Voices In My Head Podcast Episode # 269: Crowd Music Founder & CEO Mike Castronovo

Have you ever thought to yourself, man, I'd like to host my own podcast? Well, guess what? You can go to podbean.com/voices and get everything you need to create, manage, and promote your podcast. I use Podbean every week for Voices in My Head. There's easy uploading and publishing tools, stunning templates, custom domains, social and promotional tools, an embeddable podcast player, monetization tools, and more. It is your all-in-one podcasting solution. With Podbean, you can create professional podcasts in minutes without any programming knowledge. Best of all, everything is mobile ready right from the start. So go to podbean.com/voices, and when you sign up, use the code "voices" and you'll get a sizable discount. Podbean, for your home podcasting. Thank you for listening to Voices in My Head. Welcome to Voices in My Head, the official podcast of me, Rick Lee James. I'm a recording artist, a singer-songwriter, an author, a worship leader, and an ordained minister in the Church of the Nazarene. The Voices in My Head podcast is your source for discussions on music, literature, movies, pop culture, theology, and more. Now sit back, relax, and listen to the latest episode of the Voices in My Head podcast. And don't forget to let the voices in your head be heard by following me on Twitter @RickLeeJames and sharing your thoughts about today's show. My guest today on this episode of Voices in My Head is CrowdMusic's founder and CEO, Mike Castronovo. CrowdMusic is an industry renovator that values music and realizes that today's music creators are being robbed of their intellectual properties. Mike wasn't looking to start a music company, but on January 22nd, 2014, he read a piece in the Wall Street Journal that opened his eyes to a massive problem. He learned the current music industry wasn't fairly compensating those who actually create the music we enjoy, which ultimately hurts all of us as music listeners and fans in the long run. The more he dove in to trying to understand the problem, the more he was amazed that nobody had come up with a viable solution that would work for everyone. A lifetime guitarist and songwriter himself, Mike was still far enough outside the industry that he was able to take a different perspective. He imagined how the music business could be changed in a way that would benefit everyone, and so CrowdMusic was born. Mike Castronovo, welcome to the Voices in My Head podcast.

Thanks, Rick. Glad to be here.

Well, I am so glad to, to have you here. I, I've become good friends with David Browning, who is sort of your partner in crime there at, uh, at CrowdMusic. And he talks so well of you, and you and I have been connected on Facebook for a while, but this is our first chance to actually kind of sit down and have a conversation together. So I'm really excited about that today.

Well, I'm super excited to be here, Rick.

Um, I want to ask you something that— this is kind of a really softball question as we get going here today, but knowing that you are a guitarist and a songwriter yourself, Name just a couple of your favorite guitarists and/or songwriters personally.

Oh boy, you know, songwriters, you know, it's interesting, you think about, you know, who your influences are. Jim Croce, Carole King, you know, going back to those days, you know, high school, you know, got into, you know, the Peter Frampton, Styx, Journey, you know, were sort of my, you know, go-tos. You know, and today it's just, it's such a wide variety. I, I really listen to, uh, an eclectic mix of music. If you ride around my car with me and just hear what sort of goes through shuffle play, um, people will look at me and, and kind of like, okay, how'd you go from that song to that song?

Yeah.

Um, you know, and then, uh, of course, I mean, if I, if you had a, you know, say you had to pick out one album to listen to the rest of your life, it would probably be one of the Beatles albums. So Sure.

Well, that's great. No, I— nothing wrong with any of those choices, that's for sure. Uh, and you know what, I also want to say, since I have you on the air, happy belated birthday. You just had another year. And, uh, and I, I'd love to— before we get too deep into CrowdMusic today, we've already learned a little bit about your musical taste, but tell us just a, a bit about who you are as a person. I know that all of us You know, I kind of hate that question sometimes, like, what do you do? Because we really are so much more than just like, you know, our position at our company or anything like that. And I'd just love to know just a little bit about you. What defines who you are?

Oh boy, that's a big one there.

Not a big question or anything, but yeah.

Yeah, you know, at least you didn't ask me the meaning of life, so that's good. No, but, uh, you know, I'm a husband, a father. I've got a wife of 27 years, 3 kids who are also just celebrating birthdays here within this 2-week window. My oldest daughter's birthday was yesterday, she's 23. Then I've got a 21-year-old as of next week, and a son who turned 19, uh, a month and a half ago.

