Music Rights and Revenue: A Dive into Metadata, the 'Black Box', and more | No Standing Zone Ep.11

Hi guys, how are you?

Hey, good.

Okay, we need more energy.

All right, I'll grab—

I made some way mid— midpoint through this, grab some coffee.

But yeah, please do. I've got my unsweet tea sitting here on my desk, a gallon of it.

Check the Swedish water out though.

It's Swedish water.

Swedish water.

I love it.

That's the one good thing we have is good tap water.

So, uh, I love that. You have a lot of good stuff.

All marketing. Swedish water.

It's marketing. It's all marketing.

It's water.

What are you talking about?

I remember, I remember, um, like decades ago I went to Evian in France and I thought, oh, it's going to be awesome because, you know, bougie water, right? I get to Evian and it's, it's not attractive whatsoever, but you can drink the water out of the gutter and it's delicious.

That's something though.

It is something. I remember filling up my, my water bottle out of their, out of their local fountain and you could actually drink it.

You think they're going to try to censor this? I mean, you can't say that about, uh, you know.

Oh, I don't know.

I don't know.

I didn't say it in French, so it's okay.

No, okay, I'll stop then.

So let me start with the basics. Um, with the Swedish man, you pronounce your name Pear, correct?

It's true. Like the— what I usually say is like the fruit, like a pair of jeans, like a stereo pair. I have what I've dubbed the curse of the umlaut. It's, it's great within the borders of Sweden. Outside of Sweden, it doesn't make sense. So, but it's Pear.

Yeah, I love that. And I just learned that because behind your back I've been calling you Par for years, but, but you're very much on par, so it's okay.

Thank you.

And Bryson, your name is so easy.

It's a little more, uh, Scottish.

Bryson, your name is so easy.

Oh yeah, wow.

And you're, and you're, and you're based in the US.

This is the only way they'll get my name right, if I go by Bob in Starbucks.

Somehow they're going to screw it up though, because that's their job.

That's it. It is their job.

The brand promise. We're dissing brands today. Welcome, we are dissing brands.

We are dissing brands today. I kind of always do though, but yeah, we're allowed to. I, I won't, I won't make that part of my shtick.

Yeah, we're good.

So, um, can we start with, um, I would love to talk about AO because I really am excited about what you guys are building. You've had it up for a year, so it's— you're not really building it, it's built, but I'd really like to talk about that. And then if you could each go into your background a little bit, like how you got into the music industry. Who wants to start? Bryson Pear.

How do you feel? You want to kick it off?

Sure, why not. Um, so, uh, well, look, I, I would, I would actually say that we are still building, right? This thing is never quite done. I think that there are some things that we have figured out and we've made some progress and we've set a pretty solid foundation. We're fortunate to have a really, you know, rockstar team that are really good at the things that they do. Um, and so I think that we've been able to figure out some things faster than, um, it might take a larger team to be able to accomplish. So, you know, we are proud of that. As far as my background and my contribution, um, look, I've been in music tech for 15 years now at this point.

Wow.

Longer.

Uh, you started at 5 because you're pretty young as it is.

Just saying. It's the lighting, but I appreciate that.

Uh, I need your lighting.

I got, um, so I got introduced into music, the music business. I mean, I've always been a fan and, you know, I, my stories, they kind of go back to college when I was one of those guys using Kazaa and Napster to illegally download music. That was a whole different part of my life, but ironically it set me up, um, to do the kind of work that I do today, which is really understanding the metadata around music. But I got started in this business, uh, working out, working with a really good friend of mine. Shout out to Al Butter down in Atlanta, uh, is who actually brought me into the business. He took me under his wing. He, he explained a lot of things. He had to explain it over and over because, A, um, on paper, nothing about the music industry makes sense, and B, everyone who's listening to this who's ever spent time with Al, you kind of need him to repeat himself a couple times because it doesn't always make sense the first time. But he and I, we worked together with a third co-founder. We started this company called SongSplits. It was the first digital split sheet application. So important. Going through that process, you know, we really started to understand the complexity about creating— when from the studio sessions to then registering those works and then getting it in the system and how that impacted how people were learning how to get paid, right? And so going through that really painful process, it was just, it was very clear that this, um, that the emperor had no clothes. Like, this whole thing, um, this entire industry that we all love, that we assumed is doing very well for itself, is effectively being run on Microsoft Excel docs. And that was a bit concerning and terrifying, but it was enough of an intrigue to get me to want to dive all in. And so I've spent the better part of, like I said, the last decade and a half really working on that problem, trying to help lubricate the wheels and make sure that people are getting paid. Because a thing that I said when I was working with Al at the time, it was, uh, there are a lot of companies that are out here trying to figure out ways to help artists make new money. There's all of these new applications, new platforms, new video tools and things like that. Fundamentally, I felt that artists didn't need a new way to make money. They needed a way to collect the money they were already making. And that seemed like a less competitive and more pertinent issue to go and solve for. And that's, you know, what I've spent the better part of my music tech career focusing on. So that's my story.

I love that.

That's good. I have a different path, but that led us up in the same place, Bryson, as well, which is I think I'll start there. I started playing piano when I was 5. I grew up in a family that's musical. Then I played the trumpet and then the accordion. I still play the accordion. I might do it for Stacy, who's visiting here later on today. I'll let her review that. But when I was 15, I traded the accordion for a home studio and, you know, figuring out MIDI, connecting all of that. And 2004, I released— I did my first release on iTunes Number 1 in the jazz category in 2005. So I've been, you know, I always had music as a hobby. What I did sort of daytime as a job, I started early in web development and, you know, the whole digital world, mid-'90s. And then I just got into starting different companies and solving different kinds of problems. You know, prior to starting Tracklib, which I'll get to, I built what's now the world's largest distributed solar power company in India. Where the problem was there is no power. You know, we started in Uttar Pradesh with our 400, um, you know, about 400 million inhabitants, uh, and half of them don't have power, right? So in just that state, so it's, it's pretty huge, you know, the, the, the problem to solve. Well, we figured it out and we've managed to build infrastructure. And I've told people several times, when you've solved power in rural India, you're kind of ready to take on music rights. Back to what you said, Bryson, there is no infrastructure. It's really complex. Even people that should know how it works don't know. And a lot of the knowledge is local, you know, specific to territory or country. So zooming back a little more than 10 years, I started a company called Tracklib. The idea was to, you know, coming from music, having built these other companies, looking at, look, you have great creators that want to use rights-protected music, and then you have people owning that music, and it's really complex. You know, you have people really complex. It's like Deborah Mannis Gardner, who's, you know, of course, uh, co-founder and, and chairwoman of AO, which we'll get to, that then managed to get it done, right? But to do it at scale— she was instrumental as well in, in making sure Tract could happen in the first place. But it took almost 10 years to figure out the odds and ends, you know, build the platform get the rights in and facilitate more automated sample licensing, which is now providing completely new income to a lot of the creators of music, which is great. And a lot of music has come out. Now, what frustrated me in building Traktor, because I thought I knew music rights, I put music out, right? I was thinking, I'm on top of this. I had no idea. I didn't have any idea of anything outside of Sweden. I'm looking even now at the— deals that I did, my label deal, my publishing deal, I would never sign today. But I didn't know, you know, and I'd forgotten to register my neighboring rights. I did have significant airplay in some territories, lost all of that. I realized retrospectively, but also the frustration in building Traktor was seeing that it's so hard that most creators, even at a very advanced level, don't do the right registrations because these are not easy systems to interface with. And a lot is back to what you said, Bryson, is manual. And meaning that a lot of registrations are missing, meaning that the money that has been generated can't flow to the right people. So Debra and I were conversing. She'd seen over decades too, representing artists, you know, songwriters, producers, musicians getting sampled in that a lot of people don't have the rights properly represented. You might have produced part of a big recording and you have a couple of percentage points, but you never see any money beyond the advance. So the idea started to form that maybe we can start a company to be a home, an active home, a modern home, a good home for music rights and work very selectively around this. So last year we decided to start it off. Bryson joined in at the outset. We have a great team. Globally distributed team. The whole idea is to provide hyper-efficient copyright administration. So really, if you own music rights, we take care of all those copyrights and we make sure they're globally represented and that every penny is collected. And what's enabling this is a combination of the team and the technology data, you know, a lot of the things that you've built, Bryson, as well in terms of understanding what's going on out there. And this is the complexity, is just the volume of data out there. You're looking at a massive increase that we've seen in the past 10 years of the number of songs being released. The system didn't work before the floodgates opened. It's certainly not working better after this volume came into the picture. So that's why we decided to sort of— we're not— we're going to build this organically. We're going to build this on an invitation-only basis. We're going to really get into the nitty-gritty and help people who haven't had their rights together, in many cases not because of their own fault, but it just happened that way, to get organized, get protected, make sure everything gets collected. So that's AO in a nutshell. And AO actually means, are you organized? So it's both, of course, a greeting, but there's meaning to it.

