#965 - Rick Beato - AI Bands, Spotify, TikTok & The Death Of Songwriting

27:14Yeah. I was, I just had it in my head that I wonder why we haven't seen, or maybe we have and we just don't know about it. I wonder why we haven't seen pre -fabricated DJs yet. It's coming. You think? Probably. I just get the sense that you have somewhat, Charlie D 'Amelio, let's assume the, let's say that she was a dude and she couldn't, and he couldn't sing. and be like, oh, you've got the platform. God, this motherfucker just cannot hit a note. Make him a DJ. Make him a DJ. Get West's Rolex. He must be a sonny mom must be around. Get him in. Get him to West Fred again. Speak to Fred. Fred will do us a try, or whatever, right?

27:54Get that in. Okay, put him up there and then you've got the platform and you have somebody that is creating tracks in that way. Well, for in Charlie's case, it's not cost effective. She's already doing, okay, she doesn't need to be, just need to be a musician at this point, unless they've, unless they discontinue TikTok or something. That nearly happened. Yeah. What are the trends music? It's interesting, just to make a point of that. My son Dylan is, and all his friends are on TikTok. The one day, they, they stopped TikTok for one day, all of his friends went back to Instagram, and they don't use TikTok anymore.

28:32You're kidding from that one day? From that one day. Now it's not that nobody's on TikTok, but he said he noticed that all of his friends stopped using TikTok. That's just, I mean, it was literally down, I didn't even think it was down 24 hours. Yeah, it was like eight hours. Yeah, well, I mean, it keeps getting extended. That band keeps getting excited. Just got another extension, second or third extension. Yeah. I have to say, I think in the interests of national security, the collective aggregate IQ view of the entire West and my social media presence, given that I kind of suck on TikTok. I'm very pro at TikTok being taken down because I'm fucking allergic to that platform and everyone hates me on there.

29:15So we sort of, I guess, explained at least part of the process of what's going on. It's pretty interesting. When I watch your videos, whichever one should go and check out, it kind of fills to me like seeing a translator who understands a language that you enjoy, but actually have no idea what's going on. I can't break a song into its constituent parts. I can't tell you what's, oh, the goes a full step down here. This is, oh, that's interesting. That's sort of a disc, you'll notice that there's some swing in the beat or whatever. And I'm like, did a nice good vibe, you know, that's my muggle level interpretation.

29:52What are the trends musically that are dominating right now? People can have this sense that they understand where the scenes are at, but what are you seeing? What are the sort of dominant oral themes that are going on? I don't know if there is a dominant genre or dominant trend right now. Everybody is algorithmically siloed at this point, And I don't see that that there's very few shared experiences that people have as far as with music nowadays. You might have got with radio. Yes. And once radio stopped being something that was stopping dominant, then people just didn't have any shared narratives.

30:38It go back to, you know, up until 2000 or so, we'll go back to Nirvana because Nirvana was a change, a band that really changed radio form as changed everything. So Nirvana comes out, a bland metal, hair metal, whatever people want to call it, was huge in the 80s. All the sudden, MTV comes out with and I remember it 1991. First time I saw the video for Smells like Teen Spirit. What is that? I didn't understand what he was saying but I knew it was something game -changing and it spawned alternative. I mean it it literally overnight change music, killed pretty much all the hair bands, except for guns and roses.

31:37And maybe a couple others. But that was a... That was still part of the music business where you make a record, put out a single three months before the record comes out. You go to radio with your record labels, radio promotion team, they go out to their regions that they are in charge of, somebody comes to the south, they go to Atlanta, they go to 99X, whatever, they try and get the program director. Here's a new single from the disband. We're trying to get on the radio, and then you start getting traction, then if it's doing well, you hire independent promoters, There was a whole system of things that happened and there were budgets to do these things.

32:27Okay, so you're going to get it. We have a budget to hire Indies to go and promote the record. If we can get it on K -Rock, it's going to put it over the top. We're going to pay extra money to get the person. This person can get it on K -Rock. That's the old music business, basically run like the mob. I was going to say, it sounds very nepotistic. Yeah, it's, you know, to have a hit single back in the day, it's going to cost $500 ,000 or so of promotion money to get it, to pay the people what they need to get paid. Usually it's the independent people. They put people, when they made pay illegal, they put people in the middle of these things to these independent promoters.

33:13So you didn't, the record labels wouldn't directly be paying the radio stations. They pay the independent promoter that would interface and and get the songs played. But as far as dominant trends nowadays, I don't know how how it will ever return from that. Everything is controlled algorithmically by massive of platforms, Spotify, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram. Feezer. Does that suggest that we're going to see more entrenched subcultures? If people get siloed off into algorithmic echo chambers, you'd think that people would listen to more of the same kind of music, but it feels like more of a homogenization than an individuation when it comes to subcultures.

34:06So how do you square that circle? Do you understand what I mean? Does that make sense?

34:13If you think about how the Spotify works, you put in a band, bad omens. If you like this, then you're gonna like sleep token, you're gonna like, you go through the list of bands. Whatever, whatever they are, we could lick it up right now. We could pick any band, and then you're gonna see other bands that are similar cross -reference underneath. That's how these platforms work, period.

34:44They make your playlist for you once they know what you like. You get your daily playlist on Spotify if you use that. You get your recommended videos on YouTube.

35:00and most of the people are okay with it. They like the recommendations. YouTube cut the cord with subscribers getting every video. YouTube will send you a video if it is something that they think would be interested in. Just like YouTube, people that are more ad tolerant, get more ads.

35:29Yeah, it's like feeding the hardest guy at the table, the spiciest meal. Yeah, I think your channel's one of the most, I would say, consistent that when I finish one of your videos, it takes me to another from your channel. I think it's very bingeable. I think people's sequence watch a lot of the stuff on your channel. huge advantages that you get more plays, slight disadvantages that I think you have to cap a little bit of the watch time because if you start getting up toward 20, 30 minutes, people actually don't end up finishing, which means that they don't get delivered your next video. They're distracted by something on the fucking sidebar.

36:03So it's an interesting balance. But yeah, I just wonder, I wonder whether we've seen the death of subcultures. I mean, you know, growing up for me, you would have seen sort of gots, emo kids, you would have had kids that were in a hard style. I mean, I'm from the Northeast of the UK, you can tell it was a very working class. It wasn't anything very refined, it wasn't a classical music subculture up there, a jazz subculture. But I wonder whether the sort of homogenization, the fact that everybody is operating to appease the algorithm, whether it flattens some of the more experimental and interesting spikes and because everything's so fast paced it doesn't allow any scene to ossify into oh these are established rules these are the sort of things that you can expect this is what this scene means because very quickly it's in and out what's the next thing we've got a chase where the algos go what's the trend what's happening on TikTok well it kind of goes back to my video I made that was in two parts.

37:07Music is too easy to make and too easy to consume, right? So you can put down a song and you and I could write a song right now and record it and we could put it out five minutes from now. Yep. And the idea of a scene developing now, there's just things are two immediate people are too connected. And because of that, it makes everything more homogenized. Yeah. We'll get back to talking in just a minute, but first some things are built for summer sunburns, hot girl walks, your ex posting there, you were road trip and now lemonade and salt. Huh? Element just dropped their brand new lemonade salt flavor and it's everything that you want on a hot day, tart, salty and stupidly refreshing.

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38:58the if one of the things let's say guitar amplifiers okay and people watch my channel they see I've got 50 guitar amps before and well however many I have in the background well most people nowadays don't use guitar amps. They use these whatever. Helix or XFX or Kemper. These are digital modeling amplifiers if you will, but they're digital. And everybody's using the same algorithms because the amplifiers are modeled. So they have the same sounds. Yes, you can program them. You can change this, you move them to the mic placement. It's all digital though, right? It's not someone saying, what would it sound like if I move the mic, you know, 50 feet away this way or tried this or, oh, I knocked the mic out, you know, out from in front of your amp.

