How Much Is Your Music REALLY Worth? | Jeff Ponchick x Wendy Day | No Standing Zone Ep. 19

Jeff, how are you?

I'm doing wonderful, thank you. How are you doing today?

I'm doing awesome. I'm so happy to have your mogul self here. I'm so excited. I've been looking forward to this interview for weeks now.

Great. I've—

I—

as, as have I. I'm excited to chat.

I love it.

It's going to be a good one.

You have built something that is so important to artists in the music industry, and it's the area I'm just going to get right into it if you don't mind. It's the area where most of my clients have struggled because upload— we drop music very quickly here at Power Move. So we're dropping every other week and for artists to like upload songs everywhere, it just drives them crazy. They don't know if they're in the black box. They don't know if they did it properly. And you've built something that can really help. Would you talk about it?

I would love to talk about it. I can talk about it forever. So feel free and just cut me off. But, uh, no, thank you. I really appreciate you saying that. Incredible. The story behind Mogul and the problem we're solving and the product that we're building or have built is myself and the original team, we were at SoundCloud for a number of years. We had built a digital distributor called Repost Network, which we sold into SoundCloud and that became SoundCloud for Artists. And so we're a team that has a ton of experience around royalties, registrations, large data sets. And when we all left SoundCloud, We were searching for like the next big problem to solve in the music industry. And when we started catching up with artists, managers, lawyers, business managers, songwriters, just people in the space, there was this really common through line, which was it just sort of feels like there's too much to manage. And what I mean by that is you have an ASCAP account or a BMI account for public performance. You have the SoundExchange and you probably work with a few different labels or digital distributors, what we found was most artists have 7 to 10 different logins to 7 to 10 different things that pay them in different payment schedules, have different forms of data entry to get, you know, your music registered or your content out there. And also their own forms of conflict and dispute processes, right? So, and when we kind of dug into that, you know, people had, I would say, almost like a lack of confidence. You know, when you ask most musicians or people in the music industry, do you feel like you're getting paid 100% of what's owed to you, almost always the answer is— you want to say it, Wendy? Exactly. Exactly. Right.

And the worst part is they don't know because you have to go into each account and check. And then if it's not working properly, they don't tell you what's wrong. You have to then go investigate. And it's really kind of a nightmare, to be honest.

Right. 1,000%. And the music industry is incredibly fragmented from a rights standpoint, from the sheer number of companies that help artists. And it's my opinion that's gonna keep being fragmented and continue being more difficult. And as more musicians, you know, stay independent or go off majors and become independent, you know, you're gonna just find yourself working with more and more and more companies. And so that was essentially the problem we set out to solve. And the way that we do it, we have a pretty special product that I've never, I haven't really seen many companies do anything quite like this. The closest sort of product description I can do is if you're familiar with Rocket Money or Mint.com, you create a Mogul account and you actually link all the royalty dashboards that pay you. So you connect your Universal Music portal or your DistroKid portal, right? Or your Sony Music Publishing portal or your Songtrust portal, right? You connect all these things up. We log in as you, grab all of your data, your royalty statements, your catalog details, in some cases your contract details, and we all just, we just put it into one place, right? So the first step is just let's just centralize it so people just know what is going on across sound recording and publishing rights, which most artists actually, or people who see this freak out 'cause they've just never seen those two rights in the same place. But if you're a musician, you don't care, right? It's like—

Right.

Like you're just like, what pays you? So like why does it have to be different? Anyway, so we bring it all into one place. And then when, so we have that centralized data, We effectively do like an automated desk audit. And what that looks— we help find you money in a couple different ways. Our promise to musicians is we'll try and find every missing royalty that's out there for you in under 5 minutes. That's a goal that, you know, is, um, we're constantly working towards. Uh, but the main way in which we usually help artists find money is making sure everything's registered that should be. So of the 11,000 or so at the time of this recording, musicians who use Mogul, I've not had one who has had 100% registration completeness across their catalog. And what that means— Yeah. And so what that means is like, if you distribute a song to Spotify through DistroKid, is it registered correctly in your BMI account or your ASCAP account? Right. And usually the answer is not. So we basically make sure everything is registered correctly. And then because we're connected into your BMI, into your ASCAP, into your DistroKid account, We simply say, do you want us to register it for you? And you say, hopefully, sure. And we collect a little bit of information. Great. Like, who did anyone else write on this? What are the splits? It's, you know, I like to think a little bit more user-friendly and intuitive than, you know, some of the sites that are out there. And then we access your account as a designated user and we do the registrations for you. And so I think, you know, when I think of at least where we are today and the longer-term vision of the company, We wanna almost be like DistroKid, but for all the other royalties and registrations that artists and managers hate keeping track of. Yeah. So it's like we wanna be that source of truth and that place that artists can go to have the confidence and peace of mind and that, you know, it's getting done correctly. Or if it's not done correctly, they have actionable steps to fix the issues.

