Meet The Music Researcher Making Sense of the Techpocalypse

0:10Cherie Hu:Where is music headed? How can we possibly know where technology is going to evolve? Well, you need an oracle like Cherie Hu, who was my guest this week on the Drowning Sound podcast. And she was running a community, which I was part of, which was a collective research project. and they now output lots of brilliant research and that is often done collectively but tends to be done slightly more kind of like as an individual pursuit and last week she announced that that research was going to be made available publicly and I guess the reason why this conversation hasn't come out yet and why I've been sat on it for a little while is because talking to Sherry I realized so much of what I wanted to do with Drown in Sound going forwards was about collective wisdom.

1:00Cherie Hu:It was about bringing people together, bringing ideas together, showing how things are interconnected and really giving a space for music fans to make sense of not just the music industry but music's role in the world, how music plays a part in making change and really making us think about what society is. Obviously Sherry is a music journalist and researcher which I say obviously you if you've not met Sherry before if you've not come across her work you might not know that yet she's a brilliant journalist she's written for Forbes Rolling Stone all the kind of like big places you'd expect a very renowned journalist to write for and we touch a bit about who she is and what she's about quite early on in this interview and I think there's something about her approach which is so different to so much of what happens in journalism and online and although she talks about corporations and industry and maps out how all these things are interconnected she really understands the value of music and its role in the world and I think this conversation we also talk quite a lot about the value of media and it's interesting that she's decided to end the membership approach to what she's doing because is I think we're now seeing the music industry really, really rushed to kind of bring the super fan Patreon model to the fore.

2:26Cherie Hu:Anyway, this is a long meandering introduction. Maybe it's too long. Send me some feedback. You can just email me, sean at dranninsound.org. This is my conversation with Sherry Hugh on the Drowning Sound podcast. We are going to try and make sense of where the near future and where the distant future is headed.

2:50Cherie Hu:I'm not going to introduce you as the oracle of the future of music, but I often feel like that's the title that in my head. So how would you describe what you do? Because I was thinking of introducing you as a journalist and I thought, well, that's not quite right. And you're not a community manager and you're not a CEO. Like none of these titles feel quite right. So I send you a quick note before we started saying, is cartographer a title that makes sense? People that make maps of the world and potentially like making like a map of the future. How would you describe yourself, Sherry? Great question.

3:23I also feel like I, and thank you for having me, by the way, I feel like I definitely toggle among a lot of different terms. One that I don't use publicly very often, but I'm taking from a book by this futurist named Amy Webb that aligns a lot with the kind of work that I do is practical futurism. So that's more about like, it's, it's who I am, I guess, my work, but also like what I do through my work, practical futurism. What I mean by that is definitely interested in like what the future state of things is going to be, you know, like where, where is everything headed? I think that's one of the core questions in anything related to

4:10Cherie Hu:innovation especially in tech innovation um but i arrive at like kind of i guess i i arrive at um some mental model for how that'll work by very meticulously analyzing what's happening right now because like that's that's the only information that we have and so there's this futurist amy webb who um like i guess her model which aligns a lot with i think mine and what i'm trying to promote at water music is like studying what's happening at the fringes um like interesting research experiments that are happening um cool tools that are being made uh as a signal of what's to come so practical futurist for today's you're a practical futurist okay but that's that's going to be the new um journalist journalist mba or whatever it is that you get um yes so speaking of which um i was looking back through your kind of plotted past of things that are out there um you were a journalist for forbes back in about 2015 and then you then you started a newsletter and then you started a Patreon and then you started a Discord.

5:13Cherie Hu:So you feel like you've been about three, four years ahead of the curve with lots of these things, which I find the return of newsletters at the moment quite funny, like Substack becoming quite a powerful platform because the first thing I did in 2019, no, 1998, sorry, was started a newsletter about music, which was like a fanzine by email. and then Dran and Sound became a website with a community. So I can see that I've sort of traced a similar path in the sort of like two kind of glow ups of tech and music and media. And I think the topic I wanted to touch on kind of properly today was actually a question you asked on another podcast, which was what can the music industry learn from the media industry?

6:00Cherie Hu:So what can we learn from your tracing your path from being a freelancer from Forbes to running Water and Music, which I obviously have to explain to the listener a little bit about what Water and Music does. So yeah, tracing the future, whereabouts, what can we learn from where you've been since like 2015? Yeah, so as you charted out just now in that path or that history, Water and Music has lived many different lives. I started it as a newsletter just to aggregate my freelance work on the side when I was mostly freelancing still as a writer for many business and entertainment publications. Which is how I first, I think, must have started following you after reading some of your articles.

