Jesper Skibsby WARMing Up the Music Industry

Jakob Wredstrøm

In this next episode of the Founders Series, we will talk with Jesper Skibsted. He's the founder and CEO of WARM. We will get personal. He will be honest about the struggles it has been to create the company in this music industry, but also the wins. It's an interesting story and I hope you follow along. Jesper, welcome to Sound Connections. I'm very happy to have you here. You're going to be one of the guests on the Founders Series on the podcast. We're going to talk with founders in the music industry about their journey. Yes, but you live in Copenhagen? True. Yeah. I was born and raised in Aarhus, but I immigrated to Copenhagen like 12 years ago. Yeah. Well, that happens. We met briefly four years ago over a phone call. I had a company where I was exporting some partnerships. Whatever we did didn't really match with yours, but I did get to learn about your company and you've existed for some years now. I would still define you as a startup company, but you definitely have established yourself as an industry player. But yes, but before we get into Warren, could you just tell me about who you are and what was your journey into the music industry? Yeah, sure. And yeah, thanks so much for having me Jacob. It's great to see someone moving forward on this interesting space in the music industry. Well, yeah, my background in the music industry actually started, I think, with my brother. He's a big DJ here in Denmark and now also in the rest of the world called Morten. So in the early days, he was DJing at various places in Jutland and I was just tagging along because why not? And that transcended into, you know, more interest in the music industry. You know, pivot into doing tour management and, you know, drivering. And then I moved into a record label and started my own record label, and worked with independent labels, worked with the majors. Yeah, and basically got like a, like a 360 picture of the music industry, both from a practical standpoint, and, and on ground and digital and, and yeah, and everything around it.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm. And, and as far as I know, there was sort of a story behind you thinking about Worm and, and that whole company running now. And there was something about a company, artists you were managing? Yeah. So basically I was managing this band called Few Wolves, which was two guys who were wearing like some cardboard masks, imaging wolves, funny enough. It was a funny name, Fjord Wulf. We made a deal with the major in Denmark and we signed an EP, which was great and we had some great tracks released, but unfortunately it didn't really happen, at least not in Denmark. Our streams were not really fantastic and it was not because it was played on the radio or anything. But then I found out that we were actually played quite a lot on a specific radio in Poland called Set Chili. So it's kind of like, you know, similar to like an independent cool radio. So it's not because they only play the biggest hits, very commercial, but kind of like a mixture of alternative and commercial. That was really a crazy moment for me because I knew that we had done zero promotion in Poland. I didn't understand how the radio found us. The only thing I was interested in this, I want to have more of this information because as a manager and especially when working with independents, it makes a lot of sense to go where there is traction. And if you have organic growth, whether that's radio or TV or whatever it is, it can really make a lot of sense to focus your energy towards that place. So from my perspective, it was just the fact that we got played on a big radio in Poland. I contacted the radio station and sent more music their way and we got more spins with the multiple singles.

Jakob Wredstrøm

They actually contacted us to do like a radio show, like a party, and they have like once a year, they have like a festival or something similar, which then didn't happen for other reasons. But for me, sitting back afterwards was, like an epiphany or like a eureka moment, because I thought if everyone have access to this kind of granular data, especially around something difficult to tackle like radio, they can do much more, they have many more opportunities and can basically engage with the radios to get more players, but also of course to control if they actually get paid from these radios in the end. That's very interesting. Did you decide, okay, now I'm just going to stop managing and I'm going to jump into this? So what was the journey from that epiphany moment into building Worm? Yeah. So I think this was maybe in 2014, if I'm not mistaken. And Worm started in 2017. We launched the first version in mid. So it took some time. And I mean, as everything else, you know, you have a, you know, an idea and then you have to it on paper and you have to talk with people, get some feedback and spar and make a new iterated business plan and so on and so on. And in the end, I had some conversations that ended up in this Danish governmental innovation fund called KAPNOVA. And they then decided to invest, I think it was about $300,000 or euro equivalent. And then from there, it was up to me basically. Wow. Did you feel like, was this a natural transition for you to going into this founder's journey? No, I mean, I had no background of starting a company anywhere like this. I mean, I've been part of doing something, of course in the music industry, starting a record label or in artist management service, artist label service with a friend of mine, but

