Adapting E-commerce Strategies for Musicians

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Sound Connections Podcast. Today with a fellow podcaster in the studio, Jack McCarthy, welcome.

Jack McCarthy

Thanks so much, Jacob. So great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Jakob Wredstrøm

You're much more experienced than me. You're more than a few hundred episodes more than me. So I'm very excited to talk to you. And it's not often podcasts hosts get to talk together, but Jack, you've built something incredibly interesting in music industry. And we're going to cover that today. So e-commerce, merchandising, and obviously your podcast and your whole approach to artists, to marketing and making them present and empowered. But Jack, for the people who don't know you, who are you and what do you do?

Jack McCarthy

Yeah, super excited to be here. Thanks again for having me. My name's Jack McCarthy. I am the co-founder of music marketing agency called Indiex. We're an agency under a larger company called Indiepreneur, which primarily exists as a music marketing education and consulting company. So we have a few different arms of the company, one of which being Indiex, our agency, and the others being IndiePro, which is a community and a training. Training library and Indie founder, which is a coaching and consulting company. We've been around since 2017. I'm also the co-host of the Creative Juice podcast, which is our podcast over at Indeprenor. So pumped to be talking with a fellow podcaster today. I'm sure this will be super fun. But our agency, Indie X, primarily works with artists that have sizable fan bases to help them tap into a usually underutilized revenue stream, which is direct to consumer e-commerce, which is largely left on the table in the music industry today. And we've seen that as a big opportunity to really help artists build a stream that they can control. I like to call it active revenue in a music business. So we really focus all of our efforts on helping artists and their teams tap into that revenue stream, something that's active for them that they can control and really smooth out some of the revenue roller coaster that goes on in an artist's career. So that's what we do. We've been doing this for a long time. We get to work with a lot of really cool and interesting artists on a lot of very interesting projects over the years. It's been a lot of fun. So got some great stories to tell. Excited to be here.

Jakob Wredstrøm

So how long have you been doing this pursuit of helping artists and understanding how they can monetize?

Jack McCarthy

Yeah, great question. So I've been in music my whole life. I've been a guitar player and a singer and a songwriter my whole life since I was a little kid. I actually studied music production in college. So I have kind of like production as like the craft that I got into as I grew up. So I'm a classically trained. I guess you would say classically trained musician and a producer in that right. But I got into marketing in college, studied business and found my way into digital marketing kind of. Unconventionally, I guess you would say, I wasn't really looking for a path in business or looking for jobs in marketing, but I was actually in between gigs touring. I was working as a guitar tech and a hired gun guitar player at the time, just out of college, and I needed money. And so I started looking for some... some work on the side, doing social media marketing, doing digital marketing. This was about 12 years ago. And I started doing that and picked up a few consulting clients in like local business, in online business, in the nonprofit space as well. And that kind of forced me to cut my teeth in digital marketing and learn. And it was just a few years later that I met my business partner, Kyle, who was starting up the fledgling entrepreneur. I had been doing agency work. Building up a client base, he had been starting to work on building Indie X and kind of tapped me on the shoulder and said, hey, I could really use some help building this thing. Do you want to work together? I was one of the entrepreneurs first customers in the Indie Pro community side of things. So I experienced the product and when I'd seen it, I was like, I really like this guy. He really seems to know his stuff. We resonate with each other. We speak the same language. And so it was kind of a match made in heaven. And so

Jack McCarthy

joined the team partnering with Cirque back in 2018 and we've been at it ever since.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Amazing. Okay, wow. Let's cover maybe one of the things that you're most publicly known for first, the Creative Juice podcast, which I've also watched a good deal of episodes of. So how did that go about and what are you guys talking about?

Jack McCarthy

Sure. Thank you.

Jack McCarthy

Yeah, for sure. So Creative Juice started in 2017. Kyle was the primary host. I joined the podcast in 2020. After we were probably about, at that point, I want to say we were probably about 150 episodes in. Creative Juice has really existed. It's taken a number of different forms and kind of evolutions over the years, as you probably can understand with a podcast that's been going.

