Staying Lean as a Competitive Edge in Music Tech

Jakob Wredstrøm

Here.

Christian Ringstad Schultz

Yeah, I did the same.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah, so again, we've only had very few founders on multiple times before and Christian, since you and I are working together through Music Technology Norway and I get to understand your company a lot more. I really thought Master Channel really was worth a second visit. I think it's 140 episodes ago. You were one of the first. I guess we've already started the episode, Christian, but again, I know you quite well and I really think you're a cool founder. This episode really is... just to maybe have a more nerdy talk about your business and how it might be different. Because the founder journey, obviously a lot of things have happened since we talked last, we have covered to some degree. And I think, you are also pursuing a PhD in economics, I believe. So I know you have a nerdy side. So I think we'll take the opportunity today to be nerdy, if that's okay, and try to sort of dice why Master Channel might be a good model and what.

Christian Ringstad Schultz

Yeah.

Christian Ringstad Schultz

Yeah.

Jakob Wredstrøm

People can learn from it. Does that make sense? Yep.

Christian Ringstad Schultz

Yeah, that sounds good. And it's been, yeah, I had to look into when we recorded the last episode and I was like, it was released, I think, like 10th of October in 2023. So a lot of things have changed since then for the good part though. So yeah.

Jakob Wredstrøm

What?

Jakob Wredstrøm

Okay.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Absolutely, for the good. But not to force people to go back and listen to that. For the people who don't know you, Christian, who are you and what do you do?

Christian Ringstad Schultz

So my name is Christian Schultz. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Master Channel, a Norwegian music tech company, mainly doing automated mastering of music. But we also ventured into several different other services that we created over the years. We started this company, I think like five years ago. So this is our, in 2026 is going to be our fifth year as a company. Which not many at least like hardcore music tech companies can show off. Yeah, turning 32 this year. Yeah, starting to get a grip on this industry.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Okay, let's start with, you know, a nerdy question. Said, I think I correctly said it was economics. Were starting to P, well, you're becoming a PhD in economics before you decided to focus all your time on Master Channel. If you were to put on that hat again, why does Master Channel make sense for you to pursue as a business?

Christian Ringstad Schultz

So the thing that I started at PhD in was actually data-driven business models.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Sure.

Christian Ringstad Schultz

It's a kind of mix between economics and IT in many ways. So when it comes to Master Channel, to be honest, I haven't really used that much of the knowledge from the PhD, at least directly from the PhD within Master Channel. But the way that I would say it makes sense with my background for my PhD is to do things thoroughly. And we can dive more into that later because it's a topic that I find very fascinating, especially today when people wanting to have some results immediately with wipe coding and all of these different things. But the reason are to actually go very deep into a topic and explore it. And that's maybe what I've taken the most out of doing a PhD and bringing into Master Channel that do things We're really good in the first place.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Because one thing that's really interesting about your company, again, we're sort of going a bit back and forth and I hope the listeners allow us to jump a bit back and forth, is that you're running a fairly good business when it comes to revenue and users and you're very small team. Just to set the scene, can you try to of explain, again, within the realms of what you're comfortable with, the status quo and the team and the economics of the business and how you make money?

Christian Ringstad Schultz

Yeah, so we have two different revenue streams. When we started out, we started out as a typical D2C platform with a subscription model, which we still have today, which accounts for roughly 55 to 60 % of the revenue. Last time we spoke, which were in September 2023, we had just launched what we call white-labeled AI mousing service. Which essentially means that another platform can get our technology and put it on their web page for them to monetize mastering towards their user groups. So with the SaaS model on our own platform, jumping a bit back and forth here, we do monthly or annual subscriptions for unlimited mastering of songs so people can upload and then download. And it's the download that they actually are unlocking by paying. White label side, we provide the iframe, it's like an embedded YouTube video, but just for our component, and then their user can pay per song, and then we take a part of the revenue and then we pay out the partner every quarter a part of their revenue. So that's how we managed to balance it so far.

Jakob Wredstrøm

And the team that you are operating this business with, who are they?