6:42Cherie Hu:Amazing. True OG. True, true OG. Appreciate it. Yeah. So starting as a free newsletter and then kind of growing community and readership around that to the point where I made the leap and started a patreon membership around it in february 2019 um juggled that with freelancing for like around a year and then moved full-time to working on it in early 2020 um it stayed as like a standard a pretty standard yeah sub stack style membership or like newsletter experience um but then i being so in the weeds on like tech innovation for music and wanting to track the long tail what was happening and trying to think of new ways to um capture all that the interesting activity that was happening in a much more like collaborative bottom-up way this model and vision started coming up in my head of uh like more collaborative research and like water music becoming a truly uh collaborative enterprise where every article that you read is a reflection of the community just like the sheer knowledge and insight from all the people in the community and not just me we should probably um take apart what collaborative research means because i think being inside of it in the water music community it makes a lot of sense to me um and being in a community generally on drowning sound for the last 20 years it's made sense what community is but i think um the idea of the collaborative approach to things i think it's it's quite interesting once you're in the inside of it because it's somewhere between like a working men's club i guess it's something that we used to have in the uk where people would kind of have their kind of extracurricular things and like they'd run like darts teams and all sorts of um things like that and like a town hall that's run for the purpose of the town or the village um but there's something about the way in which you're all working together to shape what the research is to research together the kind of collective approach to things which is quite different it is a bit like being a magazine but it's almost like the agenda is set not by an editor but set by the community itself.

8:51Cherie Hu:And so I'd be curious how you would explain it to people because I don't think I did that very well. No, no, no. I think, no, you touched on a lot of like examples of things I have in mind. So yeah, in the lead up to this switch or this expansion towards a more collaborative research model, I definitely studied, it's definitely not a new idea. There are publications like ProPublica that does collaborative research in a very different way. I guess, sorry, to zoom out first and then dive into examples. I guess collaborative research is any research project or company that explicitly involves community input at some or in some cases at all stages of the process.

9:44So to give and then to give some examples that were kind of inspiration for Water Music's model, there are some publications like ProPublica that are definitely run still by like a central internal team. And they do a lot of like deep investigative reporting on just general issues in society and politics. But they have a lot of like crowdsourced data projects. So I think they had one project looking at the state of healthcare in the U.S., for example, and they were trying to gather anonymized data on just like what healthcare, what certain treatments cost and like how if at all that evolved over time.

10:23And there was like a huge data gathering project over months that kind of informed that. um so i i would call that collaborative research even though it's still you know there's still a team synthesizing synthesizing the information that's kind of a bit more like polling as well

10:39Cherie Hu:though isn't it it's kind of like the day the level of data they're getting is kind of not not on the granular level that you kind of collaboratively work on yes yes and so yeah the model we have at water music is um definitely different and more involved across the whole process. So we, um, I guess I can best explain this through our like biggest flagship output, um, which we call, uh, seasons or like season reports. Um, and those are multi-part reports, usually four or five parts, um, that dive into what a certain, um, technology means for the music industry. So for music and entertainment at large, um, through multiple different lens.

11:24So usually each season report ends up covering like legal issues, of course, because we're talking about the music industry. So like legal issues around rights, marketing strategies, fan engagement strategies, creativity and aesthetics and how tech is changing that. So it's a pretty quite wide range. But the exact shape of those chapters are informed from the very beginning in a very explicit way by community input.

11:59to what extent do you think in years gone by and i'm meaning like 50s 60s when people were