I love that. One of my, one of my friends asked me what AO stands for, and I said it stands for all your own, because it's all your own.

Thank you. Have you trademarked it? Or is it?

No, it's all yours.

Remix.

Exactly.

It's the remix. Exactly. AO 2.0. Brason, can you, can you explain to us what the black box is? Because I get asked that so much. And I really love your definition of it.

I make sure the windows are closed. Definition of the black box. I mean, it's— I don't know that I have a consistent and clear definition of what the black box is. I mean, ultimately what we're talking about is monies that have been collected for streaming performance, whatever, around the globe. And this money, it, it sits in these, uh, disconnected bank accounts. It's been accumulated over a period of time and it just has failed to be paid out. It's failed to be paid out in most cases because either the company doesn't understand who they're supposed to pay, or there is a conflict in what is stated that they're supposed to pay. And so technically, and understandably, if we think about this from a corporate perspective, I mean, I think that this is important to say, is where my initial thought that this is nefarious— there's, there's real liability issues in paying out money to the wrong person. So if we're not clear about who we need to pay out, then the best action is no action, and that's what tends to happen. But when we're talking about this money accumulating in any number of 400, 500 organizations around the world that are, that are holding this money, There was a point at which PROs— and I'm not going to pick on them— but there was a point at which in their annual reports they would state how much in, uh, undistributed royalties that they still had available. Um, for some reason they don't do that anymore. We can, we can assume our own reasons why they don't do this anymore. But I remember when I used to run across these reports early on in the SongSplit days We were talking about hundreds of millions of dollars that were unpaid, and then you would look for a definition for why it was unpaid, and there would be some asterisk that would explain because we were able to— unable to identify who we're supposed to pay this money to. And so I think, again, trying to give you a more succinct definition of the black box, I mean, effectively what it is It's like the lost and found of the music industry. We found this stuff, we don't know who it belongs to. So if people show up and they claim it, sure, we'll give it out. But if no one shows, we're not going to go and build a website and list everything and tag it and start reaching out to people. And so the better case scenario here is prevention. And what I found is that the music industry, for whatever reason, probably by undesign has been very reactive to this process. And what we are trying to do is be a bit more proactive on the front end to try to avoid problems. There was something that I think, um, I want to say that Thomas Watson, who founded IBM, he— there was this quote where he's like, I don't want to be great at solving problems, I want to be great at preventing them. And I think that that's kind of a way that we're thinking about, uh, this process.

I love that. I love that. I was, I was on a, um, I was on a webinar this week with the MLC, and they were talking about, they were talking about the black box, and they didn't explain it very well because they confused me. And as you know, I've been in this industry for 30-plus years. And while they were talking about it, I went to their website because they have a little search box where you can go and you can see if there's any uncollected money that belongs to you. And I typed in one of my artist friend's names, and it spun and spun and spun. So I said, okay, well, I'm on a webinar anyway, I'll just, I'll just let it go. The webinar lasted for 45 minutes, and it spun for the entire 45 minutes. I was never able to check and see if Warren G had any money in, in the black box or not. And it, it's, it's It's so interesting to me because it can be something as simple as somebody mistyping a name when they put you into the computer. You know, they transpose letters. Or it could be as simple as an artist, you know, who's sleeping on his mom's couch when he starts his career, you know, moving and not updating the— their address because they're not thinking about that. They're thinking about you know, whatever it is they have going on in that, in that sphere of the moment. Um, and it's funny to me because I have helped artists recover money out of the black box. And if I can find the artist, I don't understand why they can't find the artist. It's not really hard to see that an artist is owed money and to go onto Instagram and DM them and say, hey, you're owed some money, please reach out. That took, you know, it took me all of 10 seconds.

So I don't, I'm not in the habit of doing this, Pear. I'll let, I'll let you jump, but I wanna, I wanna say this, this is important. I'm not in the habit of defending the status quo, but I think the issue is it's volume, right? If you take the number of artists that you're focused on versus the number of, you know, clients that ASCAP has as an example. Like, we're talking about a scale issue. I mean, at best, good point, have 200 admins maybe that can do this, and they are getting thousands and thousands of registrations. Most of it is not important music. And so I think that we would, we would want to believe that technology does make this a little bit easier, but even if they could identify all of the information, just building a contact and a reach out and the management of that communication, I think that that's a really, really big task. That quite frankly there isn't a whole lot of upside for them to go and do it. So they're not terribly incentivized to do it. But even before we get to the incentives, I mean, just the pure engineering application to try to get that done, I think it's a little bit more complicated than people think. And so I just want to— I think maybe this is just being in this industry long enough. They've gone from a lot of these companies from villain to I have some empathy for them, and I think that my role is not to go and save everybody from them, but try to help those organizations just do better at what they do. Because the truth is, at the end of the day, what's best for the artist is for the system to work and not for us to try to find enemies to go out and fight, you know, if that makes sense. So it does.

I love that. No, I love that. I love that.

You expressed it much better than I would have, actually. Just adding on, its volume and its resource. And looking at many PROs and CMOs, many of them are actually not-for-profit. They're owned by their members. They don't have huge budgets for technology for these types of investments. And as we said before, if this was a system kind of crumbling, you know, under its own weight before the volume that came in with, you know, accessible digital distribution, it just compounded on a lack of resources that are there. And it's also the matter of proof in that if you want to do— I mean, to do a registration, you have to know the data. If you don't know the data, you're looking at really detective work that needs to be done, right? And tracking down people that might be very hard to reach. And when you're already struggling to deal with the volume that's there, that's kind of So I mean, that's what we flipped at AO to say that, okay, we'll do that work on behalf of people that have created and own the music. And we do it song by song, right? Which is why we can't— we're never going to grow to have millions of songs, which is why we built this boutique so that we can do that detective work and do all those corrections, right?

