Matt Adell

Lawrence Peryer:  How are you?

Matt Adell:           I'm good, how are you?

LP:                        I'm doing all right. I'm doing all right. I'm enjoying the remnants of a popsicle.

MA:                      Oh nice, well done.

LP:                        Yeah, it's been one of the best parts about working from home, I can have snacks whenever I want. And they're so much better than airplane snacks.

MA:                      Yes.

LP:                        So usually I start at the beginning with people, but I think I want to, you know, just because we're such off beat characters let me start at the end. Tell me about the business that you have either just launched or are in the process of launching?

MA:                      Well it's just launched. It's OnNow.TV. It is a discover, share, and promote platform for livestreams. We are not a live-streamer Rather we're a guide and promotion engine to any place a host or creator might want to be streaming. And then for viewers we're a place where they can discover and manage what they want to watch in the live-streaming world across all those disparate places. What happened was I was home quarantined like everybody else, and I am a gamer so I'm familiar with Twitch as a gaming platform and the other live-streaming platforms. But I'm not on social media all day every day, and I was reading about livestreams after they had happened that I had missed that sounded like I would really have liked to have heard them or seen them.

                              And additionally I was sometimes reading about them before they happened, and because live-streaming wasn't really part of my entertainment workflow I was missing them. So I took a look at the market, and realized how fragmented it was. And that a middle layer of defragmentation seemed really valuable to livestream creators as well as to fans. And so that's what we tried to build. It was really fortunate that within days of beginning to test my thesis about this I met some other folks here in LA who had a similar vision. And we combined our efforts, and we're a team of four people moving full steam ahead now. One week ago we launched our MVP, our minimum viable product on the host side. It's a simple platform that allows hosts to build a page about their livestream. It takes them about three minutes to make it, and then they can share that page on their socials. And there is technology embedded in the page that allows people to sign up for notifications, and make sure they know exactly when and where to go leading up to the launch of the livestream, including one that's just five minutes before.

                              And we're seeing that notification itself, which seems so simple be incredibly valuable to both the streamer and the viewer. Cause the viewer doesn't forget, they have an opportunity, it's a link that takes them directly to the platform. We're not trying to get in the middle of that experience at all, and then we're seeing for the streamers that they're seeing at least a 50 percent uptick in the number of tune-ins because of this notification system.

LP:                        That's amazing. So were there existing directories, and were there integrations that you've done with data sources? Or is this now an outreach initiative to creators to get them to create the pages?

MA:                      We're building from both sides of the network, but right now it's us putting stuff in to make sure that we have a great inventory and discovery for our viewers. And it's the hosts putting stuff in. There are APIs for some of the live platforms, but not all of them. And we're ingesting them now and figuring out what can be, you know, how sense can be made of that. But there is millions of data points, and we don't want to make the experience worse for anyone. So right now we're pulling in that data and figuring it out. The simplest way to think of our MVP feature set is that we are Eventbrite 100 percent customized for the needs of a live-streamer, which is very different than the needs of a host of a physical event.

LP:                        Yeah, are you comfortable at all talking about, you know, you specifically used Eventbrite as the example as opposed to say SongKit, are you comfortable -

MA:                      Well one reason is we're not music focused. So music is important and really excites me obviously, and we've seen really interesting stuff happening in music. But there is also really cool stuff happening in health, and fitness, and wellness on the live-streaming front. And I have a side hustle in the world of standup comedy, I'm not a comic but my wife and I own a standup comedy record label. And we've seen a lot of standup comics gravitating towards Zoom as well. So we want to be where you can discover something that covers any of your interests and all of your interests.

LP:                        So in this world where a lot of wellness classes and things of that nature have moved online, would those be listed in your discovery engine? Or like can you talk a little bit about sort of the stratification of types of events? Is if it's live-streamed it's in there, or are there thresholds?

MA:                      Yeah, if it's live we want it. To us live means that everyone who is watching and listening is watching and listening to the same thing at the same time together. We're all about togetherness, and so if the Prince Estate wanted to show a classic Prince concert that obviously isn't technically live because he's no longer with us, but that stream starts at eight o'clock. And it's live, and it goes until it ends, and everyone who is watching it is watching together that's what we think live is about. It's about togetherness, frequently the content itself is live. But that's not necessary, what we really mean by live is everyone is experiencing the same thing together.

