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. 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 the author of The Music Business for Music Creators (Routledge/ Focal Press, 2024). He is also 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 at BIMM University UK, a music industry consultant and an artist manager.
www.jonnyamos.com
The Music Business Buddy
Episode 62: Understanding Medallion With Music Tech Innovator Matt Jones
What if artists owned the platforms where they connect with fans? Matt Jones, CEO of Medallion, is bringing this radical vision to life with a revolutionary approach to artist-fan relationships.
Most musicians face a fundamental problem: they build audiences on platforms they can't control, then struggle to reach those same fans when promoting tours, merchandise, or new music. Medallion solves this by creating artist-owned communities where creators maintain complete ownership of their fan relationships and data.
As Jones explains, the current music ecosystem leaves artists capturing just 10% of their economic value – a striking imbalance given their cultural significance. "I just don't see a world where the artist is not the platform in the future," he states, highlighting how Medallion empowers musicians to regain control without relying on algorithmic platforms or intermediaries.
Unlike traditional subscription models that pressure artists into unsustainable content schedules, Medallion adapts to musicians' creative cycles. Artists simply debut content to their most dedicated fans before wider release, typically seeing 2-3 times higher engagement than email or text marketing. The platform has evolved from siloed communities into a unified network where fans following one artist discover others, creating organic growth opportunities for musicians at every level.
This innovative approach has attracted investment from music heavyweights including Metallica, Disclosure, and My Morning Jacket, with communities from Greta Van Fleet, Girl in Red, and Jungle already thriving on the platform. For independent creators, Medallion offers a turnkey solution that complements existing strategies while providing something increasingly rare in today's music landscape: true ownership.
Ready to take control of your fan relationships? Download Medallion from the App Store or Google Play Store today and join the movement putting artists at the centre of their own ecosystem.
https://medallion.app
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Hello everybody and a very warm welcome to you. You're listening to the Music Business Buddy with me, jonny Amos, podcasting out of Birmingham in England. I'm the author of the book the Music Business for Music Creators, available in hardback, paperback and ebook format. I am a music creator with a variety of credits I'm a consultant, an artist manager and a senior lecturer in music business and music creation. Wherever you are and 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 this week's episode I am talking to Matt Jones Guys. Matt is somebody who I've wanted to talk to for quite some time. He is a guy who is a true maverick, a true innovator, and not just in my words, in the words of Billboard, nme, rolling Stone, forbes, magazine, etc. Let me tell you who he is, what he's done, and then I'm going to tell you about what he's going to talk about today. So Matt is Medallion's CEO and has more than 15 years of experience as a founder and CEO in the tech and music industries, including managing two businesses through their exits. He began his career at the age of 16, when he established a concert promotion company. After selling that business to AEG Live, he launched his first global direct-to-consumer ticketing company, crowdsurge, which some of you may remember. This is where he spearheaded a strategic merger with Songkick in 2015. As CEO of Crowdsurge and Songkick, he raised over $50 million in funding from institutional and individual investors and managed a global team of 175. Now this is a company which went on to be sold to Warner Music Group in, I think, 2017. So this was a major, major organisation that's now a part of a major conglomerate. As I mentioned earlier, matt has been recognised as an innovative leader by Forbes, by Billboard, rolling Stone and many others. So that's a little bit about Matt, who I'm talking to today.
Speaker 1:Now let me tell you a little bit about Medallion. So Medallion is really a first of its kind kind of music ecosystem, purpose built for artists. So it's backed by some very top tier investors, and Medallion empowers artists to launch their own fully owned app powered fan community right so? Unlocking new revenue streams and creating much deeper connections with their audience right so? Something that falls in line with many goals of many people in the music industry right now. Since Medallion's launch, they've partnered with globally recognised artists, including the likes of Greta Van Fleet, girl in Red Disclosure, jungle, my Morning Jacket and many more.
Speaker 1:Artists use Medallion as a kind of a high performing interactive channel to engage fans and drive revenue. So all fan relationships and data are fully owned by the artist and the platform offers a streamlined experience that brings music content, commerce and conversation together in one place. So communities on Medallion generally outperform traditional sort of platforms, so delivering maybe sort of two or three times higher engagement than, say, email or text, for example, with built-in organic growth, no algorithm and 100% artist ownership at the core. Now, that last point there is absolutely crucial because it underpins the entirety of what we're going to be talking about today, and it's something that I think a lot of artists will need to start thinking about a little bit more. This all falls under the philosophy, the idea of a decentralized approach, ie a Web3 style company that does not rely on the kind of Web2 approach, ie centralized platforms and intermediaries. This is a move away from that into artists actually having so much more control over how they communicate peer to peer and what kind of experiences they can offer to their fan base. Now, matt has an utterly phenomenal track record at making things happen, building things, getting people behind it and masterminding something outstanding.