39:56Oh, well, that sounded amazing. Where's the mic? It's laying on the ground right there. Well, that's an amazing, you know, credible sound that you would never get. You'd never think to put the mic on the floor to do that. And if everybody's using the same palette to paint on the canvas, then you're going to have these records that sound similar. And you and I talked about this last night, a little bit about the, there's not as many professionals, like professional producers and mixing engineers, for example, that are working in rock music, pop music, country music, yes, but in rock music, because there's not the financial incentive that there was.

40:40For example, if you were a huge rock producer in the 1990s, 1980s, you'd have three points on a record, three percentage points, and you had a million selling record and you'd make $10 retail, you'd make $300 ,000 per million. The producer would make. against their points, you get an advance, $3 ,000 a track, typically, 10 -song record, you get a $30 ,000 advance. Once you pay that back, you start getting your money, right? Right. So, multi -platant and records, you make millions of dollars as a producer. Well, now there's no money for producers like that anymore. Well, they've been competed away with advanced digital workstations.

41:21That's right. So, and now there's been a whole generation of people that are making records without producers and engineers that may have different ideas than the people in the band that learned everything they know about recording from YouTube videos. Well, that's your fault. That is your fault. It's, you know, it's, when I go back and listen to records from the, that were still being mixed by pro mixers back in the 90s and the early 2000s and they just have a, when you We have something that's really mixed well. I was listening to a Chevelle record from maybe 2003. Wonder what's next. I think it was the name of it.

42:20And it's mixed by a guy Andy Wallace, amazing mixer, and it sounds massive, so punchy. And I was like, why don't records sound like that now? Well, it's because this guy is one of the best mixtures of all time mixing engineers his records sounded incredibly good. And or Brendan O 'Brien that did all the Stone Temple pilots records, all the Pearl Jam records. He mixed super unknown by Soundgarden. Brenda's mixes are amazing. They're punchy. They're fat. They're they're they have dynamics and now when I hear everything, it's like I hear drum samples I hear guitars that are recorded digitally with the same amp simulators and there's a...

43:11There can tend to be a sameness with the music because everybody's using the same type of gear and they're recording it on the same work stations. Like everything is this... You know, everybody's using all the same stuff. So it's hard for it not to get this homogenous sound. And the difference is the people who are the singers, because that's the ones that, that's the one thing. And then if you use auto tune on your voice, does this mean that the importance of the frontman or woman is going to continue to get bigger, given that the singer is the highest point of differentiation that bands and artists have now?

43:54Yeah. I think that's always been the case, though. No, but you would slash even you've got some like very talented although I suppose especially when it comes to look at sleep token and look at the drummer right you know I'm aware that the Not molesting their tracks and quite the same sort of a way. It's very self -contained unit But there is still the opportunity now I suppose for very talented Back further further back in stage Contributors to really shine through But yeah, it seems to me that if what you're saying is correct music sounds are becoming more homogenized Everybody's using the same presets and fucking decapitated and whatever the hell else it is that they're doing you didn't think and you that did you Shocked like that If that's the case then where are the remaining points of differentiation?

44:45I wonder whether this is going back to what we said at the very beginning well What about your marketing presence? What about your social media game? What about your your rollout from an advertising perspective? That's what it is. That's where that that's how you differentiate yourself. It's through that. Not through yet. But it's something the band have a big social media platform. Are they big on on Instagram and they're bringing people to the shows because that happens. That does happen. There's a band from Australia carnival that I love carnival carnival is amazing. So the base player John they have a new record coming out.

45:21He sent me He sent me the new single which it just dropped the other day. It didn't play when I tried to play it and it wouldn't play on my Spotify. You know why? Why? Because he's in Australia. So his Aussie time, they said it was the 26 that was supposed to come out Chris and it didn't. What day were you? Mine was the 26, but it was, but there are day ahead. Yeah. So I've had this before because I'm still on British, British TikTok, British Spotify. Yeah. I get access even in Austin. I'll get access to songs at 6 p .m. Because there was six hours behind now the fact that it's a full day that that's something else my entire theory is gonna other window, but If you set your Spotify to Australia time you'll get access to songs 18 hours ahead of He sent me he sent me the link and I wrote him back my jam that doesn't play I imagine he felt good about that.

46:12Okay, so the I did a breakdown of a song Goliath that's on what record is on, came out in 2007, but the... The Carnival record? Yeah. And, uh, Forrester Savils, that was a producer of it. And the sounds are phenomenal on it. The drum sounds, this one tune is in a really weird, like 27, 4 time signature. And Forrester sent me the tracks for it. And you can hear the bass in the drum tracks because they're playing it at the same time. And the drum sounds are phenomenal. Then you hear the guitar sounds. They have the room zoom, they're dumped through amps. I mean, it's ineccably recorded and mixed.

46:55John, the bass player, his bass sound is just unbelievably great, distortion. It's most aggressive bass sound. And this is kind of before people started using all this kind of, all the same gear. And it was done in a professional studio with a professional producer and you know the band is obviously very involved in what they do. These guys are pros, but it's mixed so well And I'm really curious to hear what the new record sounds like when you can finally get access to it. Um, so my I guess Total layperson contention here is If it's the case that the sound is becoming more homogenized if everybody's using the same presets If everybody is becoming more reliant on doors to basically not enable but like buttress, like to replace the production process, surely that opens the door to anybody that has even a modicum of ability to properly make music.

48:02So for every zig, there's another zag. So if everybody is using the same sounds, the same presets, the same eight away, it's the same drum, whatever, decapitate bullshit. If everybody's using that, well, all that you need to do as an artist is actually learn your craft and it's total blue ocean strategy. So I understand people might be worried about the vanilla ice cream, you know, live -lap loving of music production that it's very prefabricated. But that would just open up the door for more inventive artists. or just even remotely original artists, somebody that was built in the 90s, so to speak, but born in the 2000s, to be able to take over.

48:43So surely we're just going to see this swing back in the other direction, do you not think? I hope so. But still comes down to, do you have a tick -tockable moment? It just does, Chris. That's the, you know, it's, you can have the greatest record in the world, the most different sounding record, revolutionary, new trend in music. And if you don't have those If people don't say can you feel my heart that it doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't. Right. Okay. Let's talk about this. So why does my 12 year old know that song that came out in 2013 before she was born? Before she, the year she was born. Yes, she was born.

49:15Yeah. Well, I mean, that song, it was a good song, but it kind of languished at least in terms of that, that bring me as biggest songs for a long time. But I mean, okay. What, how do you come to think about the impact of TikTok on music generation. So I think a lot of the time normal people like me think about we consider it in one direction which is songs that blow up on TikTok. But it's by -directional which is the reverse happening. The opportunity to blow up on TikTok causes musicians to create music with the express purpose of being TikTok blow up a bull. You know what I mean? So what does that what does that sound like what is happening to the form and the structure and the sort of way that music is actually created in order to be, how do you make a song tick -tockable?

50:06Okay, so I've thought a lot about this and I believe that there's a formula for having a successful song. Here we go. It is figure outable. My word using, there's a lot of data out there that's available. There's a, I have different apps. There's an app called Chart Metrics that will show you met, give you metrics of artists Instagram, TikTok, YouTube. It'll show you when something blew up. I'll give you an example. So there's artist, Imogen Heap and my, my daughter, Laila, we're, I drive her to school every day. She's like, can you play this song called The Headlock by Imogen Heap. How do you know that song?

50:53So I came out in 2005. It's gonna say Imogen Heap's 20 years old. Yeah, so that came out in 2005. So I played, she said, yeah, I heard it on YouTube shorts, and I wanna hear what the whole song sounds like, right? And so I play her the song, she said, oh, that's really good. I said, you know, there's another song on here that was bigger song called Hyde and Sea. Yeah, it was huge. It was huge. So I start playing, she's like, you have never heard this. all the sudden two minutes and 47 seconds in, there's this spot that is the TikTok spot. And she starts singing along. She goes, oh, I know this song.

