From Artist-First to 30 Million Users: Audiomack’s Rise

You need to actually create engagement with your fans. You need to create a meaningful connection with your fans. You need to, you know, build a bond that makes them a fan for life. And the other services, they don't do that. We provide with, you know, all these tools to send them messages, comment with them, give them extra special exclusives. You know, they have the ability to control that relationship with the fan. And we draw the shortest light, shortest line between the artists and the fan. David Punty from Audiomac has built something amazing. He's been a part of building a streaming platform that focuses on discovering music. You might think, well, that's a niche product, but over 12 years they have built more than 30 million monthly listeners, and in some markets they're number one. Hey guys, and welcome back to the Sound Connections podcast. Today I have David Punty in the studio. Welcome David. Hi Jacob, and how are you? I'm good. I'm looking forward to this call. Uh, it's not often

that you meet successful streaming companies that have existed for a long time. Uh, it is extremely difficult space, but David, you have been a part of building one of those. Uh, we're talking about your company today. For the people who don't know who you are, what you do, and what Audiomac is, could you explain who you are and what you do? Yes, my name is David Punty. I am the co-founder and chief marketing officer for Audiomac. Is a music streaming and discovery platform that empowers artists. Uh, so we're one of the biggest uh streaming apps in the world. We're the one of the number one streaming app in over 13 countries in the world. Uh, music streaming app. And uh, I have one of the best jobs. I get to listen to music all day. I have a great team. You know, I get, uh, I try to get our team excited about helping artists and empowering artists, helping artists reach their goals and celebrate their wins. Amazing. I was, you know, today while I was preparing to the interview, um, I was just going through your

platform, going through your sort of value positions to customers, and it's quite unique. Like, it's not often that you see this. Could you describe a bit how Audiomac is different from any other ordinary uh streaming company that people might know? The best, yes. So there's a few reasons why, you know, that differentiated, differentiate us uh competitively from other streaming platforms. Um, I think, you know, depending on where you are in the world, you know, our value proposition might alter a little bit. Um, but I think the one that is blanketed across the entire world is that we're really focused on discovery. Uh, so, you know, the Spotify, the Apple, the YouTubes, you know, they have a discovery component, but they're really for the masses. They're not really trying to break artists. They want to just keep you on the app listening the music that is going to keep you listening the longest, which is fine. Uh, you know, there's certainly a need for

that in the market. But you know, because we're not quite as large as those companies, we don't have as much capital as those companies, you know, we want to uh try to find a niche, and our niche is to help people discover new artists, new sounds, and new scenes. So that's how we curate music. Uh, we have a touch of human curation. It's not just algorithms or recommendation engines. Uh, I have curators and, you know, dozens of countries, uh, dozens of regions around the world that are, you know, at these clubs early in the morning, uh, they're uh, you know, at places where music is breaking, and they're compiling that music, getting those artists to sign up directly to the platform uh and upload their music so that we could curate it and share that with the rest of the world. So I guess that would be one factor is that we're focused on discovery more than the other streaming platforms. Number two is some of the utility that we offer. Um, so I'll combine um being able to take songs offline

uh on an ad supported platform. So um you are able to use Audio Mac and download Audio Mac and use it no matter where you are in the world, uh, and you're able to take songs offline no matter where you are in. Um, so this is not every song, you know, that ever has existed is on Audio Mac. Uh, not every music label has licenses in every country on Audio Mac, but on the countries that we focus on and probably the countries where this podcast is going to be listened, uh, we will have the ability to provide um listeners with the, with the capability of taking songs offline and listening to it and still making sure they're getting paid for these streams. Um, so and you don't need to subscribe as well. Uh, and if you do just decide to describe, we have for a very competitive option here, uh, where you could take unlimited songs offline, you can uh have higher quality audio, you could download playlists, you know, many different things. Uh, and uh, it's a lower price point than a full catalog subscription service. So a lot of

people will either use Audio Mac as their primary stream music streaming app. Uh, they feel that we have everything that they need, and then they could either get a lower price subscription or they don't need to subscribe, or possibly because they can't. Uh, either they're too young, they don't have a car, they don't have an account, you know, they don't necessarily have enough money to, um, you know, we feel that music should be available to everyone regardless of where you are in the world and regardless of your income level. So we're able to provide high quality listening experience to these people as well as people who have multiple streaming apps. Uh, right, it wasn't too long ago where you would be like, wow, why would I need Netflix? I have cable, right? Or why would I need Peacock? I have Netflix, right? But ultimately people decided that they need as a lot of streaming services if they can afford it and if it's for them. You know, we feel that music is not exactly the same as this, but it can, it is similar