Jack McCarthy

Do a mix of education where we're really trying to teach concepts that we then go deeper in as artists and their teams and bands and music industry professionals go deeper with us, whether that be in any of the core areas that our company gets into from the training side, the community side, the coaching side, or the agency side. So a lot of it is teaching concepts. A lot of it is Also, the topics that we dive into are just delivering our takes on music industry, music marketing, music business, current events, and our responses to them as marketers in the industry, as people that are going a step further than a lot of what I would say industry talking heads or gurus might. Trying to take a little bit more of a holistic viewpoint or a 360 view on things, on topics that are going on. For example, we've spent a lot of time recently talking about AI tools and AI and how it's changing music marketing, but as well as music creation. And then we host guests. We love to talk to artist managers. We love to talk to other music industry professionals. People that are building within the music industry and hear what they're up to, what kind of value they're trying to bring to the industry. And we love to talk to artists too. We love to have artists on the show and talk about their successes, their wins, their challenges to hopefully inspire other people and other artists. So our audience is probably largely a mix of artists, bands and managers, as well as other music marketers, other music industry pros and people that are trying to just break into the business.

Jakob Wredstrøm

And you could argue that the ultimate output that you guys are trying to provide is of course a more viable path to financial success or sort of developing a career that's where you can be exposed and where you can succeed that way. One of the things you mentioned with Indiex, which is your co-founder of is e-commerce, merchandising and leaving money on the table. Maybe...

Jack McCarthy

100%.

Jakob Wredstrøm

First, to completely understand what you do at Indiex, try to describe in its core components that you're addressing in that revenue that Atsas is leaving on the table.

Jack McCarthy

Sure, 100%. At Indiex, we realized very early on in building the agency that the biggest opportunity for us to really help artists was for the right type of artist, the right fit, the right size. And usually this is an artist with, you know, a few hundred thousand fans across social media, for example, is a pretty good... Starting point so not someone who's starting out usually an artist that has some reps under their belt They've gotten building an audience down We saw that one of the biggest opportunities for those artists is at this point. They probably got revenue coming in They've got some streaming revenue They likely are on tour and they have some touring revenue and they've got some sales under their belt But when we look under the hood what we would often find was like e-commerce was really neglected as you would compare it to Brands and other online businesses, you know the businesses that you buy from on a regular basis outside of music any whether it be commodities or just Items that you like or brands that you dig we were finding that a lot of the fundamentals of ecommerce were really missing things as simple as running retargeting ads or having automations in place for email marketing are largely not paid much attention to in music, especially by labels. And so artists were really missing out on just. With those two small examples, a lot of opportunity to pick up missing revenue from their fans, let alone talking deeper about things like building regular sales cadences in their business, promotions that happened throughout the calendar year. A lot of this kind of stuff was missing. So that was a big kind of light bulb moment to us to be like, man, there's so much opportunity here. And the cool thing about it that I really love is being able to bring it to artists and managers in particular and be like,

Jack McCarthy

hey guys, like you've got a baseline with streaming potentially if we're talking about that. And that's oftentimes a lot of where the... excitement or the focus is in music right now. It's like, how do I grow my streaming audience? How do I build more of a base there? And I'm not going to sit here and throw stones at that. I certainly could. But the fact is tons of artists and bands have that as their baseline. And so there's an understandable desire to want to continue to grow that. However, the position that I often take with it and really what we bring to the table at Indie X is at a certain inflection point of audience size, there is not as much that I think you can benefit from focusing on trying to grow that revenue stream as much as you can grow actively by actually selling your own products. Because just the transactional difference between a stream and selling a record or selling soft merch like t-shirts, hoodies, you name it, is crazy. Like the value difference in terms of your top line and your bottom line can be nuts if you have a fan base that can support it. So I look at that and I say, okay, there's a huge opportunity here. For you to focus your active digital marketing on taking fans in that direction and monetizing that way. And if you can do that, all of sudden there's a revenue stream that just wasn't there before. So instead of trying to bump up something that in streaming is kind of a black box, in touring requires you to actually do the physical labor of touring. If you focus on e-commerce, there's

Jack McCarthy

just a whole new world opened up, a revenue stream that for the most part probably wasn't there. And we've audited tons of accounts where it's been exactly that story time and time again.