51:25It's the bridge of the song, where the singing, where it gets into the faster singing part. And she knew that. So then I go back and I open up this chart, I started looking at it. It's like, okay, so this song had a spike six months ago. People started playing on a TikTok. And then I started looking and then she started getting way more followers on Instagram. And then I went back and I said, Layla, where did you hear, how did you hear this? She goes, well, I heard it on a few different places. So she sent me the three different places. Two of them were anime videos, but they used different parts of the song, Chris.

51:59They weren't the same TikTok, but they had the same similar payoff. And they were from some anime. And then one influencer that had three million followers had shared it as well. But it was in multiple places and it was hashtag headlock and so I started studying these things to see and it had blown up multiple times over six months It kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Yep until she became aware of it. So what is the constituent parts of a song that has that Verality what what is it that that makes that city? I'm trying to figure that out right now So I'm not sure yet. I'm not sure what makes people want to use things and...

52:48Can you imagine how many resources are being spent trying to get, trying to reverse engineer what that is? I mean, I'm sure that lots of record labels and producers will have got some sentiment. Maybe someone's got the formula. Maybe there's some person behind the scenes that's doing all the rest of it. You remember what was that? The dude that was skateboarding down the street drinking ocean spray. Asian spray doing the dreams by Fleetwood Mac. Okay, so this is so creed, fucking creed, dude. Yeah. Like, I guess that was partly like Texas Rangers winning the World Series and that kind of being a part of it.

53:23Yeah, what is this coming from? So I, when I first started on YouTube, I used to have things not only content I did, but blocked where they'd take down videos. And one of the videos I had taken down was a Fleetwood Mac song. It was a Zango your own way, but it was written by Lindsey Buckingham, whereas dreams was written by Stevie Nicks And I argued I made a lot of videos about blocking why are are why are these big labels blocking stuff on YouTube of Songs that are 40 years old that I'm making videos of it's just like free publicity Why block it just take the content ID money and make you're making money on it Why do you want to take down a video that has a million views two million views?

54:06Like, what's the point of it? It's just free promotion for them. So finally, when that tick -tock video that you're talking about with a guy with the ocean spray, you know, listening to the song, that song went to number one. And all of a sudden, the labels are like, wait a minute. This is promotion. Wait, wait, wait. We can actually, you know, and then they then they stopped blocking it and all of a sudden all of my old videos that were blocked and unblocked. Oh, that's interesting. over the course of a few months after that. There's not really an equivalent from my industry, a little bit of a one.

54:41If you have a particularly good, quotable moment, there's a famous bit from Lex interviewing Hubertman. And Andrew says, can you read me the quote one more time? And then people super cut that with either stuff that's real or stuff that's like, if you've taken the piss. There was one I did a thing called Finn vs. The Internet. that Fentailer is a friendly roast comic from the UK. And it's half a get and half a sort of real roast. And anyway, he brings his pretend steps on out, Jeffrey is sad on the stool. And he's saying that I use a lot of quotes on the show. And Jeffrey's giving me some of his favorite quotes back.

55:24And he says, all the man needs the same as his dog. Food, water, shelter. put your nose in a stranger's arse. And that clip, that short clip has been used tens of thousands of times by the Brazilian Jiu -Jitsu community. Because if you're in North South where you're like this, like that, you've got your nose in a stranger's arse. And it's like, it's the equivalent of that. It's the only sort of equivalent thing that if you capture a small piece of something that it could, that was not what this was intended for. It's just part of a skit that the guys wrote. But yeah, I suppose the same thing goes with music.

56:07I think the thing that everybody feels concerned about is how contrived the process of creating anything is. Like the whole reason for virality is that this thing wasn't meant to go viral. And then it does. It's the fact that it feels naturalistic. That's cool. The fact that the Fleetwood Max song was not meant to be listened to while skateboarding drinking ocean spray cranberry juice, right? That's what's cool. It's the fact that can you feel my heart has this sort of slow wave and then it comes back up and you can do cool stuff on videos with it. I've seen lots of people doing like trample -eaming videos and shit to that song.

56:46That wasn't why it was designed. No. But as soon as you get to the stage, if you see how the magic trick is done, I think it kind of kills the allure of believing in it and the same thing goes for the tick -tock that you're playing a super gaslight game, where you need to create a track that works on TikTok, but doesn't seem like it was made to do that. You want people to believe that they created this meme themselves. And yeah, I don't know, 5D pests. I don't know if that people can really create things that are gonna work. I've had a lot of viral videos, and I never know what's gonna go viral.

57:27I have no idea. I do know that it's almost all my viral videos are just me talking to camera. Almost all of them very clear of that. But other than that, I don't know what I never, you know, I can't plan anything. You never know how videos is going to do. and it's, to me, I just make it move on. I wonder how many times, I know, of the last 10 years, I'd say, I wonder how many times people have got into a studio finish the final master on a track. I mean, like, that is a fucking number one. And the song's gone out and not even charted. I wonder how well the guys in the music industry can pick them.

58:18Now. I know people that have written many number one songs and they've told me that they had no idea it was going to be a number one song. You included. Yeah. But you wrote it for you even wrote it for a different genre. You didn't even write it for the genre and it was like ten years later. Yeah. Yeah. So you know, you know, whoever thinks something's going to be a number one song. Well, if no, if you're writing something for Beyonce or Sabrina Carpenter or somebody that's a famous star and it's picked as the single, the chances of it going number one or being really successful or exponentially higher.

58:53That's the last so to do with the autistic narrative this song though. Yeah, that's interesting. One of the hardest things being a producer or songwriter is to get your song picked to be a single. Historically, that's always a thing is that you write songs for a record. You might be one of 15 different songwriters on a record. Let's say it's there's three people per song, but there's five different groups of people to write for a record and everything. And then they go back and forth and back and forth with the A &R department and the head of the label. Well, maybe this is going to be the single.

59:33Well, we we sent it out to our radio guys. They think this is the single and they think this is the single. And to actually have your song picked is just the first step in that. And then it has to be,

59:48and then it's the public as its vote, right? It's like one of my friends is like, I always say, well, people tell me that they want me to make these kind of videos, then they make them and people don't watch them. And say, well, people ultimately vote with their attention, because we're in the attention economy. And that's, and that to me is not predictable. But yes, you can talk about something that's a trending topic, and it can do well. But you still don't have any control over what the public. Is this why record labels like replicable formats when it comes to music? Yeah. that we kind of have an idea that this thing worked before.

1:00:38The same way as you. I used the example of you and Dr. Mike Israel in terms of appearance quite different. In terms of content strategy, actually quite similar. I like Mike. I like Dr. Mike. Yeah, yeah, but he's got a strange shaped head. He described himself as a human callus to me. You're kind of like a if a varuka took human form. But very similar. Very okay, we're going to do some sort of it. I have a degree of expertise in pretty specific area. I'm gonna break stuff down musically. That has to be, and this is why I was so interested. He has a far better sense of humor than I do. He's really funny.

1:01:14That's true, but he's also Jewish. So, you know, there's positives and negatives to the way that Mike puts himself across. Very good with money, very bad at spending it. You know? Um, so he, the thing that I thought was interesting when it comes to the music industry is we find a format that works and then okay how do we sort of crank this until it becomes old and then we go again and we so where does the genesis of that come from? Is that even predictable? I thought a lot about this, what happened when new metal came about, you know, let's say it's early mid 90s corn, Limpiscate Lincoln Park.

1:02:03Got a Miss POD. And POD. So, so new metal was the dominant force in rock music. Now called the most dad metal. Is that what they call them? DeVos dad rocked. Okay, so, so, um, and then you had bands. Creed was not really a new metal band. And they were more of a hard rock band. Like breaking Benjamin stuff like that. Breaking Benjamin would be a new metal band. One of my really dear friends produced breaking Benjamin, but it was this dominant force and radio until it wasn't and why what happened. What, you know, was it the nickel -backification of fucking old roads lead back to Chad Krogeman, holy shit.

