Solving Music Royalties with Tech and Getting Acquired

Tom Allen

You are frozen for me, yes. That's a good start.

Jakob Wredstrøm

There you go. So.

Jakob Wredstrøm

I told you I had some technical issues.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah, it's just an iPhone.

Tom Allen

Yeah, I'm intrigued as to what your camera is exactly. It a phone in a thing? Right. I've not done that yet. I saw somebody do it on a call the other day and I was like, wow, I that. That's really great. You're sat really nicely at a desk.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah, it's actually really, really simple. Like again, I just have an iPhone 13, so it's nothing special. And it's just, you know, if you have like decent lighting, actually works quite well. Okay, where was I? So the way that we usually do it is we have this same starting sentence of the podcast is I do a very brief introduction. I like to keep it informal, which means I'll do like a 10 second introduction and then ask you who are you and what do you do. The reason why I do that, I think it gives the best sort of conversational angle. Then we'll talk a bit about your current job, but then we also cover sort of how you got into it through a company. And then I'll basically go through your founder's journey. So like how to get into industry, how do you start a company? And then we'll as much as possible go out into conversations about the specific topics, you know, royalties and all that kind of stuff. And, and I set over an agenda, which is very loose. Basically Yeah. So, and that's sort of like talking points that I'll get back to, but there will be a lot of like, you know, detours and I'll try to make a coherent discussion of it.

Tom Allen

Yeah, I made a few notes against it.

Jakob Wredstrøm

The way that Riverside works, if you used it before, is it streams the conversation, it downloads it to your computer and up-olds it at the same time, which means that I'll get full quality at the end. If it does feel a grainy right now, or at any time, it does not matter, that's not what I'm going to end up with. Also, we have some pretty good audio suppression tools, so if there's noise background, don't worry about it, it's not an issue either.

Tom Allen

Yeah, no problem too. All good.

Jakob Wredstrøm

If you do have devices that are not on Do Not Disturb, that would probably be preferred.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Amazing. Yeah, do you have any questions?

Tom Allen

I've done my slack.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Perfect, okay, so let me just pull up my notes so it's here at all times. Where are you based off of right now? Bye bye.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah. So downtown, do you guys primarily work remote or?

Tom Allen

I am near London, kind of south of London, down towards the...

Tom Allen

We have an office in Tawe Yard in Kings Cross.

Tom Allen

The large part of the downtown senior leadership is in Amsterdam. We have 50 people in London, we have maybe 100 or so in New York, Nashville, LA. The standard, I would say.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah. But is there culture of going to the office or is it? The tip. Okay.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Air war.

Tom Allen

Depends. In London, in London, not so, I would say. You know, it's not quite as good an office as the others, to be honest with you. Amsterdam's over three floors on the canals, like, you know, they've got all of that, you know, our like, kind of shared desk kind of hovel with a couple of meeting rooms, you know, it's not quite the same.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Amazing. Well, great, Tom. I'm ready. So if you are, I will start in five seconds.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hi guys and welcome back to the Sound Connections Podcast. Today we have a really interesting episode with Tom Allen. Welcome.

Tom Allen

Cool.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Tom, I'm looking so much forward to talk about your founder journey. Currently you are at Downtown Music and your company, Curve, got bought by Downtown. And we're gonna talk about what you do at Downtown. We're gonna talk about your whole journey as a founder. And I'm very excited to sort of dissect that today.

Tom Allen

Nice to be here, thanks for having me.

Jakob Wredstrøm

So for the people who don't know you, who are you and what do?

Tom Allen

No, I'm keen to dig in.

Tom Allen

So I am Tom Allen. Am currently CTO of Downtown Group. So looking across all of the of portfolio of companies that came into downtown as founder and CEO of Curve Autosystems. Yeah, and kind of came from the indie label distribution kind of business. That's kind of journey into this and always been fairly techie from a

Jakob Wredstrøm

Okay.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Amazing. Well, it's not that often I meet like a CTO with like clear music industry path. So we'll just say, dissect that a bit. Obviously, technology has always been a very interesting career, or at least many of last many, many years. Music is, it might be an interesting career focus as it's maybe less so obvious than many other industries. But maybe let's just start from the beginning. Like, how did you get into music?

Tom Allen

Or a young age. Yeah, so, you know, draw the Venn diagram of what I can do and things that I'm interested in and kind of music tech is it basically.

Tom Allen

Good question. I so I grew up in kind of seaside town in the southwest of England. By the time I got to 18, I couldn't get out quick enough to be perfectly honest with you. Long, way from music, long way from the action. You know, was keen to move to London.