enough to where you could might, you might want to have a Spotify and you'd want an Audio Mac as well, because again, you want to discover music, you want a different curatorial experience. And what we keep hearing over and over again is that the recommendations of some of the other platforms uh can get a bit uh tired, uh stale. It keeps you in the same echo chamber. I listened to this song, how about listen to this song, it's a little bit similar to that, right? And that's fine, we have that too. But there's nothing about your friend telling you have to listen to this band or you have to listen to this new song and having that connection uh that you get from hearing that based on someone's recommendation, like an actual person's recommendation, right? We have, we're that friend, right? We have these people that are actually listening. We're that human curation service. We're putting that song in front of you

because we listen to it and we know it's good. So I feel like that's not something that you could just automate. You can't just put some AI behind that and think you're going to address that need. Um, so we're trying to provide a different experience uh for a good price point, and that's what makes us different. It's very interesting. Um, obviously you guys are not a startup anymore, but at my company Amplitude Ventures we consult a lot of companies and I hear a lot of startup pitches, and if anyone with would come to me right now and say, you know, we want to build a huge streaming services where one of the primary uh value propositions is discovery, I like, I don't know, no, I would tell them don't do it. Well, that's a terrible idea. Well, you've been 12 years in the making, and depending on the numbers I've sort of seen you guys, at least what I've seen stated, is between 15 to 30 million active users a month listers you have right now, which is a extreme impressive number for that

value proposition. Obviously you offer more than that, but it must have been a journey, and I'm really interested to hear about that journey, because having such a unique value proposition and also this artist creation and love for uh love for uh curated music to discover artist is not usual, and I can imagine it must have been an uphill proposition to work with in this environment that is more probably more about mass consumption and scale, where of course you've also to big degree reached that. But let me, let me start from the beginning, David. Tell me a tiny bit about how you came into music. Yeah, so uh I will say we were, we're as of this podcast and uh we're at about 33 and a half million monthly active users. Wow. Um, and you know, it's the thing about our journey is that we've actually gradually grown every year, right? So many startups they burn really bright and then they fizzle out quick,

right? Um, you know, very rare you grow super quick and then keep that path. Um, it's just, you know, the bird, the brightest, the brightest stars burn out the quickest, right? Uh, and you see that a lot with startups. We have, we have been foundationally building since 2012. Um, and how we started was not, it's not like we had this vision, we're gonna become the biggest streaming music streaming app in Africa, or we're gonna become the biggest music streaming app in the Caribbean. We did not think of that, all right? That's not what we had in mind. Uh, it started when uh my partner Dave, David Mackley, uh who he was also the founder of a blog site uh music blog called djbooth.net. Uh, so this in the US was a pretty popular hip-hop blog. Uh, DJ Booth actually had the, was so my partner Dave claims uh the

First blog where you could stream music, um, and he basically put a real player onto the blog and you could play songs from that. I'm talking like this was like 2002 or something like that, right? Like the internet just exploded. And then what the, what the remains is like how DJ Booth started, right? So I didn't know him at the time. I met him at another company. We were just business guys at this software company that was selling um services to websites uh for online advertising, right? So we met, we met here, we came friends. We're both Italian guys, we're both from New York, um around the same age, we both went to school in Connecticut at different schools, uh but um colleges I should say, or uni. And you know he, I was a huge, I was just a huge music fan, right? Like in back when

I was at university I was the guy that would like make all the CDs for our parties, right? So I would burn three, four or five CDs, load them up into the CD player for our party and I would look at everyone, see how they reacted, how they would dance, you know, you know, what did they like this song? You should, I keep this for the next week's party. And then the CD would stop and everyone would jeer at me and be like, what's going on? Like what's going, I thought you were putting our music on. It's, you know, but that's how it worked, right? I had to load CD number two on there and then so on. I would watch everyone. I was always just like, you know, obsessed with seeing how people reacted to music. And then I would get a lot of demand for giving, you know, people say make me, make me a tape, make me a tape, you know, can you get, can I have this CD? And I would get to keep the CDs out to people, you know, after the party and people would play in their cars and in their dorms or whatever. So I just

Like always loved that feeling. Um so fast forward again to when Dave and I were working together. I would go on to his blog DJ Booth, but then I would go on to other popular blogs at the time. So this was known as the blog era, right? You'd have DJ Booth, Two Dope Boys, Aunts Man Nah, right, Up Rocks, you know, very many blogs and it was a great way to discover music at the time. You know, the bloggers were the gatekeepers. Artists would send them songs and you would scroll through all these blogs to try and find a song that you could download, right? Because there's no streaming yet. This is post CDs, pre-streaming, the blog era. So then you take this and you put, load this up on your phone and then you listen to the songs that you basically collected from all these blogs every day, a cumbersome process, you know, right? You know, you'd also go to adapt piff, maybe download and mix, take songs that you like from there and put them into what was a playlist at the time