12:08Cherie Hu:getting into journalism how similar and how different and i guess as a collective force like how much more things can you do collaboratively which even when you started out writing for forbes in 2015 that you wouldn't have been able to have do oh let me let me think so the question like so what what is possible now collaboratively that was not previously possible is that yeah yeah the question i think so sometimes you have to fish for the questions in what i'm thinking no no no it's it's a very very good question very big question i'm trying to like well i guess i guess one simple thing from like my point of view like when we started drowning sound there was nothing like google docs so you couldn't log into someone's writing and track changes and make notes and all those kind of things it was quite a difficult process and definitely you couldn't do that within our content management system um so like literally we used to run drowning sounds staff discussions and on a google group and on a back back-end message board um and which again like the chaos of of it was quite good because you'd find three people really hate an artist another person really likes them and you've got to try and decide who's reviewing the album um and things like that that's very spicy yeah um and often at a point where most of us hadn't even heard the record yet so um it's difficult to know who should have who should do the reviews or like when we started like one of the big things that are we collectively decided to do when we first started was to run almost all tour dates we could because most people were just buying music magazines not because they wanted to read them but because they wanted to find out when their favorite band was on tour which is a very 2001-2002 kind of experience of the internet but there was lots of things that we couldn't really do collaboratively as easily as we can do now so like i just i just was thinking about the like 36 people on cc on an email was just not the way to operate on certain things yes yes no google docs is a great example and has been super helpful for us um for sure yeah in terms of like tracking changes if there ultimately are like 10 to 15 people touching a doc of course super helpful um i think the the the global nature of online collaboration also is not new, but that strikes me as like, um, something that is definitely like easier, easier than ever.

14:43So it was the inherent kind of idea of what the

14:46Cherie Hu:internet was meant to be, wasn't it? Yes, yes, exactly. Like kind of, yeah. Along anyone from anywhere in the world to kind of log in and connect with anybody else. Exactly. Um, yeah. Our research for sure has gotten stronger as it's gotten more international. So we, for example, we released a very in-depth, also very crowdsourced analysis of music NFT projects in Latin America. It was led by someone, Nicholas, who's based in Buenos Aires in Argentina. And that also involved a very like crowdsourced effort of people just like submitting their own NFT projects or other NFT projects that they thought were interesting.

15:33Just painting a picture of that market. I think, yeah, again, that it's not a new idea to collaborate at that global scale, but it's certainly gotten much easier to, I think actually holding all our calls in Discord has really helped in terms of like institutional memory. so like now we have um so most like our older project threads are archived but now we have um a record that's like easily searchable of like oh what were people talking about um for this project or this tech at this time and kind of like comparing results over time

16:14Cherie Hu:so to jump back to the kind of bigger kind of opening question what do you think the music industry can learn from or the media industry can learn from some of your approach to things because I think media has in many ways not been as big a story in terms of how little you earn per stream maybe just because I'm in the music industry and I've seen those stories a lot more but the like ad supported world of media that's and the attention economy and the creator economy in these kind of different spaces, which have all sat alongside music and have been in parallel. There feels like there's a lot of lessons for artists around, for instance, if Water in Music was a community or a super group, like there's lots of different ways of looking at it and thinking about it.

17:06Cherie Hu:What have been some of your takeaways from the kind of, at least the last few years of what you've been doing, of that shift from newsletter of a lonely creator to the um community that you've you've now built up whether people are kind of like like in your what's your music super group of journalists in a way like are there any are any things where you when you've sort of asked that question before about can what can the media what can media inform the music industry like is there is there any bigger themes that you think people should be thinking about totally yeah i mean there's so many parallel challenges kind of like what you just mentioned like um i think i think uh if there's i hope this makes sense yeah if there if there's a way to like succinctly describe the shared challenge that the music and media industries have from the creator perspective also i guess the brand perspective like a label or publication um in many cases maybe most cases they feel forced or pressured to um like enter into from the very beginning into a landscape where their core product is commoditized is treated as a commodity so like say if you're an artist and you're um releasing your debut album on streaming services right like spotify apple music like those are like commodity services for music you're paying just like ten dollars a month accessing however many tens of millions of tracks now um in a playlist environment your song can easily be swapped out for another it's just yeah um songs are interchangeable congratulations your cake is available on the all you can eat buffet yeah oh great analogy yes exactly um and then on the media side uh say you start a new um publication uh a new blog and you post your first article uh yeah i guess you could post on like um social media and i guess like reach some of your direct contacts but then And you're also similarly thrown into just such a cutthroat environment of like so many different voices trying to cut above the noise.