Jakob Wredstrøm

But nothing in the scale where you have to actually hire people and you have to, you know, build something. I mean, I don't really see myself as a technical genius in that sense. I mean, I can't code and there's a lot of things I can't do and I often get into a fight with the spreadsheets and Excel. But what I can find is people who are very skilled or who have passion. Or have a combination of these things and finding these personalities and roles that can work together in terms of getting stuff made. So I see myself like a IT architect that cannot draw. Yeah, well, that makes sense. Definitely have to find someone who can draw them and you need someone who can figure out how to build the system. And maintain it and develop it, of course. One of the reasons why we do this podcast is giving information to founders in the music industry or people who want to venture into it, because it's really hard to gather the right information in order to do this. Did you feel well-equipped with information and mentors and people around you to help you do this? No, not at all. I mean, I didn't really have any mentors. My board for a long time was me and this guy who happened to be the investment manager from the governmental fund. And so we were a two-man band in terms of the board for quite some time. And yeah, so everything was on me, but quite quickly I got acquainted with the guy you also know, Josh Greenberg. We know was on your podcast also. And we, and I quickly put my clause into him and said, like you have to be on board on this project, at least as an advisor. So he was part of that for I think for three or four years or something until recently. So that was really important to find people that you can.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Spar with and get feedback on this because there's a lot of decisions to be made. And you're definitely going to make wrong decisions. I've done that quite a lot of time as well. I can imagine. So you got this 300,000 euros or dollars equivalent and you have this guy who's on the board like what did you do? Like who did you hire? How did you approach building this technology and company that you have now? Well, in the first few years, it was trial and error quite a lot, actually. I mean, I hired a few people and found out they were the wrong ones. Like my number two person I hired when we were a three person team, number two person got pregnant like three months after I hired her or something like that. And of course, for You know, now you know, you know more, and I'm also a father myself and I was happy for her. I mean, all that, but as a solo founder, and this is happening, you know, so quickly, even though it's fantastic, it was also quite challenging because I had to quickly face all these things about the maternity leave and the rules and what you can do and what you can't do. And I knew nothing about this. The only thing I could focus on is like the, the risk or the liabilities that lies in this because if she left, I have to find a substitution and the substitution can only be there for this amount of time and then she has to come back and then she didn't come back. So then I had to a new situation and all of these like crazy amount of things that you have to find out, there was no way you can prepare yourself for that. I think. But I hired people and I found out some people were not the right ones and I hired people for roles which were not the right ones and then you learn from your mistakes and make some decisions and you pivot and build from there. I was just very, very focused on the product itself and not to say that the people around me were not important. But I mean...

Jakob Wredstrøm

I have changed people several times over the course. You know, you had this fantasy, especially maybe as a solo founder, that you find someone and probably gonna ride, you know, till the end. But the fact is that people change jobs and if you have someone on your team for two or three years or four years, that's quite a long time. I mean, it's not a lot of people who stay in the same job or the same position and, you know, for four years. For decades, right? So that's something that you also have to get experienced with, right? And the first time someone quit, it was terrible situation for me. I thought we never got to survive. And then you figured it out. And next time it's still stressful, but not as stressful and you have something to compare yourself with and compare yourself to. Like for example, recently my lead developer who I mean, it's like he was the core of my company. He's like, I'm not gonna lie. I was like, if I don't have him, I don't know what we're gonna do. And then he got a job offer from a bigger company and twice the salary. And I mean, we both knew that I couldn't do shit about that. So I had to let him go. But we're still here, you know, and we'll figure it out. So there are challenges, but you know what? I think it's very true that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Wow, that's so interesting. We'll talk a bit more about the challenges as you as a founder, as a solo founder, but I think that's particularly interesting. But for the listeners yet who don't know what warm is, could you give me a one minute pitch about what is warm? I'll try and do it in a minute. So basically, Worm is a global radio monitoring service. So what we do is that we monitor radio channels, radio stations everywhere in the world, and then we detect whenever people's music is played, and we do that in real time. We're using a combination of audio fingerprinting and music recognition technology, so the closest resemblance is if we take something like Shazam.