I love that. Yeah, I love that. So am I able to go into Mogul and just upload all the information for one song and then you guys will take it everywhere so that I don't have to retype it 50 times?

Yeah, that's exactly right. So the way the process works is when you sign up, you can connect your Spotify account. So that's one way we actually get your catalog data.

We, if I don't even need to type it in because you're connected to my Spotify.

Yeah, you connect your Spotify and then yeah, you connect your, your distributor, you know. Yeah, whatever accounts you have that pay you and we get your catalog details, your metadata that way so that when it's time to actually do the registrations, you're actually inputting like as little as possible because we already have the information. So yeah, like in a lot of ways the data is already out there, but when you go to register it, you have to retype things in. You need to look up ISRC codes, right? It's the whole data entry and you're doing it like 6 or 7 times.

It's like instead of being an artist, you're doing data entry. And it's, yes, nobody wants to do it. I don't want to do it. So I know artists don't want to do it.

Yeah. So, you know, we're basically trying to be the royalty administrator for like the music industry, I guess.

I love that. And you bypassed API because you're logging in the way you do at Mint or Robinhood, which is extremely secure, very safe. I have both of those and I trust them immeasurably.

Correct. Yeah. The way we actually facilitate the registrations is usually through like a designated user status. So if you've ever— or a guest user. So, you know, if you've ever had an account with a service and you say, oh, I want to add my manager, I want to add someone like that, we basically add ourselves at our own email into that and we give ourselves copyright-only permissions. So we can't change, you know, your bank details or your personal info or anything like that. All we can do is just, you know, access— we can just submit registrations and receive data. And yes, that's the way we've chosen to set it up so that, yeah, it's safe and secure and we're only doing the thing that you've hopefully come to tell us to do.

I love that. I love that. So I know you mentioned that you built a product before, which then went to SoundCloud. Was that your entry into the music business, or did you start as a music business person?

I always say I'm a tech person in music and not a music person in music. My story is really weird. I actually started out as a reality TV editor, believe it or not. Wow.

And then— Yeah, I did not see that coming.

Yeah, no, I used to kind of be creative in that sense, but not necessarily music. And then my love of video editing actually got me into my first startup, which was a— this was over like 15 years ago, a long time ago, but it was a crowdsourced concert video app. It was sort of around the time when cell phone cameras were getting good enough and people could film, like, people were like recording the concert with their phones. Yes. I built a website where you could upload those angles and then we would basically analyze the audio waveform and auto-edit, synchronize, and then auto-edit. Wow. The fan angles into a new video. Yeah. And so that was kind of like, I was an editor. I love music. I did the startup thing. I fell in love with doing music tech and Yeah, Mogul is now my third music tech startup, which is wild to think. So yeah. Yeah.

Oh my God, you're, you're a serial tech startup guy. I love that.

Yes.

So yeah, I love that. Mogul is so necessary. Like, it's just, it's, it's a problem that I had been looking to solve for a long time in the music business and just couldn't. And my clients just won't upload their songs. Like, they just aren't gonna do it, and you're missing money. And what happens is, as they grow and they become profitable or get a deal, we then have to go back in and play catch-up. And there is nothing worse than adding hundreds of songs into somebody's catalog. And then I look at guys like LaRussell, who I adore, And LaRussell's been putting out music prolifically, but he's always using different distributors, so nothing is in one place. He's got, he's got music like everywhere because he's testing kind of everybody, which is wonderful in some respects, but it becomes a nightmare in terms of trying to track everything and make sure he's getting paid properly. If I remember correctly, Mogul would help somebody like him because of the dashboard. It does more than just upload information, doesn't it? Aren't I able to see what my songs are doing?