Wow.

So So that's what I get up and work for every day.

That's right.

And kind of, you know, spent the first part, majority of my career in the financial arena, working down first at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, left the trading floor after a really successful career. I was really blessed down there. Went into full-time ministry for about a 3-year period of time working as a worship pastor at a church that was a church plant grew pretty significantly. And then because I was working full-time unpaid with 3 young kids, my wife said it would be great if we had some income coming in again. So, so I found my way back into the wealth management world, and things were going well there until about a year and a half ago when I, you know, saw what was going on in the music industry. And my oldest daughter had come to Nashville to be a singer-songwriter, and that's really what got me focusing on just what was happening in the industry. And you mentioned there at the top, the, the article I read in the Wall Street Journal was actually by Burt Bacharach, the guy who wrote Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head. And he was just, you know, going on about what songwriters get paid. And, you know, for those of your listeners that don't know, I mean, it's fractions of a fraction of a penny. I mean, if you're, if you're a paying subscriber, for example, on, on like Spotify, their current rate that they pay out to the owner of the song. So if you own 100%, if you're the, the songwriter, the artist, and self-publisher, if they're paying you for— if you're paying for your music streaming, they pay you $0.00060673. If you're on the ad-supported where you're not paying anything, you're just using the service to listen, they're paying you 0.00015 and some small numbers after that, which are really insignificant. I mean, so, you know, to put that in real terms, I mean, for an artist today to be successful when they're putting their music out there to be streamed, I was talking to a songwriter artist the other day and he was saying, you know, I mean, you know, most bands, I mean, if they get 15,000 to 20,000 streams, you know, it's like, wow, you know, people are starting to notice us and, you know, we're getting write-ups and magazines. And, you know, to the world's perspective, it's like, wow, you're having some, some measure of success there. But you need a million streams just to make $606.

Yeah, yeah, it's amazing. Yeah.

And it's— and that's again if you own 100% of your songs, and that's at the top end if if every single one of those million listeners is paying for their streaming service, which most of them are not. They're, you know, on some sort of— some form of ad-supported listening. And so what flows through to the songwriters, even on hit songs, is just— it's just devastating because of that. You know, the world doesn't realize how many songwriters we've lost just in the past, you know, you know, recent years. I mean, there used to be 5,000 what we call staff songwriters here in Nashville alone a few years ago, and now today, um, there's less than 250. It's a loss in 95% of the songwriters out there. And, you know, David and I were talking about this the other day. I said, I go, it would be like going to your favorite restaurant where you used to have, you know, 20 items on the menu that you used to get to choose from and now you only get to choose one.

Yeah, right.

It might still be a great item, and, you know, just like there's still great songs being written today, but the selection and the variety that we really should have access to just isn't there.

So yeah, it's, it's, it's a bit like, you know, I'm seeing the, the popularity of, uh, like food trucks and things right now. If you want to use that restaurant model, I think that's happened a lot because, you know, uh, people who are chefs or want to run their own business, they can't afford necessarily the the real estate that comes with having your own restaurant. So they're kind of— I think a lot of them love it, but you know, they're sort of into this seasonal food truck business now, a much more limited thing. And I just can think even from my own personal experience as an artist, I just finished recording a new album, which has cost me— or by the time it's done, just recording costs alone, being in the studio, pay an artist, it's going to be around $12,000. And monthly right now, if I was to average what I'm making from Spotify, I get maybe $15, $20, which, you know, that's quite a few streams, but still it's not enough to like compensate for that huge amount of debt. So artists, you have to really love what you're doing, you know, to sort of be in the business right now, which is what I love so much about what Crowd is endeavoring to do and really make a difference. For the artists themselves, for the people who create music. And I'm fascinated by it. I have loved getting the sort of the advanced bonus tracks from artists that have just, just been wonderful and like nothing that I'm hearing anywhere on the radio or even hearing from Spotify or Apple Music or anything like that. Just some really quality music of all different styles. And I I just am awed every time that I get a new email that says, here's the latest artist, you know, that are coming out. They're very good. And knowing that you kind of have a family stake in this too, you know, your daughter, and you're wanting to look out for people like her who are in the business, it becomes a lot more personal in that way to you. And so I love that there is this new platform that's making a difference. I want to ask you a bit, if you don't mind. I know that there's been a couple of exciting things that Crowd has been a part of. I know that recently you and David both were guest speakers at BMI in Nashville. And just in case listeners don't know what BMI is, BMI really, it supports songwriters and composers and publishers by taking care of the aspect of their career that Getting paid basically is what it does. They pay out the artists and things like that. And what a huge honor and opportunity for you guys to get to speak at BMI. Would you mind telling us just a little bit about that experience and how that came about?