19:29I spend way too much time on Twitter and that's like the perfect kind of hotbed of this in action right now. Just like so many people trying to yell over each other with threads and takes and all that. So it's just yeah. and I think that that like uh commodity that that commodification and the pressure on that

19:50Cherie Hu:is like only going to increase speak speaking of which just just while you're collecting your thoughts the the fact I can listen to a deep fake of you reading your newsletter already feels like AI is quite quickly quite fast though your AI has a slightly bassier voice than you I think definitely definitely it's bassier and like at random times will get really sassy yeah and we don't know why there's some artifacts yeah i quite liked instead of saying scissor it says ssa sza at one point oh god there's some nice little bits where you're like yeah you i can tell this isn't you yeah because i thought maybe it was you and you just put like a filter on your voice to make out like you've used AI oh no definitely it's not me um yeah okay I'm glad I'm glad those those artifacts stick out yeah um but okay yeah but to bring it back to like yeah lessons that music and media can learn from each other I think it goes both ways from from that base assumption um information hashtag content media it's all like a commodity where is the value then like if you're an artist trying to build your career, if you're a writer or a brand trying to like build your profile as a writer, I do it's and this is like the it can be the best and the worst part of like both industries, depending on how you look at it.

21:15But it really is on building like a tight knit like network and engaging directly in like relationships, whether that's with fellow artists or fellow writers or just like people in a community who are who are like-minded and like fostering that community and that shared voice and a commitment to that voice and flexibility to express that you know however way I guess makes sense for the time so I was going to say

21:47Cherie Hu:like for instance you recently made a graph of who owns all the different companies it was like a mind map of kind of who owns what in the industry yes you sort of look at it you're like oh like these like few companies have got a slice of almost every pie um so that from from an insider's point of view you can possibly see why some deals and some hype and some different things are going in some directions and in others you can see well this is why no one's pushing back against these things because all the companies from both sides are going to benefit um but to me it seemed like a really good example of something which anyone could have made but the audience that you've already got amplified it made suggestions you've improved it um but you're uniquely trusted that what you put together was going to be correct and not just someone randomly putting putting a mind map together does that make sense totally yeah and um again appreciate that um yeah but that definitely is speaking to this idea i'm trying to articulate around like yeah like domain kind of domain expertise and like um domain focus honed very meticulously um over longer period of time ideally socially others by domain do you mean like specialism yes yes and this is this is a But actually, yeah, I think very interesting debate of like, does the current world favor like hyper generalists or hyper specialists?

23:20I think people usually fall somewhere on that spectrum. I'm definitely on the specialist side. I can only speak from my own experience. but um yeah i think just in in a world that is so noisy um people i think can appreciate and value just like like uh like i guess in in comedy it's like um committing to the bit like sticking to the bit just like choosing choosing a bit and just like sticking to it um is already like that alone is like a huge source of value i think in the current information media climate so yeah like specializing um niche focus so what that looks like in music and media is is different but definitely like in in parallel so like one of the most successful um i think independent subscription media subscriptions right now is um a co-op called defector media and they they're um I think they're an offshoot of Deadspin.

24:28You have to fact check me on that. But it's a collective. It's a co-op of writers who just like share hot takes on sports. But it's like very irreverent. And like each writer has their own style. But it is also very informed by their experience, by the history of each sport. And that collective has built trust over a very, very long period of time with like a large following of readers. But it's like, it's very, I guess sports as a topic, of course, is like not niche, but their lens on it is like very consistently like off kilter and like, and specific.

25:04Cherie Hu:Well, I was just thinking like technology and music are not niche topics in the way in which like the communities, you can be talking about Spotify royalties one minute and mid journey the next. Like these are big pieces of tech which are being used and will be used going forwards by millions. I think often being able to spot what your specialism is, is the biggest challenge for most people because you can't always see yourself to see those specialisms. Totally. Not everyone is self-aware enough to know where the beginning and end is of those things. And I think especially for musicians, like one of the big things I get when I talk to musicians, they often can't describe what their music sounds like.

25:45Cherie Hu:and then you start to ask them which artists would you like to support and they just pick big names you're like do you sound anything like them and they're like no it's like the um but for instance with this podcast I'm really trying to focus on helping music fans and artists and the music industry understand where things are to begin to understand the challenges so when they see things from the outside they can better appreciate and value it because they understand the challenges involved and like trying to to drill down into well actually my things that I'm really care about is ensuring artists get paid well to ensure as a fan that the things I love sustain um and that that comes from magazines right through to musicians and labels and all sorts of and venues and all these different things and the trying to figure out my unique place and things was was actually like should have been really easy because I've been doing this for two decades but actually was harder because I could have just launched this as like a series of interviews with musicians I liked talking about their new records because that's what Drowning Sound has always did and was always known for but I think that that that kind of like domain and that specialism I think are quite key really key things to figure out because the audience for them might be small but they might be wealthy the audience for them might be massive but they haven't got any income but a brand might find it valuable and it's like trying to figure out all those different things like you might be an incredible drummer um are you in the right band it's definitely a journey that yeah i like had to go through when i was first freelancing or when i so when i when i first started freelancing um the number of other writers who were focused just on music and tech was quite small i think i could i could probably count it on two hands maybe even just one hand so it's like a very, very small community that that certainly was a benefit.