Absolutely. Yeah. So we provide analytics and we actually do some really cool things with regards to comparing digital distributors and labels as well. So for someone like Larussell, who's worked with several distributors and labels, which is a great strategy, right? Maybe you can go that route. You can, you know, get a couple different advances, move your catalog around, right? Like that can be a really great and smart strategy. I don't know if that's the case or not, but what you can use Mogul for, right, is you log in and you connect all those distributors, you connect all those labels, right? We have accounts at Mogul. I think our largest account has over 50 different companies connected to it.

Wow.

And we, we track all the data in one place. So if you want to see, you know, who's paid you more, right? Which label or distributor has paid you more over the last year or 5 years or all time? Very easy to do. And then the one thing that we which I got in a little bit of trouble for, but I kind of, as of right now, I kind of don't care, is we look at all of your data and we actually tell you who pays you more per play on Spotify. So we will, and we started with just US Spotify plays just to kind of get the product out and see if this is something that people wanted or cared about. It seems like it is. And so we're probably gonna take it a layer deeper. Sort of TBD on when that happens. But yeah, you know, you'd be able to see, okay, Universal Music is paying me $0.00 per play across this album. But, you know, Warner Music, the release I have with Warner, you know, is paying me like 10% less on average. Like, why is that the case? And there could be a lot of reasons, right? Maybe it's your deal with the company.

Maybe—

Or their deal. Or their deal with Spotify, 1,000%. And I mean, that's kind of the interesting thing about Mogul, right, is I feel like I have kind of a very interesting blog post I could write in that, you know, we've had thousands of people connect all of these different services. And so from an aggregate macro view, we can see actually which labels and distributors pay a little bit better as opposed to which ones don't. And that kind of shocks some people. Like a lot of people think like, oh, well, You know, there really— is there much of a difference between CD Baby and TuneCore? But like, yeah, there actually could because they're all doing their own unique licensing deals and things like that. So we provide that data back to artists as it relates specifically to their catalog currently. And so, yeah, but to answer your question, we do a ton of things around analytics and data. You know, so you could compare releases to one another and, you know, things like that within the product. And we really believe that You know, anytime you look at the business or you give people the tools to look at the business, they're probably going to make more money because we'll be able to make more informed decisions. And yeah, exactly.

And, and not only better decisions, but you're actually tracking the right stuff. Not, not every dashboard— I, I find with distributors, and I say this lovingly because I really do love distributors, I love the indie world, and I noticed that there's this, um, measuring contest between a lot of distributors where they're like, oh, they're giving you 7 things to measure, we'll give you 9. And it's like, okay, you're giving me 9, but 2 of them don't matter, or 4 of them don't matter. And I find that what you guys are offering is all stuff that, that I actually use when planning out a tour for an artist or looking at where to beef up a budget or which markets matter more to me than others.

Yeah.

Platforms matter more to me than others.

Thank you. Yeah, thank you so much. Yeah, it's, you know, my last, the startup that I sold to SoundCloud was a digital distributor, right? And so I know, I know a lot about that measuring competition, right? All these, they're all selling access to Spotify, right? It's all sort of the same thing.

And yes.

Yeah, yeah. You get, you go pretty deep on competing around price. And there's a lot of companies that do compete in the distribution space around product, but there's also a lot of companies that don't. A lot of them have really terrible products. But yeah, I do know a lot about that. And I think my time building Repost Network and turning that into SoundCloud for artists, as well as just being at SoundCloud in general, which is such a, you know, that's a tech company in music as well with a huge, huge emphasis on data, right? I think one of the great things about SoundCloud is they provide city-level data and they were one of the first DSPs to do that, which, you know, others are catching up, which is great. But I was always proud that SoundCloud, you know, led on that front. Yeah, you know, I think we've just kind of been, we've been doing the music data thing for over 10 years, you know, myself and the team that's starting Mogul. So, you know, it's all about putting the right thing in front of the right person at the right time.

Exactly.

And the challenging parts of that and the art to that too is sometimes artists don't know what they need.

Right.

Right. And so also that can be sort of like the trickier thing to do, right? Like an artist might not know that Distributor A is paying them 30% less than Distributor B. They may not know to look for those things. But we, you know, we hope to build those types of, insights and like put that in front of people in a way that matters, right?