Jakob Wredstrøm

You

Tom Allen

Get involved in the music industry. Did kind of one year of a degree of audio engineering and that sort of thing. A lot of people end up in this kind of... but that university shut down. But during that summer, I was interning at one little Indian label, one little independent as it's called now. And yeah, a of a sliding doors moment in that actually. If I hadn't been doing my internship and I kind of had a restaurant job in the evening and whatever. And if I hadn't been doing that and the university shut down, I probably would have gone home and never come back again. And that little sliding doors moment there was like, I'm sticking here and I'm gonna carry on.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Okay.

Tom Allen

You know, I was an intern there for quite a long time. Got lucky, somebody left, got off the job and off I went and really landed in the digital department. Funnily enough actually landed as an intern in the international department I went off and had a career in international in record labels so it is you know kind of you land where you do and you learn the trade and off you go within that so yeah this was I guess 2000 Yeah, so this was, you know, birth of things like Spotify. Can remember, you know, bringing like, yeah, we got these free passes to Spotify that's launching in Sweden. It was like, what is this? No one's ever going to do that. What are we talking about? That sort of moment in time. So, you know, that was one of the Indian I spent maybe a year or two there and ended up then going to Cook & Miner and the distributional essential music which was later acquired by the orchards so I did probably three or four years there again like you know this is those digital days of moving from downloads to when I got to essential it was you know digital might have been five seven percent of the revenue of the company it was a largely physical company and by the time I left it was bigger than fifty percent

Jakob Wredstrøm

Thank

Jakob Wredstrøm

Mm.

Tom Allen

Ultimately just the market, know, just the market change there. But, you know, we navigated those waters and, you know, went from working with a digital distributor to doing it ourselves and all of those sorts of things there. So yeah, that was kind of my route into music and I was, you know, very kind of, as the shirt may give away, quite into my country music, quite into kind of... you know, that kind of mix between India, America and our country, that Southern rock, that sort of thing. So, and indeed at Essential we did.

Jakob Wredstrøm

But again, currently your CTO position, is inherently technical, where did your technical expertise happen in these kind of positions?

Tom Allen

Greats in that sort of market as well, so it was quite a joy to work there at that time.

Tom Allen

That's a good question, that. Ultimately self-taught in this world, but right from a very early stage, we were well into computers. Me and myself, my brother, a couple of friends. Don't know why. Don't know why. We got our first, we had the Amiga 600 and the ZX Spectrum at home, actually, when we were kids and whatnot.

Tom Allen

God, you know, our first PC kind of Windows 95 era. So must have been about 95, I guess maybe. And that was quite interesting. And then we kind of learned to program. There was these little like organizers called Sion. And we learned to program. I think it was basic, was a language that was based upon. And we learned to program that. And it was like a way to program on the... And my granddad took a great interest in this with us. And my granddad's... you know, like was not in any technical role in his life ever. So like again, he was just like learning with us and took an interest in it. And, and you know, I think that kind of sparked something, you know, so yeah, when I reflect back on this, it's like we were making like little word games and that sort of thing, like, you know, kind of exploring castles and like word games and that sort of thing. You look back on this time and it's like, you know, I was like an eight year old kid doing this and I didn't really know what the rest of the world was doing. And you look back on that time, it was like, yeah, there were like some serious people making some serious games in exactly this way. You know, those kind of early word games in computing. It's yeah. Look back on that. Oh, I was kind of always quite close to some of these things in that. But you know, that was that and got into music and girls and all of that sort of thing and football and the tech stuff wasn't quite so big for me. During that time, I did also run the computers in our school. Like they didn't have a so we used to go and boot them up and make sure it worked. And the IT teacher was somebody who just happened to be around or whatever who knew something about computers. Like it was this carnage, you know, bringing computers into schools in the UK was not, you know, anything particularly like it wasn't a great revolution. It was kind of just piece by piece. And then I used to teach the old ladies how to use computers as well. Was when I was like 12. And then you click there. So that was like my basis of it. I'd say I got into girls and football and all of those sorts of things and drifted away from that slightly. But then, you know, very much that kind of birth of MySpace and those sorts of things and branding MySpace pages and all that kind of drew me back in. Then that's what really ignited it for me that I was just very, very curious, I think, as to how...

Tom Allen

The internet worked so it was like oh you can brand this with a bit of CSS and you can do this and how do I make that button develop? Okay, that's this JavaScript and jQuery. Oh, okay. That's quite interesting. I mean you got it suddenly you're in and gone and yeah, so probably you know from that I guess yeah 2005 6 7 periods is what really kind of reignited that and again

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah.

Tom Allen

Just trying to do things, experimenting with things in marketing at one little Indian, that sort of thing. So that's what very much kind of drew me in that route and never stopped ultimately from there. Just always very, very curious, just like, okay, let's go and see how this works. Let's go and read a book about this. Like never, nothing ever seemed to be too big a mountain to climb with that.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Fast forward quite a few years, you ended up starting a company. What was it in those years in between that motivated you to take an entrepreneurial journey?