I love that. So what do you guys do at AO?

The big part is, and it's down to, you know, again, the O as in organized, but it's what we help our clients with is first of all to get organized, to get an overview of what is owned, you know, what's the paperwork around that, you know, what's the proof of ownership. Then we start looking at what is out there, you know, what does the world reflect what you actually own at the PRO level, for publishing at the CMO level for neighboring rights. Also, now we've added recording royalty administration, which is to help producers finally get paid on their producer points for sampled artists to finally get back on the backend that they were going to receive. But it starts with assessing the data, the documentation, the paper trails, then going in and correcting all of this and making sure it's all collected. So that's kind of the baseline. On top of that, we also work actively with all the clients we have to try to find new opportunities. You know, it can be licensing, it can be sampling opportunities, but, you know, having the scale and building it the way we do allows us to be active and actually represent our clients. So we're not a passive administrator to just, you know, hopefully register something at ASCAP or BMI, for example, in the US. And we're not all the way to a full publisher with a 10-person A&R team, even though we have an amazing A&R with Kat. But it's really tailoring a service to what we see that people need. The people that have joined in so far range from estates. We're then working with the heirs of songwriters, of artists, of producers that own music rights. All the way to active current writers that put out music.

Amazing.

That's the quick description.

I love that. Um, you, you touched on something that I'd like to go a little deeper on, if you don't mind. You talked about the producer royalties, and I think you're one of two companies that collect that. Um, no one else does. So could you talk a little bit about that? Because it's an area where most producers don't even realize— that they're, they're owned. Is that mechanical royalties?

What we're looking at is actually recording royalties. So, I mean, if you look at a producer who produces for an artist, the agreement is usually some type of advance or some type of upfront payment. And then you're looking at a couple of percentage points known as producer points, usually 3 to 5. There you go. On the record. But this also applies to, like I mentioned, sampled artists where it's the same thing. You typically get a a non-recoupable fee for your publishing if you own that, you get a recoupable fee when someone samples your music if you own the recording, and then you typically agree to a certain percentage point of both publishing revenues as well as recording revenues. Now, because of the nature, you know, back to many of the great points you made, Bryson, on how the industry works, let's just say that maybe the full focus isn't on accounting to all parties. When you're looking at the volume of things that do go on, the focus is often to get the music out, to release it, to promote it. But also there's always been an issue of sort of completing paperwork, agreeing all the splits, doing all this work, right? So for various reasons, you know, missing documentation or missing willingness or missing understanding of how these systems work means that a lot of these backend points and revenues don't get paid out. So what we do is we, we help producers gather all their paperwork, make sure that everything is in place backward looking, but also setting them up well for the future. And for things that are already released, we chase after it. We make sure they're, they're set up. We make sure that they get into the right accounting systems. This is also built on us having great relationships with many of the world's labels and publishers so we can facilitate this getting done. So it's not only It's not just what you know, it's who you know as well. And we're very selective on who we take on. But what we found is that there are a lot of people that need this help and this kind of representation.

Agreed. Agreed. I would venture to say every artist needs the help.

Yeah.

Publishing has always been something that's difficult to understand. And nearly impossible to, to collect for yourself. So you almost always need an administrator. And I especially love what you guys are doing because I'm not a fan of publishing deals. I'm a fan of admin deals. I'd rather see someone not sell or give away part of their publishing early on in their career. And it's something that I've seen, especially in urban music, that occurs constantly where the artist is not often the owner of their ownership of their publishing.

Let's think about if—

I mean, let's think about how this works though, right? I mean, if you're, if you're a creative, um, like, where do you learn this stuff, right? Like, who's going to teach you these things when you are 5-year-old, you know, pair who instead of being outside playing like normal kids, you're inside playing a piano. Like, who's teaching a 5-year-old pair how to do registrations and what this means and how to get this information done? So I think that, you know, while certainly it's easy to say there's an education issue, I mean, it truly is in some ways. Like, if I don't know any of that, everyone that— why did I sign a deal? Everyone I know signed a deal. Why do I want a Grammy? Every, every rap song I listen to is telling me how many Grammys that everybody else has won. So like, that seems to be the aspiration. No one's really looking at the situation for what it is. And let's, let's be honest, it's not the very sexy part of the business, right?

It's not like—

no one wants to be the person who's— who— no one wants to be the creep at 2 o'clock in the morning when everyone's having a good time in the studio, pulling out a contract, making sure that everyone gets their split sheet done right. But the truth of the matter is that that is what drives the revenue for the business. And that's the business side of it. And so I know that there's a lot of artists who, um, it's not just about the money, but I think it's really important that if you're going to invest your time and you're going to invest your creativity and you're going to put it out in the world, I think it's reasonable for you to want to be able to, um, be compensated for it. The truth is, if you don't, someone else will. Let's just be clear. If your art is valuable, it will generate revenue. So now the question is, are you going to collect it or is somebody else going to collect it? These are very simple, simple questions. And I want to say that part of the reason that this thing feels very complicated is because we discuss it like it's more complicated than it is. It's really not that difficult. I think that one of the things that Pear mentioned a little bit earlier when we talked about we bring in clients and we do this initial assessment, it's if I went to my local gym, I told the guy, I told one of the trainers, hey, I want to get in shape. Well, what does that mean? I mean, the first thing that that trainer needs to do, he needs to understand where I am. How much do you bench now? How much can you squat now? How fast can you run now? What is your VO2 max now? I need to understand where you are. Before I can start to do all of these other great things that you want to do. And I would challenge, uh, you to consider that a lot of companies, what they do is they just focus on, well, you come in day one, you got to do 50 burpees. It's like, well, dude, I've never done 5, so how do I get— I think it's really, really important, you know, one of the things that we need, we spend a lot of time on is making sure we understand, have a very clear picture on where artists are now. Um, I'm gonna throw another quote out because I'm sitting in front of a bunch of books and I have my glasses on, so I feel smart here. I am going to ask though that I not be held to standard because I may be misattributing this quote, but it's the, uh, I heard that Abraham Lincoln said, if I had an hour to, uh, chop down a tree, I would spend 55 minutes sharpening the ax and 5 minutes chopping And I think that that's— it's very easy. It's very human for us to want to jump right into action and start doing things, finding the opportunities, doing the exciting stuff. And a lot of people don't spend the proper amount of time preparing to do the work. And in our business, preparing to do the work is really getting a clear assessment of where these artists are. And as simple as that is, that is what prevents a lot of the issues that we see that clients that come to us are running into, and clients that we get served very well that we haven't found yet, that they're going to benefit.

