Chipmunk there's such a wide array of lists of credits that he has got to his name as a music creator very comfortable at home doing orchestral scores and working on all sorts of different projects, for you know the likes of sort of like films, like street dance 3d, for example, which kind of had this real combination of like cutting edge kind of urban dance beats, but with orchestral music he excels at things like that as well. He's classically trained as a music creator and he's achieved all manner of things. I'm'm going to ask him about one of his big hits in the first question in the interview, but before I get to that I also want to point something else out to you.
Speaker 1:In the second half of the interview, lloyd starts to talk about a subject which is quite pioneering. He is starting a platform called Serenada which is a very, very exciting kind of social streaming platform which could potentially completely change and ultimately disrupt the entire music industry in a very kind of artist centric and positive fashion and to talk to. He came up to my studio and sat with me for an hour and just talked about all of his ideas and I really enjoyed just talking to him, just listening to him, so I hope that you also enjoy what he has to say. So I'm going to hand over to the interview and take a note of everything that he says. Here we go, lloydd. Welcome to the music business, buddy. Uh, it's good to have you here in the studio with me as well. Thank you for being here. There's much to discuss. Firstly, how are you?
Speaker 2:I'm very well, thank you. It's a lovely drive here and the weather's lovely for a change, so it is, yeah, it's sunny all year round in birmingham, you know I've heard that, yeah, I'm not biased.
Speaker 1:Um, so many things I want to ask you about. Uh, lord, let's, let's start off by you know. May I just start by just saying, you know, a really, really big congratulations on everything that you have achieved up until this point in your career. Um, you have had some really truly remarkable highlights so far. And if I can just sort of dive into your Papa Zeus project and ask you about your hit, about you, I love that song.
Speaker 2:Oh, thank you I absolutely love that song.
Speaker 1:I love you. You know you've probably looked like one of those kind of classic overnight success stories, right, which is so laden throughout the creative industries. Of course, we all know there's a different story behind the story, but the reality is that you've been active for a very long time, right Long before that hit in 2019. Definitely you sampled the CeCe Peniston hit finally for the song and it was released on Warner UK and Spending Records. How did the idea come about to kind of sample that song and do what you did?
Speaker 2:yeah, well, actually it's more interesting than a sample. It's um a replay, and cc herself gave us her blessing to do it, so I was looking around listening to songs being inspired and make dance music. Actually, papa's used to be go for a bit longer than that as well, papa's who started in the dubstep era. Oh really, and yeah, I like making songs that have got a lot of energy and just get you moving.
Speaker 2:one. Actually, papa Z's could go for a bit longer than that as well. Papa Z started in the dubstep era. Oh really, yeah, I like making songs that have got a lot of energy and just get you moving one way or another, and I had the idea let's sample a 90s song. That's cool, people were doing it.
Speaker 2:It seemed like the thing, to do, and my manager at the time had the foresight to speak directly with Cece and say, please, can we do this song? Um, she said, absolutely, I'd like to hear it first, of course, um, yeah, and at that time I had just taken a sample. She thought it was absolutely fantastic, um, but had, as we'd spoken to her directly, we'd got um, we'd even agreed a percentage on the song that I got for publishing. Really, yeah, which is quite unusual. She then just told her publishers and her team this is what we're doing, this is what we've decided, um, and so then I then got a female vocalist to come in that sounded a bit like her and we just re-vocaled it and then I popped it on top wow, okay, I saw, I feel really silly because I didn't know that that's okay no, the girl singing it um jodie connor, she smashed it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, um yeah, she sounded. The job was the brief was make it sound as if it's cc penniston she's absolutely smashed it.
Speaker 1:She's got an amazing vocal herself I've done lots of amazing things and she was exactly the right vocalist for that song okay, so so first of all, um, wouldn't it be great if every single case like that was as easy. It's never been that easy before, or ever again no. No, that's remarkable. What was it about that particular song? I mean, that song has a special place in my heart, the original as well as yours.
Speaker 1:It's just incredible. And is it like a song that, because you and I are a similar age, right, was it a song that's like just you loved since a young age?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. There are songs that meet you when you're a teenager or something like that, and then when you're able to make music and this is the career you take you get to revisit them and sort of reimagine them. And that was one of those moments. I kind of remembered that song and just thought, yeah, I really like that song, what can we do with it? So we had to play and that's what we did.
Speaker 1:Wow, we had to play and that's what we did wow, okay, so that okay, so it obviously has kind of been sat there for years like harboring its way yeah, you know, marinating its way into your musical spirit ready for you to pick it up and well, I was a bit jealous at the time.
Speaker 2:Um, james hype had done the on vogue song right and I love that song. That's got kelly leesing in it she's another fantastic vocalist and I was like, wow, if only I thought to do that one. That would have been a brilliant idea. But this song was here and what's good about it is as I said. So my manager had the foresight let's go and speak to the team Got that, we mixed it, mastered it. So when we went to the labels, we had all the clearances ready.
Speaker 2:Everything was mixed and everything was mastered and ready to go because you don't you know, if you give an anr reason to say no, they probably will, whereas if you give them every reason to say yes, sometimes they will yeah, and so you know, coming locked and loaded with absolutely all the paperwork sorted and everything ready, it sort of I think it made it an easier decision because you know it's a big song it did really well. It was scott mills track of the week yeah, it streamed. Really well, it was, you know it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean it's got absolutely millions and millions of streams and I remember it was just it was all over radio in 2019.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, and first time I ever heard it I was like oh, this is an interesting remix, and until this very moment with you now. I always considered it to be that I didn't realise it was just kind of, you know, I mean, that's the thing. Now, right, there's a lot of songs that are kind of re-sung. You know, I manage an EDM vocalist and very often she'll do, you know, re-sings. Yep, you know, and even if not just full songs, like little clips and little bits here and there.
Speaker 2:Well, sometimes when you take a sample, you can capture something in it. There's some kind of quality, maybe it's a scratchiness or something they did back then that gets captured, some kind of artefact, and that you want in sometimes. But for me I want something clean and beautiful and has to be recorded perfectly, because otherwise it makes my brain hurt. And so we moved on after that one, and I actually did some work with sam bird, who did the song run to you, so I produced that song as well, and that was another one of those ones where it's a song I'd loved. You know, yeah, gonna run to you as a brilliant song, and I'd heard that remade in the 90s before I even knew it was a brian adams song, and so there's nothing. Those songs that just stuck in my head since I was a teenager. That really made an impression on me. And then we made the tune with the disgusting, horrible vocal. I've managed to get off the internet. And then Laura.
Speaker 2:White came in she smashed it, she's brilliant yeah so there's another one of those ones where I'd really imagine something and we didn't want to take samples because I just didn't make me feel good. I wanted to have a good modern vocalist to smash it out of the park.
Speaker 1:Wow, okay, that's the way to do it. So was it that you did you in a project, like on the About you track, did you kind of license it to the labels for release? After the track was complete, you say no, it was a full signing, so yeah, with one a full signing.
