PlaylistSupply and BookingAgent Platforms

Hi Brian, how are you?

I'm doing good, how about yourself?

I'm super good. I love your background, I wish we were both there.

Likewise, that's why I have it.

It's very relaxing.

So this is, this is good.

It's been a very hectic day. So, um, first of all, thank you for coming to, to join me. Um, I thought I would record the demo that you're going to give me and share it with the world because I think that it helps artists. So if you're fine with that, let's do it.

100%.

Amazing.

Cool. So just to give you a quick background about us, we're a small team of former managers, booking agents, and artists. And we created these tools out of— it was basically a solution to a problem that we were facing as managers and booking agents and artists. We were trying to get our artists' music on playlists, trying to get our artists, to perform gigs in different venues. And we were having trouble finding all this data. It was a lot of manual research. So we basically decided to automate that entire process, to streamline it and make it way more efficient to either get playlists or get gigs. And that's what we did. And we came up with Playlist Supply and then we launched BookingAgent.io shortly after. So Playlist Supply is a real-time search engine for Spotify playlists and curator contact information. So in the keyword search, you can type in anything. So this does not have to be a genre. You could type in a language, a mood, an activity. You could type in something like workout. You can really type in anything. I'll do jazz, and then you can search for if you want emails or social handles. You can also use this organic search, which lets you target the discovered on section from artist profiles on Spotify. So if you, if you go to any artist profile on Spotify and you scroll down, there's a section called discovered on. That's basically where the Spotify algorithm automatically adds playlists to represent a specific artist based on, you know, where they got discovered on and where they launched basically.

So, oh, so if I have a, if there's an artist similar to my sound and I go to their page, I can see what, who, like, what playlists have discovered them, and then it's the same people.

Exactly, that's what I recommend. That's what I recommend doing is making a list of 10 to 20 or even more similar artists. Of course, you want to search for artists that are similar to you in size. You're not going to search for a huge—

yeah, like Drake would not be—

yeah, yeah, of course you want to search for someone realistic in size who's maybe doing a bit better, um, and target those discovered on playlists directly to follow that, you know, a similar trajectory. So I can show you that feature in a sec. If I do jazz and email, for example, I'm going to get all jazz playlists on Spotify that have a public email address. They're going to load like this. So far we have almost 300. This is just going to keep adding playlists until it just stops at one point. You have the name of the playlist, the follower count, the track count, the owner name, and then the emails. You could do this and some playlists have both an email and the social handle available, which is really cool. What you could do is you could use the second search bar to filter out the main search. So if I type in hip hop in here, it's going to filter out the main jazz search for hip hop jazzy playlist. So kind of like Jazzmatazz, the album. Yeah, I get it. So yeah, I'll get lo-fi jazz, hip hop jazz, jazzy lo-fi beats. This kind of stuff. So you could really refine your search. Once you have the playlist that you want, you could select them, you could export, you could export the entire thing. You could also save them to your database on the platform. Once you save playlists to your database, there are a few really cool features in here. You have the playlist health score. These are our latest features. So the playlist health score basically is a quality score, from 0 to 100. So a percentage based on how many artists' profiles a playlist shows up on in the Discovered On section. So if I get a score of 63%, which is really high, that means that 63% of the artists on this playlist have it in their Discovered On section, which means it's driving a ton of traffic to the artists within it. And that's how you know that it's actually a really good quality playlist. What you could then do is open up this follower chart history and see all the changes in followers over time to make sure that it looks smooth and exponential like this and doesn't have any weird spikes in followers that, you know, might be a bit shady.

So that might indicate bots in that case, correct? Which we're trying to avoid.

Exactly. 100%. So yeah, using these two features and the organic search, you're able to tell if a playlist is legit or not and actually will drive the real streams that you want from a my playlist because that's the whole point of playlist promotion.

Got it. Um, when I see one on here that's like 0%, which you just landed on, that's a bad sign.

Exactly. So this could mean a couple of things. Maybe it's just a very small playlist that hasn't gained any traction. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's botted, but then what I would then do is open up the follower history chart and then I see spikes like this and I don't really like that. So I'd avoid this playlist completely.

Got it.

Yeah. Spikes like this doesn't look good. You want to see an exponential and a smooth graph without any, without any vertical walls like this.

Got it.

So, and yeah, as you can see, a lot of most playlists have high health scores. As you can see, they all have pretty good charts. Yeah.

Some nice growth.

Exactly. Sometimes if you see like a sudden increase like this, This could just mean that they're running ads. This doesn't mean bots.

