Streamlining Music Tech with Tuned Global

I'm going to say that anyone who really understands music would never get involved if they knew the end game at the start. I mean, you know, I really laugh around, Iguess, how simple music looks from the outside.

The whole purpose of this podcast is givingyou insight into the lives of entrepreneurs in the music industry that's done somethinggreat. Conrazzo from 2Global has done that. He does not come from the music industry perse. He's come from the outside. And made a big difference. Hope you like it. Hi everyone and welcome back to Sound Connectionspodcast.

Today we have an amazing guest. It is Con Razzo from Australia. Thank you for being here Con. Hey, great to be here and be with you alltoday. I heard about Tune Global through one of mymusic industry colleagues and it's a really interesting company and you're a really interesting entrepreneur. And we're gonna talk about your journey asan entrepreneur today and the learnings from that.

Before we dive into your journey, Um, can you just tell me about your company? What do you do? Yeah. So True Global is, provides a platform forthe music industry and it's a technology platform that really provides not only the music assetsthemselves that might be available. We have over 130 million music tracks on oursystem.

Uh, the rights to how they might be used,but, uh, also context to that. Like what would you suggest to someone tolisten to? How would you use music in gaming? How could you use music in background musicor in a traditional streaming service? In the back of seats in airlines. So we really cover a lot of different industries,but it all really does relate.

I'm gonna say in the main to music, that'sreally about 90% of what we do. But you know, we do live video, podcasting,and a whole range of services. So it's exciting to sit with companies thatare building something new and then find out how you can sort of... help them power that to something that's successful.

Amazing. Well, we'll get back to the company and reallydeep dive into your services and also the problems you're solving. But before we do that, I'm really curiousabout your story because right before we started the actual recording, we talked about themusic industry. And one of your comments were that maybe you'remore technologists that works with music as sort of the thing.

So you come from Australia and you had an upbringing in what industry? Yeah. I guess it has, I mean, as far as me to explainthat technologist thing and things like that, I mean, technology is always, I've alwaysbeen extremely curious about technology. And I guess it is my passion to really thinkabout problems from a technical viewpoint and how to solve those problems.

And I think that's the roots of what I am. I think as far as music is concerned, I wouldn'tsay that I'm not about music. I did grow up in Australia through the maybelate 70s and 80s, and that was really a time of English punk and that real emergence ofthat music in Australia.

I was definitely part of that scene and understanding and being passionate about that. I really approached my first roles from atechnology perspective, often in businesses that were starting to look at e-commerce andhow to put those e-commerce elements together.

And this was really, you know, pre-2000s,so it was quite a challenging era for how you're going to do that at scale. And so I was involved in quite a number ofdifferent businesses through that stage that were dealing with e-commerce. directly to consumers and building large-scalebusinesses in that frame. So when we started to, you know, as we'lltalk about in a moment, when we started to look at music, it was really similar to whatI'd been doing in initially a non-music space, which then evolved into working with musicin creating robotic CD duplication systems

that we started to actually... allow small-scale production that went intoretail stores. How we started to look at that in terms ofwhat would it mean for artists if they could now start to promote small-scale CD productionthemselves? Could they start to grow a revenue base?

From that process which we'll talk about ina little while, it was obvious that CD business wasn't going to stay around and we transitioned into something else. But I would say generally it's all been abouthow to deliver something to end consumers. Initially it was physical, then it becamedigital somewhat, and then became fully digital eventually.

Yeah. So you sort of got an interest for music andsort of some of the problems that are in early music that maybe you could solve. Is that sort of where your venture happened? I'm gonna say that... Anyone who really understands music wouldnever get involved if they knew the end game at the start. I mean, you know, I really laugh around, Iguess, how simple music looks from the outside, but how immensely complex it is, not onlyby the music itself and what it means and what it means to people, which is just, youknow, incredibly diverse.

but also how many people and stakeholdersare involved in the music production side, you know? Like, and so that process, I can't say thatwe certainly understood it. And from a perspective to understand the basicsof licensing and what it meant for performers and writers and other aspects like that.

Um, and our journey was, or my journey was,I started to develop consciously relationships with a number of the major labels in Australia and one specifically. And really started to build that relationshipto understand what were the gaps in the market.

By this stage, we'd already considered thatthe journey needed to be in digital music, but there was, and we'll talk about in a moment,there was a transition time that downloads were still a thing. And so it wasn't quite streaming yet. So that was part of our journey from downloadsinto streaming and that side.