And, and you, and you illustrate it beautifully. I remember when you and I first spoke, and I'm not gonna put you on the spot, so please don't panic when you hear where I'm going with this, because you might. When you and I first spoke, like, I'm forever explaining to artists that yes, DistroKid and TuneCore are great because they pay 100%, but they're not incentivized to negotiate the best deals with Spotify and the other DSPs because they, they, they just pass the money through. Whereas a distributor, you might have an 80/20 split with somebody, but that 80% might actually be more money than 100% of what DistroKid or TuneCore is paying through. And artists don't really think about that, you know. And when you and I were first speaking, I remember like all of a sudden I had this light bulb. You probably saw it go off over my head and I'm like, oh my God, Jeff, you know, you know whether 100% of DistroKid is more than 80% of United Masters or whoever. And I don't mean to call anybody out and you just smile and you're like, yeah, I do know. And somebody that has access to Mogul is going to be able to get that information as well. And that's, Well, provided they have accounts at both of those places. And that's really important because we get excited about the thought of 100% pass-through. But what if 100% pass-through really means 65% of income? We just don't know.

Yeah, exactly. Like the— I think where we— and also just like for anyone listening, right? Like all the companies we're talking about are completely for illustrative purposes, right? We're not— No one's saying any— you're not going to get, hopefully, out of this conversation any knowledge of like, this company has a better deal with Spotify than that, right?

And I'm truly not trying to put you on the spot.

Right, right, right. But yeah, I mean, the one thing we do find with a lot of people is, you know, there will be like a label that uses a distributor who's on a rev share and it'll be like a dollar comes in the distributor takes 15 cents on the dollar, so that creates 85 cents. The 85 cents goes to the label, and the label splits, you know, the 85 cents, maybe 50/50 or 80/20, right? And so what's happening is there's like people kind of up the food chain who are taking cuts out of the—

I call them middlemen.

The middlemen, yeah, thank you. That the artist has no clue. They think they're getting a 50/50 split, but in reality, they're getting like, they're really only getting like 30% of like what was generated, right? And so we catch, catch is maybe the wrong word, but we provide the data that like allows people to see those types of things when that's happening. Yeah. And, you know, my hope is that, you know, with that knowledge, it will inform musicians to make smarter business decisions. And that pressure will hopefully incentivize more distributors and labels to, you know, really care about this stuff and not— you know, not hide it as much.

Be a little more transparent.

Yeah, I think so. And look, like between one company and another, like many of the companies in the space, you know, the big distributors, the big labels, right? Like, yeah, it's a nominal difference. But there are some where it's not nominal. But—

I remember when I started in the music industry, there was a business manager named Bert Padell who was just infamous And I remember him telling me, Wendy Day, this is a pennies game. It's not a dollars game. And people get rich because they get a lot of pennies. And it takes a really long time for the pennies to start coming. But once they start coming in and you have a hit record, then they come really, really, really fast. Yeah. He's like, the trick is to make sure you get as many of the pennies that you do. You're not going to get them all because this industry is not built for you to get them all. But, and now we're dealing with fractions of pennies., and it, it's more fractions of pennies, but it's still fractions of pennies. And I'm reminded of that conversation because yes, you might be comparing two things and somebody might be paying 0.0001 cent more than somebody else. But when you're talking about billions of streams, that's a nice check.

1000%. And I mean, kind of going back to Mogul and our core offering, right? A big part of what we're trying to do is make it so artists are set up correctly so that when they do see success, they're able to capture as much of the value as humanly possible, right? Because to the point you kind of said earlier, which is, you know, oh, there's a hit record or an advance on the table and then it's— there's this scramble, right, to get everything registered and polish the car, right? So A, yes, that's like super stressful. The other thing people don't realize is how the black box works. So if in many cases, if the song has been out, for more than 3 or so years, those royalties older than that are gone, right? It's either been eaten up by— It's either been eaten up by the company or CMO or entity that's responsible for collecting it. It's just gone into their operating budget. Or even worse, it's been blackboxed out to the rest of the industry, which is guess who? Sorry. Yeah, not blackboxed. It's been paid out pro rata to the rest of the industry. And guess who that is? Guess who has the most market share? It's the major labels and the major publishers, right? So, you know, when you're an independent artist, you know, you kind of have to ask yourself this, which is, you know, yeah, maybe it's pennies, right? But like, if I bet on myself and I'm successful, do you want your money, those pennies which equal dollars, which, you know, grows and grows and grows, do you want that given away to the major labels or major publishers and these already giant companies who, for not really doing any of the work. And so I think to me, I would hope that would be a strong incentive to just, you know, just take a little bit of time, do it right, and hopefully use the service like Mogul that makes it a little easier too.