Jakob Wredstrøm

What are the product categories that you see an artist needs to sell in general? If you want to like, why?

Jack McCarthy

Yeah, great, great question. I would say there's two primary ones. It's physical media. So their actual music on CD on vinyl. We also work with some filmmakers. So having your films on DVD or Blu-ray, that's number one. And then the second one is soft goods. So merch, t-shirts, hoodies, anything that kind of falls under that category. Then there's the middle category of the more intangible stuff that becomes either an additional primary category of product or ancillary where it's added on as like bonus value. And this is where I think about things like access, like digital goods. That's the kind of stuff that exists, you know, that's layered on top of those primary two or created as like one-offs and what I mean for example to put that in like tangible terms it might be something like sign set list from your Most recent tour like these are the kinds of things that feel exclusive. It's almost like memorabilia That's kind of the third category

Jakob Wredstrøm

Okay, makes sense. And you know, obviously this is something us think a lot about, you know, it's very, it would be very foreign to me that this is not something people are exposed to, but I guess taking that into action and knowing how to do that effectively is that sort of where your clients come and speak with you. What's the situation with these assets? Like, do you need to educate them on the potential first or is it purely the execution?

Jack McCarthy

I would say it's a mix. For a lot of the sales conversations that we have at the agency, oftentimes it's talking with an artist manager or a marketing consultant or something like that, or the artist themselves about the opportunity that they know is there. They may not be able to put their finger on it. They might just say something along the lines of like, I know that there's some always on marketing that I could be doing to connect with my fans more and monetize my audience. That's the type of language that I have in consultations that I do. People are kind of orbiting around the idea a little bit. You know what I mean? They'll say things like that, but they don't necessarily know. I know I need a plan for e-commerce and I know it needs to look like this. And I know that you guys are the people to execute on it. So it's like, I have a fuzzy idea of what I need do but I or what I should be focusing on or maybe want to be focusing on but I can't quite pinpoint what it is it's like that itch that I don't know how to scratch can you help me figure out what I'm trying to synthesize here and then is that something you guys do that's a lot of times the conversation that I have which is actually a really fun conversation to have it's pretty illuminating

Jakob Wredstrøm

I think, know, in many other industries, whenever someone, let's say, I'm just gonna make some assumptions. It's not because I'm an expert, but like, let's say for example, in gaming, in esports, whenever you're a talent, you oftentimes, you know, are scouted to these talent teams where there's a tiny bit, you know, structure to what they do. The business is moving grain in the group, but with artists and managers, oftentimes it's like a happenstance that happened. It was amazing. And you had some people around you that happened to be a manager. So at least my perception is... There is also a lot about this is the first time for not just the assets, but also for the business side and whoever's acting that is that also the case you see that it's new all around for most people like what the next.

Jack McCarthy

It really depends. would say for artists that are a little less seasoned and maybe they're just getting started, they've maybe started building an audience and really getting some critical mass over the last few years, definitely. Because those are the kind of artists where it might be the first time that they've had a manager or their manager or label team or whatever might have just come on board within... last year or two. For more seasoned artists, not quite as much. The difference for them oftentimes is like they've gone through a change of hands, maybe they've shaken up their team a little bit, staffing has changed, things like that. So two sides of the same coin I would say, but yeah.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm. so making this sort of monetization work in e-commerce obviously has many different components. One thing is the actual offering. Another thing is how do you brand it and how do you actually market it in an effective manner, digital marketing or other ways. What is sort of the... the order of which you go to this. Like if an artist comes, they have some success in streaming, they have a fan base, and they have nothing. Like what are the most important order things that you would do in order to successfully launch this for them?

