Season 3 Episode 19: Josh Simons -- CEO and Co-Founder of Vampr, the world’s largest and most active social-professional network for musicians

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Welcome back to another episode of The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song. So for this episode, I got to interview Josh Simons. He is the CEO and co-founder of Vampr. It's the world's largest and most active social media/professional networking site for musicians. I feel like the theme of this season of The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song has been about how we classical musicians should reach out to our niche or our audience in a creative and innovative way, especially in this post-pandemic era. So As my show is approaching the season finale in a few weeks, I thought I should invite someone outside of our industry to talk about marketing and promotion. So I found Josh Simons, and he created the social media platform specifically for musicians, and he's in the entertainment industry, and I thought we need to pick his brain in regards to the topic of promotion and marketing. So before starting the episode, I want to welcome everyone who is listening or watching The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song for the first time. I'm a classical pianist and educator from New York City, passionate about creating a thriving and meaningful community of the classical music industry through this podcast. Please visit yukimisongstudio.com to find out more about my work. In each episode of The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song, I interview a guest speaker who has been breaking exciting new ground in the industry. Before getting started, I want to thank everyone for tuning in. Please rate the show and review it on Apple Podcasts because every rating review will help people find my show. So here we go, dear friends. Please enjoy the show. You are listening to The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song, where we talk to the brightest minds in the industry about how they are bringing the piano into the 21st century. I am honored to welcome Josh Simons, the CEO and then co-founder of Vampr, the world's largest and most active social professional network for musicians, recognized by Fast Company as one of the most innovative companies in 2022. Vampr is home to over 1 million users worldwide. Josh himself is a successful artist and songwriter and producer who has toured for many years. So with his extensive experience as a professional musician. He has a lot of credit as far as being the groundbreaker in the industry by creating something unique and timely to help fellow musicians. I am looking forward to hearing his story and how he got to where he is now, and of course learning about Vampr. As you know, I'm open to learning from someone like Josh who has created a new pathway for himself and for others. Although you may say classical music and pop music entertainment industries are different, I think we have so much more in common than you think as artists and creatives, and we can learn so much, particularly the topic of marketing and branding, from Josh today. So welcome, Josh. Thank you for being here.

Thank you for such a lovely introduction.

Thank you. So, um, I'm very excited to talk to you about your, especially your company Vampr. It's a social professional network for exclusively for musicians. So tell us, tell us about Vampr.

It came about because I was having issues in my own career about, well, now about 10 years ago. It still feels like yesterday. But basically, I had a band in Australia that did okay. And then I went back to England, which is where I'm from, and tried to recreate that success. And kind of found that I was starting again despite having sort of 5 years of touring experience, being on the radio, playing festivals and touring nationally, all the kind of stuff we were doing. And the concept of starting again in your mid-20s in an expensive city is ridiculous. It's ridiculous at any point really that it takes 5 to 7 years to find the sort of team that you need to right, actually make a living in this industry. And so I took a look around, and I looked at a lot of the technologies that existed. There were great tools for distribution, great tools for publishing, uh, even good tools for building fan bases, but there weren't really any tools to help build your team and your network, the people around you. So that's kind of how Vampr came about. I wanted to solve that problem, and I went back to my label that originally signed me and said, I'd like to partner with you on this.

And what's the really premise or the mission behind Vampr? I get that it's networking, but more specifically?

To connect the Johns and the Pauls of the world algorithmically. So, you know, it takes typically 5 to 7 years for people to find the perfect team. I said perfect. I mean, a group of people that have common interests, like-minded in their focus and what they're looking to achieve. Usually that's a living of some kind. Um, takes— it takes time traditionally to find those people, um, who believe in you and are aligned. What, what if we can do that in 5 minutes? And that, that's the mission.

Oh, wonderful. And then when did you create this, launch this company?