Christian Ringstad Schultz

So as of now, we're two and a half people, two full-time employees, and we have one part-time employees. So the company was founded by me and a German mastering engineer and audio researcher named Simon Hestemann. We are the full-time employees. We also have a third co-founder, which is Tom, or more known as the DJ and producer, Matt Homa, which is a part of the team. Board meetings and also product development and those kind of things, but not on the day-to-day business. And then we have a marketing slash business development person named Alfred who's part-time due to him finishing up his studies at the moment. And with that small team, we've managed to kind of grow and automate a lot of what we do. So our main work... which is not automated, is actually speaking to people, talking to our users through support and continue to do research and development on our core project. And we scaled Master Channel to a quite large scale. In January this year, we mastered over 99,000 songs in a month. Are currently... Yeah, this year we're currently heading towards... surpassing one million dollars in annualized revenue. Like revenue per head, which is also something I'm a fan of having as a KPI, we're in a good position there as a company. And I would say that in the music tech industry and from a music tech perspective, you need to kind of have this mindset because first of all, the music industry is not

Jakob Wredstrøm

Mm.

Christian Ringstad Schultz

Big when it comes to total amount of revenue. So you need to stay lean. There isn't that much funding out there. So you need to be smart in the way that you actually create it. And also that you have a good customer acquisition cost versus lifetime value, that it makes sense. And also when it comes to AI development, so we have created our own proprietary AI model. And on the cost basis, that makes sense versus other companies I know of which they go in like their cost when it comes to how much they process per song. It won't make sense. So they need to change something. But that's something that we have been very focused on to actually create a business model that is sustainable and doesn't need all the songs in the world for it to actually be sustainable.

Jakob Wredstrøm

I think that's interesting. Again, I do have an issue with music tech in general with like B2C models. I have a comment to this and also why I think you're doing something completely right. And that is it's incredibly difficult to scale a company with the capital needed in order to have customers and retention and you're fighting for attention across the field. And the way that... The most clever move that you made, also is quite new for me when you did it, was this sort of white label integration. And right now, you said around 55 % is from direct subscriptions, but I'm sure that also comes as a... reflection of a very successful enterprise integration. Try to explain to me what specifically was done with that white label solution and who is using a service right now, but then also how you see that affecting your direct subscriptions and how that sort of also affects business that direction.

Christian Ringstad Schultz

So when we started out offering the white labeling, the first thing we did was actually offering our API, which we build everything on. But the challenge within the, especially in the music industry, is that when you try to sell an API to a company and our main target audience when it comes to using the white labeling or API is distribution companies, like Tunecore, Amuse, Dido, Symphonic and those kinds of companies. They don't have that much tech capacity in the house. So when you try to sell access to an API, you're always getting pushed down the roadmap. And we know that our product is not a need to have. It's not like we build the infrastructure that their whole company is running on. We're a nice to have product. We are a good upsell. We provide a clear revenue stream and they can also keep their users on the platform. But when we started approaching companies with that, all of those different challenges occurred. So that's why we created the white labeling, because then we could bypass the whole tech discussion, talk directly to the marketing team. If they know how to insert a embed, like a YouTube embed, then they're good to go. And most people know that because a lot of these platforms are... The front end is built on WordPress or WooCommerce or similar things where they use HTML or just plain text. So when we launched the first one, which was with Amuse, which has been a long-time partner of ours and we have a very good relationship with them, we thought that, okay, this actually works. Makes sense from a financial perspective for both companies. And after that, we started to get the snowball rolling. Like if you have one that you can have clear data on that this works, then it's easier to onboard new ones. So the companies that are using us today, we have 35 different platforms that we have integrated with from all across the world. But the biggest one are TuneCore, Ditto, Symphonic, Amuse.