Jack McCarthy

Yeah, that's a great question. We follow a playbook that we use and iterate on for the vast majority of our clients that have like a sizable fan base. And when I say that they have nothing, maybe I'll put like one qualifier on them. Like usually, let's use the example of like an artist that has a big audience. They have streaming numbers. Let's say they have an online store and maybe they've sold through it before, but not- in any way that has been super active. Like they've sold through it when it was required to like they put an album out or something like that. But beyond that, that's kind of where it lives. This is kind of the classic story. Obviously, like one step down from that is like I'm a I'm a big artist, even like legacy artist, legacy artist. This is true of especially like I'm a legacy artist. I've got my fan base, but my infrastructure is just scattered all over the place. Like I don't know where I had an old store, I don't have it anymore, I had an email list, I don't know where it is. These are the kind of like two main common scenarios I would say. The biggest place that we start with these types and the order of operations is usually like we build some email marketing or text marketing or both infrastructure. Using modern email marketing tools, we make sure that their data layer in their online store is in place. So that's like pixel tracking, for example, making sure that's in place for all of the advertising platforms. If they don't have a store, we make sure that we build them one. Obviously that goes without saying and that their products are ready to go and installed.

Jack McCarthy

Then usually the process that we take is we gauge fan interest by trying to build email list and text list. So we'll do that organically. We'll work with the artist and their team to kind of craft a very simple sort of like freebie bribe opt-in offer, lead magnet, whatever you want to call it. We use that and then we ideally are basing that around Something that is teasing the audience towards something that is upcoming that we're going to sell So if we're going into a launch, it might be something like early access or early access content to what's coming So we're priming the audience for sales and then we're typically launching some kind of sales promotion off the back of that list growth So ideally what we're trying to do here is take a large audience convert some percentage of them into owned media so email tech subscribers and then Monetizing them and then starting to repeat that process seeing what worked look at the bottlenecks And then start to run paid media. So pay traffic on social media Oftentimes for us it's meta as the primary just because it's still the most stable and effective Advertising platform as far as like interruptive based paid traffic. So we run a lot of traffic on Meta for our clients and that's kind of like the 30,000 foot view of like a first, you know, three to six month engagement with an artist.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm. You're saying that there's sort of money being left out? off the table by not pursuing this. But again, when I hear about all these components, you know, having an agency paying for ads, you actually need products, like there's costs all around in order to do this. Like, is it, is there good enough margins all around for this to be actually a good pursuit just from a financial standpoint? Or does branding and fan engagement also play a bigger part of it? Like, what's the main motivation that you see?

Jack McCarthy

Yeah.

Jack McCarthy

Yeah, great question. There's definitely enough margin. would say that there is some caution to be taken. know, a lot of times with the artists that we're working with, they do have control over their merch IP. So like the licensing agreements that sometimes exist within music for third parties to be selling your merch, that can crush your margin. I mean, that's one of the reasons that I encourage artists and their teams to own this e-commerce channel. It's like you don't need someone else to be taking your margin. Margin there, you can control it. So there's definitely enough margin so long as there are not agreements like that in place. That's something that like we're always careful of when we're consulting with artists is like, make sure that there's the profit potential is there and in it. There's also a lot of considerations to be made about actually how the merch is made. For example, like the margins on print on demand. From companies like Printful or Printify, the margins aren't quite as good as if you are actually stocking inventory. Now, not every artist can start with... warehouse inventory and that's totally understandable. Print on demand is a really great place for testing grounds and getting proof of concept and that's awesome. You sacrifice margin in that and sometimes quality too if you're not careful but you sacrifice margin and quality in that to...

Jack McCarthy

get product market fit and validate with an audience. But to your question about fan engagement and like deepening of relationship, that's a really good point because the value isn't just in the e-commerce revenue growth. Of course, that's super important, but there's something to be said here about the quality of fan that... is created over time when you manufacture, engineer a customer journey. And this is something that we really focus a lot on. I think in music, there is this one dimensional view of a fan, two dimensional at best, where you hear terms like fans and super fans and right, that's like the two dimensions that often get talked about in music circles. But when you look at a business, I encourage artists to look at their business much more like a traditional business would, either offline or online. And that's where you're really considering, okay, I have people that know who I am. I have subscribers that are in touch with me, but maybe they're not customers yet. These are people that are on my list. I have customers. That have bought from me once. have repeat customers that have bought from me twice, three times, four times, et cetera. I have high lifetime value customers that have spent a lot of money with me and they're like my most valuable people. And working the e-commerce arm of your music business allows you to engineer a customer journey from end to end really over time and change it and morph it and it grows with you as you sell more products and as you release more creative stuff the thing that you do and what's cool about that is it builds a business that then you can actually analyze and there's a quality to it and so that allows you to this is a little bit of a long-winded answer but that eventually allows you to speak to fans in

