Topic
Independent Artists and Distribution
Distribution, ownership and business models for artists who release without a major label. 29 conversations with founders, investors and experts, newest first.
Episodes (29)
JC Sanchez, founder of Orphiq, explains how AI can help independent artists manage careers and monetize smaller audiences.
Aidan Schechter, CEO of Patchbay and partner at 1916 Enterprises, explains why independent music companies share the same workflows and need common software.
Vijay Basrur, founder of OKListen, explains how he bootstrapped an independent Indian music platform for over a decade before its acquisition by AWAL.
Noam Levinberg, founder of Safari Audio, on why AI-built plugins and prompt-based music tools may make DAWs and plugin companies obsolete.
Thierry Ascarez, Chief Business Officer at Winamp, explains why streaming rarely pays independent artists and how Winamp for Creators fills the gap.
Viktrs founder Mark Bamford explains how tracking viewer curiosity inside a video earns artists far more than YouTube pays, and why he expanded beyond music.
Jesse Flores of Intercept Music explains how independent artists should pick a distributor, budget for ads and keep ownership of their masters.
Ben Mendoza, CEO of Beatchain, explains how AI quality control, local payment systems and white-label partners help independent artists get discovered and paid.
Edward Ginis, co-founder of OpenPlay, explains how the platform frees music companies from distributors that trap catalog data and slow commercial deals.
Ex-TikTok SoundOn lead Rachel Young explains why views and brand deals are not where artists' money comes from, and how TikTok Shop and going live help.
Megh Vakharia and Chuka Chase, co-founders of Symphony, explain how their artist marketing agency became a DIY tool for every creator.
Audiomack's Gineyda Cornelio, Director of Marketing and Latin Strategy, on Latin music's 19% listener growth, curator discovery, and independent artists' rise.
Ryan Schmidt of Foundation explains why artists need business knowledge alongside talent, and how two-to-five-minute lessons help close that gap.
Ciarán O'Toole & Michael Coll
Songbox founders Ciarán O'Toole and Michael Coll on bootstrapping a private music-sharing platform for four years, and how Bryan Adams became a co-founder.
Jean Christophe Barat, founder of Allfeat, explains how blockchain-secured music metadata can fix unpaid royalties and open new web3 monetization for artists.
Jenn Miller, CEO and co-founder of AudioSocket, explains music licensing for AI, protecting artists with opt-in terms, and industry collaboration.
Louis Marks and Fabian Brown of Rope-A-Dope discuss 25 years of independent music, Grammy myths, and a people-first approach to sustaining a label.
Entertainment lawyer Priyanka Khimani of Khimani & Associates explains India's independent music ecosystem, copyright legacy and market entry for founders.
AI Jake on Sound Connections explains Will Page's completion model for music royalties: reward completed streams, curb fraud, and support fairer payouts.
TikTok and DistroKid now let independent artists create official TikTok Artist Accounts in hours, with music tabs, fan spotlight, and ticketing tools.
AI Jake reports TuneCore has paid over $4 billion to self-releasing artists and added another billion in 18 months, with 77% of new artists outside the U.S.
Scott Cohen shares how The Orchard survived $3 million in debt to become one third of iTunes and sell to Sony, and why JKBX lets fans invest in hit songs.
Alex Brees, founder and CEO of un:hurd, explains how the platform brings major-label marketing tools to independent artists at an affordable price.
AI Jake reports independent artists and labels earned $4.5 billion from Spotify in 2023, half of its payouts and four times their 2017 earnings.
Matthias Strobel, founder of MusicTech Germany, explains why small markets lack music tech startups and why founders need a network as much as a product.
Jesper Skibsby, founder and CEO of WARM, explains how a Polish radio royalty gap led him to build global radio monitoring for independent artists and labels.
Jakob Løkkegaard, co-founder of W.A.S. Entertainment, explains how the artist management firm survived years of unpaid founders before selling a Sony stake.
Rasmus Rex of Roskilde University explains how pro-rata streaming royalties favor heavy listeners and why a user-centric model could cut fraud.