And talking with these major labels, did youhave like in clearly, okay, this is some pain points that maybe I want to be tackle? I think it was more opportunities to be honest. Uh, the pain points was that here was a newemerging way of consuming music. Right. And it may have been a little bit less soin the download space, although there was a real opportunity around how different non-traditional brands may want to be involved in that space and have their own shop fronts, for want ofa better word, right, and be able to provide music to end users.

But also certainly with, you know, what was starting to happen with mobile phonesand we could start to see applications. So in that really, really early stage, youknow, we built a proof of concept on a BlackBerry device to show that music could stream ona BlackBerry. And that was something that people had rarelyseen before.

And so whereas we think about it today and go, oh yeah, it's just a music streaming application. There were so many challenges that had tobe resolved every step along the way when you were really creating brand new ways ofthis technology working and working at scale. So it was really about that, but especially,I guess, major music labels, generally speaking, I would say they're somewhat conservative.

Perhaps on the A&R side, there's a littlebit more in terms of risk to take towards someone that you think is going to break. But in terms of where the industry's going,there's a little bit more conservative stature. And so it took a while to build those relationships. So it was a very conscious effort on my partto, and I'm from Melbourne, Australia, most of the major music labels here in Sydney.

So it was a lot of trips to go to Sydney andreally build those relationships and build a story around what we could do together. And start doing a few things together to buildcredibility within that space. I'm curious specifically, in your storytelling,you worked for one company and you did something and you sort of pivoted away from these physicalthings and now into the early days of Trincoble.

What specifically happened? Did you just leave your job and started pursuingthis venture? I'm going to say some of the people, I endedup becoming the CEO of one of those early companies and some of the people I was involvedwith at the time, we decided together that there was a real opportunity here in music. So together, I guess I became the founderthat had the physical part or involvement in the business and then I had a few peoplethat were willing to put in some money for the journey along the way as well.

So we did that together. To me, it was a really big opportunity withinmusic and distributing digital music, but not within a context of Australia, but globally. So it was that real global aspect. Until that time, a lot of the things we haddone had been mainly focused around maybe Australia and New Zealand markets.

So yeah, it was that piece of taking a bigpay cut and going all in. on that process. And I think founders clearly understand that. I think there's always this element wherepeople who aren't founders don't quite get the sacrifices that you make along the wayand the near-death experiences that you have on your journey, right, that really shapeyou.

And I think you have to be happy to be ableto sleep at night with risk. Yeah. No, I can definitely recognize that. So what was your life situation when you decidedto, okay, I'm going to go on my own and start this company. Did you have like a house, a car, a family? What was your life situation? I had all that. I had three kids.

I married and so no, I had the whole processin place. And so it was... I've never... I've never shied away from a risk, althoughI would say, you know, that doesn't, I don't think I'm in the crazy space with risk.

It's always like understanding what the paybackis and the risk component is. But it was an opportunity that we felt wasjust huge, right? Now, I would say we learned a lot along theway. It's like any entrepreneur or most entrepreneurs,if you knew your journey, would you have started at the start, right?

Maybe yes, maybe no. I would say from my perspective at the moment,the answer would certainly be yes, but we're in a good position at the moment, right? If you asked me in the middle of it, perhapsI would have been a little bit more circumspect on that answer. Yeah, because you mentioned at the start ofthis interview about if you actually knew the full journey, maybe music would not bethe space you would tackle.

Let's go into that in a second because that'sreally interesting and obviously that's something I hear a lot. But you say we a lot and when you read aboutTuneGlobal, it says you as co-founder and CEO. So could you just go through, who did youstart this with? Yeah, initially it was mainly myself. It was a... co-founder that was involved for a small timein the business as well.

But I use the word we because I just believeit's always a team. Right? So the end, and in some cases, certainly myfamily and the sacrifices they have to make along the way when we think of we and we thinkof those decisions. I, you know, I think, you know, like all ofus or me in particular, I have to be conscious that I don't use the word I a lot throughthat process.

But you know, great businesses are not builtwith individuals. An individual certainly leads the process,I believe, but it is the ideas that come out of building a culture where those ideas cancome to the forefront and, you know, the normal stuff, there's no good or bad. Let's put them in the pot and understand andtest which ones work.