Sure. It was really kind of neat. We actually got an email, I think it was a Monday afternoon at about 3:30 or 4 o'clock. And It was a person reaching out from one of the publishing groups in town that represents— I think there was probably about 40 people roughly in the room, and they invited us to come speak the next afternoon at 2:30. They said, you know, hey, sorry for the short notice, but could you guys please come tomorrow afternoon at 2:30 and speak to our group and tell us about crowd music? And David and I, not being shy, we said, sure, absolutely, we'll show up. But we had no idea what we were walking into. It's like you know, are they just trying to find out about this? Is this a witch hunt? Because what you— what I found out, I moved to town from Chicago down to Nashville just back this past December, and, you know, I wanted to be here, you know, sort of in the epicenter of, you know, where the damage is being done in the industry, um, you know, to songwriters and that, and just, you know, the, the meetings with folks that I've needed to have. And so I didn't really realize, even though I've been coming back and forth here for the past you know, 3, 4 years, didn't realize on the business side to the extent of the amount of outsiders that have come in consistently over the years and profiting off the backs of creators. And I was probably viewed as, you know, okay, who's this new outsider coming in and what are they trying to do to rip us off? So, so I was probably walking into a very skeptical audience when we, when we arrived there. Um, And it was this, you know, massive room, big, huge, you know, marble, you know, oval table with, you know, like I said, probably 35 to 40 people sitting around it. Um, you know, everyone sort of looked at David and I as we walked through the doors, and, you know, you know, not everyone knew that, you know, we were the only two that were there, that no one knew who we were. And the gentleman who had invited us, you know, said, Mike, David, you know, come on in, you know, sit up here, and you pulled up two chairs for us, you know, got us a glass of water and said, well, everyone, you know, let's get started. You know, we have Mike Castronovo and David Browning from CrowdMusic here. They're going to tell us all about Crowd. Go ahead, guys.

So over to you.

Yeah, yeah. David just looked at me and was like, go ahead, take it away. And so I said, you know, not knowing what they had heard or knew about us, I sort of gave them the, you know, 10-15 minute quick 30,000-foot overview. And sure, you know, it was interesting. I mean, you know, saw people going from, you know, sitting back, arms folded, to, you know, relaxing, you know, starting to lean in. And then I opened it up for questions. And for 45 minutes, you know, they just, you know, hit us with all their toughest questions. And, you know, we just, you know, you know, answered them calmly and And the more we answered them, the more they started smiling, the more they started leaning in. And by the end of it, one of the big publishers in town said, he goes, "Okay, so if I understand this correctly," he goes, "Basically, the smartest thing for us to do would all be to sign up and join Crowd right away, then get all of our artists on board and start going with this. Let's see if we can make this thing happen because it's going to help the industry." We said, "Exactly, that's kind of our point." And everyone just, you know, they took a break after that before they went to the next section of their meeting, and David and I got up to leave, and everyone in the room virtually was coming over and exchanging business cards with us and looking to set follow-up meetings. So it was really a great thing to see that kind of reaction and response.

Well, that is great. And what an honor to be invited and then to see that kind of reaction from people who do this and to know that you really are trying to be a part of the solution and not just another person that's kind of coming in to do their thing and get the money and run, so to speak. Right. So I really, you know, since we're on that topic, and so since BMI themselves, you know, we're asking these questions, what are the most commonly asked questions that you seem to be running into, or that you and David seem to be running into when people ask, what is CrowdMusic? Because I know a lot of our listeners might be hearing this for the first time and would really like to know.