I think we launched the first version on iOS in 2016, but we didn't really launch proper until like broadly and globally and across all devices until February 2017. And then we kind of pressed pause for a year just before COVID actually, and we went back to the drawing board and because we'd learned a lot really quickly, we'd sort of managed to get a couple hundred thousand people learned how to market really effectively, but the product wasn't amazing. So we pressed pause for a minute, went back to the drawing board and sort of redesigned everything and came back out sometime early in the pandemic.

So how did the pandemic affect your company?

Yeah, that's a good question. We definitely saw a slight bump in downloads. It wasn't dramatic. You know, I remember doing interviews at the time and people like, this would either kill you or make you. And it's like, it's, it's neither. Um, it's like everything in life, it's, it's measured, right? Um, so we got a little bump in downloads, like, you know, saw an increase in people because our whole app is about connecting. It makes sense that folks stuck at home would want to connect with other people. Um, so that was mildly helpful, but then a lot of the things that people do using Vampr, like they'll catch up and then go to a recording studio together or jam in a practice room, the second part of the equation was missing. So we had to then very quickly think of what are things that we can give people online. And that's when we started adding in services like music distribution, music publishing, which, you know, they're still passive activities, I suppose, but We were like, if our users can't catch up in real life, got to find them a way to make some money online. That was sort of our thinking. And so a lot of our energy and effort went into that during the early part of the pandemic because the pandemic kind of went on for a few years. But the first year was all about coming up with online solutions.

Now, in so many ways, pandemic taught us many things. Like, for example, you know, as especially as classical musicians, we are all about acoustic performance, of live performance. And of course there's a recording too. But then, you know, pandemic taught us that this sort of communication, this sort of, let's say, collaboration online became possible and acceptable. So Did any of these things affect you, affect your company, affect the way that people think about music?

Definitely. Yeah. And aside from being the founder of Vampr, I'm also a songwriter, and I myself collaborate with other people. And during the pandemic, we did lots of online songwriting sessions and things like that. I think if anything, the pandemic probably accelerated people's comfortableness with that. And that's a good thing because it means that you don't have to be in Los Angeles or Berlin or London or Melbourne or whatever city that's culturally relevant, New York. You don't have to be in these sort of hubs, these songwriting hubs sort of centers to have access to opportunities. So that's probably the only positive thing that came out of the pandemic.

Yeah, it was a tough 3 years, but yeah, finally it's over. So now before asking the next question, I would love to hear a little bit about your background. You mentioned a little bit about your musical background and then as I introduce you to my audience that you are from professional musician. So how did you get started as a musician and what led you to where you are now today?

Yeah, so I got started because I was managing some bands when I was very young, 19 or 20, and I sort of seemed to have a knack for finding bands with really amazing talent, but they all had in common a reluctance for commercial success. So where I saw their songs performing really well on TV shows, they saw that as selling out and stuff like that. And so I grew frustrated with them pretty quickly and I was like, I might as well just do this myself. And I could sing. I'd been in choir my whole life, but I don't think I'd ever really seriously thought about it as a job. And then I just started doing it. And then within 6 months of starting, we were on the radio and then invited to play some festivals and do some big tours. And it all moved very quickly. So as I said at the top, that all happened in Australia, which is a very small market. Like, it's a small— it's a large physical country, but it's a small population. And the music industry is smaller again. So it's— there's a nuance there. But, you know, we sort of climbed to the top of the indie scene in that world. And it was a lot of fun. You know, I think we toured that country 9 times or something. You know, we were on the radio and TV and—

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Doing live performances everywhere. It was awesome, um, but it's really hard to sustain because it is such a small market. And, and also because it's a large country, it costs a lot to travel. So if you're moving a band and crew around and you're, you're an indie outfit, to get from Melbourne to Sydney is, you know, gonna cost several thousand dollars, um, that many people. And you've got to get your gear across or you've got to hire it. So there's real restrictions. And look, I'm not the only one who's had this problem. Every band in Australia has this problem. That's why there's a lot of singer-songwriters or solo performers who don't have to move production around. And we were more of a production in a lot of respects. We liked our little light show that we did with our shows. So we weren't a cheap band to tour, and that was a real restriction on our ability to scale and grow the thing. Um, but you know, there's a, there's a video online called— the band was called Buchanan, and there's a video online called An Uncommon Experience, and it kind of chronicles our journey and our career and what we achieved. I suggest people check it out.