Tom Allen

You... So we were... So when I was at Essential... distribution, the market changes and things change in it. But you know, you are working on campaigns and it is, you know, you can repeat the same year. I think, you know, when we talk about, you know, 10 years experience, is it 10 years different experience or one year's experience repeated 10 times? I think within distribution probably after you've done a few years of it, like, okay, I got it. I got this. I know what's going on. And, you know, so I was, yeah, I think ready for this is, you know, in that digital period as well, right? There was a lot of change and, you streaming coming about and that sort of thing. Yeah, I think I was ready to go into something else. And I became friends with the guys from Topspin, Rogers, Shemelle Ranasinghe, Bob Moslowski. Like they obviously were coming to sell to us, but they had drinks in London quite often. And so I hung around with them quite a lot. I'm in the back of a taxi with Ian and Shemal. They come to see us at the Central and they say, oh, we're going to see Tiësto tonight. Do want to come? I didn't even know Tiësto was quite frankly. This is not my thing, but yeah, cool. All right, I'll come. In like the Scala or something like it was, it was like a real small gig and it was like a competition winners thing or whatever. And I in the back of the taxi with those guys. You know they're talking about like. Music tech world and I was like, shit, this is where the excitement is. This is not, you know...

Tom Allen

You know, distribution stuff we were doing was pretty straightforward or whatever, you know, some excitement to it, but I was like, that's it there. So that's kind of what, you know, lit the spark for me really of seeing what those guys were doing. Like they ran an excellent company and built a lot of excitement in it and were just such a joy to work with just of how they saw the world and how we could do things differently. It was just like... That was the exciting thing for me. So, that kind of lit a spark there. So I ended up leaving Essential and launching a startup called Metaball, which was a metadata asset management platform. It was sort of kind of open play, kind of rights hub sort of thing. Those guys obviously executed far better than I, that's for sure. That was left with all of the, like, yes, we're change the world and people should have all of their assets together and we can deliver to all of these different places and do all of these things. And, you know, I guess very quickly that, very slowly in fact, you grind that out and like, like this isn't, we're not getting the spark from people necessarily. Probably lasted maybe two, two and a half years. Never raised any money, like did it out of a bit of consultancy, of, you know, money saved and these sorts of things. And, you know, we'll chalk that one up as a failure. It did fine actually. It kept me fine from the end. You know, it did maybe four or five grand a month.

Jakob Wredstrøm

No, no.

Tom Allen

You at one point and it did okay but it was never like never the runaway success and so at a certain point I was just like yeah I think I'm done with this I need to go and do other things I need to do it's holding me back ultimately from doing other things for constantly supporting it so we I decided to shut that down actually at that point somebody was like you know would you think about selling it whatever we could work together it was and really when i look back on it was a nice to have not a must have

Tom Allen

The sorts will know exactly you know what that feels like sometimes like the you your marketing needs to be a lot different your approach to you know you've got to be changing people's lives for the positive in that sort of market like probably 10x what you need to do in compared to being to being a must-have that they need to do and being a painkiller you know within that so you know I think I learn a lot with that then it was a bit of a gunfire of just music metadata things and that sort of thing. And then we got to Curve. How we kind of came up with the idea to launch Curve was we were, it was myself and a guy called Ray Bush, he ran a company called Music Royalty Company. So they were royalty accountants, they were using another piece of software and it really reached a scale of what they could do with it. Like was preventing them growing as a business. And so we went and... And I'd done a bit of a dashboard for them, you know, people come and get their statements and bits and pieces, nothing too complex, but pretty straightforward. So I, said, well, and we worked together at Cooking Vinyl and whatever, so we had a long-term relationship. Said, can you come and take a look?

Tom Allen

Software and we went and looked at everything on the market and it was just like none of this works at the scale that he's looking for none of this has a complexity across you know the breadth of independent labels and you know they might do some things very well might do the scale very well or they might deal with like some level of complexity very well but like dealing with that as the whole package was just not available there and so it was we hatched a plan basically to develop this ourselves and so I kind of went away for... best part of two years again whilst consulting and doing bits and pieces but went away for the best part of two years and developed the first iteration of curve quietly yeah and that's kind of how we got how we got that moving

Jakob Wredstrøm

Like did was financing in place like how did this happen like okay.

Tom Allen

Totally bootstrapped. So, I've never raised a pound of money. We did make an attempt with Metabol as well, actually. And all the advice you got was great. Like, you've got a little bit of traction here, you've got 10 clients on board. Great, let's go and take this and you can go and raise an angel round and do this, that and the other. And when I reflected on that, I think it was a big old distraction for us.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm.