Wow, great, great metaphors and well put. And I think on just the idea of selling to— based on that, you're selling something where you don't actually really know what you own or what the value is in many cases, right? Because you went straight into selling an asset that might not be protected too, right? And that's the thing. So it's kind of, yeah, I have this bag, but you don't really know what's in it. And we see that again. I mean, looking at— with the sort of frenzy that's been around catalog transactions, right? The basic math of it is pretty simple. I mean, it's kind of what has this piece of music generated over the past, say, 3 years, what's the average of that times a multiple, right? And the multiple being subjective, really. We shared this on a webinar we did the other week, you know, kind of what's the basis of catalog valuation. Now, the multiple is set by popularity of the artist, you know, how much is this projected to turn over over time, etc. But what you can affect and what what many people have sold their catalog haven't worked on is the actual income side. So yes, the music is out there. Back to what you said, Bryce, and you know, you've already released the music, it's already generated money, but you're probably not collecting all of it, which means that when you're selling, it's a multiple times the wrong figure. It maybe should be 30% more, maybe it should be double, maybe it's 3 times that much. I mean, one of the great people that joined in to AO, um, over 6 months we managed to increase publishing revenues by 1,000%. I mean, that's a 10x of— so this very talented person, you know, used to make a certain amount, you know, we— it's now 10 times more in our payout. And that's by doing the work, doing a lot of what, what's to us a lot of basic stuff, right? But, but you need to know where to look. You need to know what data to work on, right? But once you do, so you shouldn't— I really agree with your sentiment that you led with, Wendy Day, that many people that have sold probably regret that decision later on. You know, I— and speaking of agreements, I regret some of the ones I did sign before I knew better. But it's— I would say before you sell, might not necessarily be a bad thing to sell or to lease your royalty stream that some people do as well. But make sure that it's performing optimally before you do so, because the kind of scale difference is huge.

And, and make sure you understand what, what deal you're doing, because a lot of artists, they, they're, they're desperate. They're desperate for money, and they don't take the time to understand. They just see the advance. They know that they're broke, and they know they need money. So they're reacting out of desperation instead of out of understanding.

And I would say a Turkish quote that I learned is always negotiate on a full stomach, even if you're hungry, right?

Yes.

So if that's possible, I mean, it might be dire straits. You might be forced to do something. But I would say, you know, the best advice that we could give is look into what's actually out there or get some help to look into have you protected all your rights? You know, the fact that if you've created music and it's getting a lot of, for example, plays on SiriusXM, you're getting digital airplay, you know, or non-interactive streaming in the US, a lot of people are not aware of SoundExchange. You know, a lot of people are not aware of the fact that you should register somewhere else besides, you know, at least having an ASCAP or BMI registration, right?. And these are of course two completely different things. So it's just seeing that. I mean, so I think the basic advice to anyone starting out is always register your work, always register the song, the composition with your local PRO. Might be BMI or ASCAP in the US, STIM in Sweden, GEMA in Germany, at least sign up with one as you're starting out to have a registration and then make sure to sign up also for neighbouring rights organisation, you know, known as a collective management organisation. That would be SoundExchange in the US, that's PPL in the UK, that's SAMI in Sweden, you know. So most countries, you know, close to 100 countries respect neighbouring rights in the world. What's good to know is that in the US it's only for digital radio in terms of SiriusXM and non-interactive streaming like Pandora.. But for the rest of the world, it's also for radio. So it's normal terrestrial radio, it's TV, it's broadcast. And that's serious money. I mean, that's big. Even though the rates, which we also mentioned on our webinar, our brilliant head of operations, Tom, went through all this, is the fact that rates in terms of how much is paid out from radio or from TV, that's sort of a convoluted process where few people can impact the actual rates that are paid out.. But to get part of that, you need to be registered. So I think that's the condensed advice to anyone listening into this, you know, maybe just starting out, is to get registered with a PRO for publishing to protect the publishing copyright and then register with a CMO in the US. That would be SoundExchange for the neighboring rights or digital performance royalties.

Excellent advice. Bryson, you touched a little earlier on metadata. You are kind of the metadata king. Can you touch briefly on what an artist should make sure they add into their metadata when they're uploading to their distributor? Like, what really matters?

I think, well, let's, let's, the recording side tends to be better taken care of, right? I mean, I think when you're looking at who the performers are and who the featured artists are and who the producers are, I mean, that information usually is not the issue. I think they're where the bulk of the problems tend to be are on the publishing side. And so that means identifying who the writers are and if you have the identifiers that are associated with those writers, having that information available. I know increasingly DSPs are allowing that information to be submitted. You know, Spotify wants to know this information, right? I mean, because look, the truth is where, you know, there was a point in which DSPs were being villainized for holding the money or not paying enough money. Look, again, DSPs, they spend a lot of money, they pay a lot of money out. Now, if it never makes it home, right, if I drop it down, you know, if I drop it down this money chute and you don't catch it at the end, it probably means there's some holes in that chute somewhere that we need to go solve, right? That's, that's the real issue. No one describes it that way. The very simple way is, well, I never got the money. Um, and I think in a situation like submitting your these registrations, whether you're sending it to the PRO or you're sending it to a DSP or wherever you're uploading the information, having as much information as possible about that work that you're uploading, I think it's super, super important. One of the issues that we run into is that creatives, they don't always use the same name. And so that matters. When you look at someone like, um, you know, Snoop as an example, Snoop has, I believe, 8 or 9 IPI numbers. That's incredibly complicated because now you have, uh, you have his legal name, you have his legal name spelled backwards, you have his legal name without his middle name, you have Snoop Dogg with 2 G's, then you have Snoop Doggy Dogg, and then you have Snoop Dog with one G. And all of these, all of these have different, according to the systems, because again, when we're talking about volume, last count that I have, at least according to the data that I looked at, there are about 2.2 million unique songwriters in the world right now. Doesn't sound like a huge number. It's kind of, it's, it's a big number, but I think in the big scheme of things, it's not, you know, maybe one would believe it's bigger. But the number of identifiers that have been assigned, we're looking at about 4.9. There are a lot of songwriters who have multiple identities because they have multiple names that they're going by. And so when you think about the volume of information that's being pushed through the system, from a technology standpoint, because these systems aren't built with any AI or anything like that, the system doesn't know the difference between Snoop Dogg and Snoop Doggy Dogg. They look like different people, and so they are assigned different identifiers. And when they're assigned different identifiers, the truth is, when I'm trying to collect for a particular person, I need to assign it to one. I can't assign it to both. And so it gets very, very messy when that information gets splintered out. And so this is why it's important to try to tag this information when you send it, because if you don't tag it someone's going to fill in that gap for you, and they may not fill in the gap the way that you want it to be filled in. Or secondarily, if you're not consistently using the same information, it's going to be misattributed, or it's going to be split off into another account, which is then further contributes to this black box conversation we've had before.

Thank you.

And I'll add just on to that is what we've seen This was a learning that came up through Tracklib as well. We have a sample license that we created and they were putting out the song, it was a German group, they got in touch with us and say, "Yeah, why do we need to do PRO registration? We don't like the GEMA, we don't like them." They just didn't like them. And you start explaining kind of if you don't register with GEMA, not only won't you get any money, you won't get like the 15% of streaming money that gets paid paid to publishing in many territories, you're not going to get any airplay. But if there is a sync license, someone wants to use your music in a game or sample you or use it in an ad, there's a sync fee, and that's usually split 50/50 between who owns the recording and who owns the publishing. You can lose out on 50% of like a $50,000 sync fee because they're like, oh, we didn't know. And I think again, back to knowledge about this is that we talk a lot about releasing music, right? Get it distributed. There's a big focus on getting what you can hear, the actual song, out there into the ears of listeners. But the other side of it, it's realizing it's just as important to pick a good distributor as it is to do this registration, right? And it's often overlooked.