Exactly. With Mogul, and if you can't talk about this, please don't, but where are you guys growing to? Like, what are you looking to— you said you love solving problems in the industry, so I'm hoping that there's a bunch that you can tackle. But is there anything you can talk about, like the direction that you're going? This is me being nosy. This isn't necessary.

Yeah, no, it's great. That's a great question. You know, we just launched this tool that registers your music for you and the response has been really great. We're seeing really strong uptick in the amount of users, repeat users. It seems like there's actually some solid word of mouth happening. People just like making social posts and, you know, stuff like that. And so In my experience, when something like that happens and you feel as though you've kind of found a layer, a level of product market fit, it usually makes sense to double down. And so some of the obvious things is we're very direct to artist focused, right? So I would say the majority of people who come in our front door are artists who are doing it themselves, which is great. That's obviously very near and dear to my heart. But we also get reachouts from record labels and from publishers and from management companies. In organizations and who have the same problem or version of the same problem, but slightly nuanced, right? What a publisher needs from a registration standpoint as an organization is like a little different than maybe what a management company needs. So for us, I could certainly see us developing the platform and product to basically work with more prongs of the music industry. And also it's so blurry, right? Like there are so many artists that also have labels and, you know, so I want to kind of grow in that direction. Uh, another thing that's also been very interesting for us, and this is one of those funny things in tech where it's like sometimes the thing you put like the least amount of work into and just kind of throw out there, it ends up being the thing everyone likes. But one thing that everyone really likes is our valuation product. And at the time of right now, I actually don't know what the strategy is for this, but it's something that's always in the back of my mind. And so what, what, what our valuation product is, is you connect up all your royalty dashboards. We get all your finance and royalty data and we tell you how much you could sell it for. And that's really it. We just kind of look at how old the catalog is. We look at how consistent the royalty stream, which creates something called dollar age. And then that allows for a publishing and a sound recording multiple, right? And we kind of slap those two together and we say, hey, we think you could sell for $100,000 is sort of our rough estimate. And we get musicians coming back every month saying, you know, hey, why'd my valuation go down this month? You know, or like, or how do I get this up? Or I want to solve my issues, I want to get this valuation.

And it's the new measuring stick, a little bit.

Yeah. And it doesn't take up that much real estate in our product. It's like just a little, a little thing. But it, you know, I think when anytime when, when all the eyes are going to a thing, it, you usually say, okay, there's something here, maybe we should take it.

Yeah.

A little deeper. So I don't know if anyone's listening to this and has any ideas of how we could advance our, uh, our valuation tool or offering, uh, certainly open to it.

I love that. I love that. You know, it's, it's so topical right now because much of the music business press is focused on catalog selling for 12 to 20 times value, right? We're reading, you know, uh, Warner Brothers just teamed with this venture capital firm and they were infused, you know, billions of dollars to buy catalog. And as, as a newer artist, we don't always know what that means. We don't really understand that. You know, we, we hear the Queen catalog is, you know, almost a billion dollars. We hear what Bruce Springsteen, you know, sold his catalog for. So we're hearing the numbers, but it's very difficult to apply that to ourselves. So what you've done is you've offered a tool where somebody can go in and say, okay, I might not be Bruce Springsteen, I might not be Beyoncé, but my catalog has value. And oh geez, it's worth X amount of dollars. Let me now put some effort into building my catalog. Let me put some effort into growing my catalog so that I see my value increase. It sort of evens the playing field for somebody who's not a superstar to start taking it seriously. And I love that.

Yeah. And I think also just when you sort of see a bigger number that's like sort of 10x what you're used to seeing, it's maybe a little motivating.

Incentivizing. Yes.

That's maybe a better word. And yeah, you know, it's kind of interesting. It's like we're doing all the work to help you like centralize the royalties in the business. We're valuing your business and then we're also pointing you in the right direction of how to make more money and to grow that valuation. Right. And so we do actually get a decent amount of like producers, songwriters who kind of come through and they're like, oh, like if I just used Mogul and, you know, pay for $150 a year subscription, it's like $12 a month, right? Like if I can, if I can grow my catalog by 20%, it's sort of like polishing the car before you sell it. And it's already, it's already aggregated all the statements and all the things in the right place. So we actually do see that when people are trying to sell, they almost use us as like a pseudo, like, data room, if that makes sense. And if you're not familiar with what a data— if anyone listening isn't familiar with what a data room is, it's sort of a— it can be as simple as like a Google Drive or a Dropbox with, you know, all of your contracts and all of your historic royalty statements and some analysis and stuff like that. So since we're kind of doing the organization, yeah, we see some like funds like getting added into people's Mogul accounts sometimes.