Speaker 2:Ah, ok, yeah. With one and with most major labels, it's very unlikely that you're going to be able to licence anything to them. It's going to be a full signing. They buy essentially the master rights off of you, so they own the recording and they can do what they want with it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So it was one of those ones. Yeah, so I signed, got an advance, had a record deal so so the deal came before.
Speaker 1:You delivered that to them well it was.
Speaker 2:It was a sort of a mixture, so I took the song to them. They loved it. We'd already basically made it ready to go. Um, what you'll find is that a and r's will always want to have their sort of. They'll want to put their little stamp on it as well. And actually it was really good because, although you know I've got a great mix engineer his name's guy bus and he's brilliant um, he's been working with me for absolutely years that I got introduced to James Reynolds and then James Reynolds did his mix on it. So the sound engineering that he did just took it to another level and I was quite emotional hearing it that first time. So it was cool that we'd done it. It got us probably into the door and a bit further. But then they wanted to make sure it was up to what they called their standards, and I agreed. It was up to sort of what they called their standards and I agreed.
Speaker 1:It was absolutely fantastic once we'd used their guy Interesting. Okay, see, that's where partnership work. You know that's where it comes in. That's what it's all about, isn't it? Yeah, so your song under the same project, right Can't Stop, oh no, was used as part of a kind of viral sensation movement right that documents like funny moments in people's lives and all that like, how did that come about? Was that like, was that organic or was it kind of strategized?
Speaker 2:it was all strategy okay yeah, um, at the time, you'd see, there would have been a scrabble. All the major labels were running around trying to um buy the viral hits. Essentially, tiktok had changed the game massively overnight. Someone who had never been heard of before would suddenly be hugely famous around the world, and so they would run in and want to get their market share. Then what they wanted to do was try and develop it at early stages, when things were coming through. Data was showing that something some sound was trending, and so it was.
Speaker 2:Basically the A&R had come up to me and said look, this is trending. Obviously We've gone and already paid for the replay to be done in London. So they gave me basically a fresh and clear sample to use. So, although it sounds like the original, it wasn't a sample. Again, it was another replay and I just got the Ono bit with the singing bit. And then I hooked up with with um lovesick who are these writers, scottish writers and so I built the tune, sent across to them, then they wrote the rest of it, sent it back and then I sort of fiddled with it from there oh right, okay, so they recorded their vocals, sent them to you and then absolutely, but it's the idea we take a trending sound that people are familiar with and then build it into an actual song so we can put it into sort of a commercial mainstream setting.
Speaker 1:Right, okay, there was a lot of that happening then.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:And it's kind of not happening in the same way now.
Speaker 2:No, because it's mildly embarrassing now, I think because we all did it and it had varying levels of success. I mean, mr Jam, I remember him calling it. There's a new genre of house now. It's called like tick house or tock house, tick, tock house, something like that, and so you saw all sorts of people doing it. Something would blow up. You'd try and get onto it as quick as you could. There'd be a scrabble for it and you'd get it out as quick as you could and see what happened. And you know that was then. I don't think it quite works the same now.
Speaker 1:And we're talking about a period of time that was only kind of four or five years ago.
Speaker 2:Less, I think Maybe two or three years ago, wow yeah, but it did. Well that familiarity works, that's what a lot of hit songs work because of familiarity, whether it's in the compositional aspects, or whether it's something you hear, a hook or anything, especially when you reimagine something and oh no, that track it charted in several countries in Europe and it did really well.
Speaker 1:Wow, god, fascinating. Let's go back in time a little bit, lloyd. So you played in bands and then evolved into the electronic scene and you've had tracks on various labels and music publishing deal with Notting Hill Music. Is your publishing still with Notting Hill or do you manage your own catalog?
Speaker 2:now. No, no, um, so that I think I was. That's probably about 10 years ago. I signed with them for a couple of years. It was a really nice and wonderful time being signed to them they. They got me lots of opportunities and one of the things was the street dance movies. That was something yeah, that was.
Speaker 1:Oh, that was through notting, that was through Notting Hill, that was through Notting Hill.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and they're very active, especially at the time then, and there'd be sessions every week. Put in, we'd be going all over the place, all sorts of people making all sorts of music. But no, since coming out of Notting Hill I've kind of just kept my publishing to me and sort of administer it myself. It's something I might think about in the future. There's lots of new options these days you've got centric and all sorts of things where you can do your own publishing. But um, it's not something I rush straight back into. I think it's important to get the right publisher yeah, yeah, yeah, totally, it's an interesting one.
Speaker 1:Longer term publishing deals like that. It it could be argued that that kind of thing came in and then kind of stopped for a lot of people. You know, when you look at, look back at, say, the 1960s, even in the early part of the 70s in fact, so many people were just doing one song deals, yeah, and weren't doing catalog deals yeah and then something along the line you know changed and people were getting advanced more and going okay yeah, I'll work with them for five years if they're going to give me this at the start of it, you know, and buy a new car with that or whatever.
Speaker 1:Um, but I think now, do you think there is a movement to go back to where people were, with one song deals and managing their catalog themselves?
Speaker 2:I think it depends on genre and it depends on where you are. I think, for instance, with dance music, like you'll find in dance music you'll sign one single to one label, another single to another and it'll be it's. You don't have to do two, three single deals or album deals at all, and I think that sometimes that can make sense. With publishing and publishers, you know it's harder and harder for them these days because there's less money sort of in publishing in a weird way although there's still loads of money.
Speaker 2:It's a. It's harder to get hold of it, radio is less important and most people's attention is now on their phones rather than things that would have generated money in the old days. I don't know is the answer. I think it's.
Speaker 2:What I enjoyed about being on there with my catalog was I wanted, absolutely wanted a home. I wanted um, just to make music. I wanted people to find me the opportunities and I wanted that support. And if there were tough conversations to have around things, I didn't want to have those conversations. I'm okay with that now, but you know we're talking when I just first started and in that scene I did a lot of urban music as well, because I think part of what's missing when you try and find me on the internet is all the things I did that aren't known, which made the things I did that aren't known, which made the things I am known for actually possible yes, yeah it's like a whole load of stuff that happened that you'd never know about, but without it you wouldn't have heard of anything no, no, no quite, yeah, yeah, that, uh, that makes, uh, makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 1:You, man, you mentioned about street dance 3d there, so you were involved with the, the scoring of it. Right, that was a big, like platinum selling soundtrack it was.
Speaker 2:Yeah, um, we worked with lots of people on that that must have been it was that?
Speaker 1:was that a different kind of creative challenge, or was it just you doing what you do, but doing it slightly differently?
Speaker 2:well. So there's two, two answers to that. One is I didn't do it alone. I did it with a really talented um young producer called jc. I say young, he's not so young now, but he was young then, 10 years my junior, but he was had a you know belly full of fire and he was an incredible drum programmer, an incredible producer, full stop. And so he really understood what we needed to deliver. Um, when, before I got to london, I studied um in coventry, I studied a three-year music composition degree so I could I could already write for orchestra by the time I came to London.