Yeah, I would. And what, what genre is this? Um, It's a rock pop.

Yeah, it's like indie pop.

Okay, great, cool. Now let's get into your company Vampr because I really wanted to find out more about it. So you can find actually an app on any of the smartphones?

Yeah, that's right. So it's, you know, Google Play for Android devices and the App Store for Apple devices. But yeah, it's on the App Store. It's an app. Working on a web version on and off for years. It's coming, I just can't say when. Political reasons. But, um, oh wow, there's just— it's tricky with the— with websites, uh, you got to consider all kinds of things like, uh, what country people are visiting from and what happens if they're in a, you know, a country with blocked IPs, and, um, how's it going to scale on a mobile and is it going to behave like a web app or—

yeah.

I won't bore you with the details, but the website's taken longer to build than probably we would have liked. But right now it's a mobile app. It's kind of started as a mobile app. We started as a mobile-first company, which means sort of we build apps. And so that's where you'd find Vampr today if you want to download it. And it's very, hopefully quite straightforward and intuitive. We've not tried to reinvent the wheel. We're kind of standing on the shoulders of giants and leaning into technologies and behaviors that people already understand. So When it comes to discovering new people, we use the sort of Tinder functionality of swiping left and right and put it in a professional environment. There's also traditional search where you can just type in someone's details. We've got a section called Watch where people can upload videos of them performing or, you know, demos or collaborations. Oh wow, that looks a little bit like TikTok. So we kind of combining sort of features and, as I say, user behaviors from other platforms that people already understand. And hopefully that makes the experience, you know, less intimidating, familiar somewhat. Um, and that's, that's kind of how we've always done it. And we'd be pretty quick to adapt to whatever the latest behavior or trend is. We've also— I mean, I don't want to undermine that we also put some original stuff in there too, and try and innovate in subtle ways. For example, platforms like Vampr that allow one person to meet another person, they're usually what you call a closed social network, one or one-to-one. And how you then merge that with a social network where you can speak one-to-many, that being like a Facebook or a LinkedIn, no one's really ever successfully done both models in the one platform, where I'd argue that we kind of have. So yeah, there's some innovation in there for sure, but we always try and use languages and behaviors that folks are familiar with.

Oh, wow. Okay. So now, so Bumper is really made for musicians and then has the sort of feature of like many different multiple platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook and so forth. And but So what's so different and unique about Vampr from other networking sites? Like, well, you mentioned a little bit, but, uh, you know, you, we have LinkedIn, Instagram, Fiverr, Thumbtack, and then SoundCloud. And, uh, so what's so special, unique about Vampr?

So all the platforms you just mentioned do thing, do one or two things really well, but you know, it's comparing SoundCloud to LinkedIn. The fact that you even made that comparison is problematic because they have nothing to do with each other. One of them is a place where you upload songs, the other is a place where you upload a resume. So with Vampr, we did look at literally every one of those things you just said and we said, well, how do we create a dedicated space? Because that's what was missing. If you go on LinkedIn and type, show me a drummer who's female, 22, lives in Arkansas, and listens to Pink Floyd and The Beatles, it'll get confused and say no results, where you can go on Vampr and put all of that in and get an answer. So as I just said, you can quite literally search for that person on Vampr, whereas you can't on any of those other platforms. That's what makes us unique. And it's a dedicated space. So, you know, we, we could remove all the labels in the app that say genre, skill, favorite artist, all these sort of categories that people display on their profiles. You could put any words you like and then the app becomes that. The point I'm making is like with platforms and social apps, a lot of the usefulness comes from the context. And the context here is that we're an app for musicians made by musicians to help you meet other musicians. That's the context you have when you go in. That's the context supported by the labels and the various sections in the app. But it's a social network, so it does what you think it does.