Tom Allen

Like really the advice should have been like, let's look at the fundamentals of this. How many people have you spoken to in order to get those 10 sales and why is that and what does that look like? And I think there would have been some much better advice than going to try and raise money. So I kind of learnt from that and we did all the startup competitions and this and the other and all of that. Noise like the fundamental of the business wasn't of just like the market and how you're serving them and your expectations of them and what they might spend on this and those sorts of things were just what we thought and what was reality it was misaligned and you only know that through doing it right through testing the market and understanding it you know, and I think the market is maybe slightly different today. You know, so it comes out right, it's up, comes out open play and a few others in that space have made more movement than we did. But I also think it's still the same. Nice to have it still the same. You know, there's maybe a little more understanding of data and clean data and then some of those sorts of things today. You know, I think the market is still very much same. So never raise a penny there within Curve. So we.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Mm.

Tom Allen

It was ultimately I was I was consulting on a bunch of stuff, did some stuff for British Library and a couple of startups and you know, in the music metadata space, D-Dex integrations, all of these sorts of things that kept me, you know, food and shelter and, you know, spent my time. I mean, I literally probably worked till midnight for two years straight. It was an absolute joy, I've got to say as well. I had a couple of contractors that worked with me at parts of it. We put a bit of heat on certain parts of it to get it done and moved along. But yeah, it was a long grind to get it done quietly. So the first revenues were very easy to come by because it was Ray's company ultimately. So our music royalty company were the first client to curve, essentially. So two separate companies, but we were the first clients.

Jakob Wredstrøm

What specifically is that? What was it you built that was unique enough to eventually get acquired?

Tom Allen

They had, and our ambition to begin with was, well, if we can build a software to serve music royalty company, great. That's gonna keep me, that's gonna be great.

Tom Allen

It was the mix really of scale and complexity. Like royalties is complex. If you go back and look at all of the deals that have ever happened ever, there's a lot in there, right? Know that? And to create a platform that managed all of that in a sensible way. In a way that royalty people worked was like ultimately would have been a secret source of it and you know that came from I worked in royalties whilst at cooking vinyl and essential because digital guy and data scaling what are we going to do about it how do we deal with that kind of got dragged into that so I knew enough knew enough to be dangerous I guess didn't know everything but you know and so again was working with music royalty company of their understanding their processes and you know from what I know now in the world I would say my product process was pretty poor what really was like so a conversation and work out like tell me what you're doing there why you didn't I let me just go and draw you something quickly is that sound about right yeah okay right we're gonna do that like I say it was you know

Jakob Wredstrøm

Okay, you're welcome.

Tom Allen

It was absolutely the right thing for the right time, right? But I wasn't writing PRDs, I wasn't doing this, that, and the other Northwrestling sites. Deeply understand what they're internalize that and go and get it done and deliver it for them. And that iteration process. So, know, that, think, you know, having not raised any money, there was no pressure to launch, no pressure to like go after my own.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Mm.

Tom Allen

Going to do this and we're to get live by this date and have this revenue by then and etc. So it really took that pressure off which then allowed us to I guess really iterate very quickly very close to the to the key sort of customer but allowed us to create a product that really did hit the nail on the head for a very specific market ultimately right you know this is a this is not a billion dollar market. Is like, you know, this is a SaaS product that serves one part of the business, does it well. We look at the town of kind of royalties and it's 60, 70 million dollars in total, you know, and that's like all the enterprise things and all of the SaaS stuff and all the rest of it. Like, it's probably about the market. So really served that royalty person well, you know, and we worked that out. I think so, you know, that I didn't really know the jobs to be done theory at the time. Know, Clayton Christensen, competing against luck stuff of, you know, what are the actual things they're trying to solve, but what are the kind of social and the emotional things that you try to solve for people in that. And I think we just, you know, for a period of iteration, for a period of, know. Our first sales calls were probably awful. But we understood, okay, the boss doesn't care about the technique. Those sales calls tended to be, boss, I've got a problem, I need to solve it. Who are you? What are you doing? And whatever. We had that nice little story there of how we got here where we came from and who our first clients were. That was a real big, out of Music Royalty Company, for there to be able to say, yeah, well we do X, Z. We were like, oh, okay. They look like me. Fine, cool. Like that's good. And you've got some chunky indies in there and whatnot. And then be able to then sell it to the royalties person and just be like, like when you got into that kind of technical discussion, well, how do you deal with this? How do you deal with this far from it? Yeah, well, we do that because we do that there. You knock all of those down and yeah, I think that.

Tom Allen

It's a story of where we came from, the clients that we work with and the solving that really specific problem for that really specific person in the business somehow created a little bit of alchemy in there.

Jakob Wredstrøm

I'm a person that for some reason really like putting people into boxes, even though I know that boxes are not real. I do have a point though. When I listen to you, I have a hard time putting you in the box of are you a technologist? Are you an entrepreneur? Are you like an industry person? Like where would you put yourself in these imaginary boxes? Like what's your primary persona?

Tom Allen

Yeah.

Tom Allen

Mmm.

Tom Allen

Amusingly actually I was just at music biz in Atlanta and I saw somebody who said to me you used to be an entrepreneur didn't you Tom? I thought oh that hurts.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Okay, yeah.