Christian Ringstad Schultz

We have Horace Music and then we also have some other platforms which are not directly distribution companies but more like the promotion or other kind of companies which for example Groover is a good partner of ours, the French company. There are a lot of them. Yeah, and we had a very big focus on that in 2023-2024 but then in 2025 we also knew that okay. Do we have to take a decision? Do we want to be a feature on other companies' platforms? Or do we actually want to create a bigger company ourselves? So what we did then was that we started focusing quite a lot on our D2C platform. And the good thing about the mix between white labeling and our own platform is that we use our own platform. Where we now have close to 70,000 users as a testing ground for features. And once those features are proven to solve a real problem for the users, then we can actually roll that out to our white labeling partners, because they already have us embedded. So it's kind of like both of them are giving an advantage to both of them, because in the end, it's the same user group. Individual artist that wants to make this song sound better.

Jakob Wredstrøm

And at any point of time was the white label revenue higher than the direct subscription?

Christian Ringstad Schultz

Yeah, it's just in the past month that our own platform has surpassed the white labeling revenue. So it has been bigger for quite some time.

Jakob Wredstrøm

When you were at the sort highest skewedness there, how big a percentage did the white labeling have compared to direct subscriptions?

Christian Ringstad Schultz

So if I remember correctly, I think it was like 70, 30 or something. Yeah.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Okay. Do you believe that the sort of brand awareness of being embedded in these platforms have helped sort of you to acquire users later or what's sort of your perspective on that?

Christian Ringstad Schultz

Yes, it has. And that is mainly because we have different value propositions on our own platform versus on the white labeling side. So for example, on our own platform, we also do album mastering and we have a service called West Clark AI, which is our collaboration with the Grammy-winning engineer, Wes Clark, where we cloned his technique, sound and style so people can kind of work with him digitally. And that's not something that we have been offering to white labeling customers so far. It might open up. But yeah, and then there's also storage, like people can store their songs on their own platform. When it comes to the white labeling, they do one-offs. So it's not that easy to implement all these different things.

Jakob Wredstrøm

So what is the end game for this? Because on the enterprise side, I would call you market leaders as far as I understand. You probably have the biggest integration. And even though that's a decent revenue, it's still like you have the mercy of whatever the users are using on their platforms. And then you have this opportunity for acquiring users on your own, which is not growing the company. But to what end? Where do you see like... this path leading you, what do you want to become?

Christian Ringstad Schultz

One of the key things that we've been talking about for several years now, I remember we met people that have been very skeptical about the vision for Master Channel, because what we essentially want to become is a standard for better sounding music. So we are still providing our API and white labeling solutions to other partners because we want to be in as many places as possible. But we also want to create this. And that's also why we have a focus on B2C. That we want to create a bigger playground for creating new services that can actually solve new problems for the industry. And that's something that we see right now with, know, like Suno, Udo, all these different like generative companies coming out and the way that people are using them. So we can serve that group as well, because they have other demands and they're not that technically skilled when it comes to music production. So like both come a different way of communicating to them and also different kind of feature sets that is needed to actually help them getting better audio quality.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm. For listings listing like I'm a person that doesn't spend a lot of money in things I don't need and really in music even though I have a rich music background I only I only subscribe to two softwares one is Songbox from Ireland. Another one is master channel So like and I do that because I believe you're the cheapest best most effective solution on the market And mastering is a necessary evil or good I don't know like if you want to have something that's released mastering is sort of non-negotiable but again the old path of paying a master engineer is a bit complicated. You need to know the right guy. You need to also negotiate a good price. It can be a bit timely with revisions. And so this is just a very good product in my opinion. Could you speak about the market in general when it comes to of AI mixing, AI mastering? Like, how do you see this market? Where is the opportunity? Like you're in the middle of it. But for people sort of maybe wanting to venture into the space or already in the space, what's your take on the market?