Tell us a little bit more specifics about Vampr. So for example, features. So I went online and then I typed in vampr.me. That's the web address. And then there are like features like learn, discover, connect, collaboration, and control. Can you tell us about those 5 words?

Yeah, if you break them down, they generally translate to features inside of the app. So The primary principal feature in Vampr is meeting people. So that's why folks come, and that's all about discovery and being discovered. Then when you zoom out a little bit, you've got a lot of features that sort of support that. So you've got Vampr Distribution, which people who make music as a result of using Vampr can upload their music then to Spotify, Apple Music, et cetera, through our distribution platform. We've got our publishing division, so that's a part of the company that tries to place our users' music in film, TV, video games, and ads. And then there's our academy, which is like an edtech solution for the business of music. So there's not a lot of courses online about how to navigate the business side of music, so we've kind of provided some courses around that.

Wow.

And that's, that's our Learn features. And that's like, I don't know the exact number of hours, but probably approaching hundreds of hours of courses from top professors and industry authority figures, you know, teaching folks, particularly in the early stages of their career, what to look out for. So that's our Learn stuff. And then Control refers to controlling your own copyrights, and, and that goes back to distribution and publishing. So we kind of call those solutions and they all kind of orbit our social network. So we kind of view our— we view the discovery thing and meeting other people and connecting as kind of the heart of the company. And then those other things I just mentioned sort of circle around it as sort of ad hoc solutions that folks can use as they need them.

Right. Now, I'm curious about this distribution part. That's so cool that— so, Once you are on Vampr, you have the membership and you produce your song, then you can distribute your music or whatever on like Apple or Spotify through Vampr.

Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, that's something that, you know, not a lot of people know how to do it. It's as simple as it is.

There's a lot of options out there now. In fact, for classical music, it can get trickier because The metadata in classical music is slightly more complicated than pop music. It's not more complicated, it's just different. And not all distribution platforms will support classical music. But for non-classical music, it's pretty easy now. Like, you can work with DistroKid, you can work with CD Baby, TuneCore. Those are sort of the big players. We offer a version of the same thing. We all do the same job at the end of the day. We offer it because if people are already in our Vampr world and using our tools and services, it's just convenient for them not to have to jump onto another platform to complete a task. But most music tech companies offer a form of distribution these days.

Wow, that's cool. Then when it comes to learning course, let's say if I want to learn how to promote myself, Is there a course like that?

Yeah, there is. Yeah, there's a, a course specifically on self-promotion. Um, it's probably one of the most requested or talked about topics in our ecosystem. And a lot of people use Vampr specifically to self-promote, which in and of itself is sometimes a bit of a problem because it creates a bit of noise. And if everyone's doing it, then the quality can fall off. But that's sort of a separate topic that we could spend an hour on. How to self-promote using legitimate channels and without annoying people. Yeah, we've done a few courses on that.

Oh, wow. Yeah, that's really important. Even in a classical music world, I think that's something that as 21st century classical musicians, we have to learn. Because we have to create audience now. The audience is not there waiting for you, right? So frustrating. Yeah, I know it is. But if you know, learn how to do, then you can really create a meaningful, you know, your original audience. Like, it's not just one of those people, just they stop by the concert venue and then leave, but they would be a faithful fan, super fan, right? Exactly. Yeah. This episode is presented in collaboration with our good friends at Forte, a free alternative to Zoom purpose-built for music teachers. Forte offers features optimized for classical music lessons, including audio quality far superior to existing platforms and allowing you to hear every nuance of your student's instrument. Their colleagues at the Royal College of Music, Aspen Music Festival, Curtis Institute, and Berklee College of Music have even used Forte in their own programs.