Speaker 2:Okay, I just never got the chance until then. So you know we'd never dealt with an orchestra. But even on that one there, we went to Prague and we got the, the Philharmonic Orchestra there and we recorded them so we could make Samples, so a replay again rather than samples. So we, although all the classical music you hear in that we went and recorded in Prague, and then all the music you hear in that, whether it's like B-boy beats and ripped up, remixes, that's the stuff we went and recorded, just remixed. So for me it was a different set of skills but it was one I was very comfortable with. There's lots of musical moments in there which are orchestrated as well, which I just composed. So from a compositional aspect it was something I was very comfortable with.
Speaker 1:But yeah, different space to writing, say migrating scan course, and baseline house or something else you know wow, that's great to be able to, you know, kind of switch between between those things.
Speaker 2:Well, the really cool thing and the really exciting part was that we got to work with flawless and diversity and george samson's time. So they just you know they've been, everyone had seen them on saturday night tv. But when you work with dancers you suddenly notice that they listen to music in a very peculiar way. Every single little noise becomes a movement. So then you kind of learn how to sort of make things that are going to inspire them to move. So you get a relationship with the choreographers and you get a relationship with the dancers. And then this whole new relationship works out where you're in the studio and they're like if I put in a smash head, someone's going to die for the floor. Well, if I put an extra tom here, someone's going to skip across the floor, something like that. You know and it's so. It's a really interesting way to work interesting.
Speaker 1:Have you, excuse me, have you ever written for um k-pop, j-pop?
Speaker 2:we. I did some back in the day.
Speaker 1:I never got got anywhere with it, I know some people have been really successful with it because for those you, you know, excuse me, you have to think about those things, those exact things. Right, you know the um, this little percussive pattern?
Speaker 2:oh yeah, that might be part of the dance move or part of someone's part, as they you know yeah, and I'm no stranger to that, having done migraine skank well, no, oh yeah, that might be part of the dance move or part of someone's part.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm no stranger to that, having done Migraine Skank Well, no Only because of the dance, I would say Right, ok, what?
Speaker 2:year was Migraine Skank God, I think it was maybe 2008.
Speaker 1:Really Wow.
Speaker 2:Maybe 2009. It's a long time ago.
Speaker 1:Wow, you got early in on the dubstep thing as well, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, wow, you got early in on the dubstep thing as well, right? Yeah, yeah, I mean I did tunes. I got a song signed to a label called AEI I can't even remember that so long ago, but they were sort of to do with the UKF scene and it all blew up because YouTube channels were big then. So the YouTube channels blew up and we all wanted to get involved. We had a few bits and bobs there, but then the scene, as quickly as it grew, it was decided overnight. We just we had a few bits and bobs there, but then the scene, as quickly as it grew, it was decided overnight. We just got the message through the BBC are not taking the remixes of Dubstep anymore. It's dead, literally like that it had gone.
Speaker 1:I've never understood that, because then people started to say things like it's as dead as Dubstep and actually you could argue it's never really died.
Speaker 2:Well, it's come back again now, like people are throwing it into drum and bass now, like you've got. You've got like um, younger generations exploring some of these genres for the first time and making it themselves and they're making some incredible music. I mean, I hear it all around the world. It's not even just a uk sound. It's taken up like it's gone everywhere and then they'll throw in all of this dubstep with drum bass and making incredible, incredible noises. So I don't think it ever went away, but it's like they're always singing like the guitar is dead until the next big guitar band comes and dubstep is dead until they use the same bass sounds some other way in some other thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's true. Do you know? A few months ago I was interviewing a guy called Jason Tarver back in I think it was episode 19, production music composer, and he was talking about how influential dubstep still is in the orchestral world and how so many of the orchestral hybrids are based on, you know, the classic strings and the modern dubstep sounds, and so actually, if you were to erase dubstep and what we had, then it would change the way that a lot of television music actually sounds.
Speaker 2:I mean, yeah, there's so many relationships that you don't see between different styles of music and how they influence each other. But without them again, you wouldn't get to the bits that you do see.
Speaker 1:No, no, no, this is it OK. Um, so, you know, let's talk about evolution, lloyd, because you, you know, there's something kind of changed in your your ideals right on a business level, correct um and um. Can we talk about social streaming and what your plans are?
Speaker 2:yeah, so, um, basically, obviously, as you know we've been discussing I've been in the music business for quite a while and I've been producing and writing in all sorts of aspects for popular music and underground music and films and so forth. So I've had a lovely, wonderful career and I've managed to sort of, you know, become woven into the fabric, if you like, the structure of culture in London, as it were. But one thing that has changed massively is when I first started, we sold CDs yeah Right, and we made some money. Then it went to downloads and we made less money. And then we got to streaming and it makes even less money and it makes even less sense. Now we're 10, 15 years into that, and so, from a business point of view and from an artistic point of view, I just wanted to sort of take a look around the world and think what's going on here? Why are there so many people struggling? There's some great music out there and there's some big artists and they're struggling. And when you start hearing massive artists struggling, you know something's gone wrong. And so I took a deep, dark look at the whole structure. I started with the idea that perhaps I would make a record label, which I did. That lasted for a little while until I realised that it wasn't going to make the difference.
Speaker 2:Social streaming is where I as an artist and my experience represent essentially, I guess, the experience that everybody's having, but we apply it to how we should have streaming, how it should have always have been. I think when Daniel Ek put Spotify together, he wanted everyone to get to music and it to be much fairer than it is now. But there was a sort of a problem occurred when they put it together because they had to include older legacy catalogs and in that process of including those catalogs it took a lot of the money away, which is kind of where we are now. So I looked at streaming. I looked at how people access music. These days. You hear there's 1.6 billion people on tiktok and 1.2 billion of those find their new music therei mean tiktok was massive. It really destabilized the majors for quite a while, but if you're finding all your new music there, that means that you're decentralized discovery. You don't have a marketing funnel anymore, which is what's happened.
Speaker 2:And then when you give people the chance to just find their own music, as it stopped, no, no, it's okay um, when you give people a chance to find their own music, they start finding different things than what the majors thought you were going to get yeah, yeah so tiktok is great.
Speaker 2:It's discovery, but it's distraction. It's not built for depths, and so the the way, the modern journey, is this right? So this is an artist, as I, as I found out when I did oh no, what I was supposed to do I had somebody from the label ringing me up saying make this content, do this content. I want this, I want that, I want this, and I'm supposed to make endless amounts of content that were nothing to do with music the memes and tricks and essentially a waste of my time as a musician.
Speaker 2:I'm not making any of my fans happy with them seeing me dance up and down doing something silly right, some people really like that, but that's not what I'm here for and it's not what most musicians and artists are there for. They want you to listen to their songs. So we're making endless content for this platform, which is great for them. Then we're trying to, once we've been discovered, come across to instagram. We're trying to promote and connect. Then we're dragging them across to their favorite dsp. So we're trying to get into stream somewhere and we're only bringing back fractions of pennies per streams. You know, in the old days, in the noughties for instance, if I said to somebody I'd had a million plays of something.