Speaker 1:I think this one is going to be next everybody. So I proudly present to you my interview with Matt Jones, all about the subject of Medallion. So, matt, it's good to meet you. I've heard a lot about you and I've read a lot about you, and it's good to have you here on the podcast. First and foremost, how are you?
Speaker 2:Oh, I am excellent. I'm in London for a few weeks, so feeling really good about that Got the British weather rocking and rolling. So, yeah, great to meet you and thank you very much for the opportunity to have a chat.
Speaker 1:Oh, not at all, man. I appreciate you being here. Well, let's, let's start by, you know, by by shining a light on on on Medallion. So so if I get any of this wrong, matt right, just just say, johnny, shut up, you've got this wrong, right. So Medallion enables artists to own their fan relationships and distribution, giving them pricing power and direct revenue without relying on algorithmic you know, algorithm controlled platforms or third-party intermediaries. So would you mind kind of expanding on it a little, just to kind of give us a little bit about how the platform works for independent music creators yes, of course, your uh core audience.
Speaker 2:I hear, um, yeah, so yeah, I can. I can simplify a little bit as well. Um, I think the idea behind the platform is very, very simple. It is that for musicians of any geography, of any stage of their career, they are essentially building audience on platforms that they have no influence, control or ability to influence in any way, and these platforms serve a really great purpose around audience development, right, I mean, whether it's you know, video platforms, streaming platforms, ticketing platforms they're great distribution.
Speaker 2:It's something you have to do as a musician is, like you know, get fans right, like, go out in the world and get fans. I think that when it becomes a bit tricky is when you're hurt as you're trying to do this. Um, when it does come time for you to market a certain thing as a musician whether it's a tour, whether it's a merch drop, whether it's new music, whatever it is um, sometimes you, and most of the time now, it's very hard to reach that audience, right, I mean, like it's, it's pretty, like obvious, but like you're just not gonna permeate that entire fan base that you've worked all that um time working to build over, like in some cases, decades, right? So I think most artists, they and musicians they think, oh, I, I need to build a direct relationship so that I can kind of have a more reliable way to contact my biggest fans. That used to be an email newsletter.
Speaker 2:It's the problem, as old as time, which is like how do you go direct in the most efficient way? The email newsletter, which evolved into SMS, which is evolving and evolving into SMS, which is evolving and evolving and in our opinion, that has only really scratched the surface and not been the most productive or sustainable way to build a direct relationship with your fans. So what we tried to do at Endowment is build this interactive, all-inclusive 3D kind of experience where not only do you own the relationship but you keep fans in your own experience, where you can listen to music there. You're going to be able to buy merch there in the future. There's social elements to it, so it's really about just trying to own the actual distribution platform itself. So you want you have a relationship with your fans, but also they're doing all the stuff in association with you directly.
Speaker 1:Um, so, yeah, that's what the platform is about makes perfect, sense makes perfect sense, yeah, yeah, no, it's great and it's just so in keeping with the times of, you know, of kind of like a much more artist-centric kind of uh you know ecosystem. I mean, you know there have been a few times over the years where you know I've sat and with artists and labels and and listen to what they say and I hear them talking about certain editorials they want to go for and all this kind of stuff. And I think to myself what would happen if Spotify went down tomorrow? Like do you know what I mean? Like what would happen to that data? How would you capitalise on it? So this is like this is the answer right.
Speaker 2:I would like to think so. I think we're trying really hard. And listen, I don't want to get the wrong message across like artists, musicians, like they should definitely do this. Like you should definitely build audience on these platforms, that's what they're built for. Like I just don't think that, in 2025, that it should be your sole strategy. That's all I'm saying. Like yeah, keep doing the other stuff. Like do the tiktok stuff if it makes you happy and that's the way you want to express your art, etc. Etc. But at the end of the day, you need a sustainable director fan strategy, um, to be more prosperous. Like that's basically what I think and what we've seen happen yeah, that makes perfect sense.
Speaker 1:It's not like you're saying, oh, this is some kind of major disruption that changes everything. This is more, more like this sits on top of everything else you're already doing.