Bots would be like one vertical spike like we just saw that went up to 100,000 and then dropped down. Exactly.

But just, just a sudden increase that is still smooth like this could indicate that they're running ads, which isn't necessarily bad, honestly. I mean, it's— if they're running ads, they're driving traffic to the playlist and it's all organic, then that's perfect.

Agreed. That's, that's beautiful, actually.

So yeah, back to the organic search. If I search, for example, Blade, it's going to pull the discovered on playlist directly from Blade's profile on Spotify. And it's going to give you all their social handles and their emails. So discovered on playlists are almost as good as, or just as good as editorial playlists, but they're owned by third-party curators.

Got it.

That's why I personally like to target these the most because they have You know, they're the same caliber as the editorial playlists, but they're not editorials. They're owned by third-party curators. So it's possible to reach out to them and get on those playlists. So yeah, that's basically it for Playlist Supply. It's a real-time search engine for Spotify playlists. It's also a data analysis tool to make sure that you're reaching out to the right playlists and you're going to get the results that you actually want from playlist promotion.

Ryan, I've noticed that, um, there's a spate of, uh, playlist companies out here that are going in and adding new artists and then sending them a pitch like, hey, if you want to stay on my playlist, send X amount of dollars or whatever. This is a great way to find out if they're real or not because you can go to whatever the name of that playlist is they're putting on and see if it's spiking.

If you get any offers from playlists, you can come search for them in here and check out their health score, their follower history. You can determine, okay, how many discovered on sections is this playlist located on? If it's located on a ton of discovered on sections, it's a good playlist, could be worth it. Regarding the pay-to-play thing, we don't really recommend, you know, paying for playlist placement. But one mistake I see a lot of artists do is they would reach out to a curator and demand placement.

Oh, just—

Yeah, people would say, like, for example, this curator responded to me with saying this. I'd be like, okay, show me the email that you sent them. And they would just send them one basic email saying, hey, put me on your playlist. What I recommend is always trying to build a relationship with these curators, try to offer, you know, something in return as a value add, because And this doesn't go just for playlist creators. This goes for talent buyers, for even people that you want to collaborate with. Every time you want to reach out to anybody in the music industry or in any industry, you want to, first of all, be super nice. Second of all, you want to show them that you're willing to offer value in return and try to build this collaboration instead of just taking what they have to offer and not offering anything in return.

I love that. So like value in return, would it be if you add me to your playlist, I will promote you across all of my social media and drive back there?

Exactly. You could say I'll do a story shout out, or, um, I would, you know, try to promote it. Or even say if, if I have a gig in LA, I would invite you and say, hey, I, I can put you on the guest list, um, for this gig in LA whenever you're in LA, for example. You know, just anything to kind of build the relationship and show them that if they bring value to you by placing you on that playlist, you can also bring value back by promoting, by inviting them to a gig, by maybe if you have merchandise, sending them a piece of merchandise. There's many ways that you could offer value that is not direct money. And that's what I believe in.

I love that. And I love that their socials are on here because you can actually do a little bit of research and find out who they are, what do they like, like start a conversation. Sort of like when we came on board and I said, oh my God, I love your background, I wish we were there right now.

Exactly.

It's just a way to have connection.

Exactly. Find something in common, um, you know, have a conversation and, and just, and, and just make a connection. Because that's ultimately, once you build your network of curators and you become like friends with them all and, and you have like relationships, when you have a new release, you don't even have to ask them to add your new track to their playlist. They will automatically just do that. And then once you have— I call it an army of curators— once you have an army of curators, then they would just keep adding your tracks and you, you kind of build that flow through those relationships.

Yes. And, and like you said, that's true with everything in the music industry. We all go hard for the people that we like.

Exactly, 100%. We all want to help each other. We all, but we also want to see that I'm bringing value to this person, they're bringing value to me. At the end of the day, that's, I mean, that's how society works in general, not just in the music industry. We have to, it's a mutual give and take. Exactly, it's a give and take mutual relationship, 100%. So yeah, that's basically it for playlist supply. Super important just to summarize the strategies is making a list of similar artists, 10, 20, 30 similar artists that are realistic to you in size, finding their discovered on playlists, using the Playlist Vet and follower chart history to make sure that those playlists are legit and driving real traffic, and then targeting those curators directly and offering them value in return, trying to build a relationship with the curators.

I love that. I love that. Can you remind me where to go to find the playlist health?

The playlist health is in the playlist database in the left menu bar.

Got it.