Speaker 2:They'd expect me to be rather rich yeah now if I said I've had a million streams, they go oh, so that's a couple of grand in your pocket. Then, like it just hasn't worked out right. So I thought what can we do? Social media is really important. It's how we connect together. Discovery is really important. So that's content, media, tiktok. What would happen if we took all of those processes and stuck it right in the middle of streaming so we could find our music? We could find our music, we could find our artists and we could play it all in one place? And if we just transformed the way the money rolls, as in we just say sorry, majors, you're doing okay on spotify. We need a space for all the independent artists in the world. Suddenly there's a lot more money available and everybody can start making a bit of a better living again.
Speaker 1:Love it. Okay, so it does. So the idea is what Daniel tried to start right, which is putting creators in control and artistic control and that kind of thing. So would it still be using like a pro rata model?
Speaker 2:No See, that's just another thing, I think as we went and delved into it and we've done a lot of deep diving into all the maths of this pooled systems don't really work for those that aren't the biggest.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you know, last year, 33 songs took the majority of the money. That's a pooled system and that pool is actually quite small anyway. What we are doing is a user-centric system. So if I come onto the platform and I listen to your music, you get the entire artist share of my subscription, no one else. It doesn't go into a big lump of money and then we doll it out here, there and everywhere.
Speaker 2:It's just simply whoever I listen to, they get my subscription money, no one else yeah which means that, um, it changes the game massively because it gives up and coming artists a chance. You might have a. It means that, basically, if you had a thousand dedicated fans, that's more important to you than a hundred thousand streams from people that will never see you again. We don't count it by the stream. You count it by the person spent time with you and listen to your music interesting.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Uh, that certainly rewards listenership patterns and loyalty and all that kind of stuff. So what does it look like then? Let's imagine that that's worked and it's the future. What does it look like from a music creator's point of view? Here's my track. It's finished my EP single or whatever, what does it look like at that point for them?
Speaker 2:So what you're going to do is you're going to come and claim your space on the platform and you're going to want to build a brand and a place where you can speak to your audiences and grow your fans and therefore grow your revenue. You're going to upload some music. You're going to put a small amount of video, short form content, just like TikTok. We're taking some familiar aspects, so what we want to do is find rabbit holes worth falling down, essentially. So we will still use some of the things that people understand, that social media aspect. You have your tiktok stream sort of. You'll have your sort of instagram sort of profile and you'll put that music on and then you'll tell everybody it's on there and then your fans will share it with other fans. But also one massive new step that we're making is we're using um technology, so ai can now can scan incredible amounts of catalogs and it can pick out songs that are similar to your tastes. So, for instance, you could go on and you could give some natural language and say I'm feeling a bit down today.
Speaker 2:I got dumped last night. Can you give me something? Some 90s rock, but I want it to be sung by a man, something like that or the opposite. I want some light-hearted jazz sung by a lady. Whatever it is you want, and it will go and it will pick it all out from the entire catalog and it will create you bespoke playlists, which means that that ai is supporting two things one, artists getting found, but, more importantly as well, fans finding music that they want without endless scrolling. They can just scroll through the things that they were always meant to find but probably never would.
Speaker 1:Okay, so on a technological level then. So you've got kind of voice to text and then you've got like a sort of web harvesting system that's then scanning the text to be able to align a song with a certain thought.
Speaker 2:It's even deeper than that. It can go in and look at the song and tell you what chord sequence it is done, what key it's in, how fast it's going, how the melodies sit against the chord sequences. It can take loads of nuanced compositional, technical information. That would give it a quality that you can then match up to another thing. So you might feel as composers and producers we know. For instance, certain chord sequences make you want to dance, some make you want to cry, some make you want to sleep. Right, we know how to use all these different aspects of composition to make people feel something. Well, it can understand that.
Speaker 1:Wow, and can it understand that just from one stereo interleave WAV file Does it need stem breakdown for understanding?
Speaker 2:No, it just listens to it. Just a WAV and it goes, gets processed.
Speaker 1:Wow, okay.
Speaker 2:But one thing I want to be really, really clear about we're not training an AI to learn how to make this music. We're not training an AI to learn how to make this music. We're not training an AI to take on people's vocal qualities or styles. I think that's really important to say. We won't be accepting fully AI-generated music onto the platform either. I know some of the platforms are struggling at the moment. I've heard of a couple that have now got 20% of their entire catalogue is completely AI-generated music. I think that's really important that we make this case. We are not using AI for anything other than to support people finding music and people being found. It's a tool.
Speaker 1:So it's AI on a kind of discovery level.
Speaker 2:Yes, ok, yeah, think of it like a dating app, but for music, right. You go on there and you say the kind of things you like about somebody, right? And then it's the job of the platform to like, hook you up with those kind of people. Well, this is the same kind of thing. You'll tell it the music. You know what the kind of music you like, and when you interact, it will learn more about you as well and you'll be able to sort of be very bespoken the way it suggests things. Wow, okay, but it won't be counting stream counts. It won won't be saying, oh, this person's done 20,000 streams, that one's done 2,000 streams, so we'll put the 20,000 stream person first. That's not what it's about. It's about actual music and actual feelings.
Speaker 1:Okay, Interesting, because I know YouTube changed part of their algorithm a few months ago to reflect something similar to that, which is why we're then starting to see videos on our feeds that have less views and that kind of thing Interesting. That makes perfect sense. So let's look at an example where you mentioned there, lloyd, about the idea of somebody feeling a certain way. You know, oh, I had a bad night last night, I didn't sleep much, or whatever. So the lyrics are being scanned, not just titles, but lyrics Because, for example, instagram as it stands right now would kind of make suggestions, and TikTok, of course as well, would make suggestions on. You're talking about this in your post. Therefore, you might like this song. Now, unless I'm mistaken, it's largely doing that based upon NLP of titles of songs rather than the text body inside of a song.
Speaker 1:So what you're saying is is that this applies to. You can zoom into certain sections of a song and go. That thing you're referring to is actually in the bridge of this song over here.
Speaker 2:Well, you can even. You can even report back. So, say, you put a song out and your fans are really responding at certain parts of the song. You can get that information, that data you. It can help you to deal with what your fans like most about you.
Speaker 2:Another thing that we're going to use ai for is helping people to assist them when they put their music out. So, for instance, you might have a bunch of fans. You put it out on a friday night at nine o'clock it does really well. Perhaps on sunday at one o'clock, it doesn't do really well. So we want to be able to give you all of that data and say, look, it's been noted.
Speaker 2:Your ai assistant essentially says we want, you want to help you put that music out and you're like, yeah, I'm putting this, it's a slow jam, it's one for the, for the sweethearts, and you go cool. Well, the last time you put a song out that was like that it did better. On this time, and these are your fans to go for first, wow. So what I want to do is provide and, by the way, all of these tools are free. We don't charge artists on the way in. We don't, essentially, we don't, you know, monetize their ambition, I think because we can make a social media situation, a content media situation within streaming and all of this. Is there what it really does? It just creates a really profound way for the music to reach the ears it was always supposed to.
Speaker 1:Right, okay, yeah, that makes sense. So at what stage of the development are you in at the moment? I know you're talking to a lot of people right now. Where are you at in terms of the status of it?