So we, he would always be like, why are you going on all my other competitor sites? And I would be like, well I want to, you don't have everything I want, right? I want to find out everything that came today and I want to hear it on one thing and I want to take what I like and I want to leave what I don't like. So that right there was impetus for the curation of Audio Mac. Um simultaneously Dave, my partner, was saying, well it's not even like that hard, you could just like find a place to be able to upload the music and then uh you know basically we could build out a front end and then just display all the music that was uploaded by the blogs that day or by artists. So then we brought in our other partners, we have three other partners who helped with that part, um and our, one of our partners, a chief design officer, he designed websites for MBA.com, like big time website designer, and he happened to be Dave's friend. And then

Our programming, our CTO is someone who does not like being named on podcasts, but he's a mastermind and can manage huge systems that are doing a ton of traffic and servers and things way beyond my pay grade. And then we had Z, Brian Zizek, who's on the podcast circuit as well, he's, he goes and speaks all the time, he was the editor at DJ Booth and he knows all the artists and he knows the industry, he was a radio host and all this. So we sort of formed all of us together and built up this site and this was around 29, 2010 and then a couple years, it really is late 2011 where we actually had a product that we could test out and then we launched and in 2012 really as a place for blogs and artists to upload their music. So what would, what was going on is the blogs were, you know, the artists would send their song to MP3 to the blog and the blog would have to listen to it and then they would upload it to their site. It was just didn't make any

Sense, right? So we said hey, just put your song on Audio Mac and send them the embed player because that's how people were listening was through embed players. So by making it easier for the blogger, the chance that you're going to get featured is high because it's easier for them to do it and it's easier for them to listen to their hundreds of submissions they're getting every day. So we wanted to simplify this for everyone involved and then we also were allowed the blogs to customize their embed players so they look cool and it would fit their site aesthetically. So we were just filling all these little gaps that existed in the industry around this time. SoundCloud also started um and I believe Spotify was existed but not in the U.S. at this time or it was just starting to get going. So these things were sort of all happening simultaneously. Um SoundCloud was doing more like electronic and mixes and was, it's a European company so it was like kind of being used in the U.S. but not really by rap music or hip-hop or

Like Caribbean music, that's not, which is what our specialty was. So we kind of came in through these music channels but we also came in through tech channels that were helping to solve problems at the time. But so there's two things. So I think one of the years you mentioned was 2002 and then you went to, you guys starting something in 2009. There was, there's a big time gap between like what happened in your life and why did you sort of reconnect back to these guys? Were you in contact with the whole time? So I did not, I did not know Dave at the time. I graduated college in 2004, which is an interesting time, right? I'm a, I'm what's called an elder millennial, right, or a zennial. We have a lot of names, right? Um and basically we're an interesting part of the millennial generation and arguably even Gen X. My, I have an older brother, he's Gen X, but I'm millennial, doesn't make sense, right? Uh so but basically this is right when Facebook came out after I graduated college

And then also you had the iPhone in 2007. So this was rapid changes into in the music industry and in internet history. You also had Napster and like just the music industry just going absolute nuts. People are downloading files, stealing files, if you want to look at it like that, sharing files. Um so it was just in complete disarray, uh the music industry. Uh I did not start in the music industry, I'm just a music fan, right? I would, you know, I grew up in Long Island but I moved to New York City around this time and was just obsessed with going to different open mics and clubs and just doing anything related to music, just you know, whether it be going out dancing or whether you'd be at a hip-hop show and watching people rap, you know, or just anything. I would literally consume all types of music, all types of genres

And I still do. But I was basically working, I was working a job as like a salesperson where I would have to go door to door and sell people internet service. That's like when people did not have internet but I would sell them internet, right? I would sell them what was called DSL, uh and DSL is essentially like fast internet, just, but not even like slower than a 5G now, like much slower. But businesses didn't have this, they were using dial-up, it was just like a mess. So I would sell them DSL service and then soon became what was known like T1 service, which was like a business would use like high speed T1 service and you would get much faster internet there. So I was just going around selling and you know, you'd have to go knock on a lot of doors, right? That's what we would call it. I literally would go walk into businesses and say hey, like I'm cold calling you now, you don't want to talk to me but