LP:                        Yeah, sort of a synchronous viewing event.

MA:                      Exactly.

LP:                        Yeah, and what about gated events? You know, what are you doing around registration, ticket sales, are you simply a directory?

MA:                      So we do not do ticketing. Currently right now the people who want to list their livestreams can put links to their ticketing platform. Although ticketed events may be common among the more popular there are millions of livestreams everyday that are not ticketed or gated in any way. So there is a lot of great stuff out there that isn't gated. But we want to be there to support the livestream hosts, the livestream creators with however they want to do their livestream. So I look forward to integrating other solutions for that, but we really want to remain neutral to the platform that someone is using to livestream. And of course in some cases those platforms are going to want to be the ticketing body. Our goal is to just make it as easy as possible for people to come together while these livestreams are happening, and we want to get in the way as little as possible.

LP:                        It's really amazing to think about the very tangible innovation coming out of the COVID situation. Yeah, that's fantastic. Can you tell me a little bit about your team, you said there is four of you? What's sort of the division of labor or everybody's super power?

MA:                      So my co-founders are three guys who knew each other before the project and had done some stuff together before. All three of them are serial entrepreneurs. Terrence Scoville is our developer, and he is a private corporate website builder for big brands. And Stephan Jacobs is our COO and a co-founder, and Stephan is a well known musician, one of the names he records under is Bosa, B-O-S-A. And he really is driving the day to day operations of the business, he's also our CPO. So he's helping make sure that we're prioritizing everything we need to do. There is always more ideas than resources. And Henry Strange, the other co-founder is a great guy, he's a musician. He owns a company called Strange Electronics that builds highly customized software and hardware for big stadium style music and audio events.

                              So everyone has been an entrepreneur. I neglected to mention Stephan had a business called [Sesio] that eventually had a soft landing, but had been sort of AirB&B for home recording studios, a really great idea. And so Henry is focused on marketing, Stephan is our COO and focused on product definition, he also does some QA and some development. And then we have Terrence handling development, and I am trying to help drive strategy from the highest level, trusting in the team to deliver on those values. And I am also focused on fundraising right now.

LP:                        Yeah, OK. And it sounds like truly in the spirit of a four person team it's not so much you all sit in separate silos. It does sound like there is some overlap. I can't imagine you stay out of product discussions.

MA:                      No, I'm absolutely in those product discussions. But it has been really nice to be able to sort of trust the Agile development process, and trust my colleagues to the point where if the thing you want, the future you want is number three, yeah, on the list and you wish it was number one why get stressed about that? Cause you trust your colleagues, and one is going to get done, and two is going to get done, then three is going to get done. So I've been in those conversations, but the fact of the matter is the value we want to create is very straightforward. And now that we have users a week in it's really exciting to just be able to look at analytics, and see what we're trying to drive and prioritize based on math instead of gut.

LP:                        Yeah, do you call the phase you're in like is it a soft launch, is it a beta, what's your go to market on the consumer side?

MA:                      So we haven't called it a beta, it's just out. You know, we wanted to get this value into peoples' hands as quickly as possible. And as I mentioned before the MVP was really focused on creating value for the host. And we say host cause it might be the actual talent putting on the livestream, but we've also seen as I'm sure you know a lot of the biggest channels in live-streaming are actually brand based, Insomniac, Mad Decent. Where they're having different performers come in over a scheduled period of time, that's also something we saw as a real need in the market. Which is Diplo might have his own livestream, which is easy to find. But he might appear in other peoples' livestreams, and as a fan of Diplo how do you find that? We want to make that much easier. But now I've lost the thread of what I was talking about.

LP:                        That's all right. You're solving sort of an age old problem around discoverability, but also I think the reminder notification piece, like you said it's super powerful. It's one thing to know that there is a livestream Thursday night at eight o'clock, but it's another thing to actually have the workflow, and the personal workflow to actually go do it.

MA:                      Yeah, and so we've created the OnNow.TV Watch List, where a user can see the schedule of everything they've added to their watch list that they may want to view. So it's also not a one and done. We're really hoping that OnNow.TV can become part of peoples', and it's a terrible word but we're talking, you know, business, entertainment workflow. There has got to be a better word for it, but you know what I mean.

LP:                        Yeah, you're letting people sort of make their personalized TV guide. Yeah, and have you given much thought or do you have a vision yet around monetization or revenue?