Christian Ringstad Schultz

So there were more, or I would say there were more serious companies prior to today. You had a lot of players out there like Cloudbounce existed that is now purchased by ImageLine. When you use FL Studio, you have like the mastering feature there that is from the Finnish company Cloudbounce. You have companies like Lander who has been, they pioneered this space. You have EMaster that have been around for quite some time. And then you have more new incumbents like RoEx from England. And you have a lot of smaller platforms. But I think one of the challenges of actually making it today, if you are really focused on AI mixing and AI mastering, is to get enough people to use it in a short amount of time. Because... you need to stay lean as a company because this niche is not like the most lucrative one. So getting investment from like VCs to Pyronews or to conquer this niche, that will probably be very hard for new companies, especially as you know, like the tech costs are dropping. Yeah, but the way that I see it going forward is that these different terms might be a bit more blurred going forward because new people coming into the industry not necessarily knowing about what mixing and mastering originally was. So I think it's the important part for any company or any people that want to venture into doing something like we have done is to actually speak more about what like talk to the feelings of the people. What do you actually want to want to help them with? And that is not fixing your 50 Hz frequency. Because most people probably don't know what that even means. It's more about like, yeah, we're going to make your sound as good as possible on Spotify or SoundCloud or on your AirPods. That's kind of like the way we see that shift has been happening for some years now and going to be more important going forward.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Well, you're already touching upon it, but how do you communicate your, what's your value proposition you put in front of customers?

Christian Ringstad Schultz

So our key value propositions is one of them is that it will sound good regardless of where you play it. Like if you play it in your car, your club, on a speaker system, in your house or on Spotify, SoundCloud, Tidal, whatever. It will sound as good as possible. Another thing is peace of mind. That artists should focus on the more creative part and then we can fix all the barriers for them. And then it's cost efficiency. You can see a lot of these are competitors. Most of them have some kind of threshold when it comes to number of songs that people can actually upload. When it comes to, and if you tie that to peace of mind, that becomes more kind of hard for an artist to understand like, okay, do I need to pay this tier which has 12 songs or do I need 36 songs or whatever? That's why we provide unlimited amount of songs and then it's up to us to actually make sure that it's financially sustainable model. But for the artists themselves, they should need to calculate if it's worth spending that money.

Jakob Wredstrøm

On the technical side, I know you have a very particular way of doing mastering and I'm sure you're not giving anything away because anyone trying to venture into space have a lot of options to pick from and they probably do their homework. But you also mentioned cost in that association, like that you have a cost efficient way of doing mastering. Even though you're not the engineer, I'm sure that you could describe a bit how you're doing this and why it makes sense for your specific use case and the economic realities of the market.

Christian Ringstad Schultz

Yeah, the way that, to put it into perspective, a more historical perspective, the way that AI mastering was used to be done was having a huge data set of songs. So when you upload a song, you found the most similar one, they applied those presets and then you need to tweak it. That's how, for example, Lander has been built. We saw that was a possibility for us, but it would be so... costly to actually curate those datasets. Today we have a whole other discussion going on about ethical datasets, like do you actually have the right to use it? So we kind of stumbled into reinforcement learning, which is another way of building AI models. So when we started developing this, or Simon, my co-founder started developing this back in late 2019, start of 2020. He started to automate his workflow as a mastering engineer based on his preferences in what we called benchmarks. So when you upload a song, the system started to analyze the track and then it tests out a lot of different benchmarks. Similar to how a mastering engineer would work, we use a lot of the same kind of like EQing, dynamics and all of these different things. And then we generate two to three thousand different versions and then it's the best one. That you get back. And the positive thing when it comes to cost about this is that if a new genre pops up, we don't need to curate a new dataset that matches that genre, because it's all entangled into the benchmarks and we can easily just tweak these if needed. And that has been tweaked for five years now. It's now kind of like very good to create, to keep... the originality in the song and that's also what we hear a lot that it's no artifacts that are being putted on the song it's very much similar to how a human would actually engineer the track.

Jakob Wredstrøm

And what about the cost? You mentioned it in what you said, but specifically, what is it about that mythology that is less costly?

Christian Ringstad Schultz

One is the curation of data set. It's hard to find the relevant data set. Another thing is processing, because rather than searching through millions and millions of different songs, we have our set of benchmarks. Which means that it's less work in that degree. Then we also have a...

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah, sure.