Sure, it's, you know, it started, you know, from the fact that we believe in the value of music. And, you know, knowing limited time here, I'll try and see if I can condense it for you. Really, it was basically, you know, looking at it from an outsider's view. And so many people in the industry have told me this, and Mike, you know, it took someone from the outside to look at this problem a different way. And I just said, you know, I mean, if you go back to the root of the problem was in the late '90s with, you know, digital music and piracy, and people were able to simply, you know, copy and share files and download them. And the industry was in turmoil at that point in time. You know, it was, you know, piracy was killing it. And so the idea of streaming, you know, give your music away for free, eliminates, you know, the need for, for piracy, uh, if everyone can get it for free. And then, you know, the, the thought process was get everyone used to these platforms, get them used to the, the Pandoras, to the Apple Musics, to the SoundClouds, to the Spotifys, you know, get them comfortable with that on the what they call freemium services, where you're listening to ad-supported, and then eventually we'll start getting people to subscribe to not have to listen to the ads, and then ultimately we'll, we'll switch it over to everyone has to subscribe, uh, was sort of their game plan. But the idea came about that, um, you know, by doing this, we're not paying the artist, but, you know, like I said earlier, a fraction of a fraction of a penny sure, um, you know, for every stream. But the thought process was this gives artists exposure, they can go out now and, you know, get more gigs and find more fans because, you know, everyone's able to access these platforms. Well, there's several problems with that, you know. One, I mean, you're talking about, you know, millions and millions of songs. Spotify alone claims they have over 20,000 new songs uploaded every single day. Wow. SoundCloud, you know, claims to have the most music available out there, available for streaming, 180 million plus songs on SoundCloud. So if you're a new artist trying to get your music out there, you know, unless you're paying major dollars to be placed on a list, you know, that's supposedly Discovery, you know, it's very hard to stand out. And so, you know, where do these, where do these new artists find a crowd? Where do even, you know, legendary artists, you know, find— other than their fans, you know, how do they find new people for their music? And the biggest problem of it is, is, you know, even if the artist gets the exposure and gets to go out eventually and tour and sell merchandise and get endorsement deals they're still in a situation where the songwriters don't do that, the producers, the studio musicians, the sound engineers, all the people that used to get paid when music sold are no longer being paid. And if you stop paying the people who create music, eventually they stop doing it. It's probably, you know, from a person who came out of the finance world, I said, you know, in any healthy business, Somebody creates a product or a service of value and the marketplace buys it. Yeah, but we've gotten into this strange place in music because of streaming where, you know, the industry itself was willing to give away the core of their business, the music itself. We'll give the music away for free. And David and I just attended the Music Biz 2018 conference last week. And, you know, there was, you know, 2,300 participants. There was, I think, something like 150, uh, panels with 350 different speakers. And virtually every single one of them was talking about, you know, ways to monetize your fan base. You know, how do you, how, you know, what are all the different ways you can make money other than just selling the music itself?

Sure.

Right. You know, when you, when you take a step back and you look at that and you go, okay, you're trying to figure out all these ways, you know, to make a buck, you know, from your music or as a result of your music without actually making money just straight up on the music itself.

Yeah.

And, and that's what we— I mean, at the core of our belief, I mean, you know, we say it on our website, I mean, we believe in the value of music. We believe that, you know, the idea of purchasing a song for $1 to $1.29 when people will spend $2, $3, $4, $5 for a cup of coffee that lasts them 30 minutes The idea that you can own a song that you can play on demand whenever you want for the rest of your life. You own this. Um, you know, we did that for decades, and now only because of technology we've stumbled into this place of, you know, well, we should just, you know, I'll get it for free. And, and there's a whole generation that has grown up believing like, well, well, why shouldn't I have that for free? Yeah, even one of the I won't name his name here, but a very prominent person in the music industry at this conference last week. He actually, you know, said in his speech, he said, he goes, you know, when I was growing up, he goes, I used to have to work hard and, you know, and I'd save up to buy the 1 or 2 CDs that I wanted every month from my favorite artists. And he goes, and I, and I got to own those 2 CDs and I got to own all that music for from those two artists. He goes, but my kids are growing up in a world where they get to own all the music out there, the entire universe, for $9.95 a month, right? And I just— I sat back just like sort of stunned. I mean, people are like, you know, cheering like this is the greatest thing since sliced bread that we can do that. I'm like, do you realize what you're saying? I mean, you're saying that I used to pay for the intellectual property and the two people whose intellectual property I bought, there's a fair exchange of value when I bought that intellectual property. But now I can own everybody's intellectual property for basically nothing. I mean, it's tantamount to slavery when you stop and think about it.

And yeah, that's—

go ahead.