Speaker 2:So we're building it. Currently. We've got a great team. I've got a couple of great co-founders with me. Neither of them have any experience in music at all, which is perfect. One of have any experience in music at all, which is perfect. Yeah, one of them does product and has done 20 years of product development. Another one's ran big companies in the city, which means we can run a big company in the city. We've got developers. We've got people um leaning in from marketing experiences.
Speaker 2:Every time I speak to people and we sort of talk about the essence of what we're trying to create, which is, um, although all streaming platforms recognize rights, not all rights are equally valued. We want to get to a space where all rights are valued equally. I think it's really important to get that bit of cost too. So when people start hearing the stories and you know there might be a development programmer, but they go like, yeah, music's really important to me and what so hang on a second. Those artists that I'm listening to, they're not even getting my money like, well, no, they actually streamed less than a thousand on Spotify, so they didn't get any money right? 14 billion streams didn't get paid last year on Spotify Is that right yeah, Thinks they're new thresholds.
Speaker 2:I mean people are going to say, oh, they weren't very good songs.
Speaker 2:Oh, this is because of the threshold going to be big or anything, but I think that's how you start. You start at a thousand streams and it might become ten thousand, twenty thousand. It's not for anybody other than audiences to decide the value of that song. I think it's around the idea and this is where you know people lean in like one song isn't going to mean everything to everybody, but one song could mean everything to somebody. Yes, right, and that's the essence of music again. So that's why we need to get back to being really authentic about how we value and exchange music, and that's what the whole premise of this is. We get back to absolute basics. There's a really important relationship in this world and it's one between an audience and its artists and its artists in its audience. That's culture, that's sacred, and that's what we need to fence off and protect and encourage and give it all of the all of the love and sunshine we can so it all grows again.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that makes sense. So how then, do rights holders monetise from that platform? Is there a thing where people can monetise on that, or is it more of an introductionary point where people can socially share with each other and then the idea is that they then go back to spotify or apple to go and stream the full?
Speaker 2:song. So it's a subscription platform. I understand these days, obviously, that there is a subscription fatigue and we don't intend to charge anything like um spotify. It's probably going to be around 25 30 less than those guys. It'll certainly be a very affordable streaming platform, um, but that subscription is going to be the basis of how artists get remunerated. We're not going to have adverts on there because I think adverts ruin songs.
Speaker 2:Yeah the amount of times you should know. You're around your friend's house and they go right, yeah, play that banger. And then you get an advert for some alcoholic drink or something and it really puts you off because it's nothing to do with what you're going to listen to. So I think that we just make it a really clear and honest space. The audience come in, they pay their money and then when they listen to you, you get that money yeah, okay, um is there.
Speaker 1:If it's too early in the development to know this, don't worry. But will there be an the kind of the free tier and then the premium tier for people?
Speaker 2:what we're thinking at the moment and everything will be geared around what's best for everybody else and we'll take a lot of um advice from people as we go and we'll be asking our artists and we'll be asking our audience what do you want? We think at the moment it's going to be a free period for a set amount of time maybe two weeks, three weeks, something like that so you can come on, you can experience it, you can see the value of it, you can fall in love with some music. Maybe you'll start some social circles off. One of the things we want to do is really connect people in. So you know, like, for instance, like I might find a banger and then I'm gonna whatsapp, you go, yo check this song out, man, yeah, and then you listen to it on whatsapp. We don't need to do that on whatsapp anymore, you'll just do it in app. So you can create social circles, like followings, and you can bring people in so we might be interested in a genre or an artist and we can just have these circles and then, as they join together that's how the sharing works so you might come on, you might find yourself really liking a band and you want to follow it, and then you want to keep up with the updates that they're doing there.
Speaker 2:What I suspect is going to happen and should happen, if we've got it right is we will never enforce exclusivity. I think we'd like to earn your exclusivity If you bring your music onto us. We're not making backroom deals with major labels. We're not going to give out more than half of our money straight away as a license. There's more money for you. You should get paid more. If you're engaging and you're coming on, you should get paid more. That's the idea. So you're going to want to put more content on there, but the content isn't the silly stuff that you might be doing for TikTok, however fun that might be. It's your songs. The more songs you make available to your audience, the more your audience is going to listen to you, and so the time they have to spend listening to music, they'll spend it with you, and that's why the user-centric thing really works out. All we want to do is wake up, make songs, play it and get paid for it, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, ok, that makes sense. Is there um video built into the platform as well, or not?
Speaker 2:there will be short form video to begin with, if we can put that in it's. This is something I'll say, and then the developers will shout at me when they hear this, but the idea is that we want to get as close to something that's um recognizable. We want to put in live video eventually. You know, a lot of this takes development and we also don't want to rush things. We want to put in live video eventually. You know a lot of this takes development and we also don't want to rush things. We want to get things right every single time we do it yeah but yeah, live video would be lovely.
Speaker 2:It would be like you know great to like just tune in and see someone's rehearsal on a friday night, for instance. You know anything they want to give us. Absolutely we want to make it all available and all suggestions like that will all be considered and what, how, when we can deliver, I don't know, but we'll try yeah, sure, um, this is brilliant, by the way, I love it.
Speaker 1:Thank you very much. Yeah, I love it, absolutely. It. It makes so much sense. Yeah, um, well, it's for us yeah, it's for us.
Speaker 2:There needs to be a space that just makes sense again for for people that like music and people that make music, because you can't have all these brilliant artists around the world making all this music and never that make music. Because you can't have all these brilliant artists around the world making all this music and never being able to make any money from it, they won't make music for us anymore. No, no, there'll just be this constant chain of people that try to have a career in music and fail much more rapidly than we ever had before, and that'll be it, and we'll miss that on generational artists, we'll miss that on really important songs and bits of music, and we can't have that.
Speaker 1:Oh god, no, we can't have that. No, no, no, um, and your idea kind of really is uh, does really challenge that. So I love this. What about um major label catalog? What about if we get to the point where people are saying, oh, you know, I'm paying I don't know x amount a month, but I haven't got all my favorite songs on there? Yeah um what? What do we say to those?
Speaker 2:users?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a really interesting question. I think we're not. I'm not here to say, right, we're taking out Spotify. Spotify is what it is. Apple Music, all these people, all these big platforms that you know of now, they do a really good job of serving you up major label music and they should continue to, and if that's what you're into, then that's great. It just doesn't necessarily bear out that that's the truth of the way the world works now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, when you look at tick tock and it's you know this, 1.2 billion finding the new music, over 85 of that is from completely unknown artists or independent artists, and actually I think it's creeping up that number. So when you leave people to be able to discover it, they're not listening to the major label. That's legacy. That's what's happened. Yeah, I'm trying to set something here. That means that I can't deal with what's happened, but we can put something in place to deal with what's going to happen. We're going to get older, people are going to get. You know, come through, they're going to make music. There's going to be loads more of it and people are going to want to get to it, and that that's really what the crux of the biscuit is for this yeah, okay, that makes sense, um so go and listen on spotify.
Speaker 2:You know. If you don't want to pay for two subscriptions, maybe use their freemium. Have an advert first. If that's what you want to do, you know or have.