Christian Ringstad Schultz

Easier when it comes to storage and all those different things. We have everything in one place and we have been very focused, as I mentioned earlier, on actually optimizing what we can do and not just how much the user can pay. Because then we know that, okay, we can keep the same price and it doesn't really matter because in the end it's all about cost efficiency.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah, and you know, that's back to the argument with you probably can't raise too much capital in this space. There's also, it is a niche, like, you know, even as you guys doing significantly well in your space and doing good revenue, it's still compared to, you know, whatever opportunities there in the world for building a SaaS, it's still sort of small, but that's also the realities you sort of operate within and you need to stay very conscious of that. So I guess you spend a lot of time of just thinking about cost efficiency. Like that's where you put a lot of your energy, I guess.

Christian Ringstad Schultz

Yeah, it is. And coming from like, I have a financial background as well from studying and also from running a company prior to Master Channel. And I'm fascinated about it. Like, how can you actually make a company as efficient as possible? Which we see nowadays, like if you go five years back, then it would be much harder to get that thought around like you would need or people would assume that you would need 40, 50 people in order to run this operation. Nowadays it's very normal for a company to have two to five people and that's it. So I think like the way that we structure the company rather and rather outsourcing different parts of work, we don't necessarily need to hire a person to do design work or those kinds of things. We can outsource it and that's more like the future driven approach, I would say, to building a company. And that's where we've been from actually day one.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Since we both sit in the board of music technology in Norway, think there's an interesting thing to be discussed about music technology in general. I think we can both agree that there's many models in music technology you could pursue, but financially it can be difficult to pursue them because of the constraints of the market or requiring users of what it is. And one of the byproducts of AI that people don't talk too much about is effectivizing companies and especially models that maybe weren't

Christian Ringstad Schultz

Mm.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Viable to pursue in the past. How do you think about that? Because the way that you describe Master Channel as staying lean is not, you I know you, of course you're busy, but you're not stressed beyond measure. Like you're still a fairly composed person. When I call you, you pick up the phone. So you must have spent some time also making your company efficient. And can you make maybe a macro comment on music technology when it comes to efficiency and the models in general?

Christian Ringstad Schultz

Yeah, so this is an interesting topic, I would say, going back to our cost base, which is one of the reasons why we actually are able to do what we do and not killing ourselves with work, is that our own model is proprietary. We build everything ourselves. What we see today when it comes to a lot of these new companies is that they build on other companies' models. And that can work to some degree because you can scale it, but you're also very dependent on the cost base of the other company. So if they increase their cost, you will need to increase your cost as well. And what we had for a couple of years now is that a lot of the costs have been kind of VC funded. So I would say a lot of companies building in the music tech space today are actually

Jakob Wredstrøm

Mm.

Christian Ringstad Schultz

Building on prices that are not sustainable in the long run. So they will need to adapt to a future where the models will be more expensive, which is an advantage for us.

Jakob Wredstrøm

I want you to continue your explanation, but I think that's a really interesting point. We just need to stop there. So basically what you're saying is companies are building on models of other companies that are VC funded and basically subsidizing their rates because they can, but that part is going to end at one point. Is that basically what you're saying? Or maybe you can explain it in depth.

Christian Ringstad Schultz

Yeah, and that's the challenge for the whole AI industry. I recently read, I don't remember exactly who wrote it, but it was estimated that we need two trillion dollars in funding in order to get over that hill that we are in to make it sustainable financially. And I don't think that money will come anywhere or in the near future. So if you look at companies like OpenAI, if you look at companies that are building Google and stuff like that, a lot of them are losing money when it comes to their LLMs, but they are funding it either to VC or to other products. So that's a big challenge and that's not only for the music industry.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It's not something I think too much about. I think it's also maybe incorrect of me, but like, you know, the race to bottom model where we have these big providers fighting for market share, but it's also, you know. You just need to look at history, right? know, when the players fall, the small players will fall with them. And there's probably multiple scenarios, both with the big providers, but also music technology providers. If that's, you know, people with APIs or SDKs that you're using, that you're in the same risk category. So that makes a whole lot of sense.