So I'm really big on, you know, let's not just build it and they will come. Let's actually understand what we're doinghere in the process. Yeah. I think also, you know, the ask we just saidabout, you know, the family also being part of we... I'm in the same situation now that you wereback then. You know, I have three kids and a wife, andit definitely is a journey you take together because there's a lot of sacrosanct alongthe way.

Absolutely. I think, you know, from certainly travel... economic sacrifices that you make along thejourney. You have to be good at communication, I think. And I think you have to be able to carve outtime that is important for the family as well.

I know that's... We deal in a lot of different cultures andeach culture has something different about it. And we've got to be really conscious of thosecultures. I think to a benefit from our side, Australiaprobably has a bit of a mix of both, working pretty hard, but also enjoying what you'redoing and getting a bit of balance in that process.

I'm not gonna say it's really balanced becauseI don't think a founder can be truly balanced. It's a really difficult thing to do, but youneed to make an effort toward that. So specifically, what did you do? So you had this idea about Tune Global andthen what?

Yeah, great question. I mean, our journey is a little bit of aninteresting one. So we had this idea of Tune Global. We started, we had some, you know, there's... I'm going to say it's sales that occur sometimes. There's either sales or, you know, clientsthat want to take a position somewhere.

And some of those things don't end up workingout the way you want them to. At the end of the day, you know, clients runout of money sometimes or an idea fails or other elements like that. But I'm a really strong believer. And I look back and say, everything that wedid took us to a better place. It didn't look like it at the time.

And so, you know, one of the first thingsthat we were involved with, we started to look at clients that required different services. And there was one idea that ultimately didnot happen. And this person sort of left one of the musiclabels owed a fair bit of money. But together, we were able to build somethingthat was truly interesting and unique that and developed a really strong relationshipwith EMI at the time.

when they were still an independent musiclabel. And that was really powerful because it startedto allow us to ideate with them what are the opportunities in this particular market. Now we needed additional money, right? So along that journey. And Australia is not an awesome place to raisedollars for the music industry, right?

And so I'm going to say we probably did wellover a hundred presentations before we found a VC firm that had an interest and we literallyalmost camped on their doorstep because they had an interest to be able to get enough seedcapital.

And it was a great opportunity because wewere able to put together that seed capital. And very quickly, we actually built a businessto profitability, right? Good. Really early. But that profitability wasn't about growinga big business. It was about, great, we've now got a businessthat's profitable, but how do we take this further?

Right? And, um, and that was really the second partof our journey, which was into a more serious capital raising and understanding what itwas going to take to grow a business, um, at scale. The first product or service you delivered,what was that? Was it a technological thing or was it a consultancy service?

What specifically did you do? No, it was a technology thing. It was about how to deliver music within... It wasn't quite a... In a broad... I don't know if I can actually speak aboutthe concept so much because it's probably still there and they're probably still doingsomething with it, but generally it was around how to connect music to a physical product.

So this was early on in the industry. And so we created the entire technical platformto be able to do that and deliver the entire end-to-end technical platform. So we're able to demonstrate a great dealof capability. We would always regard ourselves as reallystrong technically as a team.

And, you know, we'd certainly build thingsthat work, not things that, you know, that... we just talk about and never exist. And the VC money, was that coming in basedon that first customer or where in the journey were they in the customer acquisition?

No, but every time that you do a pitch, youdo talk about what you've got in the pipeline. And I think some of these pipeline items don'talways work out in... But as an entrepreneur, I think one of thethings that you have to be able to do is pivot on your ideas and still deliver to your investors,but it may not be on what you commenced the idea on, if you like, from a customer set.

So I think there's been a lot of those instanceswhere there's been really strong hunger for what we do that has enabled various entitiesto want to be part of the journey.

You know, that's, I guess that's part of theentrepreneurial journey of raising that next round and seeing where you need to go, youknow, from our position now, you know, we haven't raised any money for a number of yearsin our, uh, in our journey. Um, and today we're looking more at acquisitionsperhaps, um, rather than, you know, other elements.

So it's turned a lot full circle there. In a lot of cases, I now sit on the otherside of the fence, perhaps like yourself and appraise ideas and I'm tough on them, right? As you have to be. You don't always understand that as an entrepreneur going out, that you really need to be really deep and expert on your subject and understandthe fundamentals of what you're trying to do.

in some regards, looking back at those 100pitches you had, do you understand why people didn't understand you? I think part of it certainly is the musicindustry itself and the complexity of the music industry and that perhaps we shouldhave gone to a broader market than a very challenging market such as Australia.