Speaker 2:Exactly, and I think the way that we have built the platform is it is zero lift, like, as an example, like we have, you know, a ton of artists that have been in this kind of private mode that we've been in for the last you know, I suppose, year or year plus now where we've like been holding hands with these incredible musicians around the world building this. What we think is an incredible product and the way we've been able to engineer it and get the best results out of it is, by all artists are really doing is debuting the same content on their own channel before it goes wide on these bigger channels. So it's not like you have to rebuild content in any way. You don't have to create new music for it, you don't have to create anything special, you're just kind of like debuting it here. It's honestly the same principle as an email newsletter.
Speaker 2:Right Back in the day, when newsletters were really thriving, it was all about well, should we put it out to the newsletter first? You know it's the same idea, so nothing is different. So I think we've seen a lot of success and actually, as artists have really built this channel into something very prosperous for them, they have actually thought well, maybe I should put exclusive stuff here, you know, like, and really serve that audience. But it's like a a it's an added extra. It's not imperative that you do that. So, yeah, we try to make this, like turnkey, simple, easy as possible yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 1:So really, in some ways it's kind of, you know, replacing, let's say, a youtube premiere. We're just going, instead of doing that through youtube, we do it through this platform that we have a little bit more kind of autonomy with.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, totally. And again, like, the YouTube Premiere could work for maybe one music video, but it doesn't work for, you know, every music video. Or, like you know, maybe not for BTS content from a music video, outtakes or whatever it is, I don't know Like, maybe it doesn't work for a tour diary, like there's so many facets to an artist's career that you know can be used for this kind of product that your biggest fans really want to lean into. So, like, why wouldn't you just, you know, have a strategy that is all about like, okay, well, this probably we can do, we can premiere this on YouTube, but maybe we should give this exclusively to our community. On Medallion, like you know, maybe we should drop a 30 second snippet on medallion before we put it on spotify. Like, there's all these different things that you can do. Um, but yeah, but the, the, the actual premise is so basic, you know.
Speaker 1:So, uh, we try to keep it really easy isn't that the case with some of the best ideas perhaps? Maybe you know Interesting. Okay, I love that. What about? So you recently wrote a piece on your sub stack, about a sub stack. Yes, will there ever be a sub stack for music?
Speaker 2:Sub stack squared. This is something that is near and dear to me because I've been involved in, you know, artists, fan clubs and artists like director, fan strategies for like close to I mean basically two decades, um, working with some of the most incredible musicians all around the world, um, and I think what I've figured out is that this is very bold and I kind of wrote it in this, in this sub stack, and there was a music business worldwide piece on it as well. But I think this one-to-one subscription model, this idea of like I subscribe to a specific artist in a one-to-one relationship, so, like me, matt, I subscribe to johnny as a, you know, musician, is fundamentally broken and doesn't work at scale for music. I that doesn't mean that there are fringe cases where it can work and we have seen it work. Like you know, there are cases with some subscription platforms like substack, where it can work, but I I just don't think musicians work like this.
Speaker 2:I think that musicians they are very in the in the creator economy, if you will, if you try and like, put it up to the macro in the creator economy. Musicians are obviously a huge part of that. But I think there are very different type of quote unquote creator. They're multifaceted, they work differently, they're caught the they're. The way they produce content is very different to like someone, like a journalist or a podcaster, and I just think it requires a different type of mechanism for to extract dollar value out of fans in that way. That's all I'm saying and I know I don't have the actual answer. I'm just saying that 99.9% of artists it doesn't work for and that's why I don't think it will work on Substack, because Substack is that one-to-one, you know subscription model. But you'll see on Substack that there's a few musicians that it maybe works for. I don't know, but yeah, in my experience I just think it just doesn't work.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, no, I just think it just doesn't work. Yeah, okay, no. I really admire that, and it's not like you're saying, oh, here's the answer, but it's more kind of like here's the question. This is just something to ponder and actually it's really healthy, I think, to ask questions like that because, you know, even if the answers aren't there straight away, it's just healthy, isn't it, to query things. I mean, what you're saying there, I'm kind of finding myself nodding along, matt, and I'm also then thinking about the consumer's point of view. If you think about it, just think about your basic consumer patterns as a music fan. You don't listen loyally to an artist straight for 10, 20 years. No, wow, it comes and goes. You know, in Britain this summer we've got a huge wave of people listening to Oasis because of the reunion tour. But they weren't listening to Oasis a year ago. Maybe some of them were, but you know what I mean. It just doesn't fall in line with that. That one-time subscription mod doesn't work. The other way around, perhaps, either.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think for me, like Oasis is a perfect example. Imagine if Oasis formed a fan club 20 years ago and made fans pay for it and then did nothing for however many years it's been, and then come back on this insane tour and maybe they put a record out, who knows? But musicians do that, right, they want space to be creative. That's way they. They create amazing stuff. So I think that creating this mechanism that forces them to output work when they don't want to doesn't make any sense. And on the fan side, by the way, you fans just get disappointed, right, and they're just like you know, and then it's just and also, like this is said in the, in the best possible way. But like fans have this kind of when they do that, they have this kind of idea of entitlement, like like you owe me this, you know, and I think it's wrong, like I just I think for someone like a, someone who's like a, like a videographer or a podcaster or a journalist or something like that, it makes a lot of sense. Like it's very constant, it's kind of single-sided, like it's journalism, right, it's like words, and maybe there's occasional bit of video and maybe there's some IRL stuff, but generally it's kind of the same thing and they can, they can manage their output and there's an expectation around what the output is.