Speaker 1:It's not a lot of money really no, no, it's true, it's just music's become so visual hasn't it yeah, you know, far more visual than perhaps you and I could ever have imagined when we started out. You know, um, and so I. It's almost an expectation now, right, for music to be a very visual and shared process and this idea certainly certainly taps into that.
Speaker 1:Um, could there be the idea as well, if let's say, for example, that um, let's say this all goes ahead and it all goes swimmingly which I'm sure it will, by the way, because it's you and you're a winner, mate, and you make things happen right, so I'm sure this will work. But, um, let's say, let's say, you go ahead and you do this and all of a sudden, just the byproduct of it is that you know, there's certain artists that really, really blow up and really find their audience yeah, um, that will be because of the organic nature of the platform right as opposed to a corporate push you can absolutely go viral.
Speaker 2:There's no reason why you wouldn't. But what's the point of going viral on a platform you can't then monetize and galvanize your audience around you? Yeah, so it will have gone.
Speaker 2:You can't then monetize and galvanize your audience around you yeah so it will have gone viral because people are sharing you and we'll have metrics in there. We've got these all sorts of new terms that we're going to be rolling out about. When a song is rippling through different circles and if it jumps across enough circles it starts to surge, and when these surges happen, that's basically a recognition of a song is being shared a lot by a lot of people, which means it's become important to a lot of people. In that moment and moments come, moments go, but you will absolutely, at that point, then has stand the greatest chance of capitalizing on that viral moment because people can there follow you straight away in the same app without having to go anywhere. All that frictions gone, all that app poppings gone, that fragmented journey that we piece together as either an audience or an artist to try and make sense of this journey. In the industry, it all happens in one place that, that is.
Speaker 1:That is what's been missing, right? Yes?
Speaker 2:it's an. What we're doing isn't you know, it's an evolution, so I'm not reinventing the wheel or anything. There's a few things we're doing differently. We've had some fantastic advancements. Tiktok is brilliant, right, you get to discover loads of cool stuff all over the place. You get to discover loads of rubbish as well, but it's just discovery. Discovery was really important. It's a really important thing for humans. We want to connect. Instagram's been brilliant for that one. You know Spotify, all these people. Data and streaming means fantastic. We get to have all this music we can listen to. We just need to go like.
Speaker 2:All these people and all these companies have these different agendas and they shot off in different directions and they totally did brilliant jobs in some aspects and in other aspects, it didn't do so well. So what do we do? We evolve. We take the best bits of everything that's done well so far and we try and make sense of it and, as you're saying, it's more visual. Now you're talking about expectations. We've got technology, so everyone's allowed to expect more, right? So let's just galvanize that in one unified system where all of those expectations could be met yeah, that makes that makes sense.
Speaker 1:What? What about if the major labels were to say, okay, yeah, this, we like this. You can go ahead and use our catalogues, but we're gonna need to have the same deal with you as we've had with spotify and apple and? Yeah what do you do then?
Speaker 2:this is absolute hard no okay I'm going to be really categorical about this an absolute, hard no. This, this is not for them. This is not for them. We're not doing any different deals. I think it's really important we're in a, in a space where we can talk to each other around the world and we can value each other equally. We need to value music equally. All rights need to be valued equally. A song is a song and it's worth something to somebody, right? We?
Speaker 2:can't just start saying, just because it was recorded in the 70s, it's worth more than something that was recorded in the 20s. Now, yeah right? No, absolute hard. No, we're not doing any deals with anybody that's different. You're ed smith or ed sheeran, it doesn't matter. Your song is your song. We pay everybody the same very good.
Speaker 1:We level the playing field.
Speaker 2:It's the only way to do it. Let the audiences decide what they like more. Let them be the a and r's, like I was chatting to somebody the other day and they were a really interesting person and they kind of put me onto this idea that in the old days corporations owned culture, but now, with our connected technology, the crowd owns culture again.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:And I'm like let's do that. Let's see what happens when we just trust the artists and the audiences to decide what's great. Let's see culture alive. Let's see it living and alive right now and see what we get out of that. That's how we get to the next new music thing. That's how we get the next new dubstep or drum and bass or whatever. That's how we get our next generational artists by trusting them.
Speaker 1:Wow yeah, by letting people control it Correct yeah, I mean, it's kind of what we've always wanted. Yeah, I see a lot of people now talking about this a much more kind of artist-centred ecosystem and it is right because there are better deals out there, and we were talking earlier about artists going directly to distributors instead. It's great we are moving towards that, but it's still within the confines of what we always knew.
Speaker 2:Yeah, those distributors are there to feed into the streaming platforms that would exist.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and for a lot of artists that really helps them out. They don't want to deal with all the trouble that comes with trying to deal with all the trouble, and you're not going to be able to put your music up directly on a lot of these platforms, so you need a digital distributor. Um, we're saying as an artist, if you want to, just you can use a digital distributor. We haven't made deals with them yet, but, um, you can just come directly to us. You don't need to pay anybody any money. You can just put your music on. Now, you know, come and put it on, yeah, yeah, I've just saved your money there as well yeah because we're not, like I said, we're not monetizing fragmented parts of the process.
Speaker 1:We're unifying the process and just making it all so much more simple so kind of, just because I what I'm trying to do is I'd really like people to be able to understand this fully and I'm trying to think of questions that people may ask.
Speaker 1:Sure, okay, so just to clarify that last point there, people would not have to pay, you know, their sort of 20, 30 quid a year for their everyday distributor, correct? They wouldn't have to do that. They can put it up there for free, kind of like soundcloud, right, yes, build some, put something up there for free, um, create a community around it. Um, brilliant, love it. What happens, though, if you do that and things work, but then all of a sudden, you know the, the soda tones of the world, etc. The ai models, that kind of just look at stuff and go, hey, that's really building, that's really right, we're going to go and go to that artist over there that's doing really, really, really well, um, and and pull them out of there and go and give them a load of money yeah, so if they go viral, for instance on serenada by the way, I don't think we've mentioned that oh, sorry, is that the name?
Speaker 2:yeah, the name of the platform is called serenada that is a good name thank you very much. It's, it's been. It was cool we struggled with a few different names to begin with Serenada.
Speaker 1:Yeah, sorry, that's a brilliant name, thank you.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much.
Speaker 1:Wow, Okay, sorry, it's evocative right Once again it's right back to what we're saying. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's Serenada.
Speaker 1:That's amazing, sorry, wow.
Speaker 2:Brilliant. We're about choice. Like I said, we don't. We don't make anyone exclusive. We're all pro-choice here. You've got to do what you think you need to do. If you blow up on serenada and a major label comes in and says we want to sign that record, that's what you want to do, do it and we really wish that works out for you.
Speaker 2:My experience tells me, having been on major labels, it might work out, it might not you know, but you've got to take your shot in this world, and if that's your shot and you need that money there, and then that's great. What I'd probably like to think is that if you've gone viral on serenada, you're earning right, yeah that's the point right.