But certainly from your pitches, absolutely. the more we've gone along our journey, themore we've understood to be very specific about the products it is that we're buildingand the problems that we're trying to solve. In some cases, I'm gonna say those problemsaren't always for the first, putting profit right in front in some cases.

There's some things that we wanna do to seea difference made in the industry. But obviously a company has to be healthyto be able to deliver in those particular ways.So you have to wind that into the process. So no, I think most people can't clearly explainwho their customers are, why their customers will spend money with them and be able tohave run some tests to show that's actually real and true, rather than just wishful thinking.

And if you carry... Compare your journey back then to, let's say,a current market for startups that's trying to communicate the worst of their problemsolving. Do you think that's the same case? It's just really hard to understand wherethe profit is? Is it investors that doesn't understand? What's the general issue in your opinion withstartups that are trying to do the same thing that you did?

Yeah.I think, you know, we ended up bringing on... second VC firm, there's two main ones withinour cap table, and Will, who's our chairman as well on our board, he often talks about,like me, having a fairly ignorant view of music when they first joined Tune Global,and today I would certainly regard Will as very, very knowledgeable on...

the industry and understanding through theBS where the money is really going to be. Who? I would say that generally speaking, if you'retalking to VCs that understand music... They can work through the idea, right? I think your idea needs to be simply explainedbecause sometimes as founders we can get lost in the detail rather than keeping it reallysimple to, here's what the problem is that we're solving, right?

But I do think they can work through the idea. I think the challenge is the journey thatmost founders go through to simplify their pitch and make it really clear in the problemthey're solving. the assumptions they're making and the backupsto those assumptions to offer some validity to them, right?

Rather than being pie in the sky. And I'll give you a specific example, right? In some cases. I think you've got to be careful that youdon't talk about with your idea all the different non-specific companies that might requireyour services.

as new challenges that can be met. Because those new challenges are going totake some time to monetize, right? Unless there's something that's really goingto be, bang, I've got something at scale. And this certainly could be those. I think that's one of the mistakes as a founder. You really get passionate to go, oh, thatindustry could just explode.

Yeah, it could just explode, but it's so smallat the moment that to take that journey for it to explode is just going to take too long. Where is there that needs my services at themoment? And think about it perhaps in a differentway to normal. The music industry, you could be looking athow to solve a mirrored of data related issues or call music issues.

There's a whole lot of challenges that occurin the music industry that are not solved today. So yeah, give it some real consideration andthought. I'm interpreting what you're saying in myown way, so correct me if I'm wrong. What you're indirectly saying is you believethere's, generally speaking, a lot of weakness in the way that founders in the music industrypresent their ideas concisely and understand how to actually build a company around anexisting problem.

Yes, and how they can back up their idea commercially rather than just being, here's how we could make money. Give me some evidence of what that is, right? You know, whether, you know, I'm a bit ofa proponent of using, you know, whether it's lean methodology or, you know, fail fast orwhatever else you might wanna go through that process, but show me some tests that you'vedone for wow moments and understand those wow moments and what do users think at thatlevel.

And I'll give you a totally unrelated example. And I... I won't be specific here other than to sayit was with a large rights holder. We were building something really unique. And we said, great, we now need to see ifwhat we've built here that we developed quite quickly really resonates in the market.

And we took these executives out on the streetand actually got them to start talking to people with a product in their hand. which was so foreign to them. It was so like, oh my goodness, you reallygo talk to people here. But we were able to take those ideas backand say, we didn't get a whale moment. What do we have to change here to get a whalemoment?

We looked at the idea, changed a few aspectsfrom the feedback we got, went back out the day later, and suddenly the response was totallydifferent. And so I want to at least understand do peoplelook at these and go, wow, now the second one is will people pay for it? Right.

And just as important as the first, but giveme some information that I can rely on there and not just your gut feel and then tell methat you have a sky high valuation on a gut feel, right? I mean, you know, you know what it's like. You're not going to accept those two items. So if you want a strong valuation. the more data that you've got that backs whatyou're doing, the stronger your valuation is gonna be.

When we're talking about the music industryand sort of the, let's call it the weaknesses and the startup approach in the music industry, we also indirectly compared it to other industries. And do you believe that the, let's call itcomparable weakness in the way that, most founders or the majority of founders musicindustry go about building these startups is because they come music first?