Jakob Wredstrøm

It has a database and it matches and makes a detection. In the end, it all comes down to similarity scores, but not to go so much into details. The point is that we can match the song or the app rate based on the actual parameters of the song. So, and our clients are primarily independent record labels, artists, managers, publishers. Radio promoters, basically everyone around the music industry who can benefit from this kind of insight and data. That makes sense. Your business model, is that a subscription model or how does that work? Yeah. So early days, my idea was, well, it should just cost $1 or 1 euro per song per month to track it. And then I found out that... it's going to be difficult to actually make money off of. So now, depending on what package you take and how long you commit and so on, it's about roughly about four or five euro per song per month. So it is like a selective tool. I would not recommend anyone with a catalog of thousand songs to pay $5,000 a month to track it, but maybe you have 15 of the thousand songs where you're These are my top priorities. I know they perform well on Spotify and DSPs in general. So these are the ones I'm gonna look out for. And then you will get some super relevant information where you can of course both use it as a market intelligence sense. So basically if you hired a radio promoter, you can control the results. And not just wait for the blogger to give you the information. And if you are doing a tour, you can use the information as leverage to figure out what cities you should book yourself into or where you have the biggest audience compared, of course, with DSPs, Spotify, and other data sources, Spotify for artists, or from your distributor or whatever the data comes from. But then on the other hand, you also have the evidence, which I actually...

Jakob Wredstrøm

used specifically with the Danish collection society called Coda. So speaking, taking us back to the situation with the Polish, with the Polish radio airplay, I actually went to Coda on behalf of my, and then songwriters, composers, who were the same as the artists though, about, you know, why we hadn't gotten paid anything from Poland. And they said, well, they didn't know but they wanted to investigate. And luckily enough, I had the evidence to support my claim. And then they took that information and provided to Sykes, the Polish society equivalent of Kota. And then I think maybe three, four months later, Sykes came back to Kota and actually found these 474 radio airplanes, exactly the same. So for me, this was you know, of course, quite interesting that, you know, a random independent person can come with information that the society you pay 20% in administration fee don't have, and the other society that's actually reported from the other country also don't have it, and the major label you assign to, they also don't have it, and so on, so on. And then I, as a manager, can actually do so much with this. So it's kind of like split it, what people use it for, split into market intelligence tool data. And then it, of course, also for royalty collection and leveraging that. That makes sense. Yeah, it's really interesting product. And I followed it for years and I've tried the demo function multiple times over many years. You're a solo founder. What's the reasoning behind that? Well, there wasn't really a reason. It was just because it was my idea and I just ran with the ball. And, you know, I mean, I never like had any specific dream about being a solo founder. It was not really like that. It was just, it just happened to be that I had the idea and I ran with the ball and I didn't look back. And then there was also no one else. So.

Jakob Wredstrøm

So, yeah, I mean, of course you learn a lot, but I think, you know, there are a lot of investments, investing companies and venture funds and so on who have like specific criteria of what they work, what they invest in. And a lot of these actually are not going to invest in solar founders based on previous experiences. And I can actually relate. I mean, I totally understand that it's, it must be like an additional risk, an additional unnecessary risk for investors to invest in a, in a, in a solo founder. I mean, anything can go wrong. I can steal all the money and move to Bali, you know, and go MIA or, you know, I can be hit by a car or I can lose the passion for what I'm doing or whatever. You know, And so with one person, the risk is of course a lot higher. But then at the same time, you also forced to get a lot of shit done. Yeah. So it's like- That's interesting. Yeah, there's pros and cons. That makes sense. So the people you have hired, obviously you've hired because you said you're like an IT architect that can't draw. So obviously you've hired people with the self-insight. That you can't do everything. Have you spent time, let's call it, mapping out your weaknesses that the employees need to fill out? Like what's your thought process been when you've been hiring people? I work really out of my gut feel, to be honest. I'm quite aware of what I'm not good at and what I feel more confident with. And I try to be as open as possible with the people that work with us about, you know, how I am. And, you know, I can probably seem to be quite an eccentric at times, but just like, let people know that I'm not like a gray mouse that sits in a corner and, you know, don't do anything. I can come in on a Wednesday morning and I have a great idea and let's do that. And then...