MA:                      I have. I don't want to do it.

LP:                        It makes it a lot easier.

MA:                      It does. We what we believe to be a very big revenue strategy that does not involve us charging hosts or viewers. And we'll get to that sometime next year, but we are laser focused currently on connecting these two constituents who are having such a hard time finding each other in the marketplace right now, which is the hosts and the viewers. And we believe this is a global problem, this isn't just a challenge for American users. So we are very much focused on really honing in that very very tight value, then we're going to scale that value to everyone on the planet. Then we can worry about how to make money. I mean the good news is because we're not the streamer as a business bandwidth isn't that expensive. We're not licensing content. We think other people are always going to be much better at that. We just want to be the glue that takes this fragmented market and makes it seem like one experience for users. And I want to do that globally before we begin to attack revenue models.

LP:                        Yeah, I mean it's very easy to think about follow on product or follow on capabilities just from a distribution point of view that you could provide custom feeds to different, whether it's into social channels or vertical content genre websites. Like is a really powerful opportunity to delivery new reach to some of these creators.

MA:                      Yes, new reach for those people, and I think our revenue opportunities in the future I would like to be about driving more revenue to our constituents as well.

LP:                        That's great, that's great.

MA:                      I'm being a little secretive about our monetization plans.

LP:                        Yeah, no please, I totally get it. You're a week in.

MA:                      Yeah, right.

LP:                        Yeah, all right, so something I wanted to pivot to is you talked about your side hustle. Who owns a comedy record level in 2020? Tell me about that, and where it fits in your personal ecosystem.

MA:                      Sure, so my wife is an actress and comedian. Am I allowed to swear on this?

LP:                        Oh yeah, please you're encouraged.

MA:                      She may have generated about a billion views, I shit you not. Over the last two years she wrote and stars in a viral video called "Mind Your Own Fucking Business." Which is a reminder to white people to stop calling the police on black people, and it went viral. And it's basically stayed viral for two years because sadly that's an evergreen topic. And in addition to that we built a live comedy business here in Los Angeles with her producing. We did 18 events over the last year and a half of standup comedy with a variety of comics. And then the quarantine happened, and we pivoted immediately to comedy albums and podcasts. We had already done one album, and there is surprisingly little comedy albums on the streaming services. People just don't make them anymore. But we were experiencing people doing great sets, and I know, I mean it's hard to have a hit record. But it's not hard to get a record up, you know.

                              So we wanted to help some comics here in LA that we love get their records out, so we have three releases, three albums out now. We're actually in the pre-order phase of [Joseph Schless'] first album with us, his album is called "Soliciting Dick Pics." And the live show included some large display of dicks and him reviewing them, and so we're in pre-order phase with that. And we have his album coming out at the end of gay pride month. And so it's been really fun, my wife actually was downstairs before this. We made sure we weren't doing it at the same time, recording a comedy podcast.

LP:                        Amazing, talk to me a little bit about why you think there are not comedy albums. I mean I'll give you a little thesis on my end, and maybe you could have a better take. It seems like as in so many other businesses there is a have and have not. So once you hit a certain threshold as a comedian the real money is putting aside even touring, you know, you're shooting for a broadcast or a streaming comedy special. Like that's relatively low production, that's a great business. And then on the other end I guess there is the endless inventory of podcasts. So did it suck the air out of the room for the viability of comedy albums, or was there a perception that there was no place for comedy albums? Cause I think people of our generation, like we grew up on -

MA:                      Yeah, I grew up on comedy albums. I love comedy albums, and still to this day whenever hipster people ask me what my favorite kind of music is I'd like to admit to them quite truthfully that comedy rock, like Flight of the Concords is really my favorite genre of music. But I actually think what it became was the nature of the standup specials. So the specials used to broadcast once, right, when we growing up. And then if you wanted to rehear the jokes you had to have the album. There was no other way. And now that on demand television streaming has become the platform everyone wants to get a special, everyone wants a Netflix special. It's permanently available there and Netflix is paying to produce those things, and it's not really in Netflix's best interest to put up an audio version on Spotify.

                              So Netflix works because it's a walled garden, right? You have to pay to get that content. And then podcast I think is a very different format, like comedians do podcasts but they don't really do their standup on the podcasts. And so I thought that there was this opportunity to find some middle ground where we had these great comics that weren't going to get a Netflix special yet. And perhaps doing an album, which we think is, you know, feels more tangible than a podcast would be a great intermediate step to help comics to that next level.