No, I just— it's, it's kind of astonishing because I think that we are becoming It's sort of like when we got the internet and we should have all this great knowledge at our disposal, and yet what we spend a lot of our time on is looking at cat pictures, you know? Right. And there's a sense in which music has been devalued the more of it that we have too, I think. Because I remember very clearly when I was younger taking those CDs home and getting whatever I could buy. At times, I was lucky enough that my local library would have them sometimes, where I could get stuff, but part of the experience for me was not just the listening, but it was opening up, you know, the liner notes and reading about what was going into the song. So for me, it was a very interactive experience that involved not just my listening, but there was things that I wanted to read. I wanted to know who the musicians were. And I think we're poorer for that as a culture because, um, like for instance, one of your artists who's a good friend of mine as well, Dave Cleveland, Oh yeah, on Crowd Music. I mean, nobody knows who Dave Cleveland is unless you're like sort of a music insider, but he literally is the guy that has played on everybody's album. I mean, he was, he was on the Grammy Award-winning like Stephen Curtis Chapman Live album for The Great Adventure years ago, and, and it just played everywhere. And so part of the experience, you know, I got to be in the studio with Dave a while back, and I told him, I said, Dave, I've been a fan of yours before I even knew who you were, you know, right? And so there's There's a sense in which I hope that Crowd is sort of a part of that process of bringing us back to where we can interact with our music too and start to learn more about sort of these unsung heroes behind the scenes and people that, you know, just making that whole experience something that we do not just with our ears, but something that we stop and actually take time for, you know, and I really like that about it.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And when we looked at it, you know, from the fact of— I mean, like what you said, I mean, you know, producing your, your most recent album, just the cost there. And you think about the fact that, you know, bands back in the '70s, '80s, early '90s that, you know, made so many classic albums that, you know, people still love and listen to today. Sure. And they used to be able to spend weeks, months months, sometimes even years in the studio working on perfecting it and getting just everything just right. And today, when you're giving that music away for free, you know, there's no economic reward there. You have to do it as cheap as possible, get it out as quick as possible. And, and so we are losing a piece of the artistry in that.

Yeah.

Um, you know, again, I mean, it's, it's not to say that there's not great music being made. But, you know, when— even when you talk to the best of artists, you know, a lot of them tell us, you know, yeah, I'd love to be able to spend more time in the studio, but I just can't. Um, you know, think about this. I mean, think about in what business or any walk of life, the longer you do something, generally the better you get at it. And in music, I mean, there's so many legendary artists out there that, you know, have already, you know, sort of had the peak of their career in the public. But in terms of when you talk to them and they talk about the music that they're writing, you know, today, they will tell you, I mean, it's some of our best music ever, but it's not worth it for them to record it because their fans come to see them at concerts, and that's, that's where they make their money, is on their ticket sales and on their merchandise. And their fans are looking for their you know, their songs that they know, and they look at it and they go, well, if we were to go in the studio and try to produce this at the level of quality that we've always done in the past, it would cost us, you know, $400,000 plus.

Yeah.

And we'll never recoup that. We're only going to give the music away for free. You know, it's not going to— it's not going to bring any more fans to our concerts, most likely. So, so why bother? And, and it's stuff like that that, you know, again, you don't as music listeners, as consumers, you know, we, we don't see that, so we don't feel it. But, but it is something that's, that's missing, and it's a, it's a growing void as time goes by.

Definitely. Well, let's talk quickly before we have to hang up today. I know you're busy and we have more things to do, but a person that wants to get involved as a listener in CrowdMusic— and I'm going to tell everybody right away because I subscribe to Crowd, and you've already mentioned that you can become a promoter when you subscribe. So I'm gonna tell listeners to go to crowdmusic.com/rickleejames, and if you sign up for CrowdMusic, use the promoter number 337. That's just my plug because I want people to be on board with that too. But tell people a little bit about how this works, because there's a subscription service to it, but you can actually get your money back in the subscription by getting other subscribers involved.

Correct. And so going back to kind of the beginning of it, we said, okay, you know, I said, what if you just scrapped everything we knew about the music industry today and could start from scratch? You know, what would that look like? Um, you know, and again, people just paying a small amount, you know, for a song that they could own. But how do you get people back to that? And we said You know, in today's world, you know, labels used to pay hundreds of millions of dollars marketing, advertising, promotion in order to get, you know, you and a few of your friends to tell everybody about their featured artist. We said, what if we just sort of cut out that middleman and pay you and your friends directly to tell everyone about our featured artists? And so it's a referral-based model. At the base of it, you subscribe $20 a month, and that allows you to select 20 songs. And we're still in our pre-launch phase. We're building the crowd, and we're building it to a point where it makes sense for everyone involved, both the artist to give us an exclusive song that you can't get anywhere else, and for you as the fan to have the opportunity to earn enough referral income off of that. And so the way it works for, um, you know, we knew we needed to make it simple, we knew we needed to make it low cost, and we knew we needed to make it easy for people to share. So we give you that promoter ID number like you said. Yours is, I believe you said 337.