Thank you. Once you save playlists there, you would be able to check their— exactly, their health score and the follower history. You could even do that for your own playlist just to see how your own playlists are performing. You could add them in here and monitor them, or competitor playlists, for example, or whatever.

Oh, brilliant.

Yeah. Exactly. So yeah, that's basically it for Playlist Supply. Did you have any other questions at all?

Not on Playlist Supply, but I'm hoping you'll show me Booking Agent too.

Exactly. So BookingAgent.io is our next tool.

We use this heavily in my office, so thank you. We use this heavily in my office.

Oh yeah, no, that's amazing for our clients. Yeah, yeah, we create— BookingAgent.io is a real-time search engine for venues and talent buyers and event promoters. So we used to manage this one electronic DJ in Europe, and we were trying to find venues where similar artists are performing and try to target those venues directly and find the talent buyer. And we used to do a lot of manual research process, finding the concerts, going on the website, then going on LinkedIn to find the talent buyer, then finding the email. It was just a, it was a huge manual process that took a lot of time., and we could only imagine how much time that would take for artists themselves to do this, when in reality artists just want to focus on making music and then playing live. So we decided to build this data tool for artists, managers, and boutique booking agencies to use to find venues. So there's two types of searches that you could do. You can either search by an artist's name and you're going to get all their past tour history and upcoming shows. Or you could search by city and genre if you want something general, like I could search for LA and then electronic, for example. Let's do an artist search, uh, Figure Eight, for example. Now I'm gonna get all the venues where they performed in the past and are booked to perform in the future. The venues will show up as calendar dates like this. These are clusters. You can click on any venue. You're gonna get all this info about the venue, so the name of the venue, the address, the website, the capacity, which I think is super important. Very important. So yeah, you're going to get the promoter of this one event. Sometimes if it doesn't show a promoter, that means that the venue themselves were the promoter and it wasn't an external promoter. And then you get all the contact information. So you have many different venue employees and then most importantly, the talent buyer of the venue, which in this case is Ramona. And boom, you got her email and you can basically reach out and pitch yourself for a gig. You can be like, hey, I noticed Figure Eight performed on January 16th. I think we're super similar in sound. I notice you have an event next, next month, and I would love to open at that show, for example. So you can even create different projects. You can create one called East Coast Tour, for example, save all your venues there or Europe Tour., or if you're a manager who manages a few different artists, you could have a folder for each artist that you manage and all the venues that you want to reach out to in those projects. Let me show you the, excuse me, the city and genre search. So if I search for Los Angeles and then select electronic, for example, it's gonna give me all electronic venues in LA. Again, you can click on any venue, you're gonna get the info box for the venue. It's gonna take a sec to load. For example, this one, Lodge Room, you get, for example, the general manager. If you click on this find booking contact for this info, it will find the talent buyer directly. And then like I said, the capacity, and there we go. So Eli Flasher, talent buyer at Lodge Room, you have their email, you can reach out and pitch yourself for a gig.

And their LinkedIn, so you can go and kind of get to know them and find out who were they before they were at this.

Exactly. I recommend doing that, connecting with them on LinkedIn, sending them a small message on LinkedIn, being like, hey, I just sent you an email, I'd love to connect. I just, I came across this one event, etc. And yeah, same for talent buyers. Like, I always recommend building relationships with talent buyers. You're not emailing them to demand them to book you for a gig. You're emailing them to build a relationship with them so that they could book you for one gig, but then if they see that, if they have a show in 3 months and they see that you would be a good fit to complement the headliner, for example, they will then reach out to you and book you for an opening slot or a closing slot or maybe even a headlining slot. So a lot of the strategies from Playlist Supply Sorry, there's a bit of construction on top. A lot of the strategies from Playlist Supply would be applicable here, same as the similar artist strategy. So I recommend making a list of 10, 20, 30, 40 similar artists. Of course, you want to search for artists similar in size. If you're a hip-hop artist, you're not going to search for Drake because you're going to get huge amphitheaters. You want to search for artists that play maybe depending on your size, but you want to search for artists that play in venues of maybe 500 capacity or 1K capacity or 2K, 3K capacity and target those venues directly. So, yes, I'm trying to think if I missed anything, but that's basically it. It's a venue talent buyer and event promoter research tool.

It's quite amazing. We used it very recently for— I have a client who's a country artist, and she's performing in Kansas City on a Saturday night. In a, in a, I think it's in a month and a half. And she's driving from Nashville to Kansas City. So we wanted to find a place for her to stop and perform on Thursday and then stop and perform on Friday. And then maybe on the way back, hit a Sunday night, even if she has to perform it for free. Right.