I have to convince you to give me some attention so I could try to sell you this internet and a lot of times people needed that and it was it was you know it wasn't that hard of a sale people realized they needed internet at that time and it made sense to get faster internet so I learned a lot about marketing learned about a lot about sales learned about how to you know align my company's capabilities and our products capabilities with the needs of that person which is the format of any sale is you're trying to align what you have with what they need and if you don't you need to find out what they need that's really what selling is how do I help solve the problems what are the root causes of those problems and then how am I going to match my service with that um so that's kind of the you know what sales is you know I'm getting a very high level and everyone's selling whether they know it or not you know you're selling like when we started out Audio Mac we didn't have licenses with the major

labels we had to go to the major labels and sell them even though we pay them money a lot of money but we had to still sell them on why it made sense for them to do this deal with us right even when I have an artist come here and they're not sold on Audio Mac right you know we're a big company but we're not as we're not as big as the big companies so why would they tell their fans to use Audio Mac as compared to one of the you know big public companies yeah well here's why you need to actually create engagement with your fans you need to create a meaningful connection with your fans you need to um you know build a bond that makes them a fan for life right and the other services they don't do that we provide with you know all these tools to send them messages comment with them give them extra special exclusives you know they have the ability to

control that relationship with the fan and we draw the shortest light shortest line between the artist and the fan so all of that stuff when I have an artist come here and I'm trying to say hey like mess with us it's all coming back from the sales experience I had you know decades ago that I learned you know I had my first couple of jobs hmm yeah and there's a very clear parallel to the to the entrepreneurship journey um I love how you described sort of the way that you operate as a successful established platform uh is very parallel to what most startups are trying in the super fan economy chase right now uh you know fan interaction enabling that relationship we'll get back to that because it's quite interesting commentary that uh companies so established with you already have addressed that um let's wait a bit with that because I need to understand a journey a bit more so you come from this door salesman job and you start Audio Mac what conversation happened did you just recalibrate with your co-founders you didn't know them yet like tell me the story

how did it actually happen so Dave and I are both big music fans so like when I said when I go to these clubs or we go to go to you know open mics or something like that and you know Dave and I would go as fans like we wanted to do this we recognize like the objective wasn't really to make a big global music platform it was really to make a couple extra bucks like I wish it would be I wish I had a more noble reason but like if any entrepreneur is telling you it actually became more noble as time went on but we were like it was like man it would be great to earn just like an extra five grand a month right like you know we just wanted more you know we wanted to make money and we rec Dave really recognized this he goes all these other you know all these artists need a way to show their music more professionally right like he knew as again the owner of DJ booths artists would pitch him all the time

and they didn't know what they were doing right they want to get featured in DJ booth.net the blog because it would help them get more fans and it would help them raise their profile it was like you know to be on that blog was like a notch on their belt the artists and or the managers of these artists and even label people music like major label people would reach out to DJ booth oh feature my artists here's the mp3 like and you'd have to download the mp3 and listen to it they didn't have any you didn't know anything about the artist you know there's no liner there's no media kit for the you know generally speaking it was just a problem like at the blog it was a it was it was an obstacle for the blogs to be able to provide their audience with the best music that came out that day or that week um and if you think about the blogs it's sort of like they're sort of like digital magazines like that's what actually Dave branded DJ booths as was like a like an online magazine like

a source or vibe or you know Rolling Stone whatever and so the art it was just unprof it was really unprofessional but I don't blame them for it there just wasn't the tools available so we wanted Audio Mac to be a way that an artist can make their profile put you know social media handles in it which was brand new at the time like Twitter just started and Facebook you know we had Twitter and Facebook that's and YouTube that's what you could add um and you know you could put nice pictures up there and have all your songs and you could decide what songs were going to be the first songs that people would listen to so you just send a link to someone at a blog or at any or an actual magazine editor and we knew that artists needed this was a problem and that's what an entrepreneur needs to do is to identify what the problem is and how they're going to solve it again and that's a sale that I mentioned earlier right what are the problems that

they're going to solve what are the needs that are there and then how can you solve these problems and address these needs so that's how we came up with it we just needed our CTO basically say hey like we have this idea we have this other website I also had another website at the time I'm a big sports fan and I wrote hundreds and hundreds of blogs about different teams that I like I'm a Mets fan and a Jets fan and a Knicks fan and a Chelsea FC fan right so which everyone knows I'm a Chelsea fan when they see me it's I don't know why but that's what happens right but um even I don't I'm not from there but I would write all these blogs so I got better at writing right I got better at making my point how to how to make my point so we were able to