Tom Allen

Maybe that tells you where maybe i see myself it's what an aggressive thing to say to me so i think I certainly, I think, you know, I feel at home in the entrepreneurs kind of box there off. You technology wise, I see it as a means to an end. Ultimately, most of the time, I'm very aligned to the customer often, right? You know, I totally understand technology on a deep level and... what it's doing and how we deal with data basing things and scaling things and writing good code and all of these sorts of things. So I totally understand the domain very well, but I always just sit as a means to an end for the customer. Like, why are we doing this? What are we doing? How does this really serve our business and in turn serve our customer within that? So I think, yeah.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Mm.

Tom Allen

And for me often, I'm kind of a bit of a 70 % guy, like understand this 70%, get the experts in to do the 100 % piece of this. Find the people who are really happy, go really, really deep on this thing and understand right to its core as to what needs to happen. Whereas I'm one of those guys that kind of like say like, yeah, I got it. I understand well enough what's going on here to be able to make decisions about this, to be able to work out what we need to do.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Think there's a lot of value for entrepreneurs to think that way and I'm just going to sort of use analogy from my own career. So we have around, in our empty ventures, around 70 people, we have around 30-ish developers and we were sitting with a client a week ago discussing a certain project and I love technology, I've always done, never really gone deep into it obviously when you know...

Tom Allen

And then, know, happy experts, like really filling the gaps on that.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Cursa came out, I started programming like crazy for a year. So, and I still do that. What I do have is I have a very fundamental understanding of technology and I research the topics and I watch videos. And in these types of situations, even though I'm definitely not like a CTO type, I can, in a business perspective, definitely have decisions that are CTO-ish of quality. So when I sit with, you know, we have professors on our team in computer science, when we talk about... How do we land this client? I can talk from a technical perspective. What about this open source model that I saw in Hugging Face? Can we source that and fine tune it? Yes, we can. Great. Because that professor could not give me that answer, but as a business person with enough technology understanding to say we can serve them in this way, is that true? Yes. And then he goes and researched for two weeks and find the actuals how to do it. And I think a lot of opportunity in entrepreneurship generally, especially music technology. Needs to stem from a technology understanding because there's many reasons to it but the bureaucracy and the relationships in traditional music is very hard to just farstack. You can't really do that. So if you do want to have an outsized opportunity in music in general, I do believe combining that with technology is the most viable method as of right now. And obviously music is a really interesting space right now where technology is going to play. It's always played a big part, but particularly now there's a disruption overall. Where technology can be really interesting.

Tom Allen

Yeah, no, for sure. And this is it, you know, I think having the grasp of what these technologies can do, you know, again, get that deep, deep enough understanding of it all, to then be, you know, your job as an entrepreneur is to say, how does that relate to this? And how does that relate to this? And what's the opportunity? And what's the, you know, what's the biggest size opportunity we can look at and think about with this and how do we approach that?

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm. And you can probably speak this to yourself for yourself, but we'll get to the acquisition. But if we take your current sort of now CTO of downtown, my assumptions from this conversation, which might be completely not true is that company like downtown music group, who obviously has been amazing player for many years are also experiencing this digital transformation generation two now, like anyone else in this space, where I would assume one of the reasons why you're the CTO is exactly your internal background to know how do we navigate the technology to follow this new step in music industry. Is that true or do you think this merits of that?

Tom Allen

Yeah, I think so. Think in a company like Downtown where, let's face it, you go back 20 years, whatever was, it was a music publisher, they had some entrepreneur on us in there in starting Song Trust and that sort of thing. So they always have an element of that within there. But it's very different company now than it was back then, right? So what it is now... So they sold the catalog in 2020, I think maybe, maybe 21. They switched their focus to be a services based company. So that was Publishing Admin. Also had Song Trust there, but Downtown Music Publishing as a kind of traditional publishing admin company. They acquired Fuga as a kind of a service based model of technology plus kind of... on top of it at CD Baby which was kind of artist direct stuff that came in there, a company called Dash Go which turned into Downtown Arts and Labels Services, very good distributor in its own right as well and some other technology pieces in there, Foundy, Cymbals etc so yeah kind of quite a know an array of different things and Brinke Earth into that as well. So really

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah.

Tom Allen

And in the human CTOs can be of many different shapes and sizes. You can have ones who are highly focused on standards and those sorts of things like how do we bring standards through the business and how do we measure ourselves and that sort of thing, whatever. Focus on the standards and everyone raises their game around some of this. Yeah, there's one approach to it. But you know, highly technologist sort of thing of like, do we bring all these new technologies into the business and whatever. My approach is generally, I kind of see myself as chief people officer of technology people. Right? So it is, it's a people job. When you get to get to those levels, it's all just people, right? It is, it is, know, yes, it's about lighting fires. It's about like, how do we, how do we think about.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Okay.