Speaker 2:You're actually earning now um more than you would have done in another platform, because we've made all this money available that would have normally been siphoned off, because it's user-centric when the attention's on you, it's on you. This really rewards that active listening rather than you know, plenty of editorials. We won't be having editorials. That's. That's not something we're going to do. There'll be tastemakers on there. There'll be people that are fans of music that go like okay, so you've got that mate. You know everyone's got that mate that just knows what the best tunes are at the time. So go and follow them. Like, like you can on social media. Go and follow someone for their opinion on something yeah I'm not going to have company editorials where serenade goes.
Speaker 2:This is what's topping the dance charts, because that means that it's open to corruption again. Yes, it has to be completely natural, right? Yeah?
Speaker 1:totally, that was going to be my next question. People moan about it, quite rightly. How do you?
Speaker 2:know, editorials can make or break you sometimes, and it's not necessarily based on a meritocracy. Is your team the best or not? It did it connect with enough people or not?
Speaker 1:that's these are the things that you should be thinking about yeah, because the you know, even though I mean, as you know right, we've both been involved with things that have had big editorial bumps and and and and it's great, and you see something go up and then it comes back down and people feel a bit demoralised. But what I always say to people is, if that happens on Spotify, for example, it's OK, because then what's going to happen is collaborative filtering will kick in.
Speaker 1:And actually, it's going to kick you out on another rhythmic level on site, so you need to keep doing that and then eventually it will work. However, what you're talking about here today is perhaps an evolution beyond that, because, yes, there are already tastemakers there are youtubers. There are streamers there. You know there are people out there, but they're just people. So on serenade, those people are not corporations, they're just people, correct?
Speaker 2:that's brilliant. It's authentic.
Speaker 1:Brilliant.
Speaker 1:So Serenada respects obviously intellectual property in the same way that everyone has always done on a traditional level, but doesn't ask you to relinquish any of it, and you can use the growth that you get off there to then use as a leverage point to then go to sync agents and say, hey, this song has done really, really well. On Serenada, I want to pitch this for this opportunity over here and, by the way, because of the AI analytics on there, we know that this part of the song is perfect for that kind of spot that you need.
Speaker 2:You're getting it now. Yeah, absolutely, and actually you just touched on something that I wanted to bring up, but there's so much to talk about.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but there's so much to talk about.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, right, um, one of the verticals that we're going to be putting in, because all we want to do is find as many revenue you know, streams as we can, for the artists as well. That's part of what we need to do. It can't just be about streaming. It has to be everything we do merch, all that stuff. It won't be on the mvp. I'll get told if I say it will. Okay, um.
Speaker 2:But you know, something that's been really good for my career is when I've managed to license a song to a tv advert or something like that or whatever it is. You know, um, what we want to do is make a system available that companies can listen to a song and then they can directly interact with the platform and say we'd like to license your song, and then we facilitate that so you could come on the platform. You wouldn't even need to go to that sync agent and say I've got some stuff. They can just find you, and then they can do it all in platform, and you can. We can deal with all the legal work there. We could do all the payments there, everything there, in a controlled environment that makes sure that everything's okay and it should if we get it right, mean that everyone's protected too, and all the relationships protected yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:So sorry, I'm just connecting a few ideas in my mind as we're talking.
Speaker 2:Please give me them.
Speaker 1:I want them all. Well, a couple of weeks ago I was talking to a lovely lady on this podcast, anne-marie from Darcy, and Darcy are an AI, they're a create tech company right, and they've got like a product line of different kind of co-pilot tools, some for music creators that work on a generative level. It's all very ethical. There's no like ml stuff from. So that's one of the things. But the other thing they've also built is um. Is is a tool for music users that they sell b2b right, and so what they'll do with that is they'll. It's a piece of software that can be used on an editorial level by music supervisors, and they've got this spot spot that needs fixing and needs the right music, and they know the music that they want to put in there.
Speaker 1:But then that bit to that bit can be quite time-consuming in this current era. But this AI tool just does it like that and just zips it together and says we've got 16 seconds. Let me take the most prominent parts of it and put it together. Yeah, yeah, that compared now, if we draw a partnership link between what you've just said there the growth of a particular song and the area of knowledge that people like about it, the point of access on AI data that says this is the bit that people react to when they do that the music supervisors are going to. When they do that, the music supervisor is a going to want to know that and then be able to react to it quickly. So that's a three pong triangle there of different pieces in the createch world that point towards a a quicker, speedier um solution. And we all, as we all know, right in in the music supervision world, everything has got to be like. We need it yesterday. Yes, which?
Speaker 1:you know, is very difficult sometimes because people go on holiday and people don't check their phone and people walk the dog and they don't you know, and quite rightly so. We can't stop any of those things, it's a fast-paced world.
Speaker 1:But if we have this one stop clearance thing, like we've had in sync for the last however long, a couple of decades or more but we pair it up with these tools, it is at that point that the actual like a musician, can make a living there what I'm trying to do is frame an entire economy.
Speaker 2:We'll get. It will take us a couple of years maybe three, four, five years to get everything sorted out, but what we want to be able to do is bring it all together, unify it, so we don't have different agendas, we don't have people moving in different directions trying to take their bottom line out of the little bit of the sector that they've got. Let's bring it together, let's let's just make it available and make it smooth, clean, convenient, no friction. By doing so, everybody wins. Whether you're the music supervisor, the, the fan, the artist, it doesn't matter. You're all winning and you're doing your job better, quicker, easier.
Speaker 2:And connectivity is really important. There are things we can't even imagine that we're going to do now that are going to happen, because we're still just at this cusp, this brilliant moment in time, where not only can I speak to developers and we can now afford to make something that we couldn't have afforded to 15 years ago, ie a streaming platform. We're now getting all of these futuristic bits of tech that we're going to be able to stick into it. That's going to just change everything. I want to make it sort of almost so. It's modularly ready, so like because we've sorted out all the principles, the basic principles. Anything new that comes along should just slot in and work on those principles.
Speaker 1:Interesting, okay, interesting. We know that there is big growth ahead when it comes to independent video game creators and obviously there's a a crossover point for streamers between the sort of that and and what you're building with survivor and what that might look like on a user level you mean if they wanted to?
Speaker 2:these gamers wanted to use the music from the creators yeah I think that's a relationship that we should foster absolutely, um, absolutely. I think they should be able to get in contact with them, which they will be in in platform, and be able to say I want to use your music, and then another part of the platform opens up for them to have that conversation.
Speaker 1:OK. So that then lends itself into micro licensing, on a sort of on the way it should work, which is, you know, like micro licensing now might be. Let's say, for example, a prs are trying to do their best with it, right, but of course you know. But you know, oh, here's the price point if you're reaching this many people, and here's the price point if you want to use it on this over here, and I get why and it makes sense. But the trouble is it doesn't work. Yeah, but what you're suggesting there is that actually by people becoming aware of music within that platform, that then makes people go. Hey, you know, I don't just want to be a tastemaker, I want to be a change maker here. I want to get that and use that over here, and we can. If there is then some kind of follow-up, I'm leaping ahead here.
Speaker 2:Lloyd, sorry, no, we definitely are. But once I speak to the guys, they're going to be like, they're going to be very cross, but this is where we need to be ambitious and this is where it's heading. I can't tell you how the coding works or how we're going to roll that out, but that's on, that's in the target. Yeah, that's on the list. I mean that it has to be because that's how Another?