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Yeah, there's lots of different tiers, so each solution Some solutions actually that we mentioned, in fact, I think something like 70% of our features can be used free in one way, shape, or form. So you can use Vampr distribution for free and we keep a small royalty percentage of the performance of the tracks, or you can pay us $5 a month and keep 100% of your royalties. It's all about choice, right? Same with publishing is, it's free to upload the tracks and get represented and have us in the market. Working a song. Um, if it— if we land something for you, we'll take a cut, um, but it's free up front. If you want to connect with more people, you can pay for additional direct messages and things like that with our Vamper Pro product. Um, that's also $5 a month. The education stuff's a little bit more expensive, it's $19 a month, but that gets you unlimited access to all of our courses. So it just really depends on what your appetite is.

Right. And then with that sort of whatever the tier you choose, depending on how much you pay per month, is there like a, I wouldn't say customer service, but maybe some sort of support system that you can get?

Right now it doesn't matter what tier you're on, you get the same support team.

Wow. Really? Like if I have trouble, let's say uploading my video or maybe, oh, I want to really, I have a specific question about promoting myself so I can reach out to one of the Yeah, and, and, you know, between Monday and Friday, typically we get back within 24 hours.

But we're not there necessarily to help answer questions about how to self-promote or how to make it, um, although typically we'll reply friend— you know, with a friendly response of encouragement. But the whole purpose of Vampr is to meet other people who can help you on that journey. It's not up to my company's team or myself to individually turn everyone into a star, nor do we make that claim, um, and we never would. It's the purpose of the platform is for folks to find others who can help with that and, and start networking and building their own little communities. So that's what we specialize in. And, and so someone writes in and says, I want to be on the Billboard charts, we'll go, that's great, and we want you to be on the Billboard charts too. Have you reached out to anyone on Vampr that specializes in music promotion. So that's how— but you know, if someone writes in and says, I'm trying to distribute my track but it's not letting me click the distribute button, then we'll dive in there and fix the problem, right?

Yeah, got it. Yeah, so, but if I type in search bar or whatever and say, um, promotion, you know, I'm looking for someone to help me promote then just type in the word and then it shows up, or on the, on the app?

Um, kind of, almost. Um, there's a little search, um, pop-up menu that comes up and you, you put in, you type in what you want. So it might be promotions, it might be publicity, it might be a bass player, it might be a drummer, it could be a graphic designer, it could be a videographer, could be a music director, all these things. You choose whatever it is that you're looking for, you save your settings, and then the algorithm does its thing and it produces results. And within a couple of seconds—

So you can literally create a team there?

That's correct.

Wow.

Okay. Now I'm starting to make sense. So I don't have to go to this platform to look for graphic designer because that's usually the case. And then the other platform to create my audience or create, uh, you know, uh, meet other musicians, for example. So for example, using LinkedIn, but it's all inclusive, inclusive, like, wow, it's like a LinkedIn for the music ecosystem. Cool, that's super neat. Wow. So now, who are the current users? What are the demographics around the world where, uh, people are like—

so we've got users in We've got active users in every single country on the planet. We've got, I think, 1.3 million people in total who are sort of authenticated, which means they've gone through the onboarding process, uploaded a picture, filled out their account properly. And I mean, our most popular or most active territory is North America, which I think you'd probably expect. And then there's a lot of, you know, countries Brazil, India, Spain, where there's a lot of activity, which is kind of really cool, brings a different flavor to the platform, the styles of music from all those places. And then other Western countries like UK, Australia, Canada— well, I already said North America— um, New Zealand, those, those countries are typically fairly active. But as far as like the, you know, the typical user profile, I mean, you usually looking at someone in their early 20s, male and female. Um, you know, we know things like how many artists they love. So typically, I think someone will add 17 favorite artists to their profile on average or something. Um, and then genre-wise, you know, probably won't surprise you that a lot of people affiliate themselves with dance music and hip-hop and stuff that's made with technology. But there's a healthy share of people in rock and more traditional genres as well. And when we look at all the different skills and types of people we have on there, I think the last time we checked, there was 27,000 different skills. So that's everything from, like I was saying before, your film director through to your oboist through to your— I think we've got didgeridoo as a category. So, you know, we cover a lot of categories, but yeah, there's 27,000 different categories, I believe. So, and yeah, that's music teachers, lawyers, anything you can imagine in the world of music, it's probably on there.