basically convince our now CTO to basically put dozens and dozens of hours in to create the actual back end of Audio Mac where people could upload their song where someone we people could stream their song it could host the files you know all that stuff and then we convince our chief design officer to say hey like this is how we want to present this we want people to be able to stream songs download the songs you want to be able to upload the song as well and it has to be easy to do that even an artist can figure it out right like someone who's not technically savvy like a singer uh typically or not or even a manager of an artist and especially just young people right these are 16 17 18 19 20 year old people so it has to be easy to use too so our CTO and our CDO put in dozens and dozens and dozens of hours

to create this basically with the hope that me and Dave and Z would be able to like get people to adopt this and use it and what was their incentive like did they just also jump in the back one wagon they wanted to make 5k extra month like what was the conversation you had when you tried to incentivize them to put so many hours in um I think I think yes they wanted money you know they wanted to you know this was the first business I ever I ever started and I went and I put in you know to register the LLC right and I put up the money to do that um it's probably one of the greatest and I ended up getting more equity in exchange because I put my hard money up yeah they put time up but they didn't take money out of their bank account and register the business and do all that stuff so I was like I'll do that I just want like you know whenever I'm out more and that was probably

a good uh investment uh at this point um so you know i i put my cold hard cash up and then they you know i knew they you know we designed and spec'd it out for what what it needed to do and then the programmer and designer follow those instructions that was mostly david did that with my assistants and nz's assistants and then they knew that once they had it up you know now is our turn to work we had to get artists to use it reach out to all these different websites say hey use our embed it's better you know uh you know and then do all the google stuff to show up in google and then really kind of the cheat code was that when artists wanted to be on dj booth z who was the editor of dj booth would say i'm not accepting anything unless you send us an audi mac link so or sneaky you should at least do this too because this is actually going to be good for you

And it was so it's not like we were tricking them like it really was good for them and we have artists still today that made their accounts in 2012 2013 and that's like a flex to be you know have an account that long and had that old because it says on Audiomac had an account since this date oh really okay that's cool so yeah go ahead what was it that took it to the next level like did you did you start making those 5k or like what was the actual journey that happened well we another reason I should probably mention is where those companies those sales companies I was working at was so I worked at a company that I was going door to door then I worked at the software company with Dave and then I worked at another company while I was building Audiomac with the guys this company was called Nexage it was the first mobile programmatic ad

RTB a real-time bidding company for apps so I really learned a lot about apps at this time Nexage later got bought by Millennial Media who later got bought by AOL which later got bought by Verizon so I was one of the early employees here and I learned a lot about how to put ads on apps essentially and make money and optimize this here and then the company I worked at with Dave was an ad company as well so we knew if we got some amount of traffic we were going to make money based on our online ad acumen so you know my clients were like Major League Baseball Univision NFL Weather Channel like the biggest apps in the world so I learned from them as well like exactly how to make every possible cent you could out of mobile advertising so our partners

Knew that we knew how to do that so they just all right we get traffic and then we could monetize it you know they were pretty confident we'd be able to do that and if you want to make 25 grand a month it's not like the you know the biggest business in the world for five people you know like you know that's not really you know so the amount of traffic at that time wasn't like huge you probably need like a million people a month to go on it or whatever I don't even know but it wasn't like a huge amount of traffic so now I'll answer your question you know when did things really change we were sort of growing gradually and making a name for ourselves up until around 2015 where you know Dave was like we need to make apps like everyone everything's moving to apps at that point we saw web traffic starting to tank and mobile traffic starting to go crazy and go and really

augment so we're like we need to have apps this is how people are going to consume music we saw it in the flames right and we we hired a company to create our apps and you know basically connecting to our website you know our website is still hosting the files and then it pushes them out to the to the apps on Android and on Apple so we made the apps it was 2015 2015 we made the apps and then once we made the apps we started to grow very fast especially in Africa and West Africa in particular in Nigeria and Ghana so we just started to see so many people uploading music listening to music Nigeria is a very big country you know there's it's one of the biggest countries in the world over 210 million

People 220 million people it's also the youngest country her age so it's a perfect fit for us being that we're catering to a young audience that loves music so Nigeria and also Ghana which is not as big of a country but has a great musical culture you know and then really in South Africa as well was starting to grow a lot too South Africa listens to a lot of rap and R&B and that's what we were known for at the time so the big South African rappers were using Audiomac because like this is a free it's just free I could just upload here and people could listen to for free and that's what you wanted and then it can still get paid as well so we also around this time started our Audiomac monetization program where artists can get monetized directly through Audiomac and