1:02:53Is it, is it that he had too many hits? I can no break. It's interesting. So the engineer for Nickelback Joey Moe that worked with Chad on all those records moved to Nashville. And he is the one of the biggest producers in Nashville. and he is, he engineers mixes, produces, and he's just had hit after hit after hit after hit. And I don't know why Chad Kroger didn't move to Nashville, but for some reason, And I think that I thought like maybe it's, I used to say that when blues left rock music, there's no blues riffs anymore. If you think of like audio slave or, you know, as an extension of Raging of some machine, I mean, a lot of the bands, the Pearl Jam sound guards, the bands of the 90s have a lot of blues elements in them, but a lot of new metal does not.

1:04:10Lincoln Park does not have blues licks, like crawling or I mean, a lot of the songs on the first Lincoln Park record are not based. They don't have blues melodies and blues licks. And once rock music became disconnected from the blues, it started losing its appeal to people. And then people moved to listening to country music. And now country music has been popified. Where you hear the same drum loops that you hear and pop music, you hear and I'm Morgan Wallen songs and like a lot of country songs that you hear that hit top 40 radio now. I mean, it's amazing how much country is in top 40. We need to talk about this.

1:05:01What has happened with the ascendancy of country over the last five years? What's going on? I think the production style has changed and it sounds like pop music. And so it's, I think that it's, that it just connects with more people because it doesn't sound like country music anymore. It doesn't sound like the country music of when I was going to Nashville and writing songs. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Momentus. If your workouts feel flat, your recovery slow or you've just been feeling off, it might your training plan or diet might be something a bit more boring like your testosterone.

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1:06:18Plus, they ship internationally. Right now, you can get 35 % of your first subscription and that 30 -day money -back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentus .com, slash modern wisdom, using the code modern wisdom. Check out that's L -I -V -E -M -O -M -E -N -T -U -S. E -N -T -U -U -L -I -V -E -M -O -M -E -N -T -O -U -S. calm, slash modern wisdom, a modern wisdom. I check out. So the reason, at least for me, the day, I can tell you the day that I decided to move to America, and it was partly because of country music, which just sounds like the most sly -opt way for an English person to decide to move to America.

1:06:59So it's 4th of July on Broadway in Nashville, and I was doing a road trip with a friend, and we'd started off in Dallas, Houston, New Orleans, did Nashville, did Gatlinburg. We went to Lake Norwood, we didn't do Dollywood, went to Lake Norman and then finished up in Norfolk, Virginia and then I flew to Canada. You know, rented a soft top Camaro, me and my friend, we were training every different day, staying in random places and it was 4th July. We got up and we ran the Nashville 5K, which was fun. Had a little nap, back in the hotel and and then went out to Broadway. So, fourth of July, let's fucking go.

1:07:38This is gonna be cool. So, go down on a Broadway and I see whiskey row. And I thought, that place looks cool. It's nice. I walk in and it's one of these classic, super talented, pay by the hour, sort of Nashville bands, dude's got truck cap on and no one's looking at the band. Like, what the fuck is going on? Everybody's at the bar and this is three in the afternoon, like peak Broadway time, sun's beating down, You'd windows are open, money. And everybody's at the bar. It's like, what the fuck is going on? Why is it this bands are all the crushy? I've never heard this song before, but it was cool.

1:08:14It was kind of like it sounded a bit emo, I guess, but it was definitely country, Twangie. So what the fuck? Anyway, this dude is partway through the bridge of this song. He grabs a shot, puts the shot in the air. Everybody in the room, I like a like they were part of a cult lift a shot up as well It's like what the fuck is going on like it was that it was there an email that went out that I wasn't a part of or something It was a song to Keela by Dan and Shay and there's a bit where it does a it goes like a full step up Well, there's a little change as it goes into the final verse by the final chorus.

1:08:50Sorry and When I taste a Keela everybody knocked this shot back the room explode I was like I am fucking moving to this country It can set a me sold and then it turns out that... That's what those guys write. He's a fan of the show. So I got to go and see them and I got to catch up and got to see this ridiculous bust set up. He's got, oh yeah, the way that we put the bust together, it's the same way that Taylor Swift's got hers because if you put the bed at the back of the bust, you can actually have more width than it's over the back wheel, which means it's a... This is fucking insane. But I mean, it's a superstars, right?

1:09:19Super, super production. And I saw kind of in that moment, I was like, this sounds so familiar to me as somebody that hasn't listened to that much country. And that summer, the summer of 2019, Luke Combs, massive album, Hardy with like Red Nekker, you know, we had this bro trip playlist. And I think about all of that music. You can remember listening to it at the time and coming back to the UK and you know, I had maybe three years before I finally moved to America after that and two and a half years. All right. Listening to this music. Why the fuck? Like this seems like a really, really good scene.

1:10:03So it kind of does make sense to me that we've got to the stage now where someone who was open to alternative music but not into country found fuck by country. if that's what you want to call it, or easy access country, I suppose, pop country. I could see that country music was moving that way that when I got involved in the scene and the, in the teens, it was during the bro country era. The bro country era lasted for a few years. But the era of the track guys, there were people moving to Nashville, Bill, starting in 2015, 2016, and then Nashville just blew up. And then the music started to change in style.

1:10:54And it just, I started noticing my friends that used to listen to rock, changed over and started listening to country. I think part of it is that there were guitars in country and there was no rock on the radio that they connected with because they didn't necessarily connect with the metal bands that were going on in the midteens. I don't think people know just how much the country music industry is built on the back of former scene kids and metal guitarists. I think all of Jelly Rolls band of X, you know, suicide, something or amity, there's something, you know what I mean? Everyone was part of some very black wearing death metal band in the 2000s and then grew up to do this.

1:11:49But yeah, Jelly Roll, massive pivot, post -mellon, massive pivot, Beyonce, massive pivot. I guess Taylor Swift pivoted away. But you well she moved to New York and and Change your music and she her thing was that She was dominating the charts and then she started she's like, okay. How do I broaden my appeal to to start hitting? You know pop radio because it was a different thing back when she did and there and Whenever was 2012 when she started working with Max Martin and other outside songwriters like that Max Martin and shell back and And then she started having massive worldwide hits. So, um, the...

1:12:37It's just, you know, I look at this stuff, Chris, and I think it's just tough for musicians to... There's just, it's so hard to connect with the audience, even in the era when it's so easy to connect with people. It's so hard to get any type of a momentum going, right, with a song that or with any type of artist to get that 100 million plays, you know, talking about the Yeah. Bring me the horizon song that's 500 million now. Seven. What's that? How much is it? 500 million. It's 720 million plays. It's insane, right? If you get over 100 million plays on a song, 100 million plays is... I was talking about this this morning actually.

1:13:29It is about $300 ,000, I think. A phase? Something like that. $3 million. Three. Oh, geez. I just, I know $300 ,000. I think a bill, yeah, a billion plays song is about three to five million dollars, depending. Do you imagine if me or you had a billion play video? It'd be like, baby shark. Yeah, that's what you should do, Nate. I was going to make this video series. Is this song better or worse than baby shark? That's a pretty good barometer. Is this song better or worse than what does the fox say? Okay. Okay. We need to talk about AI artists. Yeah. AI artists. What's going on? What's going on?

1:14:14AI bands, AI, everything. What's happening? I think that one of the AI companies is testing whether people will accept AI music. I mean, Spotify has AI music that they're already pushing in playlists that

1:14:38that get millions of views, a lot of it is kind of light jazz or atmospheric music and things like that. But now they have this thing I just made a video on about this band, The Velvet Sundown, that's a purported to be a fake band that has AI -looking pictures and AI -sounding songs. I always have said in my videos every time I've made many videos on AI. I got I testified at a Senate hearing in 2023 went to Washington. I was one of 19 people was a closed -door session. They did nine closed -door hearings. I was in the seventh one. The first one they had, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Zuckerberg, all these people were all the top people at these big music about.