Yeah, I just— before you Before you ask your next question, Wendy, I think it's important that we try to get as many accents out of Pear over the next 15 minutes as possible. I think so too. I just realized that we may have the music industry's version of Jay Pharoah on the line right now. We should take full advantage.

We should take full advantage because that was like the best German accent by a non-German I've ever heard.

Actually, I need to fact-check myself as well. I said 400 million inhabitants in Uttar Pradesh, this northern state of India. It's 200 million. So I actually increased my number. I 2x'd my own numbers. So there are 200 million inhabitants in Uttar Pradesh. Half of them, 100 million, don't have power. So just—

You can't tell us that using their accent?

I can, but I might slide it in. Now it's a thing. Now it's a thing, right?

It is a thing.

It's a thing. It's a thing.

It's got a— it'll come up.

So I would, I would love to talk about a little bit about lifestyle and mental health because that's really important to me. It's, it's become my thing. So can you guys talk a little bit maybe about how you balance your lives? I know Bryson, you're, you're like me, you're a reader. You mentioned you have some books on your desk. I would love for you to talk about maybe some of your favorite books. Per, if you have some favorites, I'm always— I read a book a week, so I'm always looking for new stuff to read. So feel free to recommend books. Let's start there.

Oh, I can make tons of recommendations.

Um, you're my new best friend.

Hey, we should, we should certainly spend some time together then. I have. So let me just address the, um, balance mental health piece. I mean, the best that we can. I mean, here's, here's something that I would, I would also offer is that specifically Per and I, um, we are both building together, um, but we also have, uh, outside of the professional conversation, we're both dads. Right. You know, we're both husbands and we're— I think that there are things we have conversations that kind of move beyond the scope of the business. And I think it's really important. It's important to me to have someone like Para that I can actually have nonprofessional conversation with as well as professional conversation with. I think that that helps a lot because what you understand is that my ability to be effective as a as an executive, as a partner, is very tied to how things are going on in my personal life. And so I think it's super important that we have that for each other, I want to believe. So that is something that makes this a little bit easier on me, I will say, than it might otherwise be. I'll let Per speak to whether he gets as much out of our conversations as I do. I do, but that, that's my side of this. Look, in terms of, you know, what I, what I do offline, I'm a big reader. I still very active in sports. I play, you know, play basketball, 6-8 hours a week. So work out as often as I can. I have 3 daughters and one on the way. So there's a, there's a lot that's happening in my, my personal life. And so, um, I spend a lot of time with, with my kids the best that I can. So when I'm not working, I'm spending time hanging out with the kids. I went to a concert in the city last night with my middle daughter. We, uh, went to a show at the Mercury Lounge, um, in New York and saw some new young artist, Solja, out of Texas. And Baby Bugs. Not music that I had listened to before. It's a fun time. It's a fun time to just get there, just her and I. We get to the city, we get— catch a show, we grab dinner after, we get home late. Those are the things I try to do as often as I can outside of the work stuff, because that, that fills my cup. It gives me energy to get back. And, uh, you know, how old is she? My, uh, Marissa is 14. So I have a 15, a 14, uh, 8, and, um, expecting a 4th in December.

Congratulations, that's exciting. I love that you're taking a 14-year-old to shows. My parents never did that, but I would have loved that.

It's a— it was a very cool experience because, look, it's not a— it's not It's not a large venue. Like, we've done larger shows before. You know, we've done stadium shows at Prudential. But this was something that was small. It was intimate. She got to actually meet the artists and spend some time with them because it was a small enough venue. And it was hard to get her to sleep last night, which means that she's probably struggling at school today, but it was totally worth it.

Totally worth it. You're an awesome girl, Dad.

Thank you.

You are. And I do— they mean as much to me, the conversations that we have, Bryson. I think it's a big part is to remember that we are human beings as we work as well. And I think there's been a big disconnect between that in all lines of business. It kind of— you think you need to play a professional role. I think at core of it, you know, it's hopefully reaching a stage where you can be honest, not with just other people, but with yourself on who you are and what you need. And to express, I think a lot of people struggling with mental health, I have too. I've dealt with anxiety, performance anxiety, bunch of different things, you know, and worked on that over the years. I'm 47 now. Finally starting to get a glimpse of self-insight or, you know, understand a bit more. Maybe in another 30 years, you know, it will be even better. But I think there's a stigma still around how we feel. I think a lot of people feel they need to play a role. And you're— it's about knowing that if you're readable, you will actually get help if you express this. Most— 9 out of 10, maybe 9.5, 9.9 out of every 10 people, there are always anomalies, when hearing, "I need help," or, "I feel this way," will respond to it to say that, "Hey, take the day off," or, "How can I help?" or, "Talk to me," right? So I think it's stigma that's holding people back from just being human beings in all situations. I think that's a core of it. I don't think all corporate structures adhere to this insight, you know, and stuff that I build, I've, you know, done my best to apply this to try to lead with openness, but to create space for the fact that we are human beings, right? We mess up, we have terrible days, you know, and we have amazing days. You know, we start all our weekly calls with just going around the team and checking in. How are you? You know, what's going on in your life? You know, share everything. Which means that, look, if you're having like hormonal issues that day, you know, it's life is too much, you know, or a thing happened or whatever it is. When you share that, people will treat you better and have that understanding. So it's really fundamentally communication, being okay with that. And I think to anyone listening into this who are struggling, we're all struggling. Everyone has their own battle. But to know that please express it, because most people will both sympathize and empathize and provide help, because we're wired altruistic. And certain cultures, certain environments can bring that out of people, and certain cultures and environments can sort of suppress that in people, right? So it's, it's about daring to have the conversation and remembering that. I think that's a big— yep.

How do you balance your life?

I have— I'm also a girl dad. I got two daughters. You know, we do a lot of stuff. You know, we do— I'm a big fan of camping, just going out. You know, we have a little boat. We live close to the Swedish archipelago that's over 23,000 islands that you can access. We go out there. I'm actually taking my just turned 15-year-old oldest daughter to Fugees and Miss Lauryn Hill. Later on in October when they're coming to Stockholm. So that will be your first kind of big concert. So we do a lot of stuff for the family. It's also a great ego check, you know, to have family to remember who you are, you know, when you work a lot. Keeps you grounded. But just to be present— there isn't such a thing as quality time with kids, it's quantity, you know, and they always win. You have to succumb to that. But also keeps me balanced. I mean, I read a lot. I've always read a lot. I always read probably 2 or 3 books in parallel. And in the past year and a half, because I, you know, forgot to properly take care of myself, properly go to the gym, and you can't do that and still build companies. I had, you know, I realized last year I got to change this. I went back to the gym, you know, found my meditation practice again. And it's really about Having an active self-care routine, that can be anything. But as you know, everyone needs to set aside at least 5 minutes every day to just focus on themselves, you know, and remind yourself that you're awesome, right? And that's a big part is intentionality. What I try to do every morning when I wake up is to check myself, you know, in terms of what do I want today, you know, to start with gratitude, you know, and grateful that I get to wake up at all. Right. And then think about what's important, you know, because life will always pull us into drama, you know, to, to notifications, to, you know, other people's needs. But it's something I learned the hard way is kind of, you know, back to that airplane, little safety brochure is put the oxygen mask on yourself first. Right. That's been an important thing. And I still actually produce music. That's a balancing point too. But it's kind of, you know, do stuff that you love, you know, and to actually have positive egotism in prioritizing your own health, your own self-care, because then you have hopefully the strength to support others, right?