Speaker 2:With music, it's just like, well, I want first dibs on tickets and also I expect you to give me unreleased music and I want a live album.
Speaker 2:Why didn't I get the live album from my city, like, why did it come from just London? You know I'm saying it's just, it's endless. So I just think it just doesn't work and you know I don't have the solution, as you mentioned, but I think the solution lies in harnessing and I wrote this in the piece harnessing the power of the network, where, you know, giving musicians the ability to do stuff at their own, at their own speed, at their own time, when they want to, and also leveraging the fact that fans don't just like one artist. They love loads of artists, especially the really leaned in fans, which is, by the way, where what we're seeing play out on medallion right now. Um, so yeah, I think it's it's just really cool to think about, because I think it could really be a game changer if, if we try and get a little bit closer to the solution yeah, makes, uh, makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 1:Well, speaking of medallion, you've recently launched a new version of Medallion for music lovers that puts all artists into a single network. So why the shift from standalone artist communities?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I mean the very early prototypes of the product. So you know, just for those who don't know, we started the company um around like how many is that year? The years have been going. It was either 21 or 22, I can't remember, maybe it was 2020, I don't remember. Um, but the very early uh versions of the product.
Speaker 2:We launched a prototype with sigaros, who I'm sure a lot of your listeners know and obviously an absolute institution, um, incredible, it's an absolute privilege to be able to launch something so uh, you know, so far out with like such an iconic artist, um, and then the and then the second like kind of like more fleshed out version of the product post. Our first funding round, um was with taiko, the electronic artist based out of san francisco, um, and um scott was like scott, aka Tycho, was hugely influential in designing the early products and stuff. Like this Incredible guy and really, for your listeners, the first version of the product was this idea of essentially a siloed artist community. So fans would join from all of your channels, whether it be instagram or spotify or discord, wherever they are, and they would discover this new community that was kind of like put up by the artist. So you know you join the taiko community and you can name it um and you know fans would join to get pre-sale tickets or to get it was free to join for fans and they would get pre-sale tickets and music and everything else when they got there. And we just really developed that product from a very basic like publishing platform where fans could engage with like every type of content to adding like social features and listening parties and all sorts of amazing stuff.
Speaker 2:It was a really interesting journey over the last couple of years and we did that to try and figure out how much energy, how many things and how many features and how much stuff did we need to build in order to prove out this idea that if we can siphon off a bunch of your audience into your owned and operated channel, how much would it move the needle on your ticket sales or on your merch sales or whatever it is? So if we made it more fan-friendly and put more features there, fans would enjoy it more and also they would stick around more and just more sticky. And the answer was that if artists invested in it a lot the same is true of any platform, pretty much, but if they would invest in it a lot. The same is true of any platform, pretty much. But if they would invest in a lot, the ROI, like return on investment, was huge. Right, we have loads of case studies with some incredible artists, like Jungle and lots of others, where you know the community of fans that they built in this product was, um, you know, responsible for selling you know, 20, 30, 40, 50 percent of a venue, and I'm not talking about small venues or like arenas, uh, stadiums in some cases, like we work with Imagine Dragons, we work with Jungle, we work with J Balvin, like we're all some incredible artists, um, so I suppose what I was.
Speaker 2:What I'm trying to say is is that early version of the product, conceptually as a thing, worked, but when the rubber hit the road, it was. It was. It was very hard for artists to embrace it and invest in it because it was a big commitment and it was just like it was their brand, as in the artist is facing medallions in the background and they had to kind of be present a lot and be very conscious of it. And the other thing on the fan side is it was very hard because it was built as a web product. So it's basically all built on the web. It was kind of like built desktop first because we were trying to do a lot of stuff with it and as we started wanting to do stuff like integrate DSPs and integrate Shopify and do push notifications and do all this stuff, it just became harder and harder and harder to build on the web. And we just thought like, if we want to make this easier for artists to just get started and if we want to make it easier for fans to just get started, we should just collapse everything into one place and basically create the I think, first of its kind like artist-owned distribution platform. So that's what Medallion is today.