1:15:29No, this is about AI. Right, okay. I was gonna say I don't I don't think I care about you and music. I They they invited me in with all the people sag after a Spotify people People for all these that worked it all then all basically all different interest groups, right? And then me Because I had made a lot of big videos on AI music and one of my Things that I said that I don't didn't believe when they asked I don't think that anything that's completely fully generative AI should have be able to be copyrighted. So that takes away the financial incentive for companies to go and put AI music out there to make money on it.

1:16:12If Spotify can put out fake artists and people stream it and they're perfectly okay with that and then not pay artists that are getting streamed as well because they're and then that just increases the incentive for them to fill their playlists with fake artists, right? But now what's happened is that there's this artist that may or may not be fake. So, well, the sundown that has a verified symbol on Spotify and they have a second record, even though there's no record of these people kind of looks like a fake bio. There's no record of these people and they have another record coming out in two weeks, a second record.

1:16:55And no one's coming forward saying it's us. Now, if this was a marketing ploy, this is actually a very smart thing. But people are saying in the comments and the video I just made yesterday, well, these are all bots that are on here. It's got over 600 ,000 followers now and Spotify in a week went from zero to 600 ,000. presence. Crazy. Right. Is this song any good? Well, there's a whole record there. And um, uh, it's, I don't think it sounds good to me. And it doesn't, uh, people are voting with their ears though. Did you say earlier on the ultimate to meritocracy here? Yeah. And I think that people will embrace like I said early on when you started seeing all these fake Drake videos and fake Beatles videos and all this stuff that they were on YouTube, but with the voices of the young Paul McCartney or young John Lennon, whatever.

1:17:57And I said, eventually there's going to be the Beatles and the Beatles AI and Prince and Prince AI and Michael Jackson and Michael Jackson AI. There'll be songs that are trained on their music on the multi tracks that are controlled by whoever owns the publishing. They license this stuff out. And there will be people that say, you know what? I like Michael Jackson, AI better than Michael Jackson. That's gonna happen. That will happen. There are gonna be people that like AI music and they're perfectly fine with it. Should there be protections in place for artists to avoid AI bands, AI artists coming in and taking plays?

1:18:37Do you think that Spotify should ban AI music?

1:18:46Should they ban it? Well, there's so many workarounds with this. I mean, you can create your song via A .I. A completely A .I. prompted written song and then just recut it. And then it's you doing it. It doesn't have all the artifacts. You have all the independent tracks and everything. and then who suits you, the Suno or UDO or whoever owns the thing. Hey, that's our music. Wait, wait, no, it's not. I prompted it myself and then I covered it. It's like the Spiderman meme. I don't even know what, you know, this, this, I don't know what's going to be done with it. I don't know how they can... I think this is a great take.

1:19:37I think that's a really interesting one. If you're a real person, but 80 % of the process is AI enabled, where's the line get drawn? You know, you can lock me in a room with some parchment and a quill and say, right, 60 ,000 words, but no source material. Or I can prompt chat GPT to do it all for me. Somewhere in the middle is where most people are. And some people are basically zero, You repump some people essentially a quill, but then they've got source material, Ryan Holiday's got creams and reams of flashcards from all of these books that he's reading. I've become very obsessed with the idea of plagiarism versus inspiration because very few ideas come from real first principles.

1:20:24You're so telling me that this was not inspired by anything? Well, when I look at the saxophone that you're holding, you're holding it the right way up. You're blowing into the top and not through the bit at the bottom. So you've been inspired by all of the people that came before you to tell you how to play a fucking saxophone. Right. Right. Like, you know, you're playing this thing in time. You're using the kick and the snare in a very typical sort of form because there's only so many... So everybody is inspired or educated by what came before them and that goes all the way to, well, I read this book or I watched this movie or I listened to this song and I like that, but oh, that made me think about this thing.

1:20:57So there's a wonderful line from William James that says, originality is just undetected plagiarism. And what we are seeing now is the veil being lifted on detectable plagiarism, right? Which is not only is this a direct copy of something else, but it's a direct copy of something else, masquerading as something original because it's been reconstituted by an AI. I'm going to piss every musician off by saying this. If AIs are able to create better music than you as an artist can, I think it's a very difficult argument to make to say that they should be held back, given that this is supposed to be meritocracy, because all of the graphic designers for whom mid -journey just came and decapitated, people were up in arms about it and tried to make a big issue around it, but it happened.

1:22:00Podcasts, there is a website where you can put any topic in. Yeah. And it will create a pretty listable podcast that explains. No book LM. No book LM is really good if you like learning, if you like learning stuff. Yeah, the arms they have all the. So it's interesting with the way that we, yeah, you're so right, Rick, you know, um, and if notebook LM gets to the stage where it is able to produce a better podcast than the one that I can, then I either need to work my game to be able to compete, or I'm going to be defeated by the fucking robots. Here's my theory, and I'd love to get you taken this.

1:22:36The reason that I think that musicians feel particularly aggrieved when it comes to AI coming and replacing plays, taking ear real estate from the audience, is that the barrier to entry in order to be able to create music is so high. Anybody can do a podcast. They can be very bad, but anybody can do a podcast. Anybody can draw anything. It can be really bad, but anybody can draw anything. If you put a saxophone in my hands, I cannot make a sound come out of it. So the level of investment, the mode that has typically protected musicians for a very long time, not just from being able to play the instrument, but from understanding musical form from being able to master, produce, mix, understanding how all of this stuff is supposed to be constructed.

1:23:23When you level the playing field for something that people have invested a ton of time into, they quite rightly are going to feel aggrieved because they say, this is unfair. Look at how much time I spent getting myself to the stage to be able to do this and you've just taken a shortcut. I am not allowed to feel as aggrieved because an AI is able to replicate chatting shit on a podcast. right? Because I know that the moat, the barrier to entry, the required skill set in terms of training was lower than somebody who is a fissionado at playing the keyboard or at playing the drums or doing something like that.

1:23:59And I think that this is the reason that musicians have a particular B in their bonnet around the AI thing. But I struggle to see where the delineation is between the graphic artists and the podcasters and the musicians. And if we're not going to stop notebook LM or mid -journey, I think it's difficult to say Spotify should ban AI music for the same reason because Why it took me ages to learn to play the drums?

1:24:26When I talked about this about the being good prompt or I mean there is an art to writing a prompt I use AI programs all the time um and And sometimes I'll say, okay, here's my title for my video. And to me, the best title generator is Gemini because they have all YouTube's data in it, it's Google. So I'll be like, okay, here's a title for my video. Gemini, I want you to create 10 variations of this title for a Rick Biyato YouTube. Oh, it knows me. I've trained a whole thing to do this. It knows my video titles and things like that. and then it'll spit it out. It's like, make it more clickable.

1:25:15Make it this, make it that. And a lot of times it'd be like, I like the first part of this one. I like the second part of that one and I'll do that. And, or sometimes it'd be like, you know, I need something for a thumbnail, a background where I have a cut out of me or I'm trying to do something, but I,

1:25:36you know, I want something that's that I couldn't create, but I can imagine what it is. You put it in there. It'll create it. No, do another variation, no, do another variation. No, make it more this. Can you make the, you know, so it's, so I use it constantly and you have to just keep refining it, refining it, refining it. Like you refine a song. It doesn't replace the decades that it takes to become great at an at an instrument, but there is you could argue, I'm not arguing this. One could argue that being a prompting is the same kind of skill as learning how to play an instrument. And I'm not saying that it is.

1:26:19Being very diplomatic today. But, but well, because I actually do use AI programs. And they're, you know, we talked about this yesterday about the how there are things that to me that these AI programs can do really well in music, like to be mastering. And I don't mean to upset any mastering engineers or anything, but to To me, that seems like a great use of AI is to learn how to master songs, right? I think mixing. I think, yes, mixing, there's taste, there's all these things involved. I sure love to be able to say, hey, could you mix it? There's a guy, Serben Gagnia that mixes every big pop song.