Yep.

So we give you that promoter ID number. So think of that as your referral code. You know, on any other thing, it's just you sign up for a $20 subscription to get great music and you tell your friends. If you tell 5 friends to also sign up and do it, they're going to get that 20 songs every month. And you've now cut the cost of your subscription in half. As those friends start to share with just one or two others, all of a sudden the cost of your Crowd subscription is completely free. As they continue to share with others and you continue to share with more, again, if you were to share with 5 who each did the same, at that point not only is your Crowd music subscription paid for, but we're paying you enough in referral fees that you can pay for your your Spotify Premium, your Apple Music, you know, even your Netflix, all combined can be paid for with just a very little amount of effort. And, um, you know, as people that want to, you know, get involved and share it more, bring others into helping us grow the crowd, um, the amount of money you can make monthly from it on the side is, is really unlimited. Um, but, you know, to make it something that was just super simple for people to be able to quickly jump on board and do that. You know, we wanted to make it extremely easy for people to do, and we think we've done that. We do it in a way where basically we're taking that for a, you know, single download, a dollar song, 40 cents is getting paid out to the artist instead of the 0.0001. So with the amount that we're paying out, you know, we're going to have great music, as you said, like what you've already heard. We're taking 40 cents and paying that out to the music listener as a referral fee, and then the company keeps 20 cents out of that dollar to run the company and reinvest into the platform.

Sure.

So it's a, it's a pretty simple, straight-up model, and we're just, we're paying out that 40 cents in referral fees, and we did it in a way where we are sharing that revenue on that referral basis so you don't have to do it all on your own. So we do it in a way where you make money on the people you bring in, they make money on the people they bring in, and you make a small piece of that as well. You asked earlier what's one of the biggest questions you get, and probably the biggest question we get is, "Well, isn't that a pyramid? Don't you run out of people?" Absolutely not, and I won't dive into it deeply. You can go to the CrowdMusic www.crowd1.com/rickleejames website. Go into our opportunity section there under community and look at the compensation plan. But when you dive into it, what you see is it's about effort and not position. In a pyramid, the people at the top make all the money and the people who get in last lose out. In Crowd, it's the exact opposite. It's the people who work the most, you know, have the potential to earn the most money. You know, you can make more money than me at this. You can bring in somebody that can make more money than you. You know, so we designed it to be extremely fair.

And I'll be honest too, it's not the money-making appeal of this that appeals to me. It's the music fan part of me that actually is excited about this, because it's worth it to me to pay $20 a month to find these great artists. And I want to tell everybody too, while they're listening,— that if you go to CrowdMusic.com, one of the pages you can go to is just click on the link that says "Music." And you can go in and choose genres and see the different artists that are available through Crowd right now, learn more about them. And so if you're wondering, like, "Well, what do I get for this?" I guarantee as you go in and find out more about these artists, it's music that I run to. I mean, it's stuff that I put on my phone so that I can have nearby. They've got something for every mood.. And also one thing I love about it is the artists don't have to like look a certain way. There's too many artists out there who have so much talent that are just ignored because they don't look a certain way or they're not the right age or something that is, you know, a lot of times labels will only market to those certain people. And I love just the diversity of people that you can see on the website when you go to the music. And I've listened to all of them and they all have just such different offerings that they bring about. Just amazing. Um, there's, um, there's— yeah, I just— I'll just let people go and look for it themselves. I could start naming artists. I'm on the page right now and there's just so many good ones, but they really are, uh, good music. And it's, it's my go-to when I go running, you know.