Speaker 2:It's in the App Store, google Play Store platform. So that's what medallion is today. It's in the app store, google play store, and when you download it, you know you can, you can see a bunch of artists that are already like activating on the product, like in the platform, whether it's over mono or disclosure or whoever it may be, um, but then there's the ability for you to follow other artists, and those other artists that you follow, you're also, uh, creating a data relationship with those artists, and when you do that, it creates kind of like a waitlist concept. So then the artist can see oh, I've got like 100 followers, maybe I should like lean in and start activating on this page and building out my presence on the platform.
Speaker 2:And what I just said that last bit was not possible with our web product because artists couldn't just go get with a touch of a button, get started. They'd have to, like you know, build a whole custom experience and they'd have to come up with a name for it. We'd have to design it and all this stuff. With this it's just like it's all pre-built and it's they can just go in whenever they want. So like if Radiohead wake up tomorrow and make my dreams come true and decide that they want to be on medallion, they can just press a button and get started and like that was kind of the way we did it. And on the fan side, everything is in one place. So like you don't need multiple accounts, you don't have to remember everything and all of your fandom can kind of be in one place. Sorry, that was very long winded, but that was the reason why that's amazing, oh, extremely well explained.
Speaker 1:Um, it's a real privilege to listen to you talking about this. It's fascinating, um, so would it? I'm just trying to think of so going from where it was to what it is. Now I get it. I didn't get it. I didn't understand the switch earlier. Now I do. You've explained it perfectly. Is there, therefore, then, mileage in, um, you know, emerging artists kind of engaging with medallion earlier in their career, like, is there a collaborative filtering element between the bands that they're similar to?
Speaker 2:100. So what we see is is, if I, as a fan, I could give you a typical fan journey here. Like, let's say, I'm a huge fan of the Black Keys, right, and you know they're playing in London, I want to get pre-sale tickets. They're running a pre-sale through Medallion eg. Like you have to join their community on Medallion to get access to the pre-sale first. You know there's only a certain type of fan mat. I click the link in bio, I go to the medallion page, I subscribe to black keys for free, I get my pre-sale code, I buy the ticket when I've subscribed to medallion and I.
Speaker 2:Most of the time fans get the app because they're curious and they also want a better experience. They get the app, they'll load the app up and they'll see that they're following the black keys and they'll see a giant plus button that says you can follow other artists too. On average, right now we're seeing our fans follow five artists. Now keep in mind that that could be any artist and generally it's artists that you know you love, because you're not going to go through that effort. But right now we're really building this network of like curiosity where a fan is like adding just like 5, 10, 15 of their favorite artists. Most of them, as of right now, are not really present in the product, like they haven't turned up yet. We allow artists to come in and claim their pages, but not really present. So you know, there's a ton of emerging artists that are on the platform that are just getting this passive growth because of what the black keys did. You know, like they did nothing like, but the black keys launched this arena tour, got a bunch of fans to come in and now create a bunch of um like kind of followers for other artists, and the same could be said for other artists that do it.
Speaker 2:So the idea is the the beautiful thing I think about it is not to toot my own trumpet kind of thing is that all of it's owned by artists. So there's no um, there's like the like the artist data. They have the relationship with fans. So there's no like uh, hidden agenda here, like it's just the arts supporting the arts. That's basically what it is um. And yeah, it's been really cool to see because there's like insane surprises. You see every day when an you know if you had an artist, lord huron put a giant presale for the platform and then you see the type of fans that follow other artists in the past. It's super cool. So, um, yeah, I think more and more as the network grows under the hood, it's going to be great for emerging talent, for sure that's so inspiring that jeez.
Speaker 1:I can't even imagine how much work must have gone into that.
Speaker 2:Goodness me it's um, you know, we have an incredibly talented, passionate small team here. Um, very a lot of seasoned people in the music business that care deeply about the creative industries, and if we could do this for every creative industry it would be amazing. But my personal belief is that that music has so many, so it's so um, it needs so much care and attention that you just have to be focused on it. And also, to me, it's like near and dear to my heart, obviously, um, but yeah, I mean like kudos to the team. I mean like it's, it's not. I mean this is like definitely not all my work in any way like we have brilliant team that has come up with all of this. So, yeah, kudos to them wow, that's amazing, I mean.
Speaker 1:So I mean you've raised a lot of investment and noticed some notable support from influential names you mentioned some earlier, but also the kind of likes of like disclosure my morning jacket, um ellenium, um, have you, have you noticed a kind of shift in mentality and expectation from music creators?