Tom Allen

CTO in the land right now is saying well how do we bring AI into our business from improving our processes to you know how do we bring things like cursor into our processes or whatever or how do we bring into our products and what's the real deep stuff we can do in some machine learning and data and those sorts of so without doubt there's a whole bunch of that. But with something like Downtown where we brought all of these teams together, and it might be 100, 110 engineers across the whole organization, really it's about how do we get people to work well together? How do we get to get out of our own way in some of those things? How do we create the right team structures that allow us to really run at things? And whilst...

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm.

Tom Allen

But also having some of the biggest infrastructure in the business. Something like Cougar, they deliver a lot for music industry, right? It's, you know...

Jakob Wredstrøm

In.

Tom Allen

Yeah, know, kind of key player in that market that is, you know, that you've got to keep those things running, right? It's building the plane whilst it's in the air. It's all those things. So as I say, like often, you know, I see my role really is about people and getting the people in the right seats and getting the right processes in place and for them to, for them to ultimately, you know, support people to achieve everything they can.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Mm. Is this like a culture in downtown that is so people focused? And obviously any organization would be, but it seems like again, and it might also just be my name, a CTO with that much of a people focus strikes me as unique and it might not be, but what's your perception of that?

Jakob Wredstrøm

Basically what I'm referring to, yes.

Tom Allen

Yeah.

Tom Allen

Skills today let's face it. Maybe it's slightly unique, but I think it's what's required ultimately. I don't always get it right as well. It's not my entire focus as well. I've done plenty of standard stuff in there as well. How do we normalise our standards across a business? How do we light fires? How do we put teams on certain problems? Even me leaning in through those problems and saying, okay, I can... kick this off myself and move this along or whatever it needs to be like. But yeah, mean, like when you like to have a, a strong organization, like, and I truly believe, you know, a strong organization is leader full. Like it is, it is, it doesn't need one leader at the top. It's going to tell us where we're going. Right. You can leave from any seat within the organization. If you've got an idea or feel that we need to change something or whatever, don't wait for me to tell you. You can bring that to the table. You can do a lot of the work and then bring it and say, look, this is what I think we ought to be doing. I am all for empowering all of that. And I think the best organizations are really leader full. Yes, within downtown. As we mentioned in the preamble, we were a mutual friend of ours, Josh Greenberg and myself, been working on the kind of leadership course within downtown because I want to make a leaderful organisation there, but people do feel that they can bring change within the company and not just wait on myself, Peter Van Ryan, Dave Dreeson, JP, whoever it might be to say which direction we're going and make that change there.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Mm.

Tom Allen

An organisation that has, is not, they should be doing this, but we should be doing this and we're gonna get it done. They, to me, are the organisations that have the ability to make change in the world. So yeah, I think that's probably where, that's where my focus of that comes from.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm.

Tom Allen

Really feel that they can lead change in any tiny little way, whether that's like, yeah, I've implemented this within our kind of code standards because I believe this or whatever it might be like in a tiny little way or a bigger way of, I think we need to reorganize teams do this, that and the other, or in an even bigger way, there's an opportunity for innovation here in this area. I believe we need to do this. Can I go and run at this? And I think that...

Jakob Wredstrøm

Going back to the entrepreneurial journey, you had been going on for a few years, had bootstrapped it, not raised capital, and it turned into business. What was the form it took? Did you hire employees and scale it up and then at one point got on the map of downtown?

Tom Allen

You know, think it makes a really strong and incredible business and certainly exciting to go to work with, ultimately.

Tom Allen

Yeah, so we going into COVID, we were three people. So I guess publicly launched in early 2019. We had clients from about 27, maybe into 2017, early 2018. So 2018, let's say we had a kind of. Quite year building, bringing a few clients on board, word of mouth, bits and pieces, and we publicly launched in 2019. Guy called Richard Leach joined us, who was at ADA, but had been in digital space as well, IOTA, in the early days of digital, and we worked together at Essential as well. He joined us on the sales tech, of client facing side of things, allowed me to take the kind of business, technical side of things ultimately. Client manager from one of our clients in fact you know who was he was loved the software was like he wanted to come work for us great so we got him on board Matthias and we so we went to covert with three people full-time bit of contractors and bits and pieces on the tech side but you know ultimately that was us uh i was literally the only person hiring i think probably in like may

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah.

Tom Allen

I ran a recruiter I'd with before and the boss answered the phone and was like, no, everyone's on Folo. I was like, okay, well look, I'm hiring at the moment. Can you do me a deal on this? Hell yeah. So like, because, you know, we were, let's face it, we were conservative, like in how we ran the business. I didn't take a wage, I think, until like...

Tom Allen

You know, because I kind of contracting stuff and I was okay and I always just was like, we're reinvesting into the company. I was often said, well, you should take a wage from me. So, like, we can hire the next person. And that was always it. I was like, yeah, we can hire the next person. We can do that. We can help us grow. So I, yeah, kind of, you know, didn't take a wage for a long time in order to do that. And so I think, yeah, probably we were then, let's say beginning of 21, we might have been eight people, beginning of 22, might have been eight people, just growing through revenue. Every three months or so, added the next person where we saw we fitted and needed.