So yeah, well, the other thing I'll just mention real quick that I think is real important for for fans to know is, you know, again, we're in just the very infancy of this. As this starts to grow and we start releasing, you know, hundreds of new artists every single month that are featured that you get to choose from, and the, you know, premier artists on the site that there's a growing list that, you know, fans will be able to ultimately go to the site and just download single songs. But when they do that, they have to go to one of our promoters, they have to go to someone like yourself and buy from your site. So again, you're getting paid, the artist is getting paid. So that's the reason for, you know, sort of, you know, building your crowd. Yeah, at these early stages is because it's, you know, quite frankly, this is the best time in the history of the company because no one knows about us yet. Yeah, you know, a couple, couple years from now when you go to people, hey, are you already in Crowd? They're going to tell you yes. So yeah, so it's, it's a great time to get in, um, but you're going to get that selection. And as the crowd grows, the more the crowd grows, the more the crowd actually gets to decide which artists get featured. So versus a few, you know, heads up at the top of a, you know, label, you know, sitting in an office, you know, smoking cigars going, okay, this is who we're going to make a star this month, and this is who we're going to push on the radio that you hear, you know, on repeat every 2 hours, and this is who we're going to put on the playlists and feature, you know, when people go looking on Spotify or Apple Music and they go, you know, here's our here's our featured playlist for this genre, you know, those spots are kind of bought and paid for, and the fans have very little say in that. Crowd, we sort of flipped that model on its head. We want the fans to be the one to say, hey, I discovered a new artist, you know, let me put them out there. I get paid for actually promoting that artist, and that artist has a chance to be discovered. And as you said, doesn't matter what you look like. I mean, for us, it's best song wins.

Yeah, definitely. Well, I love that. I love your platform, and I appreciate you taking some time to talk about it today. Is there anything we haven't talked about that you feel like is really important that we should before we end our conversation together today?

Oh man, there's, there's so much we could dive into, but, uh, I will say this, uh, you know, in terms of sharing this and growing the crowd, I mean, on the the business side of it, for, for helping us build this, because we are rewarding people for that. Go to our Facebook page, the crowdmusic.com, and then when you like that, you can look for our Crowd Music Biz group page. And we just started calls actually just this last week. We're doing them every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday evening at 8 PM Central Time, and it's just a, a 20-minute phone call where, where David and I, and from time to time some other folks are going to be, you know, jumping on to just give sort of a quick 20-minute overview. This is what it is, this is why you should get involved, because we realized we needed to make it easy for people to share. I know you've, you've been with us, you know, from, you know, very early on, and, you know, as we've been sort of, you know, refining our platform and starting to put music out on it for people to get a sample of what's going to be there. We haven't provided anybody a real easy way to share this. It was sort of, you know, you sign up and tell your friends to go to the website and sign up too. So we needed something a little bit more tangible that you could say, hey, you know, I just signed up for this yesterday. I get that it's going to be this really big thing. I don't really know how to fully explain it to you. Just get on this phone call tomorrow night and listen in. So we found that making it really simple for people to share it like that is having a real positive impact for us. So I'd encourage your listeners to jump on one of those calls for 20 minutes and check it out along with the website.

That's a fantastic idea. Well, and I do want to say one more time, if you have discovered CrowdMusic through this podcast, I would appreciate it if you would use my promoter number when you sign up, 337. You certainly don't have to, but it would mean a lot to me, and it even helps to promote this podcast more, helps to support it whenever we do that. So I appreciate everyone taking time to check out CrowdMusic's site. But Mike, this has been just a real honor. Thank you for taking time today to explain to us more about Crowd and sharing your heart and just telling us a little bit more about who you are as well. It's been a real pleasure.

It's been my pleasure being here with you, Rick. Thank you so much.

Well, as I say to all my guests every week, thank you, Mike Castronovo, for being one of the voices in my head this week. Thank you for joining me here this week on the Voices in My Head podcast. I hope you'll visit me on my website at rickleejames.com, follow me on Twitter @RickLeeJames, like my artist page on Facebook at facebook.com/rickleejames, and keep up to date on what I'm writing at my author page on Amazon.com. Make sure to follow my calendar on the website, and if you would like to have me come to your town to do a concert, a speaking engagement, or a book event, you can book me through my website by clicking on the link for Pare Booking Agency. That's P-A-R-E Booking. And finally, it would mean the world to me if you were to leave me a review of this podcast on iTunes. The more positive reviews that we receive, the more visible this podcast is on the internet. And now the benediction. May the God of peace, who raised Christ from the dead, strengthen your inner being for every good work. And may the blessing of God Almighty, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, rest upon you and dwell within you this day and forevermore. Amen.