Jack McCarthy

way that you couldn't before. You can talk to a fan who has, you know, invested tons of time and money into you as a creator differently than you talk to someone who's just hearing you for the very first time. And there's a quality of engagement that comes with that you otherwise don't get. And so I think there's a lot of value in that over time in how you build your business and how you treat your fans. And ultimately, that pays dividends in all of the other sectors. Of your music business. It changes the way that you approach touring. It can change the way that you approach your release cycle. It changes the way that you talk partnerships even. When you're having partnership conversations, whether it be with potential brand deals or sync or anything, when you can talk deeply about your data and bring that kind of leverage to a conversation, it's really powerful.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm. One thing that I'm thinking about when I hear you talk is about the company itself and how to have a viable business being an agency in this space. So, you know, a typical agency would be working with big companies, big brands, and you know, the premium and such work would be rather high. Working with ATSIS, you know, is a different nature because it's a customer that generally speaking has less capital. Risk averse or you know there's a big bigger reluctancy of paying someone to do stuff because of the limited nature of what they have and you guys have grown to be rather successful and there's a lot of players in this space trying to be successful everything from traditional agencies to tech platforms. What has been the reason why you have done this well? What do you believe is your edge that makes you successful in a space that's difficult to build something successful in?

Jack McCarthy

Mm-hmm.

Jack McCarthy

That's a really good question. It's a hard one. It's a hard one because it's a hard reality. It's really true what you said. There are a lot of companies in music that are trying to grow and they're trying to approach. A segment of the market that doesn't necessarily have the capital or the buying power to do the things that, you know, ultimately that company is looking for their customer base to do. I would say if I look back at the history of Indeprenor to date, the thing that has made us, has gotten us to where we are. I think has a lot to do with how we've approached the varying types of artists in the industry. By having an agency like IndieX that primarily is focused on larger artists and knowing that truly, like, I turned down more applications for IndieX than I approve. Because we really only work with the artists that we know we can be of financial benefit to and that we see alignment with. And otherwise, there isn't a point in spending X amount of dollars with us on agency services, especially for growing artists that are just figuring out how to grow an audience. There's tons of agencies out there in music that will say, I'll run your Facebook ads to drive audience growth on Spotify. That's not our thing. We really are focused on the artists that we can grow revenue for and so we've sort of

Jack McCarthy

in some ways limited ourselves to that and it's been it's been beneficial because we've done that. Now that's not to say that when we have a client that we are helping with the e-commerce growth that we don't also help them with DSP growth. Like of course like we have conversations with our clients all the time that are like hey can we also focus a little bit on this initiative and of course like that's a normal part of everyday business for us. But on the agency side of things focusing there instead of trying to serve as many artists as we can at the agency and then finding ourselves doing a ton of different types of work and splitting our focus I think has allowed Indiex to become what it is and then the rest of the company has really sort of followed that same path just with different avatars in music The Indie Founder program, which is kind of like our coaching and consulting arm, is really focused on working with artists who are at the next level down, who have great music, who have great content, are starting to get momentum. And they just need a little bit of a leg up on strategy, but they're going to need to do the execution themselves. They're gonna have to learn the skills on their own and for good reason. So that as they build team, they know as kind of the founder of their business that they know what levers need to be pulled. They know that they're putting... you know, if they hire someone three years down the line after working with us in a consulting capacity, they kind of know where the bodies are buried, where if someone's like, oh, I'm going to run your ads, and then they get in there and they're not doing a good job, the artist knows, they know what quality, what, what a good quality is. And then on the community and training side, Indie Pro, that's really become a place for where artists that are trying to learn and understand the ever evolving digital