27:41Yeah. It definitely helped me starting out in terms of like seeing an opportunity to carve out my own niche in the industry and in music media with, with that like music industry ownership chart, as an example, a voice being like super analytical, very interested in not just in like reporting the news, but in trying to connect the dots. It is cartography in a way. Yeah. Like connecting the dots among many different things that are happening in the industry um in like a like a like a systems oriented kind of way it's always been a key part of that voice um since i started so i started writing in 2015 um since then many more publications have been interested in music and tech because now um so many more of those companies are publicly traded so like spotify um uh on the label side universal Sol and Warner are now public.

28:34So there's just a lot of more like financial eyes, tech eyes, kind of on this topic. It's definitely been a helpful exercise in like making sure that we weren't like pulled in that direction of like trying to compete with like, you know, a mainstream publication that just has like a fundamentally different business model. Like at the end of the day, we are still like a niche, vast majority membership funded publication.

29:00Cherie Hu:And in terms of audience, I think it, I think it was you that shared the stat, there was 22 million tracks released. Yes. So there's a lot of artists trying to make sense of the industry and the technology, isn't there? Artists have grown to be the top role in our Discord server, at least. So, so you can choose your role and just like where you sit in the industry as part of our onboarding process. And yeah, it's like artists and then founders and people at startups. So, which is, that's been a very cool evolution to see, but yeah, lots of artists try to figure out um what's happening and a lot of our work does speak to them also to their their artist teams so and i think now for so both for media and for music i'd like to think it's a more accommodating time than ever to like a very genre bending music that like doesn't fit neatly within a certain box i mean it's it's fascinating to see how like from the top down platforms are trying to catch up so like for example um for for a while the biggest playlists that spotify was promoting um were not tied to genre they were tied to some kind of vibe like pollen so like the other two like pollen and lorem were two like very gen z oriented playlists that had had no genre not that much like aesthetic consistency throughout but that wasn't the point it was more like um meeting those like younger listeners where they're at where like they don't care as much about like those barriers anymore so yeah so it's it's it's a much more flexible environment now i think in terms of like marketing and not having to be tied to a certain label or box and that creates more flexibility um for artists but also it makes it even more important to do that kind of reflective work of like what i'm um what actually is my unique voice and like what am I bringing to like the proverbial table because because in terms of thinking about growing your audience to to grow that and to show the value of it you obviously need the odd spike moment which I guess is a bit like releasing a single um or releasing something that makes the membership make sense like how do you think about for instance when you do the summaries of some of your seasons like the headline stat which might make sense for billboard or financial times to report on and like often your data gets picked up and then someone that reads that like sees our water and music um that's great they've got a pun involving water which um obviously was drowning sound i appreciate um but people keep seeing the name water and music around look into it decide it's worth signing up to because they're either become part of the community or they'll at the newsletters which kind of summarize kind of some great knowledge that's not just information it's communicated to you in a way that makes it make sense rather than here you go some information to make sense of um how do you think about that kind of marketing and growth and maybe what could the industry learn a bit more from how you're doing that yeah so this is where there there are lots of parallels with music and media and this too but they diverge a little bit in that um for example artists certainly don't have to release like a single every month or every week like there are some who do it's a really good effect but it's definitely not necessary but for like just got to do a collaboration with calvin harris every six months yeah exactly um yeah whereas for like uh a research or information driven kind of experience like water music there does have to be some kind of consistent output especially if people are paying regularly so like for us it's like a new analysis or report every week or so so there's like a regular rhythm around it um that said the uh the actually one area where i have been very inspired by the music industry is the idea of back catalog and like what that means for media so um i don't know if if this is already like a well-known stat among listeners for this podcast but i think it's upwards of 70 75 percent of uh consumption now in the music industry is towards bat catalog which is just defined for now as music that's older than 18 months which is like actually not super old but um i guess just uh yeah point being vast vast majority of consumption is going to not to like new releases even though it's like all these there are all these new songs coming out or tracks being uploaded it's still to like music that has been out for for a while i think that in music there are apps like tiktok of course that have kind of informed that shift in percentage where like their whole catalog marketing departments at labels that um previously we're kind of just like, oh, when's the next like vinyl reissue going to be for this artist?