Get we'll pay them directly right so we have hundreds of thousands of artists that get paid directly through us amazing or get paid through Audiomac so once obviously there was incentive to use the platform from a monetary standpoint as well as the scale and the audience potential that we offered and just snowball from there became a very compelling platform to pay attention to what was the stress level in this period was this you know when you speak about like that of course it's been quite a few years and it's hard to talk about all the details but was this a dad's and roses or was it extremely hard like what was the situation with you co-founders um there was there was times when there were stress but I think like I would say Dave gets stressed but the other founders don't

Like we really don't like I try not to get stressed about money like it's money is not like a real thing right like it's kind of like a it's a thing that we made up it's not really something to be stressed about in the long term like obviously if you don't have it's stressful um and there was times when you know we weren't necessarily profitable and it was a concern um but being stressed or worried about something is not really how you're going to find a solution to those problems um I think what Dave does is that his stress turns into productivity so he like almost needs to be stressed and a lot of CEOs are like this they're like manic like are just compulsive right like to a point and I tell him this all the time I'm not like taking a shot like he like just get like manic and compulsive about something until he finds the solution I'm

Not really like that I'm a chill dude um and I if I get stressed then I lose focus so I try not to worry about anything uh because I know that ultimately being worried or stressed is not going help me solve the problem some people they need that to motivate them uh I'm not like that I'm like a workhorse in a different way where I just like just keep going at something until I figure out that until I know figure out how to do it right and um like that's my approach and it works for me and also our other founders well one of our founders maybe gets a little stressed but our other founders like our CTO like early on we had J. Cole that's a huge rapper in the U.S.

He dropped a mixtape on Audiomac didn't tell us didn't say hey I'm dropping a mixtape on Audiomac and that was one of the only times our site crashed and it was not working because of the influx of traffic this happened to be when our CTO was on vacation he's not like a Mr. vacation guy where he goes on vacation all the time like he goes on one vacation every like five years but he happened to be on vacation at this time so he was I was like we got what are we going to do here like we got to get more servers like working like we had a huge amount of traffic because it because it was an exclusive to us if we knew about it we could have obviously prepared for this but that was one of the only times the site crashed and it was for like an hour it was like for half an hour but at that time the artists wanted to crash they wanted to crash to sites because that was like a flex so like

Little Wayne would drop like you know one of his mixtapes on that piff and we would have it too they put it on Audiomac too but that piff was the mixtape site they weren't happy unless the site crashed from all the traffic so it was fine in the long run we learned some things but that was like the time I would get stressed because I'm like wow there's like 100,000 people trying to site right now and they can't get it and their first impression of Audiomac is terrible so but I try not to get stressed I want to just I'm a chill guy and I want to approach problems with a level head so fast forward a bit we're in 2024 now and you have grown to quite an impressive number with what I would call and I might be wrong but almost like a niche value proposition compared like it's very intentional towards a specific audience and I

Think you probably through having that you also actually cater to a lot more than just those, but it's just extremely impressive what is going on for Audio Mac now is that you know just continuing 12 year growth journey or are you considering other things? What's the future role for you guys? We're constantly innovating, we're trying to find you know just like when we first started and we're trying to find out what the needs are of our market, of our target audience, and trying to give them you know cool features or solutions to the problems that they face. You know we really try to build the platform for artists, right? That's always been, as the CMO, that's really our marketing strategy from the beginning was to provide value to the artist and they will evangelize the service to their users or their brands I should say. There

Are the best affiliates or the best influencers that you could have because they want people to listen to their music and we're providing that utility for them plus more, right? So what are we doing for artists? We have a new feature we just came out with, it's called sponsored songs and this is available through our creator app. So our creator app is where it is, the best artist app of any music platform. I will go toe to toe, compare, do any comparative analysis with any of the big companies. The Audimac creator app is superior and you could do so many things, it's a must have for any artist or any manager or even a label, right? So the creator app allows you to access sponsored songs and sponsored songs is just one of the many features in there, but it is new, so I'll tell you about

That it allows you to either use your balance, like I said you could monetize directly through us and you could generate a balance and you could use that balance on various things in our creator services tool or our sponsored songs. You could obviously withdraw the money and keep it of course, but you could use it towards your sponsored songs or now we just added you could use external payments so you could use Stripe, Flutter wave which is a big African payment service solution, and then eventually your credit, you could use your credit card to use your services and you could target your song or album towards a specific audience on Audio Mac. So say you're a hip-hop artist in Texas, you could say all right I want to reach hip-hop fans in the US and your song is going to play in the queue after the queue has been done for that