Jakob Wredstrøm

you know, it's just important that some, for example, developers or other people just say, that's great. But if you are going to ask me to do this, I can do this other task you asked me about the last Friday. And also like just really have a lot of communication about expectations. So we focus on that a lot. But it's not like we have like a smart HR system where we

Jakob Wredstrøm

Tried that once when we were actually developing a bigger team. But also now I feel we're actually a smaller team now, we're more closer in actually a small office, but it's much more efficient and it's actually a little bit more cozy. Instead of you can... quickly also get caught in hiring spree because it's just like so cool. You have like a logo on, on LinkedIn saying you are hiring or whatever. You know, but, but in reality, it's just really nice to have a dedicated team that works on the projects and you have a good communication on a day to day basis and there's a good environment and people are happy and smiling and all that stuff. Yeah. Dead up, you know, it's so much also about results and KPIs, which of course is important, but there just needs to be a balance in all of this. And I think it's up to the individual to feel their way forward, right? It makes sense. You started the company in 2017. How did the industry react to you trying to do this, the music industry at large? Well, I mean, I think... The main music industry probably didn't even notice or didn't care. But there were, I had a lot of conversations that were a bit frustrating. Because for example, with Koda as a society, and now I appointed Koda, but actually Koda is probably in my opinion one of the best societies in the world, so it's not to pull the rock out of them. The situation with Koda was that they feel like I was maybe a little bit annoying and a little bit like, let's just solve all this and you can be part of it. And they had their own systems and they were not really interested in solving anything radio related. They were more interested in figuring out on TV. So there was also some miscommunication. And then I was also a member of Koda in terms of writing music.

Jakob Wredstrøm

So then I could just switch, you know, taking my membership Coda hat on and then taking it off and taking my warm hat on. And I think this was very, you know, confusing for the people that I had the communication with within Coda. But I still to this day feel that they made, you know, some mistakes or they could have definitely have done things differently, where we could have worked together, where we could have... provided this intelligence or this data to 45,000 members who doesn't have it. But there are so many complications in this also that they cannot necessarily just vouch for something they don't even use themselves. And I didn't have a business model that would fit Koda. So in their defense, it totally makes sense and that it was not the point. But then I had other conversations with major labels and not in Denmark, in the UK or in the US. And I spent a lot of time traveling to these, you know, and then you take to Santa Monica and then they send you back to London and then you go through, you know, New York and, and I ended up with the same shit of nothing. You know, it's like big organizations, big companies with many different people involved with many different roles and you know, in Denmark, if you're a director. You are like the CEO, but if you're a director in a major label, you are the janitor or something. They have seen your vice president and vice president and all this. In the end, it just drained me completely. I could see I'm never going to make any business out of this because I can just have these conversations and meetings forever. It's not going to do anything.

Jakob Wredstrøm

That it's gonna be the independent sector that was gonna be my main focus, artists, labels, managers and promoters, et cetera, everyone who actually needs global radio data because the majors, for example, they have local hubs, you know, so they're divided into these different hubs in the different countries and the different regions. And that also makes sense from them, but they just define the rest of the music industry and that's going to be the problem for the independents because they are part of the industry. Yeah. Well, that's really interesting. So you were kind of focusing on the major labels and the major companies and you realized, okay, I'm not going to... you know, have success with them and you focus your energy on the dependents. How did you approach the independent music industry? How and how was that different than you tried with the majors? Well, with the majors, the idea was to, you know, I thought that if I can make a deal with Warner in the US, then a global Warner in and give them, provide them with radio, airplay data for all their artists that for me, that was like a no brainer. But. But because of this silo effect that the US looks at US data and they don't really care about small radios, they only do care about the big radios, usually the commercial ones. And then quickly became clear that this is not going to end up well. I think at least I'm not going to be able to keep receiving funds. Money to just, you know, have meetings with people in different parts of the world. Um, so, but, but in the independent sector, you have to kind of like onboard them one at a time, you know, so, so it takes some time before you need, like before you reach critical mass. Um, and, uh, but, but in this space, there are so many opportunities. There are the distributors, for example, that's our hundred percent target group.