34:09That's their catalog has been gathering dust in our department. But now it's like increasingly overlapping with new release marketing tactics because they're all looking at the same platforms and they're like looking at TikTok and trying to like react and find the most interesting moment to kind of like capitalize on new interest in a song that was released first like 30 years ago. So the parallel for Water Music's product is, I guess, like showing that we are, I guess, consistently early to trends that have happened over time and like proactively communicating that.

34:50Cherie Hu:So a bit like me always banging on about discovering artists before anyone else did. Yes. no yeah no there is there is um yeah i guess yeah i guess from the the anr side there is that that parallel

35:11Cherie Hu:i think that there's there's lots of really good articles which they're always going to pick up an audience if and i and i and i don't think enough people think about creating things which are evergreen like i'm really conscious with this podcast of trying to make it so that you can go back and listen to the episodes and they're not going to be too stuck in a moment in time they're always going to give some inspiration and thoughts um but some of them will be slightly more timely than others but i think there is something in that creating content to last forever like i did a lot of it when i worked for the bbc um like we made a video on like what piece of music calms your mind and it was like 20 different artists and i could post it every three months and it would always inspire different responses and catch people thinking about that in their collections and things so and sometimes I could just shift who the first clip was so people didn't think they'd seen it before um so I think there's like creating things thinking about them being evergreen I think is really key yeah like creating things that are that are evergreen and in terms of like what that even what that even looks like I think it is very dependent on going back to the theme of just like having a focus and like specialization and like knowing specifically who you're speaking to and why and what they might be thinking about or concerned about yeah it's all it's all it's all connected in terms of like making whatever your output is as robust and like future-proof as possible you know no matter no matter what happens yeah and i guess this is going to sound like a weird question but a lot of artists at the moment are being suggested they should start their own discords or online communities and I've just been thinking a lot about how odd it is for me to try and do that around myself for Drowning Sound but for Drowning Sound kind of makes sense because it's a bigger thing.

37:01Cherie Hu:Do you think that if Watering Music was just you and it was your community that it would make as much sense you'd feel as comfortable with it or would some of the bigger learnings got to be similar um and would you sort of be like henry ford passing off the community's research and putting onto your name and like you would see this sort of weird output of this is sherry hughes blog yeah so for so for the first year of the patreon membership it was just me and handful, dozen, eventually a few hundred other people in a Discord server. I think in the first year, if you look at like message count, I definitely like posted the most to my own server, which like, I don't know if that sounds like cheesy, but I think was necessary to like learn or start to show, not just tell the kind of culture I was trying to build in a server.

38:00And I guess the main takeaway from that as well is that it is, it is very um you need to be very consistent and also not rushed with that kind of work i think it's definitely something that um i noticed with a lot of other newer communities that might pop up is like trying to find shortcuts to community management or like good community building over time and just like as human beings who need to build trust in each other like that

38:27Cherie Hu:Like you can't you can't short circuit that process, the very human process. So, yeah, I was like the main person messaging messaging in the water music server for a while. And then it did get to a point where there are enough people. But also I wanted to like write and research more where I just knew I knew my limits. Like I knew I couldn't like manage a whole community and write as much as I wanted to at the same time. So Kat started as a part-time community manager, now full-time community lead and many other things on our core team. Like she was our first hire at Water Music, largely for that reason.

39:07And so, yeah, so like kind of early, early engagement with the first community around Water Music and like first supporters was like very, very critical. but as as an artist or creator you certainly do not have to do it all by yourself i think like like not not rushing it but also knowing like what your limits are and like not being afraid to like ask for help or like build a team to kind of help you manage that community side

39:32Cherie Hu:i would definitely encourage that i always think about how key that guy was that ran the weezer community the guy from the rentals or something and i feel like more bands need that like like mascot type role i'm very conscious of your time when i was looking you up i saw that maths is one of your specialisms. Do you think we need more music or more maths? Oh, no. Oh, gosh. I guess for context, for listeners, I went into college wanting to double major in music and math. I ended up just majoring in statistics and minoring in music. But I mean, I'm deeper in the industry now than definitely I would have expected.