Christian Ringstad Schultz

Mm.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Sorry, I stopped you. Maybe you can continue again. The major question I asked was about efficiency of work that can also make business models viable now, more so in the past. I don't know if you had more points, but I did stop you before you were done.

Christian Ringstad Schultz

I think one of the key things for teams going forward is also to stay lean and make sure that you know what you're solving. I think there are a lot of opportunities at home. I'm not trying to paint a doomsday picture here of everything going to shit, but I think there are lot of opportunities here for companies that want to solve problems in a niche, especially if their outcome is creating a lifestyle business or being acquired. Because what we've seen so far in 2026, and I find that quite interesting, that it seems like the acquisition rate and the merging rate in the music industry on the music tech side are picking up again. Splice acquiring a company, you had BeatStars acquiring a company, you had Lander acquiring a company. And like these bigger companies actually taking on smaller ones, not necessarily newer ones, but...

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm.

Christian Ringstad Schultz

But that you kind of have this merging in the industry. So that, I would say, could be a good opportunity for smaller companies if that's their end goal. Otherwise, you can also use the same tactics if you manage to scale to a certain degree.

Jakob Wredstrøm

But one of things that I preach through my studies on music tech financing is building a model that realistically can be acquired for 5-7 million euros and build a business that respects those metrics. How much capital do need? If you need a lot, you won't fall into that category and then therefore your chances of being acquired just on how the market works is less. Or you can also be acquired and you your investors lose money. There's many ways to go about this. But if you just want to follow the market realities of consolidation, then having these niche additive solutions are the ones getting the deal oftentimes. But if you've built it too hard with too much capital, you probably won't make any money on it when you get acquired. And it's not because you always have a choice. Sometimes when people get acquired, even though that can be a good day, it could also be because we can't get more growth capital or either the market is too saturated, like there's too much competition. So the next part of it is going to be almost impossible to do. So you hit a ceiling really fast. That's what I think that's the consistent thing that I see the most that I disagree with in this market is that people believe the ceiling is tall. Like it's a high ceiling. It just isn't. It might be for very few players, but for most of those players, they've existed for 20 years. Like, you know, you can break a few ceilings if you have 20 years being first in the market and get enough capital, but if you're not any of those, you'll probably get stuck at the ceiling.

Christian Ringstad Schultz

And I think that's one of the reasons why we probably will see less VC funding in this industry going forward. Or maybe not less, but at least less growth in that kind of funding. Because if you are to fund a company which is a niche in the music space, maybe you can get it to 20-30 million dollars if you're realistic about it. What kind of funds actually exist that only has that kind of capital and that are willing to invest? And as you touch on, that's a very good point, I would say that the time in the market is a key asset for any company. And I don't think we talked too much about it, but if you look at, for example, TuneCore, CD Baby or other distribution companies, which we work pretty close with, one of the key reasons why they still have their market power is because if you look at search for distribution and you want to Okay, how can I get my song on Spotify? They're the first one to show up because they are everywhere. Not necessarily because they are the best solution. It might be better solution like speaking technically today, but they are like trust is important. And that's also something that we see here at Master Channel now that we're turning five years that we've been around for long enough time for people to actually trust us where they don't think of us as a kind of scam or some other like AI model that just wants to read people off for a quick buck, which there are different examples of companies or people trying to do these days. So that's also why we are very much invested. A lot of the things that we invest in is speaking to people, being there for user support, making sure that people actually trust us as a brand, as a company, and most importantly, as humans. So we showcase our face and all those different things.

Jakob Wredstrøm

I'll be sending this to you anyways, Christian, in a couple of weeks. But as you know, I also have a nerdy side and did a master's in music business where I just focused on music tech financing. And I, my free time, have been trying to sort of understand the music scene in Norway since we started the book together. And I have basically I've just been

Christian Ringstad Schultz

Mm.

Jakob Wredstrøm

On prof and just like every single company, try to analyze the financials. And I have a really interesting numbers. And one of them that's related to this conversation, but I will send it to you in a couple of weeks, is that the average time, that the median time to profitability in Norwegian music tech companies, eight years. Eight years, so median time, which is really interesting, right? Because you need patience. Like you need patience from you start something, you get maybe some angel funding, you start revenue.