Hip-hop fan in Texas. So they're listening to a song, their album is over, their queue is done, whatever they're listening, it's going to play that song next and what we see is that you will get organic views and you'll get engagement as an artist. People are going to favorite your song, they're going to add your song to their playlist, they're going to share your song, so you're going to get fans by doing this and part of the reason why we started this of course you know I won't be shy, we want to make money, but people kept asking us for this, artists kept asking us for this and it's a shame because a lot of times the artist gets bamboozled, they get led astray, right? And they'll get, these scammers will reach out to them and say hey I could get you 10,000 plays on YouTube, I could get you 100,000 plays on Audio Mac, I could get you 50,000 plays on Spotify. These

Are fake, right? They're not real plays, they're bots, they're coming from nefarious means, you know streaming for farms and it's a huge problem. If Spotify sees this, you're done, they're blackballing you and your label or they're going to strike your label or your distributor down. If I see this and I could tell so easily, like it's like the art, I could tell immediately, it's, I'm not, I don't want to tell why because I don't want to give it out, but I could tell, you could just tell, right? The numbers are just off and I could validate it as well. Yeah sometimes I think it's juicing first glands and then I gotta look into and I go actually no this song is about to go viral, but that's a different story, but usually it's a juicer, 95 plus percent of the time. A lot of times artists is just they got tricked, right? I'm not mad them, someone scammed them, so I

Want to provide, we want to provide a way for them to get fans and get their plays up that they could pay for and that real people are going to listen to it. So we started this and this has been growing very fast, every day, every week is more sponsored song campaigns run than the week prior and it's been incredible and people keep buying it back. So I think our retention rate is like 50 plus, 52% okay wow, 50% of people come back and that doesn't mean that the other 48% aren't going to use it again, so they're seeing value in this and they're getting more fans. So I'm very excited about that, I'm very excited about the creator app because one of the cool things that you could do and again this is something that other platforms will charge you for is you could send messages directly to your fans, right? So if you want to do first of, you can't really do this on Apple or

Whatever like and that's fine, like it doesn't make sense for them, but you know if you wanted to do it with another platform you have to pay, you know or they just do one to one communication like SoundCloud which is cool too, you know a lot of people like that, I'm not hating on that, but it's better to send it to all your fans at once and then you could say hey we had one artist, she put a snippet of her song up private, only people that followed her or that knew how that link could listen, so she could also track all that, how many people actually listen to this, you know on the back end which is cool, but she goes here's a snippet of my song, I'm gonna, whoever leaves the best comment with what the name of the song should be, I'm gonna go with that and I'm gonna shout you out on social media. So like that's really cool, imagine we had an artist you really liked and you got that message on your phone, oh what is that, they said you know my favorite artist sent me a message, it's really cool. Yeah not to mention

You could you know say obviously my, what's your favorite lyric on my album, what you know, I have new merch, everyone who has this code gets 15% off. We got you know an artist do that, Wiz Khalifa did that recently, people are always coming up with new ways to utilize this feature and it's amazing to see. But you know we had certain artists, especially our really prominent artists on the platform like Ashake who's a very big Nigerian artist, amazing artist, he has a ton of followers on Audio Mac, he was our most streamed artist in 2022, he sent a connect message, he had 20,000 replies in like a few hours, amazing. I think one of the things we talk a lot about on the podcast is technology and especially sort of AI and how that's going to create a lot of disruption in creating music and engagement

With fans and what I hear over and over again from experts and of course my own thoughts is that it is human connectivity, the community driven approach of music is going to be more and more important because the best way to it is you know at the end of the day we're listening to music sometimes just to have in the background, but most of the time we listen to music because it has a purpose and a lot of that purpose comes from an association to a person or a community and sort of what you're addressing right now is really for me really interesting because it's future proving the future of music consumption in my opinion. It is having the access to have music mean more than the actual audio, the audio, if it is the people behind, it's the storytellers that tell us these stories and I think that's super timely and of course it might just be sort of answering to artists needs and you know addressing that you guys need to do a business, but it

Is one of the most important aspects of addressing the technology investment that's happening right now in my opinion, so I really love that part. I appreciate that. Yeah I agree, it's about the community, right? Like and I think with COVID it took a lot of that away of course, you know many of us were isolated and what we saw and I know this other music platforms, we lost you know people thought that our streams and our usage would go up but it went down with COVID and I know it did on I believe Spotify as well, they reported because you listen, you know number, you said you listen to music in the background, that's true, it's a secondary activity for a lot of us, we're going, we're taking the bus to school, you know we're cleaning our house, we're at the gym, you know we're cooking, whatever