Because one of the things you said beforeis like, most people you know in startups, they come music first. Is that one of the reasons why this is anissue? it can cloud your judgment, right? I think you have to be very specific aboutthe problem that you're trying to solve. And we all hear, don't fall in love with youridea because you may need to pivot on your idea.

And I think most people come in falling inlove with their idea rather than being open to how should they pivot to get to what themarket needs. And... So I do think there's an element to that forsure. And I don't think that's really that differentto any other industry that the people who are within it are always gonna have that view.

But I think awareness of it, and I'm verybig on attempting to be self-aware. I think that's a tough journey, right? To a new degree. But if you can be self-aware and understand Um, the judgments that you're making or theway that you're formulating, whether an idea has merit or not, I think you can build betterprocesses yourself as well.

So, you know, I, even in everything that wedo technically, you know, I'm always on the team to say, don't get us, don't, don't startwith a bunch of assumptions here, let's see where the data takes us through those assumptions. Um, but. But yeah, I do think the other bit of it isthough, there is some underpinning that depends, I guess, where people came from in that journey.

There's obviously a lot of fiscal responsibilitythat you would, you need to put in place in building a business. Some people have those skills or some peopleneed to make sure they bring them in. And you know, you need a mixture of skillsin a company that's certainly one of the important ones as well. We've just spent some time learning from yourwell-earned wisdom about how to navigate as a startup company.

I'm just going to turn a bit back to you guysraising money. So you raised money the first round with aVC. What did you spend that money on? At that stage, we were actually quite cautiouson spending the money because we had built a business that was profitable and the VCneeded to actually give us a bit of a shake and say, you need to spend it faster.

right, than what we've given it to you. And I would say we were a little bit naiveand we could have put better processes in place. So we spent that money on testing differentgrowth methods that we could use to grow our business bigger than what it was, right?

But I think the mistake that if I had to doit again, I probably would have spent that money on fire quality employees right at the start,and actually brought deeper skills into the company, which I think would have helped mefurther when we raised the next round, which was much more significant, right?

And so I think to that end, it was useful,we grew the business. From a technology standpoint, there's probablyto understand that at that stage, Today, we just think, oh, let's deploy inthe cloud. At that stage, we were building our own infrastructure in our own buildings, which had tremendous cost upfront that you don't have to do asa startup these days.

So it was a more challenging business in thatparticular way as well. I think it's easier to experiment today andwithout burning a whole lot of money in those experiments. So you grew the business and you did a fewmistakes with, you know, trying growth processes and strategies, and then you ended up raisingone more round.

What was the purpose of raising that round? It was really to grow significantly. So we wanted to actually push out from Australiaglobally, right, in that process. I'm going to say we weren't fully, I thinkwe're really clear on that today. It took a little while to understand.

that journey and what we needed to do in thatspace. And again, same challenge that we had withlooking at multiple investors, the traditional VC funds, family offices, a whole range ofdifferent options.

And then we did find a company that certainly has been a great relationship forus. So as a VC company that we developed a reallytight relationship with, they really bought into what we were doing and we were very transparent with them along the journey and were able to really work together.

And still with me leading the business inall the traditional ways, but I guess, you know, hopefully I've always been a good listenerin that process and understood where there's been some weaknesses to do. From a journey perspective though, I guessone of the hiccups in the music industry in general and for us specifically was we builtin Australia, we built a good profitable business in a small market.

And at that stage, other services were startingto come into the country like Spotify and think at that stage Pandora even though Pandorais not here any longer. And the major enterprises we were buildingservices for started to look and say do we really need to have our own service when wecan just give people Spotify or give people something else.

And I think that's typical when a larger companylike that enters the market. We do believe that there's a real It takes them about two years, but then theysay, is this really about giving something away or is this about building a relationshipwith a customer?

But we had this process. So what we did, and we'd already then raisedthe money at this stage, we started to move out into Southeast Asia. And this was a real pivotal point for us thatshaped us as a business, because... In Indonesia, we developed a relationshipwith some of the major music rights holders in that country, and we jointly created adirect consumer service.

We built that over a period with some reallyinteresting examples that we can go a little bit deeper on to about four million users. We got good scale, hard country to monetizein, but because we now we're responsible for the end-to-end processof a successful music service, we now start to understand what's it going to take to attractthe customer?