Christian Ringstad Schultz

Eight years. Yeah.

Jakob Wredstrøm

But median time too is eight years. also, again, I'll set you the numbers, but the really interesting thing is that the companies in NOAA that's existed more than 15 years are 10X, 15X the revenue of the rest. So like the time you exist in the market really matters. If you can get to those 10, 15, 20 year markers, I'm not saying that should be Master Channel, you might have other plans, but in music tech, in general audio tech,

Christian Ringstad Schultz

Hmm.

Jakob Wredstrøm

That's where the money lies. It lies in this consistent step-by-step, not hyper-growth path, which is to some degree closer to like an SME. Like it's, know, a small medium enterprise business that is a sensible shop. And I think that the really difficult part of financing and being a startup in this space is that you associate it way too much with Silicon Valley and way too little about like just the shop on the corner.

Christian Ringstad Schultz

Mm.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Like, I think that oftentimes is the reality of our space that you need to treat it like that. Like you need to have sensible finances. You can't lose too much money. You can't promise too much either. Like you just diligent show up and do it again and again. What do you think? Now I just threw some numbers in your face,

Christian Ringstad Schultz

Yeah. for us, we turned profitable last year. So it took us four years, which I realized that's quite fast for a company like this. But I think one of the things that we need to consider, especially here in Norway and also for other smaller companies, is that we still need to be ambitious and we need to go out, especially in the music tech scene, we need to go outside of our country right away because the money is everywhere else. Like take an example, Norway has 5.5 million people living here. In Germany, there's 83 million people. In US, there are 320 million. So the number, there's a whole different ball game. Of course, there's more competition. But again, we are building for a global audience. Music is global. So we need to take that into consideration. But I think there are four companies that want to start from Norway or anywhere else. Not treating it like Silicon Valley can be good. But going through the racism capital would also be beneficial for companies. So you're not only having it as a side gig because then... The challenge of actually building it to a big enough brand or that you can make it sustainable is much harder. But that's where I feel like we have done it in a good way by doing angel investment from people that are interested. We have some artists on our cap table. We have people that are interested in the tech, interested in music industry and want to be a part of it, but don't have that expectation of returning a fund of 400 million dollars for example, which AVC often or AVC need to do. So that's like the middle ground there, not bootstrapping but more of the angel face.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm I'll ask you a hypothetical question and it's sort of a bit nosy, but I'm sure you won't be too uncomfortable with it I don't know what your path is if that's you, know building this to a bigger brand or you, know See if you want to sell it but in the math that you understand if you were to sell like a company like yours today What do you believe that could sell for in its current state?

Christian Ringstad Schultz

That's a really hard question to answer. there are multiple ways of evaluating a company. We can look at the sales revenue, like how much do we actually have in ARR, multiply that with whatever, like four or five or something. The thing that could be interesting in our point of view and from our company is that, for example, the tech that we have is proprietary.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Hmm.

Christian Ringstad Schultz

We own it and we also have a patent pending on parts of it, which could be beneficial to others. Brand recognition is something that can always drive the value up. And a factor that I think will be more important going forward is both profitability, is your company profitable and how lean is your company? 75 % of companies when they are being acquired or they merge, 75 % of them fail because of cultural differences. So the smaller team you have, the less cultural difference it might be. then, yeah, another thing which I was pointed out by a person recently was that most companies that are being acquired... are being acquired by companies that are close to them either in domain or geography. So US-based companies often acquire US-based companies, European companies acquire European companies because the risks are lower. So yeah.

Jakob Wredstrøm

It's interesting. You never answered my question though, but you know, let's just go by the simple, by revenue and say, okay, it's.

Christian Ringstad Schultz

Yeah, where we... To be honest, I'm not really sure. We'll see.