So I love that you— I love that you learned that young in your life. It took me until I was 60 to to learn that. And I love the oxygen mask metaphor because it took me a very long time to learn that one. You know, I, I, when I was coming up, I had 3 emotions. I had angry, sad, and, and happy. And when I was sad, it made me angry. So really, I just had angry and happy. And I just learned how to feel relatively recently in the past year and a half. And while it was a very difficult lesson to learn, It's, it's made me such a better person, a better executive, uh, like all the way around. It's just made me so much better. So I totally understand what you're saying, and morning routine is, is, is everything.

It's a— but it's also, again, I learned the hard way by crashing, by not feeling good at all, you know, by being both mentally and physically weak because I didn't take care of myself. So it's kind of, you know, I think a lot of people have gone through that. And it's kind of— I learned this. We see it in our kids. We can say all we want, they're still going to make their own mistakes and learn from them. And we see it's kind of, no, don't do that. We know where that is leading. But they have to sometimes fall. They have to, right?

Yes.

Same with us. I mean, you can know all the theory, you know, you're a smoker, you know it's bad, but you still love cigarettes. You're not going to quit until whatever happens that, you know, makes you take that decision, right? And I think we learn through failure. And on that note, and related tangent to creating an environment that embraces failure, right? Because it's truly the way from— if you look at child psychology over to adult psychology, kids roughly from the age of 14 to 15 start learning from their failures. Failures. Before that, you traditionally learn from your successes, your wins. But from that, you know, semi-sentient age of 14, 15, you know, we start learning from our failures. And I think a lot of our corporate culture, you know, across the world, it does not embrace failure, you know. And the companies that do thrive, right? Because, yeah, and really Failure is giving up. I mean, then you've actually failed.

That's real failure. Yeah.

Actually messing something up. I mean, I've made so many mistakes, you know, and the big thing that does lead to that gut drop feeling of, you know, what did I do? I've overwritten websites. I had to recode stuff. Plenty of stories, right? We seldom talk about this. We love to have the cozy fireside chats of, so, you know, what I I started this company. It all seems like, you know, a completely planned journey, but it's actually the failures, you know, maybe you're near going bankrupt or you didn't get the funding or, you know, everything is pushed into an extremely concentrated situation. Then you take tough decisions and you learn or you pivot or you change, but it's allowing human beings to be human beings. You know, the important thing is that we just are open to learning fundamentally, right?

I love that. I have an expression and it's fail faster because I learn from all of my failures. I don't see them as failures. I see them as learning opportunities. And for me, I want more of them and I want to do it faster because that means I'm learning faster.

Yeah, that's a good mantra.

That's exactly right. I think on that, Wendy, I do want to suggest 3 books, 2 of them that I'm reading now and one that just seems to be appropriate for what the 2 of you were just— The Little Black Book of Entrepreneurship by Fernando Tres de Baez, de Baez, or something like that. Not sure. Fantastic book. Uh, I will just, I'll quickly say that one of the things that he talks about in this book is, uh, he talks a lot about failure. I think he opens up the, uh, the preface of the book and he talks about how, you know, if you Google business success, you'll find, you know, tens of thousands of results. And you Google failure, business failure, and you see a limited amount of results. Which is strange when you think about the fact that most businesses fail. It should be—

right, it should be the opposite.

It should certainly be, uh, there should be a lot more learnings that we can gather from that. So, um, what you guys were just discussing made me suggest that book. That's a book that I have read, uh, at least 3 times, um, and listened on audio at least twice. So I, I highly recommend that book. Um, Another book that I'm reading right now, this is actually here, um, "Be Water, My Friend," Shannon Lee, the daughter of Bruce Lee. Um, so I'm about halfway through this book right now. Fantastic read. I really, really recommend it. And then the book that I had on the train ride to and from the city Uh, that I'm reading is Die with Zero by Bill Perkins. And, uh, the premise of that book, he's, he's talking a little bit about, not so much about work-life balance, but also since you mentioned balance at this point, he's talking about how people, we spend a lot of our time trying to save money for some retirement, or we spend a bunch of time planning for some future that may or may not come. And he's talking about that ultimately, look, these gathering these resources are about then having experiences that you remember. You know, I think at the end of the day, if we're fortunate enough to have a moment of reflection before we pass away, we're going to be sat there with our family and our memories. We're not going to be looking for more time. We're not going to be looking for more dollars. We don't prioritize spending enough time creating those memories. And so to circle back to what we've talked about with the family stuff, it's really important to me to find time to create those experiences and those memories while I can, right? Not just for me, but for the family. So those are my 3 book recommendations. There's obviously plenty more. Those are— There's quite a ton of, um, and that's, you know, they're all over the place here. So we will, we'll dig into, we'll start a book club. I got some cool stuff and I'm sure you guys—

Yeah, we should do that.

Yeah, that's a great idea. And I can testify there, there's, you know, what you saw in the background is like 1% of Yeah. Excellent. And it's also one of the things where we got to know each other and vibed is that your quote machine is what I've been collecting quotes for a long time. You have been too. You know, it's, uh, I thought of books too. This is not premeditated to anyone listening. This came up on the call. I had no idea you were gonna ask about books, but, uh, I usually have 2 or 3 that I read. One that I started this summer and I haven't finished, but really enjoying and reading and kind of bits and pieces is The Complete Robot by Isaac Asimov. You know, sort of a legendary sci-fi author, but I think in a time of AI, which is really machine learning, which is also linked to robotics and that kind of thinking and that logic, it's a really interesting primer on understanding the type of logic, you know, that, that part of the logic that is behind, you know, what we program, right? So, I think "The Complete Robot" is a super interesting reading in also reflecting on what's the ultimate kind of effect on society of a lot of the technology that we build, you know. And I think sci-fi has been where we read about things that then actually come true decades later, right? So, Asimov is kind of those pioneers. Enjoyable. I get frustrated with language at times, but the content is good. Uh, you know, that's just a style thing. Another book that I read years back, I think I have it in this bag. Here it is. I wonder if it will show with the blur. Is of course the Tao Wu by the RZA. Yeah, phenomenal book, you know. And personally, being— having studied a bit of Taoism and, and quite a bit of Buddhism and also practicing meditation. I'm really impressed by the RZA's ability to distill and concentrate based on his own life story, a lot of the wisdom here. So this is a great book, very digestible too, but it's a great book. I think I'll add on that note, a favorite Buddhist author is Thích Nhất Hạnh. He comes from Vietnam originally, but then moved to France and started up. He passed away, I think, a few years back. But he's also been— you have Eckhart Tolle, of course, our German friend who interprets Eastern, Western.