Jakob Wredstrøm

We have associations, whether it's genre specific like AFEM for electronic music, or whether it's AIM or A2IM or DUT in Germany or DUB in Denmark. There's independent label organizations, independent managers organization, independent artist organizations. On top of that, you have all these different companies also in ours. In our space, you know, it could be other data companies, they could be vibrate chart metric, sound charts. Then you have band lab, bands in town. You know, there are a lot of possibilities. And of course it makes a lot of sense financially to make partnerships or API integrations or something that can, you know, give you more volume. Than just trying to call Canvas, contact each independent label and ask them, do you need some radio monitoring data? I think it's very difficult, also because a lot of people have a long history in the industry, so they have a specific way to do things. They're used to... let's say an independent label actually has a distribution with a major label, then they get data from the official data source and the official charts and whatever from the major label. And then there is this guy trying to sell them something on top of that, because they still pay indirectly for the other services, right? The same as the majors. They actually already pay. ISPI to have access to this data. So why should they pay for an additional service? No, I see the difficulty. And I think, coming back to the sole founder thing, and I think, have you experienced that to be a lonely journey? Where sort of like you meeting walls in the industry and then maybe, like, well, I'm just going to make it simple. Has it been lonely being the founder of such a company? Yeah.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Of course, of course it's lonely at times, but I'm not sad being lonely. I strive when I'm alone. I mean, in that sense, then, you know, so I do a lot of conferences myself and so a lot of traveling. So I have a lot of time to procrastinate over things and get new ideas and get connected with people or do exactly what you want. Founders or four founders or whatever and you have different responsibility areas. There are other things that can go wrong. You know, you can, you know, there's so many things, you know, more people, more problems could be, right? I think you're right. I think it's not either or. It's like from my side, it's been nice. I mean, it works well for my mindset. I have never thought that it's like, I don't want a co-founder, but it's just difficult because everything has been done around what I want and where I'm going and my mindset and all that. And so it's just been difficult to prioritize, to go and shop for a co-founder along the way. No, that makes sense. I'm curious because you're doing music technology and I live in Norway and I do have a fair bit of sense about the Norwegian scene in music technology and there's not a lot of togetherness yet. I think they're sort of working on it. What's the general thing in Denmark? Is there like-minded people that seek each other or is it like each their own boat kind of style? I think to be honest, it's everyone is in their own boat. But I don't feel anything like, you know, if I was to reach out to another company in Denmark in my space or in my line of work, I'm quite sure that they would be very positive and just say, let's meet up. And I have had that the other way around. And that's, I think that's super fine. It's not always that, you know, there comes something, you know, tangible out of it. But

Jakob Wredstrøm

But yeah, I think people are super friendly and not so competitive. But I also don't feel just because you're in the same industry, let's say music tech, it's not like you're competitors, right? We do something very, very specific, like a very specific niche corner of a very specific industry in a very specific part of that. Where a company like Linkfire, they do something completely different, but be very closely aligned and same as Soundbox. I mean, it's maybe less tech, but I mean, it's still they're building a physical product, a fantastic speaker and there's technology in that and it's music, but we're not competitive. So in that sense, I feel there are... a super good relationship between people and especially around founders. I feel I can reach out to anyone and the same goes the other way around. Sometimes I could feel there could be a need of like some kind of club or something, you know, where you could meet like-minded people or people in the same space, just as you can do on LinkedIn or whatever. But maybe more in a... in a physical sense where you could, and especially also because it seems there are quite a few tech companies in music in Denmark in general. So that could be a possibility. I make sense. What's the end goal for Worm? Like you've been working with this company for a few years and you've achieved recognition. You've like won Schloss music 20 start of the year and. You have clients and you sort of, again, as you said, you travel around the world and are speakers. So there's a lot of, let's call it verification that what you do is good and there's a relevance. But what's the end goal for you? Yeah, but it's a question I've received more than once and also, you know, in particular for our investors and stuff like that, because there can be some who is like more about when are we gonna make money off this and when are we gonna sell the business and what is the exit strategy and all that.