Tom Allen

Yeah, that, you know, we, like any company, know, this was a sales process, this was a bit of marketing, this was able to deal with music business worldwide and on a bunch of stuff. And that was like the best money I think we could have spent of just like upping our game as people knew who we were. And, you know, so it was all of these kind of just incremental pieces here of, as I say.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Thank you.

Tom Allen

I don't have a salesperson in. It's growing and another client manager grow the tech teams and kind of, you know, you just grew it kind of organically through that. And we got into, yeah, 2022. 21 maybe and we just started getting a bit of interest everywhere. You know, it was, Utopia was around, making some acquisitions. Had downtown, was a few others. We had probably ended up having interest from about maybe 10, 12 parties. And we'd always said, well, you know, we'll have a look. We never really had an exit plan, but you know, yeah, we'll have a look and see what's what. And...

Jakob Wredstrøm

Wow.

Tom Allen

The problem with that approach is once you start getting a few approaches, suddenly we'll have a look and see what's what ends up being a lot of work. You kind of got to go at least a little bit deep with people to understand that. So we, we brought in a corporate finance guy, Jeremy Tracy, who was recommended to somebody else and worked in the music tech space. I've worked on quite a few acquisitions. Few years and that was then like okay we'll run a process, a proper process on this, we've had this interest, we you know we didn't really know what our value was ultimately you know like and so you know Jeremy came in and ran a proper structured process for us there of looking at SAS multiples and all these sorts of things and so that's what then took us down the road. Yeah, we had a whole bunch of offers on the table, some with equity, some with some just having a go at trying to pick us up cheaply, some, you know, whatever. Um, but you're really more than anything. Cause again, revenue was always on the up. Were, I don't get it, like being conservative, you don't have to do silly things. Like we would just let's. Sell this product, let's never lie about our abilities, let's never tell them we can do things we can't, let's just always just like, just level it up every month and you know, revenue would grow by three, four, five grand a month. You know, we would grow the team a little bit slower than that, there's always little bit more money on the table for us to do bits and pieces and you know, it's a decent snowball, right? Know, and quite an organic journey, I would say, through all of that. Yeah, we certainly pulled some levers and did some stuff, but like, know, quite early.

Jakob Wredstrøm

And

Tom Allen

Yeah, word of mouth, bit of network effect in it. Like people would invite people into a platform, which when they go, this is cool. We need to do our roles. How do we do that? Yeah, you start to get that moving. Anyway, so we got him into that process and you know, the really, the important thing for us was for us to continue what we were doing. You know, I'm an ex-TIB founder and I'm still at Downtown. Like, like. I can see why plenty of people move on and do whatever and maybe that was the comment of you used to be an entrepreneur, plenty of people. But to continue what we were doing for us to continue serving our customers, us to continue that mission of making royalties better. Like very, very simply, how do we make royalties better for the artists receiving them, make it better for the person doing them, make it better for the business to use us rather than doing it yourself or whatever, right?

Jakob Wredstrøm

Mm.

Tom Allen

Just continually making that better and for us to continue that mission and with Downtown it was, you we saw where we fit in. Ultimately right, you know, of publishing happening, there's distribution, there's, you know, kind of royalties and services and now payments within that as well like that. Then like, yeah, we see how this fits within that, solve a few of their problems that they have, you know, internally of, you know, dealing with some... scaling royalties and that sort of thing. And yeah, their vision of music industry platforms, so having all of these applications and services that sit on top of them and being able to cross-sell and being able to pick and choose what they wanted from us was like, okay, we see how this fits and how we will continue doing our work. So yeah, it ended up looking like the best deal all around, ultimately, right?

Jakob Wredstrøm

You guys are three co-founders in this situation.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah. So was that what you believe to be a life changing moment for you? Or like, what was the experience of all that?

Tom Allen

As founders but also for the business to continue what it was doing.

Tom Allen

Essentially it was myself and Ray and then Richard joined a little later, but yeah, it was essentially three of us.

Tom Allen

Yeah. Fairly steady I've got to say on many things. You know, not being too gregarious about it of course you know a chunk of cash lands in your bank and you're like all right I've never seen that many numbers there before that's interesting and you know and the things that you know enables you to do in life and all the rest of it, you know so yeah. No, for sure. Think the options that it leaves ahead of you are most definitely interesting. I will say, I am a fairly humble person in general. Others go and buy big houses and cars and all of this, that and the other. We've not done any of that particularly. I have, the shirt behind me is... my football team, Torquay United, I am a co-owner in Torquay United. Yeah, it's a quick way to lose it all. Don't worry about that. You know, that was, again, that was actually quite a community-based thing that we are a consortium saved the club and whatnot. You know, indeed it's enabled a few things like that, but I've also kind of really seen that like, you know. You're still in your own head all the time. You're still like, how do I compare to this? And how do I stop comparing myself to these things? And how do I think about, you're still kind of dealing with the same problems and different problems in your day to day. And I don't think it makes a huge difference. So it's definitely been part of our journey, know, with Curve and part of my journey in moving into a CTO role.