Speaker 1:way is through genuine micro-licensing. You know this independent filmmaker over here absolutely loves this track, but they haven't got £10,000 to put it. On this independent documentary that actually could win awards if it had that song. But if they were able to pay £5 now and a 50% residual further down the line based upon this deal that's broken within this system, then the e-commerce sets it up for me. How does that music credit do it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you're setting a foundation for success and you're setting it up to work. Yeah, because what we know is technology is affordable. When my first studios I mean I think about the studios I first had they were expensive. Yeah, oh my God, a full Pro Tools rig or we'd get an SSL desk or something, and then I'd have to pay someone to use it, because it's actually like real scientist equipment.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah and everything was expensive.
Speaker 2:Now, like that track? Oh no, I created it on my laptop, which cost me a grand or something. You know Right? So there's all these creators and all of that. Stuff's getting easier to make and it's looking better, it's sounding better. So, yeah, absolutely. You never know where the next thing is going to come from. So let's find it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, let's find a way to find it, and when we have found it, let's nurture it and grow it absolutely. I find this tremendously inspiring and exciting thank you, I'm very excited by it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I can see why?
Speaker 1:because it's, it's, it's not just oh, here's the next latest greatest platform it's this is a part of a much wider narrative yes, well, it actually.
Speaker 2:I feel like it's kind of inevitable. It's an inevitable evolution if you look around and you recognize what's actually going on in the world, the way people are actually using technology and actually connecting and how they want to share the things they think about, the things they make. This is a very, very natural evolution of what's happening. It's just that we are kind of stuck in processes where we're honoring older systems from physical media days and corporations that shouldn't necessarily be part of this conversation right now. They've got their conversation, they've got their thing going on, and I applaud them for that, but I think we need to sort of find out what does freedom actually sound like? What does freedom actually look like? Yeah, yeah, let's find out.
Speaker 1:Well, everything you're saying there falls in line with the sort of the outline of what the ideal creator economy would look like.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And this could be a really crucial part of it. You know, going forward, do you know? Um, it's an interesting one because, um, when we look at different like so we're in our 40s right yeah and so we're kind of in that age bracket where we see the sort of the other generation beyond us that are still active in the music industry, and then we see the generation that are kind of 20, 25 years sort of behind or ahead of us.
Speaker 2:Whichever way, you see it right, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:And we are uniquely positioned to be able to turn left and right and look at both.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And that won't happen for us again after this era's gone.
Speaker 2:No, it's that generational thing that people are talking about, isn't it? Obviously, we're both Gen X.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Although it's a very funny conversation to have. We are in that very weird space between everybody. We remember a time without technology and we've embraced technology fully as well, so we're kind of with a bridge between everybody. I think it's probably why it's people at our age now that are going okay, well, I've got the gumption to do this, I'm going to work it out and we're going to, because I've also got the vision. I can see how this works, I can see where it came from, but I can see where it needs to go and we need to now take the reins and we need to take the control with. You know, it's great. Like I say, I'm not putting anybody down and I'm never going to put down a platform like spotify that managed to bring streaming to the world. What a fantastic thing.
Speaker 1:And just saying let's keep moving forward yeah, yeah, absolutely right, yeah, oh, I love it. I can't think of reasons as to why it doesn't work.
Speaker 2:I've asked you, the only way it won't work is if people don't come on board, and this is partly why you know I'm happy.
Speaker 2:I really like talking to people about it yeah, because maybe you'll tell two people and they'll tell five people and they'll tell five people and anybody listens to this podcast. You know, let's get this done. I I can't do it on my own and it's really important. It's really important that we get this right. It's really important. It's commercially viable, that it works for everybody. There's other things I want to do as well as I look back to my youth. Right, you know I'm at that age where I got free instrument lessons at school. Okay, right, they don't get them anymore, and imagine that. So, you know, there's things like when we get, you know, the money coming in and we're moving forward. I'd like to set money aside in something we've been calling the serenade of funds, where I want to do things. I want to invest back into the world and young people should have instrument lessons. The government aren't going to pay for it, so we can.
Speaker 2:Like you know, there was crises that happened all over the world. Obviously, famously, chapel rowan recently said oh, you know, if I ever got this moment, I'd want to address this. If you're assigned to major labels and they're making a ton of money out of you, or even any labels or in the industry at all, there isn't really that safety net for anybody? The moment you can't produce something and make something, you're out, and I think you know there should be. I know there are funds there, but why don't we just take our social and corporate essential responsibilities really seriously? Let's do everything right. Let's you know if we manage to make this a goer, let's look after everybody as well. Let's make this progressive. Let's do know if we manage to make this a goer, let's look after everybody as well. Let's make this progressive. Let's do something that's authentic and natural and I don't want to use the word, but I will.
Speaker 2:Let's make it spiritual, like this music at the end of the day it's a spiritual connection that we don't always understand, but we know what it does yeah, yeah, absolutely, I think.
Speaker 1:I think there's there's a lot of people that that aren't in the music business, that don't make music, that are utterly appalled by the idea that a computer can make something and make it not a spiritual connection, or maybe it can, and they don't know. It's almost like they've been feel like they're being cheated in some way. Yeah, um, and I think you know that that, as a subject is, is is rubbing up a lot of people the wrong way. It's also people are misunderstanding a lot of things around it. It's a complicated time and it will clean itself up.
Speaker 1:These things always do. But this is brilliant talking to you today, I really, really appreciate it.
Speaker 2:It's really kind of you to invite me.
Speaker 1:Oh, no, no, no. I'm thrilled that you're here talking about this. You're a top, top, top guy. Lloyd, thank you, congratulations for everything you've done up until this point and everything that's coming forward. Would you consider coming back and keeping me up to date with what happens?
Speaker 2:Absolutely Okay, brilliant yes of course.
Speaker 1:I wish you all the luck in the world, and you have my full support.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much.
Speaker 1:It's been a pleasure talking to you. You too. Thank you, top man. Wow, so there you go. What a wonderful conversation.
Speaker 1:Lloyd is an interesting guy, right? You know he's achieved so much and yet he remains so incredibly ambitious, not just for his own goals, right? In fact, not at all for his own goals anymore, but for the goals of other people, for the goals of music creators and the entire artist ecosystem moving forward. I believe that Lloyd's idea will take off and I'm very excited about it and it felt like a really exciting kind of exclusive to have him here today. It's the first podcast where he's ever spoken about this subject.
Speaker 1:I know there's a lot of partners involved with him working and developing Serenada, and it's very exciting just to see kind of where it might go in the future. He has my full support, that's for sure, and he's a very, very impressive and inspiring guy. So I hope you gained a lot from listening to his anecdotes, to his stories, to his insight, to his visions, to his goals, and we certainly wish him the best going forward. I've also asked him if he'll come back again and talk to me about the updates as to where he's at with the Serenata project, and he's he. He looked happy when I asked him that, so, so that was good. Anyway, take that with you guys. Have a great day, and may the force be with you. The Music Business Party. The Music Business Party.