Jakob Wredstrøm

And I mean, not to sound too cliche, but it's just, it hasn't really been the complete focus for me. I mean, what I really like with this is that I can be like a voice. I mean, I can go to a presentation and I could go to a conference and do a presentation and people will attend and they want to hear what I have to say and I can engage in discussions. And maybe be a little bit provocative at times, but I feel that is what changes things, or at least change the course of the conversation. So I'm quite happy with having that role in the music industry and representing a small part of something that can actually benefit a lot of people. So for me, it's mainly about where we're gonna go next. Are we gonna, for example, I would like to do a royalty calculator. I mean, I haven't even thought about what the business model should look like. I mean, I don't even know if it should be a product we should make money off of. Maybe it should just be like an add-on service to the existing. But the fact that people don't know how much their airplay is worth and the fact that there are so many myths around radio, for example, like a radio doesn't pay. Know that's simply not true. I mean, you know, you can go to a specific case in the United States and you can say, yeah, that's true. Radios does not pay neighboring rights, but that's not the radios who have decided that is a governmental decision. And it is correct that small radios, you don't get paid for, but that's not because the radio don't pay. It's because the society in that decides that the money should be distributed based on a sample testing or other models. So for example, in this sense, I feel there are so much still to be done that we could build a calculation product or we could add more information to the data already. Could we add audience speakers, for example, to the data?

Jakob Wredstrøm

And then of course the platform itself can be optimized. And what about people who are going to release music? Could we build a product where they can get feedback from A&Rs for example, like in a Submit Hub way. What about promotion? Could we build a tool that can actually target the radios with music that is relevant? Because one of the big challenges with the music and promotion around radios is that a lot of people just mass spam radios, play my music, or please play my music. And some radios, they have a dedicated system to receive music and some, you know, if you write to a radio in Germany, it makes a lot of sense to write in German because not everyone speaks German. And you know, the same goes for France. In France, they have to play, the radios have to play over more than 50% of French native music. It's good to know if you are trying to promote yourself in France and if you have a jazz record, should you then try and go for the only jazz channel in Denmark or should you maybe try and target other jazz radios in Europe? So for me, it's not so much about the end goal for me. Of course, we all want to make a lot of money eventually. I have a daughter and... you know, so there's some security in that. But for me, it's not so much what it is. For me, it comes hand in hand, if we build, if I can continue to build a great company, and we can develop that and it can be bigger and better and more products, you know, we will also make money, of course. And in the end, then you can sell your company if that's what you want. But right now, my interest is to continue being part of this and continuing to being a voice in the music industry and someone that people respect, or at least see having some relevant information, someone people wanna listen to. I think that's important and that's what drives me that wanna continue to develop more product, basically.

Jakob Wredstrøm

That's a really interesting answer because everyone has their different motivations and as I hear you say it's industry relevance and it's product focus. I think that's very inspiring itself. If I could ask you a question, if there's one thing you wish you had when you were starting this company, that being specific network or knowledge or whatever it was, what would be the thing that you didn't have that you wish you had? I think if I'm looking back, what would have been really great for me would have been if I had like, you know, a super, super skilled tech co-founder. Because like it is utopian to think that you can just build something and you have never tried it. I mean, it's like if I, I mean, my hands are like this, you know, if I wanted to build a table out of wood, I could probably do it, but it would be a lot better if I have a carpenter with me. Yeah. And you know, it's like, I mean, I can probably make it, but then, you know, two months later, I'm gonna figure out this sucks. Why did I make it so heavy? I can't move it anywhere. Why is it not different? Or why is it not blue instead of this? Why did I put this on top of it? And now, why did I make this material and all this stuff? So I could have saved a lot of time and a lot of money if... if I had a different approach and I had, let's say, a co-founder who was super skilled in IT architecture and a full stack developer or someone with experience because everything has just been like, ah, sounds cool. And then suddenly, you find out that you, the way that you're back into components is structure, it's just not, it's like,