I love that. It's also, it's also a great way to see what the valuation is if you're utilizing one of the advanced services, because there are a lot of advanced services out here and some are legitimate and some are not. And it's nice to know going in, okay, this is what I think my valuation is. And now when I go to get an advance and I learn, okay, they're doing a 6-month, you know, here's what their mathematical formula is. I've got a place to go and see exactly what my math is to be able to apply their formula myself and see if what they're offering me is really what my worth is.

Yeah, yeah, 1000%. And I would say, you know, our, our catalog valuation isn't, you know, it's not— it's like a good rough number, right? It's like, you know, and yeah, I think to your point, it's like you can look at that and if it's like well below it, you might be kind of, you know, you know, you're getting scared or something.

Yeah, I might want to tingle a little bit.

Yeah, you still, you still like do your own research for sure, but it's, it's I think kind of a handy tool to kind of get like a, you know, lick your finger, put it up in the air and be like, oh, which way is the wind blowing on this?

Yeah, I love that. I have, I have one more question for you that has nothing to do with Mogul. When, when I was coming up Um, I came up during hustle culture and one of those weirdos that's just super driven and a complete workaholic. And nobody ever talked to me about like how to balance my life. In fact, I've, I'm embarrassed to admit to you, I've just learned in the past 2 years how to bring balance into my life. So do you mind if I ask you how you find balance in your life? Or do you, cause I don't want to assume. You, but you seem very well adjusted, so I'm assuming that you—

that's, that's, that's amazing. Maybe that's a coping mechanism, I don't know. Uh, no, uh, that is such a good question and such a— and so I, I love that question, and it is so important. You know, it's— I've been better at it and worse at it in my life. I kind of feel like in my 20s I was really, really bad, like working all day every day, weekends. I was doing customer support on Christmas every year for like 8 years, right? Like my other startup. So you kind of never take a day off. And yeah, sort of there was that whole like Gary Vee, like grind, grind, grind, wake up and grind, like thing. And I totally subscribe to that. And yes, you know, what ends up happening is the personal relationships you have suffer and whether it's friends, family. And you burn out. And especially if you're trying to build an artist business or a startup, it's so, so much of your success is dependent on your mental health. I really can't emphasize that enough.

Say it again.

Yeah, it's so much, so much of your success is dependent on your mental health. Um, so I think it's about knowing what type of person you are, what type of rest do you need, right? Like, rest doesn't always mean getting 8 hours of sleep, right? Are you an extrovert? Are you an introvert? Do you need to be around people? Do you not, right? Like, how do you recharge? What are you doing to keep your body healthy? Things like that. And just creating enough space for it because, yeah, like if you're working all the time, if there— I heard this metaphor recently, which I liked, which is you're gonna be like a dim light, right? And you're just the quality of the light is going to just be dim all the time. And it's actually not going to be as effective as if you take the time and when you turn on, you're a bright shining light that's powerful, right? And so that was like a huge lesson I had to learn, which was like, yes, you need to exercise every day. Like, I am an extrovert. Like, I need to be around people, right? So like me shutting myself in a dark room and working for 3 days straight and not getting outside is probably not a good idea.

Yeah.

So you have to make time for it. And yeah, and be disciplined. And so yeah, try and be a bright light, not, not a dim light.

I love that. I love that. I'm tweaking my, my morning routine right now. And I've been reading a book called The Miracle Morning. And he was talking about something in the book that actually has nothing to do with morning routine. He was talking about, you know, when you're fueling yourself, when you're eating, are you making choices based on emotions, like what you like to eat, or are you stopping to think, okay, I have to work until 10 o'clock tonight, let me eat something that's going to give me energy, let me eat something high in protein and get some fats for my brain so that my brain doesn't get foggy. And I'm actually listening to the book, I had to stop, I pulled over because that was so profound to me. It's like, how did I get to be this age and I'm just hearing this now? And I'm like, this is freaking brilliant. And it was yesterday when I heard it, and I'm like, you know what, I'm going till 10:30. This is the last night I'm going till 10:30. And I really wanted some fried chicken. That's what I was in the mood for. I live in the South, and I'm like, no, let me go and eat something that like has some grains and some protein and, and, and a little bit of, of, of fat in it so that I can— and I made it all through the night without getting depleted for like the first time in my life. And I'm like, how am I just finding this out? Because somebody that chooses food based on, oh, I feel like salmon tonight, or I feel like chicken tonight, or— it's not about feel.