LP:                        Do you do physical product?

MA:                      Not yet.

LP:                        Not yet.

MA:                      I think if I had to do this one over again I might have done a seven inch.

LP:                        Not a ten inch.

MA:                      No, no.

LP:                        That's aspirational.

MA:                      Yeah, exactly, exactly.

LP:                        So early March hits, and you're sort of in this comedy world. You start thinking about OnNow.TV, what were you doing sort of I guess for lack of a better way to say it, what were your plans for the second quarter of this year during the first quarter. What were you thinking you were going to be doing in 2020?

MA:                      I didn't know honestly. Around January I ended almost a year of a consulting contract that was a [factor] working in the consulting in the software for musicians, you know, creation software space. A lot of that business is moving from a permanent download business to a SAS subscription (?0 model, and I was helping some people evolve their business in that direction. And I'm a hobbyist musician making music on my computer, so the more I can spend nerding out on that stuff the better. And that actually went longer than it was scheduled, and as a result I hit the quarantine with nothing on my plate. I mean I am on the board of a few companies, I'm constantly advising new startups. I've got a couple of mentee young people, you know, I make myself available to. But I went into quarantine without a strong sense of what I was going to spend the rest of the year doing.

                              Every now and then heard about jobs, you know, and I was always willing to talk to people about it. And just as I was sort of resigning myself to using this time in a different way than I thought, you know, I went into the quarantine thinking like well I'll just do nothing. This will be over soon. And instead I started transitioning to doing different things, like exercising, which I never got in the habit of doing. I'm 52 years old and exercise had never become a habit, I've made it a habit during this time. So thinking I wasn't going to be working I focused on sort of life enhancement stuff. And then this happened, and it happened so fast. I mean I feel like went from thinking about it to incorporating in like five days.

LP:                        It sounds it. It sounds it. What's really sort of striking to me is not only the idea itself and the timeliness of the idea itself. But the fact that its' so nice to be able to point to something positive and constructive that was directly tied to the events of the last several months. The pandemic in a perverse way has been very positively impactful for our business as well. And I find myself feeling very self-conscious about that. You know, it's hard knowing that there are so many people every tangibly suffering, whether it's our friends and colleagues in different parts of the business or folks that quite frankly we never come into contact with who are not visible.

MA:                      The whole time has been wave after wave of reminders of how fortunate I am.

LP:                        Yeah, yeah, well it's great that you can internalize that, right?

MA:                      And then more recently I'm reminded how fortunate I am that police don't assault me. Reminded of that too, so it's been, yeah, it's not a great time to go stand on the rafters and say I'm the king of the world, right? And it shouldn't be, but I'm learning from other people as well. I think it's worth remembering about our brothers and sisters who are black Americans that the trials and tribulations they've faced for 400 years didn't stop them from creating some of the most important music and art on the planet over that time. So I think we as humans can improve things, and work on ourselves, and still do great exciting things at the same time.

LP:                        Well along those lines there was an interview this weekend in the New York Times Magazine with Jon Stewart. And he said something, which I'll poorly paraphrase but I'll get the sentiment right. He said, after only about six or eight weeks we had white people storming their capital buildings with guns demanding their right to back outside with no masks because they were bored and impatient. And they were oppressed by the government because they couldn't go outside and go wherever they want. Imagine 400 fucking years of that.

MA:                      Right, that was a great interview with him.

LP:                        That really was a great interview, it made me realize the voice he had. But also I kind of like the mature version of him. I think he's a bit more constructive now, you know.

MA:                      Yes, he is, and the mature him wouldn't have made the show he made again, you know, in hindsight. Well I'm really glad you brought this up. I have to tell you that I read that article, and I started to write a Facebook post about it. And it became too long, and I thought what the hell am I doing there. But may I share with you what that interview made me think?

LP:                        Please, yeah.

MA:                      So Jon Stewart I remember, you know, Trump was running for office as Stewart was appearing less and less, right? And I don't remember when the show ended, but I remember him saying about Trump supporters. And this was Trump supporters before the election, right? I remember him saying, well they can't all be racist. And I knew then and I know now he's wrong. The can all be racist. That's possible. And I think Jon Stewart has a blind spot, interestingly I've seen it other friends who come from sort of a white indie punk rock background, Stewart was in punk rock bands. And then also sort of particular to the east coast, which I'm not from, which is this belief that your racist friends aren't really racist.