They night, fill in those gaps.

Yeah. Exactly. So we used it for that and it was so helpful.

Exactly. That's also what I recommend artists to do is if they have like a tour and they have any empty nights, they could literally go on here and figure it out, try to fill a dead night and make the most out of their tour. Of course, without tiring yourself. Exactly. But yeah, this could be used in many ways. And honestly, before BookingAgent.io, Booking your own shows as an independent artist was nearly impossible. Uh, finding the shows, finding the venues, finding the talent buyers was too much manual process, and at some times even impossible to find the emails of the right people or the right people themselves. So I think this is really a game changer when it comes to indie artists booking their own shows and trying to, you know, get their own career off the ground in the beginning when, when you really don't have anyone to help you out, or I agree, you have a small team to help you out, they could be using this as well. So yeah, we have a lot of boutique booking agencies using this as well to tap into new markets and do their own research and build their own, you know, databases of venues and talent buyers and their own connections and relationships with these venues and talent buyers.

I love that. I love that. Do you have 5 more minutes?

I have, yeah, all the time in the world.

I love that. So you may remember I had Benji Stein on here and I asked him about his career. Can you give me some background on you? Like, how did you get started in the music industry?

So I was always passionate about music. I was a drummer as a kid.

Wow.

I actually studied sound engineering and music production in Berlin, Germany, and that's where I met Jannis, the founder of both of these companies. And Benji as well through Yanis. And I basically got started with them when I was very young in, in college. And, and yeah, I've been working with them ever since. They, they were also, like I said, booking agents and managers. So I was basically their assistant, helping them out in the beginning, doing a lot of manual research.

So time-consuming.

Exactly. So That's kind of how I learned the whole music business. And yeah, we've been developing these softwares to help indie artists, you know, grow their careers on their own and small teams to not have to do a ton of manual research. And yes, streamline this entire process. I still kind of make music. It's more of a hobby for me. Oh, good for you. I have a bunch of modular synthesizers in my studio that I jam with. So, so yeah, that's me. I'm very passionate about music where we all are in the entire team. It's something we live by and we have always lived by. And yeah, we, our main, our main mission is to continue to build these tools to help indie artists grow and, you know, innovate in the music industry.

Yes, yes. I love that.

I definitely, I think data is super important in any industry. Especially the music industry, data is becoming something that is very essential to know how to work with, to know how to find, to grow a company, to grow a career, to, you know, to do anything. So I really like the fact that we're working with data in the music industry and continue to innovate in that.

Yes. And I come from an era where we didn't— I was going to say I'm a little older than you, but I'm a lot older than you. And we didn't have data. Like we just didn't know. Everything was our gut. Everything moved by emotion. So today, the fact that I can, I can still use my gut because I still have that, that, that intuition. But the fact that I can use data is just, it's amazing to me.

I think it's a new era where you use your intuition and your gut simultaneously with the data that you have at hand. Yes, you're more equipped. That's why we call it a tool because it equips you with the right tools and data that you could then base your intuition off of and kind of go in the right direction. So absolutely, like you said, back in the day you were fully reliant on your gut and your intuition. Right now you have tools that will support your intuition and your gut to make the right decisions and move in the right direction. So that's exactly what we're all about, 100%.

I love that, and I love that you guys all came up And there's just something special about building a company around something you need yourself.

Exactly.

You can build it based on pain points instead of, you know, something that's esoteric.

And I love that 100%. No, exactly. We initially built—

we—

thank you so much. We initially built these for our own teams. We didn't even launch them the time when we first built them. We were using them for ourselves at first, and then we showed it to a few managers. Booking agents were like—

everybody wanted it.

We're like, yeah, this is what we built for our team. What do you think? And they all loved it. They were like, you have to make this public, everyone will use this. So that's exactly what happened.

I love that. Yeah, that's so awesome.

Yeah, no, definitely super proud of everything we've built, and, and, and, uh, I'm really looking forward to the future and what more tools we build because—

yeah, because you keep adding to these.

Of course, no, 100%, we will. And, uh, we'll keep you updated as we go as well.

I love that. I love that. Ryan, is there anything else that you want to talk about? Anything that I haven't asked you that you would like to say?

I think we covered everything. I just want to say, you know, thank you so much for taking the time and for the opportunity. And yeah, I wish everyone good luck. And, you know, try your best to use the right type of data to grow your careers, I guess. And yes, and really push for it. And And yeah, more, more is coming soon.

I love that. Beautiful. Ryan, thank you so much.

Of course. Thank you as well.