Jack McCarthy

landscape but they're definitely not in a place where they need consulting or agency services. We're able to serve them and what's cool about this at Indiepreneur is like it sort of all acts as a flywheel. Like the strategies that we employ at IndieX then filter down to consulting and strategy at IndieFounder and are adapted to those types of artists and then those trainings and principles are then distilled to the folks who are engaging with us at IndiePro. So I think it's kind of created this flywheel of education that has been really unique. It's been really cool to be a part of it and to watch it happen. I hope that helps. That's kind of my analysis of it on the spot here at least.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah, well, that makes a whole lot of sense. And my reaction actually, it's positive though, is like it's almost makes too much sense. And I'll explain myself. You know, we work with a lot of startups and a lot of startups has these sort of grand plans of natural progression in the business. And

Jack McCarthy

You

Jakob Wredstrøm

and they make sense on paper, but execution is really difficult and doing things in right order is difficult. Just because you have a concept that on paper makes sense does not necessarily mean it actually works. In your case, textbook wise, it does work and practically does work. But in what order did this happen? Was there a certain element of business that naturally unlocked the other? Can you just tell us about that?

Jack McCarthy

Sure.

Jack McCarthy

Yeah.

Jack McCarthy

Yeah, actually, this is really interesting. think you'll dig this. Indie X and Indie Pro came first, and they kind of existed, they built upon each other almost like you were watching someone walk up the stairs, like watching a baby try to crawl up the stairs. Indie Pro was born of my business partner, Kyle's brain of like, I wanna teach artists how to use... advertising to get an audience. And at the time when we first launched, it was primarily teaching like native video advertising. So how to take your music video and make it seem like you're not screaming about your new song being out now and advertise in a way that makes people feel like they're catching a moment of virality and how and then how do you use paid traffic to grow that and Kyle went and started teaching that to artists. And that was kind of like the foundation of Indie Pro. What then happened was he started getting approached by artists who would be like, can you do this for me? That became the foundation of Indie X. People being like, hey, can you do some of these things for me? And of course, like we were a scrappy agency when it first started, like taking on all sorts of different projects. It didn't immediately go from teaching about video ads to the, you know, revenue left on the table of e-commerce. That evolved over time. That evolution and realization happened like, probably you know two two and a half years in but that was how Indie Pro and Indie X started to form together and Indie founder from a from a consulting and coaching point of view really became

Jack McCarthy

It got its footing about five years ago, really, in its current form. It had always existed in our kind of product service stack at Intuprenor, but it really came as a answer about five years ago to folks in our community, our customers in our community that needed more attention than what a like a do it yourself platform could provide and more than one off, you know, phone call consultations could provide. And so we looked at it and said, man, there are some really amazing artists in this community that just need like a bit more strategic guidance focused on them one on one, but they're definitely not like, they definitely don't need agency services as they exist from our company right now. So how can we do that? And that was kind of like the next order of operation So our service as it's evolved and how it's built the business has really come from problem solving. Put really simply, like we've recognized that like our customers are sort of like waving their hands and saying like, hey, like this is the next thing that I think I might need. And us just analyzing that and being like, okay, well then how can we deliver that with the resources that we have?

Jakob Wredstrøm

And you know, I would only assume that as a part of this journey, you call yourself a scrap agency to begin with, that maybe the income associates that work wasn't very attractive to begin with, like it probably took some time for this to stabilize to be an actual business. Like, when did this change for you guys?

Jack McCarthy

For sure.

Jack McCarthy

Probably about two years in was a point where we started to feel like the stability was really, there was a confident ramp where we were looking at it and being like, okay, the business is stable, growing, and we can start to deliberately hire. once you start making, as you know, in business, like I think once you start making hires and you become responsible for, as founders, you become responsible for people other than yourselves, then there becomes a new reason for growth in the company. know, all of sudden you're taking care of a team that you care deeply about. We're getting a little bit now into like founder talk, I think. But that's definitely been a motivator for me. Like I love our team so much. And so as we started to grow and saw revenue and profit in the business stabilize and grow as we did and our customer base and client base grew, as we brought on team and saw that happening, because naturally like you grow and you're then constrained by supply. that then became like an impetus to continue to grow and continue to support not only the customers and the clients with the services that we provide, but also then support the team that we're building. So that's when it started to happen. And I would say how it continued to happen, if that makes sense.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah, that does make sense. To what end are you guys building this? Obviously, you're building a services model type of company and in order to do that successfully, you need to grow over time and have a clientele and a brand of reputation. But what's the end goal for you guys when you do this?