1:27:12Then you have your rock mixers, Chris Lorette, LG, Tom Lorette, LG, Rendell, Brian, Andy Wallace. also all these these famous rock mixers that you know, oh, could you mix it in the style of this guy or mix it in the style this guy and have instantly have your thing or in 15 seconds have a completely different take of your song mixed by a different mixer. That would be kind of interesting. That to me seems like a great use of of AI as opposed to AI creating the song. For a stretch. To go back on what I said, I think it's a difficult argument to make that music is some particular protected class.

1:27:55All that being said, I do not like the idea of listening to music that's being created by an AI because to me, and this is another reason why the prefabrication of music generally by songwriters also removes a lot of the magic and the allure because I like the story, I like to read into what the songwriter meant by these lyrics and what's the emotion that's trying to be put across here. And if it's a philosophical zombie, the idea of that, it sort of operates like a human, but behind the scenes is nothing going on. If it's the musical equivalent of that, up front it sounds good and behind the scenes is nothing going on.

1:28:29But then you think, okay, is there anything particularly more special about music that was created by an AI and produced by an AI than something that was made by a team of 15 songwriters and then produced by an artist that had nothing to do with it. You know, again, right. And this is like an ethical... That's a great point. That's a great point. It's one of my friends says, well, you know, when you have 15 songwriters, it's basically like AI anyways, to your point. And then you give it to the person that had nothing to do with it that sings it. It's like, well, you know... Well, Lisa were real people playing it, Are there really real people playing it?

1:29:07There's like one guy that played the keyboard parts and put all the drum loops together. Drums are fucking sequenced, yeah, exactly. But then when you thought, okay, well electronic music, dance music, there's no very rarely, apart from maybe if you've got some custom vocals done. Sonny Moore made fucking scary monsters and nice sprites on like a 2010 MacBook Pro on planes. It was never anything, right? I guess he would have recorded his vocals at some point to put that in. But okay, where do we draw this line? And I think it very much is an ethical question of what is it? What do we need to have to identify AI artists?

1:29:47I think that would probably be quite a nice thing to do. I think if there was a particular tick, and this has been talked about on other social media platforms too, the dead internet theory that because AI is able to produce such a high volume, eventually almost all of the content on the internet is going to be produced by A .I.'s and the same thing may occur for music, but for me, I would feel conned. I would have felt catfished by a song. If I went on and I'm reading into what does it mean? What does he really mean? The rain fell like blood. What did... Oh, that's so deep. It's like, I don't know, like it was influenced by some fucking Marilyn Manson song from whatever 2005.

1:30:31That would suck. And I feel like there's two ways that AI is going to make a change. One is it's going to compete. And the other is that it's going to enable existing artists to be more effective. And it's a case of whether or not the for you, your channel may be replaced by Rick Biyato AI, but yeah, which would be great because you could retire. But also it's enabling you to stay ahead. So it's a case of are people going to use the tools in order to keep the competitive advantage over to them and how much is the competition going to come through? There's a program called the Leaven Labs that I use.

1:31:14and when I trained it on my voice, it's weird because I inputted

1:31:25dialogue from, I have a mic that's about, it's out of camera range, it's probably four feet in front of me, that's about this high or so. It's a little shotgun mic. It's a stereo mic, a stereo condenser mic. That's what I typically record my YouTube videos with. So it's a little bit of room ambience in it, but it's pretty dry because I'm in a recording studio. And then I trained some of it using SM7, like we're using right now, which is a very different sound. It's got much more bass, it's closer, it's more in your face. But most of my videos are not like that, but I used it when I was training it.

1:32:07So when I use, when I try to use that, sometimes I want to punch in on a video, but I don't have access to this. And I, and so I try and use 11 labs, but it's like, it's sending me results back with the close mic and the things don't have distance. Right. So, so I talked to 11 labs and they're going to do a two different voice profiles for me, one with a close mic and one with a distant mic. So let me give you this from fucking 11 labs. This is crazy. So, uh, Archer, um, on 11 labs, you know that it's the it was the go to British AI voice. Yeah, yeah, right. Archie. Remember that. Yeah, they updated it recently.

1:32:47Okay. I'm just gonna get you to have a little listen. Just see if you notice anything about the particular voice that 11 labs go to standard Archer British male AI voice is. Shiligit is a powerful tar -like resin found high in the Himalayan mountains, formed over centuries from ancient decomposed plantar. It's loaded with over 80 trace minerals, full of acacid and essential nutrients your body needs to function. So how does it work? You hear that? Work. Work, that's you. That's me, that's Middlesbrough. That's it's been trained on my voice. And that's now. So if anybody has an issue with my take around AI coming in taking people's jobs, so that's now, that was an ad for Shilligit, which is like a mineral testosterone thing.

1:33:41I have no take on Shilligit. I'm not associated with whatever that Shilligit company is, but it's using my voice. Do I own the likeness to my voice?

1:33:54That's a great question. When I trained it on my voice, I provided the sound samples. It takes about three weeks or so. And then once it was done, it says, okay, it's ready. Then you sign into 11 labs, then they have you read a paragraph because they have to do the voice print to make sure it's used so you're not stealing someone else's voice. I'm just cool. It's very smart. Daryfication. Yeah, verification. They have 15 seconds to do it. So you have to read this thing. and it's like, yeah, okay, it's you. Recognize it. That's cool. But I still haven't gotten it to where it doesn't sound natural.

1:34:30Mine doesn't sound natural because maybe I have a odd way of speaking. I use different registers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I have used 11 labs as an experiment where I'll go to some B -roll and I'll put 11 labs in there or see if anyone notices, no one ever notices. I've done it a few times. I don't use a lot of B -roll, but sometimes I'll sneak things in there. I was like, I wonder if anyone notices. That's cool. But I want to get it to where it works so that if I don't have access to a microphone or something and I have an idea and I want to hear what it sounds like, or sometimes I'll, I never use scripts.

1:35:13I always improvise what I do, But sometimes I'll improvise it and I'll have it transcribed and then I'll feed it in there and I'll listen to it. I was using 11 labs this morning actually. I had some ideas that I wrote down and I wanted to listen to them back. But I put them in a different voice. You didn't use fucking art, did you? I'm not reading your ideas back here. I was gonna say you better enjoy using 11 labs before this huge lawsuit comes down. I called my assistant Tom, I said, hey, can you, and he was like, what do you want me to do? I said, I want you to open up 11 labs and take this and put it in there so I can listen to it.

1:35:55Why do you want to listen to it? I said, because I wrote this down and I want to remember it, but I want to remember it by listening to it. Okay, fine. So I did that. How do you come to think about the sort of earnings and financials arc of the music industry over the years. I've heard, you know, all manner of, you need to be as much a business person as an artist now in order to be able to make it in the world of music that live is flourishing, that live is dead, that albums are pointless, that waterfall releasing is the only way to make money. What's the current state of financials in the music industry?

1:36:39Well live music is definitely a place that if you if you want to make a lot of money and you're you have a successful live. I mean there's there's not the money in in just say rock music. There's not money in there's not as much money in streaming as there is in live music a very huge band. You know, Metallica's not out there living off their stream. Well, they may be there, but they're streams because they have songs that are getting streamed that were that came out with the fucking lifestyle of Metallica's pro right on. Yeah. So it's live is incredibly important. Can you, can you make a living as a from record sales, I mean, it used to be a thing where if you had a hit record that sold three, four million copies, physical copies, the record labels, it would eventually get to the point where they had to pay you for the record sales.

1:37:54But very few artists made money from actually selling records. They'd make money from publishing. they make make money from you know, radio, airplay, things like that. But one of the only reliable places to make a living in music is playing live as far as and it that goes for any level with your playing at your local pub, whether you're playing at the a normal dome here, wherever it is, I don't know what Austin, what did. Moody send it. Okay.