How much do I want to pay for a user? What's the lifetime value of the user? How am I going to keep them engaged? What am I missing from features perspectivethat can work and things like that? And I would say our DNA today is always tryingto... clearly understand what our clients are tryingto achieve and using the knowledge that we've built over time to say, here is the suiteof products that we've made available.

So you can actually do funnel-based marketingto your end users so that you can understand how you can build a subscriber base and dothat process if that is what you're trying to do. Good. So... That was a service called Nada Kita at thetime, which means our music in Bahasa, which is Indonesian.

And yeah, ultimately we shuttered that servicebecause you really need incredibly deep pockets when a country is effectively pre-subscription,so you're funding a lot of the processes. We learned that.

This is one of the questions I mentioned before. At the end of the day, it costs a lot of moneyto attempt that. But if I look at it, I say, we just learnedso much through that process that it really shaped our journey going forward. That's one of the really interesting thingswhen I look at your website.

The amount of products and services you deliverare super complex. many-fold, and that comes from those experiencesyou've been through. So, Tune Global today, more specifically thanwhen we started the podcast with, how do you deliver services to clients? Yeah, I mean, we basically have three mainproducts that we offer.

One is what we call a content delivery service,and they're for clients that perhaps want to build their own API infrastructure, butthey want a standardized way of getting music available from... lots of different rights holders and understandingboth publishing and master rights and everything else.And we can do that quickly, easily, reliably.

Our second service is afull suite of APIs. So if someone's trying to build a full-onstreaming service, if they're trying to build live video concerts, if they're trying tobuild, for want of a better word, a Spotify compete in some way, they can useour full suite of APIs and they go deep.

They don't just provide information aboutmusic, but they provide information about the users from an anonymous perspective tounderstand what can I deliver to you that makes sense to you. Right?So we empower all those. The third one is a full-turn key solution. So we do apps.

watches, TVs, end-to-end processes. And really broad. So we have customers in Germany that focuson the Tringren's audio book market. We have clients that just focus on gaming.

Many telco clients from... Kazakhstan, through to Japan, Indonesia, Africa,Ghana, and obviously everything in between with US, UK. But I think certainly in some of those non-traditional places, we find ourselves quite strong in those areas.

And part of that reason was that as we movedearly into Southeast Asia, these were areas that were metadata poor. They didn't explain or have access to allthe metadata that is important in creating music or make more suggesting music. So we had to build many of these things ourselvesfor those markets and we're able to take those around the world.

But no, so these days, you know, a lot ofclients in medical and how do they use music in medical outcomes, health and fitness, youknow. And I think that's only getting broader. So what we've seen over the last few months,we've launched services that are much more around web three aspects.

We allow people with various partners to beable to mint their royalties on chain and actually have that music flow in and actuallyget paid out in USDC, right, directly. So it's really understanding, how do we actuallyhelp the industry adding certainly in these fastevolving markets, how do we help the local artists monetize and actually be able to buildup an income around their music, right?

And becomes core often to what we do, althoughwe have major label content and in many of our services, it's only major label contentthat's available. Obviously now you're quite successful companyand you have a bunch of employees and a bunch of customers that are very impressive.

If you didn't build this in the music industry,let's imagine you had the same amount of progress and success, but you didn't build in, well,a music related field, do you believe the company would be bigger, more profitable? That's a really interesting question. You know, a... When you think about the music that we holdand the way we have to manage rights and that we're managing over 2 billion sets of rightsat any one time, there's an interesting question to say, could this be used really successfullyin anything that you wanted to manage really complex rights for?

Right? And I think the answer to that would be yes,but gosh, it just wouldn't be as much fun though, I've got to say. Right? I guess, you know, we get a lot of engineersthat work for us and many of them come from banks or other industries that are a littlebit dry. And it is fun to be involved in somethingthat you tend to understand and be able to dissect and know in a different way.

So I don't think that really answers yourquestion, but there's so much complexity. When you think of millions of users accessingmillions of rights and the complex nature of that, I would probably say, Jacob, there'smany other ways to use that infrastructure.

Yeah. Now we've talked for a while and you reallystrike me as a very, very passionate entrepreneur that loves what you do. And building a business is great and now you'rerunning and driving a successful business. What's the outcome you're going for? Are you looking for an exit? That's a great question.

I think any business that has VC as part ofits process, I mean, that's the reason VC gets involved, right? It's not necessarily always the reason thatfounders get involved in the process because founders like to see something grow. I would love to see what we do get biggerand bigger. And there's lots of different ways to do that.