Jakob Wredstrøm

It's only gonna be worse. Everything's gonna be slower. So unless you rip this bandage off and put everything in the right boxes, so it's easy to work with, we're not gonna get anywhere. We have to do this. So we spent almost a year changing our whole bag end and our whole front end structure. It was a necessity, but you know. It would have been a lot better if we had done that in 2017 instead of in 2022. Yeah. I think that's great insight. So I think that would have saved me a lot. Yeah. Well, but you still managed to build a really cool and interesting company with a lot of industry recognition. What's going to be the next step for you guys?

Jakob Wredstrøm

I think the next step is going to be, now I just mentioned a couple of things that I would like to develop the product on and I'm probably not going to be too specific, but some of these things I mentioned is in our scope of focus. Because the platform works, you know, and we have clients who've been on the platform since 2017. We have super cool, credible clients, we have Tool Room, we have Defected and all these cool brands and especially in the electronic space. So I think what we're going to focus on is to further develop more products that is aligned with what our clients expect. And then it is also to try and approach different genres. So not necessarily different markets, where market is genres or genres. So that could, for example, be in rock or in jazz or in alternative or something different because right now we have like a dominance of clients from the electronic music space, which is great. And actually been also very helpful that we have been like very focused in that sense. But I see so much value in this, you know, if I was a jazz artist, you know, you release your music on Spotify, it gets put on play, jazz playlists, you know, in random countries, people listening to it and they might play it on the radio on, you know, this particular jazz station in Lithuania, whatever. And then you are never going to get any information out of that or any, royalties or any knowledge whatsoever. So I think this is a very good example that there are genres that are actually being pushed quite a lot in different markets. People have a tendency to forget that the way that music is consumed and also the commercial, most commercial genres is

Jakob Wredstrøm

from country to country. I mean, you see in Finland, you know, the most typical music is death metal. I mean, it's like one of the absolute biggest genres. And if you go to, you know, Latin America, Mexico, and so on, it's reggae and Latin music, right? And which also actually is developing quite a lot in the rest of the world. If you are on an island in Spain, Ibiza or Mallorca, whatever else, you will listen to check house on a restaurant. That would never happen in Denmark. So in that sense, and the same goes back to radios, don't pay or something. It's very narrow minded and it's also very different from country to country and culture to culture. So I think there are a lot more in this space that could benefit a lot of people. You know, we see K-pop is expanding quite a lot with the, because there are Koreans in all countries. So they of course, draw this to them. But here, you know, I'm betting that the distributors or the label record labels in Korea do not get fantastic radio data from Europe. I'm quite sure. So I think there are a lot of opportunities in this space, especially also outside, you know, the typical markets like Western Europe and the States, but also, you know, in Africa, it's an amazing example for, you know, a potential growth area. You see Nigeria, crazy hub of young people, you know, in five, 10 years when they figure out they all want to make music and be on TikTok, and they suddenly end up with smartphones and this is going to be a massive market and music and culture and entertainment is going to be a big part of that. Saudi Arabia is probably a little bit no, no word, but it's just from a business perspective, they are putting a lot of money into not only music but

Jakob Wredstrøm

also technology, they do conferences, they do Middle Beast. It's a huge, huge festival. It's like on the size of Roskilde or if not bigger. And so I think there are a lot of areas where there could be a lot of potential, especially around data like ours or products that would be very aligned to the existing. That's great. Thank you so much for your insight. I think it's really interesting here about Worm and your journey and your perspective. And it's really interesting to hear about the solo entrepreneur kind of perspective. And I'm very happy to have you. We're rare breed. Rare breed, but also as you said, there's also clear benefits to some degree as well. But thank you for being here, a part of our Founders series and inspiring on the founders how to do it. We'll probably meet in person at one point in our life we haven't done yet. I'm sure we'll. We shall. But this is a great, great digital meeting. But thank you so much and hope the warm is gonna go great forward. Appreciate it. Thank you so much, Sigo. Thank you.

Jakob Wredstrøm

you