Speaker 2:yeah, I mean we are very fortunate that artists see um so much potential in this team and this platform and this idea that they want to put their hard-earned dollars in investing alongside us doing this thing. I mean metallica invested as well, like it's been. You know, it's a privilege to be able to do that. I'm not gonna, let's say it's not. I think the thing that is just so apparent to me, johnny, just from doing this obviously before this did song kick and before that I did a company called crowd surge allowing artists to sell tickets directly to fans to me, the way I've kind of operated through this is like I just believe all of this is inevitable, like I just don't see a world where artist is not the platform in the future. Like I just like I've thought that since I was 16 and I left school, I was just like I don't get this. I don't understand why artists are so reliant on these other platforms. There must be a different way to do this and you know, like it just seems like that's never happened. So I'm just going to keep trying to figure out how to do it. I don't know if I'll be successful, but I think that the current state of music is further showing how it's not working, like I think, from you know, for emerging talent, for, like you know, massive superstars, like you know, obviously, taylor Swift complaining about the ticketing systems, everyone talking about streaming payouts, ai music all of these are subpar, are problems because artists have no direct connection with their audience. All of this could go away if they just fix that bit, and but you know that's a monumental task. That's like rewriting the entire economic engine of the music business and you know we're going to give it a go, but you know it's very ambitious.
Speaker 2:But that is what I think the state of music is today and I read these headlines every day and I'm just like, yeah, obviously that happened. Like obviously this is the next thing is going to get even worse and worse and worse, like nothing's going to change. So nothing really surprises me. Think about what we're doing and we take so much feedback, quite weighted very heavily, from musicians themselves. Like all of our business development efforts, all of our essentially outbound is with artists and artists teams and not necessarily their stakeholders, although they're super important the labels, the agencies, the publishers, the distribution companies, they're super important. It's not the artist. So we have spent all of our effort and most of my career embracing the artists themselves and I think to your point like you hear it firsthand how disturbing a lot of this stuff is and you know we just try and funnel it into our energy to try and build the right stuff for them. So I don't know if that answers your question.
Speaker 1:It does. Brilliant answer. I appreciate it. I mean, I wasn't sure whether to ask you about Songkick or anything, because obviously you have a fascinating and hugely successful track record of kind of building ideas into game-changing organisations that, quite frankly, shift culture. You know, what is it that kind of keeps you driving to succeed? Is it that idea that you had when you were 16 and said why does this not work that way? Like, what is it that kind of makes you go? I want to keep building, keep building.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think a lot of it is. I mean, listen, the Songkick thing was such a journey and you know we were blessed to be able to given that opportunity, to what to? To do what we did at the scale that we did it at and I mean I wouldn't change anything about it. Obviously there were a lot of bumps in the road and but I mean learned so much, had had an amazing time doing it and you know it was, it was.
Speaker 2:It was kind of like the end of a bit of a journey for me, because I started, you know, my other company, crowthers, which mostly is a song kick, but it's always been near and dear to me like this idea of like artist empowerment and I think that the way I the thing that gets me out of bed and focus on this is I get so much energy out of basically enabling artists to do the things that they really want to do and like just empowering them to like be able to go direct or empowering them to like sell out stadiums like on their terms.
Speaker 2:And in my opinion, like music is so special that it's kind of annoying that so many people like get in the way of it. You know, I mean like it's just like there's so many intermediaries sometimes that like you just want the raw thing and it's very hard to get the raw thing. So yeah, to me I've just like I just fundamentally get up every day because I just like I'm obsessed with this problem of trying to just collapse, like the ability for artists to just have a direct relationship with their fans. And I think, on on the macro, johnny is like if you actually look at the research sorry to be a bit of a nerd about this- research and you know your your audience maybe will appreciate this.
Speaker 2:but if you look at the research, if you take all the creative industries like we kind of talked about a few of them, like journalism, videographers, podcasters, etc. Musicians you know, if you look at like the I use the word gdp output like if you look at the amount of economic footprint of an artist, you know, just take any artist and you put a side by side of like okay, let's just say that one artist is a million dollars worth of ticket sales, streaming, you know, merchandise, blah, blah, blah. And then if you put that next to a podcaster, right, and then you look at how much take home the artist puts in their pocket versus a podcaster, it's like 10x less. Like it's mind blowing. And essentially what we distilled it down to is like artists take home 10 cents of every dollar, which is insane.