Jakob Wredstrøm

No, it's okay. That's why it was nosy. But again, I think I got a lot of information from the enter as well. But you as a founder now that you have a good company, know, a startup, it will always be a startup, there will always be issues, but like at least on paper, but I'm also sure in person, it's a good company now. Like you have your ROOSP, you have your customers, you know, know your strategy, you know how to acquire users, you're profitable, you have significant revenue, have good partnerships. What's the next step for you? Like, where do you want to take this?

Christian Ringstad Schultz

So going into 2026, what we actually are doing right now is that we are kind of cleaning up everything that we have, automating most of what we do in order to scale into new products. So we are thinking of several things that can be interesting and it's more about like what do our users actually need. So without going into too much detail, it's building on what we already have.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Mmm, wow.

Christian Ringstad Schultz

But if you look at the music production phase as a line, then we're kind of at the end. We're targeting some people here and we want to target more people along their journey. So that will be very important for us to acquire more users that can use us on a more frequent basis and not just as one-offs or at the end of their songs because... we can be used for a lot of different things.

Jakob Wredstrøm

One of the issues that I often see in music, including myself, is that a lot of people going into music tech are from music and oftentimes they're quite creative. In my case also with Heavy ADHD. And I've always been out of like the creation, like more opportunities, more opportunities, more products. And ultimately that's also why I do a Venture Studio because I can't abandon that notion completely. One of my friends run a company somewhat similar approach than yours, Hannah Sanderson, who's the CEO of OX sound legendary company. And they have existed for eight years. Make incredible revenue with incredible margins. And they've only released three products in eight years. And it's a, well, it's a plugin. And you know, what company in the world in the plugin industry only releases three plugins in eight years, but they have the same mentality as you is like, let's serve the client. Let's do this product the best way we can. We have a lean company with good margins and, then we build something exactly for the, for the user. And we're going to take a time doing it, which for me really intuitively is a very foreign concept to how I function as a human being, but also as I grow older and I'm also, I think I'm 32, I'm 31. I remember. As I grow older and I have three kids, I've come to realize and appreciate the sensible path a lot more. Like things will take time, things will be hard. Let's not make it harder for ourselves every single day.

Christian Ringstad Schultz

Hmm.

Christian Ringstad Schultz

Yeah, and I think that's very important to have in mind when you want to venture into MusicTech or in any company for that sake. That you realize that it's not something that you will build in a year and then you're good to go. Most companies will never end up as lovable where they have like 500 or 200 million ARR in two or three years. That's not realistic. So you need to be more realistic about it. And I think like on a general note, that's a challenge that we are facing right now where people want that immediate feedback all the time, much driven by social media and those kinds of things. So I think if you are in the space right now and you have built a company that is sustainable in a good way financially and you manage to like have a long-term vision, but also break it down into smaller pieces where you can solve different problems for your customers, then you probably are in a good position long term because new people coming into the scene will probably need to do the same journey as you are and you're always ahead as long as you don't like rest on your laurels. You need to stay hungry.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Very true. Well, Christian, it's been a pleasure. Always love talking with you. And I think MasterChef definitely deserved to be guest again after 140 episodes. Christian, think you're brilliant businessman. I love talking with you about business. And I'm very excited to see how the next steps will be for you because you've built a solid ground. And I think you can build something on top of that, like a really good foundation rather than... another just moonshot pursuit and I'm not saying Master Jam was a moonshot but you've entered into a difficult space that's for sure and did well so

Christian Ringstad Schultz

Yeah. And on like a final note, I recently spoke with Einar Helde from Ames API. And he mentioned that like 2 % of music tech companies make it. So I feel like this industry is a lot tougher than a lot of others, especially due to it being less money here. And there are a lot of people who want to create in this space. So yeah, it's hard to stick out. But for a...

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yeah.

Christian Ringstad Schultz

But the ones that do, there are endless opportunities because the amount of people that want to use those kinds of products are bigger than we might think.

Jakob Wredstrøm

Yep, and probably become more. Thank you, Christian. I appreciate your time and we'll talk soon. Yep.

Christian Ringstad Schultz

Yeah.

Christian Ringstad Schultz

Yeah, thanks for having me. All right.