Wow. So it's like a really village. You're creating a village, right? That's the plan. So how can Vampr help classical musicians? Because, you know, our industry exists a little differently, right? Even the music making is a little different. Like, we do a lot of— it's based on performing arts, so it's very time-consuming to learn music. Audience is very different from, you know, pop rock industries. And also music itself itself is extremely structured and less creative in that sense, but there are other ways of being creative in classical music, you know, industry, don't get me wrong. But so are there any classical musicians or the community of classical musicians, or maybe in the future, are you thinking of expanding in that classical music industry in that Vampr ecosystem?

There's definitely classical musicians on the platform. Yeah. And there's a small community there. I've heard from them directly, so I know that they're there, not just relying on analytics and data. But yeah, that community exists. I don't know if it's the preferred place or destination for people in the classical world because, you know, just being honest, I don't know enough about that world. It is unique and different than pop rock, and I wouldn't pretend to know the nuance of the things that go along with being an active member of the classical community. But we certainly have managed to attract a healthy number of classical players who identify as classical players. I don't know. Maybe you've got to go on there and tell me what you think.

Yeah. Especially, I'm curious about the learning part and also the streaming part, but also being able to discover someone in the expertise of, let's say, someone knows more about production or someone knows more about promotion. Fits in one app, that's really an ideal. I don't have to go around and look for people all over the place. And then, you know, online search is convenient. However, it's really overwhelming because you end up talking to someone that you didn't connect, but you wasted 30 minutes. And it's— I'm actually, for the last 3 years, that's exactly what I've been doing, like looking for someone, someone who could teach me about marketing, or someone who could you know, do this service for me. And honestly, it's really exhausting.

I bet the internet and tools and apps like Vampr and stuff in some respects really make life, uh, that speeds things up. So, you know, if you think about it, might have taken you years in a previous, you know, 5, 10 years ago to have to go through a phone book or a rudimentary website or Craigslist and dial around and speak to people, you know, by email, and then you don't really know what they look like or sound like or what their attitude is, and then they turn up and they're weird or they're not quite the right fit, and you waste— I mean, I did this with my band when we were looking for a drummer. We wasted hours, hours auditioning people. The purpose of Vampr is to take that hours and turn into minutes. And it is funny to hear you say, you know, you can waste 30 minutes in a conversation. You're right, you can. But I would, I would put it to you that that's better than wasting hours or days or weeks on a, on a lead that doesn't, you know, come good. And so, um, you know, would we like to get it to seconds? Sure. Um, and in Vamp, you can connect with someone within 2 seconds, literally, if you want. But you probably want to check their profile first. But there'll be a, there'll be ways that we can speed that process up. But it's already a million miles better than it was a decade ago.