1:38:33That's why people go out and these long tours. That's why ticket prices are incredibly high. If you can sell tickets, that's where it goes. Because it's funding the rest of the operation. Yeah, right. And it wasn't, that wasn't always the case. You know, pop music still, there's still money and streaming for huge pop songs. You know, there's plenty of, playing a Vardis post -molone, you'll kind of his thing or the weekend. They have multiple songs to have over two billion streams, you know, Coldplay. Anybody that's in the top, any of the top 25 artists in Spotify, those people are making can afford from streaming.

1:39:21As you get further down, it's less and less and then, it's just, you know, it's kind of always been like this. I think sometimes it's over exaggerated how much money people used to make from radio and from record sales and things like that. Everybody loves the idea of a golden era. Yeah. That they want to part of. Right. I will say this though as a producer, one of the things that when I started producing and things were went to streaming eventually is that people didn't have the physical CD to see the producer's name on the back. Whoever it is, whether it's me or whoever it is or see the songwriters or see who played on it.

1:40:09So those things are not available if I want to know who played on a song I have to go to a separate website I have to go to all music comm It's not in is it not in credits on credits on on Spotify are they'll have the songwriter and They'll have um, but they don't have the people that played on the record. Okay. So you have to either go to to Wikipedia would you So, I was going to say should be connected. I was going to say it would be a good idea if it's Spotify to just integrate. Absolutely. And they're so bad about, if you look at Sabrina Carpenter's newest song, when you go to Man Child, for example, Amy Allen and Jack Ants and I both have hundreds of credits.

1:40:54But Amy Allen only has a little triangle that, oh, you can click on it. you click on it and shows you all the list of her songs from the most streamed down. Jack Antonovs doesn't have that, but if you go to a different song of Sabrina Carver, just please, please, please, that was on the last record that they were both involved with, then they both have arrows on it. You can click Jack Antonovs and see all his stuff. It was a, it's just that they haven't gotten around to updating it. I mean, stupid, right? You think that, hey, if you were him, hey, why don't you update my thing there? and whose job is it to put it on there?

1:41:30And then of course you go to the streaming thing on Spotify, it takes you to do a different on my phone, a Safari browser, and then you can't get back to Spotify, you have to close that, and if you want to look someone else up on it, it's just ridiculous. All that information should be contained in there. What's the good, the bad, the ugly of Spotify, and its impact on the music industry? I like Spotify because I like it's easy to make playlists on it. And Apple, I have both, I pay for both every month. I've always paid for Apple. If you have an iPhone, you know, I have tons of music that I paid for that are part of the Apple ecosystem and I pay the monthly fee, and but I use Spotify predominantly.

1:42:17I just, it's just easier to use, and that's the thing, you know, it's the, It's kind of like, why did certain, why did Facebook outlast my space? You know, why didn't, you know, eventually people upload so much stuff to Instagram or Facebook or whatever, that they don't want to try a new social media platform. Right. You're saying that Spotify, the ease of making playlists on Spotify is given everybody sunk cost fallacy. And unless I can port all of my very complex and my algorithmic preference. Oh, so you're telling me I need to go back to 2014 and listen to all of the stuff I was doing there and it needs to see the arc that I went through and you know...

1:42:55Chris, I have hundreds of playlists on Spotify, private playlists that I refer back to. Hundreds. What do I really want to go and start them all over again on another platform? Even though Spotify pisses me off a lot, no, I don't want to do that. I don't know of any artists. I know of lots of podcasts as me included. Thank you Danielaq. They treat me very well. I'm super happy with what they've done, but I It's very rare that I speak to musician they say yeah Spotify thanks really good people get mad at me when I do most every four months. I do a Spotify top 10 countdown video and I do that so that people know and and people get mad in the comments to like, I don't believe that these are the top songs.

1:43:45What do you mean? I just read them off the thing. Easily verifiable. Yeah, I'm not part of a sayop to make you believe that Sabrina Carpenter's higher up than she actually is. Right. I have nothing to gain from, you know, this is what's on the charts. Well, it's all, I don't believe it because it's, these are all bots and this thing. It's like, where's your evidence that it's all bots on the chart? Is it possible for something to change with regards to Spotify? It does seem like I don't know what coming to a head even means. Musicians need Spotify. If you've got even medium sized bands doing hundreds of thousands of plays monthly, what are you going to do?

1:44:27You're going to protest Spotify? You're not putting your music on Spotify. You're going to keep putting your music on Spotify. So what does it mean to try and apply pressure to the guys at Spotify HQ in order to make some sort of a change, but we have a little bit of a unsolvable equation here, which is that the artist, many of the artists, I speak to have a problem with it. You know, it's... And what is their problem that they don't feel like they're getting compensated, Farab? Yeah, the compensation is insufficient. The removal of staff that happened, I think, about 18 months ago, two years ago, so resulted in much more algorithmic curation of playlists, rather than human curation of playlists.

1:45:18That largely seems to be a complaint by artists who aren't getting algorithmically curated into playlists very much, because I'm sure that all the people that are at the top of the new music Wednesday or whatever are like, yeah, I love it. But still, I do think that it allows the system to be game in a manner that's a little bit less fair. I think rightly artists have a very big concern around what's happening with AI. I don't know whether this is true. I got sent some information that suggests record labels get paid out at a higher rate per stream than independent artists do that there's some sort of preferential pricing, which Which means that if you can bypass the record labels and go straight to the AI artist, there's also even more large concern, which is well if Spotify is able to reverse engineer its own AI artists, then kind of like if only fans developed a VR girlfriend company that you would end up completely bypassing all of the poor only fans models that were no longer needed because you have both distribution and creation contained within the same platform.

1:46:23So I think the last two around the AI bands and this reverse integration up back up the stack Those are future concerns Compensation and playlists are the two things that I hear the most but I don't know I don't know what artists can do they need Spotify They do need it. It's

1:46:46It's it's kind of like people that complain to me. Oh there. I'm being shadow band on YouTube or I'm doing this and that's like content sucks too.

1:46:56You know, the algorithm hates me. It's like the algorithm's the audience. It's like there's nothing to hate. You know, it's agnostic. You've fallen off for a little bit and you just need to be a bit more creative. Yeah, I, I feel it. It's a, I don't know. I just, I wonder what that is. Okay. What do you think the future of music monetization looks like? what will artists do when it comes to keeping the liquidity wheels greased? It's hard to say. I saw a...

1:47:37I forget who was talking about this about using blockchain to verify that something is a real... a real artist as opposed to AI, right? And that that's a, would be a great use of that technology.

1:47:56And as far as the future of monetization, hard to say, because I'm, even though I'm involved in the music business, at least in the, with what I do, I don't, a lot of the people that I interview are really famous people that made their money in the old music business. Like heritage. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, none of them are missing any meals as they say. So it's, I don't hear about the struggle. I, no, I have friends that are, that I have on the channel, the younger musicians. and but they're all out touring. For the most part, everybody that I interview are people that are pro musicians that are, you know, my friend Tosin that plays an animals as leaders.

1:48:55He's been on my channel many times. Tim Henson from Polyphea. And, you know, I know all the guys, yeah, Zed. I mean, all these people that are friends of mine that been on my channel, they're all professional musicians and they've all got their own recipe of all the different income streams, whether it's some people are, they have money from Spotify, they have a YouTube channel, they have a pedal that they, that's their thing or pedal company, or they've got their amp model that is made by neural DSP, or whatever it is, they've got their whole recipe of special Yamaha lettuce strap, whatever it is.

1:49:36Whatever it is that, or they're doing, some people do these lessons, group lessons before shows, they do VIP meet and greet. I mean, there's so many different places that you can, that you can. That's a really good point. I think what musicians, and I understand why, especially given the CPMs that we can generate on YouTube, especially on podcasting with the two, three hour long episodes, the RPMs can get really get up there, especially if you hold onto people. I understand why I put so much blood sweat and tears into making this record. I put it out and you got to pay 10 bucks a month and listen to it, infinity times.