Speaker 2:When you think about how important they are to culture, how important they are to culture, how important they are to these massive platforms, you know how, how influential they are and everything we do all day, every day and I think that that's basically been my mission is that how do I take that 10 to 90, 100 like? Why, why can't it be that and why? Why can't you? Substack has done this for publishers, like for journalists. They have figured it out Like that's why I wrote that article. Like you launch a subscription on Substack, they take 10%, the journalist takes 90%. You look at the amount of journalists that are coming out of the major publications. That's why, and I think, why can't the same be true for music?
Speaker 1:So yeah, that's really what I get excited about. Wow, you're a maverick. You're a rock and roller. I don't know about that.
Speaker 1:Oh well, if I may say so, I think you are in the coolest way possible. I think it's great. I really do, because you're kind of. You know, it's much more than just bricks and mortar of a system, it's a philosophy and actually, you know, if I look back, I was just as you were just talking then, matt. I was just cycling back slightly in my mind, thinking the amount of conferences and networking events I've sat in where people go, we want to build an artist-centred ecosystem. And I kind of sit there nodding, I go yeah, yeah, but we haven't got one, have we? And I kind of sit there nodding, I go yeah, yeah, but we haven't got one, have we. You know what I mean. And then there's you and I'm talking to you and I'm like, oh, this is the guy, man, this is what we need. It's amazing, can I?
Speaker 1:just say right on behalf of the silent majority, thank you for what you do.
Speaker 2:Oh, thank you, I appreciate that. It's amazing me again. It's like you know, the team that I've worked with on this company, past companies, like you know, the people that have put their hard-earned dollars into investing around this idea. But, yeah, man, it's like it's so near and dear to me and I don't think I'll stop until I figure it out. I probably I don't ever, ever will figure it out, but, um, yeah, I just think it's so important, um, and you know, we've got, we've, we're just opening slash, opened the platform up so that every artist can get in there and get stuck in and do what they want with it.
Speaker 2:And a really big part of what we're doing is, you know, right now the platform is free for obviously free for musicians to use, and we want to keep it that way, and it's free for fans to subscribe, and it's free for fans to subscribe.
Speaker 2:But, as we talked about, like you know, there's all these ideas around how do we create economic relationships with fans on artist terms, right, but not on platform terms? And so we're going to be testing a lot of stuff around, like you know selling merchandise and selling digital music and doing all these things in a really different way, just to kind of like see what sticks and see what fans are into and what artists are into. And I, and you know it's obviously a big shout out to all of our early musicians who've been on this journey with us. Like I mean, it's just like an unpredictable crazy, you know, like just going for it, um mentality, and like these are some of the most influential musicians in the world who have decided to go on this journey with us. So like obviously, big thanks to them. Um, yeah, a lot more to come, I think well I think.
Speaker 1:I think so. I you know. The final, final question for you, matt, and uh, I'm intrigued as to what your thoughts are on this, because you're so much more, uh, informed and the average person on this. When I ask to ask you about NFTs, I remember back in sort of I don't know four years ago when they started making waves and then I had a book that was published last year it was about music business where I kind of talk about how I think they're going to return on a much stronger level. I just wondered what your thoughts were on either sort of on collectibles or just on saleable assets, maybe just the general subject of NFTs.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Explain more on your thesis of them coming back. Why, and I'm very interested.
Speaker 1:Well, I just feel like it kind of got a bad press. But the idea is really good and I think one of the things that we perhaps have witnessed more so perhaps in this decade than any other, probably because of technology is that scaremongering is a big thing, right. So we've got it with ai. Right now it'll pass. We've had it before with samplers and cassettes and cds and so on and so forth, and but we're getting it more now with a certain narrative where we go oh, nfts are the future.
Speaker 1:I remember I don't know like four years ago, there's so many people talking about NFTs and I'd be like, do you know what they are? No, but they're going to be massive. You know what I mean? Like people's nodding along with everything that's going on. And then they kind of you know, kind I got a bad press because there was a bit of corruption or whatever, but to me it's always felt like something that was misunderstood and untapped. And then you've kind of seen artists build their own collectibles and it falls in line perfectly with what you're building. Yeah right, and so is there a future for them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I mean, actually the origins of this company started around the crypto industry and the company was founded right in the middle of all of that and we had a very strong thesis and I do have still have a very strong thesis on blockchain infrastructure and you know we tried a lot of stuff uh, around that thing. I think to your point, it was very noisy. It got off to a very bad start. Yeah, um, and you know this is the way the music industry works. You know it's like you. You kind of just get you get one bit of bad press and then it's just like wildfire, like it's just very hard to contain, um, and I think they just got a bad rep. I mean, the wider market of nfts is not good either. So I think, like kind of broadly, it's not been working. But I will say this on on kind of music x you know crypto, if you will.