Yeah, of course. Yeah, that, that, that was exactly the point I was making. Because with the algorithm and everything, I think it's much smoother with this process. Because honestly, without, without it, you know, I have to go to this site and that site and then talk to this person, that person. And it It was because usually those social media is not made for musicians exclusively. So, yeah. So is there any other thing that you would like to highlight about Bumper that helped musicians? Maybe is there like specific story that you want to share? Success story or—

So my favorite success story is a woman called Rae Khalil. She's a Los Angeles rapper and had— as a rapper, she's just one of the best that I've heard. Um, it's phenomenal talent, but she'd had no music producing skills, so she desperately needed a producer to bring her ideas to life. And she used Vampr, I think like 5 years ago now, to find a guy called Jared Rubens who had his own production duo and band thing going on. And they just clicked and vibed and made, I think they made 1 or 2 albums together. But her getting those done put her onto sort of the world stage and she got onto a Netflix show called Rhythm and Flow and got to work with people like Chance the Rapper and Anderson .Paak. Wow. So it just— it, it was the start of something very special for her. And, you know, she's now doing appearances on Sway and Fox and stuff like, you know, all the big— so she's on her own little journey now. But we played obviously a role in the very early days. I love stories like that. There's many stories like that. Um, that's my favorite, but there's a lot of stories where Vampr played a very fundamental role in the very early stages of the career.

So what's the next step for Vampr?

So we got acquired not so long ago by a music company called Jaxsta that does music credits and has the world's largest database of official music credits coming from all sources like labels, PROs, publishers, etc. So we're just working on successfully integrating the companies together, which is sort of pretty big task, but I think will be very rewarding. So that's what's coming up. It probably doesn't sound very sexy, but it's really important stuff to kind of cement our position as the leader in our space. So we're kind of going to be a bit heads down, thumbs up for the remainder of the year and working on improving the experience and and bringing these two products together. So that's keeping me busy.

Oh, wonderful. That sounds really amazing. Exciting. Now we're really toward the end of our conversation, but I have a few more questions. So it's going to be a little bit more like philosophical questions that I want to ask. So I want to know your thoughts on this because you're not a classical musician. So through the lens of a pop musician, I'm a trained classical musician.

I did— oh yeah, I did piano up to, you know, AMEB grade 8 or whatever it is when I was a kid. So really?

Oh, sorry, then you're a classical musician, so you know what it's like to be this, you know.

It's not part of the classical kind of community, if you will, because there is, you know, people who go beyond the stage that I got to in the classical world tend to stay in circles, and they really grow in influence and power and they build careers. I'm not a part of that classical world, but I'm classically trained.

So then how do you think we can keep this classical music relevant and the industry thriving in this fast-paced society and the post-pandemic era?

That's a really interesting question. I hear classical music in popular music all the time. The popular music is built on classical music in the chord progressions and the turns and the time signature changes and all the things that go on. You can hear them all in very early classical music. Pop's popular music's just found the parts that resonate and repeat them 4 times and call it a day at 3 minutes and 20 seconds. So I think classical music is around us all the time. That would be my answer. As far as how do we keep the community alive, again, I can't speak to that, but I would encourage folks to use tools like Vampr to kind of advocate for and push their own or grow their own communities. And people are doing that on YouTube. I follow some really great classical artists on Instagram and TikTok, and it's really cool just to watch that there's still people really passionate about that genre. And although I think the word genre is almost insulting when we refer to classical, because it's a bit too broad. But yeah, I think it's going to be fine. It's the foundation of all music.

Yeah, absolutely. But I think I feel like with this audience of new generations to come, we have to give them some sort of a context. You know, to— in order for us to attract them, right? Instead of just—

how many—

I mean, I don't know what your social feeds look like, but mine are just people playing insanely fast on a piano and people being mind-blown. And then I think also music scores play a part in keeping people interested too. So yeah, you got these viral videos of people playing fast, but then you've also got viral videos of people playing the Interstellar theme as written by Hans Zimmer on pianos in tube stations in London. And, you know, and I think that keeps people's interest in specifically piano, but more classical sounding music. Um, so I think they're exposed to it, you know, anyone who's interested in music is in some way exposed to classical.

Right, right. Yeah. So you may have already answered this, but how can we as classical musicians reach out to the 21st century audience creatively? Well, use Vampr. Yes.