I'm getting an accent. I'm about to get an accent.

It's always there lurking. But he's a great interpreter as well. I think Thích Nhất Hạnh, I love his way of just finding very visual metaphors for strong concepts. You know, one of the things I learned from Thich Nhat Hanh was kind of water the flowers that you want to see grow. Super simple, back to intent, right? I mean, it's powerful stuff. So I think no matter what religion background you have, I mean, there's a lot of interesting philosophy in this. So those are the 3, 3 tips.

I love that. Thank you so much. Is there anything that I haven't asked you guys that I should have?

I think it's— we want to give you flowers for just being awesome, you know, and all that you've done. I just have to slide that in because— thank you, you know. Uh, and I'm— and thanks to Deborah for introducing us, and, you know, huge thanks to Deborah.

Gratitude.

I'm— I don't know where to begin. I have a lot of questions. What do you— what's your take on, you know, do you have— because I think you have a lot of different people listening in to this podcast, you know, everyone from super established to just starting out, you know, based on your decades of experience, you know, If you're starting out, if you're a really talented artist, talented producer, you know, coming into this, what's kind of starting advice, you know, about things to think of? You know, do you have a checklist? Do you have a couple of first things, you know?

Yes. Um, absolutely learn the industry before you jump in. That doesn't mean that you should have analysis paralysis. But just like you wouldn't step onto a basketball court without understanding the rules of the game and knowing how your opponents play, you shouldn't jump into the music industry with zero understanding. It's an arena where you can really get eaten alive. You know, um, Jeezy has a, an expression where you're either predator or prey, and I don't think it's I don't think it's that black and white, but I do think that if you jump into this industry without knowing any better, you will get eaten alive. You will get taken advantage of because there are players in this industry that aren't looking out for your best interest, and they will definitely take what they can in order to profit themselves, you know. So understanding the game is important. Um, once you understand it, you realize that this is not a free industry. And I'm not sure where people got a memo, because I, I never received that memo that said it's free to build a career in music. And it's probably the thing that aggravates me the most, because it should be free. Knowledge should be free. Art should be free, yet the creators should get paid, you know. So, um, I just feel that if you're— if you're— if you're gonna do this, figure out how it gets done, and then figure out how to get what you need in order to get where you want to be. It's sort of like what you just said about watering the flowers that you want to grow. That— that's probably some of the best advice I've ever heard heard, and it's so simple, you know. Um, people always think that the grass is greener on the other side, and it's not. It's greenest where you water it. It's really that simple. When you take care of something, it, it— and you give focus to and attention to it, that's, that's what grows, you know. And, and then the last thing I'd want to put in, you know, I, I come from the music business in the '90s. I've seen it change a lot. I come from hustle culture, you know. When I was living in Brooklyn in the early part of my career, it was a badge of honor for me to skip sleeping one day a week so that I could get more done. It was a badge of honor for me to never take a vacation. It was a badge of honor for me to be able to take a beating and survive and get back up and not tell anybody that I had just taken a beating. Right. And all of that was wrong. I'm thankful for it because it got me where I am today. And I'm the person I am today because I went through all that. But I make sure now that I get 7 or 8 hours of sleep every night because I'm not good to anybody if I skip a night of sleep. I really become the bitch from hell, to be honest with you. And that's not who I want to be, you know. I've learned that taking care of myself is, is more than just taking a spa day at the Four Seasons every now and again. You know, for me, self-care is working out 3 times a week. It's water aerobics. I've just lost 90 pounds. So I've lost a lot of weight since I saw you guys. And I've learned that— and thank you. And I've learned how important that is, not just the actual getting healthy, but the journey of getting healthy. You know, I have Eckhart Tolle sitting on my nightstand. The first thing I do when I wake up every day is read. And he has really short chapters, but I'll read a couple pages. And it sets my tone for the day of how I'm going to enter the day. Reading has become really important to me. So I've got, instead of listening to music in the car the way that I used to, as much as I can, I listen to audiobooks because that's important to me. Have I answered your question or did I just kind of ramble?

Oh yeah, I'm just listening. Please don't stop. This is so great. Thank you for that. And a great derivative work created, you know, where, where what are the flowers you want to see grow, but then also the grass is green where you water it, right? So I see you, it's all you did. Good. But it's true.

Thank you. I've also learned to manifest. I've spent a lot of time, you know, um, part of my, my self-care is I, I've studied neuro-linguistic programming and self-hypnosis. Well, I've studied hypnosis and then used it on myself, so Both of those things I've used to get over, like, my fears in life. I'm extremely introverted. If I could avoid all people, I would, because they kind of make me nervous. We just lost Bryson. They— people in general make me nervous. So I've really learned to— I've really learned to get over that and just deal with my fears. And that's something that I never did when I was in that hustle culture mindset. I was so busy that I didn't pay attention to having to be a better person. And now I just want to be the best me I can be.

Those are huge insights. Powerful. Thanks for sharing that.

Sure.

I wish I learned this in my 20s.

I wish too. I mean, back to youth is wasted on the young. If I would have known then, what I know now, and all of this. But you learn, and I learned, you know, it's never too late to learn. You can be 80 and have a revelation, right? But one thing I learned from a very kind and very wise and very smart friend of mine, Hamid Ghatan, who's a brain researcher and scientist and also a medical practitioner, is neuroplasticity. I mean, this links to neurolinguistic programming to understand that the fabric of the world has plasticity. I've seen that in the things that I'm— I've been able to build against all odds, kind of, you know, the flight of the bumblebee, you know. Um, but there is plasticity, and I think, you know, back to mental health, again, if you're in a dire situation, you know, a lot of anxiety, it feels like there's no way out, to actually know that there is plasticity. You know, the fact that— oh, Bryson lost power, by the way.

Oh, wow.

Electrical power. Funny, we talked about electricity in India and then there was some problems.

And then off he went.

Yeah, yeah, that happens. But he might reappear. But I think remembering that there is plasticity, remembering that we can affect our lives, we can change things, we hold that power. And I learned it, I feel, later, you know, in life. I wish I'd known it before. But there is plasticity. There's always room to change, you know. And if you are—

the brain is always changing.

If there is frustration, just embrace change. I mean, it's back to the classic quote, you know, progress requires change, right?

Yes.

And we have it in us to actually change. The very fabric of existence by being intentional, you know, but knowing also there is plasticity. We can actually program ourselves. What happens in CBT, if you go to therapy, is that you are actually reprogramming.

Reprogramming.

So even if you don't have a spiritual faith, religious faith, whatever it is, that's pretty awesome stuff, right? So by even through prayer and affirmation, you you know, or therapy or whatever it is, we work with the plasticity. We can change things.

Exactly. That just triggered a thought. And I, I don't know why I'm mentioning this, but it just feels important for me to say it. It's kind of the difference between having a growth mindset and a fixed mindset. Whereas with the growth mindset, and you embrace and myself, we all have growth mindsets where we want to learn, we want to expand, we want to learn for the sake of learning. We want to become the best us that we can be, right? The best me I can be, the best you, you can be, the best Bryson he can be. And when you have a fixed mindset, you kind of spend your, you kind of spend your, your, your life focusing on proving how smart you are or proving that you already know something so that you're not really able to, grow and be the best you, you can be, you know. Hey, Bryson, welcome back! We missed you.