                              And he says something in that interview that I thought was also incorrect, which he said, and I know he meant it well. Don't get me wrong, he is on the right side of history. You know, I will stand next to him any day, but he said he thought that we, whoever the we is, are focusing on the wrong issue. And that it's not about what some individual cops are doing, but it's systemic. And I completely agree, the issues are systemic. But right now or at least two weeks ago when the interview was done and we were really facing the beginning of the re-escalation of the Black Lives Matter Movement is it was our black brothers and sisters just asking us to get the cops to stop killing them. That is what our brothers and sisters asked us to face and fight against. And I don't think it's a good look for Jon Stewart to say, well that's the wrong thing to be focused on. And I think it shows a blind spot that a lot of white Americans have.

                              Which is they just can't believe how racist so many people are. And you know what? Just to guarantee you our black brothers and sisters know exactly how racist all those other people are, and there is a lot of them, and they're very racist.

LP:                        Yeah, it's funny that you zero in on that part of the article because it was sort of in the last third, or the last quarter of the interview where he got into this topic. And it's really the only piece of the article that sort of lost me. And I agree with you that when he, I don't know if it's a generational thing, cause he really isn't that much older. But there is too much of a sense of like accommodation or conciliation, and you're exactly right, this idea that just because they support Trump they aren't racist. Actually I'm with you in the part. If he had tried to say well the racism comes from their cultural conditioning, or the way they were brought up, or some kind of ignorance I would have been able to go a little bit further with him in his line of reasoning. But his idea that he could have been right five years ago, but there is no way he's right now.

MA:                      Well I mean just in the moment there is going to come a time where we need to be focused on the systemic stuff as well. I've seen this a lot lately, cause I think I'm further to the left and loud on this topic than many people that I grew up with. But I think it's incumbent upon us to see Trump fans, and I'll say fans right now, you know, the people who are big enough fans to have gone to the rally. I don't think it's fair to think they're stupid. I don't think it's fair to think that they've been brainwashed. They have agency. I think the most derogatory dismissive thing to do would be to not treat them like they have agency. They've chosen to be racist. They're not misinformed, and as long as they're not children it's not the responsibility of how they were brought up. They have agency. I think to presume otherwise is really the most classist way to think about it. That they're just dumb. I don't think that's fair. I don't think they're dumb. I think they're racists.

LP:                        Yeah, I think that's extraordinarily fair, and to elaborate on that a little bit, yeah, it's sort of demeaning to take somebody's agency away like that. But it also then denies them of responsibility for their actions, which to me that's the most disgusting part of that line of thought.

MA:                      Exactly, yeah.

LP:                        All that said, what I thought was interesting. So as a company we watched over Zoom the other day, as a company the other day we watched "13" and then had a listening circle afterward, you know, where everybody was able to sort of share their reactions. And it seems to me that when that film came out a few years ago to now, I mean the impact of that film just gets sort of, it seeps in further and further. I don't think people were having the conversation about the historical legacy of slavery and the real systemic systems I guess that were put in place since then through the criminal justice system, and the prison system, and just the changes in language and coding. All those strands that were pulled together so masterfully in that film, but I say all that because the way he spoke about that in the interview made me realize oh these thoughts have finally, like that film is now a mainstream view.

                              Like it's finally an accepted piece of historical context that I think before that people had little pieces of it. But it was so masterfully pulled together, and so impactful, and have [John Ericlman] in it, and having Newt Gingrich in it, and Grover Norquist, like it was so masterfully done.

MA:                      Yeah, it was really well done.

LP:                        It was really well done, and it's impacted mainstream thought, which is great. So where did you grow up? I don't even know if I remember.

MA:                      Well so I was born in Rochester, New York cause my dad worked for Kodak. But by the time I was like three years old we were in Evanston, Illinois. So if someone is from Chicago I say I grew up in Evanston. If you're not from around there I say grew up in Chicago.

LP:                        Gotcha, well how did you get there? And please don't say by car.

MA:                      How'd I get to Chicago?

LP:                        How did you get from the Roch to Evanston?