Speaker 2:I think this idea of blockchain and applying it in a world where, like, artists do own fan relationships and you can put some kind of immutability on that, and eg, like it's great that we share data with us, that's very important, but at the end of the day, what are they going to do with a lot of this data. Right, like sure, they, they there's a lot of, there's a lot of, um, there's a lot of uh, what do they? What do you call it? There's a lot of feeling of like safety when that happens, but with the blockchain, what you can do is is you can actually put a lot of this stuff on chain so it lives forever, like this idea of like fan profiles living on chain so they're associated with certain artists. So I actually think that the blockchain technology is like infrastructure, for this idea of like creating permanent records that are owned by the people that should own them makes a lot of sense. Yeah, and I think that that will ultimately come back, because I think it's a no-brainer um, and I think artists actually want that kind of like independence.
Speaker 2:Now some people would argue like you can just do that in the cloud and blah, blah, blah, but I think that with blockchain technology, I think it's like, if we can figure out quick ways to do it would work with nfts, I don't know, um, I think it's. It's it's a big hill to climb and I think for some artists who have a lot of visual output and are very creative and want to lean into it and do it properly. I think it makes sense. I also think nfts in the broad sense of the word, if it's around music and music additions and digital music as nfts, I also think that's interesting. But I think that it's going to require it's going to require someone to come in and really create a safe place to do it, because it was kind of felt like the wild west a little bit right, yeah, and I think if we can figure out a way to do that, then amazing, and that's definitely something we we keep an eye on. Um, because I said like the company has origins in that stuff.
Speaker 1:But you know, I think it was unfortunately a very bad start yeah, well, yeah, I, I knew that you had your roots in it and um and uh, yeah, it did, it did.
Speaker 1:Maybe it'll be called something else, maybe the term nft, you know, kind of got a bit too much for people and it will come back as it's. Like you know, people don't say ufo anymore, they say uap, and it's like that's the same thing. We're just calling it something else because it sounds different, right, but maybe it'll have a new title, but the idea behind it in many ways is kind of it's not without its flaws, of course, but it's a strong idea. Do you know, one of the things that I have witnessed quite a lot of in especially in the last five years actually, matt, is the amount of artists that are coming out of their record deals and going just direct to distributor, getting advanced that way, or maybe even just going. Do you know what I'm just going to do, like an artist label, services deal or whatever it might be, and it's very often because of power, if you like, and just that.
Speaker 2:So everything that you're building falls in line with that, with that perfectly, you know, to thrive I, I'd really imagine a world where artists can do more of this stuff themselves and, um, you know, that's obviously great for emerging artists who have less stakeholders at the stage of their career. Like you know, maybe they don't have an agent yet, maybe they don't have a record level yet and they can just put stuff on, like you know, distro, kid or whatever it is, and they can just get stuff out there. But I think that for the more established artists as well, it's like it's an amazing time, like to be able to do that kind of stuff like I mean, you look at let me look at artists like Jungle. Like you know, they are distributed through AWOL, have had an incredible last four years and, you know, just doing it themselves, like you know. I mean, it's amazing. So, yeah, I think that we're going to get that train is not slowing down. I think that is and that's great for everyone. Like to me, that is just closing the gap even more.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It helps absolutely everybody. Yeah, yeah, totally. Um, matt, I really appreciate your time. I know you're a busy boy, right so of course, mate I I really, really, really appreciate it. I'll let you go, but thank you so much for being here, for discussing, for opening up the way you have.
Speaker 2:Uh, it's a real pleasure, man, I appreciate it amazing really appreciate the time mate plug for the company medallionapp and easy to get started for everyone who wants to get going brilliant and I'll put a link in the description.
Speaker 1:All that good stuff as well. Yeah, wicked mate. Thanks a lot. Ah, what a dude. Wow, what an impressive guy. I hope that you gained quite a lot from listening to.
Speaker 1:You know, what he's building here with medallion is not just something that sits within the upper echelons of signed artists everybody, not at all, as he mentioned there just a few short moments ago. Actually, you know, this is this is also this is for everybody that makes music. You know, this is just a much more kind of forward thinking, data owned, decentralized way of working, which you know, I look around and I go to conferences and I speak to people on network and this is the theme that keeps coming up again and again and again. And you know, somebody had to come along right and build that, and who better than Matt Jones to do that right. So, who knows, maybe this won't work, but I think it will, and it was a real, real pleasure to talk to him about that today. I hope you've gained a lot from that. Until next time, everybody, may the force be with you. The Music Business Party. The Music Business Party. The Music Business Party.