Tom Allen

Looking at different problems and you can think you know how to solve all of these problems but you know experience is worth 10x of theory for sure so you know having those experiences being in those situations that are like okay yeah we got to work out how we solve this people problem or like change management or whatever these things might be right you know for us to think about that so it's which are all at a bigger scale within downtown ultimately right and within Curve I think

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah.

Tom Allen

13 people when we were acquired. It's about 32, 34 now. I've kind of moved on from that. So we've grown it through downtown as well and these sorts of things. Know, but you know, those problems are of those scale when you look at, you know, downtown with 600 employees around the globe and different products and there's certainly other, the problems are different and more, slightly more complex. And, you know, I think it's.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm.

Jakob Wredstrøm

When I hear your sort of story at face value, one of the questions I have, which I think I know the answer to, is it sounds like a straight line almost. Was that how felt? Was it that natural, just step by step and...

Tom Allen

Interesting to indeed think about those problems differently.

Tom Allen

It's a very good question of how, because it does, when I tell it now, it does feel like a pretty straight line. Well, we always knew we'd get there and it's fine. And of course, that's not the case in the moment. Know, is, you know, plenty of, you know, plenty of disagreements and plenty of, you know, where are we going and how do we think about this better and differently and whatever. No.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Okay.

Tom Allen

I probably after 2019, Kerr was a pretty straight line. And I think possibly I set it up to be that of being a little conservative and like, yeah, we're only gonna work with the cash we got. And going into COVID as well was just like, shit. People might not pay us. And you know, what are we, I might not be able to pay people in a few months or whatever. Like, there was all those kinds of concerns in there that, you know, that we needed to work through ultimately. And I think because of that slight conservativeness, that did keep it on a straight line. You know I do you know go back and look at certain points there and think yeah maybe if we raise some money we might have been a bit quicker on some of this maybe if you know raise a bit of growth capital there of you know 500 grand or whatever it might have been at a certain moment we might have run at this a bit quicker and got to bigger scale and again you know at point of acquisition I look back on it now and think We might have had another roll of the dice there, might have raised a couple million quid or something and gone for global expansion and done a few things there. So there's definitely a few moments there that think, okay, maybe this story could have turned out a little differently. Maybe we might have, but that's not so many regrets in that. That's just like, can...

Jakob Wredstrøm

Mm.

Tom Allen

Look back at what's happened in life and think there were other options on the table that didn't appear to us at that moment and with more experience now you might have looked at that differently but yeah you know it's interesting i mean you know one of the kind of

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah.

Tom Allen

I am always learning something. I'm big reader, a big... audio books are my thing, actually. I've read a lot from him, he doesn't read very much. You know, so I... The cogs are always turning on something. And I say, like, maybe of late it's been more of the leadership stuff. Side of things, know, kind of always in the business side of things in the tech side of things and the understanding like and I think so what may appear to be fairly linear, I guess, is, is always being backed up with like, you can improve my skills and improve improving constantly. And so these things are natural progressions, I guess, for me and those around me and for the business and

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah.

Tom Allen

Both sorts of things. You know, go back to the comment of one years experience 10 times or 10 years experience in some of these things, I think. Indeed, probably after two or three years, if I'm not improving, I'm not changing or whatever, but I'll get bored and find my next challenge for me. So I think it's

Jakob Wredstrøm

In.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Amazing. Well, Tom, it's been so interesting to hear your journey. I think it's also a breath of fresh air that to hear the clarity of your story to some degree, even though I know it wouldn't feel that in a moment. And also there's a lot of nuances we didn't touch today. I often perceive the music industry as being somewhat of a desperate navigation of opportunities.

Tom Allen

Yeah, fairly, I guess so it is fairly linear and answer your question about 10 minutes ago. Yes, I think it probably is.

Jakob Wredstrøm

And lot of that is also trying to raise capital to have other people pay for your sort of activities. And even though I believe there's a lot of validity to that, and I do buy into that, I think it's also really healthy to be reminded that sometimes know a space, know how to solve the problem, go at it, and then hopefully some positive things will come from it. And I'm very interested to sort of follow your work at Downtown as well, as the world is changing. It's done for many years, but again. I think it's a particularly interesting era of royalties and IP metadata right now. And you guys have a lot to navigate. But Tom, thank you so much for having your time and being on the podcast.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Great man.

Tom Allen

Yeah, thanks for having me. Meandering story of how we got here. Thank you having me.