MA:                      Oh well my parents, my dad worked for Kodak for a gazillion years, and they moved him around the country. My parents actually conceived me in San Francisco during the Summer of Love when my dad was a Kodak salesman there. Then I was born and they were moved to Rochester, then we got to Evanston, my dad worked in the Chicago Kodak corporate headquarters. Evanston, Illinois is where Northwestern is, but it also borders on Chicago. It's the first suburb north of Chicago, so it had both access to the city, some of it was fully suburban and very upscale. But a lot of overlap with the city, and I went to one of the most racially diverse public high schools in the country at the time as a result.

LP:                        Oh amazing, if I have to think about a theme or a through thread in your career and your various endeavors, at least your professional endeavors, it seems to be about sort of advocacy and empowering creatives. Helping them take control over their distribution, or monetize their career, or choose not to monetize their career. Just giving them optionality and control, one I wonder if you agree with that. And two I wonder what accounts for that? Where did you pick that spirit up from?

MA:                      Well I think even if you count me starting in the late 80s, early 90s, an independent house music record label in Chicago, even all the way back before I was creating tools that was about putting out my friends' records, right? I think part of it came from very early in life, very early in life being lucky enough to be around some really really talented people. And although I am creative and artistic I would never say I am an artist. But something about my personality always led me to being around a lot of artists. And I would end up falling in love with somebody's work and wanting to find a way to share that. It's how I signed a couple of bands to Wax Tracks Records when I ran Wax Tracks back in the day, it's why I started the house label after that.

                              And then I think what expanded was the idea that it didn't only - in the internet I could scale these solutions, and it didn't have to be about my taste. From a business perspective first off if I love it, you know, it's not likely to be top ten let's just say. And although usually trendy or big enough that there could be business to be had, my taste sat somewhere in the middle. I'm not Joe Underground and first to uncover anything either. But what I immediately liked about working in software and on the internet was this idea that I could spend time and energy empowering anybody who wanted to come to the table. There are challenges with that cause eventually someone uploads a fucking Nazi techno record or something like that, and you have to figure out how to deal with that.

                              But I've really come to really enjoy being in the platforms business so that anybody I guess, in quotes, can come amplify what they're doing to be creative. I also really believe that we need to separate creativity more from making a living for a lot of people. I think somehow we've gotten in this weird place where if you're talking about DJ-ing or being a musician it's talk about making it as opposed to the pure joy of doing it. Imagine if every golfer was asked every time they went to play golf, well when are you going to win the tournament? No one does that, people understand that people love to play golf, right, and that's OK, the act of it. And I believe the same thing around creativity. And so I think another theme of what I've been working on is making sure that even people who make art that is never going to pay their mortgage can find an audience. That kind of really interests me.

LP:                        Yeah, that's a very interesting distinction and a line of inquiry. I've thought about that a lot in the last few years, around the idea of, I've thought about it with a slightly different slant. And this is primarily within like a pop or rock music business context. Why you're entitled to be a superstar? Or what makes you think you're entitled to be a superstar? And all I can come back to is that it's just a phenomenon of the last maybe 70, 80 years, the recorded music business. But before that if you were passionate about any art form, including music, you would just do it. And you might have another job that paid the bills, or you might be a street performer and be itinerant. But nothing was going to stop you from picking up your lute, or your lyre, or whatever it was and playing because that's what you needed and wanted to do.

                              And how that got conflated with an entitlement to a way of life, I think that's really distorted young peoples' perception, it's distorted the audience's perception, and it's wreaked havoc on the business. The un-sustainability of even some of the largest businesses in the music business who are so obsessed with being platforms to transfer money to artists. It's fascinating. And I think it's one of those areas that it's difficult to have a reason to discussion about because the framing today is so much. To have this conversation you have to be pro or anti, and these conversations aren't about pro or anti they're just about context and nuance. And we're not allowed to have nuanced conversations I suppose.

MA:                      No, not anymore.

LP:                        That's what I'm trying to do here.

MA:                      I mean you remember that book "The Long Tale," right? It was wrong. The internet has in fact resulted in far more concentration of engagement around far fewer pieces of content.

LP:                        Well that's a whole other topic too, right? Anybody with a certain number of years behind them like we have remembers the emergence of these platforms, remembers the emergence of the internet as a platform. And how quickly it became corporatized and commercialized. And again those are loaded words, and I don't really say them with much value judgment except to say it happened. And they're global media platforms, and global media platforms by their very nature get consolidated, and controlled by gatekeepers, and industry, and all the other things that come along with that. I don't know, the information revolution happened in lots of different ways, but it didn't happen in terms of leveling the playing field. To your point earlier though, it's easier to get a record into Spotify. I think the lay person who has no idea finds it, they'd be shocked to know like what you could do through DistroKid or something.