Capella Entertainment's founders explain how pitching music as IP won over investors and helped them build seven companies in under two years.
Questions these episodes answer
Why do artists need AI tools for career management?
JC says artists face endless tasks around releases and social media, and learning AI prompting is one more job. Orphiq aims to put AI in the background so artists stay creative without mastering technical prompting.
What kind of creator will succeed in the future?
JC says the successful creator is a storyteller, someone who makes people feel seen, heard, and understood. He says this has been true for the whole of human history.
Can smaller audiences be profitable for artists?
Yes, JC believes AI can make it much cheaper to monetize a smaller audience. He says the goal for most artists is to live off their music, and future tools can support that without needing superstardom.
How does Orphiq acquire customers?
Orphiq relies on product-led growth, being easy to find and use. JC says they use SEO and GEO and design the product to create network effects, with artists inviting their teams and vice versa.
What is Orphiq's business category?
JC positions Orphiq as artist management software, separate from distribution and labels. He wants it to be a productivity layer like Notion or Google Drive that follows artists between projects.
What does Patchbay do for music managers and labels?
Patchbay is a shared workspace built for managers, labels, publishers, lawyers and business managers to track an artist's releases, deals, invoices and touring in one place. It checks contracts against MLC, PRO and SoundExchange data so people can see whether royalty splits and credits match what was agreed, instead of using spreadsheets, Airtable or Notion.
Why did Aidan Schechter decide the music industry needed shared software like Patchbay?
After roughly 10,000 hours of conversations with music executives, Schechter found that independent companies were all solving the same problems with no shared back office. Everyone invoiced producer fees to the same labels and filed publishing splits in the same format at the same collection societies, yet each business hacked together its own solution in spreadsheets or Airtable instead of using one shared system.
How is AI changing how Patchbay builds its product?
Schechter says AI research tools would have saved Patchbay about a year of early architecture work if they had existed when the company started three and a half years ago. Now the team uses AI, including Claude Code, to rebuild front-end work such as onboarding, which frees them to focus on harder problems like automated catalog enrichment.
What does Aidan Schechter see as Patchbay's long-term competitive advantage?
He argues the moat is trust rather than software alone. Patchbay verifies client workspaces for managers and teams, including collaborators behind about 35% of last year's Billboard Hot 100, so that when a client's song involves someone else's team, both sides can transact through a shared, guarded network instead of starting from scratch.
How did Vijay Basrur come up with the idea for OKListen?
He wanted to buy music from an independent band he discovered called Them Clones and realized there was no digital way to buy Indian independent music. After the CD he ordered by post missed a home delivery, he researched the market, found nobody was selling independent Indian music digitally, and decided to build the platform himself.
From: Building a Music Tech Company Before the Market Was Ready
Why did investors decline to fund OKListen in its early years?
Venture capitalists told Basrur and his co-founder that independent music was too niche a market to reach real scale, and suggested they pivot toward Bollywood or broader commercial music instead. Basrur and his co-founder were not excited by that advice and chose to stay away from it, so the company went unfunded.
From: Building a Music Tech Company Before the Market Was Ready
How did Vijay Basrur keep OKListen alive while working full-time corporate jobs?
After failing to raise capital, artists urged him to keep the platform alive, so from 2014 to 2019 he held a day job while his co-founder returned to a family business, and he hired a junior employee to keep OKListen running day to day as the business slowly kept growing.
From: Building a Music Tech Company Before the Market Was Ready
People
- JC Sanchez
- Aidan Schechter
- Vijay Basrur
- Noam Levinberg
- Thierry Ascarez
- Mark Bamford
- Jesse Flores
- Ben Mendoza
- Edward Ginis
- Rachel Young
- Megh Vakharia
- Chuka Chase
- Gineyda Cornelio
- Ryan Schmidt
- Ciarán O'Toole
- Michael Coll
- Jean Christophe Barat
- Jenn Miller
- Louis Marks
- Fabian Brown
- Priyanka Khimani
- Scott Cohen
- Alex Brees
- Matthias Strobel
- Jesper Skibsby
- Jakob Løkkegaard
- Rasmus Rex