right and then there's also the best way to discover music is not on an app right it's in with a bunch of people like-minded folks and you have that energy in the same room right or maybe in the car right you're in a car with your friend he goes listen to this song song's amazing and you hear it and you have that connection with your friend right or if you're at a festival or you're at a club and everyone is moving and swaying at the same same time right like you see those videos those are always just so mesmerizing right like you see the big festival and the artists from you see their back and they're facing the audience and you see everyone going crazy like what's you just can't you just cannot simulate that in any other way you're not AI not going to do that right so now I'm not saying there's not a place

for AI and that there's not, you know, it's not going to find its way in the music industry and it's not going to help people. I think it is, but it's never going to match that, it's not going to simulate that. You have to, it's a human thing. It's a universal language that everyone can understand regardless of the actual language you speak. So it goes deeper than what's on the surface, you know, you feel it in your bones, and for the real music fans and real music heads, it's like a high, right? Because it's of that connection you're making to the composer, to the songwriter, or even that person next to you, you know, at the concert, you have your arm around your wife or girlfriend or husband or boyfriend or whoever, you know, you can't simulate that in any other way. David, this has been an amazing interview and we're sort of rounding up soon, but I have

a few questions about what you guys are looking for in the future. Are you looking for just growing this to scale even more? Are you looking for an exit? What's the future for you guys? Well, I think we want to put the power back in the hands of the artists, right? And I think we've done that to some degree where, you know, as an artist you don't necessarily need to have a label, you don't need to have a major label, right? You could put your music on Audio Mac and other services too, and people around the world can hear your music. You know, it's crazy that we have artists here in America, in the states, and you look at their stats, right, when they go onto the creator app or on the dashboard and they go, wow, I didn't realize I had so many fans in Liberia, right? Like it's crazy, and they're

just like they can't even wrap their head around that, right? We want to make, want to forge those connections and draw the shortest line between the artist and the fan, you know, and be allowed them to build that relationship and that connection, you know, and it might be digitally, but it's still great, you know, you know that you have the fan in Liberia, you know, if you're a Nigerian artist, you know, you could come to New York and do a sold out show, right? We just had that this past weekend that just happened, and we want to keep fostering those connections and of course from a business perspective we want to continue to grow our users, you know, we don't need to exit, right? Of course, you know, anyone can make an offer we can't refuse, but, and I'm all ears, but we're not like actively shopping, you know, the platform, you know

we want, we want to build it like we always have, which is foundationally, you know, with a solid base, solid, you know, revenue numbers, solid profitability, solid EBITDA, you know, the boring business finance things, which we have a great finance team that's helping us do that, because ultimately, you know, we're paying this money to artists too, so we giving artists the ability to put their first song on AudioMac, grow, get their first check from AudioMac, reinvest into their career and continue to grow, and then they can have the option of signing to a label, right? Now they have some leverage, right? They can continue to stay independent, which a lot of our artists they realize they could do, they build their own team and essentially their own label and they go ahead and do that, which is great. So we're providing more options, we want to continue to innovate and push, you know, our slogan

is moving music forward, so we want to do that. One other feature I want to say super quick that encapsulates all this is called AudioMod. If you're a listener in AudioMod, you could take any song and you could speed it up, slow it down, nightcore, daycore, muffle it, or you could customize your own way, right? So that's where we see music going. If you go on any social media site, songs are sped up, they're slowed down, people want to make the song their own way. So we're providing this tool with AudioMod so that you could speed it up, adjust it, and make it exactly the way that you want to hear it. Artists and labels and copyright holders still getting paid, in fact they're getting paid more, what we see in our numbers. So creating features like AudioMod and staying ahead of the curve is what we plan on doing. We already know our competitors are copying us right now and building the same feature, I know

so you'll see this everywhere soon, but we are flattered by that and we're also happy to move music forward like that and push the industry to its boundaries so that we can make a fair and equitable system for all the artists and all the people involved. David, it's been so refreshing hearing a startup story in the music industry that's based on so much love for music. I think sometimes the music industry, including my own career, can sort of get lost in why we started, and sometimes, you know, I'm motivated by entrepreneurship or creating business and once in a while music gets forgotten and for many different reasons, even though we work with, it's very refreshing to give you a story that is, it's so central, the love for music, the love for artistry, it's the core of what you do. So thank you for being generous with your time, thank you for telling the story, and I'm looking very much forward to following you and your company for many years to come and see what happens

Thank you Jacob, I really appreciate it, fantastic questions, you know, I had a great conversation and it was lovely to speak with you and I'm excited to share this with everyone in my network and tell everyone to subscribe to this podcast and listen to it each week. Love it, thank you David, we'll talk soon. Alright, thanks Jacob