MA:                      Right, exactly, yeah.

LP:                        I don't think people realized how short the last mile really is to distribution. But good luck getting seen or heard, or somebody to click the play button.

MA:                      Yeah, I'm really fascinated right now with the end of the difference in inventory between UGC platforms and licensed platforms. I worked at Napster, legal Napster I like to remind everybody when we paid everybody. And I ran the music department, and I remember how much music was available at the time. I think it was about 5 million tracks. We were on par with everybody else, and I hated when it first launched CD Baby's service or whoever was the first place, which was basically a DIY upload service into my channel. I hated it cause we were already dealing with a lot of inventory, trying to make sure our customers were hearing the music they wanted.

                              And I figured if they wanted to go listen to unsigned people they could go on YouTube. And again my thinking at the time was old fuddy-duddy thinking. I get it now, but at the same time because you can effectively upload anything through DistroKid what's really the difference between the inventory experiences of SoundCloud or Spotify. I mean I know the difference down deep just because sound cloud has the ability to be working with derivative works. It's more friction free. I could sing right now and we could upload it and see some metrics tonight, which is different than the few weeks it would take to get my record on to Apple. But I'm really seeing a disintegration of those big differences I feel like now.

LP:                        And what are some of the implications of that?

MA:                      It's going to change the way content can be monetized for sure. I think we're seeing different cohorts gravitate to different platforms because of accessibility and level of affluence. I think there is a reason hip hop has gravitated so quickly to SoundCloud, not the least of which is people under 16 don't have credit cards. So SoundCloud is the place to be. It seems like their friends are there. But I don't know what the outcome of this is, but for years I liked there being a difference between the record store and that other pile of stuff. I mean there is just no such thing as a unsigned band anymore. You either have a recording or not.

LP:                        Yeah, yeah, that's fascinating. As somebody who has been an observer and sort of participant and innovator in the space, what are your thoughts on the current state of like product differentiation between streaming services, or at least western streaming services?

MA:                      Right, I think that I don't really believe that people care about the product differentiation between the major streaming services. I think they care what they got the best deal on, on their way in, and what's convenient on their device. If you signed up for Tidal three years ago and you like it, it's inconvenient to change even though it's an app you've got to install. So I've believed for a long time I don't actually think when people pay for streaming services they're paying for music. The music is everywhere. I think they're paying for convenience, and those are varying kinds of conveniences available. One is that your whole music collection is right there. You can listen to things anytime you want. A little bit deeper might be the convenience of sharing a link with your friends because they're also on that platform, and you want to share a link and talk about the same song.

                              But people are paying for convenience not the actual content. That's disappointing, that's why there is so little revenue being driven back towards the talent. But I've believed for a long time it's context and convenience. So context is something that they're both very similar, I mean I was at MusicNow 20 some years ago. We were the first all major label licensed subscription service for music. And we made playlists at that time, and we had radio programming at that time. None of that has really changed, the inventory has gotten better. But context has changed, I think Apple did a deal with [Usample], and it generates these cool sampled playlists. That's context. Stories, Spotify is getting ready to do these stories things with songs, which are a little bit different than playlists. That provides context. I think both of them licensed the billboard charts, so you can go listen to that context. So I don't think there is much more room for all you can eat services. I think that's done, just like I wouldn't start a Google competitor tomorrow either.

                              But it turns out that TikTok is a streaming service, and if we include that in the US though, cause it's certainly taken off. It's a kind of streaming service. So I'm looking forward to more unique experiences with music that aren't necessarily about make sure all music is there. But unique experiences with it, the fact of the matter is TikTok will get deals done soon that you can search for it and find just about anything. And maybe they'll start charging, I don't know how that's going to work. But TikTok was sort of an audio first video-selfie experience. So I look forward to more new things like that. But the industry has missed the mark multiple times on the level to which people want to interactively engage with music. And I'm one of those people. I had us build the Stem Store at BeatPort when I was there. You know, Stems being for folks who might not know, you get one audio recording that's the base, one that's the vocal, one that's drums, and you can play with those things separately.