Use all of the tools. I mean, Vampr is one important one, but, and Vampr is a focused one. So you want to like proactively build your own little community of of people who are supportive of classical music in a certain age group, you could do that on Vampr. Absolutely. But I would encourage people to use all the tools. Like, you can, you can do that on TikTok too. You can do that on Instagram as well. And, um, yeah, it's not gonna— you've got to put some effort in, right? Like, we always say this to our users as well, and they— people, some— it doesn't happen much anymore, but people in the early days would be like, I've been on the app for a month and no one's reached out to me and we're like, yeah, but have you reached out to anyone? Effort. Reward requires effort.

Yeah, absolutely. All right, so last question. Advice for young musicians.

Keep turning up. So whether that's to practice, whether that's to a band rehearsal, whether that's to theory lessons, school, whatever it is, just if you keep showing up, eventually things will work out. You have to take my word for that, but it's true.

Thank you so much. So for those who are watching or listening, so Josh Simons, he is the CEO of Vampr. And then you can check out the company Vampr at vampr.me. That's the web address. And you can sign up for free too, right? So there's a free account, but also there are several tiers, so you can check them out. Maybe I should just sign up and then start out as a free account, and we'll see what happens, right?

Yeah.

Okay, before I let you go, there's one more thing to do. So this has been a really fun, inspiring conversation, Josh, really. And thank you so much for really tuning in from Australia today. And then, so, um, now, uh, right now we're, we're going to do a little segment called The Piano Pod Rapid Fire Questions. And this is the part of the show where I get to ask fun questions to each guest. And here's a little warning: as silly as these questions may sound, your answers may reveal who you truly are. So, yeah, are you ready?

Yes.

Alrighty, so question number 1: What is your comfort food?

Oh, pizza.

All right. How do you like your coffee?

Decaf.

Oh, really? Okay. Cats or dogs?

Dogs.

Okay.

What is your word or words to live by?

I think I answered it in the earlier bit, but just, yeah, keep at it. Persistence. You know, it's the key to everything.

Amen to that. Great. So now, what is the most important quality you look for in other people?

Initiative.

Initiative. Great. Name 3 people who inspire you, living or dead.

Bruce Springsteen, Barack Obama, and the Queen, because I'm English.

Okay. I love the Queen. The Queen as in not the band, but the The Queen.

As in Queen Elizabeth.

Oh, okay. I thought you were talking about the musician Queen.

Oh, no, I love the band too. I'll go for 4 and Queen the band as well.

Okay, great. All right, name one piece in your current playlist.

I don't know, to be honest with you, I don't listen to a lot of music running a music company. Oh, my goodness. It goes in stages. That's not true. What I should say is I don't listen to albums on repeat because I hear so much music every day. I hear in the background in the office thousands of songs a day. And so then you don't often find yourself in the mood at the end of that to sit down and listen to a playlist. And so I don't really have playlists. That is the truth. I don't really have anything at the moment that I'm listening to. I'm sure without going through my phone, it'd be very hard to answer. Occasionally I'll hear something brand new and I'll listen to that on repeat.

Right.

But I can't remember.

Yeah, it's your job, so it's like maybe at the end of the day you need a little bit of silence, right?

Yeah, that's exactly right.

Yeah.

Great. Now, last question. Fill in the blank. Music is blank everywhere. Everywhere. Wonderful. Thank you. So that concludes this episode of The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song with Josh Simon. Thank you, Josh, for joining my show today and sharing your stories and insights and expertise. You can learn more about Josh Simon's company Vampers at www.vamper.me. The link is listed in the show notes. And thank you to my wonderful audience and fans for tuning in. If you enjoyed today's episode, please rate and review it on whatever podcasting platform you use. Remember, to hit the thumbs up button and subscribe to my channel if you're watching from YouTube. And then please follow The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song on social media to get the latest piano news via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. I will see you for the next episode of The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song. Bye everyone, and thank you, Josh. Thank you so much.

Pleasure. Hey guys, it's Ryan.

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