1:50:21And I got paid a rounding error on my sandwich for today. That feels unfair and I think it feels unfair, large due to wankering buyers. that in the past that CD would have cost 10 .99 or 7 .99 or something. And fuck, like I missed that. Imagine if I got the streams I did, you know, a million plays a month, but there were all single sales at 3 .99, that would be a mate, and you don't. But then on the flip side of that, you think, okay, well, you can do early access, Patreon, behind the scenes, subscribe our only content. You can get easier access to merch. I got a friend who, the way that they do merch at shows in order to speed it up is these QR code things that you buy in advance and then you collect it, like getting Uber Eats collection.

1:51:12Which is a great idea. Yep. You have the listing on your Spotify page for your upcoming events that will geotog it, the people that are listening. Dude, that wouldn't have happened. You'd have had to have had an outdoor billboard campaign that would have been organized in each different city that you're going to or fly posting. I put it in the news that I'm putting it on paying for fucking radio spots. Okay, so we've got that. We got merch. Merch can be sold through a merch shelf on Spotify. We don't have that yet. Podcasts don't have that yet. Wow, I can't sell my merch on Spotify. You can sell courses the same way that you do.

1:51:46The same way that Gabe from I prevailed does. Right, you can use your live experience, capture that, use that as the front end of your funnel, then teach people to do the thing that you do to get the life that you have I've been ordered to, you know, so it's kind of just a changing of the times. But I really do, I feel it because fundamentally what we want is creative songs that make us feel something and are a good vibe and the less that bands are incentivized or artists are incentivized to do that thing. Ultimately, the live experience will be worse because the songs I'm going to be as good.

1:52:24The listening experience is going to be worse because it's going to be more homogenous and there's going to be less care and attention put into it. Like everything is sort of born out of the song. And is it Spotify's job to incentivize the culture of music creation in that way? Probably not. I think it's difficult argument to make that it's their job to do it. But it kind of is that position in the market to enable that at least. And I think that this little gaudian knot is kind of where people get caught up. When I open Spotify, if there's a band that's in town in Atlanta, and I said, oh my god, they're playing.

1:53:06I mean, that's, that's, that's amazing to be able to, you've shown the interest and you go to the service. I would never have known, because there are no magazines or anything that I look at to see. I spread again coming to Austin. I didn't even see them. Yeah, so it's...

1:53:29There's so many artists that I, when I look at Spotify, that I'll click on a song and I was like, oh my god, there'd be your next week. I think that there are so many opportunities for people to... different income streams and combine them to make a living. But my friend, Tosin, Tosin Abbasid, Tosin has a guitar company. He has plugins that he makes or he's got so many different things that he's a part of. He's a real entrepreneur and the people that do well nowadays that are people that don't just write songs and go out and tour with their band. They have to figure out what their recipe is for making living.

1:54:24And it takes a lot of work to do that. That's the drag of it. It takes a lot of work that is that used to be done by other people. and is orthogonal to the main thing, right? A lot of musicians, and this is kind of creating the world that music's going to move into, which is, a lot of musicians get into music to be purest musicians, and then to play songs that they care about and have people respond and all the rest of that stuff. But increasingly, if you need to be a businessman and the success of your operation is based on how good you are at business, well, that's gonna select for business people, not for musicians.

1:54:59And that's not fantastic, given that we're all here to listen to good music. And, uh, yeah, I... Chris, when people complain to me, and I mean to interrupt, but when people complain to me, younger musicians about stuff, I'm like, hey, I'm 63, and I figured out how to do this stuff. I mean, come on. It's like... I think the... We're not splitting the atom here. The glass half full approach to this is the only way to go about it. Because okay, dude, you're not happy with the state of the music industry. Stop right stop making music Yeah, that's cool. There's other stuff that you can do. What do you go be a music teacher?

1:55:36Why don't I do that? It's like all right them figure it out figure it the fuck out right you do not get to whine about the Changing of an ecosystem that is happening to everything you know the horses being upset were quite rightly so the fact that they were about to be killed and supplanted by the automobile in the 20s. There was an entire industry of muck shovelers in New York, New York City to get rid of all of the muck that came out of the horses. With the space of five years, all of the muck shovelers were gone. And you're okay, but here's another thing. You are, as far as I can see it from a musician's standpoint, you are more protected than almost any other industry because of life.

1:56:19Because AI cannot come and replicate life. Yeah, it's not what what would that mean? What would it mean to replicate a live experience? I'm just talking about this tape robots going out and playing the AI songs. Of course, I'm joking with this. Yes, so this is of course this will be somewhere in the future be robots that can really shred on the guitar. I think people will go and see it as a spectacle. But it's not going to have and again, okay, so you have this walled off garden in order for me in the podcasting world to do that, I need to completely revamp. It is not the same skill set for me to go out and stage and do a two hour TEDx talk with fingering jokes, which I am doing actually.

1:57:00So come and see me in Chicago, Boston, Denver, New York, Salt Lake City, and where's the fucking final one that I've gotten about Austin, this winter, come and see that ever else is sold out. In order for me to do that, I don't just get to replicate things I say on a podcast. Like it's a whole new fucking, yeah, to whole new moat for me to get over in order to be able to do that. But even for me, I'm thinking I should probably apply quite a lot of effort to becoming really good at doing live because if notebook L .F. comes, the fucking human center feeds me out of the front of this industry, I'm going to have to have a new moat that can't be replicated.

1:57:38And the people that it can, that it's going to replicate, the people like you and I that have so much content out there with our image and our voice. Well, the biggest fucking training data, right? I mean, that's the, this is like the easiest, easiest thing to do. Yeah, yeah, you're right. I mean, 2000 videos for you, whatever, two, two and a half thousand on my channel. Yeah, I look. I really think that the live element is something that will be protective, but you're fighting against an ever more insular culture, especially among young people. So yeah, going out to see Benson Boone or whatever sounds great, but Netflix is on.

1:58:25I'm sure that someone will record it and put it on YouTube and I can just watch it through whatever, I've heard it on Spotify, do I really need to go out? So times are a change in man.

1:58:38For all that, I can kind of tell musicians that I think it's the times are going to change and they need to keep up, but I really hope it doesn't damage the creation of music, because that would make me really sad. I've been a huge part of my life. It would suck. It would suck to not have the kind of emotional depth that people access through good songwriting be taken away by Yeah Well, we're in an interesting time right now just the fact that that that These AI artists that they're I mean to me that they're testing the waters and then we don't know who's doing it If it spotifies our AI artists is it soon?

1:59:19Oh is it audio? So whose artist is this? Is this in conjunction? Is it one of these AI companies, music companies, with Spotify and they're testing it out to see if people will bite on it? I think it's fascinating, actually. Well, there's definitely going to be a... The main fear that people have is it's an open loop. It's like, okay, what's going to happen? We don't know. If we come into land and, okay, there's AI playlists with AI artists in there, but it's actually walled off or it's this, but the concern people have is, what if the top 10 is five of them are AI. What if that makes it twice as hard to get to the stage that I need to?

1:59:54And actually, to create even more fear, if you assume that the reason that live works is because people have privately listened to the track, but that real estate in people's ears is being taken up increasingly by AI, that does make getting to the critical mass to become a successful live artist more difficult. because the song, the record is the genesis of the interest and the popularity that you then sell merch and do your courses and do all the rest of it. Well, I'm sure that there will be platforms that will arise that are, you know, non -AI, just so - Human only. Human only, yeah. Which is pretty funny to think of, right?

2:00:40That you have to do that, but there's a There's a business model for that out there right now ready to be had. At some point, yeah, I don't use Spotify anymore. They're the I artist. I don't, you know, it's like buying people. I only buy organic. No. Mm -hmm. Organic music. Funny. Rick Beato, ladies and gentlemen, Rick, you're awesome, man. Your channel's fucking crushes. I appreciate it. Same, same, but thank you for inviting me. Until next time, man. Let's keep a weather eye on whether or not we're going to be replaced by robots anytime soon.