                              Lots of people have spent a lot of time and money believing that users are going to want to do that. It turns out the only way they wanted to do it was in Guitar Hero and Rock Band ten years ago. Maybe they'll want to do something similar again. The thing that really excited me about TikTok was they really invented a new way for people to play with music. And I think the people who can invent new ways to play with music are going to win. It's not about customizing music, I think some of us thought it might be at one point. It's not about making your own version, it's about playing with it, and I think we'll see more services like that coming.

LP:                        So something that strikes me about that is that you're not dogmatic or precious about a music first experience or said differently, like there is not a puritanical notion of like it has to be about music, or has to be solely about music. It's about, I don't know, it seems to be more about entertainment and experience.

MA:                      Yeah, yeah, I mean well part of it is I'm getting older. You know, OnNow.TV is the furthest away I've been from the music business in a long time because it's not only about music. We're featuring comedy, and health, and wellness, and so forth. Certainly as you get older you discover less new music. You go out less, it's still fun to listen to my favorite record from three years ago over and over again. But I'm also really focused on how do musicians want people to experience their music? And you can see with TikTok that is being embraced by contemporary musicians, so it's OK with me so I'm not precious of it. I grew up working in a record store in middle school and high school. And I learned then that it doesn't matter if I like it. I'm here to help that person find the record they want. And then my world view expanded even further at BeatPort because, and I'm a house music guy but none of my favorite house records were ever going to be top ten on BeatPort. This was the EDM moment, and I remember half jokingly tell people at work all the time, you know what the best record of the week is? The number one record.

                              And not because it was making us rich. But because it was the record that most people wanted, and as I think I get older and more experienced every time I become less and less precious about how I think things are supposed to be. And more willing to listen to how other people want to experience things. But also for me as long as a musician wants it experienced that way then that's also good enough for me.

LP:                        Yeah, well I like that. That's a really sentiment and ethos. And I appreciate that.

MA:                      I tell people all the time that in music, and I think this is something that's wrong with the streaming services actually. They've gotten better at it is they're all run by music nerds, right? Us included, we're all record nerds right? And so we think that whenever you're going to play music you want to hear something new. And mathematically nothing could be further from the truth. Mathematically any time someone wants to listen to a song 99 percent of the time they're going to want to listen to a song they've heard before. Think of the pile of CDs, you know, you had your collection and then you had a pile on top of the player that was sort of your current stack right? And mathematically you were more likely to play from that current stack. So filling the front door of a streaming service with recommendations of things you've never heard before, it's a direct contradiction to how people actually behave.

                              And I think Apple in particular has gotten better with this, the front page is about 50 percent reminding me of stuff that I have listened to, and very little focus on what have I never experienced before. I think that's a mistake a lot of the services make when they launch. And one of the reasons I like TikTok, and I'm not precious about it, is because it's the opposite. It's completely non-music, non-record people who thought this might be a fun thing to do adjacent to music.

LP:                        Yeah, which by definition just grows the pie for music.

MA:                      Hopefully, I mean I am not a fan of all these tech companies effectively knowingly stealing from artists as a way to scale, and then sorting it out later. That's what everybody does, and it hurts the talent, absolutely hurts the talent.

LP:                        Yeah, that's a legacy of the last 20-25 years.

MA:                      Yeah, yeah, I mean frankly it's the Napster way, and it's the way Uber and AirB&B scaled globally. They just ignored local laws and sorted it out later. It's become the way.

LP:                        Or YouTube.

MA:                      Yeah, exactly.

LP:                        YouTube, MySpace, yeah, all the big brands started with this rogue point of view.

MA:                      Yeah, and it's harder to start a company with that rogue point of view in the US, as it should be. And that's why we're seeing these new previously rogue hits come from places in Asia where we've had a difficult time enforcing copyrights. You couldn't start, remember Musically, which I think eventually became TikTok and ByteDance, like you couldn't start something like that in Los Angeles anymore. The people who work at Universal would come to your house and beat you up. But do it in Hong Kong quietly for two years until you're ready to debut.

LP:                        Yeah, I think that's a strong point. That's a strong point. We're nearing the end of our hour together. Thank you so much for making time, it's great to talk to you.

MA:                      It's great to talk to you. I'm sorry I veered a little bit off subject. I am really here to promote OnNow.TV god damn it.