Somehow lost power here. I apologize.

We have a hurricane going on. Maybe it's that. Maybe it's some residual hurricane issues.

Yeah, it's, uh, I welcome the rain because it's been pretty dry around here, but—

and your grass is getting greener. And, and your flowers are growing because the rain is focusing on them. Way to prove a point, Bryson.

That's what I did in comedy. We call that a callback, right?

Callback. But what you missed while power was out was we talked about plasticity and neuroplasticity and the fact that, you know, we, we can actually affect things more than we think.

Thousand percent.

That, that's the recap.

Thousand percent.

Yep. And I talked about growth mindset versus a fixed mindset, cuz we all have a growth mindset, which is so important. You know, I, I, I realized, um, in hiring my staff, I hired people that were really great at their jobs and what I should have done. No, you know, this is 3 years ago, 4 years ago now. Um, what I should have done was hired people people based on a growth mindset. Because when you hire somebody that has a fixed mindset, they're, they're not trying to get better. They're not trying to improve. They're not trying to fail so that they can learn. They're trying to always prove that they're great at what they do. And it, it's not conducive to running a great company. Um, one of my favorite books is Good to Great by Jim Collins. I don't know if you guys have read it. It's Amazing fucking book. And that's kind of what he talks about. He talks about get people on the bus that are, are, that don't really have fear and that really want to win and that have growth mindsets. And have everybody, you know, have a big, hairy, audacious goal and you'll achieve it. Like, the bigger your goal is, the more likely you are to achieve it. If you have a small goal Nobody's going to achieve shit, basically. I'm paraphrasing, but, you know, he didn't say shit or fuck.

I mean, you, you aim for the treetop, you're going to hit the trunk of the tree, right? Aim for the stars, maybe you'll get, you know, at least above the trees.

Exactly.

It's so true. And we help affirm that. And I, and I think back on people and teams, I learned, you know, I can't remember who said it, but, but And it's probably a classic quote, but hire for attitude, train for competence generally, in that you want good people to power a team. And you want voracious learners, et cetera. But I've seen that it's so important to have agility, an openness and willingness to learn. And not everyone has that.

So important. So few people have that.

There are plenty of jobs where being specialized, being the expert, makes a lot of sense. I think if you're building a new operation, and I would say generally in entertainment, all fast-moving industries, you thrive on your ability and capacity to change, right? And change is scary. I mean, it is. I think it's a Mark Twain—

So is getting out of bed in the morning, though.

It is.

Like, feel the fear, do it anyway. I didn't mean to interrupt you. You were going to—

I talk too much generally. Bryson can testify. No, you don't. But the quote machine Mark Twain said, I think the quote is, I like progress. What I don't like is change, right? So everyone wants progress, but it requires— it's painful. I mean, you see in parenting, you know, you can— there was a wise family friend, Hannah, who said, you know, I've learned I've really learned becoming a parent that she was a bit ahead of us in getting kids, that I want them to change, but I actually realize I have to change myself. That's the really tough part of parenting. You can be annoyed, you want to see different behavior, and you realize it's on me. I have to level up.

You have to lead by example because you can say something over and over. It's sort of like a parent that tells their kid, don't smoke cigarettes, don't smoke cigarettes, as they're lighting up a cigarette. You know, you can't do that. You've got to, you've got to lead by example.

Yeah, that's the hard part.

Bryson, is there anything that I didn't touch on that, that, that you would like to talk about?

No, I look, I, I don't think so. I mean, look, I've— well, let's take a step back. We could talk for hours. Yeah, so there's plenty that we, that we could discuss. Uh, I really appreciate you having us on and having this conversation. I think I love this. Fantastic. Uh, there's not— as far as the business is concerned, I mean, I— this is a problem worth solving, you know. Trying to get this right is worth solving. So I think when I think about incentives, I think it's important. Selfishly, I really enjoy music. I have in my office no less than 4 or 5 different speakers that I could yell at to play any given song at any given time. I have a subscription to 4 different streaming services. It's a little ridiculous. But this is just, look, this is where I am. And I say all of that to say it's really, really important to me to continue to be able to listen to good music. And I don't want that to be undermined by the fact that it becomes untenable for artists to be able to create because of this very, very convoluted system. And I know that the music industry, even with all the good intent, they're not going to be able to solve it all. It's very, very difficult to read the label from inside of the bottle. And I think that this is why the music industry is going to continue to struggle with solving some of these issues. And so what I'd like to do is take some of the talent and the expertise that I've sharpened my skills in, in other industries, and kind of deploy them here and see how we can be helpful. So that's, um, that's the role that I play. Uh, that's the role that I'm going to continue to play into some more tells me that it's time to stop, and I don't anticipate that that's going to happen anytime soon.

Same. I don't think— I don't anticipate that either. I also have to thank you. Unknowingly, you really helped me when we were— when the three of us were sitting in my office for that 4-hour conversation. One of the pieces of the conversation that we had was being comfortable being uncomfortable. And I realized that that's really one of the keys to my success is that I grew up, you know, always the outsider. So when I came into the music industry, you know, I was the white female amongst Black men, right? So I learned to be uncomfortable always being different. And we kind of had a little bit— it was like a little bit of our conversation of, um, being comfortable, being comfortable, being uncomfortable. And you had shared a little bit about, about your background. And, um, like a month after that or two months after that, I got to speak at Lincoln Center and I got to speak to like 600 high school kids and they wanted me to speak about negotiation. I had 20 minutes to talk, so I talked 5 minutes about negotiation and then spent 15 minutes talking to them about accepting the, you know, being uncomfortable, like getting comfort, being com— becoming comfortable with being uncomfortable. And I feel like I really got to deliver an amazing talk to high school students, to something that they could really apply and use in their lives, in their careers, far better than negotiating, right? Negotiating's important, but what's more important is learning to accept change and learning to be comfortable within ourselves and being comfortable being uncomfortable. And that all came from you. So thank you for that little seed that you don't even know that you planted, because you changed my life with that, and you changed the lives of the people I got to speak to at Lincoln Center. And thank you.

Well, that's awesome that you got to speak to the kids. And listen, I am— we're all trying to figure this out together, right?

Yes.

I think that that's— You know, if that message came through me, I will— I'll take some credit, certainly won't take all the credit. I think that we're sharing here, and this is why formats like this is super important for us to talk these things out.

Yeah, agreed. Thank you guys, you've been so generous with your time. I'm so appreciative. You've given so many gems here, both, both in you know, the publishing world, the, the collecting money, the rights world, as well as the— in life in general. And that's so important.

Thank you, Wendy.

Thank you.

I love you both so much. Thank you for starting AO. I think it's, it's so necessary. Anything I can do to help you, I'm here for it.

Well, let's not make this the last. How about that?

I love that.

I love that.

Okay, my guy, thank you so much for your time and your energy. Thank you. Okay, bye y'all.

Bye.