Jack McCarthy

That's a great question. think that's always in... More recently, I think that's kind of been in flux for us. Like we don't really talk too much about like exiting Indepredor. It's something that as like the founding team, like we really love the thing that we've built. And so being involved with it is probably something that I see myself doing for a very long time. As far as like building culture and building our team, we've really tried to build a company where all of our, all of our team members, our staff, our artists, our musicians in their own right. And so we've tried to build a company where they can thrive in their creativity as well. So we have a lot of flow. We're a remote team. So we have a lot of flexibility for people to do things like go on tour and play shows and. record records and make music and get creative and build a fan base of their own. And so we've really tried to build a culture that fosters creativity, both at the company and extra-curricularly, you would call it that, for our team. And what's really cool about that and what I really like about that is it almost feels like we've just built this big creative playhouse for both our clients, customers and team to exist within like an incubator for everybody. And that feels really cool. Like that, that has kind of always felt like the end game of Indepreneur to me to just keep building a moat around that. organism that we've created here. And we do that by growing the company, right? The Moat is our revenue, the Moat is our client base, our customer base, and our product and service. And the more that we do that, and then the more that we can add people into the party, like that's kind of the end game for me, I think.

Jakob Wredstrøm

I heard most of it, it just lagged for a while, so I think your internet is tiny bit unstable. But that's all good, we can edit that breakout. Can you hear me?

Jakob Wredstrøm

You hear me now?

Jakob Wredstrøm

One, two, three. Maybe you're back now? Yeah.

Jack McCarthy

Hey, Jacob. Yeah, that was weird.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Now you're gone again.

Jack McCarthy

Is going on.

Jakob Wredstrøm

There we go.

Jack McCarthy

Back hey jake i'm sorry about that man my internet totally dropped out on me

Jakob Wredstrøm

All good, of course, no problem. So I think what's going to happen is after the call, you just keep your browser open. should upload all the remaining files. It says you need to close, try to do this. Try to close all the browsers you've Riverside on. It says you have multiple open and then close this one again. So, and make sure you only open one.

Jack McCarthy

Cool, sounds good.

Jack McCarthy

Sorry about that, kind of broke the flow there.

Jakob Wredstrøm

If not, the sink is fucked up. So if we just close this meeting, make sure everything else is closed, no other riverside and then look back in.

Jack McCarthy

Cool, should I keep the upload windows open?

Jakob Wredstrøm

As far as I understand their system, no. So right now the issue is that you have multiple things open.

Jack McCarthy

Okay, cool. Gotcha, okay. All right, one second, I'll be right back.

Jack McCarthy

Okay.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Okay. I think this should realign.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Perfect. So with my experience with this, it's gonna, so as soon as we end the recording, it's gonna make sure that the remaining local files are, yeah. So I think we should, good. So let me just reconnect. So the last question we talked about is sort of like where you see this longevity exit and that part of it.

Jack McCarthy

Cool. Awesome.

Jakob Wredstrøm

So let me just, there's the next question I want to ask. Let me just get that naturally in.

Jakob Wredstrøm

So why do you believe we're moving as an industry with Atzis? Is there gonna be a world where things will have more product offerings, where the fans' engagement with Atzis would be more digital-based? And it comes from a fundamental question from my side as... I'm not a typical music fan, but CDs, vinyls, merchandise, it's never been my thing. So for the that I like, it's very limited with how I can engage in a purchase of things. Where do you believe the future is heading here for artists and fans' ways of consuming items?

Jack McCarthy

Sure.