1000%. There's a book called, and you know, better that you figure that out later rather than never, right? So But the— there's a book I think called Happiness, which is about balancing short-term versus long-term happiness. Right. It's like eating the fried chicken is going to make you happy in the short term. But like, what's the long-term effect versus like maybe not eating the fried chicken, but like achieving some goal for yourself in the long term and being happy once you— maybe happier once you reach that goal. Right. And there's some really good, like, practical stuff around, like, journaling and sort of frameworks about how to, like, balance those two things.

I love that. Yeah, I love that.

I think the book's called Happiness.

Yeah, Happiness. Thank you. I'll, um, I'll find it and, and link it below. Is there anything that I didn't ask you that I should have?

That's a, it's a good open-ended one. Um, trying to think. No, we, I think we got into what Mogul is. I think it was, yeah. Great chatting about, you know, problems within the music industry and some of the fun ways in which we're solving it.

And I love that we touched on the black box because a lot of people don't— they just, you know, they just kind of skate over it. And it's, it's a lot of fucking money in the black box. It's, it's like, you know, it's not $3, it's like billions of dollars.

Yeah, billions of dollars that of money that isn't going to the artist it's intended to.

Correct. And it could be something as simple as a misspelling of a name, or you think that you've registered a song in your writer's account, in your publisher's account at BMI, and it's not. You missed one of them and you just don't know because you're not checking, and Mogul is looking for you.

Yeah, I mean, that's sort of the weird tin hat thing, which is like, are like, are these processes difficult for a reason? Because ultimately the companies, you know, responsible or who eat the black box are the ones who are responsible for paying it out.

Yes.

But yeah, I think, I think in my opinion, the problem with the black box is it boils down to lack of education. I think that's a huge component of it. I think it's education. I think it's ease of use. I think it's very difficult to manage this process, which is what we're trying to solve. And yeah, and I think it's also that mindset where, oh well, I don't really have that much money out there for me, it's not worth it for me to do the work, right? And that attitude where you're just not betting on yourself, I, I personally don't understand. But, um, yeah, those, those pennies, as you said, it's a business of pennies, they, they add up. And they end up eventually going into someone else's pocket. So I don't know, I'm of the mindset, I don't think I wouldn't want any of my money going into someone else's pocket.

Agreed. So I've also learned over the years that how you show up for one thing is how you show up for everything. So if you're half-assing it on one side, you're probably half-assing it in everything in your life. So if we as people can just tighten up a little bit, especially when there's some easy processes in place like this, it's kind of a no-brainer to me.

Yeah, yeah, completely agree. And I love that quote. I've heard that quote before. I think, I think about it whenever it's like time to do the dishes or something. I'm like, nope, you got to do it. Yes, how do you do one thing? It's how you do everything. Don't, don't, don't not handle the things you have to do, you know.

I, I think about it. I, I work out twice a week and I think about— I hate working out. And I think about it every time I work out because my trainer will say, okay, do 8 reps and I'll do 10. And at one point we were like a year in and she looked at me and she said, I just want to point out that you're always doing this. And I'm like, yeah, because how I show up here is how I show up for everything. She's like, I understand why you're successful. Yeah, you're doing one more, always one more. I'm like, yeah, yeah.

Do you, do you run through the finish line or not, right?

Correct.

Do you run through or do you stop at the finish line? Like that kind of mindset. So Cool.

Jeff, thank you so much. This was amazing.

Yeah, I really appreciate you having me. It was super fun. I always love chatting with you.

Thank you. I do as well.

Thank you for the opportunity.

No, thank you. This is— you've built something that's so frigging important. And my followers know, like, I'm not a salesperson. Like, I'm pretty hard on people that are, you know, trying to extract money from the music industry. And as soon as I found out about you, I'm like, I'm signing up. Thank you.