Right. There's ways to do that by working out ideasthat work at an IPO level. There's ways to do it with strategic partnerships. There's ways to do it with buying more companiesand creating a bigger entity that has more power. in that market.

And we've certainly been looking for ourselvesat companies that dramatic... The companies we're always interested in arecompanies that have technology that provides strong user engagement. Because our clients at the end of the day,really that's what they're passionate about.

How do they connect? more dwell time, more usage time in whateverthey're doing for whatever purpose that they're doing. So I'd say the end game is still to be written in that way but you know I think if an entrepreneur is going to take on VC funding they it's probablyone of the questions that I'm sure the VC will tell you about but you want to understandfrom the outset that obviously a VC gets in only to the reason to get out.

Yeah, that's true. Yeah. We're sort of soon wrapping up the episode. It's been extremely, extremely good. But if you were a young entrepreneur againin 2008, but you would be living in 2024, what would you think would be one of the mostinteresting things tackling or grabbing the opportunity in the music industry?

I think the way that we consume music in thefuture will be really different. I think the emergence of more and more musicand you know moving through to what everyone says is going to be 450, 500 million tracksthat are available are going to mean that there is a strong, in my opinion, emergenceof many different services that people have accessto.

I think right now we stink always in the termof an app. And you say, but will people download additionalapps or subscribe to additional apps to do that? But we're starting to see the early stagesof using different types of AI that build a layer between the applications that areperhaps running in the background.

and what the user is being presented in theforeground. So I think there's real opportunity to builda different way that people can access the music they love, but the sources of that musicaren't coming from any one point. Those sources are effectively being, you know,in the past we would have, I mean, Yahoo was one of the early aggregators of news websites,but AI puts something different on the...

And it provides a different way that you canvisualize, or perhaps not even have to visualize, maybe get it to an audio realm, that experience. So for me, I think there's a lot of discoursearound AI at the moment, but most of it centers around how people are training models or generating generative music.

How does it actually affect the way that Iwant to consume music? For me, that would be just a huge opportunity. That's really interesting and it's actuallythe first time I've heard someone vocalize it the way that you do and I try to stay kindof on top with these new ideas. So that's super interesting and I'll delveinto that myself.

I think that's it. So as an entrepreneur specifically, as oneof the last questions, if we were to use your example. of that new paradigm, that new way of consumingmusic, would the opportunity be in building some sort of service that would feed thatfeed? Or would it be creating the layer that couldsource some of that product into that feed?

Like what do you believe the actual practicalapplication would be? I think... rights holders and understanding how rightsholders are part of this process or if you're building something just for the independentmarket is key in music. So you know I think too many people come intomusic and they ignore that aspect and build something and then go yeah but no one's goingto license this or make it available or do anything else.

So you have to tackle those items first andso you have to ensure that the people that you are working with or making their product available inthis way, are taken on that journey with you. Now, how you choose to do that is complex,right?

And some people have greater availabilityof some of these people than others, right? So that can be a challenge in some cases. We didn't have great availability to thesepeople. We had to put the hard work in building therelationships and understanding how we built those relationships in that process. But I would be looking more at that side.

And then, yes, there's a technical processhere. And there is models that have to be considered. But I'm not thinking of those models as modelsthat are really around music in there themselves. They're more around the usage behavior ofpeople and how they work. And I think if we brainstormed around thatparticular topic, we'd have enough for another two hours.

Yeah, sure. I just don't. I say to our team and to people, listen, Ican't think of a better time to live than right now. I mean, it's truly exciting. And I think you have to look at it in thatway and say, what are the problems that we can solve here that will have impact?

If I'm an early startup, how do I do thatso that I can at least get to stage one, which is to get some money in the company and getmoving with what I'm trying to do? Well, thank you for this talk. I think it's super inspiring and I reallyhope the entrepreneurs and music industry professionals that listen to this episodewill be inspired.

I feel like I've learned a lot and I do wantto thank you for your time and good luck with your ventures in the future. Thanks, Jacob. Thanks for the time. It's been great sharing with everyone andhopefully, yeah, you know, hopefully someone's able to get something out of this and be ableto move it on. and build something truly inspiring for me. I always look for the next great idea andI'll be looking out there for it as well.

Thank you, Tom. Thank you. Great to have you on.