Jack McCarthy

Yeah, great, that's a really great question, really interesting. I think about this a lot. I think if we zoom out, like removing the thought of like transaction around certain types of products, because like media could change, right? CDs became out of fashion. and now people are buying CDs again. Vinyl went out of fashion and people are buying vinyl again. If we remove the specificity of what kind of product is being sold, the question that remains is do we think that fans will, audiences, fans, customers will... be increasingly interested in transacting with the artists and the creators that they enjoy? And I think the answer is yes. I think that's the direction that we're going. And there was a really interesting phenomenon that we saw early in 2020, 2021, when the coronavirus pandemic really squashed the ability for artists to tour. We saw a few things happen. Number one, we saw obviously tons of artists really interested in connecting with their fans online and certainly trying to sell things online because they needed a revenue stream. Totally understandable. But there was an interesting phenomenon that also came along with that is that same desire then stayed beyond that period of time. It continued even once the ability to tour came back. And what's really interesting about this is I think with that came a similar reaction from

Jack McCarthy

the customer and audience side of this relationship where fans wanted to be more deeply involved with the artists that they like and social media has played a huge role in this people feel like they have more access or they want to have more access to the influencers, creators, artists, filmmakers, actors, celebrities, public figures that they enjoy watching or paying attention to or consuming content from and so because of those two phenomenons existing together, I think we're going to continue to see The idea that an artist isn't a far away, you know, untouchable figure. There's going to be this continual intertwining between... business and customer, I think. And that applies to artists just as much as it applies to any other kind of business. We are like intertwined and ingrained with each other in how we interact from a communication standpoint. And that goes all the way from like first type of communication, like advertisement, all the way down to purchasing, know, transacting. And I actually think that's really cool. It allows for a feeling of connection between people. It allows for a feeling of connection and loyalty to the brands that you like. And so my long-winded answer here is yes, I do think we're gonna continue to see that. And I think that it's a byproduct of really like...

Jack McCarthy

just how interconnected the internet and the social media landscape has made us. And I think that will probably continue also because of the scale at which AI technology and software is going to make things faster, more efficient, cheaper. That's probably only going to continue. Now the... the places that efficiency exists in music is still, you know, kind of up for question and it's evolving every single day. So I don't know exactly where those technologies will continue that phenomenon along for us. In my wildest dreams, I don't know if I could guess right now. I have a few ideas, but I think that's, yeah, I do think that's gonna continue. And with that, like I'll point to one concrete example of I saw more when touring came back, I saw more people excited to buy merch at on tour and also when bands were off tour, like a lot of our clients would run like pre tour sales or post tour sales and more fans were excited about that than ever before and more fans wanted to have a memento something to remember and experience by. to take home with them. And I think that's kind of the, one of the big talking points that I bring when I'm talking with artists and their teams about e-commerce and this phenomenon of how fans wanna be purchasing from you and how you should own that channel is, your customers want, something to commemorate experience with. It's like the gift shop at when you're on a trip or when you're at a museum, right? You want something to commemorate the experience with that you can take home and hold and is tangible and real. And that is different for every artist. You know, like you said, for some types of artists and some types of fans, it might not be vinyl and CD and physical music. It might be something else. And that's for every artist to figure out on their own.

Jack McCarthy

And for their teams to figure out. But there is always that desire from a fan. It just takes different shapes.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Amazing. Well, Jack, thank you so much for joining the podcast. It's been a pleasure. I'm happy that you have been able to unlock a model that is sustainable, servicing us as directly. It's incredibly difficult and obviously it has its worth on your clients and it has its relevance. but that's not always how it works in music. It's not the value equals success. And even though I know that you guys are still on a path towards what you want to build, congratulations for coming this far, which is a feat in its own. And I'm sure that it's also related to continuity, like your podcasts. So we didn't cover it much today, but I think that's sort of the red thread in this is like there's a...

Jack McCarthy

Thank you so much.

Jakob Wredstrøm

single omission. You have a very specific idea of who you want to deal with in what specific way and then just keep on doing it. And I think oftentimes when I work a lot with startups, something that we forget that, you know, a lot of times businesses just continuity, clarity and continuity and, you know, just do that over and over again. So I think your journey witnesses that to be true.

Jack McCarthy

Well, thank you so much, man. That means a lot. And I really appreciate you having me and for the very thoughtful questions today. This was a blast. It was really enjoyable to go deep on some of these topics with you. I haven't gotten to go quite to this level of nerdy, which I know we were talking about before we started rolling. Like, feel free to get nerdy. This was really fun. I appreciate you allowing me to be nerdy with you. This is a blast. Thank you so much.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Amazing. Well, have a great day, Thank you for the talk.

Jack McCarthy

You too. Thanks, Jacob.